But the end was note quite yet. The Red menace destined to end much as it had begun--with an explosion of gunpowder, not words. The time was 12:05 p.m., September 16, 1920--the place Wall Street, the financial heart of the United States. The sidewalks that noon were filled with clerks, stenographers, and messenger boys hurrying to lunch in the time-honored manner of New Yorkers. Inside the House of Morgan, a conference taking place in the back parlors kept the financial leaders of that great institution working past their lunch hour. It was a conference that probably saved their lives, however it affected their purses. A few minutes earlier, just ahead of the noontime exodus, a somewhat incongruous and seemingly trivial incident took place across the street from the Morgan establishment. An unshaven, dirty-looking workman had leisurely driven up the street in a delivery wagon and reined his horse along the curb by the Sub-Treasury Building. But in the hurry of the midday rush-hour scarcely anyone cast a glance in the direction of the patient animal whose now absent driver had left him tethered to a hitching post.

Suddenly, and without warning, there was a blinding flash of light which illuminated the whole of Wall Street. An instant later a deafening roar accompanied by a shock wave spread through lower Manhattan and across the river into Brooklyn. For the next split-second there was silence--then the tinkling rain of thousands of splintered windows falling to the streets. A great mushroom cloud* of yellowish-black smoke rose one hundred feet into the air; this was followed by a spreading pall of dust from broken plaster and chipped building facings.

When the reverberations of the explosion died away, the screams of the injured and dying cut through the clouds of dust and smoke--strangely thin sounds after the deafening roar of the explosion. The lifting haze revealed a scene of incredible destruction and horror. A half-naked woman whose flesh was seared, tried to rise, then fell back dead. A dying messenger begged for someone to guard the pouch of securities he had been carrying when he fell. Some of the injured were afire--screaming with the pain of burning flesh. Their blood ran in the gutters.

All told, twenty-nine people were killed outright, and six died later in hospitals. Plate glass was shattered for blocks around, and in the immediate vicinity of the explosion the facades of buildings were chipped and scarred by bomb fragments. Over one million dollars in damage had been done in an instant. The interior of the House of Morgan, the presumed target of the attack, looked like a no man's land: glass was strewn all over the floor, and much of the beautiful imported marble work had been wrecked. A clerk lay dead among the splintered furniture. Outside, the front of the building was pock-marked by chunks of iron that had been used to reinforce the bomb.

Across the street there was no sign of a wagon--only a shallow crater left by the bomb--and the horse, who had been the unwitting bearer of the infernal machine, was reduced to unrecognizable bits.

Soon ambulances arrived to gather up the dead and injured. A huge, hysterical crowd of people, some from as far away as Broadway, were drawn to the scene by the noise of the explosion and the wail of the ambulances. An alarmed Secretary of the Treasury requisitioned one hundred regulars from the 22nd Infantry Battalion stationed on Governor's Island to protect the Sub-Treasury from looting. In the soldiers' wake, the Red Cross and a small army of city officials and workman arrived to carry our their several tasks of mercy, investigation and reconstruction. Thirt detectives were hurriedly dispatched to guard the Morgan residence, and eight seperate investigations were launched to ascertain responsibility for the outrage. One of these manhunts was under the direction of the famous detective William Burns.

But in spite of thousands of man hours spent in tracking down leads, the perpetrators of the crime were never found. This much seemed clear: the explosion was caused of a huge time bomb made from TNT and reinforced with slugs of cast iron cut from old window weights. In confirmation of this analysis, pieces of homemade shrapnel were cut from the bodies of the victims. There was no doubt the infernal machine had been brought to the site by the man who left the horse and wagon; however, the only concrete clue to his identity was the horses's shoes. Theoretically, at least, they should have been traceable; and the blacksmith who forged them was eventually found, but here the only promising lead petered out.

The consensus among the investigators was that anarchists were responsible for the crime. One supporting fact in favor of this hypothesis was the discovery of crudely printed threats in nearby mailboxes. Frank Francisco, of the Department of Justice, also thought it significant that the explosion took place soon after the Department's "Red Square" had been abandoned. The bombing, it seemed, was the last horrible gasp of the dying Red menace which had been threatening the security of the United States ever since the closing days of the first World War. But the nation had recovered its equilibrium to such an extent that everyone realized so senseless an outrage could have been perpetrated only by a small group of men with twisted mentalities and in no way reflected the wishes of any significant number of Americans. The hysteria was over.

In accounting for the Red hysteria of the Twenties, the influence of World War I legislative and patriotic factors has already been discussed. It has been demonstrated that the epidemic was primarily a domestic issue rather than the result of an international conflict with Russia. Aside from these etiological factors, several additional points are worthy of brief mention as a kind of concluding commentary for this study.

To begin with, this episode of mass hysteria illustrates the ever-present danger in a democracy such as ours of what psychologists call "displaced aggression." In social upheavals this form of aggression manifests itself as scapegoating. Americans, in common with people all over the world, suffer from a high level of personal frustration, anxiety and conflict. In a civilized society there is little outlet for the tensions generated by such psychological forces. Paradoxically, war provides a safety valve at the same time it intensifies the very forces for which it is serving as a cathartic. Perhaps this is why wars of the pre-atomic variety were not as unpopular as they might have been. Perhaps this is why the incidence of neuroses and psychoses markedly declines during periods of international conflicts.

But during World War I, the fires of emotion forged a curious mixture of idealism, hatred of things foreign, and superpatriotism which never found a satisfying outlet in the conflict itself. "Bolsheviks" therefore became the scapegoats, and in the name of fighting them every tradition Americans held sacred for over a century was thrown overboard. Minority groups suffered the most, as they always have and always will, since the worst sort of people get in the driver's seat in times like these. And the worst sort inevitably attacks at odds of ten to one.

Another contributory factor was the lack of leadership in the White House while the furor was going on. Since the end of the war, Wilson had been preoccupied with the famous Fourteen Points for peace and the establishment of the League of Nations. When Congress renounced his programs, the President took the stump in a direct appeal to the people. After an extensive tour, he collapsed from fatigue and strain in Pueblo, Colorado, in September of 1919. Shortly afterwards he suffered a paralytic stroke which rendered him unable to carry out the duties of his office. Therefore, as the hysteria was gaining ground, there was no national leadership to dampen it. When the madness reached its height, Warren Gamaliel Harding had been elected--a popular leader but hollow as a jug. It was a ripe opportunity for a totalitarian like Palmer, of whom Wilson once said, "He would make a good President." Wilson, as well as the majority of the American people, had succumbed to the human weakness of looking up to authoritarian leadership in a time of crisis, irrespective of whether this leadership was good or evil. The dangers of this sort of thing were made all too clear by the events of this sort in Germany and Italy not too many years afterwards. The moral would seem to be that democracy needs strong leadership, just as it is true as any other form of government. It cannot run itself or be allowed to drift with the whims and passions of the moment.

In conclusion, a careful and much more detailed study of the events outlined here also makes it clear that loyalty cannot be legislated by a welter of hastily passed laws and the activities of high-pressure patriotiv groups. The Constitution provides us with broad, liberal principles which give the greatest possible latitude to the loyal opposition. Nothing in American history has ever demonstrated that allowing these principles their broadest interpretation both in theory and in practice results in serious danger to the Republic. The world's greatest philosophers, musicians, artists and statesmen--including our own founding fathers--have always been in opposition to their times and their governments. The price of progress has always been opposition expressed in free debate. That the minority point of view is sometimes shouted from soapboxes in inflammatory language need not cause a panic. Niether should isolated cases of criminal behaviour inspired by radicalism, such as the bombings of 1919-1920. It is precisely on the hysteria generated by unwise retaliation for such outrages that members of the lunatic fringe thrive.

We might well follow the example set by Britain while the Red scare was going on in the United States. A British radical introduced into Parliament a bill advocating sweeping reforms. He was invited to talk the matter over dinner with the King and Queen. In the United States in those days he would have had his dinner in jail and probably added dozens of fringe cases to the ranks of confirmed radicals by arousing sympathy for his cause. Political mass hysteria is the most dangerous of all types of hysteria. The events of 1919-1920 show all too clearly that it should be kept at the dinner table instead of the cellar.