by Thai Jones
City Hall illuminated.
Each faction then had to decide its own response. The anarchists remained adamant in their protests, telling reporters that “Caron’s death won’t end it.” Berkman was considering plans for a mass funeral for his martyrs. Most others sought to distance themselves from the victims. The I.W.W. denied involvement and repudiated the claims that any of the victims had been members of the One Big Union. Mayor Mitchel ordered Woods to step up the surveillance and infiltration of radicals. Across New York, anxious minds were contemplating their futures in light of the explosion. But in the morgue at Bellevue Hospital, Arthur Caron’s sleepless nights were over.
* * *
ON BLACKWELL’S ISLAND, the Fourth of July began like every other day—with the prison bell bawling before sunrise. Frank Tannenbaum stirred on the cot in his blank cell. Three months inside had hardened him to the raspy, unwashed clothes, the stench from the toilet bucket, the bedbugs and lice. Approaching in the corridor, he heard clanking keys, and then the keeper arrived, beating the walls with his baton and calling everybody up. The doors opened and the prisoners hustled out, jostling to get toward the front of a ragged column for the washroom, and then breakfast. It was Saturday, the least pleasant period in the penitentiary. Toiling in the trade shops was tedious, routine work, but at least it passed the time. On the weekend, with no exercise or recreation, the hours spanned out interminably. The toilet pails would not be emptied till Monday, and the air would be befouled, unbearable, long before then.
At other jails, some special provisions were being made for the Fourth. Inside the Tombs, guards played a phonograph for the male inmates and even allowed the women to dance in the corridors. On Blackwell’s Island, in former years, the prisoners had been allowed to celebrate the holiday with parades and parties. But Commissioner Davis had canceled that tradition. The men felt wronged. All day their frustrations grew; restive complaints came from all sides, scuffles erupted in the suffocating cells.
But Frank, at least, was grateful for the long, quiet hours and the chance to pursue his reading. Having begun with books strictly related to anarchism, he had since graduated to a more general course of study: literature, history, sociology, voraciously consuming everything he could. Carlyle’s French Revolution, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Herbert Spencer’s Education, the novels of Tolstoy, whatever his supporters could send him. He spent so many hours squinting over the pages, with only a flickering lightbulb for illumination, that his sight had begun to fail. Comrades had seen too many imprisoned Wobblies go through this same ordeal. “Giovanetti’s eyes were ruined in prison,” an I.W.W. leader had written him in late May, “and I do not mean the same thing to happen to you.”
With the new glasses that supporters had sent him, Tannenbaum was better able to read his daily letters. Unemployment was not so bad as it had been during the winter months, but many people remained out of work, and even his most optimistic correspondents could report only that “industrial conditions are slightly improving.” News of the movement arrived in snippets and asides; through his mail, Frank heard of the Ludlow Massacre and the protests against the Rockefellers. Since his incarceration, the Wobblies themselves had been eclipsed by the anarchists. And though the daily press was heedless of the distinction, the activists themselves were acutely alive to sectarian splits. “I hope that you will bear in mind that the I.W.W. is not an anarchist group but an organization,” wrote Jane Roulston, a schoolteacher and Wobbly with pronounced doctrinaire views. “I.W.W. principles have kept us from taking part in the not very scientific actions which have taken place in New York City, and vicinity, since you left,” Roulston continued. “But we feel much sympathy for the actors in those affairs—knowing them to be driven desperate by the horrors of the capitalist regime.”
Supper passed without incident that evening, though inmates were still smarting from the injustice of missing the holiday. When the lights were put out at nine P.M., Tannenbaum and the others in his ward bedded down. But in a different wing the day’s anger finally broke through. There the prisoners could hear the sounds of the Safe and Sane holiday; music and cheering drifted out across the East River, a teasing reminder of their own exile. The men responded with a concert of their own—whistling, calling out, rapping the bars—and didn’t quiet down until Warden Hayes appeared. Typically, one or two ringleaders might have been given a reprimand, but this time every single person in the cell block was punished, their privileges stopped indefinitely: no mail, no visitors, no tobacco.
The next week was tense and tetchy. Attendants and prisoners eyed each other, waiting for the next confrontation. It was nearly supper time a few days later, and Tannenbaum was marching toward the mess hall, when he heard the sounds of riot. Meals were supposed to be taken in total silence: Anyone who spoke risked a thrashing from the guards who patrolled the tables. A few moments earlier, a keeper had moved to punish a whispering inmate. He had raised his baton to strike, but before he could land his blow, a metal dish flew at his head. Loosed after so much pent-up fury, dinner plates began to volley in from everywhere. By the time Tannenbaum arrived with the second supper shift, the battle was at its climax. From outside, he watched the pandemonium unfold. Hundreds of prisoners, in their gray work clothes, were standing on the tables, shouting down at their oppressors, cursing and skimming their bowls into the air. The officers were in open rout, running for the doors, shielding their faces as best they could from the flying projectiles, tripping over themselves in their rush to escape.
Panicked guards scrambled out to where Tannenbaum stood and locked the doors behind them. One aimed his gun at Frank—hand shaking wildly—threatening to level him if he moved. Others fired their revolvers in the air until the defiance wilted, and the quieted men filed out and returned to their cells. For this disturbance, the warden again retaliated with an extreme decision—putting everyone in the mess hall on lockdown. The measure was too harsh; prisoners throughout the penitentiary worried they would be the next to receive an unreasonable punishment. At breakfast the next day, a whisper passed between the men: If the others were not let out, then no one would work. “It was going to be one for all and all for one,” decided Tannenbaum. The inmates at Blackwell’s Island were about to go on strike.
Frank seated himself at the machine in the brush shop, where, typically, he would have spent the next eight to ten hours assembling bristle heads. But this time he just sat there. The others, who had elected him spokesman, followed his lead. Attendants rushed out to inform their superiors. The penitentiary’s industrial production totaled hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. With this revenue under threat, it took just a few minutes for the warden to appear.
“Why, what’s the matter with you boys?” he said. “Why don’t you work? I didn’t do you anything. You have no grievance.”
Tannenbaum started to explain to him the meaning of solidarity, but the prison chief had no intention of arguing politics with him. He turned to a nervous youth sitting nearby, who explained that he was brother to one of the men under punishment.
“Warden,” Frank interjected. “He has got one brother locked up and I have got a hundred brothers locked up. And every one of them must be given a chance to wash and something to eat before we will do a stroke of work.”
With that, he stood and walked out of the shop. The others followed, and then the rest of the manufacturing gangs, who had been watching to see what Tannenbaum would do, abandoned their posts as well. But first they avenged themselves on the machines: cutting the belts, smashing the apparatuses. Fires started up in the shoe shop, the paint shop, the bed shop. “The boys,” said Tannenbaum, “simply avenged themselves on the system.” Seeing the striking workers marching out, the men on lock-down joined the insurrection: “They broke every window in sight. Everything they could lay their hands on was destroyed.” The noise of their rioting could be heard in Manhattan.
After the keepers had finally regained some control, Frank w
as taken by guards down to the punishment ward, known as the cooler. While they took his coat, shoes, and tobacco, he could hear voices of those who were already there begging the keepers to let them out. The barred door locked behind him. He stood in a tiny cell without a bed or a window, equipped with only a dirty blanket and an open bucket. Nothing in his previous captivity had inured him to this degree of squalor. The toilet pail was never emptied; it took days just to stop gagging from the reek. Ten-inch rats skulked through at night. Sleeping on the stone floor was uncomfortable, but the blanket was worse. Every movement raised “a cloud of dust” so vile to Frank that he would lie as still as he could, until his whole side had gone numb, before turning over. For sustenance, he received a slice of bread and a drink of water every twenty-four hours.
On July 10, Commissioner Davis arrived on the island, trailing a gang of reporters, and determined to settle the strike. Of the fourteen hundred inmates, nearly half had been confined to their cells and put on reduced rations. The eighteen chambers of the cooler were filled with ringleaders. Touring the facility, she defended the warden and took a stern, scolding tone with the sullen men. “It’s true, quite true that I am a woman,” she told an audience in the mess hall. “But while I wish to be human, and even a little more than human, I am not soft and don’t propose to be soft. I’ll have order over here if I have to call out the militia, and not one of you will get a personal hearing until the whole lot of you make up your minds to be orderly.”
Katharine Davis on Blackwell’s Island.
Passing through the punishment ward, she paused in front of Frank’s cell.
“Why don’t you, for once,” asked the commissioner, “take the side of law and order?”
“I will,” Tannenbaum snapped back, “just as soon as law and order happens to be on the side of justice.”
For four days, the strike in prison halted all production. But at last hunger drove the men back to work. Davis had spoken of instituting a “kindness plan” once resistance ended, but if anyone had hoped for sweeping changes, they were disappointed. As one of her ameliorations, she ordered that the men in the cooler be served bread twice a day—instead of once—so from then on the daily allotment was sliced in half and distributed morning and night. But the portion remained the same.
After seven days in isolation, Tannenbaum had finally accustomed himself to the smell. But he could tell from the way the guards flinched when they approached him that he had become as fetid as his surroundings. When he finally returned to the general cell block, he was so starved that he could hardly stand. To the other inmates he had proven his status as a good comrade. But his correspondents on the outside, who had picked up vague, distorted accounts of his actions from the newspapers, offered only qualified support. “Remember that our real activity must be at the ‘point of production’ and not in prison,” an I.W.W. colleague wrote him. “I trust you will do nothing rash.”
* * *
POLICE INVESTIGATORS AND newspaper reporters had meticulously gone through the wreckage at 1626 Lexington Avenue. From the evidence collected, they believed they could piece together a reconstruction of what had happened on the morning of July 4. In their story, the men had leapt from their beds as Louise Berger had left, to continue working on their “infernal machine.” Carl Hanson was probably holding the bomb, with Charles Berg nearby and Caron perhaps at a little distance. From the damage, it appeared that a huge quantity of TNT had ignited. “Half a boxful of dynamite is an amount you don’t often find outside an explosive factory,” judged the department combustibles expert. Placed correctly, such ammunition could have “wrecked the neighborhood.” Only the holiday celebrations, which had drawn people from their apartments early on a Saturday morning, had prevented a far higher death count.
Newspapers described other finds pulled from the rubble in the “death flat”: pistol cartridges, dry cell batteries, bundles of wire. “There is no doubt in my mind,” said the lead inspector, “that there was not only one bomb in that apartment, but that some one was manufacturing them there.” The explosion of a small device had ignited the cache, causing the unbelievable destruction. On Sunday, the deputy commissioner interrogated Louise Berger for eight hours. She confessed to the printing press, but stuck to her previous statement: There had been no dynamite, or any other explosive paraphernalia, in the apartment. She was released, no charges filed.
Alternative versions of the story were also being offered. “I should not in the least be surprised,” Alexander Berkman countered, if capitalist agents had been responsible for the explosion. “The Rockefellers have committed many murders; they would not stop at anything to add a few more coldblooded crimes to the long list of which they are guilty.” Upton Sinclair also voiced this idea, attempting, perhaps, to salvage his own image of Caron. “Rockefeller is a very powerful man, who is accustomed to getting what he wants in this country,” he wrote in the Appeal to Reason. “The bomb could have been set upon the roof,” he speculated, “and it would have done exactly the same work as if it had been inside the room.” Not surprisingly, the police scoffed at the notion, telling reporters that “if they wanted to get rid of three anarchists they could do it without risking the lives of more than 100 innocent persons.”
But the vast majority of the populace was simply ready to accept the headlines. From the first editions, the papers speculated that the bomb had been meant for Rockefeller. Everything that had been reported about the anarchists suggested the plausibility, if not the inevitability, of this outcome. Before long, almost nobody still questioned the assumption that the victims were would-be assassins. And that their deaths had prevented something far worse.
During the preceding months there had been broad approval for radical agitations. But in the aftermath of “Caron’s bomb,” casual supporters were shocked into a swift retreat. The atmosphere of tolerance had ended. “The whole aspect of affairs has changed in the last forty-eight hours,” editors at the New York Herald insisted. “This city is no place for further operations of the ‘I.W.W.’ or the Free Speech League.” The Outlook, too, decided its dalliance with militancy was over. “It is one thing to sympathize with the struggle for industrial freedom and against industrial oppression,” its pages proclaimed, “it is another thing to commit murder.”
Not for the first time that year, people turned for precedent to the 1880s. The victims, suggested the Herald, had been “determined to carry out their ideas of force quite as desperately as the Haymarket rioters did in Chicago. That they blew up themselves instead of the Tarrytown City Hall or the New York City Hall or the Standard Oil Building was an accident.” Bill Haywood worried that the anarchists would escalate the situation into “another eleventh of November,” referring to the night in 1886 when the bomb had been thrown in Chicago. And Berkman was determined to do just this. “The Haymarket Bomb was followed by a terrible wave of the mob spirit,” he wrote. “No Anarchist was safe from the blind fury of the murderous law-and-order hordes, in and out of uniform.” This time there would be no cringing or underground hiding. On July 5, he announced the intention to hold a fitting service in Union Square for his martyrs. “We will mass the coffins, or urns—I do not know which they will be—in the street,” he said firmly. “The public funeral will be held.”
Thus challenged, it was time for the authorities to react. Commissioner Woods’s policies, some felt, had enabled this disaster. Under his liberal eye, editorialized the World, radical meetings had grown “openly threatening.” Orators had promised to kill and destroy in support of what they called “free speech.” And the dynamite outrage proved the seriousness of these intimations. It was quite apparent that Woods had not been prepared. “The police were stunned by all that had happened,” a reporter commented. They had known Caron and the others as committed agitators, and “had seen them again and again.” But they had not suspected “that this daring band of long haired youths—for youths they were—was making bombs almost within the shadow of a police station and
right in the very heart of one of the most thickly populated communities in the world.” If the authorities had concentrated on their responsibilities, rather than condoning, even promoting, sedition, they might have prevented an escalation that ended in dynamite. Only providence had prevented a far worse catastrophe.
A few weeks earlier, Mayor Mitchel had been forced to explain comments suggesting a place for force in police procedures. Now tough talk was popular again. “Anarchy seems to have met its deserts,” he said. “It seems to me to demonstrate that the police are justified in taking precautionary measures, and we are going to continue to apply such measures. I do not know what other measures the police can take. They are watching all the time.” Woods, like Sinclair, had seen free speech as a safety valve; allowing dissidents to have their say was supposed to assuage the burden of their anger. That had not happened, and so the commissioner adapted, insisting that “he would not permit any one to make martyrs of the dead men, and that no parade would be allowed unless absolute assurance was given that the law would be respected.”
The funeral preparations became a showdown between Berkman and Woods. Lofty constitutional principles had dominated the free-speech battle; this round would be fought through minute legal technicalities. Authorities had no power, under existing ordinances, to “disperse a strictly orderly gathering in any park or to suppress public speech in any park unless that speech incites to riot or disorder.” So they simply changed the ordinances. On Tuesday, July 7, the Board of Aldermen put a new law on the docket requiring police sanction, requested thirty-six hours in advance, for any parade in the city. The bill passed unanimously and was immediately ratified by the mayor. “Fortunately,” Mitchel said with relief, “the Police Commissioner now has the unquestionable power to refuse permits for parades if, in his opinion, there is likely to be disorder. We have never permitted disorder, and we are not going to permit it.”