The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  Gerard darted for a phone and called Herbert Bayard Swope of the World, who told him that the news was indeed true. Just as Gerard hung up the receiver, an opera company director passed by. Excitedly, Gerard broke the news and demanded that the director do something—“order the news read from the stage, for example, and have The Star-Spangled Banner played.” The director replied coolly, “No, the opera company is neutral.” Shocked and angered, Gerard hurried back to his private box, shouted the news to the audience, and called for a cheer for President Wilson. Startled by this announcement, the opera-goers sat in silence a moment and then broke into cheers. On its own initiative the orchestra swung into the national anthem. Some people in the audience were still yelling and applauding when the curtain went up on the last act to reveal, among others, a German singer, named Margarete Ober, who played the Wife of Bath. It was obvious to all that she was nervous. About two minutes later she fainted and had to be carried off stage; the opera finished without her.

  On April 6, 1917, Congress voted for war, and the President signed a resolution declaring that hostilities existed between the United States and Germany. At 5 A.M. that day Dudley Field Malone, collector of the port of New York, got a crucial phone call from Washington. Word also was flashed to the army installation on Governors Island. In port at the time were eighteen German ships, five of them anchored in the Hudson just off West 135th Street.

  When Malone gave the signal, 600 waiting customs agents seized the vessels. In the anemic light of dawn Malone, accompanied by a group of his men, boarded the Vaterland, one of the world’s largest passenger ships. At the top of the gangway he was met by Commodore Hans Ruser, who knew Malone. They bowed and exchanged wispy smiles. The German officer said sadly, “We are ready.” Down came the flag of Germany, and up went the flag of the United States on this and the other German vessels thus interned. It was the first act of war.

  The Twenty-second United States Infantry had slept on its arms awaiting the call. Army tugs nosed against Governors Island, took aboard the soldiers, and then posted them on piers throughout the city. A total of 1,200 German sailors and 325 naval officers were arrested and sent to Ellis Island. A company of American soldiers marched through the Hudson tubes to Hoboken, where they seized piers of the North German Lloyd and Hamburg-American lines, placing part of the Hoboken waterfront under martial law. About 200 Germans were rounded up in saloons and boardinghouses of the Hoboken dock area and interned on Ellis Island. New York City Police Commissioner Woods had organized 12,000 of his policemen into what he called “a fighting force.” Now he threw guards around all bridges and filled 180 trucks with machine gunners and sharp-shooters ready to put down any attempted demonstration. After all, the city still held many German army reservists.

  A sunken steel net was stretched across the Narrows to prevent U-boats from sneaking into the Upper Bay. At the outbreak of war the United States ranked only ninth among the nations of the world in total tonnage of oceangoing vessels. New York now became the principal port for movement of cargo and shipment of troops, a total of 1,656,000 doughboys sailing from here for France. Before long German submarines sowed mines around Sandy Hook in the path of outbound ships, so 16 tugs were outfitted as minesweepers. Working in pairs, they found and exploded floating mines, which might have taken hundreds of lives and sunk thousands of tons of shipping.

  Intolerance swept New York like a plague. A statue symbolizing Germany was one of twelve figures decorating the sixth-floor façade of the Customhouse just south of Bowling Green. A sculptor was hired to chip the imperial eagle from the breastplate of this Valkyrie. A Brooklyn pastor cried that “German soldiers are sneaking, sniveling cowards!” Dachshunds, a breed of dog well liked by Germans, were kicked on the sidewalks of New York and renamed liberty pups. Sauerkraut became liberty cabbage. German measles were called liberty measles. German-language lessons were banned in city schools. The Bank of Germany at First Avenue and Seventy-fourth Street changed its name to the Bank of Europe.

  Theodore Roosevelt demanded that the German-American press be muzzled. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt urged the translation of a book about German atrocities—most of which later were proved untrue. Telephone wiretapping, first used in New York in 1895, was resumed on a large scale in 1917. The federal government set up a huge switchboard in the Customhouse, tapped the lines of hundreds of aliens, kept relays of stenographers taking notes on private conversations, and nabbed many enemies.

  However senseless and cruel some of these acts may seem in retrospect, there was a very real danger of subversion and sabotage. Colonel House wrote President Wilson: “Attempts will likely be made to blow up waterworks, electric light and gas plants, subways and bridges in cities like New York. . . . Police Commissioner Woods tells me he has definitely located a building in New York in which two shipments of arms have been stored by Germans.” Mark Sullivan said: “Five German spies, taking up points of strategy and acting simultaneously, could paralyze the city of New York.” Mysterious fires broke out along the Brooklyn waterfront, fire bombs were found in ships heading for Europe, and in the first 7 months of the war more than $18,000,000 worth of food supplies was burned in the United States by German sympathizers. It must be added in all fairness, though, that only a few aliens interfered with our war effort.

  After Herbert Hoover was appointed the nation’s food administrator, the all-out effort to conserve food was called Hooverizing. New York’s vacant land and some small parks were turned into vegetable gardens. No meat was served on Tuesdays. The Hotel Association of New York City gave Hoover a plan that called for adulterating wheat bread with cheaper flour and holding rolls to one ounce or less. Oscar of the Waldorf prodded his chefs into inventing desserts to be made without eggs, butter, or white sugar, and a recipe for War Cake à la Waldorf was distributed throughout the country.

  Employment rose, and office space became scarce as industrial contractors poured into the city. The largest armory in America was erected in the west Bronx. Ten two-story buildings were constructed on Wards Island to serve as a military hospital. More than seventy structures and a temporary railroad system were installed on Governors Island. Schoolchildren collected fruit pits and nutshells for use in making gas masks, besides gathering twenty-five tons of clothing for the children of Belgium and France. And Broadway became a rehearsal hall for the League of Nations.

  Colonel House was intimate with many of the most powerful men on earth, but the man who attracted him most, next to Woodrow Wilson, was Sir Edward Grey. A high-minded statesman, sincere and experienced, Sir Edward was Great Britain’s Secretary for Foreign Affairs. He and House soon discovered that they thought alike. Sir Edward believed that war might have been averted if the nations of the world had been organized into some kind of permanent international conference. As early as 1915, in a letter to the colonel, Sir Edward had used the phrase “League of Nations.” In later letters and conferences with Sir Edward, House agreed that an association of nations was needed to preserve the future peace. Looking forward to the years after this unfortunate war, the colonel transmitted Sir Edward’s idea to Woodrow Wilson. On May 27, 1916, in a major address the President first announced his belief in the establishment of such a league, saying that “the nations of the world must in some way band themselves. . . . ” In the summer of 1917 the President suggested that Colonel House organize a group of experts to draft a constitution for a League of Nations.

  Since these men would concern themselves with postwar problems, they were wary of letting the Germans hear about the project, lest they think that the United States was considering surrender. Work therefore went forward in absolute secrecy. The League was given the non-committal name of the Inquiry. Colonel House named his brother-in-law head of the organization; this was Dr. Sidney E. Mezes, president of the College of the City of New York. Walter Lippmann was made executive secretary of the Inquiry. A native New Yorker and an editor of the New Republic, Lippmann had gone to Washington
to help Secretary of War Newton D. Baker handle labor problems connected with war production. Only twenty-seven years old, Lippmann was brilliant and capable.

  The State Department played no part in this project. The Inquiry’s expenses were met by private funds available to President Wilson. Colonel House and his associates recruited a small staff of specialists from academic circles and held their first meetings in the New York Public Library. But because of the lack of space and the fear that they might attract attention there, the new group soon moved its headquarters. Among the recruits was Dr. Isaiah Bowman, director of the American Geographical Society, the nation’s oldest such organization. It occupied a building on Broadway between 155th and 156th streets, and this is where the Inquiry really buckled down to work.

  The nearly 150 scholars brought into the group included geographers, territorial experts, specialists on colonial possessions, historians, ethnographers, cartographers, economists, political scientists, and the like. Reading, writing, conferring, checking references, and blowing dust off ancient atlases, these dedicated men avoided any major conflict with the State Department and managed to keep their work a secret from the press. In their collective wisdom they compiled a suggested outline for a permanent association of nations. This, they hoped, would guarantee the territorial integrity and political independence of its members, ban the manufacture of munitions by private enterprise, and otherwise enforce disarmament. Their original draft consisted of twenty-three articles, which House offered to President Wilson. The President approved all but five. Wilson dropped the proposed international court but retained the suggested secretariat and an assembly of delegates. Thus did the League of Nations first take shape on upper Broadway in New York City.

  Colonel House became suspicious of another New Yorker who had won the President’s respect. This was Bernard M. Baruch, a handsome long-legged Wall Streeter, who camouflaged his lightning-quick mind behind an easygoing manner. He made a fortune in the stock market and bluntly identified himself as a speculator. But Baruch’s definition of a speculator was “one who thinks and plans for a future event—and acts before it occurs.” In 1912 he had met Wilson for the first time in New York’s Plaza Hotel. Like Colonel House’s, Baruch’s life was changed from that moment on. He said reverently, “I have met one of the great men of the world.” As war deepened, Baruch was often seen at the White House, reporters noting his air of self-assurance, his high stiff collar, and the costly stickpin in his tie.

  Baruch believed that “if you understand raw materials, you understand the politics of the world.” Baruch knew raw materials. He understood the sources of supply, production, and prices. Wilson appointed him chairman of the War Industries Board, thus bestowing on him perhaps the greatest power ever held by any American except a President. Granted the authority to mobilize industry and man-power, Baruch was expected to convert the entire nation into one huge factory. Henry Ford, during his anti-Semitic period, called Baruch “the most powerful man in the world.” Colonel House distrusted Baruch because of his Wall Street background and put a spy on his trail. The secret agent found nothing suspicious in his behavior; indeed he came to like Baruch so much that he finally confessed that he had been hired to watch him.

  To conserve coal, the federal government ordered all big cities to cut down on the use of electric signs. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels later wrote:

  New York responded with such howls and denunciations as can hardly be described . . . in some respects New York is more set in its provincialism than any “hick” town in America. Smaller cities obeyed the order to do without the White Way at night because of the exigency of war. Not New York. It raised such a row that coal operators doubled their energies to furnish enough coal so that the White Way could again blaze brightly and let New York City turn night into day.

  New York was anything but a hick town. In 1917, for the first time ever, it contained more motor vehicles than horses. That water-shed of a year the city had 114,717 cars of various kinds and only 108,743 horses. New York’s last 2-horse streetcar made its final trip down Broadway on July 26, 1917.

  In the municipal election of 1917 Mayor Mitchel’s talent for making enemies caused him trouble. Standing for reelection, he lost the Republican primary and ran on the Fusion ticket alone. His Tammany Hall rival for mayor was John F. Hylan.

  A ponderous man lacking wit, warmth, or wisdom, Hylan was called Red Mike because of his red hair and mustache. Although he was only a mediocre lawyer, he had served as a Kings County judge. Hearst backed Hylan for mayor because both favored municipal ownership and operation of rapid transit and because Hearst knew that he could control Hylan. The campaign was vicious. Mitchel and other Fusionists tried to smear Hylan as pro-German, but Hylan himself was almost forgotten in the attack on Hearst, the so-called spokesman of the Kaiser. Bumbling empty-headed Hylan won, however, and Woodrow Wilson murmured, “How is it possible for the greatest city in the world to place such a man in high office?” Once again Tammany Hall sat in the saddle.

  The defeated Mitchel enlisted in the army and was commissioned a major in the air service. He suffered from excruciating headaches, which may have been caused by an Indian poison that had got into his system when he was traveling in the wilds of Peru. The attacks would leave him temporarily blind. “If I get a real bad headache while up in the clouds,” he told a friend, “it will be all over with me.” On July 6, 1918, Major John Purroy Mitchel fell 500 feet from his single-seater scout plane and was killed at Camp Gerstner, Lake Charles, Louisiana. An investigation proved that his safety belt had been unfastened.

  As other gallant youths spilled their blood in strange places with unpronounceable names, a horror as great as war itself visited New York City. This was the flu epidemic.

  Influenza is an Italian word meaning influence. An acute infectious disease, it was called influenza because it was first believed to be caused by the influence of some mysterious agency. This was before the discovery of the filterable virus. In September, 1918, the flu was brought to the eastern seaboard by sick people disembarking from transatlantic liners. Americans and others called it Spanish influenza, but there is no proof that it originated in Spain. At first the disease was the subject of feeble jokes, such as this: “I had a little bird named ‘Enza.’ I opened the window and in-flu-enza.”

  Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t regard the illness as a jest. On September 19 the handsome Assistant Secretary of the Navy landed in New York after a two-month tour of overseas naval bases and the front lines. Stricken with the flu, he was carried off the transport Leviathan and driven by ambulance to his mother’s home at 47 East Sixty-fifth Street.

  The onset of sickness was rapid. A victim felt chilly and weak, suffered pains in his eyes or ears or head or back, complained of dizziness, coughed, clutched his throat because it felt sore, and in a few hours was prostrated. Anyone in close contact with a flu patient could expect to be stricken within the next few hours or days, so quickly did the plague spread.

  After the first few cases of influenza had been diagnosed in New York, Dr. Royal S. Copeland, city health commissioner, declared, “The city is in no danger of an epidemic.” He was wrong. More and more New Yorkers sickened and died from the flu. Incoming ships were fumigated. It was too late. The death toll in the city quickly climbed to more than 800 persons within 24 hours. Some hysterical people claimed that the disease had been sent here deliberately by the Germans, possibly by U-boats. Hospitals filled up, overflowed, and turned away patients. Doctors urged everyone to stay home. So many staff members at Bellevue Hospital succumbed that a few doctors suggested the place be closed, a proposal voted down by the trustees. Nurses dragged about their duties, eyes black-ringed with fatigue.

  Two thousand telephone operators, about one-quarter of the city’s staff, were stricken. Municipal services slowed down as transit workers, garbage collectors, firemen, and policemen failed to report for work. Cops lucky enough to stay on their feet directed traffic wearing ma
sks over their faces. Children enjoyed the cheesecloth masks their mothers fitted over their faces but gagged on poultices made of garlic and camphor. City welfare workers were pressed into unfamiliar jobs such as carrying stretchers, scrubbing floors, and digging graves.

  A worried Mayor Hylan told city engineers to plan the excavation of many graves. He said he would punish any doctor who overcharged, but apparently few did. To be sure, some undertakers gave special consideration to the rich, and in one tenement a corpse was not removed for four days. By contrast, a certain prostitute gave such tender care as a volunteer nurse that she was praised by patients and authorities alike.

  As the epidemic mounted, business firms, cultural institutions, and places of entertainment closed down. From September to November, 1918, the city’s hubbub was hushed. The flu killed more New Yorkers than any plague in the city’s history. In relative numbers, however, it was by no means the most deadly epidemic. In 1832, 1849, 1854, and 1866, when the population was smaller, cholera killed proportionately more.

  The final death toll from the flu epidemic of 1918 was New York City, 12,562; New York State, 20,000; the United States, 500,000; and the entire world, 21,000,000. The disaster struck a heavy blow at New York’s insurance firms. They paid more money to the beneficiaries of flu victims than they did to survivors of soldiers killed in battle during World War I.

  About the time the plague waned, the war itself came to an end. When the United Press wrongly reported on November 7, 1918, that an armistice had been signed, New Yorkers celebrated wildly. Elderly brokers danced in Wall Street, J. P. Morgan threw ticker tape out of his office window, strangers hugged one another, pushcart peddlers gave free candy to children, girls kissed the first uniformed men they saw, and a French general was carried triumphantly up Fifth Avenue. A roll of toilet paper tossed from the Waldorf-Astoria landed in the lap of a dowager, and motion-picture star Mary Pick-ford looked and listened as Italian tenor Enrico Caruso stepped onto a balcony of the Hotel Knickerbocker and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” to the multitudes massed in Times Square. When the real armistice was announced on November 11, much the same scenes were reenacted.