Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [189]
Let me emphasize that my “solution” to this mystery is imaginary. There is absolutely no historical evidence for the notion that the true masterminds behind the bombing were Senator Albert Bacon Fall, Thomas W.Lamont of the J. P. Morgan Co., or former Treasury Secretary William G. McAdoo. These men are real historical figures; the latter two are properly credited with significant public service and important accomplishments. The background facts that I recount about them are true. My story, however, about their responsibility for the Wall Street bombing is just that—a story.
What then is real and what imaginary in The Death Instinct? The principle I tried to follow was simple. The action of the book—the perils of its protagonists, the evildoing they uncover—is fiction. The world in which that action takes place is fact.
Thus the backdrop of events and circumstances against which The Death Instinct unfolds is true. At the very moment of the explosion on Wall Street, and directly opposite, almost a billion dollars in United States gold was indeed in transit from the old Sub-Treasury to the adjacent Assay Office via a wooden overhead bridge. A few miles away, a hundred working women would have been painting luminous watch dials, using their lips to point their poisonous brushes. In Washington, D.C., Senator Fall was in fact machinating, nearly successfully, to bring about a war with Mexico that would have enriched himself and his powerful friends in the oil industry. Meanwhile, in war-devastated Europe, Sigmund Freud had just arrived at a new understanding of the human soul, according to which every individual is born with two fundamental instincts—one aiming at life and love, the other at death.
On the other hand, the theft of the Treasury’s gold described in The Death Instinct is invented. The United States has always denied that any gold was lost. The accepted account is that the simultaneity of the bombing and the gold transfer was mere coincidence and that the workmen moving the precious metal happened to take their lunch break, closing up the heavy doors on either side of the bridge, moments before the explosion.
From the great occurrences like the bombing, to the petite Curie radiological truck driven by Colette, the world described in The Death Instinct is as real as I could make it, every detail based on actual historical sources. Readers who learn in these pages that thousands of soldiers were needlessly killed on November 11, 1918—after their commanding officers already knew of the armistice—can be confident that this fact is documented in numerous reliable accounts. If I quote a newspaper, the quotation is verbatim or, if edited, only very slightly for style, without alteration of content. If I offer particular images from the September sixteenth explosion, every one of them is drawn from contemporaneous accounts: a taxi was in fact blown into the air; a woman’s head was severed from her body; the pockmarked walls of the Morgan Bank can still be seen today. Even the outrageous forgeries I describe, purporting to show that the Mexican government had paid bribes to three anti-interventionist United States senators, are historically based, although these forgeries would not be circulated until a few years later, in another failed effort to spur an American invasion of Mexico.
To be sure, I can’t vouch for the truth of the historical materials on which I rely. When I quote Toynbee describing German atrocities in France in 1914, readers can be sure the quotation is exact, but they can’t know—and I don’t know—whether Toynbee’s account is itself correct. The ultimate validity of historical sources must