by Thai Jones
A campaign poster for John Purroy Mitchel.
When the ballots were tallied, Mitchel had earned the most overwhelming victory since the unification of Greater New York in 1898; he’d won every borough and had a majority of more than 120,000 votes. Second only to Wilson’s victory the previous year, this was proof that reform was still rising. From the president he received a telegram reading, I CONGRATULATE YOU WITH ALL MY HEART. The Morning Olympian, in Washington State, decreed that “Tammany got a richly deserved licking.” The Grand Rapids Press celebrated Gotham’s liberation as if it was its own. “With this vicious organization kicked out by an overwhelming majority,” its editors wrote, “the country’s largest city should make a fresh start toward honesty and decency in its civic affairs.” Fusion was hailed in Knoxville, Tennessee, and in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “Mr. Mitchel,” punned Montana’s Anaconda Standard, “seems to be the man who took the many out of Tammany.”
* * *
ON THE MORNING of New Year’s Day, staggering survivors of the previous night reached out for bromo and bromides, according to the World, to “soothe the tired, aching muscles which so gaily tangoed between tables, on slippery floors, in subway stations even, not to mention the humble and unresilient sidewalk.” Mitchel had hardly slept—if he’d rested at all—and he had dark circles around his eyes to show for it. Last seen doing the two-step long after midnight in the grand ballroom at the Plaza, he again appeared at 8:52 A.M., when his auto pushed through a small crowd in City Hall Park. Eager, ready, and impeccably dressed, he wore “a black cutaway coat trimmed with braid, dark trousers with a small stripe, and a necktie of mauve, relieved by a pin of pearls.” A violet in his buttonhole provided the final touch. Without pausing to banter with the crowd, he escorted Olive into his new office on the northeast corner of the first floor.
Economies began at once. The inauguration ceremony, which began a few minutes after noon, offered a complete break from the traditionally interminable Tammany affair. The outgoing mayor’s speech lasted one minute. Mitchel took the oath, his right arm raised high above his head. He looked round the room, crowded with 150 friends and colleagues. Olive and his mother stood in the corner, watching with admiration and concern. Addressing the crowd and the gathered reporters, he began by quieting the expectations that had grown throughout the campaign. “We will develop our program slowly,” he said. “I would rather have the government of this city for the next few months inconspicuous than have it heralded from day to day in the papers through promises made as to what will be done.”
Then he turned to the commissioners who were to lead the municipal departments. In the past they would have been political functionaries, men whose sole credential was loyalty to the Machine. This was a different group entirely. Mitchel had wanted “persons with special qualifications for the tasks assigned to them.” Hundreds had applied for the positions, and sorting them had been a nightmare. “There is nothing in the world worse than trying to select appointees for public office,” Mitchel wrote to a former traveling companion. “I would rather go through ten campaigns or a long illness than tackle that job.” Still, he had soldiered through, diligently perusing the files, turning away many good choices, selecting only the best. These were the experts he would entrust with the sacred work of reform. For the first time in municipal history, social scientists were going to take their theories into the laboratory of the streets. “Run up and down the names of his heads of department,” a reporter wrote with wonder, “and you will scarcely find one which indicates politics, while in case after case the sole suggestion is of special training or highly qualifying expertise.”
The mayor’s first day in office.
Standing closest to the mayor was his most talked-about appointee, Katharine Bement Davis, the new commissioner of correction, who had just become the first woman to hold a cabinet post in a city administration. Nearby stood John Adams Kingsbury, a former radical from the Northwest who was the newly named head of the Department of Charities. Arthur Woods, an old friend who as yet had no official appointment, was present, too. To the commissioners, many of whom were already prominent in their fields, Mitchel urged the importance of teamwork, “that each man must not feel that he—or she”—he said, with a laugh and a glance toward Miss Davis—“can regard his—or her—department as apart from the others.”
His speech lasted five minutes. Then the reception began. This was the ordeal Mitchel had been dreading. Immemorial custom demanded that he receive his constituents. Thousands had come; they massed in a double line extending through the corridors and out the doors into the park. The first five hundred passed through, shaking His Honor’s hand, wishing him well. A headache came on. He paled steadily, and finally could do no more. Two thirds of the visitors were sent away in disappointment and Mitchel retreated to his private office. A half hour later, some Columbia friends found him there still. “As we entered through the door,” one recalled, “he was seated before his desk, with his arms resting on the desk and his head buried in his arms. He straightened up as he heard us approach, his face white and drawn.” Alone with his peers again, the mayor of New York could finally reveal his thoughts.
“It’s been hell,” he said.
* * *
FAUGH! STUPIDITY. OFFICIAL WINDJAMMING. Thus thought Alexander Berkman, flipping through the excretions of the plutocratic press in early January. “It is disgusting,” he complained, “to witness the brazen hypocrisy” of the newspapers and magazines, and yet compulsively he searched his enemies’ propaganda for material to fill his monthly column in Mother Earth, the anarchist magazine he edited for Emma Goldman. It was a game he enjoyed—turning their words against them, using the evidence printed daily in the bourgeois journals to show “the utter rottenness of our whole politico-economical life.” Some mornings, though, it required “nothing short of heroism” to face the latest batch of lies and half lies. January 1 presented more than the usual measure of irritants. The papers overflowed with the typical buncombe, but in addition the new year had inspired the most miserable sort of dialect pieces and doggerel, Messages of Optimism, paeans to “Progress”—shoddy, threadbare stuff.
The new calendar also brought the inevitable retrospectives and annual reports. Newspaper after newspaper plastered entire pages over with charts, tables, and coded maps. Poultry and dairy records, self-congratulatory discussions of death rates, misleading numbers and pseudofacts displayed triumphantly as the hard proof of national health and prosperity. Berkman liked to use statistics, too. In the column he was working up for January, he noted that “the United States, according to statistical figures, employs more children in stores, factories, and mines than any other ‘civilized’ nation.” While the press predicted peace, he understood that capitalism and conflict were inseparable. He noted the invention of an improved machine gun that could fire hundreds of rounds a minute. “Think what that means!” he wrote. “A single company of soldiers will, by means of the new Lewis gun, have a destructive power equal to a whole regiment at present. Wonderful human achievement.”
The holiday season had been a busy time, though anarchists enjoyed the festivities in their own way. “It is hardly necessary to assure those who attend our affairs,” said Berkman, “that they will find there no preachment about peace on earth, good will to all, but, what is more vital in our days, joyous abandon and true comradeship.” In October, Mother Earth’s annual reunion party had been a “most unique and interesting event … so enjoyable was the camaraderie that every one stayed until the wee hours of the morning,” leaving reluctantly, even then. The Christmas Eve Dance was another tradition. A newspaper reporter had once come to see it for himself. “All the clever girls, all the intellectual girls, all the thoroughly worthy, serious-minded, housewifely girls, sat around the walls most of the evening,” he wrote. “All the pretty girls had partners for every dance.” Aunts paired with young nieces. Awkward waltzers stomped each other’s toes. “In other words … the anarchists’ Christmas b
all was an own twin brother to every other dance that ever was.” Except for the hair. No blondes. No “downright, healthy, open-minded, you’d-like-to-play-tennis-with-her” redheads, either. Only brunettes had attended. “Perhaps so much densely, lustrously, trenchantly black hair, and so thickly set,” the newsman sneered, “never gathered in a room before.”
The city had been especially aggravating in recent months. Since August, the mayoral race had monopolized the headlines. “The political hucksters are tremendously busy these days,” Berkman complained. “One gang of grafters supersedes another in an endless round of elections, and no one’s the wiser except the politicians.” The furious and self-righteous accusations and counterclaims were mere distractions; Fusion and the Machine were equally corrupt. To the workingman, elections were irrelevant. “He may vote blue, white, or red, but however he casts his ballot, he always votes to continue his own slavery.”
All this only heightened Berkman’s peevishness. He was forty-three years old. Out of prison for nearly a decade, he now found himself trapped in the sedentary life of a publicist and critic. Occasionally he appeared at demonstrations, but his most militant days, he feared, were slipping further into the past. Along with Emma Goldman, he was the face of American anarchism; increasingly, though, his own was becoming the face of a bank teller or a railroad clerk.
He was bald, bespectacled, and short, softening in the middle; he dressed like a dandy, with a particular taste for light-colored suits and panama hats. Ages had passed since he’d last trembled the bourgeois establishment. The only tool that still worked for him was the pen. But even in his columns, his frustrated pessimism revealed itself. Describing movement allies, he used the flattest terms: His friends were all martyrs, comrades, heroes. Only when writing about antagonists did he let fly, creating an elaborate taxonomy of labor fakirs, reformer-mollusks, parasitic speculators, property patriots, hired plug-uglies, pathological degenerates, government squealers, slimy creatures, Judases, Hessians, harpies, troglodytes. Woodrow Wilson was the “Chief of the plutocratic Cossacks.” Theodore Roosevelt was “the arch demagogue,” the “Tartarin of Oyster Bay,” a “Tarasconian Super-Barnum.”3
After aiming such vituperation at the capitalist leeches, he did not neglect to chide the anarchists’ “step-brothers”—the socialists—as well. Founded at the turn of the century, the Socialist Party of America conceived of itself as the political arm of the labor movement. On many issues the radicals agreed; they were, as Berkman wrote, “friends with somewhat similar aims.” Both looked forward to a society where labor was not exchanged for wages, or goods sold for profit, where workers controlled their own lives. But while the anarchists refused to collaborate in any form with the institutions of bourgeois capitalism, the socialists attempted to reform society from the inside by first amassing political power through votes, offices, and the entire panoply of government. For the moment, this strategy was showing progress: The party was at the peak of its power and influence. Eugene V. Debs had polled nearly a million votes in the recent presidential election; it left him a distant fourth overall, but the organization had successfully elected a congressman—Victor Berger, of Milwaukee—as well as scores of mayors and hundreds of minor public officials. But the anarchists believed that to participate in government was to acknowledge its legitimacy. By seeking political offices, the socialists had fatally compromised their revolutionary beliefs. They joined the capitalists in advocating slow reform; reining in the most radical protests, urging the anarchists to “be patient, keep quiet.” So in all their accomplishments, Berkman saw only defeat. “The present ‘victory’ will prove the final debacle of American Socialism,” he wrote in Mother Earth at a time when the party was celebrating the latest election result, “if the Socialists at large don’t take timely warning against the siren promise of political success at the cost of forswearing their real aims and ideals.”
The role of perpetual censor may have inspired his sharpest writing, but it also propelled his most cynical impulses. Comrades saw danger in his “graveyard humor,” fearing he might lose the ability to distinguish friends from foes; or, more seriously, that he would fully become the ranting scold he played in his diatribes. Already his most perceptive acquaintances sensed that he was “desperate,” unfulfilled, “just full of despair.” He skipped from lover to lover and “couldn’t be faithful.” Anarchism was supposed to be an affirmation, yet increasingly “he really at heart had no faith in himself.” It had not always been so; once he had fancied himself a force of pure ego, a true revolutionist.
He had been twenty-one years old in the summer of 1892, handsome, febrile, with lithe muscles and sensual lips. Having immigrated to the United States from despotic Russia four years earlier, he had plunged into the life of his new homeland. Moving in a whirl of passion, his tumescent politics rendered every question crucial, beautiful, simple. He lived in poverty—working as a cigar maker and a shirt packer, sleeping some nights on the steps of City Hall—but it hardly mattered. In the evenings, he joined the radicals at Sach’s Café or Mazzini’s. These were the most militant activists in New York City, and yet his own commitment far outstripped theirs. He allowed no slippage between ideals and actions. When a sick comrade required treatment, he refused to waste the movement’s funds on a cause that was merely sentimental. He had “neither personal interests nor desires above the necessities of the Cause.” Moving beyond the world of doubt and regret, he was “revolutionist first, human afterwards.”
Alexander Berkman in 1892.
Yet human, too. He communed with Emma—a year older than he and already gaining notoriety as “An Eloquent Woman”—making love in her apartment for the first time after a particularly inspiring rally. And there had been others: Anna, Masha, Nadya, Kolya. Luba, “with the swelling bosom, the delicate white throat,” had let him touch her breasts above, and then beneath, the bedsheets. Flitting about as opportunities demanded, their liberated ménage evolving constantly as friends and lovers passed through, they were inventing a new way to exist, a modern morality. They were enacting in their private lives the future society they hoped to create. Some days brought rapture and others carried pain, but every moment was exquisite.
All this he had voluntarily given up.
With insatiable rage, he followed the events in Homestead, Pennsylvania, where the Carnegie Corporation had locked out the steelworkers in order to destroy the union. The local despot, Henry Clay Frick, hired hundreds of Pinkerton plug-uglies and constructed miles of stockades topped with barbed wire to surround the plant; then he’d shut down the factories and girded for war. Labor offered concessions, but Frick would hear no negotiations. He was Caesar, Baal, personifying the furnace fires of his mills. “No!” wrote Berkman. “There can be no peace with such as Frick,” nor with the rest of the bourgeoisie. “Fricks, vampires, all of them … they are all one class. All in a cabal against my class, the toilers, the producers.”
An anarchist lived for the revolution, forging himself into a weapon of defiance, observing society with the patience of a hunter—judging the moment to strike. This was the anarchists’ strategy for constructing class consciousness. Propaganda of the word—the work of Mother Earth and other radical magazines—educated workers in the theory of revolution. Propaganda of the deed—the assassination of an enemy—displayed those ideas in practice. No one was naïve enough to think that a single action, even the destruction of a tyrant, could instigate an insurrection. But each lone feat served to advance the struggle.
While the socialists amassed votes for their candidates, the anarchists were compiling a tradition of personal sacrifice that would eventually build until it inspired a mass movement of its own. In 1886, a bomb exploded at a labor rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, killing several policemen. That had been the first step. The next year, when the state avenged itself by executing four well-known anarchists for the crime, that had been another. No uprising had ever arisen spontaneously; the French Revolution, the Paris C
ommune, each had been precipitated by untold and unremembered deeds. “In the midst of discontent, talk, theoretical discussions, an individual or collective act of revolt supervenes,” wrote Peter Kropotkin, a Russian aristocrat who had dedicated his life to the cause. “One such act may, in a few days, make more propaganda than thousands of pamphlets.”
The halfway anarchists of the cafés quailed at the thought of propaganda of the deed. “But, the killing of a tyrant,” Berkman argued, “is in no way to be considered as the taking of a life.” To assassinate such a one as Frick was to attain the highest honor an egoist could demand. The act itself might be “unpleasant,” but the test of a true radical was “to sacrifice all merely human feeling at the call of the People’s Cause.” With his mind fevered with wrathful thoughts, he noticed some fine ladies on horseback. They trotted past him, sharing a joke, their eyes hardly resting on his face. They were mocking him, no doubt, snickering at his ill-tailored clothes, his big lips. “Laugh! Laugh!” he thought. “You despise me. I am of the People, but you belong to the Fricks. Well, it may soon be our turn to laugh.” Bound for revenge, he boarded the train for Pennsylvania.