More Powerful Than Dynamite

by Thai Jones

  One hundred and ninety men and one woman had been arrested, the largest roundup in the city’s history. McKay was in amongst it the entire night: From the church he toured the precinct houses, and then made the late-night trip to the Yorkville court, in midtown, to watch Tannenbaum’s arraignment. It was exhilarating to see his plan coming to a satisfying end. McKay wanted these troublemakers locked away. “Absolutely nothing but a felony goes,” he told a subordinate, “charge every one of them with a felony. We have plenty of room.” Reporters crowded round him, asking when he had started plotting his coup, whether the mayor had ordered him to act. McKay jokingly denied any premeditation. It wasn’t like that at all, he replied, eyes twinkling: “I just happened to be in the neighborhood.”

  * * *

  ALEXANDER BERKMAN WAS in no mood for anniversaries. And such is life, he marked them everywhere. The March issue of Mother Earth celebrated the eighth year since the journal’s beginning. It was eight years, also, since Johann Most, a onetime mentor in anarchism, had died. And Berkman did not need the Revolutionary Almanac to recall that this was the month that had seen the opening salvos of the Revolution of 1848 in Prussia, or the founding of the Paris Commune a generation later. To spiritually linger in the past was an unpardonable weakness. One should draw lessons from history but live in the present: He despised colleagues who prated forever about their former deeds. But as the commemorations came he could not help recalling the passion of his former self. It was his today, his unbearable today, that made his yesterdays of such concern. If only Berkman could find meaningful work to do—new deeds, new triumphs—then he could release himself at last from this nightmare weight of past generations.

  Such despair as he felt was inexcusable. Mere human sentiment was unworthy of the real revolutionist. Detachment in all things was paramount, but he could never quite manage it himself. Not when it came to women. And not when the cause was at stake. Detachment in most things. He was two men. An anarchist philosopher who overflowed with affection for the world, and an anarchist propagandist whose sworn duty it was to inspire rage and goad others to violence. “The propagandist,” he wrote, “must, in a considerable degree, be a fanatic and even hate where the human in him yearns to love. This is perhaps the severest struggle in the inner life of such a one, and his deepest tragedy.”

  He had such a desperate need for a worthy crusade—one that could justify his self-imposed misery—that he almost tried to wish it into existence. “In the whole history of this country,” he wrote in the latest Mother Earth, “there has never perhaps been witnessed a popular movement of deeper meaning and more far-reaching potential effect than the raiding of churches by the unemployed of New York.” The out-of-work army had shown the highest qualities of anarchism. It was spontaneous, nonviolent, dignified, and viciously subtle in its revelations of hypocrisy. A few ragged men at a handful of churches had exposed the reformers and reverends, the socialists and police, for what they truly were. And most of all, it perhaps signaled the beginning of the mass movement he so longed for. “The roots of this crusade go deeper,” Berkman wrote, hopefully. “It challenges the justice of the established; it denies the right to starve; it attacks the supremacy of the law; it strikes at the very foundation of THINGS AS THEY ARE.”

  The aftermath of Tannenbaum’s arrest, in contrast, was almost too sordid and predictable. The capitalist press, of course, was all relief and approbation. “Stern and repressive measures,” cheered the Herald, “yesterday broke the backbone of the mob of church raiders who had been led through the city for nearly a week by Frank Tannenbaum.” The Socialist newspapers sniveled in their obnoxious way, offering nothing but condescension and hostility to the prisoners. Thus encouraged, the police forbade all further open-air meetings, arresting more speakers in Rutgers Square on the night following the mass arrests. The only one to behave like a man through it all was young Tannenbaum, who refused his friends’ offer to pay his fine, preferring to remain in jail with the rest instead of taking freedom for himself alone.

  The city’s newspapers reveled in Tannenbaum’s arrest.

  The remainder of the story was just as foreseeable to Berkman, who had witnessed this all unfold before. The claim by officials to have received scrawled death threats, followed by the suspicious discovery of hidden dynamite. The ludicrous spectacle of police incompetence, the stupor of the courts. Revelations of brutality and barbarous conditions—“scenes that would shock the moral sensibilities of man”—inside the city prisons. The betrayal and cowardice of supposed allies in struggle.

  No matter. Tannenbaum had revealed a weakness to exploit. And Berkman took it upon himself to do so. He organized a rally at Union Square to show that the spirit of revolution in New York could not be tamped out by a few arrests. On Saturday, March 21, when he arrived, thousands had already gathered. Emma Goldman, back in the city after one of her frequent lecture tours, was first to speak.

  “Your toil made the wealth of the nation,” she began. “It belongs to you.” The audience crowded in around her, blocking the northern reaches of the plaza. A bright thin sun did little to warm the freezing air. It was the first day of spring. “The rich are keeping it from you. The officials do nothing to help you.” The thin trees of the park stood lonely amidst the remaining hummocks of snow. It was twenty-five years now since Berkman had first looked out from this vantage. He had spent chilled nights with no other place to shelter. He had fled from charging phalanxes of police. He had paraded here in triumph with his fellow workers. “March down to the mayor. March down to the police. March down to the other city officials.” He had heard Emma make this speech a hundred times. “March upon Fifth Avenue and take that which belongs to you!”

  With that, he began to gather the crowds into a loose mass. When they were organized, he strode to the very front. With a pretty young girl on either arm, he led the column up Broadway. He had no permit to parade, but the few detectives assigned to watch the rally followed passively, unable to stop him. Some of the protesters walked in the streets, others claimed the sidewalks, jostling the afternoon shopping crowds in the Ladies’ Mile. Discordant shouting. Snatches of song. At Thirtieth Street, they fell still and silent as a man unfurled a black silk banner. Red letters spelled out one word: DEMOLIZIONE. The column closed in, linking arms. Then, in a shrill, high key, a lone woman began to sing “The Marseillaise.” After a few notes, other female voices joined, and then the men began. In a moment, the revolutionary anthem was on every lip, echoing in half a dozen languages. The sun vanished ominously behind a wall of clouds. And the parade was moving again.

  Anarchists on the march.

  Fifth Avenue—“Millionaire Avenue”—and here came Berkman with his army. The Waldorf-Astoria, the Metropolitan Club, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Henry Clay Frick’s nearly completed mansion: At each landmark, the demonstrators jeered, chanting, “Down with the parasites! Down with the parasites!” Anarchists took command of every major intersection, halting trolleys, blocking traffic. One rioter, a young woman, rapped on automobile windows, forced open the doors, and spat at the passengers. It was a rout. A revolution. There were no uniformed police on hand at all, just the few detectives, who found themselves helpless to intercede. “Berkman and his followers,” a reporter wrote, “were laws unto themselves.”

  When the parade finally ended with a celebratory dinner at the Franciso Ferrer Center on 107th Street, Berkman felt once more the young man’s thrill in combat, “the spirit of revolt that has fired the hearts of the downtrodden in every popular uprising.” He judged the city’s mood and believed he had thousands with him. From his enemies, he saw only cowardice and panic. “What! The starvelings to be permitted to parade their naked misery, to threaten the moneychangers in their very temple?” he pantomimed disdainfully. “The black flag of hunger and destruction to wave so menacingly in the wealthiest and most exclusive section of the metropolis, the fearful cry of Revolution to thunder before the very doors of the mighty! That is too much!”


  JUST ONCE, John Purroy Mitchel wished the citizenry might remain sensible instead of indulging in hysteria at the slightest indication of unrest. But so far during his short time in office, his constituents had shown no inclination to do so. The mayor had been motoring uptown on Fifth Avenue at the time of the anarchist “revolution.” He had seen a clump of people on the march, and the sight had been so innocuous that he had driven on without giving it the slightest attention. When newsmen interrogated him outside of his office, he treated the affair as a joke.

  “Some of the speakers urged that they should call on you here at the City Hall and demand their share of the world’s riches,” a reporter asked. “What would you do in a case like that?”

  “I would suggest that instead of calling they file their application for the riches.”

  “I suppose you know that Emma Goldman denounced you in true anarchistic style at the meeting.”

  “That is habitual and chronic,” said Mitchel, “and she would denounce anybody who happened to be in office.”

  But many of his supporters took the threat more seriously. “It will not be easy for the police to explain their toleration of the disorderly demonstration,” complained the World. “The procession was worse than disorderly. It was lawless.” Once again, just as with the church invasions, he was being pressed to respond with drastic measures. “This is an attack—an attack on the social system,” declared the Times. “Its aim is nothing less than revolution.” The detectives on the scene could not restrain their frustration. “It is evident that the men downtown do not recognize the seriousness of this movement,” said Detective Gegan, who had arrested Tannenbaum. “We who follow them from day to day see that they are gaining strength, and unless they are checked serious consequences may result.” Panicky rumors were abroad. The word that anarchists had occupied Fifth Avenue had been wired to ships at sea, and some papers were reporting that Mitchel had called on the National Guard to restore order. Finally, the mayor snapped at all the hectoring. “That is all damned nonsense,” he said. “The more attention there is paid to such insane stories the more the agitators are helped.”

  Nonetheless, certain interests had to be placated. On the Monday after the Fifth Avenue debacle, Mitchel again met with Commissioner McKay. And again they emerged from their conference with strong statements. Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman were well-known to them; the citizenry could rest easy, knowing that all prominent anarchists in the city were under constant surveillance. “They may have their public meetings,” the mayor decreed, “and their speeches may have the widest latitude, but any general disorder or disturbance of the peace will not be permitted.”

  * * *

  ON THE MORNING of March 24, guards scraped open the iron gate of cell number 813 of the Tombs prison, and Frank Tannenbaum was marched to a lavatory, where he freshened up for trial. Around ten A.M., when the heavy wooden doors of the General Sessions Court opened for him, the benches had already filled. There weren’t as many friends as he had hoped for, but he showed nothing but composure, nodding to the few comrades he did recognize and taking his seat at the bench.

  The attorneys spent hours wrangling over prospective jurors, most of whom freely admitted their biases against him. But they hardly needed to say so. Their smug, well-fed appearances told the same, as did their occupations: real estate, architecture, management, foreman, speculator. These men were not of his class. They would not sympathize with what he had done. He had never wanted to submit to this trial, but his friends had insisted he go through with it and he had finally agreed. Not that he had hope of an acquittal; maybe the publicity would make good propaganda.

  On the afternoon of the first day, and all through the second, the state presented its case. The police detectives perjured themselves shamelessly, claiming Frank had entered St. Alphonsus’ Church despite their protests, when in fact they had invited him inside—and that he had refused to leave, when, to the contrary, they had barred his exit. The prosecutor called his men “a mob,” and the judge overruled his attorney’s objections. The defense called as witnesses the newspaper reporters and photographers who had witnessed the arrests. All of them corroborated his story. The unemployed were not violent, no property had been damaged, the police had manufactured the entire episode. By the time the jurors withdrew on the evening of the trial’s third day, the truth of the case had been so clearly established that his friends assured him justice would prevail.

  Forty-five minutes later, the twelve representatives of bourgeois order returned to pronounce their verdict: guilty, of course. The judge lectured him about American democracy and gaveled him the maximum sentence, a year in the workhouse on Blackwell’s Island.

  Frank Tannenbaum smiled.

  “I would like to make a statement, I think,” he said.

  “You are,” said the judge, “at liberty to make any statement you desire.”

  Frank told about the men he had met in the Tombs, and how they were as decent as any magistrate or district attorney. He described the rapture he had felt watching his hungry men eat, and how if that feeling wasn’t religion, then nothing was. He insisted that he had been polite from first to last. He recalled the first time he had gone into a courtroom and hadn’t been able to tell a clerk from a judge, and how now—after nearly a month’s experience with the legal system—he knew all he needed to know: that the working class could expect no mercy from the law. When the first man had been convicted in the first court, he said, justice had flown out the window and never returned.

  “I suppose,” said Frank Tannenbaum, “that the press tomorrow will say I wanted to make myself out a hero or a martyr. I don’t know who it was who said, some well-known preacher, that society would forgive a man for murder, theft, rape, or almost any crime, except that of preaching a new gospel. That is my crime.”

  II

  Life in a democracy, where there is progress, where new things are being established, is more or less of a battle and in a battle almost anything is likely to happen.

  —MAYOR JOHN PURROY MITCHEL

  The Possibility of a Revolution

  In the mornings, Mabel Dodge woke amid the mussed white linens of her gray Parisian canopy bed, surrounded by embroidered Chinese shawls and draped silks from Biarritz. Every wall and surface of her boudoir was bleached, snowy, silver, or the color of cream. Rebelling against the grime outside, she could never seem to get enough white into her apartment. The coffee appeared, and she was reaching for the telephone even before she drained the cup, making plans, calling for the automobile, inviting everyone everywhere.

  She had lived at 23 Fifth Avenue for little more than a year, and already she knew the most interesting artists and writers. After dismissing her second husband, she had helped to publicize the Armory Show, contributed essays to Art and Decoration, and introduced American readers to the poetry of her dear friend Gertrude Stein. “I kept meeting more and more people,” she wrote, “because in the first place I wanted to know everybody, and in the second place everybody wanted to know me.” Wealthy and independent, she dressed in billowy Grecian robes that were utterly unstylish and yet perfectly becoming. Men, especially, attended to her. Young or middle-aged, married or bachelor, her presence brought out the best and worst in them all. “Their passions become exacerbated,” said Max Eastman, editor of the Masses, a radical magazine of arts and politics. “They have quarrels, difficulties, entanglements, abrupt and violent detachments. And they like it—they come back for more.”

  Insurrections were everywhere, in painting and poetry, in perceptions and relationships—somehow they each formed part of the same struggle—and she and her comrades in Greenwich Village were waging them all at once, together. “The world could not understand us—not our innermost selves,” Dodge recalled. “We could be superior and laugh at the world together in an ecstasy of companionship.” The ferment and excitement was leading to an entirely new order of their own creation. To Gertrude Stein, she wrote, “I am following
any events which seem to bear on the possibility of a Revolution.”

  Mabel Dodge.

  This city of dreams had its landmarks, too. Café Boulevard, on the Lower East Side, had been the site of innumerable raucous parties and late-night celebrations until its closure in January 1914. At Polly’s restaurant on MacDougal Street, near Washington Square, the cook delighted his customers by referring to them as “bourgeois pigs”; upstairs, the Liberal Club hosted debates and lectures and was particularly popular among writers for the Masses magazine.

  For anarchists, however, city life revolved around the Francisco Ferrer Center. Located in a three-story brownstone on East 107th Street, the institution combined “class-room, committee-room, check-room, lecture-hall and library, all in one.” The basement held a lunchroom and kitchen. The main floor auditorium featured speeches and lessons nearly every day of the year, and was usually “packed to the doors.” Clarence Darrow, Lincoln Steffens, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn all spoke there; Berkman and Goldman were frequent guests and Man Ray occasionally attended the art classes upstairs. On the walls hung portraits of Charles Darwin, William Morris, Leo Tolstoy, and Walt Whitman. Near the lectern, a giant bronze sculpture represented “A Proletariat.” But pride of place went to a full-length painting of Francisco Ferrer, an anarchist and educator who had been executed by the government of Spain in 1909.

  The center fostered adult education at night, but during the daytime it was home to the Modern School, an educational experiment that drew observers from around the world. A dozen or so children from the neighborhood attended classes conducted in a thoroughly anarchist style. Students arrived when they pleased and studied whatever interested them: writing, singing, piano, drawing, carpentry. Instead of imposing discipline, the instructors used only “patient reasoning” to curb disruptive behavior; at the end of the day the pupils often refused to leave. Field trips to the park or the city’s museums formed a central part of the curriculum. And no outings were so highly anticipated as the frequent visits to the nearby offices of Mother Earth. “We were sure to get a warm booming welcome from Alexander Berkman,” one of the students recalled. “He always had time for a bit of boisterous fun. He was very proud of his physical prowess and loved to indulge in all kinds of contests with the younger men. Often we found ourselves caught up and tossed about in those impromptu acrobatics and we loved it. Then Emma would come out and somehow it grew colder. She never said anything, but we knew that she did not care for children and we soon went away.”