When Dynamite Turned Terrorism Into an Everyday Threat

By the time the newly appointed commissioner of the New York Police Department, Arthur Woods, arrived at the scene, along with the city’s chief bomb expert, Owen Eagan, firefighters had pulled the body down from the fire escape. Searching through the dead man’s jacket, the police found a notebook signed “Arthur Caron.” Woods recognized the name immediately: Caron was an anarchist who had recently spearheaded a series of pickets outside John D. Rockefeller’s estate in Tarrytown, protesting the Ludlow massacre in Colorado, where almost a dozen striking miners and their families were killed by military forces. Caron was a known associate of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, arguably the two most prominent political radicals in the United States at that time, and Berkman had vowed to respond to the Ludlow crimes with dynamite. This was no gas leak or construction mishap, Woods realized. The N.Y.P.D. would later determine that the explosion was an accident, but the bomb that detonated that morning had been intended for an act of political terrorism.