0.3 Great war (part ii)  (Page 15/16)

In June of 1919, several bombs went off nearly at the same time throughout the Northeast and in Washington, DC. One in particular was set off in a carriage parked outside the home of the US Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer. At this time President Wilson was still recovering from his latest stroke and thus Palmer, working on his own, created a new national intelligence unit called the General Intelligence Division (GID) and hired a young attorney named Herbert Hoover to lead the GID. During the summer and fall of 1919, and using the broad powers of the Alien and Espionage Acts, Palmer ordered a series of attacks against suspected internal enemies. Known as the “Palmer Raids,” thousands of suspected radicals were arrested and held without bail.

One possible reaction to these raids was a massive bombing of Wall Street. On September 16 ^th , 1920, a horse-drawn carriage parked near the entrance of the J.P. Morgan bank. Nearly forty people were killed and 400 were injured. "The horrible slaughter and maiming of men and women," wrote the New York Call , “was a calamity that almost stills the beating of the heart of the people.” “There was no objective except general terrorism,” wrote the St. Louis Post-Dispatch . “The bomb was not directed against any particular person or property. It was directed against a public, anyone who happened to be near or any property in the neighborhood.” The Washington Post labeled it an “act of war.” This 1920 attack will be the worst act of terrorism witnessed in New York for another 81 years.

Even elected officials were not safe during this “Red Scare.” Sam DeWitt was elected to the New York state assembly was expelled because he was a Socialist. The voters of Wisconsin elected Victor Berger to represent them in Washington, DC on the Socialist ticket. Berger was refused admittance into Congress and he was expelled from the national capital. The Washington Post applauded the Senate’s decision calling it an “impressive demonstration of Americanism.” Berger will be re-elected but will still be barred from taking his seat Washington, DC.

The political fear of the “Red Scare” following World War II is but a small example of the aligning of the political universe following World War II when the bipolar world of the Cold War will be the driving characteristic of the second half of the twentieth century.

Soldiers returning from western Europe will bring back stories, medals, souvenirs, and influenza, which Americans will call the Spanish Flu in large measure because Spain will be the place where most Americans soldiers were kept before retuning to the US. The disease inflected approximately 28% of the US population. Worldwide deaths averaged 30 million people, or, ten times as many people died from the 1918 influenza pandemic (which probably was born in the trenches and incubated in the overcrowded port towns of Spain while troops waited for ships to take them back home) than from fighting in the trenches during the Great War. 1918 saw the end of the Great War and before the first anniversary of the Armistice, 675,000 Americans will die from influenza.