More Powerful Than Dynamite

by Thai Jones

  As the president’s meditation continued, the carriage turned right onto Canal Street, the main thoroughfare through the Lower East Side. The security detail scanned the crowds with special vigilance. Because of the recent protests in New York, Wilson’s advisers had pleaded with him to avoid the parade. But he had seen it as his duty and insisted on participating. Now the procession was entering the tenement districts, which harbored so many “avowed enemies of government.” Rutgers Square, Mulberry Bend: These were the places where the radicals congregated. For weeks, anarchists and Wobblies had denounced Wilson and his imperialist adventure from these very streets. Factories and shops had let their workers out to view the spectacle, and the sidewalks were filled. The Secret Service men were tense, focused.

  The crowds had not expected to see the president, and it took a few moments for them to realize that he had come among them. As the fact registered, the reverent silence that had endured since the early morning finally was swept away. Cheers and huzzahs grew to such a pitch, a reporter noted, that “the demonstration took on almost the appearance of a gala day, instead of one of mourning for the nation’s dead.” Where Canal Street intersected with the Bowery, the youngsters of the Crippled Children’s East Side Free School clapped and shouted, “Hurray for the President!” In the carriage, Wilson busied himself acknowledging the accolades and seemed to momentarily forget his reverie. Then the cortege climbed onto the Manhattan Bridge and processed again in silence.

  A million New Yorkers had watched the coffins travel for two hours through downtown, and thousands more awaited them at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The president took his place on a reviewing stand along with Mitchel and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, assistant secretary of the navy. Commissioner Woods and his team of detectives surveyed the crowds anxiously for agitators. The seventeen flag-covered caskets were laid in a row on an improvised bier in front of the dignitaries. The sun parched the hard-packed parade ground; the president removed his hat and gloves, and “with head uncovered, stood looking down upon the scene with grave face.”

  Woodrow Wilson had previewed this scene in his mind long before it had come to pass. He had anticipated the concern and confusion he would feel if he ever was required to serve as a wartime commander in chief. Now “his strong voice trembled, and once it nearly broke” as he shared his emotions with the audience. “For my own part,” he said, “I have a singular mixture of feelings. The feeling that is uppermost is one of profound grief that these lads should have had to go to their death, and yet there is mixed with that grief a profound pride that they should have gone as they did, and if I may say it out of my heart, a touch of envy of those who were permitted so quietly, so nobly, to do their duty.” The dead, at least, had been spared the trauma of being president. “I never went into battle. I never was under fire,” Wilson said, “but I fancy that there are some things just as hard to do as to go under fire. I fancy that it is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shooting at you.” Such had been his lot as critics had called on him to take action against the nation’s southern neighbor. In the end, he had ordered these men into combat, but he had not done so until he had assured himself of the full propriety of their mission. “We have gone down to Mexico to serve mankind,” he explained. “A war of aggression is not a war in which it is a proud thing to die, but a war of service is a thing in which it is a proud thing to die.” The decision to expose American troops to peril had been agonizing. The consequences—these caskets before them—were appalling. But it had not been in vain.

  Veracruz victims crossing the Manhattan Bridge.

  He stepped back from the rostrum. A marine rifle squad offered volley after volley in salute, and the crowd began to disperse. From a nearby barracks, a dozen telegraph machines keyed the president’s closing sentiments to the nation.

  “As I stand and look at you to-day,” Wilson had concluded, “I know the road is clearer for the future. These boys have shown us the way, and it is easier to walk on it because they have gone before and shown us how.”

  A Film with a Thrill

  They filed inside the Lyric Theatre, on Forty-second Street, passing beneath the stone marquee and into the cool of the lobby. Up toward the balcony climbed the fifteen-cent-ticket holders; the rest, having paid a quarter, proceeded to the orchestra. Inside, the plastered walls and ornate ceiling were hued in rose, cream, and gold. The house lights flickered down. Murmurs from the settling crowd were replaced by the clicking of a motion-picture projector, and then General Pancho Villa and his rebel army charged into view up on the screen. Cameramen had braved “more or less constant fire for twelve days” in Mexico to bring this film, The Battle of Torreon, to American audiences. It was an unflinchingly “grewsome” depiction, showing falling soldiers, burning corpses, devastated villages—and all authentic. The premiere, on May 10, coincided with the memorial to the Veracruz dead. Banking on the warlike yearnings of the paying public, theater managers hoped to sell out two matinees and two evening shows a day.

  New York had become a city of filmgoers. The Lyric and its competitors catered to fashionable audiences near Times Square. Jewish garment workers congregated in the airless halls on Houston Street, families from northern Italy jammed the auditoriums around Bleecker Street; down on the Bowery, “chance-met” crowds consisted of any stranger who could spare a nickel. For the millions who worked twelve-hour days and then had nothing but a tenement flat to come home to, the motion pictures were a precious refuge. “Outside, the iron city roared,” a patron recalled. “Before the door of the show the push-cart venders bargained and trafficked with customers. Who in that audience remembered it?” One by one, playhouses were converted into movie theaters. “Above Fifty-ninth street there is not a legitimate theatre that survives,” a columnist for the World discovered. “On One Hundred and Twenty-fifth street, where there were four, they have all surrendered to the movies.” The process would continue until vaudeville and the melodrama had been eclipsed, and a thousand screens flickered in New York from morning till midnight.

  The Battle of Torreon.

  Nearly a quarter million viewers attended screenings in the city every day, and many observers feared the moral repercussions of the “moving-picture evil.” The district attorney claimed that crime was rising in proportion to the popularity of Black Hand films. “It is not a rare sight to see boys and girls engaged in mimic ‘hold-ups’ on the street,” complained a spokesman for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. “These shows are sinks of iniquity!” a magistrate declared. “Ninety-five per cent. of them ought to be closed.”

  But there were others among the respectable classes who believed that films could be just as useful in teaching virtuous habits as they had been detrimental in the spread of vice. Compared to other amusements, these activists argued, the cinema was relatively wholesome. “The moving-picture show cheers, but does not inebriate,” wrote the editor of the Fra magazine. “It never gives you that dark-brown taste the day after, nor a headache and that tired feeling.” However evil the onscreen action had become, it was hardly more vicious than the bawdy trash that graced the Broadway stage. “There is to be said in favor of the moving picture,” a skeptic was forced to concede, “that as yet such rank productions as ‘The Girl from Rector’s’ … have not found their way to any alarming extent into films.”

  Produced by private foundations and philanthropic organizations, movies urging moral and spiritual improvement became common in the city’s theaters. The Edison studios released Children Who Labor, a dramatization of the dangers of factory work. Productions depicting the hazards of crossing busy streets were created by the Safety First Society. Religious leaders—including Reverend Parkhurst, Schmittberger’s old patron and a leading campaigner against vice—commissioned cameramen to shoot biblical scenes in the Holy Land. Hope spread that the balance had turned to favor good. “Not always, when gay and frivolous youth flocks to the moving-picture show, can you say that i
t is going merely to pass an idle hour and watch some too-too thrilling drama of wild adventure,” an advocate of uplift pictures exulted. “Sometimes the young people have their minds improved even as their pulses are stirred.”

  And then the White Slave films appeared.

  The Inside of the White Slave Traffic premiered at the Park Theater, on Columbus Circle, in December 1913. Advertisements implied that it would be yet another of the new reform-minded movies. Endorsements from reputable civic groups were prominently displayed outside the box office. Posters proclaimed that it had been “produced from actual facts” and based on the “observations of a former US government investigator.” But despite these trappings of probity, audiences were ravenous to see it. And that surely was suspicious. “Long lines of men and women and of the youth of both sexes wait, day and night, at the box offices,” a reporter wrote. Even with five shows daily, and an auditorium that could seat nearly two thousand patrons, hundreds had to be turned away.

  “White slavery”—the kidnapping of women into prostitution—was a titillating subject indeed for a motion picture. The issue had been a persistent fixation ever since a McClure’s article in 1911 had identified New York as the center of an international trade in young girls. Newspapers and magazines had followed with salacious stories of abduction in which immigrant girls were surreptitiously drugged, placed in captivity, and sold into a life of sexual servitude. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had chaired a grand jury inquiry into the subject, and when it failed to reveal any evidence of an organized conspiracy, he had founded his own research foundation, the Bureau of Social Hygiene, to continue the investigations until the truth could be discovered.

  The whole thing was fatuous, radicals pointed out, founded in the inability of puritanical philanthropists to imagine that one could become a prostitute through any means other than trickery. “What is really the cause of the trade in women?” Emma Goldman asked. “Not merely white women, but yellow and black women as well. Exploitation, of course; the merciless Moloch of capitalism that fattens on underpaid labor, thus driving thousands of women and girls into prostitution.” But no one listened. Politicians and religious leaders mobilized around the issue; the Presbyterian Church claimed that more than a hundred thousand girls were trapped in the nation’s brothels against their will. And when the Bureau of Social Hygiene finally released its findings, it concluded—unsurprisingly, though again without proof—that the commerce in flesh was “a hideous reality.”

  The Inside of the White Slave Traffic claimed to be an exposé of the social evil. “A film with a moral,” its backers claimed. “A film with a lesson. A film with a thrill.” Skeptics were not convinced, and when a social worker attended a showing, she found her suspicions confirmed. Rather than condemning the ills of prostitution, the movie appeared to glamorize the life of a fallen woman. Three fourths of the audience was male, and the prurient crowd, far from being edified by the events on the screen, instead “seemed to gloat over the horrors portrayed.” Opposition spread. The Board of Censors decried it as “an illustration of the white slave traffic, thinly veiled as an attempt to educate the public.” From pulpits and editorial columns came denunciations; the film, a rabbi told his congregation, had done “nothing more than stimulate an unwholesome and morbid curiosity instead of driving home a moral lesson.”

  Protests against the movie climaxed just before Christmas, when a Saturday-afternoon showing was abruptly halted by the arrival of half a dozen detectives. Crashing into the auditorium, they confiscated the film reels and arrested the entire staff while the crowd shouted in protest. It was priceless publicity. “The advertising the so-called white slave films have been given through the efforts of the police to suppress them,” reported the World, “has resulted in extraordinary attendance.” The next day there were eight screenings instead of the usual five, and thousands jammed the sidewalks in front of the building, “surging in and out of the doors of the theatre in increasing volumes with each succeeding exhibition.”

  The controversy sparked a genre; within weeks, audiences were choosing between Traffic in Souls, The Exposure of the White Slave Traffic, The House of Bondage, and Smashing the Vice Trust, while further elaborations were “coming thick and fast.” Each followed the same formula of phony reformism. Smashing the Vice Trust advertised a fictitious endorsement by Reverend Parkhurst. And when one of the others purported to be based on the findings of Rockefeller’s Bureau of Social Hygiene, Junior issued an outraged public statement of denial.13

  MONTHS LATER, in April, Rockefeller again found himself victimized on screen. At the height of the Ludlow crisis, in the week before the massacre, a family friend alerted him to a movie, By Man’s Law, which was screening at “a horrid place” in the Bronx. “The object of the picture,” the correspondent wrote,

  seems to be to make the ignorant people hate the name of Rockefeller, and it succeeds well, for the people were all hissing,—of course the name of Rockefeller is not mentioned, but it represents the “oil magnate” cold and cruel and merciless, who sends the cost of oil up higher and higher, and then smiles while the people kill each other in a labor strike. There is also a son who is interested in philanthropy and social reform, so I don’t think there can be any doubt as to whom the picture means to represent.

  Junior was convinced that the movie had been released in order to capitalize on the crisis in Colorado. “Would you kindly look into the matter for me,” he wrote to one of the researchers for the Bureau of Social Hygiene, “and if you find the pictures as represented, see what can be done looking toward the discontinuance of the films?”

  The answer was nothing. Junior had no recourse but to suffer this indignity along with all the others being tossed upon him.

  The White Slave pictures, at the crescendo of the scandal, had been earning more than $5,000 apiece in weekly box-office receipts. From New York they went on a national tour, generating outrage—and profits—nearly everywhere. By comparison, The Battle of Torreon, depicting the Mexican war, had fallen flat. Though the film represented something truly new—the first attempt by cameras to capture a modern conflict as it occurred—audiences were unimpressed. A two-week run at the Lyric netted little more than half of the anticipated revenue. The picture was pulled and future installments canceled. Reality was just not dramatic enough; long shots of distant maneuvers, no matter how authentic, could never compete with the studio-made war stories, where the action could be captured in close-up, down to the anguished grimace on a dying soldier’s face. This was the new vérité of war.

  7.

  A Sleepy Little Burg

  Arthur Caron rode to Tarrytown alone on Friday, May 22. Down near the railroad tracks, a few clapboard tenements housed the village workforce. Trudging up steeply rising streets, he was soon passing tidy brick storefronts and prosperous-looking commercial buildings. Then—and it didn’t take long—he was on tree-lined paths flanked by the Gothic and Queen Anne homes where local professionals raised their children. After less than a mile, he was in a countryside not of farms but of estates. High walls stood on either side of the road, hiding secluded mansions belonging to some of the wealthiest families in America.

  Accustomed by now to this route and no longer so awed by the scenery, Caron again approached the gates to the Pocantico Hills property. This time, he made a careful survey of the defenses, probing for entry points and vulnerabilities. With the Free Silence pickets abandoned in the city and New York authorities meting out revengeful sentences, he was scouting other means to pressure the Rockefellers. He had briefly mulled a plan to hold a mock funeral march, complete with hearse and coffin, on the road to the estate. But it had proven unfeasible. Now, after a few hours’ investigation, he was convinced it would be equally impossible to trespass on the grounds. He strolled back down to the village and called on the local authorities. At each office, he requested permission to hold a meeting in the public square. These applications were denied—agitators were not welcome in Tarrytown—
and Caron departed in defeat.

  He promised to return, however, permit or no, to instigate in Westchester County the same sort of free-speech fight that he had led down in Union Square. Caron’s imagination teemed with grand ideas, but his visions never manifested themselves quite as he had planned. In April, he had urged the unemployed to order meals in restaurants and then leave without paying. Nothing had come of it. Then there had been the mock funeral. And now this proposed mass invasion of Tarrytown. So far, few of his schemes had amounted to much of anything. Looking back at his life to date, none of his dreams, really, had come out as he had hoped.

  Arthur Caron was thirty years old. Born to French-Canadian parents, he claimed to have American Indian ancestry on his mother’s side. As a boy he had lived in New York State up to around the turn of the century, when the family moved to Fall River, Massachusetts. It was there he received his initial experience of industrial labor. Fifty miles south of Boston, with a population around one hundred thousand, Fall River was the “Queen City of the Cotton Industry,” the “Manchester of America.” The Caron home, on Thomas Street, stood near a cluster of factories where Arthur, and many of his seven siblings, soon found work. Most children in the community left the classroom following the fourth grade to take jobs as bobbin boys or sweepers. Deciding this was not the life he wanted, Arthur determined to better his condition. After his ten-hour shift at the cotton mill ended, he would drag himself to a commercial night school to study engineering, and then finally stagger home and lose himself in his books.