by Blum, Howard
Railroad safety regulations required that explosives must be carried on special trains, ones without passengers or other freight. It could take a few days, the salesman advised. Maybe more.
Still, the next day, and then every day for the following week, Holt went to the station on Jackson Avenue to inquire if a shipment for Henderson—the new name he was using—had arrived. And each day the freight agent, George Carnes, would tell him sorry—nothing for Henderson. But the persistent Henderson wouldn’t take no for an answer, and would invariably ask Carnes to check again.
It got so irritating that one morning Carnes barked back, telling Henderson to calm down and relax or get out of his office. And when something finally arrived for Henderson, it wasn’t the dynamite but a big black trunk shipped from New York and weighing thirty-six pounds, according to the shipping invoice.
Henderson seemed glad it had arrived, but he let Carnes know that he was still waiting for the explosives he needed to remove an ugly stand of tree trunks. “It’ll come when it comes,” Carnes told him.
So he waited. He nailed a bull’s-eye target to a tree behind the bungalow and began practicing with the revolvers. He was good with guns, and the target’s inner circles were soon perforated with holes. And when he wasn’t shooting or pestering the freight agent, he went off and did reconnaissance.
LIKE A GOLDEN ARROW POINTING the way, East Island on a bright June day was a shining narrow peninsula of land jutting straight out toward the shimmering blue waters of Long Island Sound. The Gold Coast town of Glen Cove was famous for its great estates, mansions as big as the Ritz surrounded by fields of shaved green lawns. But most locals would enviously agree—especially those who were weekend sailors—that Matinicock Point, the estate house situated at the center of East Island, was special.
It wasn’t that the house was particularly large, although as with nearly every estate on the Gold Coast, there was enough room to bivouac a battalion. Nor was its architecture distinguished, or even graceful. It was a squat, dormered two-story redbrick mansion, its front door flanked by a fatuous pair of Ionic columns. And if you believed the old saw that people choose houses that reflect their personalities, at first glance you’d guess that this was a banker’s home—solid, uninspired, and forbiddingly dull.
But what rescued Matinicock Point, what transformed a stolid redbrick fortress into something more lively and unique, was the boldness with which it had been sited. It rode the tip of the peninsula like a figurine carved on the prow of a pirate’s ship. Every room not only looked out on the water but offered open vistas that conspired to make the sound—its whitecaps, its roar, the pounding rhythm of its waves—a nearly palpable presence. It was breathtaking.
Matinicock Point was J. P. Morgan’s home. In mid-May he’d take up residence, commuting to Wall Street by automobile or steam launch across the sound; and, except for a precious few days at the family camp in the Adirondacks, he would stay on Long Island until the annual August trip to his farm in the English countryside. His oldest child, Junius, had married that spring, but his three younger children and his wife, Jane, had settled into Matinicock Point for most of the summer.
Holt spent days surveilling the estate. In an inspired bit of cover, he posed as Thomas Lester, a representative of the Society Summer Directory, even flashing an embossed card with his name and title to confirm his identity. Gold Coast matriarchs, with snooty humor, called the Society Directory “the Good Book” and kept it by their phones. It listed the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of the only families with whom one would need to speak, along with other necessary information such as club and university affiliations. As a result, its representative was greeted with courtesy and offered the sort of discreet information that would never normally be shared with an outsider.
Lester politely knocked on mansion doors throughout Glen Cove and, without pressing too hard, succeeded in gathering a good deal of intelligence about Morgan, his family, and even his servants. It was such resourceful fieldwork that Tom, mulling over it all after the fact, had to admire Holt’s skill. At the same time, he also wondered how a college professor with no apparent knowledge of the smart set had the inspiration to pass himself off as a Society Directory representative, down to the impressively embossed card.
TWO CRATES ARRIVED AT THE Syosset station for “C. Hendricks” on June 28, holding 120 pounds—two hundred sticks—of 60 percent dynamite. The standard formulation contained 40 percent nitroglycerin, but this batch was considerably more powerful. Holt was elated to discover that at last his shipment had been delivered. With great care, he loaded the wooden boxes into his Ford and drove off.
Another crate arrived the following day, packed with blasting caps and fuses. But when Holt banged on the locked freight office door at 6:00 p.m., the crotchety Carnes roared that the office was closed. He should come back tomorrow.
Holt refused to leave. He begged that he really needed to get the crate. He even apologized for all his incessant pestering.
Carnes couldn’t see why there was so much rush to blow up a few tree trunks, but it’d be easier to get things done and over with than to keep on arguing. He opened the door and gave the man his crate. It was only as Hendricks was driving off in his Ford that Carnes noticed he’d signed the receipt “Hendrix.” Which was odd, but then again, he told himself, everything about that fellow was odd.
Holt spent the next two days in New York. The clerks at the Mills later told Tom that he’d leave by nine in the morning and wouldn’t return until after dark. Did he walk the streets aimlessly? Was he gathering up his courage? Did he meet with his control? Tom could only guess.
But Tom did establish that on Thursday, July 1, Holt arrived in Glen Clove on the 3:00 p.m. train from Manhattan. He found a taxi and instructed the driver, Matthew Kramer, to take him to the Morgan estate.
Kramer had grown up in the town and was proud of knowing everyone, including all the grand families. There was little he liked better, in fact, than letting people know how deeply he was tied into the gilded community. And talking helped to break up the tedium of sitting behind the wheel of his cab. When his passenger started asking questions about Mr. Morgan, Kramer was only too happy to let him know that he was speaking to the right man.
The taxi driver cheerily confided that this was going to be a big holiday weekend up at the house. On Saturday the Resolute, Morgan’s yacht, would be racing the Vanitie in the America’s Cup trials. And then that night there was a party in honor of Junius, Morgan’s oldest son, and his new bride. There were lots of people coming, he said knowingly. Even the British ambassador.
As Kramer talked on, the plot took final shape in Holt’s mind. The timing, he had to realize, couldn’t be better. The July 4 weekend offered the perfect opportunity.
When the taxi reached the causeway that connected East Island to the mainland, he told the driver to stop. From his seat, Holt had a clear view past the tall wrought-iron gate and the manicured lawn to the redbrick mansion. He stared at the house in silence. Morgan lived like a king; and he’d die like one, too.
At last he gave the driver the address of the bungalow in Central Park, and ordered Kramer to take him there.
The next morning Holt left on the 7:09 train to Penn Station. He had hired the young son of a local livery operator to wheel a large brown trunk to the train, while he carried two small suitcases, one in each hand as if for balance. Once he reached Manhattan, he arranged for the trunk to be sent to a storage warehouse on Fortieth Street, just off Seventh Avenue.
Then he boarded a train to Washington, D.C. His mission had begun.
Chapter 45
At the end of the long checkerboard-patterned first floor of the U.S. Capitol Building, adjacent to the mahogany door leading to the vice president’s office, were two tall arched windows that looked out across the city toward the Washington Monument. A deep alcove stretched beneath the windows, and it was there that a telephone switchboard had been wedged. It serviced a row of phone
booths, their elegant raised paneled doors carved from the finest walnut, reserved exclusively for the members of the U.S. Senate. A senator could give the switchboard operator a number anywhere in the country, and within minutes she’d make the connection.
On the afternoon of Friday, July 2, the Senate was not in session, and the switchboard was covered with a canvas drop cloth. Tourists, though, were allowed to walk through the Capitol. As Holt rambled through the hallways, a suitcase in his hand, he walked past a door whose gold-leaf lettering announced, “Office of the Vice President.” This would do, he decided.
He surveyed the hallway and saw the covered switchboard across the way. He knew he had to act now, or he would never find the nerve. He glanced to see if he was being observed, and when he was certain no one was watching, he quickly shoved the suitcase beneath the canvas, placing it directly under the switchboard. Unless someone lifted the canvas, then got down on his hands and knees, they’d never notice a thing, he reassured himself. Still, at about 4:00 p.m., as he hurried as best he could with his gimpy leg down the long stone Capitol steps, his heart was pounding.
Inside the suitcase was a bomb.
AFTER ARRIVING AT UNION STATION the previous day, Holt had wandered until he found a boardinghouse. He checked in, immediately went to his room, and then made sure the door was locked. For further security, he wedged a chair against the door. He didn’t want the landlady bursting in while he was assembling his bomb. Its core was three sticks of dynamite.
When he was done, he reread the letter he had drafted during his long evenings in the Central Park bungalow. He had made five copies, one to President Wilson and the others addressed to the four principal Washington newspapers.
Satisfied with what he had written, he put the five envelopes into the inside pocket of the pin-striped brown suit jacket he’d be wearing tomorrow. Then he cleaned up carefully. He still needed to plant the bomb, and he wanted to make sure the maid tomorrow morning found nothing that would prompt any concerns while he was on his way to the Capitol.
All had gone off as he’d planned. Even better, in fact. No one would ever notice the suitcase; finding a switchboard covered by a drop cloth had been a genuine bit of luck. Walking down the block from the Capitol, he passed a mailbox. He pushed the letters one at a time through the slot. In case anyone was watching, he tried to act as if he were mailing off nothing more significant than a payment for an outstanding bill, which was precisely what he believed he had done—paid America back for its great unfairness.
Holt returned to the boardinghouse, retrieved his suitcase, and checked out. Then he walked the city, waiting.
He expected to hear the blast crashing through Washington at any moment. The wait was excruciating. And the steady, even hum of city noise was a constant reprimand. How can I have failed? What has gone wrong? he wondered, close to panic.
He knew he shouldn’t return to the Capitol Building, but he couldn’t restrain himself. At 10:30 on the hot, quiet night he was pacing back and forth on the Senate terrace, his eyes fixed on a pair of tall, arched windows.
Growing tired, he found a bench at a nearby trolley stop, where he sat with his back turned to the road, all his shivery attention on the Capitol. He watched and listened, but the domed building remained swathed in an immense silence.
At 11:23 p.m. the bomb exploded, violently shaking the Capitol Building to its foundations. The roar reached across the city. Sitting at his desk in the basement of the Senate, Frank Jones, a thirty-five-year veteran of the Capitol police, was thrown from his chair. “It sounded like several cannons going off,” he said. “I thought the Capitol dome had toppled.”
Inside, plaster rained down from walls and ceilings, gaping holes were punched through stone walls, doors were blown off their hinges, crystal chandeliers crashed to the floor. The East Reception Room was in shambles. No one had been killed, but a message had been delivered: America was under siege.
Holt had seen it all happen. He was sitting on the trolley bench when the huge noise burst into his ears like a victory trumpet. As a curious crowd gathered, he walked off, tingling with a great, proud excitement.
It was three blocks to Union Station, and he covered the distance in time to make the 12:10 a.m. train to New York City. The conductor showed him to a berth in car 27, but sleep was impossible. Alone in the darkness, he listened to the sounds of the powerful train racing down the tracks, taking him to his destiny.
A photograph taken in the aftermath of the explosion that rocked the U.S. Capitol on July 2, 1915.
(National Photo Company Collection, Library of Congress)
AND THEN IT WAS SATURDAY, July 3.
In Manhattan, Holt transferred to the Long Island Rail Road, boarding an Oyster Bay line train.
It was 8:30 on the quiet holiday weekend morning when he stepped off the train at the Glen Street station. He wore a stiff-brimmed straw hat on his head, and in his hand he carried a suitcase. It was filled with newspaper clippings about the war in Europe—and two sticks of dynamite. In his brown suit coat were the .38- and 32-caliber revolvers, one in each pocket. An inside breast pocket held another stick of dynamite.
At the station, he hailed a Glen Cove yellow cab. He told the driver, Arthur Ford, to take him to the Morgan estate.
It was a two-mile drive.
In Washington, he expected the president and the newspaper editors would soon be reading his typewritten letter.
“Unusual times and circumstances call for unusual means,” it began:
Would it not be well to stop and consider what we are doing?
We stand for PEACE AND GOOD WILL to all men, and yet, while our European brethren are madly setting out to kill one another we edge ’em on and furnish them more effective means of murder. Is it right?
We get rich by the exportation of explosives, but ought we to enrich ourselves when it means the untold suffering and death of millions of our brethren and their widows and orphans?
And there was a handwritten postscript:
We would, of course, not sell to Germans if they could buy here, and since so far we only sold to the Allies, neither side should object if we stopped.
It was signed, “R. Pearce.”
Now that he had their attention, he hoped that they would read his words and understand that he was right. Men like him, those who were special, had a responsibility to make other people—even the president of the United States or the richest man in the world—listen. It was his natural duty. He could not turn away.
The taxi drove through the open gate toward the big brick house. It stopped in the circular driveway across from the front door.
“Oh, I forgot,” Holt told the driver, hesitating for a moment before he got out. “I have to get my card.”
He opened his suitcase and searched for the card that identified him as Thomas Lester of the Society Summer Directory.
He found it, and put it in his jacket.
Ford, watching, wondered: Was that a revolver sticking out of the passenger’s suit pocket?
But before he could ask, Holt had left the car.
He walked up the three short brick steps to the front door and rang the bell.
Chapter 46
Physick, the butler, was immediately wary. As soon as he opened the door and took quick measure of the man in the rumpled brown suit, holding a battered suitcase, he knew something was not right.
“I want to see Mr. Morgan,” the caller said, and handed the butler a business card.
Physick glanced at the card identifying the stranger as Thomas Lester, a representative of the Society Summer Directory. But he was still not persuaded. The hollow look in the man’s eyes was reason enough to remain on guard.
“What is your business with him?” the butler asked, his curtness deliberate.
“I can’t discuss that with you,” he answered. “I am an old friend of Mr. Morgan. He will see me.”
Physick did not appreciate the insistence in the man’s tone. It was inapp
ropriate, and certainly not how a gentleman would conduct himself. “You must tell me the business you have with him,” the butler repeated firmly.
So it had quickly come to this, Holt decided. During his weeks of planning, he’d liked to imagine that he’d be swiftly ushered in for an audience with Morgan; and that as they sat face-to-face the financier would be not merely persuaded by but impressed with the powerful logic of his argument. Morgan would appreciate that he was talking to an equal; a friendship would blossom. And violence would not be necessary.
But even as the vision took shape in his mind, he also knew it would never become a reality. He had prepared for rejection: guns were in his pockets, and his suitcase was packed with dynamite. He had offered an alternative, but they refused to listen. Now he would do whatever was necessary to complete his mission.
Holt pulled the .38-caliber revolver from his jacket and charged into the front hall. “Where is Morgan?” he demanded, the gun trained on the butler.
“In the library,” Physick lied. He knew his employer was at the other end of the big house, in the breakfast room dining with his houseguests, including Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, British ambassador to the United States. When he led the armed intruder down the hallway to the library, it was a diversion. It was all he could think of to protect the household.
The library double doors were open, and Holt rushed in, waving his gun. It was a spacious room, and with the curtains drawn and the dark mahogany paneling it seemed bathed in perpetual night. Adjusting his eyes to the shadows, he surveyed the space.
It was empty, he quickly discovered. He had been tricked!
In the same moment Physick bolted, taking advantage of the gunman’s confusion. He ran down the hall in the opposite direction, toward the breakfast room, his feet slipping on the well-polished marble floor, his frock coat constraining his movements. Terrified that any second a bullet would slam into his back, he ran as fast as he could down the mansion hallway, all the time shouting at the top of his lungs, “Upstairs, Mr. Morgan! Upstairs!” It was imperative to warn his employer. Mr. Morgan needed to lock himself in an upstairs bedroom. “Upstairs, Mr. Morgan! Upstairs!” he repeated as he fled.