More Powerful Than Dynamite

by Thai Jones

  On April 8, when Arthur Caron walked out of the courtroom at 300 Mulberry Street, his derby was battered through in three places. But he was a free man.

  COMMISSIONER MCKAY HAD helplessly watched the burnish fade from his coup. The same public that had chided him for inaction now complained of his exuberance. The Tribune demanded an official inquiry into the violence at Union Square. “Disapproval of the methods and purposes of the Industrial Workers of the World,” wrote an editor at Outlook, “so far from affording an excuse for brutal police conduct, should make the police authorities the more scrupulous in seeing that the rights of such people are maintained.” The Times alone continued to support the commissioner and his men. “It is nonsense to say that the police made too free use of their heavy clubs,” the paper insisted. After all, “none of the malcontents was disabled.”

  Mitchel had spent the weekend in Atlantic City, but he sent an emissary to witness the trial where Caron was vindicated, lending “weight to rumors that I.W.W. sympathizers had gained the Mayor’s attention.” On his return he attempted to restore composure to the metropolis, claiming for the second time in a month that there was “no such thing as an ‘I.W.W. situation’” and reiterating his commitment to principled government. “I want the police to take all necessary steps to prevent breaches of the peace and law,” he said. “On the other hand … there must be no unnecessary clubbing.”

  These speeches were eagerly accepted as a sign of coming peace. But it was Mitchel’s second act that really indicated his attitude. He fired the police commissioner.

  The mayor had always intended to replace McKay, who was hired by the preceding administration and had never matched the profile of a Mitchel appointee. He made no claims to social-scientific expertise, had not published any studies, nor conducted sensational experiments. If he had shown a knack for leadership, perhaps he could have remained longer, but the only flair he had revealed was for mismanagement. On April 1, he received a letter from the mayor that acknowledged his “efficient and faithful” service—and that also accepted his resignation. The debate over his replacement, which had begun even before Mitchel’s Fusion government had taken office, now intensified into a public canvass of suitable candidates for what was widely considered to be “the hardest job in the entire city government.”

  Some of the most prominent administrators in the nation saw their names mentioned in connection to the post. G.W. Goethals, engineer of the Panama Canal, William J. Flynn, head of the U.S. Secret Service, and General Leonard Wood, the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, were all courted in turn. And each eagerly declined to serve. “The surest way to be out of a job within a year,” people said, “was to become Police Commissioner of New York.” Fifteen men had already come and gone in the sixteen years since the position was created—“Commissioner had succeeded Commissioner at the same reckless pace”—and if not all had been downright crooked, neither had they especially distinguished themselves. “Few have had time to learn more than routine,” an editor wrote, and “none has stayed long enough to impress upon the department a continuous and consistent policy.” Of all the men to lead the police force, only one had not been ruined by it—Theodore Roosevelt—and he had served from 1895 to 1897, before the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York.

  Ask most New Yorkers to define police, and the response, according to the Outlook, would go like this:

  police (noun)—a blackhander to whom the use of bombs is forbidden, but otherwise fully authorized by the state. (v. t)—to beat, club, shoot, bulldoze, threaten, or graft. (F. < L. politia, state; < Gr. politeia, city.)

  Of the city’s many failures of governance, none had caused more chagrin than its “corrupt and disorganized Police Department.” The cops were considered to be “the dirtiest, crookedest, ugliest lot … outside of Turkey or Japan.” Outrages from the force had been so common during the previous twenty years that by the 1910s they elicited little more than a shrug. “Once more New York City has set the Nation by nose and ears with a scandal of police corruption,” sighed a longtime critic of the department, with absolutely no surprise.

  In a typical year, New Yorkers committed six times as many murders as the residents of London, and could almost match the combined homicide totals for all of England and Wales. Prisoners waited months to be tried, and conviction rates were appallingly low. The civil service procedure was faulty, and politicians played favorites anyhow; promotion was haphazard and often found the wrong man. No one thought to maintain adequate files; “our criminal statistics are so crude and incomplete,” complained the Bureau of Social Hygiene, “that deductions are difficult to make and when made are little better than rough estimates.” Every sort of depravity was sanctioned by grafting cops, and “collusion between exploiters of vice and officials in the Police Department” was common knowledge.

  Every decade or so an investigation would reveal the dirty details of these operations—the Lexow Committee in 1894 and 1895, the Mazet Committee in 1899—but they had no discernible effect. The public had more or less given up on reform; it would have been satisfied if law-enforcement officers would just conduct their crooked business out of sight. Lincoln Steffens described New York–style Good Government as “clean streets, and well lighted; an orderly police department, with well-ordered blackmail and corruption (of which people don’t hear), and general comfort and cleanliness.” But even that was too much to ask.

  There were irregular, spectacular occasions of depravity, and these could still raise a newspaper reader’s eyebrows. But far more detrimental to morale and efficiency was the quotidian influence of habit, suspicion, silence, and self-interest that was universally known as the System. “The police ‘system’ in New York, as the man-on-the-street understands it,” explained a muckraking reporter, “consists of a cohesive group of men who sell the privilege of breaking the laws, surrounded by a larger group which, while honest, is stultified by the tainted spirit of the powerful and corrupt few.” Take care to sustain the System, and it would take care of you. Every few years a commissioner might pass through with some improvements in mind, but the policemen knew enough not to worry. The reformer would be gone and the System would remain.

  “I believe it is essential that the police commissioner should have a long term of office,” a progressive activist had told a conference in 1913. “Today he is a bird of passage. And usually he flies so fast that the men on the force have hardly time to determine his species. The policy of the force, when a new commissioner is given them, is to try to size him up—what kind of man he is—and then to humor him as the occasion calls for.” The speaker’s name was Arthur Woods, and on April 8, the same morning that the I.W.W. agitators were being acquitted in the Magistrate’s Court, Mayor Mitchel swore him in as the tenth police commissioner in the history of Greater New York.

  Waving off his chauffeured car, Woods walked up from City Hall to police headquarters at 240 Centre Street, arriving a few minutes before noon. As cameramen snapped photos for the next day’s papers, he chatted with the outgoing chief. Best wishes were exchanged; the “room filled rapidly and every one was as happy as if the occasion were a picnic.” At precisely twelve o’clock, Woods sat at his desk for the first time and signed general order No. 15, finalizing his “assumption of the government and control of the Police Department” and placing its nearly eleven thousand men under his authority. “Is there anything I can do for you?” McKay asked, preparing to leave.

  Arthur Woods.

  “I wish you’d pray for me,” Woods replied.

  “I HAVE DONE a good many things,” Arthur Woods once said of himself. “I have been a newspaper man, and I have been a schoolmaster, and I have been a business man. It is pretty hard to generalize from all those three.”

  He was the great-grandson of the founder of Andover Theological Seminary, the grandson of a president of Bowdoin College; his father had earned a fortune in textiles. After graduating Harvard in 1892, he spent a year at the University of
Berlin, and then returned to teach English literature at Groton, where Franklin Delano Roosevelt numbered among his students. When the classroom became too confining, he contemplated a missionary’s life in the Philippines but instead asked his friend Jacob Riis for a position on the Evening Sun. As a police reporter, he covered grafting officials, the Black Hand, pickpockets, and safe breakers—taking lessons from the Other Half that he could never have acquired as a prep-school don.

  Eager to apply this experience to a useful cause, he agitated for municipal reform. In 1907, the city created a new position for him—the Fourth Deputy Police Commissionership, with jurisdiction over the Detective Bureau—so that it could benefit from his expertise. He accepted, deferring the appointment to steam to England at his own expense to study the methods of Scotland Yard. For two years he pushed innovations, reorganizing the undercover branch and introducing the use of police dogs. But when the commissioner he served under was replaced by a Tammany functionary, he returned to private life. In 1913, the potential of a Fusion victory brought him back to politics. Becoming a top strategist for Mitchel’s campaign, he served for a few months as the mayor’s official secretary. When everyone else turned down the thankless position of police commissioner, Arthur Woods jumped at the job that nobody wanted.

  He was forty-four years old in 1914, tall, with graying hair and strong features that were just starting to sag. To one reporter he seemed “a keen, dark, alert, well-groomed gentleman—very much the gentleman.” Photos made him look severe, but acquaintances described his “crust of levity” and a “light and airy way of talking.” He lived at the Harvard Club in midtown with other wealthy bachelors, and his peers judged him an awfully good fellow. “Just as he was in school, so he is to-day,” a member said. “Whenever a man’s in trouble and needs a confidant, he goes instinctively to Woods.” Since his college days, he had been “engrossed,” even “obsessed” with theories for “municipal progress and social betterment.” Having mastered the literature of reform, he understood the connections between crime and housing conditions, employment opportunities, or social neglect. “Arthur Woods had ideas of his own,” Edward Mott Woolley would write in a profile for McClure’s. “The traditional scheme of a police department is to delve out crime and abet the punishment. Commissioner Woods saw an additional function in the department: the prevention of crime through the removal of the impulse of people to commit it. He believes that crime is due largely to environment.”

  “There has never been a Police Commissioner quite like him,” gushed a reporter for the Times. “He may not succeed in carrying out his ideas, but he can never be charged with a lack of them, or an unwillingness to fight for them.” In Arthur Woods, New Yorkers believed they had found the leader to transform their police department into an efficient, twentieth-century force. “Few men,” proclaimed Outlook, “have come to municipal office more fitly trained for its duties than he.”

  Commentators wondered if the new commissioner could make any headway against the “System.”

  On the evening of his first day in command, Woods ate dinner with Chief Inspector Max Schmittberger, the highest-ranking uniformed officer on the force. Afterward, taking a police automobile, they toured several uptown station houses. At each precinct he made “quick upstairs, downstairs, into-the-cellar explorations,” examining cells and blotters, explaining to the anxious men on duty that he was “just getting acquainted.”

  Down on East Fourth Street, meanwhile, five hundred angry, excited radicals—as well as an undetermined number of plainclothes police—were crammed into the Manhattan Lyceum to discuss the next phase of the anarchists’ campaign against the city. O’Carroll and Caron sat onstage, where their wounds could be most effectively displayed. Becky Edelsohn spoke first, arguing that it was the newspaper editors and the Rockefellers who were the real inciters to riot. “It is difficult for me to speak in moderation of these cowardly police,” she went on, “who for a few measly dollars … beat and almost kill the working classes.” Berkman, who had disappeared just at the moment when the previous Saturday’s violence was commencing, spoke with even more fury. “If I had seen the brutality of the police,” he sputtered, “if I had seen it with my own eyes right on the very spot, and if I had had a revolver, I would have used it.” Rage sent his rhetoric right over the threshold of decency. His bloodcurdling climax was all but unprintable. The morning papers transcribed it as “To_____with all the____ ____ ____!”

  Berkman ended with a promise to return to Union Square on Saturday, April 11, for a “monster mass meeting” to assert the right of free speech. “I believe in resistance!” he shouted. “I claim the right to preach riot if I want to!” And in three days’ time, he intended to see if anyone—including the new police commissioner—would attempt to stop him.

  ARTHUR WOODS KNEW the potential gravity of Berkman’s threat as well as any officer in the department; he was familiar with the anarchist’s methods and considered him an “auld acquaintance.” The two had first confronted one another six years earlier, in 1908, during a similarly miserable winter when mass joblessness had again posed a desperate crisis.

  In late March of that year, thousands of unemployed protesters had crammed into Union Square for a socialist rally. Within minutes, the police had arrived to break up the demonstration. Inevitably, resistance led to clubbing and scuffles. At the height of the violence, Woods, in his role as fourth deputy commissioner, had arrived with a detachment of reinforcements. With his help, the officers cleared the square and the danger appeared to have subsided. Only a few reporters and some stragglers remained. A contingent of twenty cops lined up. Their work done, they formed ranks prior to being dismissed.

  As the men stood in two smart rows, a young immigrant dashed at the formation from the rear. Pausing a few steps away, he fumbled with a parcel and raised it chest-high. “There was a splutter of sparks,” a witness said, “and then an explosion like the report of a 6-inch gun.” Through the smoke, the unharmed officers sought their assailant. They found him, a Russian-born anarchist, wounded on the pavement. His hand had vanished and half of his body was in tatters. The bomb—a brass bed knob crammed with broken nails, nitroglycerin, and gunpowder—had detonated a moment early.

  “A second Haymarket horror was averted yesterday by the narrowest of margins,” the Tribune reported the next morning. Woods took charge of the investigation; his detectives sped through the city after leads. One of his first measures was to arrest Alexander Berkman, who had had no connection with the riot and who was released with a warning from the magistrate.

  An anarchist bomb in Union Square.

  But if Woods’s first instinct was punitive, on reflection he had come to a different understanding of what had occurred at Union Square in 1908. The police, he realized, had initiated the violence by storming a peaceful rally. At one point, a protester had demanded that Inspector Schmittberger respect his right to free speech. The veteran officer had motioned icily with his baton and said, “The club is mightier than the Constitution.” The quotation had become a rallying cry for the radical opposition, and the whole affair had turned into a political embarrassment.

  Six years later, as he took up the commissionership himself, Woods recalled the lessons he had learned. Although certain newspapers were calling once again for repressive measures, he had the confidence to follow his own experience. On his second day as commissioner he addressed the upcoming demonstration, meeting with Lincoln Steffens to discuss a possible truce and making reassuring statements to the newspapers. “The fact that a man talks on the subject he is interested in, and even uses profane language in punctuating his remarks, is not a breach of the peace,” said Woods. “The speakers will be allowed to do their oratorical best if they do not violate the law. I do not expect any trouble.”

  Rather than sending hundreds of menacing police, he assigned just a few officers to the square. McKay had exhorted the troops to “Break ’em up!” Woods instructed his men to adopt a radically d
ifferent approach. “It was pointed out that the crowd would undoubtedly be most provocative,” Woods later recalled of the briefing he gave to his men,

  that many in it would try to make themselves martyrs and desired nothing more ardently than to have the police assault them; that they would tempt the police to take what would seem to be the initiative. It was explained to the police that their great effort should be to prevent trouble. If trouble should arise they were to suppress it, and to use whatever force might be necessary for suppression. But their aim was to be to prevent it from arising … Beyond this, however, they were charged with the duty of radiating good nature, of trying to maintain an atmosphere of quiet and calm. For a smile is just as infectious as a sneer.

  Most of the city expected bloodshed at Union Square. The agitators were hinting at more trouble. “What are we going to do Saturday, huh? You wait and see.” The Socialist Call warned its readers to stay away. Big Bill Haywood refused to attend. A rumor circulated that the anarchists had recruited gunmen from around the nation to retaliate if and when the police made their assault. Anticipating a spectacular battle, the World assigned a special correspondent to the scene—John Reed.

  By two P.M. on April 11, thousands had already gathered. They arrived in separate groups, organized and ardent. The unemployed marched in from one direction. Anarchists appeared as a separate unit. Men wore hatbands that said BREAD OR REVOLUTION. Speakers attracted attention in all parts of the square. “The whole place was murmuring and boiling with low-voiced propaganda,” Reed reported. “Free speech was beginning.” “Little east side radicals, quacks, social service workers and even politicians were the centre of eager little tight-packed groups, arguing and preaching … One saw Lincoln Steffens plunging through the mob … shoals of strange radical women in the Greenwich Village uniform, and others in civilian clothes. All the intellectuals were there. Then there were hundreds of Socialists, although their official daily paper had warned them to ignore the meeting. And many I.W.W.’s who had also been told to hold aloof.”