by Thai Jones
Mabel Dodge had scant interest in children, and she considered the Ferrer Center a hub “of social disaffection”—a little too coarse for her and her friends. The mixture of poverty and naïveté did not live up to the standards of Bohemia. Of her acquaintances, few were as dismissive of the anarchists as the devilish Walter Lippmann, a twenty-four-year-old Harvard graduate who carried himself, she wrote, “as one who expects to be president in about 3 yrs from now.” He was pudgy, awkward, and contemptuous of everything. Having studied under William James and Lincoln Steffens—as well as serving as aide to the socialist mayor of Schenectady, New York—Lippmann still found himself dissatisfied with the confused philosophy of his elders. To sort the contradictions of modern society required a clarity of mind that no public figure possessed. And so he did it himself. Lippmann set about obliterating all prudishness and romanticism from his thought, leaving only “the cleanest strokes of an edged intellect.” His initial book, A Preface to Politics, published the previous year, had brought praise—and anxious attention—from his elders. His goal for it had been modest enough: to fundamentally discredit the life’s work of the entire previous generation of social theorists.
To accomplish this, he applied the ideas of Sigmund Freud to the study of American conditions. Reformers such as Steffens, or the Reverend Charles Parkhurst, who had founded the Society for the Prevention of Crime, had believed that sin resulted from a logical equation. Poverty, squalid surroundings, and immoral teachings led to vice; by eliminating these factors, a harmonious civilization was attainable. Lippmann revealed this to be a delusion. Once subconscious urges were considered, the notion of rationalizing behavior became indefensible. For proof, one only had to look at New York City. “Men who in their youth took part in ‘crusades’ against the Tenderloin,” he wrote, referring to the section of midtown Manhattan, roughly from Twenty-third to Forty-second streets, that was home to the city’s most notorious brothels and cabarets, “now admit in a crestfallen way that they succeeded merely in sprinkling the Tenderloin throughout the city.” For Steffens, exposure to these new ideas was a jolting revelation. “I remember thinking how absurd had been my muckraker’s descriptions of bad men and good men,” he later recalled, “and the assumption that showing people facts and conditions would persuade them to alter them or their own conduct.”
Most conversations with Lippmann ended that way—with the interlocutor feeling browbeaten and depressed—but Mabel Dodge still savored their frequent lunches together at the Holland House. He made fun of her intellectual clutter. “Your categories aren’t any good,” he’d tell her. “They remind me of a Fourth Avenue antique shop.” In him she saw “a fine poise, a cool understanding,” with “all the high humor in the world shining in his intelligent eyes.” But unlike most of his acquaintances, she could prod at his self-importance and laugh when he said things like: “Human nature is a rather shocking affair if you come to it with ordinary romantic optimism.”
Inspired by Lippmann and others, Dodge began devoting herself to political pursuits. John Reed, her lover for a time, had convinced her to volunteer with the striking silk workers in Paterson. She had attended each day of Frank Tannenbaum’s trial, and spoke publicly in his defense. “I think that the unemployed are justified in doing anything to call public attention to their condition,” she told a reporter for the World. “Anything that doesn’t injure people … Of course, I don’t believe in dynamite and that kind of thing.”
Walter Lippmann.
Nevertheless, she had still been terribly nervous the first time she visited the brownstone shared by Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman on 119th Street. Nothing was more precious to her than human life, and the anarchists, she knew, agitated for violence. Not only did they discuss it, they had even committed it themselves. While she and her downtown circle dithered over abstractions, these people had been doing things. “They were the kind that counted,” she felt. “Their judgment was somehow true. One did not want their scorn.” As she climbed the stone steps to their door, thinking about the detectives who were probably watching from the shadows, Dodge was most concerned about making a good impression.
Once inside, “the warm, jolly atmosphere” of the dining room quickly alleviated her anxieties. A vast supper overspread the table, and Emma Goldman bustled about, foisting hunks of beefsteak and fried potatoes on her guests. “She didn’t look wild or frightening,” thought Dodge, relieved. “She looked to me, from the very first, rather like a severe but warm-hearted school teacher.” Berkman made a different impression. Friends assured her that he was harmless, but somehow she never saw it herself. He was heavy jawed, “bald in front, with veiled eyes and thick lips.” There was a menace in him that she found repellant.
Since men were always hanging round her anyway, Dodge took to inviting them to her apartment, making sure to mismatch them just so, in order to ensure exciting discussions. She would slouch in her armchair, suggesting lines of conversation, and the guests would pursue these discussions, hoping to impress her. “Poor and rich, labor skates, scabs, strikers and unemployed, painters, musicians, reporters, editors, swells”—all were welcome to participate in her evenings. “It was,” declared Steffens, “the only successful salon I have ever known.”
At the end of March, excitement surged around a debate between Big Bill Haywood and the anarchists. He would explain the philosophy of the Industrial Workers of the World, while Goldman and Berkman would counter by justifying their own ideologies. But it did not go well. The speakers groped about, Haywood mumbled confusedly, and Goldman fell back on her persona as schoolteacher. Berkman sulked. Lippmann asked questions that no one could answer. Everyone was uncomfortable in the white-on-white rooms, and the audience soon lost interest. At last, a spectator called out from the back of the chamber, “They talk like goddam bourgeois!”
The disappointment added to the reserve Dodge still sensed from the radicals: “I felt they had Plans. I knew they had. I knew they continually plotted and planned and discussed times and places.” Berkman was always intimating about “the day when blood would flow in the streets of New York.” He seemed to think that this moment would be a “blissful and perfect consummation, to be lived for, to be worked for, and sacrificed for.” He would die to bring it sooner. “There was blood in the air that year—there truly was,” she recalled. “One was constantly reminded of it.”
Lippmann was slipping away from an activist persona in order to adopt the guise of a full-time commentator. The journalist’s knack of condemning everything came intuitively to him, and he had already espoused firm prejudices against just about all the factions vying seriously to affect the American scene.
Rockefeller and the plutocrats, he believed, were largely to blame for the ferocity that wracked the labor movement. “As rulers of American industry,” Lippmann had declared after the 1910 bombing of Harrison Gray Otis’s virulently antiunion Los Angeles Times, “Otis and his kind have exhibited the same sort of incompetence as the rulers of Russia.” As for President Wilson, those who decried him as a socialist—or worse—had little understanding of his true beliefs. “Wilson doesn’t really fight the oppressions of property,” Lippmann noted. “He fights the evil done by large property-holders to small ones.” The anarchists, on the other hand, were too undisciplined to accomplish much; in Lippman’s mind, they were “wild in their dreams and unimportant in their deeds.” As far as he was concerned, all the anarchists’ bluster, and even their occasional forays into violence, amounted to a case of overcompensation. “It is the weak unions, the unorganized and shifting workers,” he wrote, “who talk sabotage and flare up into a hundred little popgun rebellions. Guerrilla warfare is the only tactic open to weakness.”
But Lippmann was not opposed to plans as such. Though reviewers were still grappling with the arguments of his previous book, he had already moved on. Freudianism, socialism, syndicalism—these ideas were all passé. There could be no solution to societal questions until all parties were ready
to consider the situation rationally. “You cannot plan a civilization on a heated powder mine,” he argued. “You cannot rearrange industrial processes, lay out cities, solve the problems of food and work, devise uses for leisure, breed finer strains of men, on a battlefield.”
His new project was to be a manifesto called Drift and Mastery. In it he planned, at last, to explain without prejudice or sentimentality the entire complex of problems that comprised modern life. It would offer the prescription for a future founded on a humane science that was self-aware and not self-deceiving. “This is what mastery means,” he revealed, “the substitution of conscious intention for unconscious striving.” But Mabel Dodge defined his undertaking differently. Writing of Lippmann to Gertrude Stein, she explained, “His second book is called ‘Drift & Mastery’ & is about everything & everyone contrasted with himself! The world he represents as Drift, himself as Mastery.”
THOUGH THEY KEPT trying, Dodge and Berkman just could not communicate. When she purchased a copy of his Prison Memoirs and asked him for a signed dedication, he wrote:
TO MABEL DODGE, FOR A DEEPER SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND A MORE PERFECT CRYSTALLIZATION OF A DEFINITE GOAL TO MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE TO LIVE IN FOR MEN AND WOMEN.
Which was nice enough. But, as with everything about him, it irked her. In particular, there was something in the word crystallization that she objected to. “I cannot imagine myself ever crystallizing into an anarchist,” she responded, brutally. “Any crystallization seems to me only an opportunity for further disintegration … no sooner has an idea become crystallized into an institution, a habit, or even a party, than it is ready for some spiritual dynamiting.” The same rules applied to affairs of the heart. “I do not believe or disbelieve in marriage,” she continued, “but I do believe in love, which may exist either within the institution or outside of it, provided it is free.”
Stung and a bit confused, Berkman was all contrition. “Words indeed are poverty-stricken things,” he wrote. “I despair of clarifying myself to you on paper.” Instead, he suggested they might communicate through “presence” and “personal contact.” But his attempts in the flesh were even worse. Soon after their exchange of letters, Dodge and Berkman found themselves alone with each other in a taxi. She had written insouciantly about free, unfettered love, but during the ride she was appalled to realized he was flirting. Then he leaned over to assay a kiss, and when she saw “his eyes half closed, his red mouth expressing nothing but an impersonal hunger” as it lunged for her lips, she was filled with fear and indignation. She recoiled, aghast. In the panic of the moment, she blurted out the most conventional phrase imaginable: “I am not that kind of a girl.”
Later, she tried to analyze this reaction. It wasn’t just that he was a would-be murderer, or that he was so much older, and so unstylish, or his ludicrous accent. It was the disrespect implied by his assault. Despite all her experiments with independence, Dodge still felt the burden of being an unprotected woman. No one realized how brave she was to do the things she did. And she could not tell them, since then they would have understood how scared she was in the first place. “I did not want them to know that ever,” she decided. “They had to be content with my mystery.”
4.
“Three Cheers for the Cops!”
At one thirty in the afternoon on the fourth of April, crowds enjoying the Saturday half-holiday in Union Square were startled at a sudden incursion by a massive contingent of police. Four hundred officers hurriedly deployed, asserting control over the area. Some patrolled the outer boundaries. Others swept up and down along the pathways of the park, warning idlers to “move on.” Fifty uniformed men filed into hiding within a pavilion at the north end of the plaza; scores more concealed themselves inside a construction shed, and another hundred or so plainclothesmen mingled among the spectators.
Commissioner McKay arrived in his green automobile and established a command post on Seventeenth Street, between Broadway and Fourth Avenue. During the previous two weeks he had endured ceaseless criticism for having failed to prevent the anarchists’ last parade through the wealthiest neighborhood in Manhattan. This morning, he had received word that they were planning to repeat the performance, and he was absolutely determined to forestall them. To do so, he called on all the department’s resources. Besides the men on the scene, he had two hundred more officers dispersed among the basements of every fashionable club and hotel from the Ladies’ Mile to Harlem. One thousand more reserves stood ready in the precincts to act as reinforcements. A general order issued to all these forces that morning was terse and direct: “Break ’em up!”
There were two rallies planned for the afternoon. The Central Federated Union, a conglomeration of A.F. of L. locals, had received official approval from the city to hold their meeting. The anarchists, as usual, had not deigned to beg for “the kind permission of the master class and its armed hirelings.” Berkman suspected that the police were intentionally pitting the groups against each other, using the moderate trade unionists to discredit the radical unemployed. Newspapers, he knew, would gleefully exaggerate any conflict between rival labor factions. So he had two choices. He could march and face accusations of fomenting dissension within the working class, or he could postpone his parade.
It was after two P.M., and no one outside Berkman’s inner circle yet knew what he had decided. Six or seven thousand demonstrators were milling around at the northern edge of Union Square, where the trade-union meeting was just being called to order. Spectators hovered on the periphery or watched from windows, hoping to see some excitement. Three motion-picture cameras swept the scene. McKay and his inspectors surveyed the crowd, while reporters and photographers scrambled to cover any potential outbreak. Lincoln Steffens stood on tiptoe trying to get an adequate view. Everyone kept sharp for the anarchists.
And then with shout and shove, they were there. The group surged forward in a tight, organized mass, “seeming to spring from the ground,” wrote a reporter, “so rapid was their approach.” The militants pushed through the crowd, distributing propaganda as they forced a path toward the speaker’s platform. The mob tightened in, cheering crazily. At the front, Berkman scaled a stacked tower of lumber that served as an improvised stage. As the highest spot in the area, the platform also happened to be the police operations center, so as he turned to address the demonstrators he was just a few feet from McKay and his inspectors. Everyone craned closer to hear.
He started with his usual imprecations against labor fakirs and the “capitalist class.” Then came the substance of his address. “We will postpone our meeting,” he said, “because we want the people of New York and of the country to see our solidarity with labor, whether organized or unorganized.” As Berkman clambered down to the sidewalk, the police inspectors momentarily relaxed.
At the very moment their attention lapsed, they lost control of the situation. A different group of radicals—either unaware that their rally had been put off, or unwilling to abide by the decision—chose this instant to raise signs reading HUNGER, UNEMPLOYED UNION LOCAL NO. 1, and TANNENBAUM MUST BE FREED. Seeing the placards, policemen at the boundaries of the demonstration thought a parade was forming and recalled their orders to “Break ’em up.” Forming wedges, they sliced into the throng. Commanders signaled frantically, but whether to stop the assault or urge it on, it was impossible to know. “The crowd jeered and yelled and the banners continued to wave for a moment or two,” a reporter wrote. “Then the flags were jerked from the hands of the color bearers, and a minute later those color bearers … were on their way to the East Twenty-second Street Police Station.”
Riotous demonstrators trailed the officers and their prisoners to the upper edge of the park, shouting threats and turning back only when a line of mounted policemen cantered over to block their path. Facing south, the leaders improvised a new plan. “Come on, men,” shouted an unemployed anarchist named Joe O’Carroll, “We’ll march to Rutgers Square.” With him in the lead was Becky E
delsohn, “a comely young woman” of “electric vitality” in her mid-twenties, who was a former lover of Berkman’s and was becoming a leading campaigner for militancy. During the previous parade up Fifth Avenue, she had been the one who shocked even some of her own cohort by prying open the door to a limousine to spit at the faces of the women inside.
Arm in arm they showed the way, and within a minute, hundreds had fallen into line behind them. The column soon stretched the entire length of the park. Demonstrators shouted “Kill the capitalists!” and “Revenge Tannenbaum!” Detectives scurried to head off the leaders, while the mounted patrol trotted menacingly on the parade’s flank and the hidden officers streamed out from their concealed positions. For a few moments, the two sides marked each other. Then, at Fourteenth Street, the detectives ordered the protesters to disband. The crowd responded with taunts and hisses. And, at last, detectives Gegan and Gildea—the officers who had been pining for this moment since early March—ordered the attack.
The horsemen formed a column, drew their batons, and spurred directly toward the middle of the parade. “Invective and imprecations hurled at the policemen changed to yells of alarm and terror” as the surging cavalry struck the mass of demonstrators. Protesters fled, if they could, or were ridden down. Horses wheeled and charged, wheeled and charged, knocking dozens to the sidewalks, raising a clamor that could be heard for blocks around. At the front of the march, plainclothesmen and uniformed policemen pushed their way toward the heart of the mob. “The officers fought coldly, contemptuously, systematically, shoulder to shoulder and elbow to elbow,” a reporter wrote. “The I.W.W. and anarchists battled wildly and lost all judgment in a furious rage.” Each side unleashed its resentment and hatred on the other. “The yells of defiance, the curses, the screams of pain from men and women, the clacking of galloping horses, the curt orders from police commanders made a chorus which overwhelmed the ordinary song of the streets.”