by Thai Jones
When he was eighteen, Caron left home for a disastrous stint in the navy. As a low-ranking landsman he had served aboard the Constellation, a training vessel stationed in Newport Harbor. The stern discipline had not been to his taste. He was cited repeatedly for “leaving ship without permission” or for returning late from shore leave; a third of his time in the service was spent in hospitals getting treatment for gonorrhea. After fourteen months, to everyone’s relief, he was declared “unfit for service” and discharged.
A civilian once more, Caron remained in Rhode Island and found success. His studies at home qualified him for positions above the mass of laborers; he served as an inspector at the Providence Engineering Works and as an expert mechanic at the Alco automobile factory. His social life thrived as well. He made a reputation as an athlete and married a woman named Elmina Reeves. After a few years they were ready to start a family, and on December 2, 1912, their son, Reeves, was born. Arthur’s fortunes crested here. The child was significantly premature, and three days after its birth, the mother died. Leaving the fragile newborn with his in-laws, Caron returned to the crowded house in Fall River and an unskilled job in a cotton mill.
Since the time he had first entered the factories as a teenager, Caron had been a believer in trade unions, but he had never been the sort to demonstrate or to rant against the owners. His hope had always been to join the managerial class. Back on the work floor again, he came to identify more strongly with his fellow laborers. And in 1913, when I.W.W. locals in Fall River campaigned for higher wages, Caron involved himself with the protests. He did not officially join the Wobblies, but he became known to the police as an agitator. At the height of the conflict, he had gone to City Hall to request a permit to speak in public—much as he would later do in Tarrytown—and when his appeal was denied, the Boston Journal reported, Caron had “made a veiled threat to the effect that his organization would ‘get’ the mayor.”
As a result, he lost his job and fell out with his family. He drifted to Boston, seeking employment, and then arrived in New York City sometime during the winter. Of course, there was no work there either. Despite years of effort and tantalizing moments of promise, he had failed to escape a toiling life. As winter worsened, he sank even lower than before. It had been months since he had held a paying position. Jobless, homeless, and hungry, he stayed at the University Settlement House on the Lower East Side or slept on the street. Some nights, his friends let him use a mattress on the floor of their apartment, on the top story of a tenement on Lexington Avenue at 103rd Street.
Arthur Caron.
Dark and broadly built, he was “about six feet tall” with a well-knit sportsman’s frame. High cheekbones and “a slightly dark complexion” added credence to the rumor of his Indian ancestry. He had a wide, unself-conscious smile that he showed frequently, despite the setbacks he had suffered. “Caron,” a Tarrytown Daily News reporter observed, “appeared to be a jolly, good natured fellow and was continually cracking jokes.” Upton Sinclair thought him “the most level headed and intelligent chap he had known in a long time.” Those who knew him only in passing rarely noticed anything other than this cheery first impression. Trusted comrades observed the other side. To them, he confessed certain details of his past. The stories changed in the telling and retelling, but always they centered around the death of his wife, the loss of his son.
These deeper resentments revealed themselves through his actions. He courted, and even craved, danger. It was a rare protest that did not feature him among the most froward participants. When Craig Sinclair, who had taken a motherly interest in his well-being, warned him against these risks, he had replied, “I made up my mind sometime ago that they would kill me before they got through. I am prepared for whatever happens.” Since March, he had been a leader of the I.W.W.’s Conference Committee of the Unemployed and a frequent orator at Anti-Militarist League meetings across the city. More recently, he had spent much of his spare time with the revolutionaries of the Ferrer Center, and even that bunch was sometimes taken aback by his militancy. “His views were far more extreme than mine,” claimed Marie Ganz, the woman who had stormed into 26 Broadway threatening to murder Rockefeller Junior. “He was a pronounced anarchist who preached the most extreme views.”
Certain themes came up again and again in his speeches. He despised the idea of begging for a reformer’s handout. “If you wanted anything,” he’d say, “the way to get it was to go and get it.” For the authorities, he felt a hatred born of hard experience; nothing pleased him more than provoking an officer of the law. He would point to the men on duty at his rallies and sneer, “When St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland they all came over to America, and from them the breed of policemen were derived.” The cops who thrashed him at Union Square had not been acting at random. “Believe me, when they were clubbing me, they were out to get me,” Caron explained. “When they caught me with Joe O’Carroll and their clubs began to come down on my head they knew what they were about.”
No foe roused in him the kind of hatred that he harbored for the owners of Standard Oil. “‘To hell with Rockefeller!’ was the sentence on which most of his explosive spirit would spend itself,” an audience member recalled. “Caron would flare up till his cheeks and forehead were flaming red upon the theme of Rockefeller.” Week after week, he urged himself to escalate the demonstrations. Dissatisfied by Sinclair’s pickets at 26 Broadway, he had moved the protest to West Fifty-fourth Street, and then pressed on to Tarrytown itself. “Of all the young men and women who came into public notice during the Union Square riots,” a reporter for the Times observed, “Caron was noticed for a constantly growing aggressiveness.”
But the effort came with a hard private cost. He was hungry and tense. All his emotional and physical stamina poured into his work, and the exertions left him shattered and empty; after making his speeches, he would slink down from the soapbox in exhaustion. His wounds had been poorly tended to and misdiagnosed. In between trips to Tarrytown, he checked himself into Lebanon Hospital, where doctors discovered that his nose was broken and infected from neglect. By late May, Marie Ganz was shocked to find him “wild-eyed, haggard, ragged,” and looking “as if he had neither slept nor eaten for days.”
CARON HAD PROMISED to return in force to Tarrytown. But days passed, then a week, and nothing came of it. Rockefeller Senior tested out a system of flashing electric lights that would warn him if any trespassers approached, but so far it had not been put to use. Downstate, where New York City was also enjoying a lull from its troubles, the respite allowed the mayor a chance to manage his critics. To hardliners who believed he had given too much leniency to dissent, he had, in advance of the Veracruz memorial, offered some arrests and a tougher stance against provocations. Confronted by those who believed “no night-stick government is needed in New York,” Mitchel had hedged. He favored tolerance that stretched only so far: harshness, but only as needed. “While it is necessary sometimes for the police to use a certain amount of force in overcoming violence,” he elaborated, “the Police Commissioner and I will stand unalterably against the use of any more force than is absolutely necessary to prevent crime and overcome violence.”
Since February, the radical agitation in New York City had adapted and changed emphasis repeatedly. First, there had been Tannenbaum and the unemployed raids on the churches. Berkman and Edelsohn had then shifted the focus to the conflicts in Mexico and Colorado. Finally, Sinclair and Caron had directed these energies at Rockefeller Junior. The Mitchel administration had responded early on with a persecution that had merely spread the troubles. Taking charge of the police in April, Arthur Woods had attempted more humane methods. But with the Ludlow Massacre occurring just weeks after his regime began, the anger of the demonstrators had not been assuaged by a few signs of tolerance. The mayor had then sought a middle course, one that would not satisfy the radicals but that largely placated his critics among the city’s businessmen and newspaper editors.
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The success of these maneuvers was shown during Alexander Berkman’s latest “monster mass-meeting” at Union Square. When the day came, “the afternoon was balmy, and every bench in the park was occupied. Yet, with all the favorable circumstances, Berkman brought fewer than 200 sympathizers,” and the assembly “was a tame affair in which most of those present soon tired of the oratory and yawned back at the speakers.” Detectives Gildea and Gegan looked on lethargically, and even Becky Edelsohn made an oration that “was much less radical than on former occasions.” Affairs were even more demoralized for the Industrial Workers of the World. Local 179—Tannenbaum’s own chapter—had sunk back to its former languor. “About a dozen come to the weekly business meetings now,” a member confided to Frank in prison. “The Sunday meetings, held indoors, were so poorly attended as the warm weather came on that we are giving them up.”
The moment seemed bleak, but at least the Industrial Workers of the World had people talking. The head worker at the University Settlement, where Caron often stayed, had been impressed by the Wobblies he had seen. “Compared to the Bowery type of hopeless ‘down and outs,’ the leaders of the I.W.W. are intellectually keen and are even red blooded,” he said, “and since their purpose was to get publicity they may be said to have been a ‘howling success.’” But with the recent malaise in radical circles, this had become a minority view. “They were after publicity, and they got it,” editors at the Tribune admitted. “If that is the measure, they were a success. They are the most ingenious self-advertisers in the world, though they have some clever imitators in Upton Sinclair and Bouck White. But aside from self-advertising what did they accomplish?” Victor Berger, the Socialist congressman from Wisconsin, passed through New York and was besieged by questions about the local agitation. “The whole affair is absolutely foolish,” he replied. “It has been an instance of fanaticism run mad. There is no reason why the Rockefellers should be afraid. They are being assailed only by some crazy, overheated, excited people, who want to talk their heads off, but who have neither desire nor intention to do anything else.”
Bill Haywood was the only one able to move beyond criticism to analysis. In April, Berkman’s broadsides had brought thousands of demonstrators to Union Square; a month later, the anarchists were able to draw only a few hundred listless disciples, and Big Bill knew the reason why. “With the clubbing came the converts,” he explained, “and after there was no more martyrdom there were no more additions to the ranks.” The Jacobins, in other words, could not succeed without an obstinate ancien régime to oppose them.
BY MAY 30, Arthur Caron was through waiting for his permit. With eleven others, including Becky Edelsohn, he took the circuitous ride northward, hopping off the trolley onto Main Street, Tarrytown, around nine P.M. It was Saturday night, but the byways were quiet and mostly empty. The group walked down Orchard Street to Fountain Square, the traditional site over the years for revival meetings and Salvation Army drives, where a few residents were enjoying the warm evening. No one really paid much attention to Caron as he stalked from the sidewalk out into the middle of the street, deliberately set up a soapbox, and then stepped on top of it. The others clapped as he rose, to attract attention.
Main Street, Tarrytown.
“Did you ever hear the wail of a dying child and the wail of a dying mother?” he cried out. “They were murdered in Colorado while the American flag flew over the tents in which they lived, and the murderer was John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who lives in this—” and, before he could finish his sentence, a police officer dragged him from his perch and into custody. “No sooner did Caron’s feet touch the ground,” a witness wrote, “than another member of the band stepped up on the box, only to descend even more quickly than Caron, with the assistance of another policeman.” Becky was next. She managed to say, “The only thing John D. Rockefeller ever gave away was oil to burn the mothers and babes in Ludlow,” and then she too was seized. One and then the next, each anarchist was detained in turn, until all twelve had been arrested. Placed together in two cells, the eleven men immediately made themselves a nuisance. “They began to sing boisterously and kept time by pounding on the iron bars with any implement they could lay their hands on.” No one in the neighborhood could get to sleep for hours. “This is a stale joke,” remarked Becky when she was led into the little-used women’s lockup and introduced to her cellmate: She’d be sharing her quarters with the police department chicken.14
Berkman arriving in Tarrytown.
Alexander Berkman didn’t linger when he learned the fate of Caron’s party. Gathering a dozen others with him, he rode north the next morning, May 31, and arrived in Tarrytown at one P.M. Having come to agitate, he had no trouble getting the locals swarming. They awaited him at the train station and chased him with jeers and threats, hustling him ahead whenever he paused. The anarchists ended up wandering for several hours in search of a place to gather. “They kept protesting all the time that they had the right of free speech and intended to exercise it.” But onlookers and police had no notion of allowing this. Berkman was chased from Tarrytown to North Tarrytown and back; he and the others were shoved and antagonized. And if a radical answered back, the officers took the chance to tackle, punch, and arrest him. Over the course of the day, three additional anarchists were seized. With his forces dwindling, Berkman called for aid. Twenty more men hurried up on an evening train, but by then the mob had lost patience. Unconstrained by the police, the locals attacked. “What followed,” thought a reporter, “looked like a scrimmage between half a dozen football elevens. Men were swept from their feet and kicked and stepped on.” It was ten P.M. before the authorities were at last able to calm their own neighbors enough to reinstate some order. Berkman and the others were paraded to the station and forcibly loaded aboard a southbound train.
Becky Edelsohn under arrest.
The village courtroom was hushed and tense when Caron, Edelsohn, and the rest of the original twelve agitators were brought in for their arraignment that evening. Officials had been working for hours on their case; most of the men in town, and all twelve members of the police force, had been on duty for days without a break. Clerks consulted in whispers with attorneys; spectators slumped exhausted across the benches. No one spoke. “This is a solemn occasion,” Becky said, breaking the silence. “I would like to borrow a handkerchief from some kind soul to weep on.”
“Becky—” called a reporter, with some query.
“My name is not Becky to you,” she snapped back. “It’s Miss Edelsohn.”
The sheriff noticed a book she was carrying—Beyond Good and Evil— and asked who the author was. “It’s by a well-known convict,” she hissed. And after that, no one else asked her any more questions. When the town justice informed the defendants that they had been charged with “disturbing the peace, blocking traffic and endangering the public health,” Miss Edelsohn leaped up in a fury.
“What do you mean charging us with blocking traffic, when you haven’t got any traffic in this town to block?” she demanded. “This whole charge is fictitious and a gross lie. There ain’t enough people in this town at nine o’clock to block anything. You would have to come here at two o’clock in the afternoon and then you would find half the town asleep.” As for the accusation of threatening public safety, she had some choice words on that matter, too. “My God! Endangering lives!” she said, as the court officers swapped nervous looks and shrank into their seats. “You endangered lives of our men by locking six in a cell. And you placed me in a lockup which you used as a chicken coop. Why don’t Tarrytown build a hencoop of its own? But we don’t expect any better justice in this town, which is owned by John D. Rockefeller.”
The defendants refused to have attorneys appointed, demanding to be returned to their cells; they would make the village accommodate them until the trial. The vision of eleven noisy anarchists banging on the bars night and day was not a good one for the sheriff. But the prospect of s
pending more time with Miss Edelsohn—the “tarter” with “an awful tongue,” as a local reporter described her—went far beyond evil. Pleading inadequate accommodations, the police decided to transfer their prisoners to White Plains, the county seat. At midnight, relieved townsfolk watched as five automobiles, carrying the agitators, disappeared down the dark roads and out of sight.
CLUBS HIT HEADS WHEN I.W.W. RAIDS J.D.’S “OWN TOWN” was the big headline in the World on the morning of June 1. “Twelve I.W.W. agitators in jail, Alexander Berkman sent back to New York with his gang of anarchists; the whole police force of Tarrytown on continuous duty for twenty-four hours,” called the Sun. “This, in brief, tells the story of the most riotous night and day this Sleepy Hollow country has ever known.” Nearly a century had passed since Washington Irving had chosen this area as the setting for his stories. “A drowsy, dreamy influence,” he had written in 1820, “seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere.” Since then, the New York Central Railroad tracks had tied the village to the city, and some parts of the main street had been paved with brick. But otherwise, residents liked to think that little had changed. “Our people retain their old Dutch conservatism,” the editor of the local newspaper proclaimed. “We are a steady people.”
In fact, the countryside had been transformed by arriving “nomads of wealth”—flourishing industrialists in search of a place to homestead. They were drawn by the proximity to Grand Central Station, as well as the area’s reputation as “an unwavering Republican stronghold.” The Rockefellers had claimed the choicest parcels, but they were joined by Goulds and Beekmans until Tarrytown was believed to be “the home of more millionaires than any other town of its size in America.” These families were perceived as generous benefactors—they had dedicated schools, churches, and roads to the community—and now that they were under threat from outsiders, most residents were inclined to repay their generosity. “Public opinion is with Mr. Rockefeller. It has little sympathy with the ‘mourners,’ “reported the local paper. “No Capitalist that ever lived … was ever more of a parasite upon society than this crew of hoodlums and blasphemers who preach a gospel of riot and murder in the name of labor.”