by Thai Jones
Junior might have acted on his growing doubts. He could have admitted his mistakes, confessed to having been misled, and set about redressing the wrongs that had been committed in his name. But he did not. Betraying his own better judgment, he relapsed into nervous tension and wiled away his days petulantly griping about the treatment he was receiving in the press. “To describe this condition as ‘Rockefeller’s war,’” he complained, “as has been done by certain of the sensational newspapers and speakers, is infamous.”
In order to painstakingly—obsessively—follow the coverage, he had all the New York dailies forwarded to his sickbed in Tarrytown. Grateful for compliments, he wrote one editor to thank him for his paper’s “fair and broad-minded” reporting. He congratulated Adolph Ochs, publisher of the Times, for an editorial on labor unions. But he was just as quick to protest against any perceived offense. When the World published a few critical pieces, he was particularly upset. “I tried to get you on the telephone today but was informed that you were away,” Junior wrote Ralph Pulitzer, the publisher, who was an old friend.
I simply wanted to inquire whether the editorials regarding the Colorado situation which appeared in the WORLD of this morning, and one or two previous editorials of a somewhat similar tenor, represent your views and were published with your approval. In view of the pleasant relationship which has existed between us I can only assume that these editorials have been written without reference to you and have escaped your notice, for I cannot believe that … you could have authorized the editorial of this morning.
Pulitzer’s response could not have been what Junior had expected:
I have always felt it my duty to accept responsibility for what appears on the editorial page of “The World”. In view of the pleasant relationship which you mention, I will depart from this principle to the extent of saying that had I written or edited the editorials to which you refer, I would have qualified one statement of principle and would have modified certain expressions which might have been construed to contain personal animus, but with these amendments the editorials would have expressed my own views regarding the Colorado situation.
When he was done examining the newspapers, Junior found comfort in the correspondence arriving daily from friends and strangers across the country. “I wish to tell you how deeply … I sympathize with you in your present position—Be patient,” wrote Andrew Carnegie. A note from Oswald Garrison Villard, publisher of the Evening Post, began, “I hope you will let me say how genuinely I have sympathized with you in the annoyances of these past weeks, and that I admire the dignity and self-restraint with which you have borne yourself.” And then there were the letters from supporters he had never met. Most began by apologizing for the intrusion, and many came around to ask for a job. Junior read each one, marking his favorite passages in pencil:
I feel that every man in the Country should write you a short note, congratulating you on the stand you are taking in relation to the strike in Colorado.
Don’t be distressed by those crazy anarchists, etc., who threaten you. Right is right, and will conquer in the end.
What this country needs is a few more Americans like yourself + no more “Americans” of the Sinclair, Edelsohn + Ganz type.
Ahead of all this trouble is the issue of God vs. Anti-God …
I am prepared to assert that all the labor unions in the United States, including the I.W.W., with the exception of the railroad orders, are controlled by the Order of Jesuits …
* * *
Times Square was lonely and forsaken at 7:45 in the morning on May 3, when Arthur Caron met the six anarchists who were to join him for a day’s excursion. The empty theaters and cabarets were shuttered and dark. At the newsstands, the headlines had to do with Colorado and Mexico, or the previous day’s suffrage parades. Stepping down into the station, the little group rode the Broadway subway to its northern terminus in the Bronx. From there, a fifteen-cent trolley fare carried them past the hamlets and farmsteads of Westchester County. At eleven A.M., they disembarked in Tarrytown.
It was Sunday morning, and the sidewalks were packed with families on their way to church. The party asked passersby for directions to the Rockefeller estate, and curious stares followed them as they went. A few blocks took them from the village center onto a quiet country road. The rural setting, and the sunshine, put the leader in a jovial mood; Caron kept up a steady patter of encouragement as they made the two-mile walk. Then the great iron gate to Pocantico Hills emerged into view. The anarchists fell quiet, their eyes following the walls that disappeared from sight in both directions. The estate was enormous, far more imposing than they had imagined.
The great iron gate to Pocantico Hills.
Patrolling automobiles noticed the approaching group before it had reached the gates. Workmen scrambled to lock and chain the entrance. Guards hustled over. They scowled through the iron bars, while others crouched, heavily armed, behind nearby hedges. Junior’s children were called in from their play; pausing for a moment to stare at the protesters, their anxious nurses shooed them on. The radicals did not say a word. In the drive, they paused to tie black crepe to their arms—one woman affixed a card to her hat that read I PROTEST AGAINST THE MURDERS IN COLORADO—and then they started marching with the same “slow, steady tramp” that had resounded across the city.
“We came up here to-day to worry Rockefeller and we have him worried,” Caron told the newspapermen who had come along. “It is a peaceful demonstration, but we intend to keep it up every day. Tomorrow we will have double the number, and we will follow Rockefeller wherever he goes. We have him thinking.” For two hours, they continued their mourners’ march, and then they trudged back into town for an ice cream soda before beginning the long trip home.
The next day, every gate at Pocantico Hills was locked and guarded, and Rockefeller Senior, was laying plans to construct a new main entrance to the estate: It would be “one of the most pretentious in the country,” and utterly unassailable to invaders. Armed men tailed the children in their play. Detectives and workmen patrolled the perimeter, but no I.W.W. assault materialized. Instead, Caron had gone to 26 Broadway to take his turn among the mourners, explaining that he had postponed his next visit to Tarrytown until he could raise a larger corps of volunteers.
Released from the Tombs and eating again, Upton Sinclair was crafting plans of his own. He sent telegrams to leading socialists across the nation, suggesting they add their protests to the New York agitations. THERE ARE BRANCH OFFICES OF STANDARD OIL IN EVERY TOWN, he cabled to party officials in all the major cities. CANNOT YOU OR THE NATIONAL EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE RECOMMEND THAT MOURNING PICKETS APPEAR BEFORE THESE OFFICES? CANNOT ALL SOCIALIST LOCALS PUT CREPE BEFORE THEIR DOORS? The answer came back: No. “The Socialists here are decidedly tired of this cheap clap-trap of Sinclair’s,” a party secretary informed reporters. “They know it is the quiet work of organizing that counts and never this self-advertising noise. Sinclair’s noise is his own personally organized affair, and we have nothing to do with it.”
Without national support, the ardor drained from the movement. When it rained, the makeshift office became a jumble of drying lines crowded with musty, sagging garments. Hostile passersby shoved mourners to the ground. Businesses complained that the protests were hurting commerce. The granite silence from 26 Broadway persisted, and Junior kept out of sight. “You may judge that it was rather a dull day,” a reporter joked midweek, “the loquacious-lipped and prolific-penned Upton Sinclair didn’t issue a single voluminous statement, and the fair but fiery Marie Ganz didn’t make a solitary murder-threat.” Derision poured in from everywhere. “Why should the authorities of New York interest themselves in trying to prevent Upton Sinclair from his ‘silence’ strike against young Mr. Rockefeller?” asked the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “The more silence there is around Mr. Sinclair’s neighborhood the larger the relief to the rest of the country.”
After a few more days of this, Sinclair decided he was “t
hrough with the Free Silence mourning.” It had been intemperate, perhaps rash, to think he could be of service here in New York. He could do more good in Colorado. On Saturday, May 9, he boarded a train for Denver at Pennsylvania Station, leaving his wife and the others to carry on—or not—as they so pleased.
On Sunday, Leonard Abbott disbanded the organization. “The reason there is no more need for the Free Silence League,” one leader explained to the public, “is that the Anti-militarist League, headed by Alexander Berkman, and the I.W.W. forces, headed by Arthur Caron, have taken hold so successfully that we may as well drop out.” But Craig disclosed the true motivation to her friends. She feared the movement was plunging toward bloodshed; not a day passed without at least one visitor appearing at her apartment door, asking her to “give them some job of violence to do.”
The Rockefellers had decided to abstain from Sunday services for a second week in a row, but the pews at Calvary Baptist Church, on West Fifty-seventh Street, were crowded on May 10 with a congregation boasting “the wealthiest and most influential people in the city.” Conspicuous among them were detectives Gildea and Gegan and a squad of plain-clothesmen. As the final notes of the organist’s prelude faded off, the pastor stood at the lectern to announce the text of his sermon: “Samson, the Man of Sunlight, the Man of Tact.” But before he could continue, a middle-aged gentleman in a white suit bounded from his seat and hurried toward the altar. “I am here to speak the truth,” he called out. And then a gang of ushers grabbed him by the arms and began hustling him up the aisle toward the exit. Slipping their grasp, he clung to the back of a pew. They pried at his fingers as he thrashed and kicked. Parishioners shrieked. “I want you to let me speak,” he cried, “so that I can tell you about one member of your congregation who is guilty of the murder of women and children in Colorado.” They pulled him loose, and he stumbled to the floor. As he struggled, his scattered followers rose to their feet and shouted—“Let him speak!” “Shame!”—while the rest of the audience cheered the ushers with cries of “Put him out!”
On the street outside, the disruptor’s white suit was torn by police as he and ten supporters were manhandled into waiting vans. At the Forty-seventh Street station house, he identified himself as Bouck White, a Harvard graduate, author, and founder of the Church of the Social Revolution in Greenwich Village. It was as a fellow man of God that he had risen to challenge the pastor at Calvary Baptist. As a socialist and Christian, he had hoped to redeem the wealthy congregation with a message of poverty and brotherhood. Hundreds of fervent acolytes gathered in the courtroom for his arraignment. When the magistrate released him, pending trial, they threw their hats in the air and hoisted him on their shoulders, rapturous with joy.
For White, the foray into the temple had been a holy mission. “The real God of the Bible,” he explained, “is on the side of the workers and the poor, against the privileged class at the top.” But for most observers, his antics indicated yet another escalation in a months-long series of radical outrages. Allusions to the Haymarket Riot and the Paris Commune began appearing frequently in the press. “Have we not had almost enough of the I.W.W. agitation in this peace loving city of New York?” asked the editors at the Sun. “Is it not time that means were found of stopping malignant provocation to riot?” The Herald offered simple remedies—“A quick application of nightsticks, a proper use of the patrol wagon”—and posed a provocative question: “Is Mr. Mitchel a Mayor or a mouse?”
Arthur Woods had theorized that promoting civil liberties would prevent eruptions of violence: agitators would exhaust themselves with words, instead of pursuing more inflammatory tactics. After a triumphant beginning, this doctrine now appeared more tenuous with every protest action. The invasion of Calvary Church discredited any standing it retained, and Mitchel moved to distance himself from his commissioner.
“Mr. Woods’s ideas on the subject of free speech are known to be extremely liberal,” a reporter explained, “considerably more so than those of the Mayor, who believes that ‘incitement to crime is not free speech.’” For Mitchel, the time for social experimentation was done. “You cannot handle with kid gloves” an occurrence like the attack on Calvary Church, he declared. Radical provocations henceforth would be met with “vigorous methods.” The noonday meetings at the Franklin statue, which had instigated such nuisances over the previous weeks, were banned. Mourning marchers on West Fifty-fourth Street were detained. Marie Ganz was arrested and given sixty days in the Queens County Jail; it took a magistrate only twenty minutes to sentence Bouck White to six months on Blackwell’s Island.
The severity of these measures was partly due to the imminent arrival of the president of the United States. Just a few days after presiding over his daughter’s marriage to the secretary of the treasury, Woodrow Wilson was coming to the city for a memorial service honoring the casualties of the Veracruz invasion. The attention of the entire country would be fixed on the ceremony. For the Mitchel administration, it was a chance to demonstrate the capacities of honest and efficient government. The agitators hoped it would be the perfect occasion to foist their grievances on a national audience. To prevent this, Woods and Schmittberger made elaborate plans for security. By the morning of May 11, the city’s worst troublemakers had been locked away, and New York was as secure as the police department could make it.
THE GATE TO Pier A, in Battery Park, scraped open at nine A.M., and a squad of marines placed the first coffin onto an artillery wagon and draped it with a flag. Spectators clutched their hats to their chests. Warships in the upper bay stood silent; skiffs and tugs in the rivers refrained from the usual bawling and whistles. Sixteen more caskets followed, and when they had assembled, the parade commenced. Mounted policemen led the way, followed by the honored dead and then Wilson, somber and introspective, in an open carriage. Thousands upon thousands of onlookers filled the Broadway sidewalks “from curb to building line.” Up above, they thronged in the windows and crowded the rooftops. Police in dress uniform were stationed every twenty feet. At the Standard Oil Building, the officers lined up shoulder to shoulder. Security agents had observed the demonstrations out front of 26 Broadway for days, and as the president’s carriage approached, “there was a visible increase in the vigilance of his guards in that troubled zone.” Then it was behind them, and there had been no incident.
Business was suspended at the cotton and produce trading floors, the curb market, and the New York Stock Exchange. At the Equitable Building, construction workers paused in their riveting; high up on the steel frame, they gripped the bare girders with one hand and doffed their caps with the other. No one had known beforehand whether or not the crowd would cheer. The answer was now apparent. “The roll of muffled drums,” a reporter wrote, “the soft tread of feet, the gentle tap-tap of the horses’ hoofs, and the rumbling of wheels were the only sounds.” The bell at Trinity Church tolled as the procession neared Wall Street, then St. Paul’s joined in. But the spectators maintained their quiet witness.
Mayor Mitchel, in top hat and formal attire, was waiting on the steps to City Hall as the horses appeared in the plaza. Hundreds of school-children offered a hymn of mourning. The mayor approached a podium, and the singing stopped. “The people of New York pay their solemn respect to these honored dead,” he began. “These men gave their lives not to war, but to the extension of peace. Our mission in Mexico is not to engage in conquest, but to help restore to a neighboring republic the tranquility and order which are the basis of civilization.” When he had finished, Mitchel advanced with long strides forward into the quiet square and set a wreath of orchids on the coffin of a nineteen-year-old seaman from Manhattan.
The choirs took up a new song as the mayor clambered into the president’s carriage. Seated there, he appeared even younger than usual. The military spectacle had him fired with a craving for action and sacrifice, and his excitement made it difficult to maintain the proper dignity. In contrast, Wilson—wearing a pince-nez, and with wispy gray hair p
rotruding beneath his hat—had a haggard look. “The President was silent and very grave,” a reporter observed. “His square jaw was set … and his eyes were misty.” He had toiled through months of personal anguish before ordering the marine expedition to Veracruz, and now he faced the awful results of that decision. With thoughts of death upon him, he congratulated the mayor on his fortunate escape from assassination. Then he relapsed into somber introspection. The leaders of the two largest governments in the United States rode up Centre Street together, past the Tombs, without a word.
The invasion of Veracruz had not lived up to the president’s hopes. Never imagining that the Mexican garrison would resist American incursion, he had expected his troops to be greeted as liberators and friends. Instead, it had taken three days before the city was pacified, hundreds of civilians had been killed, and Wilson was being cursed as an aggressor throughout most of Latin America. The statue of George Washington in Mexico City had been pulled from its pedestal and dragged through the streets. Stunned by the response, the administration retreated from any plans involving further, prolonged occupation.
The president and mayor shared an open carriage during the procession.
The greatest shock for Wilson had come at the news of the American casualties. Back in March, he had worried over the impact of combat on the sweethearts and relatives of the stricken boys; now he had to confront the reality of his fears. “The thought haunts me,” he confided to the White House physician, “that it was I who ordered those young men to their deaths.” Determined to take responsibility for what had occurred, the president had called a press conference to personally announce the results of the fighting. “I remember how preternaturally pale, almost parchment, Mr. Wilson looked when he stood up there and answered the questions of the newspaper men,” a witness recalled. “The death of American sailors and marines owing to an order of his seemed to affect him like an ailment. He was positively shaken.”