ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the 1916 San Francisco Preparedness Day Bombing within the broader context of American radicalism and isolationism during the Progressive Era. It examines the conditions and realities of not only Gilded Age economic growth but also, and especially, the realities for a United States working class that found themselves overworked and underpaid. The rise of an American brand of anarchism, one that, like its counterparts in Europe, became increasingly receptive to sabotage and violence as a path to change. The book traces the widening gulf between capital and labor, increasing radicalism, and a few notable examples of these developments during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The stories of San Francisco in and around 1916 reveal a city, and nation, grappling with the tensions of war, patriotism, free speech, and loyalty.
