More Powerful Than Dynamite

by Thai Jones

  Just a few score uniformed officers spectated from the sidelines, stirring only to prevent marchers from parading out of the square. Berkman spoke and no one moved to silence him. Leonard Abbott, a founder of the Ferrer Center, proclaimed that “the whacks of the police clubs that fell upon the head of Arthur Caron a week ago have already been heard around the world.” Still, the cops kept their distance. It gradually became clear that new guidelines were in effect. “These people have faith in Mayor Mitchel, and faith in the new Police Commissioner,” Abbott confessed, “and it seems to have been justified … You can fairly feel the ugliness of the crowd’s mood seeping out of it.”

  I.W.W. meeting in Union Square.

  Alexander Berkman in Union Square, April 11, 1914.

  Woods, who had been receiving regular updates from Schmittberger, arrived just as the demonstration was breaking up. Even he was surprised at the results of his own orders. “The change of method was almost unbelievably successful,” he realized. “There was no disorder.” Emboldened, he mingled with the protesters. “I was not recognized,” he recalled. “I went up toward the crowd of one or two hundred people, perhaps, and their orator got up on the billboards, and as I went up he called out, ‘Well, boys, the cops certainly have made good today. Three cheers for the cops!’”

  * * *

  “WITH SUCH A man as police commissioner,” said a relieved John Purroy Mitchel, “I’ll have no police problem. I can just stick him up in headquarters and forget him.” One less cause for nerves, however, still left far too many worries and did little to ease his overall anxiety. The imperturbable “young knight in shining armor” who had taken office four months earlier had grown pale and thin; the black hair around his ears was turning gray.

  Mitchel’s workdays usually began at breakfast, with one or more cabinet heads joining him in the wainscoted dining room of his apartment in the Peter Stuyvesant, an elegant building on Riverside Drive at Ninety-eighth Street. The upper-story windows looked high over the gray waters of the Hudson to the trees and cliffs on the far shore, offering a brief promise of serenity. But then the telephone would ring and city business pressed again. Downstairs, he and his subordinate would climb into the open tonneau of his automobile—the chauffeur draping a fur robe over their legs to protect against the cold—and they would accelerate out onto the drive. Often they would stop by some other commissioner’s apartment and pick him up, too, before speeding downtown to City Hall. By the time the mayor arrived at his office, he had already done an hour’s worth of work. And many nights he wouldn’t leave again until nine or ten in the evening. “Mayor Mitchel’s friends,” a concerned Sun reported in May, “say he is burdening himself with the pressure of work such as few men stand for more than a limited period.”

  Mayor Mitchel en route to City Hall.

  Mitchel, who prized efficiency first and last, felt himself everywhere thwarted. He employed two full-time secretaries—one for official business, another for the private obligations engendered by his position—and they each placed about a hundred telephone calls a day. Still, nothing got done. Or it was done, and then undone, and had to be done over. Newspapers magnified any misstep into a ruinous lapse, and saw disaster in every portent. If there happened to be a real problem—as, for instance, with the unemployed—it was inevitably exacerbated by the press. It felt as if his five and a third million constituents had nothing to do but lodge bitter complaints, request impossible favors, waste his days with eccentric schemes. He received between two hundred and three hundred letters a day, asking for matrimonial advice, offering headache remedies, challenging him to a tango competition. “Quite a lot of time of this office,” he complained to an interviewer, “is taken up by matters that never ought to come before the Mayor at all.” Unable to mask the frustration he experienced around constituents, he became increasingly impatient, “and not seldom too curt,” with citizens who behaved “captious and unreasonable.”

  Doctors had promised that his migraines would gradually diminish, but thanks to the stress of his responsibilities the attacks were in fact occurring with greater frequency and severity. His bodyguard would find him in his office, prone on the couch, head in hands, in “bending pain.” On the worst days, he would vanish into a secret hideaway in the Municipal Building to recover alone. In March, a headache forced him to retire from a meeting of the Board of Estimates. When newspapers published exaggerated articles about his “collapse,” the mayor warned reporters: “If you are going to write such stories, you will have to do it about twice a month.”

  There were an estimated two hundred thousand “mental incompetents” in the country, and a disproportionate number of them, it seemed to Mitchel, must have been resident in the five boroughs. The city had an inexhaustible stock of neurasthenics, dipsomaniacs, hypochondriacs, and plain old “bugs”; “There are thousands of people who write threatening letters,” Mitchel testified. “The Mayor is always receiving threatening letters.” Of course, the majority were harmless, and there was really no way to protect against the rest, anyway. But he couldn’t completely ignore them. His predecessor, William Gaynor, had been shot in the throat by a deranged assassin; the wound had festered for years before killing him. With a growing sense of his own vulnerability, Mayor Mitchel took to carrying a revolver in a shoulder holster whenever he ventured out on public business.

  IT WAS ABOUT one P.M. on April 17 when Arthur Woods appeared in the mayor’s office. While they prepared to leave for lunch, he described the scene of a lodging house fire he had just toured. Together with Frank Polk, the corporation counsel, and George Mullan, Mitchel’s former law partner, they left the building, descending the marble steps onto City Hall Plaza. The afternoon was cloudy but warm, and the old elm trees were just showing yellow buds. Office workers on their midday break jammed the square. A group of socialist orators gathered, as always, around the plinth of the Benjamin Franklin statue. As the officials walked south toward Park Row, many in the crowd paused to get a close look at their mayor.

  A police department automobile was idling at the curb. Mitchel clambered first into the narrow rear seat, followed by Polk and then Mullan. The chauffeur reached across to cover them with the fur robe. Woods, who was to ride up front, ventured round to the street side, carefully avoiding the nearby trolley tracks. A shabbily dressed old man approached, threading through the traffic. Woods stepped onto the running board and was about to climb inside. The old man had reached a distance of about five feet. He raised an arm, revealing a snub-nosed revolver. Woods, two jumps away, was already in motion when the first round fired. There was no second shot. Woods, an expert in jujitsu, grabbed the attacker by the shoulder, tackled him to the ground, and pinned his arms.

  In the car, Mitchel thought for a confused moment that he had heard a muffler explosion. But then he felt the burning in his ear. To his right, the corporation counsel coughed blood and teeth. The mayor was unscathed except for some scorches from the gunpowder. Gathering himself, he drew his blue-gray revolver, enraged, eager to retaliate. He made a survey of the crowd, looking for assailants, hoping to trigger off some revenge. But Woods and the chauffeur had disarmed the shooter. They had him on his feet and were leading him away. Thousands of civilians were mobbing the car. Police whistles blared from every corner, and Polk was gagging with pain. Mitchel, still brandishing his gun, supported the wounded man back inside City Hall. Even then, in the throes of excitement, he was already experiencing relief. For months he had anticipated this moment; the burden of dread had grown excruciating. Finally, instantaneously, it had been removed, and he could proceed with the work he had to do.

  The assassin fired from about five feet away.

  Only a few hours later, the mayor faced an audience of hundreds at a Press Club dinner. “Calm, smiling, cool,” he displayed “a jaw of steel,” wrote a witness, and was “totally unlike a man who had escaped a funeral.” He rose to speak, and the thankful crowd offered a five-minute ovation before he could say a word. “The ex
perience of this afternoon is, of course, one to impress itself on any man’s mind,” he began. “I had been almost expecting some such thing, not because I had any reason to expect it, not because there is any reason why such a thing should happen in a civilized community ordered by laws, as is ours, but because I know that 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.”

  It was midnight when the mayor eventually got home to Riverside Drive. By 8:30 A.M. the next day, he was already dressed and breakfasted. Riding the elevator down to his waiting auto, Mitchel arranged himself to confront the business of a new morning.

  Chief-Inspector Judas

  On May 3, 1903, he parades through a perpetual ovation. Stock-ticker tape slips in helixes through the skies from Bowling Green to Trinity Church, and confetti cloaks his uniform. The jammed spectators at Houston Street refuse to let him pass until he tips his cap three times to them. Every block reserves its loudest huzzah for his approach. From both sides of the boulevard, they surge against the police line, stamping and calling out, “Max!” “Schmitzy!”

  Eyes front, Inspector Max Schmittberger nudges his horse from Fortieth Street onto Fifth Avenue. After twenty-nine years of service, he is still the “Police Samson,” a “big, burly six-footer.” In the late-afternoon light, the brass buttons and gold oak leaves on his coat no longer shimmer as they had at midday, but his gloves and cap remain pure white. A fine hussar’s mustache overtops his small, tight-lipped mouth. He wears the Prussian Order of the Black Eagle and has invoked the diktats of Field Marshal von Moltke to many a subordinate. Even on station duty he demands a crisp salute. The handiest horseman in the department, he is its truest sharpshooter and “an artist” with a baton. “He is not only the equal of any man on the force,” a former chief declared, “but I cannot think of any one who is his equal.”

  The reviewing stand is in Madison Square, near the foot of the new Flatiron Building. The police commissioner and mayor are in the first row on the flag-strewn platform. Distinguished guests are massed twenty deep, and the colorful din belittles all that has preceded it. Schmittberger draws even with the dignitaries. For nearly a decade, these men and their predecessors have humiliated and ostracized him. They have “cuffed and cursed” him, accused and slandered him with “nasty and vindictive” attacks. Until this year—his year of redemption—they have forbidden him even from marching in the annual policemen’s parade.

  Max Schmittberger.

  He turns his blue-gray eyes on them. He salutes. And then, eyes front.

  * * *

  SUCH CURSES HAD covered him in the previous decade, such obloquy and derogation. The newspapers called him “liar” and “grafter.” Churchmen took him for a “thief and a crook.” An “everlasting disgrace,” said the district attorney. Socialists jeered him as an anarchist, and anarchists warned he was a “marked man.” His fellow policemen—the honest and dishonest alike—loathed him, one and all. He was “Judas,” a squealer who had “split on his pals,” and many officers refused to serve under him. He should be in Sing Sing, not in uniform, ran the everlasting outcry. “Schmittberger will never do police work of any kind again.” “Schmittberger will get a hard drubbing.” “Schmittberger has got to go!”

  A DECADE EARLIER, in 1894, he had been a recently promoted captain with a record “unmarred by a single complaint.” He was a shrewd and patient investigator, a fearsome pugilist, and a modest subordinate who had personally accounted for nearly a thousand convictions and had arrested more murderers than any other man in uniform. And, like every other officer of his rank on the force, he was corrupt, in a good-natured sort of way. He would collect payoffs for his superiors and rake off his due portion. He was selective about the brothels and illegal saloons he busted up: Proprietors who were paid up with the police tended to stay in business longer than those who fell behind. It wasn’t corruption so much as it was tradition. These were established practices, and Schmittberger was a firm believer in upholding them.

  Sometimes the private business of the System would escape the shadows into the public eye, and then the reformers would be involving themselves. Every ten years or so, some impaneled bluebloods came around scratching for trouble. In 1894 it was the Lexow Committee, state investigators hoping to irritate the city bosses. It looked, at first, to be the usual nothing: a circus for the papers, a political career for a prosecutor, some catharsis for the Society for the Prevention of Crime. But witnesses sometimes say funny things—like, in this case, about handing a $500 bribe to a captain named Schmittberger. Subpoenas ensued. Still, even this was no source of worry; the captain was known as a dependable fellow with a small mouth, the taciturn type.

  Nevertheless, every seat was occupied in room 1 of the Tweed Courthouse on the morning of December 21, 1894. A long delay heightened anticipation, and a “loud buzzing” greeted Schmittberger’s entrance. He wore civilian clothes and had “dark rings about his eyes, which told of sleeplessness and mental suffering.”

  Q: You are a police captain of this city?

  A: Yes, sir.

  Q: In command of what precinct at the present time?

  A: The Nineteenth.

  Q: Now, captain, you are called here as a witness on behalf of the State of New York to testify in relation to matters in the police department of this city … you appreciate the obligations which rest upon you, do you?

  A: Yes, sir.

  Q: You know that the oath administered to you is binding absolutely upon your conscience?

  A: Yes, sir.

  Q: To tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

  A: I have come here to tell the truth wholly and truly, without any promise of any kind.

  No more buzzing. “Half a dozen police captains who were in the room opened their eyes wide, and bent forward to hear what was coming next.”

  And then Schmittberger talked. He tallied the bribes he had taken, the payoffs and political contributions he had disbursed. He explained how patrolmen purchased their appointments and then paid again to be promoted. He sketched the system of coercion and collusion, from chief to roundsman, that was ruining discipline in the department. And he revealed the crowning exposure of all: that protection for any “vice and crime” in the city could be purchased at an established price. When he had told enough to fill seventy pages of testimony, he descended from the stand, a “broken man.”

  At every place where New Yorkers gathered to talk, they spoke that night of Schmittberger, “in all the hotel corridors, the social clubs, the political organizations, the theatres, the fine cafés in the fashionable streets and avenues and the rumshops and ‘dives’ of the East and West side.” The lone exception was 300 Mulberry Street—police headquarters—which wreathed itself in silence.

  * * *

  HE “WAS A villain in two ways, in two worlds,” wrote Lincoln Steffens, his friend and adviser. “The good were against him for his grafting, the underworld for squealing.” Schmittberger remained with the department, as an outcast. He was stripped of his posting in the glamorous, roaring Tenderloin and sent to the wasteland of the Bronx, where “the chief business of the police is said to be watching for stray goats.” Languishing in Goatville, he waited for the officers he had exposed to get their transfers to Sing Sing. But no indictments appeared. The worst of the thieves retired on comfortable pensions. All the rest retained their rank and standing, determined to see him break. His “years of purgatory” had begun.

  AT THE DINNER table, in his apartment on East Sixty-first Street, his eight children sat in silence. They nudged one another, passing the question along to the oldest son. “I say, Pop,” he blurted out at last, “is it true this stuff they are saying? It’s all lies, ain’t it!”

  He would redeem himself through labor. He followed cases overnight, two nights in a row, stealing home after sunrise to burgle a few hours of sleep. Newspapermen found him composing repor
ts simultaneously on seven different typewriters. He was a good cop, and these were not so plentiful. Antivice forces could not afford to waste an honest police captain who was estranged from the System and desperate for forgiveness. They pardoned his faults and convinced themselves of his repentance. Theodore Roosevelt, in his years with the police, used Schmittberger as a “broom” to sweep out whatever districts his constituency happened to find most appalling. The Reverend Charles Parkhurst, whose Society for the Prevention of Crime had urged on the Lexow investigations in the first place, met with him almost daily to discuss the condition of his conscience. But the reformers never lasted longer than one election. The Tammany men always returned, and then Schmittberger’s torments would begin again.

  Early in 1903, Schmittberger took the exam to qualify as an inspector, scoring higher than any other captain in the rolls. His opponents rallied their last reserves to slander him. But his repentance and redemption had won the “support of the best people in the country.” Roosevelt, now president of the United States, wrote him a letter of endorsement and shook his hand in public during a visit to New York. With no other recourse, the police commissioner regretfully granted him an inspectorship.