The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  America emerged from World War I as a creditor nation and thus the strongest country on earth. New York superseded London as the world’s foremost financial mart, and Wall Street became the pinpoint of power the globe around.

  Chapter 42

  WALL STREET IS BOMBED

  WHEN THE DOUGHBOYS got back to New York, they were feted and petted and soon forgotten. Shedding their uniforms for civilian clothes, the veterans began asking themselves, “What price glory?” which became the title of a fine Broadway play. People were tired. They felt that it was time for fun and games. Between 1919 and 1929 a change in emotional weather swept over the country. After spilling so much blood and offering up sacrifices that seemed to count for little, with the overthrow of traditions and conventions, many people wallowed in a vacuum of cynicism and intellectual anarchy. Now they threw themselves wildly into the Jazz Age, also called the Lawless Decade, the Era of Wonderful Nonsense, and the Roaring Twenties.

  The cost of living in New York City had risen 79 percent between 1914 and 1919. A depression set in. The federal government bought fewer goods that it had during the war. There was a sharp drop in domestic purchasing power, which had been partly financed by federal money. Private bankers curtailed loans. Interest rates rose. In 1919 the average worker had an income of only $1,144. President Wilson addressed a joint session of Congress about the high cost of living. As New Yorkers suffered from a housing shortage, Henry Clay Frick died and left a $17,000,000 mansion filled with $30,000,000 worth of art treasures. Strikes flared across the nation. When New York’s streetcar workers walked off the job, people were amazed to see Broadway trolleys armed with bulletproof screens to protect motor-men still on the job. The city also endured strikes by dress- and waistmakers, cloak- and suitmakers, engineers and firemen, American Railway Express drivers, cigarmakers, longshoremen, printers, subway employees—and actors.

  On August 7, 1919, New York’s actors and actresses walked off the boards, as Actors’ Equity Association struck against the highhanded methods of theatrical producers. The public and press supported the performers. They were led by Frank Bacon, a character actor and playwright. Opposed to Bacon was George M. Cohan, actor, playwright, songwriter, dancer, and one-half of the producing team of Cohan and Harris. He hastily organized a rival union called the Actors’ Fidelity League, which sided with the producers. Life-long friendships broke up. There were street brawls and arrests and speeches and suits and countersuits. About 250 chorus girls staged a rally on Wall Street. Comedian Ed Wynn performed stunts at street corners. Ethel Barrymore, John Drew, Al Jolson, and Marie Dressler addressed the performers. Tallulah Bankhead, then only sixteen years old, coaxed her father out of $100, which she donated to the strikers. On September 7, Equity won the strike and has since remained the undisputed spokesman for legitimate actors.

  During the war an alarming tendency to suppress civil liberties had developed; it was born of fear of sabotage and espionage. Now the federal government overreacted and indulged in some of the very tyrannical acts it condemned. In 1919 a reactionary lawyer named A. Mitchell Palmer was appointed U.S. Attorney General. At the time President Wilson was a very sick man and out of touch with affairs. Left pretty much on his own, Palmer launched a reign of terror.

  At 2 A.M. on April 29, 1919, Charles Caplan, a clerk in the parcel post division of the New York Post Office, was on his way home when he read a newspaper story. This told about a Negro servant who worked for Senator Thomas R. Hardwick in Atlanta, Georgia. She had opened a package addressed to the Senator, and a bomb inside it blew off her hands. Before this happened, Senator Hardwick had urged the restriction of immigration as a means of keeping Bolshevism out of America. The news story described the Atlanta package as being about six inches long and three inches wide, wrapped in brown paper, and marked with the return address of the Gimbel Brothers’ department store in New York City. Now this struck a chord in the mind of the postal clerk. Suddenly he remembered.

  Changing trains, he hurried back to the post office and found what he was looking for. He had put sixteen brown-wrapped packages on a shelf, because they didn’t have enough postage. One was intended for Attorney General Palmer, another for J. P. Morgan; all, in fact, were addressed to highly placed federal officials and capitalists. Each bore the deceptive Gimbel label. Caplan notified his superior, who called the police. The packages were taken to a nearby firehouse, gingerly unwrapped, and found to contain bombs. Besides these sixteen packages, twenty others had been mailed elsewhere in the nation. Fortunately, none of the intended victims was injured. Officials never discovered the identity of the person or persons who mailed the bombs.

  Another unsolved mystery resulted in a monumental tragedy. Late in the morning of Thursday, September 16, 1920, all seemed to be business as usual at the corner of Wall Street and Broad Street; which narrows into Nassau Street at this spot. The southeastern corner was occupied by the House of Morgan. The southwestern corner held the New York Stock Exchange and a fenced-in hole where a twenty-two story addition to the exchange was about to be erected. On the northwestern corner stood the thirty-nine-story Bankers Trust Company Building with its pyramided peak. The northeastern corner was occupied by the Subtreasury Building.

  One block west, at the head of Wall Street, the Trinity Church clock began chiming the noon hour. Clerks and brokers, messengers and telegraphers prepared to leave for lunch. Hundreds of persons already strolled the streets. Up Wall Street from the east came a brown wagon covered with canvas. Drawn by an old dark-bay horse, it stopped at Wall and Nassau streets. The driver tossed his reins across the horse’s back, jumped to the pavement, and walked away. As the twelfth bong of the Trinity clock reverberated through the autumn air, horse and wagon vanished in a tremendous explosion.

  Eyewitnesses told different accounts. Some said that the blast gave off a bluish white glare. Others described it as a white ball of fire emitting acrid yellow flames that changed color, spat tongues of green flame, and soared skyward in a pillar of thick brown smoke. Higher and higher soared the smoke, darkening from brown to black and flattening mushroomlike above nearby skyscrapers. Awnings burst into flames a dozen floors above the street. The roar of the explosion bounced from building to building like a cannonball rolling free in the hold of a foundering ship. Iron fragments zinged through the air. They gashed pedestrians’ arms and smashed legs and crushed skulls. The shower of metal was followed by a shower of glass, cascading onto the pavement. The blast knocked out windowpanes within a half-mile radius. A man walking along John Street, five blocks north, was felled by a four-inch length of pipe crashing on the base of his neck.

  Like the eye of a hurricane, an ominous hush followed the first roar. Then people screamed. Fatally stricken girls stiffened, sagged, and slumped to the pavement. Blood seeped from them and spread fanlike over the concrete. Up from the street leaped a fountain of flame that clawed the façades of buildings on both sides of Wall Street. Desks caught fire. Officeworkers suddenly found their hair flaming torches. People in offices as high as the sixth floor were badly burned.

  Among those who died in the explosion was Edward Sweet, a millionaire who once owned the famous Sweet’s seafood restaurant at Fulton and South streets; all they ever found of him was one finger with his ring still on it. On Bloody Thursday 35 persons were killed, and 130 others injured. Property losses amounted to almost $3,000,000. The House of Morgan suffered the worst damage, and Junius Spencer Morgan, a grandson of J. Pierpont Morgan, sustained a slight gash on one hand. Apart from young Morgan, no other important Wall Street figure was hurt. Despite a protracted and far-flung investigation, the perpetrators of this crime were never discovered.

  Prohibition was scheduled to go into effect at midnight on January 16, 1920. New York’s weather that night was bitterly cold, the temperature sinking to six degrees above zero. In saloons, bars, cafés, restaurants, and supper clubs all over town the dry era was ushered in on a melancholy binge. Waiters dressed as pallbearers carried c
offins. Some establishments had mailed black-bordered invitations to patrons to take part in “Last rites and ceremonies attending the departure of our spirited friend, John Barleycorn.”

  In one elegant café two golden slippers were filled with champagne and passed from table to table. The owner of a chili house on Forty-first Street pondered the idea of eluding Prohibition by serving booze in teacups. Pandhandlers prospered with a standardized whine: “Give a guy a quarter for a last drink.” Bat Masterson, the fabled gunfighter from Dodge City, Kansas, now employed by the New York Morning Telegraph, finished writing a column about a prizefight, walked to a nearby bar, and sadly ordered a cup of tea. Elsewhere in the city a famous madam, named Polly Adler, scoffed, “They might as well try to dry up the Atlantic with a post office blotter.”

  She was right. Before Prohibition a man could get a drink in 15,000 places in town, but soon thereafter 32,000 illegal New York establishments sold liquor. There weren’t enough federal Prohibition agents, many were inefficient, and some were downright corrupt. Stanley Walker wrote: “It was a common sight in certain New York speakeasies to see a group of agents enter a place at noon, remain until almost midnight, eating and drinking, and then leave without paying the bill.” The venal agents kept up the price of illegal spirits. Some took protection money and raided other operators refusing to pay off.

  Izzy Einstein was a postal clerk when Prohibition began. He lived in a $14-a-month flat on the Lower East Side and was the neighborhood cutup. Forty years old and balding, Izzy stood only 5 feet 5 inches tall and weighed 225 pounds. He had a huge cantaloupe head perched on a pumpkin-fat body. For all of his love of the ridiculous, Izzy was an intelligent man, who could speak English, Yiddish, German, Polish, and Hungarian; could make himself understood in French, Italian, and Russian; and even knew a few Chinese phrases. Bored with his post office job, he asked the chief enforcement agent of the Southern District of New York for a position as a Prohibition agent. The official was dubious, but Izzy convinced him that “this Prohibition business needs a new type of people that can’t be spotted so easy.” He got his gold badge.

  The fat man showed up at a Brooklyn speakeasy, knocked on the door, and announced, “I’m a Prohibition agent. I just got appointed.” The doorman grinned and let him inside. The bartender poured a whiskey, and Izzy quaffed it. This was the wrong technique, for it provided no evidence. When Izzy grabbed for the bottle, the bartender became frightened, scooped it off the bar, and ran out the back door. After this fiasco Izzy changed his tactics. In his vest pocket he hid a tiny funnel connected to a rubber hose that led to a flat bottle secreted in his vest lining. From that time forward, when Izzy was served a drink, he would take a sip and then pour the rest into the funnel while the bartender was making change.

  After a few weeks Izzy talked his friend Moe Smith into joining him. Moe, who also liked to clown, weighed more than Izzy but was a couple of inches taller. Moe turned his little cigar store over to a relative and teamed up with Izzy. They were a spectacular success from the start.

  They wore disguises. They used offbeat approaches. They carried objects tending to allay suspicion. They never looked like Prohibition agents. Izzy disguised himself as a longshoreman, Park Avenue dude, poultry salesman, and football player and even blackened his face with burnt cork to resemble a Negro. Who could suspect a little fat man lugging a pailful of dill pickles or a pitcherful of milk, carrying a fishing rod, or burdened with a violin or trombone? He pinched so many bootleggers and blind pig operators that his picture was displayed in bars all over town.

  Izzy was more imaginative than Moe, but they made an unbeatable team. Izzy never carried a gun, and Moe, who sometimes did, fired it only twice. They timed their raids for the convenience of reporters and newspaper photographers, winning reams of publicity. Columnist O. O. McIntyre declared that Izzy had “become as famous in New York as the Woolworth building.” For more than five years newspaper readers chuckled over the antics of the two rolypoly agents.

  They were the best Prohibition agents in the service. They confiscated 5,000,000 bottles of liquor, worth $15,000,000, and thousands of gallons of booze in kegs and barrels, as well as in hundreds of stills and breweries. They made 4,392 arrests, of which more than 95 percent resulted in convictions. Despite this phenomenal record, federal officials were annoyed by their burlesque performances, and in 1925 they were dismissed “for the good of the service.” The Tribune said: “They never made Prohibition much more of a joke than it has been made by some of the serious-minded Prohibition officers.” In 1962 Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith were the inspiration for a Broadway musical comedy called Nowhere to Go But Up.

  Prohibition closed many restaurants which had depended on the sale of liquor to make a profit. The respectable oases were replaced by speakeasies, nightclubs, and clip joints. With a new type of customer frequenting such resorts, Café Society was born. Socially prominent young men and women now rubbed elbows with criminals, for most speakeasies fell under the control of gangsters.

  Greenwich Village started to become an artists’ colony in the first decade of the twentieth century. One winter night in 1916 a group of tipsy Villagers climbed to the top of the Washington Arch on the northern side of Washington Square to shoot off a cap pistol and proclaim Greenwich Village an independent republic. By the end of the war the Village was populated mainly by Italians, who were annoyed by the antics of writers and painters, but the influx of bohemians kept increasing because rents were low.

  This Manhattan enclave, with its old-world atmosphere, became the mecca for many young people from all parts of America who rebelled against their parents and the materialistic values of the day. College graduates and nonconformists headed for the Village to create or talk about the creation of artistic masterpieces. A hard core of talented people made the Village the center of America’s literary movement, but surrounding them was a lunatic fringe. Men wore their hair long, girls wore their hair short, and some wore their morals thin. Poets debated whether love was sex or vice versified.

  One of the most romantic figures in Greenwich Village was Edna St. Vincent Millay. Born in Rockland, Maine, in 1892, she moved to the Village after graduating from Vassar. Her first book of poetry was published in 1917, and in 1923 she won a Pulitzer Prize, for poetry. Carl Van Doren wrote: “Rarely since Sappho has a woman written as outspokenly as this.” Burton Rascoe called her “one of the few poets who have been able to breathe life into the sonnet since Shakespeare.” Another critic said that next to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she was the supreme mistress of sonnets.

  A small woman with a wraithlike figure, Miss Millay had bobbed chestnut hair shot with glints of bronze and copper, a long and graceful neck, a fey smile, a snub nose spattered with freckles, and bright-green eyes. Edmund Wilson, one of many men who fell in love with her, wrote that “her eyes had the bird-lidded look that I recognized as typically Irish.” Edna St. Vincent Millay stimulated men and women alike. Restless and neurotic, she boasted about burning her candle at both ends. For a while she lived in the city’s narrowest house, a three-story structure at 75½ Bedford Street. It was only nine and a half feet wide and thirty feet deep.

  One of her friends was Eugene O’Neill, the playwright. O’Neill was born in 1888 in the heart of New York’s theatrical district in the Barrett House, on the northeastern corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street. He was the younger son of James O’Neill, a popular melodramatic actor. An unhappy and rebellious young man, Eugene was expelled from Princeton, prospected for gold in Honduras, worked as an ordinary seaman, drifted aimlessly for years, endured a bout with tuberculosis, and began writing plays.

  During his Greenwich Village days he hung out at a dive, called the Hell Hole, located at Sixth Avenue and Fourth Street. A heavy drinker, O’Neill became a favorite of an Irish gang, called the Hudson Dusters, who made the Hell Hole their headquarters. It was from this place that O’Neill drew most of the character for his famous play The Iceman Cometh. The Iceman was
Death. O’Neill, like Edna St. Vincent Millay, wrote much about death. Morose and silent, smiling sardonically and never laughing aloud, the mustached O’Neill was a handsome black Irishman, who attracted women. “I’m all Irish!” he often cried. Nothing shocked him. His big brown eyes shifted quickly from softness to savagery, for if Millay was a candle burning at both ends, Eugene O’Neill was a live volcano, seething, boiling, bubbling, and then overflowing with searing dramas. In 1936 he won the Nobel Prize for literature, and he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize four times, the last time posthumously. In their definitive biography of him, Arthur and Barbara Gelb wrote that O’Neill became, “except for Shakespeare and possibly Shaw, the world’s most widely translated and produced dramatist.”

  A great wave of Negroes from Southern states and Caribbean islands had washed into the city during the war. In 1910 the 90,000 Negroes in New York represented less than 2 percent of the population. By 1920 their numbers had increased to 150,000, or about 3 percent. Before the end of the 1920’s the Negro population more than doubled, leaping to 327,000. Most of them wound up in Harlem, which became a city within a city and the Negro capital of the world.