The Bombing of Wall Street, PBS American Experience: Premier Feb. 13

[appalachiablue]

Sept. 16, 1920, in the Financial District of New York a bomb planted in a horse-drawn carriage exploded outside JP Morgan & Co. Bank killing 38 people and injuring more than 200.

[appalachiablue]

1. PBS American Experience The Bombing of Wall Street

Premieres February 13, 2018, The Bombing of Wall Street

Film Description

On September 16, 1920, as hundreds of Wall Street workers headed out for lunch, a horse-drawn cart packed with dynamite exploded in front of Morgan Bank — the world’s most powerful banking institution. The blast turned the nation’s financial center into a bloody war zone and left 38 dead and hundreds more seriously injured.

As financial institutions around the country went on high alert, many wondered if this was the strike against American capitalism that radical agitators had threatened for so long. A mostly-forgotten act of terror that remains unsolved today, the bombing helped launch the career of a young J. Edgar Hoover and sparked a bitter national debate about how far the government should go to protect the nation from acts of political violence. Based on Beverly Gage’s The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror.

>More with Special Features:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/bombing-wall-street/

[C Moon]

2. Plan on watching or recording this.

[ancianita]

3. Thank you. History is always instructive.

[appalachiablue]

6. For sure, and 'What's Past is Prologue' as Shakespeare

wrote in 'The Tempest.'

[yuiyoshida]

4. Do you think in the Trump Era this

could happen again??

[appalachiablue]

5. I certainly hope not, the human carnage in this terrorist attack was horrible!

Stricter laws and expansion of US federal police forces resulted from the 1920 NYC bombing event. That period was a very tumultuous time of rising unrest among various groups viewed as highly dangerous to the established order, notably anarchists, some activists involved in labor and anti-war issues, even members of the suffragette movement.

As well, in 1917 a few years earlier the violent Bolshevik Revolution in Russia had stunned the world, alarmed many governments and leaders and resulted in even more monitoring and opposition to radical groups, especially in the US and Europe.

Today there's much more in the way of communication advances, deterrents, surveillance technologies and heightened awareness of potential terrorist attacks, so hopefully nothing like this could happen again. On the other hand, we're experiencing individual and group assaults on a lesser but still lethal scale more every year now it seems, here and all over.
Criminals in Nice, France and England drove trucks to plow through innocent bystanders and caused death and great harm to many, even without the use of explosives like in 1920. Now is also a time of increased concern about many issues, to say the least!