by Thai Jones
Having alienated 90 percent of the electorate, Bingham proceeded to lose the sympathy of subordinates by incessantly harping on the deficiencies of his department. “I have done all in my power with the force at my command,” he complained, demanding funds for more than a thousand new recruits. In a memorandum to the mayor, he proposed dissolving the existing detective branch and starting over with a new secret service modeled on the Italian Carabinieri, the Sûreté of Paris, or England’s Special Branch. “The crowning absurdity of the entire tragic situation in New York lies in the circumstance that the Police Department is without a secret service,” he insisted in a notorious article in the North American Review. “In the one city in the world where the police problem is complicated by an admixture of the criminals of all races, the Department is deprived of an indispensable arm of the service.”
Annoyed by the commissioner’s griping, the Tammany mayor at the time ignored all of his pleas except for the least expensive one. Bingham was granted the right to assign a new assistant to his staff. In June 1907, he created the position of Fourth Deputy Commissioner and chose Arthur Woods to fill it. Not just another underling, Woods took charge of the Detective Bureau. To him would fall the day-to-day responsibility of implementing Bingham’s vision of an American secret service.
Lieutenant Petrosino also hoped to contribute to the new commissioner’s efforts. He presented Bingham with a far-ranging report, offering his multifaceted plan to curb the lawlessness of the Italian colonies. While it did include repressive measures, such as mandating deportation for anyone convicted of a crime, many of his suggestions were broadly ameliorative: educating the Italian community about the American legal system, reducing population density in the tenements, and controlling the sale of explosives. “It’s our own stupid laws,” Petrosino believed, “that have allowed them to organize.”
But Bingham had no interest in anything for the Italian colonies but secret policing, or, as he described it, “rigorous punitive supervision.” Petrosino’s advice was brushed aside; he was ordered to focus on clandestine work alone. Moved to a larger—though still inadequate—office on Elm Street, he was granted more resources: Every Italian-speaking patrolman in all five boroughs was reassigned to his supervision, until the branch contained about eighty men. Knowing that the unit could never expand enough to keep pace with the increasing rates of crime, he nevertheless had no choice but to grind on. “Petrosino and his men have been worked beyond their endurance,” a Times reporter wrote. “Some of them sleep on the tables in the dingy little room which is their headquarters. Petrosino himself has seen little of his home and family for six months.” Still, results from the added labor remained elusive.
Bingham found yet another justification for why the city needed a real undercover force in 1908, with the botched attempt of a Russian anarchist to assassinate a phalanx of policemen in Union Square. “Americans have never been brought to consider anarchism seriously,” the commissioner grumbled. “There is always the possibility of some crack-brained fanatic being influenced by the anarchist … to a desperate deed.” He estimated that at least a thousand radicals currently resided in the city, and to counter their plans he again demanded $100,000 and the creation of a secret service on the French or Italian model. Critics pointed out that despite their renowned clandestine organizations, these nations had been subject to a litany of assassinations during the previous decades. “Secret police have not stopped ‘Anarchist’ outrages in the Continent,” noted David Graham Phillips, a famed muckraker. “Why should they here?” But Bingham was unmovable in his determination to infiltrate the city’s “gangs of Italian criminals and their anarchist accomplices.”
Another year of frustrating Tammany obstructions would pass before he finally got the chance to put his theories to a street test. Then, in February 1909, a Times article conveyed the startling news that “police commissioner Bingham has a secret service of his own at last.” The mood was jubilant at headquarters. “I have money and plenty of it,” the commissioner crowed, “and it didn’t come from the city.” Coy about specifics, he let it be known that he had obtained most of the financing from bankers and merchants in the Italian community, people who had been subjected to blackmail and other Black Hand predations and believed plainclothes police were the solution. But not all the money had come from Little Italy; there was a mystery benefactor, “said to be the head of one of the great industries of this country, whose great wealth has made him the target for all sorts of letters.” Most assumed this meant John D. Rockefeller.
The money went to hire a score of special officers, including men who had once served in the Italian Carabinieri and who would now act as a paid private investigative force under the supervision of the police department, answerable only to Petrosino and the commissioners. Hoping to deport anyone from New York who had a criminal record in Italy, Woods traveled to Washington, D.C., to seek President Roosevelt’s assistance in negotiating a repatriations treaty with the Italian government. As for Petrosino, nobody had seen him. Pressed on the lieutenant’s whereabouts, Bingham coyly replied, “Why, he may be on the ocean, bound for Europe, for all I know.” As it turned out, he was. And the commissioner’s slip was an unpardonable indiscretion. Petrosino had traveled to Sicily to gather the criminal files needed to begin deportation proceedings. Word of his arrival spread. Only two weeks after Bingham announced the creation of his new secret service, Petrosino was shot dead, with four bullets in his back, on the streets of Palermo.
The experiment of using privately financed special agents faltered after Petrosino’s death. Sensing another setback, Arthur Woods wrote an article in McClure’s to argue Bingham’s position that America was vulnerable to the plots of criminals and anarchists. “Here the police are local,” Woods noted. “We have no national police force.” The absence of a federal investigative bureau put more emphasis on the city’s efforts. All resources should be in play. If the Italian squad had failed, he believed, it was only because it had not been ambitious enough. Regular detectives could never succeed on their own, but “if they could be supplemented by a dozen or twenty men,” Woods argued, “working always under cover, never appearing in court or at headquarters, there would be fewer mysterious stories in the newspapers, and the jails would be more full of swarthy, low-browed convicts.”
But neither Bingham nor Woods would be in office long enough to implement these plans. Fittingly, it was their commitment to surveillance that resulted in their downfall.
For the previous fifty years or so, every person arrested in New York had been photographed, and their portrait added to the Rogues’ Gallery at police headquarters. Over time, the collection had expanded to encompass more than thirteen thousand images. It had grown so unwieldy that suspects often had to be released because investigators could not sort through the mess and locate the proper picture that would have incriminated them. Arthur Woods’s first assignment as deputy commissioner had been to reorganize the entire system.
Among the thousands of other photographs, there appeared the face of George Duffy, a milkman from Brooklyn, who two years earlier had been seized as “a suspicious person,” held overnight, and then released without charges. It had been a simple case of wrongful detainment, but because he was in the Rogues’ Gallery, police detectives now recognized him on sight, and his life became a nightmare of constant harassment and arrests. Duffy’s father complained to New York State Supreme Court justice William Gaynor, an inveterate critic of policemen, who agitated to have the picture removed from the collection at headquarters. When Bingham refused, the judge penned a public letter censuring the police commissioner. “He is possessed of the most dangerous and destructive delusion that officials can entertain in a free government,” the note concluded, “namely, that he is under no legal restraint whatever, but may do as he wills, instead of only what the law permits.”
Rather than admit their mistake, Bingham and Woods attempted to convince the public that Duffy was, in fact, what they s
aid he was: a criminal whose picture belonged in the gallery. While reporters interviewed his parents, employers, and even former teachers—all of whom confirmed the milkman’s good character—the police attempted to link him to prostitution and fraud, slandering him as a “degenerate.” The cover-up drifted over toward intimidation; Gaynor, and Bingham’s other critics, believed that they were being followed by detectives.
The commissioner had made too many enemies to survive the Duffy Boy scandal. On July 1, 1909, Bingham was dismissed. His replacement dismantled the secret service squad two weeks later, and the men of the Italian branch were put back on common patrol duty. Judge Gaynor used the popularity he had accrued as Duffy’s defender to mount a successful campaign for the mayoralty. For Arthur Woods, who resigned in solidarity with his chief, the warning was clear. Secret policing had to be conducted discreetly. He would write no more articles praising the idea of clandestine surveillance. Henceforth the graveyard work would be conducted out of sight, where it belonged.
* * *
JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER, JR., glanced up from his four-by-six-inch note card and scanned the audience in the Pocantico Hills Lyceum, just down the road from his estate. The small stone building served the village as library, theater, and dance hall. On Sunday evening, April 19, the folding chairs were arranged in neat rows and the Lyceum had been transformed into a church. Junior was presenting the vespers talk on the subject of “workaday religion.” Amongst the gathering, he recognized Abby and the children, neighbors, employees: friendly, familiar faces all.
“Workaday religion,” he continued, “is not primarily to die by but to live by. It is not primarily for old age but for youth.” He looked back at his notes.
Workaday Religion
1. its uses
a. not primarily to die by but to live by.
b. ″ ″ for old age ″ for youth.
2. everyone needs it
A Christian but not doing anything about it.
3. they need it now
What if all Pocantico had this religion.
After propounding these ideas, he offered a sort of test his listeners could use to tell whether they possessed the faith that he had been talking about. There was a passage in the Book of Matthew describing Judgment Day, when the Lord would divide the charitable from the selfish and reveal that every compassionate act on earth had been a mercy to God. This was the origin of the Golden Rule, the foundation of his beliefs. “Verily I say unto you,” quoted Junior at the conclusion of his speech, “In as much as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.”
The next morning—Monday, April 20—was cold and blustery in the Colorado coalfields. Linens twisted and wracked on the clotheslines of the Ludlow encampment, the temporary headquarters for the United Mine Workers in its campaign against Colorado Fuel & Iron. Not far from the border with New Mexico, and fifteen miles from the militia barracks in Trinidad, Ludlow itself was little more than a railroad depot flanked by a huddle of houses. The strikers’ tents, imported from a previous labor conflict in West Virginia, were laid out in not-quite-military precision across a flat patch of prairie.
More than a thousand people had lived there since the previous September. Fitted out with wooden walls, plank floors, and coal stoves, the bivouacs were grim, if scarcely less comfortable than the company-owned shacks the workers had been forced to leave when the lockout had commenced. After eight months of blizzards and rainstorms, the canvas had grayed and worn out; but the inhabitants had managed to add some personal effects, a few sticks of furniture, silverware and china, some photographs. Frequent gunfire had inspired many families to fortify; some had dug pits under the floorboards, and beneath one structure there was a large bunker meant to serve as a maternity ward for the pregnant women of the settlement.
Those precautions now seemed excessive. The violence that had marked the earliest phases of the conflict had dissipated; months of nearly constant warfare had been replaced by a lull. No one had been killed on either side for more than a month. “On the whole, the strike, we believe, is wearing itself out,” an optimistic L. M. Bowers had written to Junior on April 18, “though we are likely to be assaulted here and there by gangs of the vicious element that are always hanging around the coal-mining camps.”
Most of the militiamen had withdrawn, leaving only two companies to protect replacement workers and patrol the mine operators’ property. Though their numbers had been reduced, the troops who remained were among the most belligerent. Their ranks included former mine guards, soldiers of fortune, ex-convicts, and deserters from the regular army. These men, whom Bowers especially praised, made no pretense of impartiality. Other units had mingled freely with the people of Ludlow, but these combatants were on the side of the operators; they unequivocally viewed the miners as “the enemy.”
Early on April 20, a detachment of soldiers visited Ludlow on the pretext of asking about a man whose wife believed he was being held against his will in the camp. The union leader informed them that the woman’s husband had left the previous day, but the soldiers refused to accept his answer. Using this excuse as a way to aggravate tensions, the troopers gave an ultimatum: Produce the missing person by noon, or submit to a search of the settlement. The militia then returned to their headquarters and geared up for combat, marshaling forces and positioning a machine gun—which, like the miners’ tents, had also been imported from a previous strike—on a high spot of ground commanding the level plain where the tents stood.
Sensing an attack, the residents of Ludlow hustled their families into the nearby hills. “The prairie was covered with human beings running in all directions like ants,” one of the miners’ wives recalled. “We all ran as we were, some with babies on their backs, in whatever clothes we were wearing.” The union men snatched up hidden rifles and flung themselves into defensive trenches outside the camp. The two sides began shooting at just about the same moment. Refugees were still in flight when the first bullets fired; those who had not been quick enough to flee pried open their floorboards and scrambled into the pits beneath the tents.
Gunfire continued for several hours, with casualties on both sides. By the early afternoon, though, militia reinforcements had arrived, bringing with them an automobile fitted out with a second machine gun and seven thousand rounds of ammunition. “Go in and clean out the colony,” their commander told them, “drive everyone out and burn the colony.” When these soldiers attacked, the defense cracked; “both machine guns,” wrote John Reed, “pounded stab-stab-stab full on the tents.” Inside, the bullets shattered mirrors and splintered furniture. By sunset resistance had been subdued, and the soldiers roamed unhindered, ransacking the settlement. The “men had passed out of their officer’s control,” investigators would later conclude, “had ceased to be an army, and had become a mob.” They looted “whatever appealed to their fancy of the moment … clothes, bedding, articles of jewelry, bicycles, tools and utensils,” and then began to systematically burn the tents, dousing the canvas with oil before tossing on the matches.
Most of the remaining families were soon smoked out: Unearthly, screaming figures appeared suddenly from their subterranean pits and ran from the scene, refusing any offer of assistance by the soldiers. But the women and children who had chosen to conceal themselves in the maternity bunker decided to stay, even after the tent above them began to crunch with flames. They coughed in the smoke, and their prayers came shorter as the fire drew out the oxygen from their hiding place; the floorboards above them were too hot to touch.
At dawn the next day, soldiers were still passing torches round the camp, firing the rest of the tents, so that, barring a few camp stoves and iron bedsteads, nothing of Ludlow would be left standing. The sun was well up before anyone discovered the charred bodies of two women and eleven children who had been suffocated in the pit.
Ruins of the Ludlow Colony.
L. M. BOWERS WIRED his summary of the battle to Junior while the smoke stil
l hung over the burnt tents. Describing AN UNPROVOKED ATTACK UPON SMALL FORCE OF MILITIA YESTERDAY BY 200 STRIKERS, he suggested that the Rockefellers tell the news to some FRIENDLY PAPERS, in order to begin influencing the press coverage. But this time it was Bowers’s telegram that arrived too late. NEW YORK PAPERS HAVE PUBLISHED FULL DETAILS, a distressed Junior snapped back. TO-DAY’S NEWS IS APPEARING ON TICKER. WE PROFOUNDLY REGRET THIS FURTHER OUTBREAK OF LAWLESSNESS WITH ACCOMPANYING LOSS OF LIFE.
Having tried desperately to secure his personal integrity from the discord inherent in economic practices, Junior now faced his worst fears. He would be faulted for what had just occurred. The Rockefeller name would again be condemned to vicious hatred. Hoping somehow to prevent this, he grasped at any chance to clear himself of blame. Perhaps the recent battle had not directly involved the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company; there were other operators in the region, after all. On April 23, he demanded a clarification on this point from Bowers:
HAVE ANY OF THE DISTURBANCES REPORTED IN YOUR TELEGRAM OF YESTERDAY OR THOSE REPORTED IN TO-DAY’S PAPERS OCCURRED IN CONNECTION WITH MINES OWNED BY OR WITH FORMER OR PRESENT EMPLOYEES OF THE FUEL COMPANY? PLEASE ANSWER.
His subordinate’s response evaded the question, asserting that NONE OF THE THREE MINE TOPS DESTROYED OWNED BY ANYONE CONNECTED WITH THIS COMPANY NOW OR FORMERLY. But Junior had not asked about “mine tops.” What he needed to know was whether the women and children in the pit had been his responsibility. He immediately wired another cable: