More Powerful Than Dynamite

by Thai Jones

  Meeting in Mayor Mitchel’s office on April 22, Woods had other matters to discuss. Commissioner Polk was healing well after surgery to mend the wounds he had received in the murder attempt. At first it had been supposed that the gunman from the previous week had been a radical assassin, with Alexander Berkman and his cadre the most likely source. “The Anarchists have no particular feeling against Mayor Mitchel, and do not consider they have any feud with him,” Berkman had insisted. “Anarchists do not resort to assassination for fun, and the only time when it might occur would be when an individual Anarchist in a time of great political or revolutionary excitement might select a much-hated man for a mark.” Although this may not have been wholly reassuring to authorities, a short interrogation of the shooter satisfied them that he was no radical, but rather an unstable former city employee with a grudge. Currently, he was under the supervision of alienists in the Tombs, and a transfer to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane was imminent. Mitchel asked Woods to examine any more messages that arrived from “nuts,” and also suggested “a plan for looking up the writers of threatening letters and committing them to Bellevue.”

  Among other immediate topics, Woods and Mitchel had to consider the local impact of a looming war with Mexico. After more than a year of idleness—Woodrow Wilson called it “watchful waiting,” while his opponents preferred to think of it as “deadly drifting”—military intervention was now at hand. Finally convinced that action had become a moral necessity, the president had deployed the North Atlantic fleet to blockade the Gulf Coast city of Veracruz. He would deploy force of arms not for conquest or profit but out of compassion. The specific incitement—a minor diplomatic transgression, for which the Mexican government had speedily apologized—hardly mattered now that he was bent on war. The important thing was the greater message his new decisiveness would impart. “I hold this to be a wonderful opportunity,” Wilson explained, “to prove to the world that the United States of America is not only human but humane; that we are actuated by no other motives than the betterment of the conditions of our unfortunate neighbor, and by the sincere desire to advance the cause of human liberty.”

  If fighting began, repercussions in the city would go far beyond Haywood’s speech. And indeed while the two officials spoke, the first dispatches started to arrive from Veracruz: FIRING COMMENCED AT DAYBREAK. SHIPS NOW SHELLING SOUTHERN PART OF CITY. The long standoff between Mexican leaders and the U.S. government had finally erupted in gunfire. Personally, Mitchel thought the affair had been bungled. Woodrow Wilson had dithered for months instead of taking action. The mayor would have opted for a direct declaration of war weeks earlier. But now that troops were committed, he wired Washington immediately, promising the president that “the people of the City of New York are with him and behind him in this crisis.” Locally, it would mean political posturing—Tammany Hall had just announced it would be raising a regiment of its own—antiwar protests, angry tempers, and patriotic outbursts. Recruitment centers would be jammed; the Brooklyn Naval Yard would have to expand operations.

  While they talked, the officials heard some sudden commotion coming from outside the building. Commissioner Woods rushed out to City Hall plaza, where he found a mob of a thousand people roiling round the statue of Benjamin Franklin. They circled the area, pressing in almost to the pedestal, where some unseen instigator plied his trade. Calling the reserves from the Oak Street precinct, Woods forced his way through to the front of the crowd. And there he found Becky Edelsohn antagonizing the throng of hecklers.

  At that moment he joined a widening circle of city residents suddenly concerned about her activities. “It is little more than a month since the newspapers began printing the sayings and exploits of one Becky Edelsohn,” the Tribune announced. “Besides being an agitator, who and what is this person who, bursting out of obscurity, has caused more editorial comment for and against than any woman since Emma Goldman? … What has this young girl endured to make her ready to outface street rowdies, to criticise the government and laugh in the face of recognized authority?”

  Becky was young and shocking. “She was a tremendously fiery person,” a friend recalled, “always two steps ahead of Berkman or Goldman.” Her good looks and bright red stockings made a striking impression. “She was five feet four inches tall,” a comrade recalled, “moderately plump, with black hair; she was very pretty—beautiful I should say.” But most people remembered her for her fearless self-possession. “Becky’s eyes,” a reporter wrote, “were built to flash, not to weep.” In court, she once leveled her hardest stare on a judge who tried to silence her. A member of the audience caught the look. “I knew she was not one of the inarticulate mass,” he later wrote, “but a girl with power.”

  Born in Ukrainian Odessa on Christmas Day 1892, she had come to the United States with her family two years later, and had battled with parents, teachers, and everyone else who claimed authority ever since. She spent a year in high school and tried to train as a nurse, but in each instance had found the discipline unbearable. An elder brother introduced her to politics, and she soon became one of the many strays gathered up in Emma Goldman’s extended family of anarchists. She left her family to live with the radicals at the age of thirteen, and a year or two later, in 1906, she had her first chance to display her antiauthoritarian inclinations. When cops raided a protest meeting, the Tribune recounted, she “was roughly handled and put under arrest, because she failed to leave the hall as quickly as ordered.” Though she was still “a little girl with short skirts,” she was accused of assaulting a policeman. The magistrate took one look at the 250-pound arresting officer and dismissed the charges.

  She was fifteen when Alexander Berkman, then in his late thirties, was released from prison. Becky comforted him through his first years back in the world, and before long they had become lovers. This was the first of a series of relationships. Becky’s sexuality exerted a fascination on outsiders, who let their lascivious imaginings cloud their appreciation for her leadership abilities. A clandestine informant who infiltrated the radicals’ circle sniped to handlers that Edelsohn had a “reputation among the anarchists of being able to be ‘intimate’ with more men in a day than any woman.” She underwent an abortion in 1911, and though this would not have been a scandal in the circles she frequented, her general behavior had led to some disquiet; “her lack of responsibility and perseverance in her personal life,” Emma Goldman would later write, “had for years been a source of irritation to me.”

  Now, at the Franklin statue, she was doing her utmost to irritate the hostile crowd.

  “It’s all a frame-up by the capitalists,” she was yelling, “so that good workingmen’s blood will be spilled to protect the investments in Mexico of Hearst, Rockefeller, and the Guggenheims.”

  “Ah,” people were laughing, “cut that out, kiddo.”

  “Show your American citizenship papers,” someone called. “And if you haven’t got ’em, then shut up.”

  “How many of you would fight for the flag?” she asked.

  Every hand shot into the air.

  “A flag isn’t anything to fight for!” she cried out. “The American flag isn’t fit to defend!” No one was laughing anymore. Clerks and office boys shouted her down. “Hooray for Wilson!” they called. “Hooray for the flag! Down with the greasers and the I.W.W.!”

  “Lynch her!”

  “Kill the reds!”

  Rotten fruit started flying round her head. “War is hell,” she yelled, “but when you attack a poor little woman like me it is worse than hell!” The mob pressed forward until it had her pinned against the railing at the base of the statue. And at that moment—“just in time” to save her “from rough treatment”—the Oak Street reserves appeared. “The police formed a flying wedge” and pushed up to the center of the ruckus, “shoving the crowd back, using their sticks now and then as persuaders.”

  Officers lined up in front of Becky and some other speakers, cordoning them off f
rom the hostile throng. The captain urged the radicals to make their escape, but, led by Becky, they refused to desist. They would test the police department’s commitment to free speech in the most dramatic way possible. For the next hour, the speakers railed against the war while the police held off the crowd. Finally, the spectators had had their fill: “Lashed to fury by the tongue of Reba Edelsohn,” they attempted one last sortie, charging the cordon, squirming between the uniformed officers. No longer able to protect either the speakers or his own men, the captain ordered the anarchists’ arrest. Most submitted meekly, but when a six-foot-tall patrolman tried detaining Becky, she struggled so ferociously that a paddy wagon had to be called in to transport her to the precinct.

  A COUPLE OF weeks earlier, police had trampled and clubbed dissenters into the hospitals. Now officers were risking their own safety to assure that all points of view were heard on the city’s streets. “In New York,” Arthur Woods would later tell an investigating committee, “we not merely permit free speech and free assemblage and picketing, but we protect it.” In less than two weeks as commissioner, he had already done much to prove the truth of this statement. He was establishing a novel set of protocols; no longer would the policeman be the instinctive enemy of the protester. Demonstrations would be condoned as long as they did not incite listeners to immediate acts of violence or seriously impede traffic. “If we don’t have unrest,” Woods had come to believe, “if we don’t agitate for better things, if there is not a wholesome discontent, we shall not make progress.”

  These broad-minded policies had won over some of New York’s most skeptical observers. “Commissioner Woods has nerve,” judged Lincoln Steffens, who had been a leading critic of the police department for the previous twenty years. The veteran journalist had been especially impressed by the triumph at Union Square. “There was no show of force at all, and no abridgment of free speech,” he wrote. “It was an experiment in liberty, and liberty worked.” Walter Lippmann was so enthusiastic about Woods’s success that he quickly redrafted the opening paragraph of Drift and Mastery, his work in progress. “In the early months of 1914,” he wrote, “widespread unemployment gave the anarchists in New York City an unusual opportunity for agitation.” Newspapers and government officers had succumbed to hysteria and violence, but then there was an about-face: “The city administration, acting through a new police commissioner,” ordered an end to repression. “This had a most disconcerting effect on the anarchists. They were suddenly stripped of all the dramatic effect that belongs to a clash with the police … their intellectual situation was as uncomfortable as one of those bad dreams in which you find yourself half-clothed in a public place.”

  Woods himself did as much as anyone to promote his own ideas. A onetime newspaperman, he wrote punchy and dramatic essays about his experiences with the police. Lecturing to society audiences, he portrayed himself as a cosmopolite of crime, cracking wise with seamy characters that his audience would have crossed the street to avoid. He titillated listeners with tales of Lefty Louis, Hunchy Williams, and other criminals of his acquaintance, then left them sobbing over the sacrifices and simple wisdom of his patrolmen. Over and over again he spoke of the Union Square demonstration and described how his men had protected antiwar speakers, including Becky Edelsohn, from angry mobs in Lower Manhattan. These parables of toleration soon earned him a reputation as one of the nation’s leading advocates of civil liberties.

  In all his speeches, however, he never mentioned another aspect of his practice, the tactics he referred to—when he mentioned them at all—as “graveyard work.” This was no oversight. Arthur Woods believed in clandestine policing with the same conviction he showed for free speech. To him they were two sides of the same strategy. But he had learned through harsh experience that secret practices were best kept private.

  IT WAS IN 1900 that the police department had first felt its lack of an effective plainclothes branch. That year, Italian anarchists living in Greenwich Village and New Jersey sent an assassin back to the home country to murder King Umberto I. Learning of the attack, a shocked New York police chief at first denied that the plot could have originated in his jurisdiction. “He had heard nothing of a local group of Anarchists for the past two years,” it was reported. “If such a group did exist he would have known about it.” Once he accepted the fact, however, a second truth became apparent: He was helpless to investigate. In the entire force, there were only a few Italian-speaking detectives. One of them, Giuseppe Petrosino, a brilliant young sergeant who had immigrated from Campania twenty-five years earlier, was immediately assigned to the case.

  The city had changed, but the police had not. Officers patrolling the old beats found transformation at every storefront and corner. Kleindeutschland teemed with Russians; Italians pressed the Chinese in Mott Street. “Within a few minutes’ walk is the Hebrew colony of the great East Side. Within half a mile is the German colony to the northwest, while to the west are the colonies of Assyrians, Egyptians, and Arabians.” Eighty-five percent of all residents were either foreign-born or the children of immigrants. “The Irish patrolman,” commented a reporter for McClure’s, “watched curiously over this half million of queer, jabbering foreigners like a child regarding a strange bug.”

  More than a million and a half Italians would process through Ellis Island during the next ten years, nearly a third of them settling in Manhattan and Brooklyn. “Generally speaking, they are gentle drudges—honest, faithful, and inoffensive,” Munsey’s magazine assured its readers. “As to their alleged proneness to crimes of violence, there has been much exaggeration.” Compared to the Irish, for instance, they were less disposed to pauperism, drunkenness, or suicide. “In 1904, only one in every twenty-eight thousand Italians in New York was sent to Blackwell’s Island,” reporters noted, and most of these had been charged merely with disorderly conduct.

  Lieutenant Giuseppe Petrosino.

  If crime existed in the Italian colonies of Mulberry Bend, Williamsburg, and Eastern Harlem, that hardly separated these areas from other densely packed and impoverished districts in the city. But the Italians soon found themselves encumbered with an extraordinary reputation for delinquency. Every trespass in their neighborhoods was attributed to the actions of a mysterious criminal syndicate—the Black Hand. Police officials and newspaper reporters stoked fears over what they dubbed “perhaps the most secret and terrible organization in the world,” and endowed the situation with the appearance of a crisis. “The city is confronted with an Italian problem with which at the present time it seems unable to cope,” the Tribune had complained in 1904. Those same detectives who had been helpless in the anarchist investigation found themselves confounded by the rash of bombings, kidnappings, and blackmail that constituted the Black Hand crime wave. With community leaders calling for protection, and newspapers filled with chilling stories, the police commissioner announced the creation of an Italian squad solely dedicated to infiltrating the mafia. Petrosino took command; under him was every detective in the force who could speak the language. There were nine of them.

  For secrecy, Petrosino and his men avoided headquarters, at first operating out of his two-room apartment. But there were so few of them working the same streets day after day that secrecy was impossible. “Every New York detective is more truly a public character than the Mayor is,” a reporter observed. The elected leader of the city “could walk a thousand miles up and down his five boroughs without being recognized by more than a handful of citizens … But let a ‘plainclothes man’ sally forth, and patrolmen will nod to him, streetcar conductors will ask no fare, hallboys will pick him out, janitors will make a sign, bootblacks will look eagerly about for his quarry, politicians will wink patronizingly, barbers will stop in the midst of a shampoo.” When new criminals arrived, old hands taught them straightaway to recognize all the undercover operatives on the force, and Petrosino himself “was probably the most widely known Italian in New York.”

  With no hope, then, of
operating in secret, they resorted to publicity and “brass band” methods, developing a large network of contacts and sources, working with leaders in the Italian colonies to bolster community resistance against criminals. Over time, Petrosino concluded that secret policing, even done effectively, would never solve the ills that had befallen Little Italy. He coordinated neighborhood vigilance committees and urged settled immigrants to shepherd new arrivals through the process of assimilation. “There is only one thing that can bring about the end of the Black Hand,” Petrosino explained to a reporter from the Times, “and that is enlightenment.”

  Lacking this more general approach, the secret branch made hundreds of minor arrests but did little to address the root causes of crime. Most of the time, the suspects they did manage to detain were released by the magistrates. With no reason to believe that the police could protect them, witnesses were hard to come by in Black Hand prosecutions. After two years, the squad could claim few successes. “The number of crimes attributed to the Black Hand society … has grown,” the Tribune reported. “In the more serious cases, such as murders and fires, there have been no convictions.” The initial enthusiasm for the unit dissipated; its members were ridiculed by the rest of the Detective Bureau. By 1906, only “a dejected pretense of an Italian squad was in existence.”

  But that year a new police commissioner arrived. Theodore Bingham was an ex-army engineer with a wooden leg and a determination “to put the town under martial law.” Enemies denounced him as “autocratic and severe,” while even his friends conceded that “there is a decisive and a soldierly directness about Gen. Bingham which has often been mistaken for abruptness or brusqueness.” An amateur genealogist, he boasted of ancestors who had come from England in the seventeenth century to help settle the village of Norwich, Connecticut. He had little affection for anyone whose forebears had arrived much later than that—which included nearly every immigrant in his constituency. “Predatory criminals of all nations” had infiltrated the city, he wrote, “the Armenian Hunchakist, the Neapolitan Camorra, the Sicilian Mafia, the Chinese Tongs … the scum of the earth.” His aversion to Hebrews would make him a loathed figure in the Jewish community, but this was as nothing compared to the revulsion he felt for “the Italian malefactor,” who Bingham asserted was “by far the greater menace to law and order.”