April Mail Bomb Attacks
In late April 1919, at least 36 booby trap dynamite-filled bombs were mailed to a cross-section of prominent politicians and appointees, including the Attorney General of the United States, as well as justice officials, newspaper editors and businessmen, including John D. Rockefeller. Among all the bombs addressed to high-level officials, one bomb was notably addressed to the home of a Federal Bureau of Investigation (BOI) field agent once tasked with investigating the Galleanists, Rayme Weston Finch, who in 1918 had arrested two prominent Galleanists while leading a police raid on the offices of their publication Cronaca Sovversiva.
The mail bombs were wrapped in brown paper with similar address and advertising labels. Inside, wrapped in bright green paper and stamped "Gimbel Brothers - Novelty Samples.", was a cardboard box containing a six-inch by three-inch block of hollowed wood about one inch in thickness, packed with a stick of dynamite. A small vial of sulfuric acid was fastened to the wood block, along with three fulminate-of-mercury blasting caps. Opening one end of the box (the end marked "open") released a coil spring that caused the acid to drip from its vial onto the blasting caps; the acid ate through the caps, igniting them and detonating the dynamite.
The Galleanists intended their bombs to be delivered on May Day. Since 1890 and the Second International, May 1 had been celebrated as the international day of communist, anarchist, and socialist revolutionary solidarity. Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson, who had recently attained national prominence for opposing a general strike in Seattle, received one of the mailed package bombs, but it was opened by William Langer, a member of his office staff. Langer opened the wrong end of the box, and the bottle of acid dropped onto a table without detonation. He took the bomb to the local police, who notified the Post Office and other police agencies. On April 29, Georgia senator Thomas W. Hardwick, who had co-sponsored the anti-radical Immigration Act of 1918, received a similarly disguised bomb. It blew off the hands of his housekeeper when she attempted to open the package. The senator's wife was also injured in the blast, which severely burned her face and neck, and a piece of shrapnel cut her lip and loosened several of her teeth.
News reports of the Hardwick bomb described its distinctive packaging; an alert post office employee in New York connected this to 16 similar packages which he had set aside a few days earlier for insufficient postage. Another 12 bombs were eventually recovered before reaching their intended targets. The addressees were:
- Theodore G. Bilbo, Governor of Mississippi
- Frederick Bullmers, editor, Jackson, Mississippi Daily News
- Albert S. Burleson, Postmaster General of the United States
- John L. Burnett, United States congressman, Alabama
- Anthony Caminetti, Commissioner General of Immigration
- Edward A. Cunha, Assistant District Attorney, San Francisco
- Richard Edward Enright, Police Commissioner, New York City
- T. Larry Eyre, Pennsylvania state senator
- Charles M. Fickert, District Attorney, San Francisco
- Rayme Weston Finch, field agent, Bureau of Investigation
- Ole Hanson, Mayor of Seattle, Washington
- Thomas W. Hardwick, former United States senator, Georgia
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, United States Supreme Court justice
- Fredric C. Howe, Port of New York Commissioner of Immigration
- John F. Hylan, mayor, New York City
- Albert Johnson, United States congressman, Washington
- William H. King, United States senator, Utah
- William H. Lamar, Solicitor of the Post Office
- Kenesaw Mountain Landis, U.S. District Judge, Chicago
- J. P. Morgan, Jr., businessman
- Frank K. Nebeker, Special Assistant to the Attorney General
- Lee S. Overman, United States senator, North Carolina
- A Mitchell Palmer, Attorney General of the United States
- John D. Rockefeller, businessman
- William I. Schaffer, Attorney General, State of Pennsylvania
- Walter Scott, mayor, Jackson, Mississippi
- Reed Smoot, United States senator, Utah
- William C. Sproul, Governor of Pennsylvania
- William B. Wilson, United States Secretary of Labor
- William Madison Wood, president, American Woolen Company
Read more about this topic: 1919 United States Anarchist Bombings
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