Down With Wall Street! (1920 version)

Ninety years ago anti-Wall St. sentiment exploded.
 
by Stephen J. Gertz

"Direct Action." New York: 1920.
Broadsheet (28 x 22 cm)
On newsprint, recto-only.

At 12:01PM on September 16, 1920 a massive blast outside the headquarters of J.P. Morgan bank at 23 Wall Street, the Financial District's busiest corner, left thirty-eight people dead and 143 seriously wounded.

It was the deadliest bombing on U.S. soil to date. The Washington Post declared it "an act of war."

Just prior to the explosion flyers were found by a Post Office letter-carrier in the District. Printed in red ink on white paper, the text read: "Remember, we will not tolerate any longer. Free the political prisoners, or it will be sure death for all of you." It was signed "American Anarchist Fighters."

The case dragged on for over three years yet no indictments were ever issued. The I.W.W., the Communist Party, the Union of Russian Workers - the usual suspects - were investigated and cleared.

Curiously and quite coincidentally, dramatist Booth Tarkington wrote a play, in four acts addressing the radicalism of the times, that opened exactly one week before the bombing, on September 9th.

"Written as a light satiric comedy, Booth Tarkington's Poldekin (1920)...was intended to laugh Communism out of existence. A comic rendering, he offers, was 'more effective than to fall into a fury at mention of the word, as so many Americans are doing.' The title character...leads a group of Russian revolutionaries, who, seeing themselves as sociopolitical missionaries, intend to launch a rebellion in the United States by publishing propaganda and inspiring a class war. Referring to postwar upheaval, a professor among them intones: 'We take advantage of the violent mood to produce universal war between the classes'" (Wainscott, The Emergence of the Modern American Theater, 1914-1929, p. 172).

The play, which only ran for one month,  inspired the anonymous author of this broadside, published without imprint or any identifying information whatsoever. All we know is that is was issued between September 16  and sometime in October 1920, when the curtain rose for the last time; Poldekin closed after only forty-four performances. Though a  light satire it was, apparently, too heavy for theater goers prior to the bombing and afterward, when nerves were frazzled and fear was dominant.

(Famed stage, later film, actor George Arliss played the title role. Twenty-seven year old Edward G. Robinson portrayed Pinsky. Sidney Toler, who later starred in the Charlie Chan movies -  assuming the role after Warner Oland's death - acted the character, Welch).

Wall Street, September 16, 1920.
Photo credit: World-Telegram

This broadside is one of the many items concerning Social Movements that rare book dealer, Lorne Bair, features in his most recent catalog, Catalog Ten: Fall 2010. 

MARLEN, George (pseud. of George Spiro).
Earl Browder: Communist or Tool of Wall Street -
Stalin, Trotsky or Lenin?
New York: By the author, 1937.

"Our mission," Bair writes, "is to seek out unusual and obscure material relating to (mostly) American social movements and to approach it with the respect and scholarship it has long deserved but only rarely received from collectors and booksellers.

The Pink Iconoclast. No. 49 (Nov. 14, 1903).
Colorado Springs, CO: E.E. Sonnanstine.
Quirky, scarce newspaper devoted to
freethought and radical politics.

"Though our sympathies lie decidedly on the Left, we feel a responsibility to document as much of American social history as we can stomach...So in this catalog you'll find George Lincoln Rockwell butting up against Big Bill Haywood, and primitive racist lost-race fantasies rubbing elbows with civil rights manifestos.

"SLEUTH" (pseud. of S.O. Berg?)
Capitalism's Last Struggle: Fascist Terrorism
Just Around the Corner. Manifesto of the
United Workers and Farmers. Revised
from Prosperity Around the Corner.
Seffner, FL: S.O. Berg, [c. 1934].
A fictional parable of Depression-era class warfare.

"Don't let this bug you. Or, rather, go ahead, let it bug you; get worked up: that's what nearly every item in this catalog was intended to make you do. 

WHITE, Bishop Alma.
Heroes of the Fiery Cross.
Illustrated by Rev. Branford Clarke.
Zarephath, NJ: The Good Citizen, 1928.
Racist, and anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic
encomium to the Klu Klux Klan.
Published in New Jersey.

"It's strange times we live in, and we could do worse than to remember that even stranger times preceded us." 

For example: KKK activity in New Jersey.

ADAMS, Samuel Hopkins. The Flagrant Years:
A Novel of the Beauty Market.New York: Horace Liveright, 1929.

The beauty business had, by the time  The Flagrant Years was published in 1929, evolved into the the beauty industry, and the beautification of the average American woman became a social revolution that triumphed over all religious and moral objections. It was, in its way, as radical as any contemporary political movement. Case in point: the  Marcel Wave.

Lorne Bair Rare Books logo.
Based upon that of The Vanguard Press,
the venerable radical publishing house.

The culprits to the Wall Street bombing of 1920 were never apprehended. It had been suspected that  sympathizers to Luigi Galleani, the Italian anarchist active in the United States until his deportation in 1919, were to blame. It appears that Galleanist Mario Buda was behind the attack; never questioned in the bombing's aftermath, he skipped to Naples, never to return to the U.S.

And Booth Tarkington's Poldekin has, to the best of my investigation, never been published, separately or within an anthology. As playwright, director, humorist, and drama critic George S. Kaufman famously declared, "Satire is what closes on Saturday night." But when the satire concerns radical politics it closes on Friday night and theatricals publisher Samuel French wants nothing to do with it.

___________

All images courtesy of Lorne Bair Rare Books, with our thanks.

A special thank you to Peacay at BibliOdyssey for a key assist.

___________

If you enjoyed this post, you will also enjoy:

Sacco & Vanzetti: Jazz Age Terrorists?

__________

__________

Wall Street Bank For Poets Proposed. Never Too Big To Fail?

There are many contenders for Top Dog status in the bone yard of bonehead ideas. [Provide favorite to Comments]. In the late nineteenth through early twentieth centuries, the highest honors for magnificently cockeyed excogitations belonged to one known only as the Idiot.

The Idiot, the creation of Harpers humor editor, John Kendrick Bangs (1862-1922), whose Idiot confections were collected into six volumes*, was a boarder in Mrs. Smithers-Pegagog’s High-Class Home for Single Gentlemen. I’m always anxious to learn as much as I can about the history of the fleabag with a foyer and threadbare lace doilies I currently call home, so, naturally, I am drawn Bangs’ stories.

The Idiot presided over all communal meals as an impresario of inanity, serving up moronic opinions and dubious schemes for the “amelioration of the condition of the civilized” onto his dining companions’ plates con mucho gusto, the meals invariably ending with indigestión con vertigo for fellow residents the Poet, the Biblioiphile, Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog and her ex, Mr. Pedagog.

“The trials of the barbarian are really nothing compared to the tribulations of civilized man,” the Idiot declares. Amen, brother.

So, in The Inventions of the Idiot (1904) he turns his attention to the plight of the lowly poet.

“What I’d like to see established is a sort of Poetic Clearing-house Association. Supposing I opened up an office in Wall Street – a Bank for Poets in which all writers of verse could deposit their rhymes as they write them, and draw against them, just as they do in ordinary banks with their money. It would be fine. Take a man like Swinburne, for instance, or our friend here. Our poet could take a sonnet he had written, endorse it, and put it in the bank. He’d be credited with one sonnet, and wouldn’t have to bother his head about it afterwards. He could draw against it. If the Clearing-house company could dispose of it to a magazine his draft would be honored in cash to its full value, less discount charges, which would include postage and commissions to the company.

“’And suppose the company failed to dispose of it,’ suggested the Poet.

“They’d do just as ordinary banks do with checks – stamp it, ‘Not Good,’ said the Idiot. “That, however, wouldn’t happen very often if the concern had an intelligent receiving-teller to detect counterfeits. If the receiving-teller were a man fit for the position and a poet brought in a quatrain with five lines in it, he could detect it at once and hand it right back. So with comic poems. I might go there with a poem I thought was comic, and proceed to the usual deposit slip. The teller would look at it a second, scrutinize the humor carefully, and then if it was not what I thought it, would stamp it ‘Not Comic’ or ‘Counterfeit.’ It’s perfectly simple.”

And perfectly idiotic, though it does raise the possibility of gainful employment for poets that involves poetry. Those receiver-teller positions are going to require skilled craftspeople to separate the iambic from the trochaic, the spondaic from the dactylic, the systolic from the diastolic. And, as required, comic timing will be necessary.

The Bank For Poets had a bad quarter
Sub-prime muses all underwater
Foreclosed stanzas sitting idly
Interest rates down- swing wildly
Down, down, down, the drunken bard
Says with the bastards in verse pithy
I’ve had it with these rotten bums
Who securitize our work and leave us crumbs



Spending days diffusing risk
While Greenspan yawned and said, "Tsk, tsk"
Diced poems trade for the highest quote
There’s a guy in Butte who bought a syllable I wrote
And thinks he’ll profit while I starve
But I’ve sharpened my knife for morbid carve
Weak and weary I know the dreary score
And you can quoth me on this: “Nevermore!”

__________
*
The Idiot (NY: Harper & Bros.,1895).
Coffee, Repartee, and the Idiot (Harper & Bros., 1899)
The Idiiot At Home (NY: Harper & Bros., 1900)
The Inventions of the Idiot (NY: Harper & Bros., 1904)
The Genial Idiot (NY: Harper & Bros., 1908)
Half Hours With the idiot (NY: Harper & Bros., 1917)

Many thanks to Valerie Urban of Rulon-Miller Books for images of title page and binding.