Powerful than Dynamite Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York's Year of Anarchy Thai

447 Pages·2012·2.17 MB·English

by  Thai Jones

More Powerful than Dynamite
Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York’s Year of Anarchy

Thai Jones

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

2012
© 2012
Thai Jones
All rights reserved
ABSTRACT

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

Thai Jones

The year had opened with bright expectations, but 1914 quickly tumbled into disillusionment and
violence. For John Purroy Mitchel, New York City’s new “boy mayor,” the trouble started in
January, when a crushing winter caused homeless shelters to overflow and dozens of the city’s
homeless froze to death. By April, anarchist throngs had paraded past industrialists’ mansions,
and tens of thousands filled New York’s Union Square demanding “Bread of Revolution.” Then,
on July 4, 1914, a bomb destroyed a six-story Harlem tenement. It was the largest explosion the
city had ever known. Among the dead were three bomb-makers; incited by anarchist Alexander
Berkman, they had been preparing to dynamite the estate of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., son of a
plutocratic dynasty and widely vilified for a massacre of his company’s striking workers in
Colorado earlier that spring. More Powerful Than Dynamite charts how anarchist anger,
progressive idealism, and plutocratic paternalism converged in that July explosion.
Table of Contents

Introduction 1
Prologue December 31, 1913 22

PART ONE

Chapter 1: So the New Year Opens in Hope 37
Statistical Abstract 68
Chapter 2: The Jobless Man and the Manless Job 73
The Social Evil 104
Chapter 3: A New Gospel 110

PART TWO

The Possibility of a Revolution 142
Chapter 4: “Three Cheers for the Cops!” 151
Chief-Inspector Judas 182
Chapter 5: Somebody Blundered 191

PART THREE

The Lid 223
Chapter 6: Free Silence 230
A Film With a Thrill 258
Chapter 7: A Sleepy Little Burg 265
Safe and Sane 294
Chapter 8: His Own Medicine 309

PART FOUR

Chapter 9: The War Has Spoiled Everything 327
Chapter 10: Who’s Who Against America 349
December 31, 1919 388
Afterword 403
Bibliography 427

i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Committed archivists are essential to any work of nonfiction, and I was fortunate to
benefit from the assistance of great researchers at numerous libraries. I would like to thank Eric
Wakin and Susan Hamson at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Lea
Osborne at the New York Public Library, Candace Falk at the Emma Goldman Papers Project,
James Folts at the New York State Archives, Fernanda Perrone at Rutgers University Special
Collections, Kathryn Kulpa at the Fall River Public Library, Bonnie Coles at the Library of
Congress, Sara Mascia at the Sleepy Hollow Historical Society, and Patti Fink at the National
Personnel Records Center. I was also aided by librarians at the UCLA Special Collections
library, the Western Reserve Historical Society Library, and the International Institute of Social
History, in Amsterdam. I thank Robert Plunkett and Thomas Krieg for their willingness to
confide their family histories to me. In particular, I wish to acknowledge the generous assistance
given to my research by the late Kenneth Rose at the Rockefeller Archive Center.
Important sections of this book were developed in Columbia University seminars
conducted by professors Elizabeth Blackmar, Kenneth T. Jackson, Alice Kessler-Harris, Sarah
Phillips, and Simon Schama. Chelsea Szendi Schieder read the manuscript as it was being
written, and then reread the whole after its completion. Her perspective was always sharp and
inspiring, and she made the work seem fun. My fellow doctoral candidates in Columbia’s
Department of History have provided guidance and solicitude in equal measure. Jessica Adler,
Melissa Borja, Victoria Geduld, Elizabeth Hinton, Sarah Kirshen, Justin Jackson, Ben Lyons,
Tamara Mann, Yuki Oda, Nick Osborne, Matt Spooner, Mason Williams, Mike Woodsworth –
thank you all – and now get back to work!
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A book on anarchism would be mere chaos without constructive feedback from critical
readers. Zayd Dohrn, Rachel DeWoskin, Chesa Boudin, Jonah Hoyle, and Nick Miroff read parts
of the manuscript and offered useful suggestions. Samuel G. Freedman, mentor and role model,
read and edited the entire proposal – seemingly overnight – and his notes were keen and erudite,
as always. Billy Herbert and the profoundly missed Margaret Black Mirabelli were insightful and
enthusiastic supporters. Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Kathy Boudin, and David Gilbert
provided their political acumen and experience in ways that fundamentally shaped my
understanding of the street demonstrations and prison conditions of the past. Sean and Hudson
Jacke provided expert technological assistance. Harry Kellerman, Tom Meredith, Aisha Ayers,
Camila Piñeiro Harnecker, Carole Armel, Jane Hirschmann, Richard Levy, Michael Ratner, and
Karen Ranucci all graciously offered their homes as places for me to write, research, and revise.
Finally, the people who have contributed the most to this effort. Eleanor Stein, my
mother, whose erudition continually amazes me, and Jeff Jones, my father, a political thinker
without peer, offered loving support and priceless encouragement at all times. My brother,
Arthur Bluejay, not only had to read each and every word, but was often forced to read them out
loud, More Powerful than Dynamite never could have been written without him.

iii
PREFACE
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 Weatherman 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 of the young and desperate against the old and
entrenched. They were provocateurs. More than anything else, the extremists in these
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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 to combat them. 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 also 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 ballgames 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
v
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
vi
1
Introduction

“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)

When this study begins, on New Year’s Eve in 1913, the United States was a markedly different
nation than it would be on New Year’s Eve in 1919, when it concludes. In that time, federal
bureaucracy and expenditures had greatly expanded, lessening the relative importance of
municipal governments. A diverse conglomeration of reform societies had achieved several long-
cherished goals, while falling relatively silent on others. The mainstream labor movement had
won some successes, while simultaneously losing much of its oppositional edge. An unpopular
overclass had gone from being the target of mass protests to earning wide admiration as
exemplary good citizens. And many of the nation’s most militant voices had been silenced
through out-and-out repression.
In short, a momentous transformation had occurred.
This project traces the transition as it unfolded in New York City during the years 1914 to
1920. At the start of this turbulent period, the municipal government found itself confronted by
homelessness, unemployment, and demonstrations led by angry militants. Responding to these
pressures, the city created a diverse new array of institutions, expanding its capacity to
administer charities, punish criminals, and otherwise extend its powers into the lives of residents.
Some of the most threatening protests had targeted Wall Street and its representatives, especially
the Rockefeller family, which – at the time – was implicated in the violent repression of a
miners’ strike in Colorado. Facing ruinous threats to their safety and reputation, the Rockefellers