More Powerful Than Dynamite

by Thai Jones

  As Independence Day approached, the multitudes who chose to stay in the city prepared for an uplifting celebration. “A noiseless Fourth—and for New York—tut, tut!” the chairman of the committee said. “We are only going to show them that a Fourth of July celebration can be a noisy affair without the assistance of gunpowder and squibs.” By July 3, the preparations were complete. All the lights had been tested. Police detectives thwarted an eleventh-hour effort by fireworks dealers to smuggle their wares into the city. Only one thing was left. A final order issued from City Hall: “Show your flags!”

  8.

  His Own Medicine

  The sliver of moon had set and midnight was long past when four men turned from 103rd Street onto Lexington Avenue. Treading the timber planks over an unfinished subway ditch, they entered a shabby yellow-brick tenement. Under the bare bulb in the vestibule. Up six dark flights of stairs. Careful, careful with the package. They crept inside apartment 34 and dropped into bed, two to a mattress, falling asleep without bothering to undress. It was the dark before dawn: Saturday, July 4, 1914.

  A few hours later, at daybreak, cannon flashed from the battery in Lower Manhattan as the city saluted the Glorious Fourth for the 138th time. The report from the guns was the only explosion people expected to hear; the Safe and Sane holiday meant fireworks and combustibles were forbidden.

  By seven A.M., many residents of 1626 Lexington Avenue—”one of the human rookeries characteristic of the Upper East Side”—were up and doing. Doors scraped. Murmured discussions drifted into the corridors. Feet pounded down the stairs and out into the street as early-rising families set off on long streetcar rides to Coney Island or Brighton Beach. Others planned picnics in Central Park, a few blocks away. In apartment 34, Louise Berger woke first and fixed breakfast. Feeing ill the previous night, she had been asleep when the men had come home. She sat alone eating at the table, careful not to make a noise while the others rested. As she finished, they began to stir. For one of them, Arthur Caron, it had been another restless night. With no home or family in the area, he stayed with comrades or at settlement houses. The White Plains jail, where he had recently spent a week, was the closest thing he had to a fixed address. To a swollen nose, he had now added a gash across his mouth—a gift from the Tarrytown mobs. Louise offered him coffee, but he refused. Needing respite above all else, he rose from his pallet on the parlor floor and lay back down in her recently vacated bed.

  Eight A.M. The chilling nights of a few months earlier were a cold memory on this sunny morning, which was quickly maturing into a cool, clear day. “There was a fine tang in the air,” a reporter wrote, “and the sky was as blue as the field that holds our forty-eight stars.” Expecting a thousand dignitaries to hear the mayor’s Independence Day oration, the staff in City Hall Park draped pennants and rowed folding chairs on a temporary grandstand. As they worked, a red auto braked to a halt; Mitchel sprang from the backseat and bounded into his office.

  At nine A.M., a band struck up in Lincoln Square, on Manhattan’s west side. The Safe and Sane celebration had begun. Almost every neighborhood had its own rally planned: In Harlem, Riverdale, and on the Lower East Side, recent immigrants would parade their patriotism. The Tammany Hall Wigwam, the organization’s headquarters near Union Square, would be the site of denunciations of the mayor and his policies. And even the radicals had plans. Although, as an anarchist told a reporter, “we do not celebrate the Fourth the way you do,” they had nevertheless scheduled a picnic for the afternoon.

  Nothing, however, was scheduled for Fifth Avenue. Tradesmen and maids would keep busy there, but most of the grand homes in midtown were deserted, their masters having escaped the holiday festivities for vacations at Lake Placid or the Jersey Shore. Rockefeller Senior, four days from his seventy-fifth birthday, was in Tarrytown. Armed guards, high fences, and pretentious gates kept outsiders away. Junior was at his summer home in Maine’s Seal Harbor. There had been talk that the anarchists would follow him even here, and detectives monitored all boats docking on Mount Desert Island, watching for suspicious strangers.

  SINCE HIS RELEASE from jail, Caron’s anger had grown ever more manifest. Formerly, he had kidded with comrades, sought good company, laughed easily. That part of his personality had retreated. He grew gaunt and solemn, his disfigurement only adding to the impression of brooding violence. “He looked half-starved,” Marie Ganz recalled, “his cheeks sunken, his eyes glittering feverishly. When he spoke his voice was hoarse and rasping.” A friend invited him for coffee. “No,” he replied. “I’m too busy with something very important.” His features were set “very tense.” In just two days, on July 6, his trial in Westchester County was scheduled to begin, and he expected no clemency from the courts in Rockefeller’s demesne.

  On the night of July 3, he had attended a meeting at the Ferrer Center to discuss defense strategies. While the adults talked upstairs, youths watched the doors below, making sure no strangers entered the building. Around midnight, the conclave disbanded. Caron, Charles Berg, who had also been imprisoned in Tarrytown, Carl Hanson, a Latvian anarchist, and Mike Murphy, an I.W.W. member from the West who had just arrived in town, then met for a more intimate session at a nearby saloon. Berkman talked with them there for nearly an hour. Then, around one in the morning, he had retired and the others went their own way. Taking a small package, they traveled to Tarrytown one more time. Something on that journey had not gone as planned, because hours later, when they returned to the Lexington Avenue apartment, they still carried the bundle with them.

  Having stayed up, they were now lying in. That afternoon, they planned to ride the trolley to Hastings and then take a train to New Jersey, where Leonard Abbott was hosting a picnic. Around nine A.M., they were all settled back into their beds and seemed to be asleep. Louise Berger stole quietly out to the hallway and descended the stairs. She stepped down onto the busy holiday avenue and turned uptown toward Berkman’s house on 119th Street. Streetcars brimmed with summer families. Workaday cares had receded and the neighborhood was relaxing industriously. A cloudless sky stretched from Georgia to Maine. The morning weather “couldn’t have been more satisfactory if it had been made and provided for by act of Congress or Presidential proclamation.”

  Twenty minutes passed.

  Then, a thunderburst.

  The roof of 1626 Lexington Avenue evaporated. Powdered stone, shivered joists, and collops of flesh clouded for a stroke of time and then rained down on the suddenly fleeing, screaming crowd. Sharded glass hailed into the street. The concussion busted windows for two hundred yards in all directions; in their apartments, people were blown off chairs, smashed into stoves, vaulted into bathtubs. A patrolman on the beat was knocked to the pavement; fearing the subway tunnel had exploded, he staggered to a telephone box and called for aid. The top half of the building’s south side shivered, avalanched violently, and took minutes to finally settle. One person was hurled through a wall or window. He tumbled with the collapsing façade and then hung from the iron balusters of a fire escape. “The back of his head was badly shattered and the bones of his arms and legs were broken.” The corpse remained suspended, doubled over, above the street. Another body atomized. Scraps of torso flew onto the rooftop of a neighboring church. A leg flopped between the Lexington Avenue streetcar lines.

  1626 Lexington Avenue.

  In a stunned pause, survivors could hear the victims. “From inside the house came the screams of women and children, and scores of persons with bleeding faces came running out of the hallway and clambered over the sunken tiles of the sidewalk.” One man had the mattress he was sleeping on crash down through the floor beneath him. Scratched and dazed, he found himself “looking up through a network of beams and mortar to the sky.” On the street, police took him to the nearest precinct, gave him an overcoat, and moved him along. As residents poured out, rescuers ran in, shouldering up the blind stairwells. Trapped voices pleaded for attention. “Forms could be seen lying under beds, broken furni
ture and debris.” Coroner’s physicians, building inspectors, and a fleet of ambulances hurried to the site. The death toll, they feared, would be appalling. Firefighters banked ladders against the walls to scale the higher floors, while officers from six districts cordoned off a dozen blocks, holding back the terrified crowds.

  Commissioner Woods arrived half an hour after the detonation. Noting how the wreckage cascaded down from the roof toward the street, he saw immediately that the blast had not come from the subway but from an upper level of the tenement. Perhaps a gas line had exploded. As Woods watched, rescuers disentangled the dangling body from the fire escape and carted it to the 104th Street precinct. The corridors of the old brick precinct house were jammed with displaced tenants. “Half the refugees were only thinly clad, and all were hysterical. Men, women and children, crying, and at times fainting, crowded the reserves’ quarters of the station.” Officers shoved through, carrying the corpse down to the basement cell block and stretching it long on a low cot. Newsmen watched the police rifle its clothes, searching for identification. From an inside coat pocket, they took a little morocco address book. On the flyleaf they found a name: Arthur Caron.

  “Isn’t that the I.W.W. fellow who has been leading the demonstrations against Mr. Rockefeller?” one of the reporters asked. “It looks like him.” A deputy commissioner had just entered the room. Hearing this, he abandoned the idea of a utilities accident and dispatched detectives to gather up all known anarchists in New York City.

  As police scattered across the boroughs, the department’s combustibles expert arrived at Lexington Avenue. “There is no doubt in my mind,” he said after a brief inspection, “that this explosion was caused by a large quantity of dynamite.” Since TNT detonates downward, and the worst destruction was near the roof, he concluded that the touch point had been on the top floor. The subway tunnel had merely collapsed from the force of the raining debris. “The only possible conclusion,” he declared, “is that some one was making, or was going to make, high explosive bombs.”

  When detectives arrived at Berkman’s house, he and Louise Berger had already learned of the accident. She couldn’t talk; she could barely walk. They carried her to the station. Authorities already had a firm identification, but they took their grieving suspects to the basement anyway. When an officer pulled back the blanket from Caron’s head, Louise “strained forward, her mouth open and eyes glazed. She tried vainly to speak, but made only inarticulate murmurs, and then, jumping away from those who held her, she swooned.” Seeing the mangled corpse, even Berkman pulled a “yellow face.”

  Back upstairs, facing a deputy commissioner and an assistant district attorney across an interrogator’s desk, Berkman was “cool and collected” once more.

  “Did you discuss the possibility of taking action of a violent sort against any one?” they asked him.

  “Most assuredly not. It was simply a meeting to discuss the defense of the prisoners and those who are out on bail.”

  “Was there any talk of bombs?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Did you know there were any explosives in the apartment occupied by Caron and the others?”

  “I did not, and do not know it yet.”

  “You are a very discreet man, Mr. Berkman,” the commissioner acknowledged, and the anarchist bowed.

  Reporters found Upton Sinclair in his apartment. “For God’s sake!” he exclaimed when they told him. “I don’t know what to think. What can I say?” He had considered Caron a disciple, and had convinced himself, despite all evidence, that the younger man had shared his commitment to pacifism. “He had been up here to see me and my wife and he assured us that he would follow the peaceful method,” Sinclair said. “If I thought he was planning anything like force I would have had nothing to do with him.”

  Becky Edelsohn and fifty or so other friends of the Ferrer Center were relaxing at Leonard Abbott’s picnic, drinking beer and eating corned beef and tongue sandwiches. A newspaperman arrived with news of the explosion. The guests “discussed the tragedy animatedly among themselves,” the reporter wrote, “but when approached for an expression of opinion they became silent and declined to say a word.” The moment required discretion. “Everyone was hushed,” one picnicgoer recalled. “There was an undercurrent of excitement. No one knew what to say. Besides, we knew that there were spies among us.”

  The anarchists got a firsthand account of what had happened later that day, when Mike Murphy, bruised and in a borrowed coat, staggered out to New Jersey. He had been the person whose mattress had fallen through the floor of apartment 34. The police had let him go because at the time they had still believed the explosion had originated in the subway tunnels. Berkman had sent him to Leonard Abbott’s house, and from there he disappeared.

  THE TURNOUT AT City Hall had been disappointing. Most of the thousand seats reserved for dignitaries still sat empty at ten A.M., so what crowd there was had been allowed to fill them. A fife and drum corps emerged from the building, followed by four Sons of the American Revolution, dressed in the uniforms of the Continental Army. Mitchel appeared last, wearing a boutonniere of red, white, and blue posies. “We need no longer pay tribute to the democratic ideals of the founders of this country, with tongue in cheek or shame in our hearts,” he said. “The city is free for the work of the city. We have lifted the grasping hands of selfish, little hearted men off the levers of our governmental machinery and have set about the business of preparing this great government for a new measure of productivity.”

  Mitchel then packed into his red car and dashed off to East Forty-sixth Street, where he spoke to the League of Foreign Born Citizens. Thousands of listeners, “all distinctly not of American ancestry,” cheered “as American patriotism and freedom were upheld.” Next, he was off to Brooklyn. By the early afternoon, athletic contests busied parks and sandlots around the city. Band concerts crowded the air with ragtime. Residents of the Colored Orphan Asylum and the Howard Industrial School listened to encouraging speeches.

  At three P.M., policemen at the 104th Street station finally carried Arthur Caron’s body to the morgue. On Liberty Island at the same moment, a starter’s gun went off and an airplane spiraled to altitude, five hundred feet above the water. A few minutes later, a second racer climbed into the air. The contestants flew north over the Hudson. “From the Battery across Manhattan to Spuyten Duyvil gaping thousands with faces turned toward the sky lined the waterfront and cheered.” The race covered a thirty-six-mile course, which the winner completed in forty-three minutes.

  In Tarrytown, news of the explosion panicked an already anxious community. Two officers watched the train station for outsiders. “Pocantico Hills, always thoroughly guarded, was policed to the last inch as soon as news of the explosion reached there,” wrote a reporter for the Sun. “A mouse would have had a hard time getting past the guards without a challenge.” The Rockefellers’ “small army” of detectives was supplemented by deputy sheriffs at the main gate. “They are quick to see and interpret callers. No one is admitted unless he is a friend of the family and can show credentials.”

  In Philadelphia’s Independence Square, President Woodrow Wilson gave a history lecture. “The Declaration of Independence is not a Fourth of July oration,” he informed the crowd. “The Declaration of Independence was a document preliminary to war. It involved a vital piece of business, not a piece of rhetoric.” Pounding the very desk on which the document had been signed, he said, “Popularity is not always successful patriotism. The most patriotic man is sometimes the man who goes in the direction in which he thinks he is right, whether or not he thinks anybody agrees with him, because it is patriotic to sacrifice yourself if you think you are right.”

  While the president spoke, another sacrifice was honored. At Artstetten Castle in Austria, attendants carried an archduke and his wife, slain six days earlier in Sarajevo, between a line of soldiers and interred their coffins in the ancient vault. Franz Ferdinand’s assassin had been a
Slavic nationalist, not an anarchist, but his act had found admirers among the radicals in New York, who mourned not for the militarist heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. “He would have practiced a million-fold the assassination that he suffered,” Berkman wrote in Mother Earth. “He had to swallow his own medicine—that’s all.”

  As night fell, New Yorkers strolled the parks, marveling at the display of electric lights. At City Hall, an illuminated baton kept time as thousands sang “Yankee Doodle” and “My Old Kentucky Home.” Onlookers on Lexington Avenue pressed against the police lines at both ends of the block. During the day more than one hundred thousand spectators had visited the scene. As the last light faded, they watched inspectors emerge from the building “carrying grewsome bundles wrapped in newspapers.” Detectives searching for clues inside discovered a hand press and some bulletins. “Why wait longer for these money tyrants to come to our terms?” one broadsheet proclaimed. “We must employ force. Force is our remedy.” It had been the most powerful dynamite explosion in city history, yet because so many families had left their apartments early to celebrate the holiday, the casualties had been miraculously light. So far, police had found only three bodies in the apartment. A next-door neighbor, Marie Chavez, had also been killed. A fifth person was still missing.

  July 5 was a new morning in New York. Early editions arrived at newsstands before dawn; in every paper, the screaming headlines announced that the bomb, which had accidentally detonated too early, had been meant for the Rockefellers. The explosion was being called a “sensation such as has not been known before in many months.” Ever since the beginning of the year, the city had been arguing amongst itself, debating, among many things, the ties between militant speech and actual violence. For the moment, that question appeared to be settled. Officials declared “that the city was perhaps on the eve of a reign of terror such as culminated in the Haymarket riots in Chicago in the 80’s.” As residents reckoned with the damage that had been done—and contemplated what could have happened if the bomb had been properly constructed—most concluded that this result had been the inevitable consequence of all the unrest that had come before.