by Thai Jones
“But you can bet we’re coming back,” Becky informed the spectators who tailed them from the jail to the station. “We are going to show them in Tarrytown that we can hold meetings there in spite of their old police force. We’ll answer violence with violence … It’s a matter of principle now.” They rode the Harlem Line down to Morrisania station in the Bronx, where scores of anarchists were waiting to cheer their arrival. Then a rowdy impromptu parade took them to the Ferrer Center, where the freed agitators were greeted to a triumphant welcome.
Nothing so far had occasioned the sort of exposure that the anarchists were earning from their Tarrytown protests. “The most astonishing situation in the history of the United States exists in Pocantico Hills,” the Day Book of Chicago asserted. “Thirty-six dollars and seventy-five cents have one billion two hundred million eighty-nine thousand dollars surrounded, blockaded and balked … John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in the world, and his son, John D., Jr., are today as close prisoners in their estate as are the convicts in Ossining penitentiary.”
The standoff made headlines in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Olympia Daily Recorder, and the Aberdeen Daily News, leading to a national debate over civil liberties. “The right of free speech is guaranteed under the constitution,” an editor at the Grand Forks Herald conceded, before continuing on to say, “but there is another right that is inalienable, and that is the right of silence. If a man enters your house and wants to talk to you, and you do not want to hear him, you tell him so.” While few went so far as to cheer the anarchists, there were observers everywhere who demanded they be given an opportunity to express themselves. “What these spouters were and what they spouted is immaterial,” argued a writer for the Memphis Commercial Appeal. “They may be either fools or patriots; they may be forgotten tomorrow or have statues erected to their memory a hundred years hence. The important fact is that they have been denied their rights.”
For Arthur Caron personally, none of the publicity was more satisfying than an article Sinclair had written for the June 20 issue of the Appeal to Reason. The author described a vaguely familiar person: a young man who had happened to be in Union Square in April, when he had witnessed the cops attacking some protesters. “He was a boy with no idea whatever about radical matters,” Sinclair explained. “He had neither read nor thought about the class war. But he saw this outrage and from pure human sympathy rushed forward, crying out in protest. Instantly two policemen fell upon him, and began to club him. They did not stop until they had laid him out insensible. They broke his nose; and they also opened his eyes.” This character, naturally, was Arthur Caron himself, or at least the version Sinclair had chosen to see. Despite all his empathy, the author was an appalling failure at judging others. But even for him, this characterization of his fellow radical as a naïve youth was absurd. “Caron told me that he did not know whether he was an anarchist or Socialist,” Sinclair continued, “because he had had no time to find out what either meant.” For the actual Caron, the episode was an absolute joke. He carried the article in his pocket when he attended protest meetings and showed it around to his comrades, laughing at the portrayal.
TWO WEEKS HAD passed since the prisoners had left the White Plains jail and returned as heroes to New York. Their trial had been rescheduled for early July, and the village police assumed that was when the next demonstration would occur. The new tar in Fountain Square had dried. The deputy policemen had returned to their civilian jobs. There had been so many false reports that nobody took seriously the dispatch on June 22 that the agitators were coming. But when the six P.M. local from Grand Central arrived at Tarrytown station, eighteen radicals stepped down onto the platform. At first they loitered, seemingly without a plan, but then the 8:20 train arrived and another forty or so disembarked. No more hesitation. The sixty anarchists marched with swift strides up Main Street, singing “The Marseillaise” and gathering a following of vengeful residents.
“Like the minute men of’76,” a reporter wrote, “Tarrytown’s harassed villagers went forth to repel the foe.” A crowd of five hundred men trailed the demonstration as it turned left on Broadway, passed the village president’s flower shop, and then veered again onto McKeel Avenue. There they paused in front of a narrow strip of lawn that formed the right-of-way for the old Croton Aqueduct. Technically, this was New York City property, and it was here that the anarchists intended—at last—to hold their meeting. The mob around them knotted tighter, an enraged semicircle, with a band of automobiles forming the outer ring. Berkman grabbed a soapbox and positioned it under the glow of an arc lamp. When he climbed on top of it, the chief of police shoved him down, but then another anarchist leapt up and the outnumbered officer hurried off for reinforcements.
Becky Edelsohn was the first to try and speak. She rose and held up a hand for silence, which prompted a chorus of jeers.
“You cowards!” she cried. “You curs!” A man in the front of the throng hurled sand in her face. Then a second handful hit her in the mouth, and she choked. And finally dirt was heaped on her from three sides, and Berkman had to hold his hat in front of her eyes to protect her. “She held her place for twenty minutes,” a witness wrote, “and made a plucky fight against the hoots of the crowd and the charge of sand and sod thrown at her.” When she stepped aside, at 9 P.M., Berkman himself took her place on the platform. The mob had reserved their best ammunition for this moment. “We demand the right of free—” was as far as he could get before a squall of rotten eggs, cabbage, and tomatoes flew toward him. Sods of dirt struck his face and yolks covered his clothing and ran down into his collar as a stone knocked him down from his perch into the arms of his comrades.
Then Arthur Caron stepped up. The halo from the street lamp marked him out against the night, while his persecutors all were masked by darkness. As he spoke, the taunts resumed in even greater torrents. “Caron has a strong voice,” a reporter for the Tarrytown Daily News observed, “and when he began shouting the jeers of the crowd could hardly drown his voice so the owners of automobiles, which were stopped in the street, began tooting their horns and the din could be heard blocks away.”
“I was born on American soil,” he began.
“How do you like this soil?” came the response, as a sod clump struck his mouth. “This marked the beginning of a bombardment,” a newspaperman wrote. “From every part of the crowd came missiles. There were eggs, many of them; stones, vegetables, clods of dirt, sticks, and uprooted sod.” The police stood by, making no effort to intercede.
“I have Indian blood in my veins,” Caron shouted in the midst of the onslaught, “and you cowards who are throwing this dirt are traitors to the flag.” At that moment, a stick smacked him in the jaw, broadside on. Bleeding from his mouth, livid, he continued defying the mob until Berkman and the others dragged him—unwilling, resistant—from the box. They had accomplished their goal of bringing free speech to Tarrytown, in spite of itself, and now it was time to get out. The anarchists filed from the aqueduct property and headed for the station, while the police strained to hold off the throng. “We want Berkman!” they cried. “Let us have him!” “Lynch Berkman!” It took only a moment for the mob to loose themselves from restraint. One concerted rush bowled over both the anarchists and the police. “The Crowd swarmed around like bees.” A passing trolley had its windows smashed. Berkman was separated from the rest, pinned against a wall, and beaten until the cops came to his aid. Then he and the others were all hustled down the hill to the station.
Hundreds of rioters packed the platforms and filled the nearby streets; passing trains skulked by to avoid the spectators who spilled out onto the tracks. Finally, the 10:50 southbound local crept up to the far end of the platform, and two rows of policemen, with clubs drawn, faced down the onlookers while other officers shoved the anarchists into the smoking coach.
“Go back to New York where you belong,” the locals crowed.
“We’ll be back again,” shouted Becky, still defiant, as the
locomotive jolted forward.
Then they were in the quiet of the car. Berkman’s clothes were torn and ruined, his face smudged with dirt. Becky’s eyes were red and swollen from the sand, her dress “a yellow Niagara” of egg drippings. “Caron was the most severely injured,” a reporter wrote. “His jaw was badly cut and his lips were so swollen he could hardly talk.”
THE NEXT MORNING, some were in the mood to gloat. “The anarchists who have been howling for any opportunity to air their views in Tarrytown had an educational experience when they took the police by surprise on Monday night,” editorialized the Sun. “They succeeded in coming face to face with the plain people and they learned exactly what the plain people thought of them.” But a writer for the Times better understood what he had witnessed. Most previous demonstrations had merely “defied John D. Rockefeller, Jr.” Some had called “for a peaceful agitation for free speech, others for a radical movement, but the leaders usually were restrained from going as far as they liked.” This latest escalation by the anarchists represented something new. There could be no reconciliation after such a battle.
Safe and Sane
Returning from work on the evening of June 22, inhabitants of New York’s Lower East Side discovered a pamphlet with the words FOR YOU on the cover awaiting them at home. Inside, the pages were filled with practical tips for better tenement living:
Don’t Throw Things Out the Windows.
The man who bathes every day works better, and can earn more money than the man who doesn’t.
DON’T PUT THINGS DOWN THE TOILET. Use it only for what it is intended.
DON’T KEEP LODGERS. If you are keeping lodgers get rid of them as soon as you can.
The Police are Your Friends.
YOU CAN COMPLAIN if there are bad women in the house who entertain many men callers in their flat and who make their living in an immoral way.
Don’t spit on the floors.
A back page featured a photograph of a Tenement House Commission inspector in full uniform. “The inspector is your friend,” explained the accompanying text. “He is paid by the city to help you to have right conditions to live in … If you hinder him or do not tell him what is wrong, it is your own fault if the house is not fit to live in.”
Moralizing tracts had been common for years, but unlike most previous broadsides, “For You” was printed and disbursed by a municipal agency—the Tenement House Commission—instead of by a private philanthropy. Tammany mayors had left uplift to others; Mitchel and his aides held the opposite belief, that “the greatest social worker of them all should be the government of the city.” The pamphlet, which experts hoped would eventually reach every poor family in the metropolis, was a modest preliminary advance toward an essential shift in the relationship between authorities and citizens. Residents would find their elected officials taking an ever greater interest in the details of their lives. The booklets were a prelude of intrusions to come.
And this was only one of the initiatives taking tangible shape in New York. After six months in office, Mitchel and his cabinet leaders were advancing their plans in every field. Katharine B. Davis had filed a proposal to expand the city’s correction facilities by constructing a “skyscraper jail” for women in Manhattan, as well as a Disciplinary Building on Riker’s Island that could quarantine anarchists and other troublemakers from the common inmates. Commissioner Kingsbury’s indignation had not diminished since his first days on the job. Investigating municipal clinics, he had discovered “shocking conditions of overcrowding”: Sick patients were sleeping on benches and stone floors, and in one hospital he had ordered the immediate termination of the entire executive staff. Arthur Woods had reorganized the Detective Bureau, bringing back a “plain clothes patrol system” much like the one he had developed in the previous decade under Commissioner Bingham.
With these reforms in progress, Mayor Mitchel turned his attention to the looming crisis of Independence Day.
THE CARNAGE OF the holiday was proverbial. Life magazine’s “Fourth-of-July” lexicon, published in late June, hinted at the state of affairs:
ORATION — A disclosure as to the identity of the greatest, grandest, biggest, noblest, finest country on earth.
PARADE — A line of patriots, banners, small boys and canines filling in the space between one Sousa march and another.
AMBULANCE — A vehicle for the transportation of the scraps and remnants of Master Willie and Little Harold on the Fourth of July.
FINGER — A fragment of small boy used as a projectile for a toy cannon.
Since 1903, when the Journal of the American Medical Association began keeping statistics, celebrations of the Glorious Fourth had claimed a calamitous toll. In that time, firecrackers, Roman candles, skyrockets, and pistols had killed nearly two thousand people and wounded another forty thousand more. Infected lacerations led to “patriotic tetanus”; stray bullets felled unlucky bystanders; little boys lost fingers, or eyes, to defective fuses; small girls were immolated when their dresses caught fire. What was supposed to be a national celebration of higher purpose had deteriorated into an “annual carnival of noise, smoke, and bloodshed.”
There was once a time, respectable New Yorkers imagined, when things had been different. The “Old-Fashioned Fourth” had been a country affair, with the village green packed with heavy-laden tables, and orators who could really make the eagle scream. These simple joys had been sacrificed to the cities, where the laboring masses—foreigners, for the most part, unfamiliar with American customs—used the holiday as an excuse for lawless rioting. By the 1890s, “going away for the Fourth” had become axiomatic; wealthy families fled the crowds, and the holiday found the prosperous districts deserted. Each year it was the same. “There was more or less biff, zipp, sputter, and bang all over the city from early morning until late at night,” a reporter wrote around the turn of the century. Animals panicked at the noise; humans coped by stuffing their ears with cotton. After a particularly lawless rendition, the Times editors complained, “A bombardment could scarcely have had a more disastrous effect in shattering the nerves of nervous people.”
At last, a countrywide agitation arose to reclaim the nation’s birthday. Endorsed by such luminaries as John D. Rockefeller and ex-president Taft, the Safe and Sane movement grew into a great campaign, with a national organization and steering committees in every state. To prevent injuries and restore order was only part of the point of these efforts. “Quite aside from the matter of safety,” explained writers at the American City, “a saner method of commemorating our Independence Day has become necessary because of the coming of the nations into our life.” The holiday could become an educational tool to inculcate immigrants with native traditions. Promoting a revival of the “Old-Fashioned Fourth,” the reformers replaced explosions with concerts, speeches, and athletic competitions. Women’s clubs and civic societies promoted the idea. A two-act play toured theaters, and The Sane Fourth, a film that dramatized the fireworks evil, was “doing well over the whole moving-picture circuit.”
The Safe and Sane July 4 offered reformers yet another way to improve society.
Twenty cities held Safe and Sane celebrations in 1909; two years later, the number had risen to 161. Cleveland, Saratoga, Providence, Racine, Tacoma all sponsored their own versions. The future seemed promising, but after decades of experience with similar crusades, activists tempered their optimism. “We are not sanguine of a sudden reform,” one proponent cautioned. “The surreptitious revolver, cannon cracker, and dynamite torpedo will explode as of yore. But as ordered observances and spectacles come to replace the old anarchic celebrations the casualties will yearly grow less.”
From 1907 to 1909, New York City suffered 1,339 injuries and deaths from fireworks on the Fourth, a higher toll, reformers liked to point out, than was taken “in the Revolutionary battles of Lexington, Bunker Hill, Fort Moultrie, White Plains, Fort Washington, Monmouth and Cowpens combined.” In 1910, the butcher’s bill in New York tot
aled five dead and ninety-seven injured. The next year, when Safe and Sane measures were finally instituted in the metropolis, the numbers began to decline—and since then, the city had passed through the holiday without a single fatality.
In early June, Mitchel named a Fourth of July citizens committee, which set to work planning the festivities. “In place of bombs, cannon crackers and skyrockets,” the newspapers predicted, “the coming Independence Day celebration will be the ‘safest and sanest’ in the history of this city.” Parks in every borough were to host baseball games and gymnastics exhibitions; musical performances were scheduled throughout the day. An airplane race would careen around the circumference of Manhattan. And once the sun went down, the traditional fireworks would be replaced by a fantasia of illumination—as bright as a million candles. “The City Hall will be ablaze with electric lights,” the organizers promised, “and altogether as lurid as some Arabian Night’s dream.”
Despite the plans for a “safe and ultra sane” holiday, the city’s well-to-do residents still intended to leave town as usual. The New York Central Railroad offered discount two-dollar fares to the Adirondacks and Green Mountains. On June 24, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and his family had fled Tarrytown for their summer home in Seal Harbor, Maine. The anarchists, too, had planned a daylong excursion to Leonard Abbott’s country home in New Jersey.