In The Day Wall Street Exploded, Beverly Gage tells the story of a once infamous but now largely forgotten terrorist attack. Based on thousands of pages of Bureau of Investigation reports, this historical detective saga traces the four-year hunt for the perpetrators, a worldwide effort that spread as far as Italy and the new Soviet nation. It also takes listeners back into the decades-long but little-known history of homegrown terrorism that shaped American society a century ago.
The book delves into the lives of victims, suspects, and investigators: world banking power J. P. Morgan, Jr.; labor radical “Big Bill” Haywood; anarchist firebrands Emma Goldman and Luigi Galleani; “America’s Sherlock Holmes,” William J. Burns; even a young J. Edgar Hoover. It grapples as well with some of the most controversial events of its day, including the rise of the Bureau of Investigation, the federal campaign against immigrant “terrorists,” the grassroots effort to define and protect civil liberties, and the establishment of anti-communism as the sine qua non of American politics.
Many Americans saw the destruction of the World Trade Center as the first major terrorist attack on American soil, an act of evil without precedent. The Day Wall Street Exploded reminds us that terror, too, has a history.
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“A highly relevant, hard-to-put-down history of terror and civil liberties in America.”
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Publishers Weekly (starred review)