by Fran Leadon
CHAPTER 15
INCENDIARY SPEECH
SAMUEL B. RUGGLES ONCE DESCRIBED UNION SQUARE AS A “theatre adequate to the utterance of the national voice,” and when Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted redesigned the park in 1872, they included a public piazza at the north end of the square that could accommodate crowds of 10,000 or more. The centerpiece of the piazza was a graceful pavilion similar to structures Vaux and Olmsted had designed for Central Park, with a wide porch that doubled as a stage for speeches and band concerts.
Vaux and Olmsted called the new structure the “Cottage” and envisioned it as a dais for orderly meetings of business associations, veterans groups, and cultural societies, and for patriotic pageants like the 1876 Centennial Celebration. But on September 5, 1882, the Central Labor Union and the Knights of Labor organized the first Labor Day, and when 10,000 people marched up Broadway to Union Square, Vaux and Olmsted’s urbane park truly became Union Square, the outdoor headquarters of the city’s labor movement.
The square, situated in the center of the growing Garment District and its many sweatshops, became the focal point of daily rallies, attracting vast throngs of the unemployed and dispossessed, many of them immigrants. Wagons were often set up around the square to serve as extra speaking platforms, where speeches were given in German, Yiddish, Polish, and Italian.
It was onto one of those wagons that twenty-two-year-old anarchist Emma Goldman climbed uninvited during a raucous May Day rally in 1892, a demonstration that at one point featured anarchists grabbing Central Labor Union secretary George K. Lloyd by the legs and hauling him off the stage onto the ground. From the wagon Goldman waved a red flag and harangued the crowd, refusing to stop speaking even as the owner of the wagon hitched up a horse and drove away. Her theatrical performance, the New York Tribune cheerfully reported, “was the chief incident of the evening.”
GOLDMAN WAS BORN in Lithuania in 1869. In 1885 she immigrated with her Jewish family to the United States and for three years worked in a factory in Rochester. Inspired to political action by the 1886 Haymarket Affair, in which seven police officers and four demonstrators were killed at a labor rally in Chicago, Goldman moved to New York in 1889 and there joined a community of anarchists that included Johann Most and Alexander Berkman. Goldman became Berkman’s lover, and in July 1892 helped him plan an unsuccessful assassination of Carnegie Steel chairman Henry Clay Frick in retribution for his part in the bloody Homestead Strike at a Carnegie mill outside Pittsburgh. Berkman was sentenced to twenty-two years (he served fourteen). Goldman was never charged, and continued speaking in union halls and before ever-larger crowds in Union Square.
On the evening of August 21, 1893, Goldman took the Cottage stage and, speaking in German to a crowd of 4,000 unemployed workers—the Panic of 1893 had caused unemployment in the city to skyrocket beyond 20 percent—suggested that if her listeners were hungry they should take bread by force. A police detective in the crowd took notes and a few days later arrested her for making public remarks of an “incendiary character” meant to incite a riot. The ensuing trial was a circus: The press universally condemned her, while taking great delight in calling attention to every detail of her appearance. “She is small,” the New York Evening World wrote of Goldman, “has a smooth, clear complexion and a face full of intelligence. She talks fluently. When she speaks her face lights up and she is almost pretty in spite of a long, odd-shaped chin and lower jaw.” (The New York Sun, meanwhile, described her as “distinctly pudgy.”)
Goldman never had a chance. Grave doubts arose over the accuracy of the detective’s field notes—it wasn’t even clear if he understood German—but Goldman, despite ex-mayor A. Oakey Hall defending her in court, was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison on Blackwell’s Island (today’s Roosevelt Island.) At the sentencing hearing the presiding judge called Goldman a “dangerous woman.”
Released from prison eight months later, Goldman took up nursing and, much in demand on the lecture circuit, traveled throughout Europe and the United States. But in 1901, anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated President William McKinley in Buffalo, and claimed that Goldman’s speeches had inspired him to action, Goldman was arrested and detained for two weeks. She was ultimately cleared, but was vilified after she refused to condemn Czolgosz.
In the wake of the McKinley assassination, Goldman disappeared from view for a couple of years, but returned to the fray after passage of the Anarchist Exclusion Act in 1903. Her style of public speaking—pacing back and forth, working herself up into a fury, and then unleashing a thunderous tirade—became the model for thousands of aspiring soapbox orators, Socialists, Communists, and members of the Industrial Workers of the World (the “Wobblies”) among them, who each and every day took up positions on platforms scattered around the square and faced huge crowds laced with ever-increasing numbers of police.
On March 28, 1908, at a rally of the Socialist Conference of the Unemployed, twenty-two-year-old anarchist Selig Silverstein attempted to throw a homemade bomb at the police after they had clubbed demonstrators. The bomb exploded in Silverstein’s hands, killing him and a passerby but leaving the police unharmed.
In the aftermath of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre in Colorado, in which National Guard troops murdered striking coal miners and their families, anarchists became more open in their calls for violence. After three hapless anarchists blew themselves up trying to make a bomb intended for Ludlow mine owner John D. Rockefeller, Berkman, who had been released from prison eight years earlier, staged a “funeral” for the would-be bombers in Union Square. Speakers, including anarchists Rebecca Edelsohn and Charles Plunkett and Wobblies Carlo Tresca and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, held forth under the watchful eyes of Chief Inspector Max F. Schmittberger and a force of 1,000 police armed with clubs.
“I want to say it’s about time the working class came out frankly and openly and said ‘Yes, we believe in violence,’ ” Edelsohn, wearing a black dress and red stockings, told the crowd. “We will use violence whenever it is necessary to use it. We are not afraid of what your kept press says; and when we are murdered and cannonaded, when you train your machine guns on us, we will retaliate with dynamite.”
“[I] am for violence,” Charles Plunkett shouted. “Not only defensive violence, but offensive violence. I don’t believe in waiting until we are attacked . . . [They] have guns, they have cannon, they have soldiers, they have discipline, they have armies—and we have dynamite. To oppression, to exploitation, to tyranny, to jails, clubs, guns, armies and navies, there is but one reply: dynamite!”
“[While] we are approaching the Social Revolution,” Berkman declared, “there will always be individuals, more intelligent, more determined and daring than the rest, eager to pave the way by acts of individual devotion and sacrifice.”
The bodies of bomber Selig Silverstein and the passerby he killed, Union Square, March 28, 1908.
“That was pretty hot stuff,” Schmittberger, a Broadway Squad veteran, remarked when Berkman finished. Schmittberger refrained from arresting Berkman or any of his cohorts that afternoon, but with each demonstration the police grew less tolerant of the Union Square gatherings.
“[The police] were always there; they always came around,” Mary Sansone remembered. Her father, Rocco Crisalli, an Italian immigrant and IWW organizer, spoke in Union Square almost every day and in the evenings returned home to Brooklyn full of union fervor. In 1928, when she was twelve, Mary hugged her father “like glue” until he relented and took her along to Union Square, where he boosted her up onto his platform while he spoke to the crowds. “The place was mobbed,” Sansone recalled.
She was hooked, and tagged along with her father to the square whenever she could. Before long she was giving speeches of her own, while the police lurked at the edges of the crowd, listening. “The police were bastards,” she said. “If you spoke, and they didn’t like your language, they’d take you away.”
DURING THE DEPRESSION the IWW split into factions an
d its influence waned, while the Communist Party, its newspaper the Daily Worker published from a building overlooking the east side of Union Square, steadily gained in strength and numbers. On March 6, 1930, the Communist International called for global rallies in support of the unemployed, and riots broke out in Detroit, Cleveland, and Washington, in Germany, Spain, and Czechoslovakia. In New York, 35,000 protestors assembled in Union Square barely one week after police had brutally dispersed a union rally in City Hall Park.
At first the rally was tense but peaceful. Police Commissioner Grover Whalen, who had stationed thousands of police around the square’s perimeter, stood on the Cottage porch and dared the Communists to make a false move. He had even forbidden newsreel crews from filming with sound movie cameras.
“I saw no reason for perpetuating treasonable utterances,” he explained later.
William Z. Foster, chairman of the American Communist Party and a former IWW organizer, stepped onto the Cottage porch and encouraged the crowd to leave Union Square en masse, march down Broadway to City Hall, and demand an audience with Mayor Jimmy Walker. But the Communists had no parade permit, and Whalen ordered the police to stop them from entering Broadway.
“Any celebrities coming to town are allowed to use Broadway. When the workers want it they can’t have it. Are we going to take ‘no’ for an answer?” Foster asked the vast throng.
“No!” came the reply.
“Then I advise you to fall in line and proceed,” Foster shouted, pointing toward Broadway. But as the crowd tried to leave the square, 1,000 police blocked the way and then waded in, swinging clubs, blackjacks, and fists.
“From all parts of the scene of battle came the screams of women and cries of men with bloody heads and faces,” the New York Times reported. “A score of men were sprawled over the square, with policemen pummeling them.” One woman was “trampled into unconsciousness” by a patrolman and a detective. When a few police were knocked down by thrown bricks, Whalen retaliated by turning fire hoses on the crowd.
Foster, Daily Worker editor Robert Minor, and three others hopped in a taxi and sped away, but the police caught up with them. Convicted of inciting a riot, Foster served six months, and so was in jail when Communists convened at Union Square on May Day, two months later. This time, surrounded by police and with machine guns trained on them from surrounding rooftops, the Communists became docile and obedient and the rally ended without incident. Two months later, on August 1, a crowd of 5,000 Communists formed a phalanx in front of the Daily Worker offices and refused to disperse. The police moved in, someone threw a brick, and the police began clubbing everyone within reach, including a sixteen-year-old girl, bystanders, and an Associated Press reporter.
The 1930 riots were the worst New York had seen in years and forever changed Union Square. Although it continued as a place of mass meetings, the threat of violence from police gradually cowed demonstrators into submission, and speakers began to temper their language. Throughout the remainder of the Depression and World War II, Communists, Socialists, labor unions, and other groups continued to meet in Union Square, especially on May Day and Labor Day, but their events were gradually upstaged by choreographed pageants reminiscent of the 1876 Centennial Celebration. Beginning in 1947, a patriotic “Loyalty Day” celebration replaced the usual May Day rallies in Union Square, and by the 1950s, with the rise of McCarthyism, May Day in Union Square had become safe and sanitized. (One typical May Day, in 1958, featured red, white, and blue balloons sent aloft bearing packets of “brotherhood seeds” and musical performances by the United Nations Singers, the St. Francis Xavier High School Glee Club, and the Department of Sanitation band.)
Anarchist Alexander Berkman, center, speaking from Union Square’s Cottage, May Day, 1908.
On Labor Day in 1960 a New York Times reporter went looking for rabble-rousers in Union Square and found only a handful speaking to a small gathering of hecklers and “impassive loungers.” Union Square had become, the Times reported, “a graveyard of memories.” There was a resurgence of protests in the square during the Vietnam War era—Catholic activist Dorothy Day gave a memorable antiwar speech there in 1965—but until very recently Union Square was known more for its drug dealers and large homeless population than as a bastion of free speech.
TODAY UNION SQUARE is shared by a cross-section of the city’s richest and poorest citizens. It is a complicated common ground: Four days a week, a farmers’ market catering to wealthy and upper-middle-class professionals takes over the northwest corner of the square, while a small but persistent community of homeless people and drug addicts colonize the benches and sleep on the grass along its eastern edge. Hip-hop dancers attract large audiences while, nearby, Hare Krishnas chant and bang on tambourines. People play chess, solicitors pester tourists with petitions and other come-ons, and commuters rush through in the morning and afternoon. Soapbox orators are rare, far outnumbered by lunch-hour idlers sitting on benches munching overpriced doughnuts and chatting quietly. Occasionally, Union Square still attracts protests, as on July 9, 2016, when Black Lives Matter activists marched there to demonstrate against police shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana. And there were more rallies in the square in the wake of Donald Trump’s election to the presidency. But for the most part, Union Square has come full circle, reverting to Vaux and Olmsted’s 1872 conception of the park as a pleasant, public node in the heart of the city, a verdant interruption in Broadway’s relentless path.
MILE 4
UNION SQUARE TO HERALD SQUARE
CHAPTER 16
LADIES’ MILE
“WE ARE ALL SATISFIED THAT GENTLEMEN HAVE NO GENIUS for shopping,” the editors of the Emporia (Kansas) News wrote in 1861. “Nature has left their facilities imperfect in that particular. They can write books and make speeches, and all that sort of thing, but they are not up to shopping. It takes the ladies for that. Men go to a store, select what they want, and buy it. But that is not shopping; that requires no genius.”
Broadway had long been inseparable from its merchandise, and each new generation repeated the same rapturous descriptions of its shop windows. When King’s Handbook of 1893 catalogued Broadway’s “silks and velvets, laces and jewels, rich books and music, paintings and statuary, rifles and racquets, confections and amber-like bottles, cloisonné and cut-glass,” it was only repeating Walt Whitman’s description of thirty-seven years earlier, when he strode up Broadway past “pictures, jewelry, silks, furs, costly books, sculptures, bijouterie, plate, china, cut-glass, fine cloths, fabrics of linen, [and] curious importations from far-off Indian seas.”
The opening, in 1846, of Stewart’s Marble Palace, with its large plate-glass windows and spacious lounges, had consecrated shopping once and for all as a communal activity. The annual “opening of the spring fashions,” when large wooden crates of dry goods from Europe arrived in stores, was a highlight on the city’s social calendar on par with Christmas and New Year’s Day. For women, a day spent shopping was a day out of the house, a chance to have lunch with friends and to walk, in an era when women didn’t have many opportunities for exercise and recreation. Some observers admired their pursuits, as when William Henry Rideing wrote in Harper’s Weekly that a “woman out of the house is always magnificent, and . . . never so elaborate in her toilet as when, with the plea of nakedness on her lips, she sallies out on a shopping expedition.” But for others, shopping was not only a waste of time but an invitation to drift toward ennui, listlessness, and frivolous, sinful consumption.
“A woman who gets adrift on Broadway, without a clear and definite idea of what she wants to buy, is like a ship without a compass,” the American Phrenological Journal warned in 1867.
There was something about legions of well-dressed women marching up and down Broadway that captured the popular imagination, and Broadway’s shoppers were commemorated in poems and songs, as Broadway Belles had been a generation earlier.
On they go, on they go,
The crowd rushes o
nward—
All down Broadway they go,
Ladies by hundreds.
“What shall we do?” they said—
The sky is blue o’er head:
All down Broadway they go,
Ladies by hundreds.
But there were rules, beginning with a rather inflexible dress code: a dark silk dress, a merino shawl or possibly a fur, a bonnet, and kid gloves. Under no circumstances were fashionable women to appear on Broadway during the summer, as that would imply they had not the means, or the invitations, for trips to Saratoga or the White Mountains.
Shopping was further restricted to the hours between ten o’clock in the morning and two or three o’clock in the afternoon, hours that roughly coincided with the opening and closing gavels of the New York Stock Exchange. And there were geographical constraints, as well: Prior to the mid nineteenth century, the shopping and financial districts coexisted side by side, with substantial overlap, in the City Hall Park area. But as Broadway’s commercial center stretched ever northward, an invisible, ever-shifting line formed, which separated the shopping district to the north from the financial district to the south, and women from men. By 1857 that line, at least according to Harper’s Weekly, ran along Broome Street, where S. M. Peyser’s dry goods store was located.
“Believe me, young ladies, let Peyser be your pillars of Hercules, beyond which no east wind should tempt you to wander,” Harper’s advised. “You may, of course, of a morning, when every Christian will respect your incog., steal down to the delightful bower of silk and lace, which Master Stewart has erected for the temptation of frail youth and the exasperation of moneyed age, but linger not in its alluring precincts after one. As two o’clock approaches, the film which covers the best-bred eyes is dispelled, and you may be recognized.”