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  MORE POWERFUL THAN DYNAMITE

  Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and

  New York’s Year of Anarchy

  THAI JONES

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Introduction: December 31, 1913

  I

  1. So the New Year Opens in Hope

  Statistical Abstract

  2. The Jobless Man and the Manless Job

  The Social Evil

  3. A New Gospel

  II

  The Possibility of a Revolution

  4. “Three Cheers for the Cops!”

  Chief-Inspector Judas

  5. Somebody Blundered

  III

  The Lid

  6. Free Silence

  A Film with a Thrill

  7. A Sleepy Little Burg

  Safe and Sane

  8. His Own Medicine

  IV

  9. The War Has Spoiled Everything

  10. Who’s Who Against America

  December 31, 1919

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Sources and Notes

  Footnotes

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  To Jeff and Eleanor,

  aka my parents

  The history of martyrs is the history of people who expanded to their faith. Indeed, men have shaken destiny because they felt they embodied it. Patriotism, the Cause, Humanity, Perfection, Righteousness, Liberty,—all of them large and windy abstractions to outsiders, are more powerful than dynamite to those who feel them.

  —WALTER LIPPMANN, DRIFT AND MASTERY (1914)

  Foreword

  For me, the anarchists came first. I was surprised to discover that three young radicals had been killed in New York City in 1914 when a bomb they were constructing had prematurely detonated inside their apartment. The accident had come in the midst of a national crisis over unemployment and labor rights; contemporaries believed that the dynamite—if it had served its handlers’ intended purpose—would have been used to assassinate John D. Rockefeller.

  No one I talked to had ever heard of the incident, which had occurred on Lexington Avenue, in East Harlem. This was not far from where I lived, and so it was easy to go and see the building where the blast had struck. The façade had been rebuilt, but a vicious scar still marked the line of devastation where the bricks had come cascading down, along with glass, pieces of furniture, and bits of flesh. Each day, for decades, hundreds of people had walked past the site. Many must have noticed the evidence of damage, but few—if any—could recall its origins or significance. It had taken less than a century for this history to be lost.

  At the time, the Lexington Avenue explosion had been the largest dynamite disaster in the city’s history. But others would follow. In 1970, a similar accident cost the lives of three young members of the Weather Underground. Their device had been meant for an officer’s dance at Fort Dix, in New Jersey, and when its sudden power tore up from the basement, the force destroyed an entire townhouse on West 11th Street, in Greenwich Village.

  Whatever differences of ideology and purpose separated the two sets of would-be bombers, I was struck by the similarities that linked them. Having written about the 1960s generation—my parents’ generation—I immediately recognized their kinship with the radicals of a half century earlier. These were demonstrations by the young and desperate against the old and entrenched. They were provocateurs. More than anything else, the extremists in these movements had been brought to the same pitch of anger by social injustice. Whether it was the Vietnam War or the daily horrors of industrial violence, both the anarchists and the Weathermen had been prepared to kill in response. And in these two instances—separated by ninety-two blocks and fifty-six years—it was they who died in the attempt.

  Investigating the anarchists’ deaths unveiled a broader history that had itself largely been effaced by time. As it happened, they were not the only insurgents in New York in 1914. A new mayor had taken office that year, a reformer determined to implement the latest ideas in government, who had surrounded himself with a coterie of nonconformists and social scientists. In Washington, D.C., a sympathetic leader, Woodrow Wilson, had recently begun his presidency. These were the officials tasked with anarchy’s containment: not some corrupt political machine that could resort to violence without a qualm, but progressive administrations constrained by their own ideals of civil liberties and impartial justice.

  And then there were the Rockefellers. The patriarch had retired but remained the richest man on earth. His son had quit the family business to focus on works of charity. He dedicated his energies to disbursing the money his father had earned, hopeful, perhaps, that if he could do enough good in spending his inheritance, then Americans might forget the ruthlessness that had acquired it in the first place.

  Finally, there was New York City itself. Residents saw ball games and went to the movies, rode the subways and watched planes pass overhead. They were assailed by advertisements, and bustled by skyscrapers without caring to look up. They were jammed in the Times Square crush; they cursed the traffic on Broadway. It was, in fine, a modern city. And yet, that same year, a large proportion of tenement apartments lacked private toilets; hundreds died from typhoid, tuberculosis, and diarrhea. Tens of thousands of children labored in sweatshops and factories instead of attending school.

  “We live in a revolutionary period,” Walter Lippmann, a young journalist, wrote in 1913, “and nothing is so important as to be aware of it.” Despite conflicting outlooks for what the nation should become, every political person understood the intensity of the moment. Drastic transformation would come—it was stirring already. On those New York streets, these three blocs—radicals, plutocrats, and progressives—each struggled to impart their own visions of the future onto society as a whole. The issues being contested—free speech, corporate power, industrial democracy—have remained at the storm center of American politics ever since.

  In the opening years of the twentieth century, these partisans tested the possibilities and limits of what it would mean to be a modern citizen. Either violent protest would forcibly create a truly democratic society, or the combined restraints of reform, philanthropy, and scientific expertise would prove to be more powerful than dynamite.

  —Thai Jones, August 2011

  Introduction

  December 31, 1913

  The masses approached. Wall Street businessmen, wary from past demonstrations, encased their windows behind heavy timbers to protect against the crush. Civic leaders pleaded for restraint. Police made scores of arrests. But for one night the streets belonged to the mob. December 31, 1913, most agreed, was the “wildest” New Year’s Eve the city had seen in more than a decade.

  By ten P.M., the city air popped with frost. The downtown canyons glowed from the lantern atop the Singer Tower, down past twenty-seven illuminated stories of the Woolworth Building, to the Edison arc lamps on the avenues. Crowds decanted from the cross streets into Broadway—tenement dwellers and denizens of “East Umpety-Umpth streets,” gentlemen wearing spats and slender worsted jackets, women swathed in a “kaleidoscope of colored and tinted gowns and wraps.” In dark spots where no light spilled, men in long coats discreetly inquired if passersby needed “a nice watch and chain, cheap.” And one cherub—quickly escorted to Bellevue—managed to defy fashion, the cold, and moral decency when he appeared wearing “no raiment between a cigar he was puffing and his shoes.”

  For abstainers, the Society for the Prevention of Useless Noises had organized an edifying program of cho
ral music and prayer. Their “Safe and Sane” celebration drew thousands to a solemn service where any display of verve was quickly throttled by the police. Officers arrested more than a hundred peddlers of rattles, buzzers, and clappers, and even confiscated confetti and false whiskers. But these raids only inflated prices; horns sold for as much as half a dollar, and enough customers violated the blockade on these “instruments of torture” that large portions of the city were debauched by the “blare of raspy throated tin horns, a clattering staccato tumult of wooden rattles, jarring bells,” as well as numerous other sounds emitted without any discernable purpose.

  New Year’s Eve in a New York café.

  An hour before midnight, the theaters released thousands toward the restaurants. Celebrants with foresight had reserved their tables a month in advance; throngs overran Reisenweber’s and the Marlborough. The owner of Rector’s, on Forty-eighth Street, thought he could have filled all of Madison Square Garden with the customers he was forced to turn away. Patrons at Sans Souci and the Café des Beaux Arts received complimentary souvenirs, direct from France. But the food and favors held no interest, and even the champagne sweated alone, untouched. Hurriedly throwing down their coats, the guests rushed the dance floors to fox-trot and tango. Between numbers, they visited their tables for a sip of brut or a nibble of something, but they did so absentmindedly, and only for tradition’s sake. “It was dance-dance-dance, everywhere,” a World reporter wrote. “New York literally abandoned itself to the seductive sway and swing and slide of the new sort of dance.” Couples spun in the basement wine vaults of the Astor, and they pirouetted on the rooftop of the Belvedere. They would not be refused, and even the fusty Waldorf begrudgingly cleared a small area for those who absolutely had to waltz.

  The toughest reservation in town was the Plaza. Two thousand luminaries filled the grillroom and packed the auxiliary salons and ballrooms, so that extra tables had to be placed in the corridors to accommodate the overflow. But hallway seating was not for the honored guests. Harry S. Black, the Realtor, Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, a millionaire suffrage advocate, Elbert Gary of U.S. Steel, Stuyvesant Fish, the retired president of the Illinois Central—they supped comfortably in the main dining room. Nearby, at a table almost but not quite so well situated, sat a promising young couple: Mayor-elect John Purroy Mitchel and his wife, Olive.

  Wiry and tall, at thirty-four Mitchel already looked like a man of authority. He had sharp, focused features and eyes “alive with the joy of fight.” This was his night, and these were his people. All round the room they scrutinized his precise, unaffected manners—a reporter for Hearst’s magazine thought he carried himself with an “almost patrician dignity”—and discussed his apparently limitless prospects. As course followed course, coworkers, elder statesmen, and chums from his Columbia days came to offer advice or congratulations. Among his own sort, Mitchel displayed “an infectious kind of gaiety, and an unusual capacity for friendship.” He greeted each well-wisher with the just-right tone, switching naturally from deference to bonhomie. “There was kind of an aspect of a young knight in shining armor about him,” a colleague recalled, “here was a man who wanted to run out the crookedness and inefficiency and do something brighter and cleaner than had been done for a long, long time.” He was master of himself, master of the room, and he would awake the next morning to become master of the greatest city on earth.

  Mayor-elect John Purroy Mitchel.

  No man, whatever his outward composition, could anticipate the prospect without a tremor. And Mitchel, in fact, awaited it with extreme apprehension. The perfect ease he felt with his peers was mirrored by the pure revulsion he experienced among the masses—the very multitudes who were now reveling on the Fifth Avenue sidewalks—who would imminently become the main of his constituency. With them he felt acute and obvious distress; the tension and toll of contact could knock him low with devastating migraines. Tomorrow he faced inauguration. No vision could be more terrifying—the previous mayor had shaken a thousand hands at his swearing-in. But that was tomorrow. As another acquaintance came to pay respects—or as the Neapolitan singers wandered into the main dining room—Mitchel set aside his shadowed cares. His pearl-and-platinum pocket watch displayed the hour; midnight approached.

  ON THE STREETS, celebrations everywhere. Directed by hundreds of policemen, the crowds marched north along one side of the thoroughfares, south down the other. A horn-blowing but genial traffic jam extended, according to the Sun, “from Bowling Green up Broadway to Park Row, up Park Row to the Bowery, up the Bowery to Third avenue, up Third avenue to Fourteenth street, and so across Fourteenth street back to Broadway and up that thoroughfare of fun to some place probably near the north pole.” Rioting taxicabs and private autos posed an incessant menace. Impromptu parties enlivened the upper levels of the buses as riders traversed the routes back and forth just to view the scenes. Even the unfashionable districts above Central Park South participated. Young couples without the “necessary wherewithal” to afford the exorbitantly priced horns or prix fixe meals promenaded along the boulevards uptown—“125th street, ordinarily a live enough thoroughfare, was in a blaze of glory.”

  THE NATION’S MOST notorious anarchists were throwing a party in their Harlem brownstone. Notifications had gone out the previous week, inviting friends and comrades to “be among us to kick out the old year and meet the new.” By ten P.M., welcoming lights glimmered inside the three-story building at 74 West 119th Street that served Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman as home, office, and meetinghouse. They had moved there in September and already the location was well-known to the city’s radicals—as well as its detectives. But this was the official housewarming celebration. The evening “brought the procession of friends,” Goldman recalled, “among them poets, writers, rebels, and Bohemians of various attitude, behaviour, and habit.” They climbed the stairs to the main floor and were welcomed into a warm and chaotic sanctum that could easily accommodate a hundred guests. The young people waltzed to the gramophone. German Bundists poured stout brown beer. Italian sindicalisti swallowed Chianti. They reminisced; they gossiped. “They argued about philosophy, social theories, art, and sex.”

  As midnight neared, “everybody danced and grew gay.” Typically, the hosts would have been the cheeriest participants. Goldman was known as a “great dancer.” Berkman was ever the gallant suitor, typically partnering up with one or two young ladies, and sometimes with “scores of other radical women.” But not this evening. Suffering through a spiteful separation with a younger man, Goldman felt “lonely and unutterably sad.” For Berkman, it had been years since he had surrendered himself to happiness. The arrival of each new year only reminded him of the fourteen that he had lost in prison. One time, in the Western Penitentiary of Pennsylvania, the inmates had stayed up past curfew. They had waited for the sounds from beyond the walls—ship sirens in the Ohio River, church bells, factory whistles—to inform them when midnight had come. The prisoners answered with what they had, and Berkman could hear it still. “Tin cans rattle against iron bars, doors shake in fury, beds and chairs squeak and screech, pans slam on the floor. Unearthly yelling, shouting, and whistling rend the air.”

  Alexander Berkman.

  In those years, he had grasped for the mercy of such vivid moments. Now, though he was a free man again, the immediacy of those thrills eluded him. The fanatical revolutionist of his youth had been replaced by this forty-three-year-old gadfly—bald, nearsighted, paunchy. For Berkman, another year meant another year older.

  * * *

  FROM THE 125TH Street station, it was only two stops on the New York Central Railroad to the village of Tarrytown, forty-five minutes—or “a rubber of whist”—away. A short automobile ride up North Main Street led to arcadian countryside, winding roads, the reservoir, and the well-watched gates of the Rockefeller family estate. Within this private preserve, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.—the thirty-nine-year-old son of the world’s richest man—passed the evening with his wife and c
hildren.

  Their perfect holiday season had begun with stockings before breakfast on Christmas morning, followed by a musicale and gifts beneath the tree. Gathering in the schoolroom of their mansion on West Fifty-fourth Street, they had unwrapped their presents—a new sweater from his wife, for their daughter a bicycle. It was “a noisy, happy time,” with paper heaped round them, that lasted until the moment came to assail the turkey. After luncheon, they had crowded the automobile for a ride up to Fort Washington Park, scrambling down around the river just as a light snow began to fall. The next afternoon, the family journeyed to the Tarrytown property for a charmed interlude of “quiet and freedom.” They gave concerts for each other on the pipe organ, experimented with the new bike, went ice-skating, and took pony rides. “The children were as happy as their parents,” Junior wrote. Everyone was relieved to escape “from the rush and hurry of the city.”

  Such casual ease was in itself an accomplishment for Junior, who had been drilled in austerity and self-denial. Wealth notwithstanding, the holidays had never brought indulgence. As a child, he once confided a Christmas wish to his mother. “I am so glad my son has told me what he wants,” she had then reported to a friend, “so now it can be denied him.” As he grew up, the family had kept to little gifts. This year, Senior had sent $1,000; Junior reciprocated with “a dozen white handkerchiefs, a dozen colored handkerchiefs and ten cravats.” But when it came to pleasing his mother, the game broke down. “I wanted so much to send you something particularly nice,” he apologized, “but have not yet seen just what I thought you would like; so to my chagrin and regret, I am sending you nothing. You know how queer I am about presents.”

  Junior knew that few would sympathize with the burden of his wealth, but that did not mean it did not weigh upon him. “You can never forget that you are a prince, the Son of the King of Kings,” his mother had told him once, “you can never do what will dishonor your father or be disloyal to the King.” He sometimes felt he was not strong enough to bear the pressure. Shy and directed inward, he had “always had a very poor opinion” of his own abilities. Coming to work for Standard Oil after college, he had felt inferior even to the secretaries. “They can prove to themselves their commercial worth,” he explained. “I envy anybody who can do that.”