More Powerful Than Dynamite

by Thai Jones

  Long after everyone else was settled, John Adams Kingsbury, the newly appointed commissioner of charities, remained active, stalking between the ferries, issuing directives, planning improvements. Until three A.M. he stayed among his charges, and by then he had seen too much to keep still. At thirty-seven years old, he was young even for Mitchel’s youthful administration. A leading theorist of philanthropy, he had not yet learned the policy of silence. “I consider that the present provision for this overflow is absolutely inhumane, inadequate, and indecent,” he stormed to reporters the next day. “The men are packed like sardines on the floors of the waiting rooms and docks and suffer severely from the cold.”

  The new administration was stocked with nonconformists, but Kingsbury could be downright unconventional. “He is of medium height,” a reporter wrote, “well built, and wears a mustache and short beard, which cannot hide the kindliness of his face.” A former socialist, he had spent part of his childhood in an orphanage and took from that experience a deep sympathy for his work. Mitchel had no doubt that he was the “ideal selection” to head the Charities Department. “His good faith,” a colleague recalled, “was transparent.” If he lacked political experience, he profused good intentions. “Nobody could meet him without realizing he was an idealist, that he was disinterested, that he was an enthusiast in trying to accomplish what he thought to be good things.”

  John Adams Kingsbury.

  It wasn’t just the men sleeping in boats that riled Kingsbury. He had occupied his office for less than two weeks and already felt plagued with emergencies. Abuses tainted every division of his department. The Children’s Hospital was so polluted that patients arriving with a single illness promptly contracted several others.5 Students at the nursing school were dismissed for holding late-night ginger-ale parties. Insubordinate matrons grumbled at their superiors. The elderly ladies at the Home for the Aged and Infirm had no soft pillows. In the almshouse, inmates complained of fish “served usually in a dried-up condition and without gravy.” Embezzlement and peculation—or “honest graft,” as the Tammany men said—were as viral as the other ailments. In a single month, ten thousand pounds of bread, three thousand pounds of beef, and one thousand pounds of mutton had to be marked down simply as “not accounted for.” In the morgue, keepers sodomized the corpses.

  Kingsbury was responsible for the largest social welfare system in the United States. New York City housed and fed one hundred thousand children, which was one third of all the publicly supported minors in the nation. The municipality paid more for its orphans than most states paid for their university systems. During his first days in government, Kingsbury toured all the many institutions of his magistracy. Not content to follow guides on sanitized inspections, he could appear at any odd hour. He wandered “in the dead of night through the hospitals where these poor people lie suffering, frequently on the floors and packed so close as to make it most impossible to step between their prostrate forms.” He inspected “the foul smelling wards where little children—sick children—sleep, two in one little crib.” He watched “the feeble-minded asleep in beds crowded so close these helpless creatures must crawl over the foot to enter.” He tiptoed over the roaches in an asylum on Staten Island. Then, back at home after these Bedlamite visions, he dedicated the remaining “wee small hours” to researching the history of his bureau, tracking the development of the city’s welfare facilities, sketching designs to help the helpless creatures for whom he was now responsible.

  THE GALE HAD exhausted itself by the morning of January 13, but temperatures were falling toward zero. For the first time in three years, the Great South Bay froze over; ice encased the shore of Long Island from the Rockaways to Shinnecock. Telephone wires grew brittle and snapped. Broken glass crunched on the sidewalks; boarded-up windows became “so common a sight as to escape comment.” The Municipal Lodging House was overwhelmed and police considered converting their precinct buildings into temporary shelters. Kingsbury and Mitchel debated a plan to transform Madison Square Garden into a massive dormitory: “The suffering among the poor was the greatest in years and all agencies of relief were taxed to their limit.” Six people died as a direct result of the cold; scores more were hospitalized with frostbite. Dozens of fires disturbed the evening as families in unheated tenements burned anything available to generate some warmth. At midnight, temperatures dipped to four below zero, the coldest mark of the century.6

  Ten more died the next day. Already undernourished and unhealthy, they no longer possessed the stamina to resist the cold. The city veered toward catastrophe and the Mitchel administration faced its first emergency. Tammany leaders had been able to improvise solutions. When storms came, thousands were crammed into saloons or meeting halls. Unemployment and homelessness were ward problems, resolved through handouts, favors, personal connections—or simply ignored. But the reform government couldn’t backslide into these old folkways. Progressive methods were required, and Commissioner Kingsbury had to provide them. He began with the worst abuses. Touring the moored ferries, seeing “the prostrate forms of homeless men strewn over the deck of the boats … huddled like hogs on the hard floor, and smelling worse than any hog-pen could,” had shocked even his toughened sensibilities. By the night of the fourteenth, he had enclosed an open-air pier and imported hundreds of additional cots. More than that he could not accomplish alone.

  On January 16, the mayor attended the theater. Afterward, he was driven to East Twenty-fifth Street, where Kingsbury was waiting to lead him and Katharine Davis, the new commissioner of correction, on a tour of the Municipal Lodging House. For Mitchel, these occasions usually ended with a headache. They passed through all six floors, beginning around midnight, when the dormitories were filled with sleeping men. “Others, awake, sat up and looked hard at the Mayor as he made his way among the long rows of cots. The Mayor smiled at those who spoke to him, but addressed none of them.” In a dinner jacket, silk hat, and overcoat, he was profoundly uncomfortable and out of place. Ms. Davis, who had superintended the women at Bedford Hills prison for years, was more at her ease. As the elevator opened at the basement, Kingsbury stepped out first. The others started to follow, when suddenly he turned and rustled them back inside. They had accidentally arrived at the shower room, and it was in use. Luckily, the mayor’s—and Ms. Davis’s—dignity had been preserved.

  Distasteful as it had been—and if not for Kingsbury’s sharp reflexes, it could have been much more unfortunate—the experience prompted Mitchel toward intervention. “Times are hard,” he proclaimed, “and the city should meet the situation.” More soup was to be distributed. A new municipal employment agency would link jobless men with vacant positions. Statistics would be compiled. “Above everything else I believe that it is important that we should not become panicky,” he said. “We must be optimistic and go right ahead buying what we need and giving employment so that these conditions will improve as quickly as possible.”

  UNFORTUNATELY FOR THE administration, goodwill alone could not address these problems. A condition of “industrial leanness” affected the entire country. Everyone remembered the panic of 1893, when prosperity had “collapsed like a house of cards,” and the winter of 1908, which had seen “thousands and thousands of people out of employment.” It appeared that 1914 would be as hard or worse. Kingsbury’s own Association for Improving the Conditions of the Poor, “an old and conservative organization,” estimated 325,000 jobless men in New York City alone. Nationwide, the total approached three million; more than one third of all employees were out of work or laboring part-time. Distressing reports arrived from every state:

  Kalamazoo, Mich.—A thousand men idle; works closing down.

  Pottsville, Pa.—Ten thousand men of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Co. in the Panther Creek Valley have been laid off.

  Washington, D.C.—With the completion of the Panama Canal, about 30,000 workers, a large number of them residents of the continental United States, will be out of employment.
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br />   Joplin, Mo.—Two thousand men in the Joplin zinc district are reported out of work.

  Schenectady, N.Y.—Three thousand employees of the General Electric company have been laid off till spring.

  Pendleton, Ore.—Farmers are furnishing meat for the hundreds out of employment in various small cities near here. Twelve hundred rabbits were contributed in one day.

  Los Angeles, Calif.—Mrs. Mary E. Erickson, a widow, out of work and threatened with starvation, threw a brick through a plate glass window so she might be arrested and given food.

  But to some, the weather made for a charming diversion. At Pocantico Hills, Junior and his wife had awakened “to find five inches of snow on the ground and every twig of every tree and bush beautifully covered with pure white snow … the picture from every window was simply like a fairyland.” In New York City, during the most frigid moments of the gale, some wealthy residents had “laughed at the weather and all its works” by strapping into their ice skates and tangoing across the marbled surface of Van Cortlandt Lake in the Bronx. As they danced, others were freezing. Of the dozen or so fatalities that week, one in particular embodied the iniquity of suffering. On January 13, a socialite rode to a Carnegie Hall concert. While she was inside, her chauffeur sat behind the wheel in the open cab of her limousine. Two hours into the performance, a policeman suspected he had fallen asleep and tried to nudge him awake; the chauffeur slumped forward in his seat, dead from exposure.

  For revolutionaries, such incidents presented an opportune crisis. Nothing radicalized the working classes like a business panic. “At Rutgers Square, at Tompkins Square Park, in Mulberry Bend, almost anywhere in the tenement districts,” recalled a young radical, “a few minutes of speech-making would draw a thousand people together.” Pointing out that Congress’s new billion-dollar budget had failed to allocate a single penny to “aid the out-of-works,” the Socialist Party offered a platform of jobs bureaus and government relief through public projects. Anarchists scoffed at such reformism, urging direct action. “The problem of unemployment cannot be solved within the capitalist regime,” Alexander Berkman noted. “If the unemployed would realize this, they would refuse to starve; they would help themselves to the things they need. But as long as they meekly wait for the governmental miracle, they will be doomed to hunger and misery.”

  Wealthy residents taking the opportunity to ice tango on the lake at Van Cortlandt Park.

  The suffering had forced people to attend to questions that they otherwise might have ignored. For the first time in years, even influential professionals were discussing unemployment, lecturing on the subject, offering advice. When Mayor Mitchel appealed to the public for suggestions, the responses flooded first his office, and then the Department of Charities, so that Kingsbury—who was already holding daily staff meetings on the question—had to request that future letters be forwarded to the commissioner of licenses.

  As yet everyone was dictating to the unemployed; no party or group had emerged to speak on their behalf. One potential candidate, the American Federation of Labor, the most powerful association of working people in the country, exhibited scant interest in the task. The organization favored skilled workingmen; it had no place for factory drones, let alone the homeless or jobless. It claimed two million adherents in all regions and industries. But they were sundered into hundreds of competitive subdivisions. In 1913, the A.F. of L. consisted of 110 national and international unions, 22,000 locals, five departments, 42 state branches, 623 city central unions, and 642 local trade and federal labor unions. Organized by trades, the separate units could be insular and competitive. A major industry, such as railroads, could easily be partitioned into a dozen distinct craft associations and brotherhoods, each with its own ambitions and interests. Brakemen, engineers, and conductors thought of themselves as brakemen, engineers, and conductors, not as a unified group of workers with a single set of needs.7

  Since the federation was not interested, that left only one group with the potential to transform the disorganized and destitute into a militant and coherent force—an organization for which unity was a watchword, that insisted upon local leadership and total inclusiveness. For a decade, the Industrial Workers of the World—or Wobblies—had pushed “straight revolutionary workingclass solidarity.”

  The Wobblies’ membership totaled about 1 percent of the A.F. of L.’s, but they offered “One Big Union” of all the workers, were more welcoming to women and minorities, and had long organized conference committees for the unemployed. While the craft unions focused on workplace issues “pure and simple,” the I.W.W. saw these gains as the first step toward industrial democracy. “The final aim … is revolution,” one leader explained. “But for the present let’s see if we can get a bed to sleep in, water enough to take a bath and decent food to eat.” This vision transformed the tiny, impoverished, anarchic I.W.W. into a looming menace. Capitalism could survive if the Pocketknife Blade Grinders’ and Finishers’ National Union won a pay increase, but the fulfillment of the Wobbly dream would mean revolution. “Organized a little we control a little,” they liked to say, “organized more we control more; organized as a class we control everything.”

  The Industrial Workers of the World had been founded in the western timber and mine lands, but most of its victories were urban. It had waged free-speech fights in Denver and San Diego, had organized a triumphant strike versus the textile masters of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and its long battle against the silk lords of Paterson, New Jersey, right across the Hudson River, had just ended. But the Wobblies had not fared well in Gotham itself, and national leaders were grumbling. Big Bill Haywood, the union’s most notorious spokesman, was eager for anything that would make “the town rise out of a stupor.” And other organizers asked, “Why has not the I.W.W. a stronghold in the greatest industrial center of this country, New York City?”

  The metropolis contained several chapters, including Local Number One, but the meeting halls on Grand and West streets were somnolent. “Are they alive?” the leaders wondered. “No—the most of them fell asleep.” The problem, reported the official newspaper, Solidarity, was solidarity. Meetings were disrupted by discussions “of a purely theoretical nature,” and the entire area had become “afflicted with internal discussion.” Sections were “worried into a state of inanition” by debates between political actionists and antipolitical actionists, centralizers and decentralizers. Eager recruits who had joined to accomplish “effective, constructive work” discovered an atmosphere of constant “peevish, petulant criticism” and soon dropped out.

  Still, many chose to be optimistic. If only you could “fight capitalism as well as you fight one another,” a member wrote to his comrades, then the I.W.W. would have already achieved its goals. It was time to “drop all hobbies and get into the harness” for “one big united effort!” A drive to organize restaurant and hotel workers was producing results. And the unemployment situation offered new chances for agitation. “Let us fight against capitalism,” wrote a national leader, “as we never fought before; and make the year 1914 glorious in the history of the SOCIAL REVOLUTION!”

  The local ennui had not affected Frank Tannenbaum’s faith in the One Big Union. On the contrary, he “took interest in nothing but the I.W.W … read nothing but of the I.W.W … considered all speech futile which did not ostentatiously expound the unexcelled virtues of the I.W.W.” Nineteen years old, he had worked as an omnibus, washing dishes, in a luncheon club in Wall Street until late in 1913, when he—like so many others—had lost his job.8 Unable to pay for his room at the Sherman Hotel, in the Bowery, he had taken to sleeping in parks and lodging houses. Increasingly, he found himself in “close contact with the unemployed in New York City.” He watched “men pick bread out of garbage barrels and wash it under a street pump so that it might be fit to eat.” At night he sat with them, “closely huddled together, with their collars drawn up, their hands in their pockets, and heads tucked in to keep as warm as the conditions permitted
.” He joined them in their search for a job, standing in line for advertised positions, and never coming close to reaching the window. “Looking for work and not finding it,” a former stonemason told a reporter, “is the hardest work I know.” These were the same people the papers decried as shiftless loafers, profiting from the city’s generosity. “It’s a lie,” Frank muttered as he read such stories. “A d——d lie.”

  He had been born in Austrian Galicia in 1894. Ten years later, his family steamed to the United States. Borrowing money from relatives, the Tannenbaums purchased an abandoned farm near the town of Liberty in the southern Catskills. But rural life was “not all honey and flowers, bluebirds and green grass.” The apparent freedom of outdoor work tangled with orthodoxy and constraint, “poverty, ignorance, loneliness, and narrowed and blighted lives.” Frank felt himself stultifying, and while still a youth he fled the feudal relations of peasant life for greener pastures in the Bronx.