More Powerful Than Dynamite

by Thai Jones

  The next morning, husband and wife appeared at the entrance to 26 Broadway, the “severe but imposing” fifteen-story skyscraper that was “known in every part of this broad world as the headquarters of the Standard Oil.” Inside, they handed the secretary a note, informing Mr. Rockefeller that Upton Sinclair had arrived to see him. The secretary vanished briefly and returned, asking them to come back in an hour for a reply. They did, only to be told there would be no meeting. Sinclair presented a second note, prepared in advance. “Do not turn us away,” it read, “but let us tell you what we know. You will find us quiet and courteous people. We ask nothing but a friendly talk with you.”

  The clerk returned again, with Junior’s final word: “no answer.”

  The next morning, April 29, Sinclair returned to the Standard Oil Building. He and the four women who had agreed to join him as mourners wrapped black crepe bands around their right arms. Then they linked hands and began solemnly to pace the thirty feet of sidewalk that stretched before the entrance to 26 Broadway. A small crowd gathered to watch. After about five minutes, a clutch of patrolmen came over to suggest they take their little walk somewhere else. They refused. A police officer grabbed Sinclair by the arm and began shoving him forward.

  “Please behave like a gentleman,” Sinclair hissed in his ear. “I have no idea but to go with you.”

  At the precinct house, he told the desk sergeant the story of the Ludlow Massacre, then he repeated the narrative again to the magistrate who arraigned him on charges of disturbing the peace. Having been ordered to return to court the next day for sentencing, Sinclair hurried back to Broadway, where he found his wife in command of a new group of mourners. All afternoon, the protest continued to grow. Alexander Berkman, who had been leading his own rally with Becky Edelsohn near City Hall, came to take his turn among the pickets. Volunteers kept arriving, and confidence was high. That day, Sinclair somehow found funds to rent an office in a nearby building. He had telephones delivered, and was about to order stationery when he realized the movement needed a name. “We had to fight it out for free speech,” said Leonard Abbott, a leading anarchist from the Ferrer Center. “Now we will fight it out for free silence.” The letterhead would read, FREE SILENCE LEAGUE.

  In a light suit, with a black mourning band on his arm, Upton Sinclair paraded solemnly in front of the Standard Oil Building on Lower Broadway.

  AS PROTEST PLANS coalesced in New York City, the slaughter climaxed in the coalfields. In the week following the assault on Ludlow, avenging miners had counterattacked, and dozens more combatants and innocents had been killed. With the state militia on the defensive, L. M. Bowers and Junior now demanded that Woodrow Wilson send federal troops to protect their property in the mines. Hesitant to let Colorado Fuel & Iron executives employ U.S. soldiers for their own ends, the president had tried to compromise. If Rockefeller would submit to arbitration, or otherwise demonstrate his goodwill in settling the strike, he offered, then Washington would consider sending military assistance.

  To conduct negotiations, Wilson dispatched Representative Martin Foster, the leader of the committee that had called Rockefeller to testify earlier in the month. For three hours on April 27 the two sides discussed possibilities, but the bloodshed had done nothing to alter Junior’s position. He still refused to budge on the only substantive issue—the miners’ right to unionize—and the congressman departed in frustration. “The attitude of the Rockefellers,” he told reporters afterward, “was little short of defiance, not only of the Government, but of civilization itself.” In the end, Wilson conceded to Rockefeller’s demands anyway. He had no choice. Violence had spread more than 150 miles north, nearly reaching Denver, and civil unrest was tending toward civil war. On April 30, both sides watched with relief as U.S. troops detrained at Trinidad, fifteen miles south of the ruined Ludlow tent colony. Miners and militiamen alike turned over their firearms to the federals. The truce did nothing, however, to end the strike—nor did it placate the Rockefellers’ critics.

  IT WAS SOPPY and bleak in New York on Thursday, April 30, a day of chastisement for the Rockefellers. Upton Sinclair left his apartment before nine A.M. and traveled to court for his sentencing. Having eaten only an orange and some ice cream since Monday night, he was “working under high nervous tension.” In front of the magistrate downtown, he rambled and protested so much that the court had to forbid him from launching into any further orations.

  “I had a moral purpose when I went to 26 Broadway,” explained Sinclair. “I wanted to bring home to Mr. Rockefeller the feeling that he is responsible for the murders in Colorado.”

  “You are making a speech,” chided the judge.

  “This is a serious crisis of my life. I am facing a physical breakdown.”

  He so disrupted things that the proceeding, which usually took a few minutes, lasted nearly two hours. For disorderly conduct he was given the choice between paying a three-dollar fine or spending three nights in a cell. Not believing they would dare send him there, he chose prison.

  “I say to you that I will go to jail,” raved the defendant, “and lie there till I am carried out dead, if need be!”

  “All right,” replied the exasperated judge, “if you like.” And, before he quite realized what was happening, Upton Sinclair was being escorted across the Bridge of Sighs, the notorious passageway leading from the courthouse to the Tombs.

  With Sinclair incarcerated, the leadership of the protests fell to Leonard Abbott, who served as a link between moderates and anarchists. He spent Thursday morning in the newly acquired office, a converted bedroom up four flights of shaky stairs. His assistants—the students of the Modern School at the Ferrer Center—scampered around performing chores. On the wall, a warning had been posted:

  IF YOU WANT TO BRAWL OR FIGHT, GO TO COLORADO, BUT DON’T HURT OUR MOVEMENT BY TRYING IT HERE. WE WANT ONLY MEN WHO WILL PLEDGE THEMSELVES TO SPEAK TO NO ONE AND GO QUIETLY WITH THE POLICE IF ARRESTED.

  He told newspapermen that their readers would be amazed if they could hear the names of the prominent citizens who had telephoned during the day to offer donations and support to the Free Silence League. The effort to “send the social chill” to Rockefeller Junior appeared to have the backing of everyone of importance in New York. Even the police department had agreed to give the radicals at least its tacit support. Abbott had spent part of the morning at headquarters talking to Commissioner Woods, who had authorized him to publicize the government’s position: “The city administration considers this a period of intense public feeling, due to the killing of men, women, and children in Colorado. It is the intention of the administration in this crisis to permit the fullest possible play of public emotion through free speech, free assemblage, and free passage through the streets of all persons not engaging in organized parades.”

  “So long as we only wear crepe on our arms and do not display banners,” Abbott elaborated, “we may walk up and down in front of 26 Broadway as long as we want to.”

  Around midday, however, a group of protesters that refused to bind themselves by rules of any kind were beginning their own demonstration. At noon, the anarchists harangued a sodden, angry crowd at their usual setting, the statue of Benjamin Franklin near City Hall. Berkman and Becky ceded the rostrum to Marie Ganz—an East Side anarchist whom the press had dubbed “Sweet Marie”—who stood on a ledge inciting the audience.

  “I haven’t come here to talk about the flag or Mexico,” she began. “I’m going to lead a delegation against John D. Rockefeller, Jr. I want you to come along and wipe him off the face of the earth. I want you to show him that he’s got to take action in the Colorado strike … Follow me!” With a shout, she leapt down to the sidewalk, and, with Berkman and Becky at the lead, began to march down Park Row toward Broadway. Hundreds of rain-soaked demonstrators fell in behind them; scores more joined as they proceeded. With a thousand followers, the anarchists dashed down to Standard Oil headquarters, where the silent mourners were still pacing the sidew
alk.

  Crowds swarmed the front of the Standard Oil Building each day.

  As the police rushed toward Berkman, Ganz slipped through the line of pickets and darted into the building. With a cursed threat, she ordered the elevator operator to take her to the top floor. Bursting in on the startled employees at the innermost sanctum of the corporation, she demanded to see John D. Rockefeller, Jr. He wasn’t in, a nervous secretary stuttered. “Tell Rockefeller,” screamed Sweet Marie, within the echoing walls of the office, “that I come on behalf of the working people, and that if he doesn’t stop the murders in Colorado … I’ll shoot him down like a dog.” And before anyone thought to stop her, she turned and fled back into the elevator.

  Down on the street, Berkman and Becky had found a raised platform, and they were hollering protests at a throng of angry clerks and messenger boys. Shards of wood, paper bags, and sand flew at their heads as the police struggled to hold off the mob. Becky, who had just been released from jail for her disorderly conduct arrest from the previous week, was firing up the audience in her indomitable manner. “A crowd of two thousand gathered, jeering and yelling at her,” a reporter wrote. “Twice the crowd surged forward and swept her and her friends off their perch, but they fought their way back, their voices breaking shrilly through the roar.” Finally, using a cordon of officers as a barrier, the anarchists were able to escape down into the Bowling Green subway station.

  “Sweet Marie” Ganz.

  That evening, reporters visited Upton Sinclair in prison. He paced his small cell on the lowest, most fetid tier of the institution. Finally, he rested on the edge of the narrow cot. “I guess I can sit down,” he said, uncertainly. “The keeper assures me this cell is sterilized.” He had once spent a night in a Delaware workhouse, jailed for playing tennis on a Sunday, but the rancid and filthy Tombs presented a different degree of penance. The keepers had been by with supper, a bowl of stew with some potatoes and bread. “I took one look at it,” Sinclair told the newsmen. “It didn’t interest me.”

  He had been too listless to write much that day, scratching out only two lines of a poem. He languidly watched a slant of sunlight falling across the floor and pulled his overcoat around his thin shoulders. Outside, the rainy morning had cleared into a fine, temperate evening. “Do you know that you have the queerest feeling when you’re locked up?” he said, at last. “Gee! But it’s awful.” Only when his visitors described the riotous antics of Berkman and the anarchists did he recover some of his lost energy. “Oh, dear me,” he exclaimed, “these fools! They kill the whole business.” As the reporters started filing out, Sinclair roused himself for one more blast. “I hope you will give this message to John D. Rockefeller, Jr.,” he called after them. “Tell him I hope he enjoys his meals enough for both of us while I am languishing in jail.”

  Night was falling in midtown when the ruckus out on Fifty-fourth Street brought Abby Rockefeller, Junior’s wife, to her window. The chauffeurs at the University Club, across the way, were being more than usually boisterous. She peered out onto the sidewalk in front of her mansion and saw a group of men marching back and forth before her door. Black crepe ribbons circled their arms, and they wore pins on their lapels that read THOU SHALT NOT KILL. The mourners had come uptown. Reaching for the telephone, she called Arthur Woods and asked that he send over some protection for her and the children.

  When the police hurried over from the Sixty-seventh Street station, they found half a dozen or so I.W.W. men pacing, silent and grim, while onlookers jeered and women taunted them from passing automobiles. Arthur Caron tramped in the lead, his face jaundiced and swollen from the beating he had received at Union Square three weeks earlier.

  “What do you want in this neighborhood?” the detective asked him. “Move along.”

  “I’m here to walk up and down,” Caron replied, without breaking his pace. “And I won’t move on at all.” More police arrived, until the cops outnumbered the protesters. With the orders from headquarters urging restraint, there was nothing they could do. And so Thursday, April 30, ended with Arthur Caron pursuing his lonely demonstration, east and west along the row, scrutinized by the butlers and servants in the mansions.

  “JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER, JR., had yesterday the busiest day he has experienced since the outbreak of the Colorado strike,” declared the Tribune the following morning. “He left a trail of riots, threats and arrests wherever he went.” The next day, which was the first of May—the international workers’ holiday—saw even greater demonstrations: protesters in the public squares, pickets at 26 Broadway, mourners on Fifty-fourth Street, disruptors in Calvary Church, where Junior sometimes led his Bible class. Diffuse anger from months of agitations now converged on one man. Banners in the labor parades accused him of being a “multi-murderer.” Berkman decried him as a coward with a “guilty conscience.” From the West, the president of the United Mine Workers observed that more Americans had been killed in Colorado than in Mexico. “As to John D. Rockefeller, Jr.,” he continued, “his life, in spite of his riches, is empty.”

  Attacks from professed enemies he could withstand, but condemnation was spreading far beyond the usual coterie of radicals. Acquaintances and colleagues spoke out against him. Mayor Mitchel’s administration, which he had done so much to encourage, now acquiesced to his tormenters. Pastors in Manhattan took “Rockefeller’s War” as their text; in Brooklyn, a minister “denounced the outrages against the miners.” Newspapers reveled in his mounting unpopularity. “The suspicion is beginning to grow very strongly,” an editor at the Herald surmised, “that the leaders of the strikers rely on the name of Mr. Rockefeller to win their struggle for them.”

  Throughout the week, demonstrators haunted his home and office. They terrorized his secretary, his pastor, and even his wife. But none, so far, had seen Junior himself. His movements, and the condition of his nerves, became the subject of widely divergent speculation. Sinclair had heard rumors that Rockefeller was sneaking in and out of 26 Broadway through a back door. The family claimed he was bedridden with bronchitis. Certain sources insisted that the “social chill” had not affected him; according to others, he was “seriously troubled by the agitation at his office and elsewhere by sympathizers with the Colorado strikers.”

  In fact, anxious and wounded, Junior had avoided the office all week. On May 1, around noon, he was spotted arriving at Tarrytown, where he spoke briefly with his father, and then retired to his quarters. The next morning, his wife and children joined him behind the walls of the Pocantico Hills estate. Detectives from the William J. Burns agency had been hired to provide extra security; they patrolled the family’s miles of private roads and guarded the gates, accosting anyone who approached. Senior continued playing his habitual round of golf each day, but now he was accompanied at all times by two bodyguards, who “followed him around the course and kept a sharp outlook for strangers.”

  Junior found himself housebound and helpless, reduced to scanning the newspapers each morning for signs of approval—and finding little of it. “He has been much affected by the things said and printed concerning him,” his secretary admitted. Junior himself confessed that “the last two weeks have been trying ones, for no man likes to be blamed and criticized, when he feels that such public censure is unfair and unmerited.” He was mortified to think that anger toward him was inadvertently affecting others. “I profoundly regret to bring so much notoriety and discomfort to the Class and the Church,” he wrote to officials at Calvary Baptist, “and hope that this period of public hysteria may soon subside.” To intimate advisers he admitted the strain he was under. “Those who are closest to us,” he wrote to his pastor, “realize how trying the present situation is, for they know its injustice.”

  Junior’s detractors did not understand the conflict he was suffering. In public, for the sake of Colorado Fuel & Iron, he had to maintain a unified front with his subordinates. He could not be seen harboring critics of the company, and therefore he had rebuffed not just Upton Si
nclair but official union delegates, congressmen, the secretary of labor, and the president of the United States. His press statements reiterated the testimony he had given to Congress. It was the same official position that had been passed down from management: The company treated its workers generously, most employees had no interest in joining the union, labor agitators were responsible for most of the violence. But Bowers, who had always patronized him, had been lying to him as well, and Junior was catching on.

  Privately, Rockefeller attempted to ameliorate the situation in the coalfields. The telegram he had sent to Bowers before the massacre ordering him back to New York had arrived too late. Then, in the immediate aftermath of the assault on Ludlow, he had probed suspiciously at Bowers’s crafty omissions concerning the battle. Now, with hatred pouring in on him, Junior kept seeking for a moral policy. He wanted to accept the government’s offer to arbitrate the strike. Bowers refused. When Rockefeller broached the idea of sending “disinterested men” to serve as mediators, Bowers replied that “such a scheme would be most unwise.” Distraught by what he was reading of the violence, Junior’s thoughts turned to the sufferers. IF IT IS TRUE AS REPORTED IN THE PAPERS THAT ANY OF OUR EMPLOYEES HAVE BEEN INJURED IN THE RECENT DISTURBANCES, he cabled to Colorado, I TRUST THAT YOU HAVE ALREADY TAKEN STEPS TO PROVIDE FULLY FOR THEM AND THEIR FAMILIES. This last telegram was simply ignored.

  Bowers had one care: to defeat the strikers. The struggle, for him, had grown beyond an industrial dispute. He believed himself to be the leader of the “conservative, level-headed, patriotic business men of the country” in their crusade against “labor union agitators” and “the political muckraking rabble.” Each gesture toward mediation, every suggestion that reforms were necessary—even an offer to reimburse the victims—was an admission of error that would harm the company’s efforts to vanquish the union. Once the miners had surrendered, then and only then would it be appropriate to assess managerial practices. Until that time, unwavering support was necessary.