This is the fourth chapter from a book long out of print, "Rumor, Fear and the Madness of Crowds" by J. P. Chaplin. Published in 1959, I bought a used copy of it in the late Summer of 2001. I read this chapter in late October of that year. The reasons that it so astonished me will become obvious as you read it. I was mystified as to why, given current events, no one seemed to be drawing any attention to this period of American history. I was more astonished to discover that there was no detailed information on the web about it.
So here it is. I leave you to draw your own conclusions, but I will say:
"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
Sometime between the hours of 6:00 and 8:00 P.M. on the evening of April 25, 1919, two men drove up to a mailbox on 28th Street near 6th Avenue in New York City. The man on the passenger side got out quickly, and, after a glance or two up and down the street, deposited a number of small packages in the box. He hurried back to the car and the two drove across to Broadway, where more of the little brown-paper wrapped cartons were dropped into a box on 29th and Broadway, and again on 32nd and Broadway. After carrying out this seemingly innocent mission, the two men disappeared into the city's millions, never to be identified.
Four days later, and hundreds of miles to the south in Atlanta, Georgia, the United States Postal Service carried out its traditional mission of getting the mails through in spite of such elemental difficulties as rain, sleet, dark of night and the more mundane problems created by the Service's patrons. Despite the fact that one of the packages mailed in New York had been incorrectly addressed to Sandersville, Georgia, it was duly delivered to the home of addressee, Senator Thomas Hardwick (Dem., Ga.), former chairman of a committee advocating restrictions on immigration. A little later, the Hardwick maid collected the package along with the rest of the morning's mail and took the lot to Mrs. Hardwick. The Senator's wife glanced at the small package and noted that it was addressed to her then absent husband. But since the return address was Gimbel Brothers, the celebrated New York department store, and because the pencil-box sized package bore the inscription "Sample," Mrs. Hardwick assumed that it contained a free gift of pencils for promotional purposes and gave it to the maid to open while she looked through the rest of the mail. When the girl untied the knot and started to remove the cord, there was a terrific explosion accompanied by a blinding flash of flame and a barrage of deadly shrapnel. Both of the maid's hands were blown off, Mrs. Hardwick was severely burned about the upper part of her body, and both victims were deeply lacerated by small fragments of metal that had been packed around the explosive. Later, experts from the Department of Justice expressed surprise that the two women were not killed instantly, for such was the force of the explosion that the furniture in the room was badly damaged.
For all its diminutive size, the infernal machine, as it came to be called, was one of the most diabolical and deadly devices ever contrived for mail-order bombing. As subsequent events proved, it consisted of a six by three inch stick of hollowed out wood about one inch in thickness. Inside the core was a stick of dynamite that had been soaked in nitroglycerin. Three fulminate of mercury percussion caps were attached to the cord in such a way as to detonate the device when the package was untied.
Apparently the Atlanta bombing was no isolated incident. Twenty-four hours earlier, a simliar device had been discovered in the mail of Mayor Ole Hanson of Seattle, Washington, who had been stumping the Northwest denouncing radicals. It was described as powerful enough to 'blow out the entire side of the County-City Building." Fortunately the Mayor's aides became suspicious of the unordered package and turned it over to the local bomb squad.
On the following day, April 30th, Charles Caplin, a New York City postal clerk, purchased a newspaper at a kiosk on his way home from work. After boarding his train, he folded it for subway reading in the curious manner of New Yorkers, and was soon absorbed in the lead story of the Atlanta and Seattle outrages. Since the package addressed to Mayor Hanson had not been destroyed, the news story carried a detailed description of its wrappings and return address. There was something oddly familiar to Caplan about the description. He racked his memory for a hint as to where he had previously seen a number of similar packages. Suddenly he remembered that he had set aside sixteen identical parcels in the sorting room of the Post Office because they had insufficient postage and would have to be returned to Gimbels.
Caplan hurried back to the Post Office and found the little packages neatly stacked on a shelf where he had set them aside several days previously. They were destined for some of the country's most prominent citizens, including Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, Postmaster-General Burleson, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Kenesaw Mountain Landis (then a jurist, later baseball commissioner), and the famous capitalists J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. The remainder were addressed to other government officials and high magnates of the business world who were prominent at the time.
That following morning a nation-wide alert went out to all post offices in the United States ordering postmasters to intercept any additional packages similar to those found in New York. At the same time a massive investigation was launched to discover the perpetrators of the bomb plot. It appeared obvious from a study of the intended recipients of the infernal devices that those responsible must be anarchists. Attention was first directed at Gimbels personnel, since all of the packages discovered thus far had identical labels bearing the store's address. However, Isaac Gimbel, the store's owner, while promising an investigation, announced that his hundreds of employees had been carefully screened by "experts" at the time of their employment. Consequently, there was virtually no possibility that the famous store harbored a nest of bomb-making nihilists. He accounted for the labels on the packages by suggesting that they had been procured by persons making legitimate purchases who subsequently removed them for their own nefarious purposes.
In point of fact the anarchists were never found. Every clue, such as the source of the packaging material, the origin of the dynamite and the caps, and the identity of fingerprint-like smudges found inside the packages, led to dead ends. At the close of the investigation only one thing was clear. Thirty-six bombs had been destined to wipe out thirty-six government and business moguls who by word or deed had taken a stand against radicals, socialists, Bolsheviks, members of the I.W.W. and aliens. The bombing had been calculated to initiate a reign of terror and confusion among those unsympathetic to left-wing causes. The frustration of the plot saved its intended targets (the maid and Mrs. Hardwick were its only victims), but to the subsequent discomfort of the plotters it served as the stimulus that brought to a head the incipient antiradical hysteria of the period. The Red Scare of the Twenties was on.