Wall Street Bombing In The 21st Century

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Following the 9/11 attacks, the United States came together with a staunch promise to “never forget” that day’s atrocities. Congressmen from opposing parties reached across the aisle and stood arm in arm at the Capitol to show their commitment to this pledge. But,when another terrorist attack had stunned New York City a century earlier, this promise did not exist. In 1920, a bombing on Wall Street rattled the city’s financial core and earned the title as the city’s worst terrorist attack until 2001. The assault came merely two years after the US debuted as a global superpower with World War 1’s end. Despite the attack on this newfound American identity, the bombing never found closure for proving for the first time that the US was not invincible. Though many Americans thought the country as indestructible, the Wall Street Bombing had shown the opposite. On September …show more content…

James Barron’s “After 1920 Blast, The Opposite Of 'Never Forget'; No Memorials on Wall St. For Attack That Killed 30” explains that police only had theories that pandered to the time’s nationalist attitudes, blaming Italian anarchists. One anarchist, Mario Buda, supposedly staged the attack as revenge for what he deemed to be an unjust court decision. Earlier that year, the courts had indicted two Italian anarchists, Niccolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti earlier, for their political affiliations, rather than concrete evidence. The pair had been believed to be the perpetrators of a shoe robbery incident that killed two civilians. Emerging months after the attack, the theory could never be verified with the corrosion of the physical evidence (par. 12-14). According to J. Michael Martinez’s Terrorist Attacks on American Soil: From the Civil War Era to the Present, others had ignored the attack altogether, believing that Wall Street was merely the site of the transportation of dynamite gone wrong

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