More Powerful Than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York's Year of Anarchy

407 Pages·2012·5.92 MB·English

by  Jones Thai

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 choral 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 dancedance-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