by Thai Jones
Having read for months about the radical uprisings down in the city, the citizenry was primed for panic. “Unrest among the so called Industrial Workers of the World, anarchists, and other kindred organizations has never before been pitched to such fever heat as now,” the Tarrytown Daily News had recently informed subscribers. “The anarchists have never had fuller sweep in their scope of murderous endeavor in any country or in any city than they are now being given in New York.”
Terrified that these ordeals were soon to be visited on their own hometown, the local authorities lost all composure. The police chief swore in fifty deputies and outfitted them with clubs. The fire chief attached hoses to the hydrants, so that water could be pumped onto the protesters. The menfolk promised to tar and feather any outsiders and then dump them in the river. Volunteers watched the roads into town. Observers positioned themselves at the railroad station and the hotels, accosting every stranger who arrived. Paranoid reports of invading Wobblies came from all quarters: Twenty had been seen approaching from the south, they would mob the jails, they were sneaking in one by one. When Berkman suggested that he and his followers would come and slumber outside in Fountain Square, the town disfigured its own streets with a thick coat of asphalt. “They may sleep on that if they care to,” a policeman laughed as he surveyed the mess with satisfaction, “but there’s no telling when they’ll get up.”
The radicals responded with threats of their own. Berkman described a regiment of mad anarchists—from the northwestern timberlands, the Rocky Mountain coalfields, the city ghettos—that would march, unstoppable, on Sleepy Hollow. “Threats of bloodshed or ducking do not alarm us,” he said. “We have been treated in Tarrytown worse than Russian Cossacks treated serfs. If any one made disorder there it was the police, not our people. The Constitution is greater than any village ordinance, and it guarantees to every man and woman the right of free speech. We mean to have this even if it costs blood and imprisonment and the peace of the Rockefellers.” While his army coalesced, he wasted no opportunity to rile the city farmers of Westchester County. In Mother Earth, he wrote:
A tiny village on the Hudson some twenty miles from New York has been placed on the map within the past two weeks and is now as well known as Trinidad, Col. This sleepy little burg is a suburb of one of John D. Rockefeller’s estates and hitherto has been known only to commuters from Poughkeepsie and Ossining on their way to New York. The Anarchists and some members of the Ferrer Association have suddenly thrust fame upon this unoffending village by trying to hold meetings under the shadow of the town pump.
The marauding anarchists, and the panicky residents, had brought the village a notoriety it had not wanted. “Tarrytown is the laughing stock of the country today,” a local editor complained. “Commuters who go to New York told us last night that they don’t dare say they are from Tarrytown. New Yorkers who know them jeer and boo them. It is a pretty spectacle!” From afar, the city papers showed unbecoming glee in seeing another community undergo the troubles with which they had become so familiar. “It is impossible not to sympathize with the people of Tarrytown in their aversion to having their town made the rendezvous and forum of this I.W.W. riffraff,” wrote an editor at the World. “Everybody has a right to a peaceful life, liberty from noisy mountebanks and the pursuit of sleep—if he can get away with it.”
A week earlier, the Mitchel administration’s policy of limited tolerance had brought the radical cause to a frustrated impasse. The press had lost interest. Attendance lagged worse and worse at every protest. All of this was now reversed. The anarchists, with the unintended assistance of the Tarrytown authorities, had discovered the perfect platform for their agitations. Only thirty miles north of Union Square—but a world away from the jurisdiction of Commissioner Woods—Arthur Caron had found his Bourbons.
The Tarrytown train station.
* * *
WORKMEN AT POCANTICO HILLS reported glimpsing “a pale and haggard” Rockefeller on the occasions when he left his father’s mansion. The chances to see him were rare; he had hardly strayed more than a few hundred feet from the house in weeks. He had spent years meticulously landscaping the grounds, choosing the fountains and statuary, making the gardens into places of comfort and introspection. With Caron and his threatened anarchist militia expected hourly, that serenity had vanished and the family estate had become a militarized encampment. Four guards, armed with automatic pistols, were stationed at every gate; rifles were stacked and ready in the guardhouse. Sixteen of Tarrytown’s new special deputies were posted to Pocantico Hills on rotating twenty-four-hour shifts. Burns detectives loitered in the shadows.
Letters continued to appear, and not all of them offered solicitous encouragement:
You fooled us last Sunday + the Sunday before but you wont fool us much longer we will get you & your father yet Maybe next Sunday in Tarrytown, Yonkers, or wherever you go look out.
I.W.W.
Dear Sir,
I have fully made up my mind to assassinate you … As I am an expert rifle shot I guess I can pick you off regardless how many detectives or guards you have around you …
Yours, A Sufferer of Capital
These were filed away, or passed on to the Burns investigators. But letters from sympathetic strangers could be just as upsetting. People he had never met offered to commit violence in his cause. Several writers offered unsolicited advice, almost all of it corrupt and repellent. A businessman informed Junior that he was on the verge of purchasing Century—“the most influential, and in many respects the greatest, magazine in the country”—and in exchange for Rockefeller financing, he could promise sympathetic coverage of the Colorado events. “There is such tremendous pressure brought on writers just now to inflame class hatred,” the author explained, “that it might be worth while to have a big sane organ voice the truth.”
Another proposition came from Isaac Russell, the New York Times correspondent who had drawn the unwelcome assignment of insinuating himself among the protesters. “As a reporter for the Times,” he clarified, apologetically, “I have had, of course, to keep in close touch with all the various groups who have created disorder hereabouts for several months.” They, in turn, had come to accept him. Considering Russell a friend and “an honest man,” Upton Sinclair had even entrusted him with secret correspondence divulging some of the future plans of the Free Silence League. Now the reporter forwarded this document to Rockefeller. “I have not shown the letter to anyone,” Russell wrote to Junior, “and I shall never tell anyone that I have sent it on to you.”
After all these months of passively accepting the facts that Bowers presented to him, Junior had finally lost faith in the Colorado executives. He began to cultivate alternate lines of intelligence, receiving telegrams from trusted sources in Denver that gave a more critical view of the operators’ actions. But when he tried to go further—to take positive steps toward reform—his colleagues blocked him. They absolutely would not condone anything that could undercut the company’s position while the strike persisted. Rockefeller had the idea of sending Raymond B. Fosdick, a researcher for his Bureau of Social Hygiene, to make an unbiased study of living conditions in the mining camps. “I feel quite strongly about this,” he insisted, “and hope the idea may commend itself to the rest of you.” His jaded subordinates tactfully killed the plan. “My first instinctive reaction was one of doubt as to the wisdom of this suggestion,” replied Starr Murphy, his attorney. “I feel that the fight has got to be fought out to a finish. When it is finished, I should cordially favor an investigation and a report with a view to vindicating the Company if the facts justify it, or as furnishing a basis for reforms in future if the report shows changes to be necessary. But that will have to be deferred until the present fight is won.”
Of all the unsettling communications he had received, none spoke more closely to his deepest concerns than a note from the secretary of the interior—one of the many officials who had tried, and failed, to convince Junior to step
out from behind the actions of his counselors. “I am very sorry,” the letter began. “I believe that I have urged you to a course that in the future your conscience and your intelligence will commend as the only wise one. I have spoken to you as your friend: There is no man who can decide for another what his personal course should be. Your ideal of yourself, not as a maker of money but as a doer of good, should determine every time your course of action without respect to what your advisers say.” But while Rockefeller was unwilling to ignore the iniquities of business, he was equally unable to intercede against the executives of Colorado Fuel & Iron. He let his integrity dictate his choices, but not to the point where they could affect his father’s interests. By refusing to make the hardest decision, he had sentenced himself to an existence of subterfuge and violence. For someone who honored probity and candor above other virtues, this was hardly a life at all.
Which is why it was such a relief to meet Ivy Lee. A southerner just a few years younger than Rockefeller himself, Lee had graduated from Princeton and attended Harvard Law School. He then worked as a reporter in New York before switching careers and revolutionizing the field of corporate publicity. He was currently engaged on a campaign for the Pennsylvania Railroad, but the Rockefeller account was too plummy to pass up. “I feel that my father and I are much misunderstood by the press and the people of this country,” Junior said to Lee during an interview on June 4. “I should like to know what your advice would be on how to make our position clear.” Junior had corresponded with several fast-talking public relations men in recent weeks, and he had been perturbed by their willingness to manipulate and mislead their targeted audiences. Lee, the drawling gentleman, deprecated the use of lies, or paid advertisements masquerading as news stories. No publicity, he argued, was ever so effective as the truth. “This,” an ecstatic Rockefeller replied, “is the first advice I have had that does not involve deviousness of one kind or another.” Lee was immediately retained at the fee of a thousand dollars a month.
Ivy Lee.
“Desiring as I do that you should understand some of the ideals by which I work,” Lee wrote to Rockefeller a week later, “I am venturing to inclose you a manuscript copy of an address I delivered before the American Railway Guild in New York some weeks ago.” Lee’s speech presented the outline of his philosophy of public relations. Crowds did not reason, he argued, but were guided by symbols and stories. There was no point in offering in-depth statistics, since the majority of Americans would be convinced by a few choice tidbits. Reduced to its simplest expression, he practiced “the art of getting believed in.” Strongly denouncing the publication of outright lies, he suggested a more nuanced approach: “We should see to it that the public learns the truth in all matters, but we should take special pains to see that it learns those facts which show that we are doing our job as best we can, and which will create the idea that we should be believed in. We must get so many good facts, so many illuminating facts, before the public that they will overlook the bad.”
Putting these ideas into practice in the coal controversy, he submitted for approval Bulletin No. 1, in what would be a series of weekly pamphlets stating the truth—as Junior wanted it to be. “It is of the utmost importance that every American citizen should understand what has really been going on in Colorado,” the publications explained. “The facts have been beclouded with unusual venom.” The leaflets were to be “dignified, free from rancor, and based as far as possible upon documentary or other evidence susceptible of proof.” Several key passages each week were underlined in black:
In the present issue we are not opposing or waging a war against organized labor as such.
The issue in Colorado has ceased to be, if it ever was, one between capital and labor.
Shall government prevail, or shall anarchy and lawlessness rule?
Junior quickly gave his endorsement, and Lee prepared to distribute the document to a catalogue of “thoughtful people” he had compiled. His list contained eleven thousand entries, including “about 3,500 newspapers, all members of Congress, all members of state legislatures, the mayors of all cities having a population of over 5,000, teachers of economics in colleges, and … every one whose name is mentioned in the latest issue of ‘Who’s Who in America.’ “Lee’s plan relied on convincing these people. “It is thought that by sending these leaflets to a large number of leaders of public opinion throughout the country,” he wrote to Rockefeller, “you will be able to get certain ideas before the makers of that public opinion which will be of value.”
But it was not enough to print the truth and then broadcast it widely. The bulletins needed to appear trustworthy. Recipients were not to realize that these reports had been composed by a publicist at 26 Broadway—the pamphlets had to come from somewhere else. “This publicity work on behalf of the operators,” Junior wrote to an executive at Colorado Fuel & Iron, “while even more important in the East, as things now are, than in the West, must, of course … emanate from Denver. All of the bulletins and other matter which Mr. Lee is suggesting will be mailed from Denver.”
And so Rockefeller set out to spread the truth.
* * *
UPTON SINCLAIR HAD gone to Denver to get a firsthand view of the strike zone. All it took was a few days in Colorado and he had already been denounced by the governor as a “prevaricator” and an “itinerant investigator.” He had also managed to instigate a feud with local journalists as well as the Associated Press. “What next fool thing will Upton Sinclair do to get his name in the newspapers?” asked a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. “He comes perilously near being a pest.”
Undaunted, he traveled to the mining districts, toured the ruined camps, and talked to anyone who would talk to him. The professionals and society folk he met described their anxieties during the previous months. “It was touch and go—like that!” a lawyer told him, snapping his fingers. “We almost had a revolution.” The stories he heard from the miners and their wives kindled in him the same sort of ache he had felt, years earlier, for the workers of Packingtown, in Chicago. Once again he was determined to pressure Rockefeller into admitting his sins. “About a month ago I addressed a letter to you on the subject of the Colorado strike,” Sinclair wrote to Junior in late May.
At that time I had only hearsay evidence concerning the situation; but now I have been upon the scene, and have talked with scores of victims of the crimes that have been committed. I have met a mother who was made a target for militia bullets while she dragged her two children away from the blazing village of Ludlow; another whose three children were left behind to perish in that inferno. It seems to me as if the air I breathed were full of the smoke of powder and the scent of burning human flesh; as if my ears were deafened with the screams of women and children.
Sinclair returned to New York and replaced the defunct Free Silence League with a new organization that operated out of his apartment. Pausing momentarily in his protests, he assisted in a screen adaptation of The Jungle. The author was certain that his venture into the movies would be a success, especially since he would be appearing on screen, playing himself, in a sort of prologue to the feature. He was already spending, in his mind, the millions he would earn; it was left for Craig to make sure he did not do so in actuality. The film ended up being banned in Boston, and though it ran for a few weeks in New York City, the company went bankrupt and the Sinclairs never saw a penny.
Catching up on events, he found the city newspapers bursting over the latest agitation. “Edition after edition appeared, each one with new alarms upon the front page,” he recalled. “The I.W.W. was marching upon Rockefeller’s town from all over the United States! The anarchists were plotting bombs and assassinations! The authorities of Tarrytown had hired fifty special officers, each armed with a hickory club and two loaded revolvers!”
For once, the itinerant investigator hesitated. This frenzy was even greater than the furor over the mourning pickets, and after the scathing abuse he had received during the previ
ous weeks, Sinclair feared to involve himself in Westchester County. “One had to be reckless as to his reputation,” he reflected, “when he meddled in that story.” Furthermore, he and Craig were destitute and exhausted, and his wife felt they had done their duty. “We had let the public know what was wrong,” she argued, “and now surely it was up to the public to protect its own free institutions.” But Sinclair could not bear to miss a chance to involve himself. He went to Tarrytown and demanded free speech. When the village authorities refused him the streets, he made them promise to find a private auditorium in which to hold his meeting. The owners of the Union Opera House and the Music Hall refused to rent to the radicals, and so Sinclair enlisted a wealthy village resident—Mrs. C. J. Gould—to let them use her lawn. The Tarrytown Daily News attacked him relentlessly, turning on its own local officials anytime they acceded to his requests. But he was no longer willing to play the victim. One morning, the editors of both local newspapers found themselves under arrest: Upton Sinclair had sued them for libel.
On June 6, he traveled to Tarrytown to see the trial of the twelve imprisoned anarchists as a correspondent for the Appeal to Reason. Caron, Edelsohn, and the others had spent the previous week in the White Plains jail. “To read the accounts of the arrested agitators, you would have thought they were maniacs or wild beasts,” Sinclair wrote. “They howled and made pandemonium in their cells. They cursed and reviled God, and the Pope, and the chief of police of Tarrytown.” Facing a year in prison, as well as $500 fines, the anarchists enlisted Justus Sheffield, who had represented Frank Tannenbaum, to conduct their defense. The attorney managed to gain a series of postponements that delayed the trial for a month. In the meantime, Berkman had scrambled to gather money for bail. On June 8 he handed twenty-four hundred-dollar bills to the village officers, and the twelve inmates were released.