by Thai Jones
A crowd of men outside the city’s Municipal Lodging House.
At six P.M., the doors opened and the line stuttered forward. There was “push and jam for a minute,” but the policemen at the entrance—as well as an attendant with a blackjack—demanded order, and the shoving steadied into a blank progress of “hats and shoulders, a cold, shrunken, disgruntled mass pouring in between bleak walls.” Outside, fear increased as the line shortened. At any moment, the gatekeepers would shout, “Beat it!” or “All out!” The door would slam closed, and the unfortunates still on the street would spend the night folded up between the iron armrests of a park bench.
Those who made it inside faced interrogation. “They are told that they must go back to their relatives, or made to feel at once that they can stay but a very short time, or spoken to as if they were not making an effort to get employment.” Anyone who possessed twenty-five cents or more was told to leave: The city’s largesse was only for the utterly destitute. Once past the questioners, inmates were taken to the basement and forced to strip and shower. In another room, their pockets were rifled by the orderlies—the unwritten law of the lodging house was “findings is keepings”—and then their clothes were fumigated. Dinner was plain and meager, though a few coins could supplement the fare with a smuggled chop or some eggs.
Not so many years had passed since the city had sheltered its homeless in a boat moored to an East River dock. After that, the derelict were quartered in the city morgue. But those days were gone; the Municipal Lodging House on East Twenty-fifth Street had opened in 1909 at a cost of half a million dollars, and it was “one of the most elaborate of its kind ever erected” with public funds. Containing 750 beds, it was the Department of Charities’ most important resource. Visitors on guided tours agreed that it was an “exceptionally fine building,” as clean as a hospital. “The food being prepared looked wholesome.” The bedsteads were painted white; the sheets, pillowcases, and wool blankets were “freshly creased.” It was, a reporter decreed, “paradise for the wanderer.” It hadn’t taken long, however, for its shortcomings to reveal themselves. In the dormitories there was “rough talk,” beatings, bullying, thefts. The bunk beds, rowed from window to wall, were springboards for “tuberculosis, pediculosis, and other communicable diseases.” Though the building was just a few years old, it had been constructed without fire escapes.
At five A.M., the boarders were roused up and ushered out to litter the parks and streets. The next evening there would be more of them. The following week more still, too many to ignore. The number of homeless whom the city shelters could not accommodate had grown over the previous three years. In January 1912, the total had been 8,986. In 1913, it was 14,315. For 1914, the figure was predicted to double—to nearly 30,000. Though Mayor Mitchel acknowledged “an unusual condition of general unemployment,” which needed to be investigated, quantified, and eased through efficiencies, he saw no cause to entertain “various suggestions of an extreme nature.” Childishness, snorted Berkman: The profit system would always demand desperate, available laborers. “Modern civilization spells the paradox: The more you produce, the less you have; the more riches you create, the poorer you are.”
* * *
JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER, JR., had been feeling rather homeless himself lately. Workmen had only just vacated his new mansion on Fifty-fourth Street, and though the family had occupied it since September, several rooms remained undecorated. Up north, his lodge on the Tarrytown grounds was undergoing renovations too, and the racket of building emanated from construction sites at the stables and the front gate. Furniture was continually being crated and uncrated, shipped, lost, dropped, chipped, shattered. With all these distractions—the maid had “been rushed from morning till night!”—everyone was exhausted. For a full week after the new year, Junior and his wife, Abby, did not rise for breakfast once. “We slept,” he wrote his mother, “as we had not slept for weeks.”
But then the vacation was over and they reluctantly returned to Manhattan. The older children—Babbie, John, Laurence, and Nelson—resumed classes and music lessons. Rockefeller went back to his suite of offices on the top floor of the Standard Oil Building at 26 Broadway, where a pile of correspondence awaited his attention.
He had hated working here at first, and had merely come to tolerate it since. For years he had attempted to impersonate a business executive, but the effort had resulted in little more than a succession of nervous collapses. The more he understood the realities of industry, the less capable he was of participating in them. He was an idealist. He was sensitive. Swindled by a stock scam, witnessing his colleagues giving bribes to party bosses at the back door—these experiences led to a crisis of conscience. Even the office furnishings—massive rolltop desks, bare walls, mustard-colored carpets, overstuffed chairs in need of “the attention of an upholsterer”—were abhorrent to his delicate tastes.
After a decade or so, he came to the same conclusion as the muckrakers: Modern corporations were so large that they could not be held to high ethical standards. He sat on the boards of directors for about a dozen companies. Somewhere within these firms, people were offering political kickbacks, manipulating stock, exploiting workers. Whatever misdemeanors they committed, they did so in his name. If there was a scandal, publicity would inevitably focus on the Rockefellers, and it would be the Tarbell series all over again. The thought tormented him. Finally he decided he had “to live with his own conscience,” and so, in 1910, at the age of thirty-six, he had announced his retirement from business.
In the four years since, he had continued working in the office, but his focus had shifted to philanthropy and social reform. Serving on a grand jury to investigate the “social evil”—as prostitution was euphemistically called—he had discovered a side of the city never glimpsed during his cloistered Baptist upbringing. At the end of a rigorous inquiry, he presented his findings to the public. There was brief interest, and then nothing. The revelations were sensational, but Tammany, which was complicit in the corruption, had little will to pursue them. Junior did not give up. Realizing a sense of his own mission, he decided to use his family wealth for social causes; the Rockefeller fortune could bridge the gap between “seeing the need for and getting done.” He founded the Municipal Research Bureau, which launched studies on prostitution and policing practices. His Bureau of Social Hygiene opened a laboratory to examine the sexual habits of women inmates at the Bedford Hills reformatory.
This was vital labor, and by 1914 Rockefeller was a recognized patron of reform, “a much more important man to the country and to the world,” decreed Current Literature, “than he ever would have become as a financial magnate.” But accolades just masked the fact that the actual work was being done by others, while Junior’s time still went to accounting for expenses, signing receipts, and other drudgery. “No one else can do the big things as well as you can,” his wife consoled him, “no one has the faith, the courage and the persistent desire that you have.” But, she continued, “I have felt with deep regret, that others were doing the inspiring part of your work while you poor dear were looking after the details of the neglected work of some underling.” In her opinion, there was no need for her husband “to be quite so modest as he is.”
JUNIOR LOOKED TO the letters and memoranda that had crowded on his desk during his absence. It was the usual assortment of looming crises and petty annoyances: Christmas cards, entreaties, expense reports.
Several documents dealt with the incoming administration. Junior admired the new mayor. He had been one of the largest contributors to the campaign and had written a warm letter of congratulations after the victory in November. With the anti-Tammany Fusion candidates elected, he hoped that all the private work he’d done would finally prove useful to the public authorities. “As you know,” he wrote Mitchel in December, “the Bureau of Social Hygiene, with which I am connected, has been at work for several years, studying in as thorough and scientific manner as possible the whole question of th
e social evil … It is the desire of the Bureau to render to you any assistance in its power in dealing with this subject.”
Before Christmas, he had gone to City Hall to meet with Mitchel, waiting for nearly an hour in an anteroom before being admitted for a few minutes of conversation. This was all that the mayor-elect could spare. He was living a nightmare of importunities and requests: Everyone in New York who had any connection to politics had a friend or relative to recommend for a position. But Rockefeller did not have to discuss appointees, since so many of his own people had already committed to joining the new government. Katharine Bement Davis, manager of his Laboratory of Social Hygiene, was the new commissioner of correction. The director of his Bureau of Municipal Research, Henry Bruère, was now city chamberlain. Raymond B. Fosdick, currently studying law enforcement in Europe, was a leading candidate to head the New York Police Department. If anything, Rockefeller worried that too many of his own people would be lured away.
Some on his staff believed that with a Progressive mayor in office, the Rockefeller bureaus had become redundant. A few even suggested that the continued existence of these private organizations would tempt Mitchel to inaction. “They believe,” internal memoranda suggested, “that a known large fund in the Bureau’s hands will paralyze the initiative of the administration.” But others—including Junior—thought that since they had already sacrificed Davis and Bruère, their duty now was to support them as fully as possible. A reform regime backed by Rockefeller resources could do unprecedented work for social uplift. “Our effort should be not merely to get an honest and economic administration,” Junior’s advisers concluded, “but to raise the standard so high as to make the Mitchel Mayoralty a memorable object lesson of Good Government and thereby a substantial asset of the reformer in future Municipal campaigns.”
Also on his desk was correspondence addressed to stockholders of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company. This certainly concerned him, since he and his father together owned 40 percent of the shares. In addition, Junior sat on the board; it was the sole directorship he had kept after his retirement from business in 1910. He had decided to stay on because the Colorado mining concern was one of the worst acquisitions the family had ever made. In the decade or so since the Rockefellers got involved, it had never made a profit, or paid a single dividend on its common stock. Junior had remained out of loyalty: He “had to see it through” until it had been put on a sound footing. He eagerly looked forward to the time when Colorado Fuel & Iron would be securely solvent and he could finally relinquish his last ties to the world of business. But that was looking like an increasingly distant prospect.
The family’s representative on the scene was Lamont Montgomery Bowers, a veteran executive with impressive successes in his past. But Bowers was a truculent opponent of organized labor, and in September—when miners across the southern Colorado coal fields had gone on strike—he had chosen to take an inflexible line. His was a dominating personality, typical of an earlier generation of business autocrats. Believing that his company treated its employees as generously as could be asked, he was convinced that agitators from the United Mine Workers were fomenting discontent among his uneducated, immigrant workforce. Bowers’s “whole attitude was paternalistic in character,” Junior recalled. “He had the kindness-of-heart theory, i.e., that he was glad to treat the men well, not that they had any necessary claim to it, but because it was the proper attitude of a Christian gentleman.” He hired replacement workers and private detectives and steeled himself for combat. Bowers would stand against the strikers, and from New York Rockefeller would stand by him, even if at times he felt that his older subordinate sometimes treated him like another one of his misguided employees. “You are fighting a good fight,” Junior wrote in early December, “which is not only in the interest of your own company but of the … business interests of the entire country and of the laboring classes quite as much.”
The newspapers were reporting that Mother Jones was back in Trinidad, Colorado, the town nearest to the center of the coalfields struggle. A matronly rabble-rouser, Jones went where the trouble was, traveling from strike to strike, encouraging the workers to rise up against their employers. Bowers had complained to Junior about her back in September, and the governor of Colorado blamed the entire conflict on her “incendiary teachings.” This time her visit was brief. Militiamen seized her before she had even stepped off the train, held her for two hours in the local jail, and then deported her to Denver. As the locomotive stirred, she had called out to the miners, promising to return to Colorado “as soon as it becomes a part of the United States.”
On the day after Christmas, Rockefeller had sent another letter before leaving for Tarrytown. And there were two new replies waiting for him when he returned to his office. The reports were mixed. “There are several hundred sluggers camped within the strike zone, who have rifles and ammunition in large quantities,” Bowers wrote, “we are facing a guerrilla warfare that is likely to continue for months to come.” On the business side, however, news was better. “Everything is running along about as usual,” the second note said. Men were deserting from the strikers’ camps. Nonunion workers were proving satisfactory. The mines were producing as much coal as the market demanded.
With the Colorado matters tended to, there was finally the business of the antiques for his new house on West Fifty-fourth Street. During the previous month, his home had been transformed into a gallery, with dozens of antiques on loan from dealers’ collections. Vases and sculptures, beakers and benches—he had arranged and rearranged them. And, unfortunately, he had broken some, too: A teakwood stand had splintered, and a Persian vase had crashed from the mantel in the dining room. Now, after weeks in the presence of these treasures, he was ready to commit to the items that had truly moved him. He struck a bargain, agreeing to pay for the damages in exchange for getting 10 percent off the entire transaction. He commissioned the dealer’s secretary to go from room to room, properly bracing and riveting the various stands and cabinets in order to prevent further destruction.
Junior had initially felt a little selfish collecting art objects, worried that he was buying for himself “instead of giving to public need.” But over time he had embraced the pleasure that material beauty inspired in him. After all, “he wasn’t taking bread from anybody’s mouth,” and the pieces would end up in museums anyway, so surely he was justified in spending some small part of his fortune on things that gave him joy. Wandering the rooms of his new mansion, carefully avoiding any more accidents, he savored the sense of occupying a space that he himself had designed to his own sensibilities. The money to build it may have come from his position in life, but nobody could accuse him of inheriting his taste. It was one of the few things he could truly call his own.
Abby Aldrich Rockefeller.
* * *
AN INFINITESIMAL MOVEMENT disrupted the predawn stillness. On the roof of the Whitehall Building, 454 feet above Battery Place at Manhattan’s southern terminus, the Weather Bureau’s thermograph machine took its reading. A trembling brass tube, filled with liquid, jarred a train of levers attached to a pen that bore down lightly, leaving a mark on a slowly rotating drum of graph paper: At seven A.M. on January 12, the temperature was 27 degrees.
Smoke puffed and clotted round the chimneys above a hundred thousand other rooftops. In the barren avenues, the streetlights had just switched off. A suggestion of sunrise showed from the east. Policemen relieved the peg posts, marking the shift change with a single tap of a baton to the sidewalk; in the silence, the thwack of wood on pavement could be heard for blocks. At 7:23 A.M., almanac dawn, the morning gun fired from the military installation on Governor’s Island; tugs and schooners in the harbor replied with whistles and jeers of their own. The elevated trains crowded up, rattling windows; subways droned below. From the South Ferry and Bowling Green stations, thousands of men, joined by high-heeled office girls displaying “their cold little legs in cheap bright stockings of imitation silk,�
� rushed toward the office towers. Hundreds made for the Whitehall Building and their desks at the White Star Line, the U.S. Realty and Improving Company, or O’Rourke Engineering.
Above their heads, the Weather Bureau accumulated data. The thermograph’s paper drum continued to spin; the line of ink grew jagged and started to descend. Beside it, the anemometer’s four gyrating cups creaked and then began to fly. An Arctic gale bore down, a wall of wind amplified and eddying among the tall buildings and narrow streets. The currents “seized old ladies and tangoed with them at crossings.” Women near City Hall had their legs knocked from under them; some were carried fifty feet or more until they were dashed into walls and autos. Falling signs and construction debris fractured skulls. A man was blown off an elevated station platform into the tracks; another was chucked into the East River. A schooner ran aground. Policemen abandoned their fixed posts, fleeing to the safety of the precinct houses. Smoke whipped from the chimneys and vanished in the onrushing currents. At three P.M., with the anemometer spinning nearly out of its socket, the forecaster’s register marked the wind’s velocity at seventy-four miles an hour.4
By sundown, Battery Park had emptied. Benches in the plazas and promenades sat vacant. “The Bowery was deserted,” a reporter for the Call described, “and the saloons, restaurants and similar places were filled to capacity with the shivering, emaciated mass of humanity, whose sole thought was to keep out of the cold.” Hundreds more went to missions, University Settlement, or the Salvation Army. And in numbers greater than on any other night in its history, they wandered toward the Municipal Lodging House. By eight P.M., the facility’s beds were filled. Latecomers received coffee in a tin cup and some hunks of bread. Some were taken to sleep in the city morgue. Others were led to the Charities Department docks, on East Twenty-sixth Street, where three ferry boats were moored. Once aboard they made do “on the benches, in reclining chairs, inside and outside the cabins.” They lay close together on the unheated ships, more than a thousand of them, newspapers and overcoats substituting for blankets.