More Powerful Than Dynamite

by Thai Jones

  Frank Tannenbaum.

  Tannenbaum had suffocated on the farm, but in the city he remained “restless, dissatisfied.” He had come to try and educate himself; his ambition was to earn a high school degree. But conditions did not allow it. He had to find employment to support himself. Working as an elevator operator, he read Plato between ascents and descents. All he knew was that he had to keep learning; he felt “a sort of inarticulate hunger, a longing for books.” He took close notes on all he read, and then, at night, he and his friends would walk across the Brooklyn Bridge carrying on passionate arguments about their conclusions. He found his greatest fulfillment in politics. His “best friends and his bitterest enemies” were the comrades in I.W.W.’s Local Number 179. It was “a socializing vortex” of passions and disputes, committee meetings, “picnics, parties, benefits and funerals.” When he wasn’t down in the hall on West Street, he was uptown with the anarchists at the Ferrer Center, their community school and meetinghouse. He came to know Berkman and Goldman, impressing them with “his wide-awakeness and his unassuming ways,” and aided in the chores of publishing Mother Earth.

  He was quiet and conscientious. Neither he nor anyone else could ever remember him being impolite. With tousled black hair under a floppy woolen cap, a tight smile, and no trace of a beard, there was little to distinguish him from the city’s other youths. And his ordinariness was agony. His aspirations mocked him. “What are you doing? What have you done? What are you planning?” These questions he constantly asked himself. Interacting with the elders of his movement, he was self-effacing and deferential, but he persecuted his peers with propaganda. Those who disagreed with him “were stupid, ignorant, useless people.” He “scorned the Socialists, the American F. of L.,” and “despised their methods.”

  According to a friend, Frank possessed “three predominant faults, namely 1. a noticeable desire to become popular 2. self conceit 3. too much of the ego.” But he didn’t see these as flaws: Focus and determination were necessary for success. “Personally ambitious, desirous for place, acknowledgment, and honor,” he found, through the I.W.W., “a constant battleground for the attainment, as well as expression, of these ends and motives.” He helped to organize restaurant workers, contributed fifty cents to the legal defense fund, and volunteered as secretary for the Industrial Union League. But so far he had done nothing memorable; he had not distinguished himself. In the evenings, he strategized with friends, drafting elaborate plots to further the cause of industrial democracy—and, incidentally, to force the name Frank Tannenbaum into the public mind.

  * * *

  THE NEXT STORM rolled up along the tracks. Following the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe lines from New Mexico, it dropped ten inches of snow in St. Louis on the morning of February 13. Three thousand men dug out the Union Station yards, but the switches were frozen and traffic stopped moving east. The weather surged forward, tracing the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks and the New York Central System, through Cincinnati, eight and a half inches; Wilkes-Barre, twelve inches; Scranton, twenty inches. Depending on one’s location, it was the worst storm of the year, of the past three, the most snow seen since the “Big White Christmas” of 1912, the biggest in five years, the most destructive since the Great Blizzard of ’88.

  The first flakes that fell on Grand Central Terminal, in the early evening, were “small and dry and were blown about.” At midnight, the storm grew serious. By one A.M., “snow was coming down in blinding swirls.” Plows, sand, and channel cars couldn’t keep the transportation network running. Streetcars and elevated trains were blocked, autos stalled as “engines tore their hearts out trying to buck their way through drifts, and tires wore to ribbons with mileage that could hardly be measured.” Dead machines clogged the streets. In the railroad stations, people escaping the weather mixed with those waiting for friends and relatives to arrive. The Twentieth Century Limited, the Chicago Express, and everything on the Lackawanna lines were hours late. Some companies doubled up their engines, but trapped locomotives blocked tracks throughout Pennsylvania and across the Mohawk Valley. The Erie Railroad was “badly demoralized.” The Albany Local was “annulled.” Ten inches of loose and powdery “dry sleet” fell in the city, making walking “difficult and treacherous.” And then the tempest passed on—along the New York, New Haven, and Hartford tracks—toward Maine.

  ON THE MORNING of February 14, during the storm’s hardest anger, unemployed men, boys, and one woman, “with collars turned up and hands thrust deep in their pockets as the drifts formed about their feet,” queued out front of No. 27 Lafayette Street. Inside, the staff completed its final preparations to convert a giant storeroom into the city’s first municipal employment bureau. The mayor was certain that this new institution could lessen the muckery and muddle that lay behind the labor crisis. There were 725 licensed job-placement agencies in the metropolis, but their efforts did not coordinate. Together they had only managed to fill 58.5 percent of all available positions. More than ten thousand jobs remained empty as a result of the scattered system. “The figures show conclusively,” Mitchel argued, “the need for a clearing house, so that in some place in the city a man or woman looking for a job can find out whether a job he or she can fill is available anywhere in the city.” At eight A.M., the doors opened, and the line of potential workers slogged inside. The examiners took down their pedigrees and the names of their most recent employers. The results revealed a hearty crowd of chauffeurs, clerks, carpenters, and bakers. “There wasn’t a single man among them,” a reporter thought, “who didn’t look as if he had something to offer in return for employment.” And, as it happened, New York had suddenly acquired the need for such a crew.

  Ten inches of snow lay atop three hundred miles of avenues and boulevards in the greater city. The sanitation department had twenty-three hundred full-time street cleaners, sweepers, and drivers. In a big storm, that number could be doubled with auxiliary helpers hired through private contractors, but even this force could remove only an inch of snow per day. Barring a thaw, that meant it would take more than a week to clear the streets. In the meantime, the fire hydrants were blocked and streetcar service was in disarray. Extra hands were urgently needed, and the administration knew just where to locate them. On its first day of operation, the municipal employment bureau assigned 570 men to shovel snow, at a salary of thirty-five cents an hour. A temporary solution to the jobs crisis, certainly, but nevertheless the combination of labor and laborers had the aspect of providence.

  February 14, 1914.

  The slush froze hard. By the afternoon, men were hacking at ice, stretching to lift their loads onto small, high carts and losing half a batch with each shovelful. After two days, with progress finally apparent, another flurry added a new layer of a “fluffy sort” of flake, and everything backed up again. Fifteen inches—three million cubic yards—of snow covered the streets. Twenty thousand men were now at work, and even Mayor Mitchel plied a shovel.

  Up in Tarrytown, Rockefeller Senior’s golf course lay beneath two feet of snow. He had to keep himself—and a hundred employees—busy by digging out the paths around his house.

  After a week, even the city’s main thoroughfares remained deranged, the ice skaters had discovered new diversions, and reserves of good humor had emptied. “As a comedy of inefficiency and waste and feebleness, nothing could equal the scenes of overcoming this blockade of New York’s streets,” griped the World. “It is Lilliputians wrestling with a native of Brogdingnag. It is an army of moles working at a mountain.”

  Thirty-five cents an hour was no fortune, considering the severity of the work. And that old foe, graft, incised deeply into even this meager sum. Each person sent from the employment bureau was directed to a private contractor who took twenty-five cents off the top plus a dime to hire the shovel. After an eight-hour day, and another nickel for the foreman, a man might have a dollar left. But he didn’t get a dollar, he got a ticket, which he could use only at a particular saloon. There he was ch
arged 20 percent to cash the thing and was forced to buy a drink. “Well, you are faint, frozen, trembling with weakness and fatigue,” a snow digger explained:

  You are only human. You may take two drinks, three drinks, four—and your body has paid the toll of toil and you are dazed with bad whiskey that saps what little strength and resolution you have left. The next day, sick, aching, empty, you haven’t a penny, you haven’t any strength, any heart or any hope—you are only sick, aching and starving; your feet are bruised and wet and cold, your dirty clothes cut and chafe you, the grime and sweat is caked on you—you are a dead man who limps and aches and whimpers!

  It only took a few days before protests began to disturb the business of the municipal employment bureau. Sick of shoveling, the men “became obstreperous,” and the director called in police reserves to drive them out. Two hundred marched from the exchange to City Hall, denouncing a system that identified a quarter million men out of work, offered a few of them pennies to perform back-destroying labor, and considered the problem solved.

  THE LAST OF the snow was gone, washed into the sewers by a blessed rain, when on the morning of February 27 hundreds of delegates crammed City Hall for the first national conference on “The Jobless Man and the Manless Job.” Representatives from charity groups in Chicago, Milwaukee, London, and dozens of other municipalities were on hand to share their experiences. John Adams Kingsbury sat on the dais, and Mayor Mitchel offered the opening statements, extolling the success of his new employment office, suggesting mild remedies, cautioning against drastic measures. That evening, the conference held a second session at Cooper Union. The tone became less reserved. There were half a million vagrants and beggars in the United States, a delegate claimed, and each year they caused $25 million in damages to property. “We must do something,” cried another. “We cannot let things go on as they have been doing.” During the general discussion, an audience member asked William Howard Taft what advice he’d give an able man looking for work; the former president shook his head and replied, “God knows.”

  Outside the hall, a massing, angry crowd gathered to listen to more constructive suggestions. The principal speaker, a nineteen-year-old boy in a worn-out cap, had a plan. “New York City is full of churches,” he explained. “We will march to one of them and go to bed. If they don’t like it, they can lock us up and then we can sleep in jail. We will march to the Court Houses and they can lock us up. We must get some food, too. In this city there is plenty of bread and provisions. We have a right to as much as we can eat.” And with a thousand men behind him, he led his army of unemployed toward the Old Baptist Tabernacle on Second Avenue. The next morning, New York City would finally read his name, or at least a version of it: “Frank Lenebaum.”

  The Social Evil

  There was a time when Americans had spoken of prostitution as the “Social Evil.” Just so, capitalized and with the definite article—the Social Evil—as if all the ills of modern life were reducible to a single Satan. By 1914, such generalities seemed antiquated: Wickedness had specialized. The Social Evil was disaggregated into its constitutive elements: the prostitution evil, the industrial evil, the political evil, the tenement evil, the smoke evil, the divorce evil, the automobile evil, the gang evil, the moving-pictures evil, the cigarette evil, the pushcart evil, the tango evil, “the whiskey evil, the slavery evil, the gambling evil, the living for pleasure evil, and the capital and labor war evil.”

  Traditionally, curbing vice had been church business. But the calamitous conditions of the cities now sprawled beyond the pulpit’s reach. All the best elements rallied, forming a “wave of moral house cleaning,” an “organized militia of philanthropy” as various and diversified as sin itself. Chicago, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Jacksonville, Little Rock: Between 1910 and 1914, each of them sponsored vice investigations of their own. Colorado had a Denver Morals Commission. In Pittsburgh, there was a Moral Efficiency Commission. In Syracuse, the Moral Survey Committee. The trend was ubiquitous. “Everything is being reformed these days,” an editor marveled. “Not to reform is out of date.”

  For someone seeking to “catalogue the eighty-seven or eight thousand and seven societies that have been organized to do New York good,” a columnist for the World suggested, the place to start was the Charities Directory. The 1896 edition ran to 517 pages; by 1911, the volume was nearly twice as thick, its leaves crowded with handy entries for the New York Cremation Society, the Clean Streets League, the Country Home for Convalescent Babies, the International Pure Milk League, the Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, the Committee on the Congestion of Population, the Union of Religious and Humanitarian Societies for Concerted Moral Effort, the Society for the Prevention of Useless Noises.

  Whereas previous generations had practiced social reform, the catchword for the twentieth century was “social hygiene.” While the former was messy and moralistic, the new discipline was systematized and professional. “Social hygiene is at once more radical and more scientific than the old conception of social reform,” Havelock Ellis, one of its leading practitioners, explained. “It attempts not merely a haphazard amelioration of the conditions of life, but a scientific improvement in the quality of life itself.”

  A geography of uplift overlay the city. Trained agents of sanitary prophylaxis and capable experts in concerted moral effort toiled together within the skyscrapers of the United Charities Building and the Russell Sage Foundation, both on East Twenty-second Street, as well as the Hebrew Charities Building around the corner and the Central Civic Hall a few blocks away. The Presbyterian Building on Fifth Avenue housed the Anti-Cigarette League, the Anti-Saloon League, “and half a dozen other anti-leagues” as well. Down in the Village, Theodore Dreiser watched a breadline grow “from a few applicants to many,” until it had become “an institution, like a cathedral or a monument.” One hundred and nineteen settlement houses operated among the immigrant neighborhoods. Concerned wardens patrolled the corridors of the Home for Friendless Girls, the Home for Intemperate Men, and the Reformatory of Misdemeanants. Young humanitarians led classes at the Institute for Atypical Persons, the School for Stammering, the School to Discipline Wayward Boys, the West Side Day Nursery Industrial School and Kindergarten.

  A collage in a contemporary guidebook illustrates the baffling proliferation of charitable institutions.

  In such a congested field, it was necessary to advertise. Yearly reports and solemn tracts no longer sufficed. “The charity that never is in the newspapers stands a good chance of being forgotten,” an executive noted. “A wise board of directors always keeps things on hand to announce in the papers.” Full-page proclamations routinely touted organizational accomplishments, while the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor stumbled on the best gimmick of all: Its list of “New York’s 100 Neediest Cases,” published around the holidays, brought in thousands of dollars each year.

  These business methods sapped philanthropy’s credibility as a spiritual, altruistic enterprise. Critics began to discuss the “charities trust,” a monopoly of the best-endowed organizations, which—like Standard Oil—would destroy competitors, dictate terms, and wield untrammeled power. An old couplet rose to the lips of more than one disgruntled sufferer:

  The organized charity, scrimped and iced

  In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ.

  The proliferation of unions and associations was baffling. Most contemporaries would have known that the Help-Myself Society promoted temperance, that the Short Ballot Organization favored an easy-to-understand voting system, that the International Sunshine Society offered aid to blind children, and the Simple Spellers advocated typographical reform. But then the various cliques began to blend together. The Union for Practical Progress, the Purity Alliance, the American Vigilance Association: All these did valuable work, no doubt, but of which variety? And what—besides discretion—distinguished the Secret Law and Order League from the Law and Order Union, or the New York Sabbath C
ommittee from the New York Sabbath Alliance? In churches, the pastors were so “distracted” by the various groups jostling for time during Sunday services that they began insisting on “a union of all these societies, which more or less overlap.”

  The Suppression of Vice was the aim of the Committee for the Suppression of Vice, and it was a laudable aim—in moderation. But others would brook no closure of saloons on Sundays, and any “lot of high toned men” who sought to “make rules and laws for the great masses” would find the German-American Reform Union standing in their way. The Committee of Seventy had to be replaced by the Committee of Fifty, which, proving unwieldy, was pared down to a Committee of Fifteen and then a Committee of Three. Denouncing all these bodies as tools for the four hundred was the Committee of One Hundred, which claimed to speak for the multitudes.

  Down that road lay madness, at least in the considered opinion of experts. When a Times survey asked leading psychologists, “Is ‘Reform’ Sensationalism Responsible for the Apparent Increase of Insanity?” the answer was: Yes, oh yes. “There have been Bryanism and free silver, municipal ownership, Socialism, and other insane doctrines,” a neurologist complained, “and many persons of weak minds have been so confused by the clashing of opinions that they have become insane.”

  Before long, many citizens decided: Enough. Too much. Murmured protests against the “pestering and hectoring of the people by flap-mouthed reformers” grew louder and more caustic. “The noble company of the half-baked,” complained a Tribune editor, “have established themselves as our most active experts on all matters of political and business policy.” Walter Lippmann declaimed against “the panacea habit of mind,” whereby engineers wanted to reconstruct society, sanitation experts would scour it clean, and lawyers planned to argue it into submission. “No one who undertook to be the Balzac of reform,” Lippmann would write, “could afford to miss the way in which the reformer in each profession tends to make his specialty an analogy for the whole of life.”