http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/1969-a-year-of-bombings/
By Bobby Allyn
August 27, 2009
One night, 40 years ago this month, about 50 typists were on the
eighth floor of the Marine Midland Building, keying records on
automatic booking machines, when a bomb exploded.
Placed next to a bank of elevators, the bomb which detonated around
10:50 p.m. on Aug. 20, 1969, with a force equal to about 24 sticks of
dynamite ripped off the elevator doors, blew out windows on three
sides of the building and overturned filing cabinets. The blast
collapsed the eighth floor into the seventh floor below. The
explosion ripped a hole eight feet wide through a 10-foot-thick
floor. About 150 late-shift employees were on duty at Marine Midland,
at 140 Broadway in the financial district, but only two people had
injuries serious enough to require extended medical treatment.
During a period of less than four months in the summer and fall of
1969, eight bombings rocked major institutions in New York City.
While no one was killed, the bombings caused several injuries, jolted
the city, damaged property and became symbols of the radical
movements that were challenging the foundations of American society.
Prof. Jeremy Varon, a historian at the New School and the author of
"Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army
Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies"
(University of California Press, 2004), said that "1969 was the high
watermark of anger and frustration in the Vietnam war."
He added: "The bombings that year were an expression, an act of, if
not foolhardy, optimism. They were desperadoes. They had the belief
that they could bomb old ideologies out of existence."
Prof. Beverly Gage, a historian at Yale and the author of "The Day
Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror"
(Oxford University Press, 2009), said the zeitgiest of the '60s and
specifically, the fears of faltering moral leadership contributed
to the paranoia of the era.
"One of the interesting things about the late '60s bombings was the
focus at the time: Everyone was focused on the youth," Professor Gage
said. "In other periods, it was about immigration and other issues,
but people then were asking: Why are our children doing this to us?"
The F.B.I. created a 20-person unit to investigate the New York City
bombings. Eventually, the Marine Midland bombing and several other
major bombings that rattled the city in 1969 were ultimately
attributed to one Samuel J. Melville, who was charged as the
principal conspirator and bomb-setter.
Mr. Melville, 34, an engineering technician turned antiwar radical,
was arrested on Nov. 12, 1969, as he tried to place a knapsack full
of dynamite on Army trucks at 68th Regiment Armory, at 26th Street
and Lexington Avenue. Earlier that day, a bomb had damaged part of
the fifth floor of the New York City Criminal Courts Building, the
fourth such explosion in Manhattan in two days.
Mr. Melville was apprehended with three others: George Demmerle, John
D. Hughey III and Jane L. Alpert, a Swarthmore College alumna who was
romantically linked with Mr. Melville. (Mr. Demmerle turned out to be
a paid F.B.I. informant.) Mr. Melville was ultimately convicted of
plotting eight bombings:
The United Fruit Company warehouse at the Grace Pier on the Hudson
River (July 27).
The Marine Midland building at 140 Broadway (Aug. 20).
The Federal Office Building at 26 Federal Plaza (Sept. 19)
The Armed Forces Induction Center at 39 Whitehall Street (Oct. 7)
The Chase Manhattan Bank at 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza (Nov. 11)
The Standard Oil offices in the RCA Building at Rockefeller Plaza (Nov. 11)
The General Motors Building at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue (Nov. 11)
The Criminal Courts Building at 100 Centre Street (Nov. 12)
A letter to The New York Times from the bombers read:
The Establishment is in for some big surprises if it thinks that
kangaroo courts and death sentences can arrest a revolution.
In 1970, Mr. Melville was sentenced to 13 to 18 years in prison for
his role plotting the eight bombings. The following year, he was
killed during the Attica prison uprising.
The 1969 bombings were part of a wave of similar episodes across the
nation that spurred fear and anxiety. (One study found that from
January 1969 to October 1970, there were about 370 bombings most of
them minor in New York, an average of more than one every other day.)
"Bombs are back," Police Commissioner Howard R. Leary testified at a
Senate committee in 1970. "Bombing has reached gigantic proportions."
The hearing, part of an investigated led Senator John L. McClellan,
Democrat of Arkansas, concluded that from January 1969 to April 1970,
the United States sustained 4,330 bombings 3,355 of them
incendiary, 975 explosive resulting in 43 deaths and $21.8 million
in property damage.
Dr. John P. Spiegel, then the director of Brandeis University's
Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence, which analyzed civil
disturbances, told The Times in 1970 that the bombers were engaged in
a sort of guerrilla theater, and that they were motivated by the
ineffectiveness of peaceful protests against the war.
"You can attack property rather than people," he said. "I mean you
have to snipe at a human object whereas this is a way of symbolically
attacking the Establishment without attacking human beings. There is
something symbolically satisfying about a pure explosion, the
emotional satisfaction and drama attached to it, calling everybody's
attention to the fact that something has been done."
Professor Varon, of the New School, described Mr. Melville and his
collaborators as an "ad hoc collective." He said most of the urban
warfare that plagued the nation in 1969 was orchestrated by "small
groups of friends."
"Melville's collective beat the Weathermen to the punch," Professor
Varon said, referring to the radical group that destroyed a Greenwich
Village town house in March 1970, killing three people. "They were
the precursors to the Weathermen, who, of course, received more notoriety."
New York City has not endured serial bombings of the '69 scale since
that summer. But the explosions that year were a major chapter in the
history of the Police Department's bomb squad, which was founded at
the turn of the last century to eradicate Italian Black Hand
extortionists who were terrorizing fellow immigrants.
"Forty years later, however, there's little if any public tolerance
for the rationalization that radicals once employed in trying to
justify their means to an end," the Police Department's chief
spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said in an e-mail message in response to
questions about the bombings.
Professor Varon said that the movements out of which groups like Mr.
Melville's emerged will always have a degree of romantic resonance
with young activists.
"It's the nature of young people," he said. "They will always be
inspired by people of intense principles. The bombers represent the
extreme edge of the commitment. They will for a long time be regarded
for their generational mobilization. It's impressive to most people."
.
0 comments:
Post a Comment