The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  When trading ended at 3 P.M., U.S. Steel closed at 206. Montgomery Ward, which had opened at 83 and fallen to 50, shot back up to 74. An astonishing total of 12,894,650 shares changed hands that day. The New York Times called it “the most disastrous decline in the biggest and broadest stock market of history.” Not until 8:07 P.M. did the tardy tickers stop chattering prices from the exchange floor. That night Wall Street buildings were honeycombed with lights as brokers and clerks struggled out of an avalanche of paper work.

  Brokers wired customers to ask for more margin. The Marx Brothers, natives of New York City, were playing in a show in Pittsburgh. Harpo Marx’s broker telegraphed him: “FORCED TO SELL ALL HOLDINGS UNLESS RECEIVE CHECK FOR $15,000 TO COVER MARGINS.” The harp-playing comedian managed to get the sum and sent it to his broker. The next morning Harpo got a similar request. Then a third. The last wire read: “SEND $10,000 IN 24 HOURS OR FACE FINANCIAL RUIN AND DAMAGING SUITS STOP MUST HAVE $10,000 REGARDLESS WHETHER I CAN SELL YOUR HOLDINGS.” By this time Harpo’s holdings had shrunk to $1 per share, he had borrowed all he could, and he had liquidated every asset he owned. Once worth $250,000 on paper, Harpo was almost penniless. His brother Groucho was completely wiped out.

  In the next few days, despite reassuring words from President Hoover and others, prices continued to fall. The Commercial and Financial Chronicle, taking a realistic view, said that “the present week has witnessed the greatest stock-market catastrophe of all the ages.” On November 13 prices sank to a low for 1929. The disaster blew into thin air $30,000,000,000 worth of supposed values. As Frederick Lewis Allen later pointed out, this was “a sum almost as great as the entire cost to the United States of its participation in the World War, and nearly twice as great as the entire national debt.”

  No one man was responsible for the crash. The get-rich-quick mania had afflicted almost everybody. About 9,000,000 savings accounts were wiped out, 85,000 businesses went to the wall, 5,000 banks failed, agriculture hit bottom, and national income was cut in half. New York and all America suffered the biggest jolt since the Civil War. In 1929, according to John Kenneth Galbraith, there began “the most momentous economic occurrence in the history of the United States, the ordeal of the Great Depression.”

  Chapter 44

  THE GREAT DEPRESSION

  POLLY ADLER, who ran the most famous bordello in town, noticed a curious change brought about by the depression. Most of her clients were, or had been, rich, and now they visited her place not so much for sex as for liquor. They got drunk on champagne costing $30 a bottle and beer costing $1 a glass and behaved like madmen. One man kept muttering that he used to control Wall Street but didn’t know now whether he could pay the next month’s rent. Another said that he came back night after night because a whorehouse was the only place where he could cry without being ashamed.

  Bernard Baruch stood rigidly in his Madison Avenue office and murmured to a Times reporter: “In the presence of too much food, people are starving. Surrounded by vacant houses, they are homeless. And standing before unused bales of wool and cotton, they are dressed in rags.” At the Canterbury School in New Milford, Connecticut, thirteen-year-old John Fitzgerald Kennedy wrote his father: “Please send me the Literary Digest, because I did not know about the Market Slump until a long time after, or a paper. Please send me some golf balls. . . .”

  New York City nearly went under financially. Because property owners were unable to pay taxes, city revenues declined. Expenses, however, continued to mount. The city had to borrow on anticipated tax collections, piling up a public debt almost equal to that of the forty-eight states combined. As a result, city credit suffered.

  As unemployment rose, hopeless men stared at smokeless chimneys. Manufacturing firms quit the city, leaving fewer plants in operation than at any time since 1899. Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library, degenerated into a weed-filled jungle. Construction of the Triborough Bridge was stopped for lack of funds. Work halted on a fashionable new hotel, named the Hampshire House, at 150 Central Park South. The city’s taxicabs decreased from 28,000 to 13,000, and some hackdrivers made only $20 a week. Saleswomen in some Woolworth stores were paid $10.80 a week, and others got as little as $7.

  To help homeowners, the state legislature declared a moratorium on foreclosures if the interest on mortgages and taxes were paid. But many people were too poor to pay even these and lost their homes. In the Sunnyside area of middle Queens eviction notices were fought by collective action. Doors were barricaded with barbed wire and sandbags. Householders bombarded sheriffs with pepper and flour. More than 60 percent of Sunnyside’s homeowners lost their houses through foreclosure. Families began doubling up in houses and apartments.

  The homeless slept under bridges, in railroad terminals, on subways, in missions, and in municipal shelters. By buying one drink, a man could sleep on sawdust in a cheap speakeasy. The unemployed also lived in parks, someone saying that “ten-cent men sleep under thousand-dollar trees.” A young Ph.D. camped for eight months in Morningside Park. Another man loaded all his worldly goods into a baby buggy and sought refuge in Central Park. Each night he lowered the buggy’s dashboard, put down the seat in the back, crawled in, covered himself with a rubber sheet, pulled the buggy’s hood over his head, and fell asleep.

  College graduates suffered, along with the uneducated. Professional men slept in subways, while Queens County politicians rode around in Pierce-Arrows. Although Hollywood ignored the depression as long as possible, it finally faced up to the ugly problem. A movie called One More Spring depicted actor Warner Baxter as a penniless producer roasting a partridge in his makeshift home in Central Park. Sallow-cheeked men sold apples in the streets. New York became accustomed to the sight of the breadline, which Heywood Broun described as “the worm that walks like a man.”

  When the weather was bad, many children failed to attend school because they lacked warm clothing and shoes. Those who did go could not pay attention to lessons because they suffered from malnutrition. Groucho Marx said that he knew things were bad when “the pigeons started feeding the people in Central Park.” In 1931 four New York hospitals reported ninety-five deaths from starvation. The Welfare Council told about a family in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn:

  Family reported starving by neighbors. Investigator found five small children at home while mother was out looking for vegetables under pushcarts. Family had moved into one room. Father sleeping at Municipal Lodging House because he could get more to eat there than at home and frequently brought food home from there in pockets for children and wife. Only other food they had for weeks came from pushcarts.

  The depression hit rock bottom in December, 1932. Nearly one of every four employable New Yorkers was jobless. The song “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” became a byword. Men with elbows poking out of sleeves asked one another ruefully, “Got change for a match?” Charles M. Schwab, a steel company president living in a seventy-five-room mansion on Riverside Drive, confessed, “I’m afraid. Every man is afraid.” Carl Van Doren, the brilliant editor, historian, and critic, later wrote: “I had no systematic thoughts but I had recurrent dreams. One dream, rather, in several forms. It was a dream of fear. . . .”

  There was much talk of suicide—some of it sad, some cynical. A favorite joke concerned a hotel clerk who asked guests if they wanted a room for sleeping or jumping. A total of 1,595 New Yorkers killed themselves in 1932—the highest number since 1900.

  Harlem suffered more than any other section of the city. Negro men who worked as casual laborers and colored female domestics soon found themselves unemployed. Negroes lucky enough to find jobs were paid less than whites but charged more than whites in rentals. Knowing that their tenants could not move to other neighborhoods, Harlem landlords were quick to raise rents. As a result, there were wholesale evictions. To help pay for their apartments, some Negroes took in lodgers, which produced appalling overcrowding.

  Cheated and cramped, jobless and hopeless, many Negroes
tried to escape reality by drinking, buying “love potions,” consulting fortune-tellers, burning incense to destroy “evil spirits,” purchasing dream books, and playing the numbers game. Lottery tickets sold for as little as a penny and paid off at 540 to 1. A banker for one of Harlem’s big policy games, a Negress who called herself Mme. St. Clair, enjoyed an income of $250,000 a year and a private bodyguard. One of Harlem’s best-known purveyors of “love potions” was a man who styled himself High John the Conqueror.

  The greatest of all these charlatans was Father Divine. Although his origin is shrouded in mystery, he is thought to have been born in Georgia about 1877 and named George Baker. After growing up, he drifted to Baltimore, where he worked as a handyman. Sometime during this period he decided to become a minister and started calling himself the Reverend M. J. Divine. Then he headed farther north, settling in Sayville, Long Island.

  Squat, only about five feet tall, bald as a balloon, with a flashing grin and sparkling eyes, Father Divine had a magnetic personality. His preaching was so rhythmical that it hypnotized ignorant people. Seeking something greater than themselves, they drank in nonsense such as: “It is personifiable and repersonifiably metaphysicalizationally reproducible—” Besides being a spellbinder, Father Divine was a shrewd organizer and manipulator. He attracted disciples and bewitched them into giving him their earnings. With this money he founded cooperatives where all true believers could live in peace and comfort. “Peace” was the slogan. His followers, called “angels,” regarded him as God, and when they got together they chanted, “He has the world in a jug and the stopper in his hand.” In 1931 the Sayville police arrested him for maintaining a public nuisance. A judge sentenced him to a year in jail, but the conviction was reversed.

  In the pit of the depression, Father Divine arrived in Harlem, where he established the first of his many “heavens.” Unemployed Negroes turned in growing numbers to his promise of security and dignity. No other Negro since Marcus Garvey had attracted such a large following. Forbidding his disciples to accept public relief and providing living quarters and food with the money supplied by employed believers, Father Divine became a power. The trademark of his movement was the banquet. Devotees would sit down to the table at his most important “heaven,” located at 152 West 126th Street, and feast on twenty kinds of meat, five salads, eleven relishes, fifteen kinds of bread, six desserts, six different beverages, and cheeses and cakes “as big as automobile tires.” For all this each disciple paid only fifteen cents.

  Father Divine demanded that his “angels” give up sex, tobacco, alcohol, and their money, but in those hard times this didn’t seem too much to surrender. Husbands and wives slept in separate dormitories for only two dollars a week. Those joining the movement sacrificed their names and took others, such as Angel Flash, Blessed Mary Love, Peaceful Dove, Love Note, and Gladness Darling. In spite of the fun poked at them, they made good workers and were rarely involved with the police.

  While Father Divine tackled the depression in his own self-rewarding way, others began questioning the worth of an economic and political system that could result in such mass misery. The dean of the Harvard Business School admitted, “Capitalism is on trial and on the issue of this trial may depend the whole future of Western civilization.” Heywood Broun, a syndicated columnist for the Scripps-Howard newspapers, became a Socialist, but this was too tepid a change for those who wanted deeds, not words. In 1932 John Dos Passos wrote: “Becoming a Socialist right now would have just about the same effect on anybody as drinking a bottle of near-beer.” Wherever the unemployed looked, they seemed to see Communists in action—taking part in jobless demonstrations, leading strikes, suffering beatings, going to jail, and sometimes being killed. Granville Hicks later wrote: “What impressed us about American Communists was their absolute devotion to the cause. We didn’t like them very well, but they did get results.” Besides, the Communists glorified the poor and in those days nearly everyone was poor. Clifford Odets, who wanted to become a playwright, was trying to live on ten cents a day. In 1935 he joined the Communist party but resigned eight months later because its leaders tried to regiment his writing.

  The American Communist party increased the number of its members. They were organized into three categories of clubs—community clubs, shop clubs, and industrial clubs. Above the clubs were sections and state organizations. The area embraced by a club or section depended on the density of membership. New York had city, county, and section groups. Because this was a vast city, a local club might embrace only a neighborhood, whereas in a small town there might be only one club in the entire community.

  In the Coney Island area of Brooklyn there were several clubs. They were known collectively as the Coney Island section. This, in turn, was part of the boroughwide Brooklyn organization. As David A. Shannon wrote in The Decline of American Communism: “In some parts of New York there were enough party members in one apartment building to constitute a club. Isadore Begun, Bronx county chairman, gloated over one building in which there were ten members: ‘Just think, if you want to call a meeting all you have to do is knock on the steam pipe.’ ”

  Russian periodicals exaggerated the American depression. A Moscow paper published pictures of holes dug in Broadway by repairmen, the captions declaring that the pits were caused by “bombings” and “riots.” The Third International, a worldwide organization set up by the Bolsheviks with the aim of conquering the world, ordered that March 6, 1930, be observed as International Unemployment Day. According to Benjamin Gitlow, an American Communist official who quit the party, the Comintern commanded the comrades to provoke police. The Soviet plan was to touch off bloody riots in an attempt to prove that capitalistic nations were oppressing the workers.

  Grover Whalen was police commissioner of New York in 1930. His intelligence squad reported that 100,000 postcards had been mailed to Communists and sympathizers in the New York area, summoning them to a rally at noon on March 6 in Union Square—sometimes known as Red Square because Communist orators harangued crowds there. Whalen had little patience wtih radicals. According to Socialists Norman Thomas and Paul Blanshard, he said publicly that Communists, “these enemies of society, were to be driven out of New York regardless of their constitutional rights.”

  Whalen asked William Z. Foster, Robert Minor, and Israel Amter to come to Police Headquarters to confer. Foster was the nation’s No. 1 Communist, Minor was editor of the Daily Worker, and Amter was a local Communist organizer. Whalen told them that under a city ordinance it was necessary to obtain a permit three days in advance of any outdoor meeting. Having been ordered by Moscow to antagonize American officials, the Communist leaders snarled that they did not respect the laws of the United States, of New York State, or of New York City. Curtly they refused to apply for a permit for the Union Square rally. Then they turned on their heels and strode out of Whalen’s office. He later wrote: “I doubt if any police commissioner has ever been more openly defied.”

  The biggest Communist demonstration in the history of New York City was held on Thursday, March 6, 1930. It was a clear and windless day. By 10 A.M. a crowd had begun to gather in Union Square. Police spies within Communist ranks had told Whalen that there were exactly 9,567 Communist party members in New York City. They provided the hard core of the Union Square crowd, which was reinforced by thousands of sympathizers and curiosity seekers.

  The dapper Whalen wore a dark overcoat and light homburg. He set up emergency headquarters in a garden house inside the square. A wall three feet high surrounded the park. Whalen did not interfere with newspaper photographers and silent movie cameramen, but he forbade picture taking by photographers for the new talking pictures. Whalen later explained: “I saw no reason for perpetuating treasonable utterances, and I don’t mean to engage in censorship. But why glorify these people?”

  Ever more overcoated men and women thronged into Union Square. By noon, according to Whalen, more than 100,000 people had congregated in and around the square
. New York Times reporters estimated the size of the crowd at 35,000. Five speakers’ platforms had been erected in the center of the park, and diehard Communists clustered around them. These party members carried placards declaring that they wanted no charity, protesting evictions of the jobless, and insisting that public buildings be used to house the unemployed.

  Congestion became so great at subway entrances near the square that Whalen arranged for all subway trains on the line to skip the stations between Brooklyn Bridge and Grand Central. Just before the rally started, he ordered Foster, Minor, and Amter brought to his temporary office. Accompanying the three Red leaders were a Negro sailor and a white soldier. The five men announced that they constituted a committee of workers, soldiers, and sailors. Trying to control his Irish temper, Whalen said that although their meeting was illegal (since they had failed to get a permit), he would let it go on, provided that it ended promptly at 1 P.M. Again the Communist leaders stamped out.

  As they dived back into the massed throng in the square, a Soviet flag was run up on a flagpole over the Stars and Stripes. Police told the Communists to reverse the sequence, declaring that no one would be allowed to speak until Old Glory fluttered over the Soviet banner. The flags were reversed. Then five Communist orators climbed onto the portable stands and began haranguing the multitude about “Whalen’s cossacks” and their “brutality.”