More Powerful Than Dynamite

by Thai Jones

  Woods had the administrative apparatus of the city at his disposal and he used it, down to the most obscure Health Department codes. Caron’s mother, learning that the Catholic priest in Fall River would not bury her son in the church grounds, had yielded his remains to the anarchists. Berkman wanted to position Caron’s body as the centerpiece of his demonstration. But the corpse itself lay in the morgue, and city law required its burial or cremation within four days. Extensions were granted regularly, but in this instance none could be expected. If the anarchists did not retrieve the dead men before ten A.M. on Wednesday morning, the victims would be shipped to the potter’s field. The anarchists had been organizing frantically for a huge Saturday ceremony. A midweek funeral could not hope to draw the kinds of crowds they wanted. But Woods had left them no alternative.

  Berkman’s party arrived at the morgue on East Twenty-sixth Street just before the deadline. Fifty policemen waited outside as he and a score or so of others, wearing red carnations and mourning armbands, filed past the unpainted coffins. The caskets were loaded onto two horse-drawn hearses, wheeled to the Thirty-fourth Street ferry landing, floated across the East River, and finally trolleyed to Middle Village, Long Island, for cremation. In the chapel, Berkman spoke briefly. “Comrades, friends and sympathizers,” he began, “we have with us the remains of our comrades and we consider the occasion of their death requires a service that shall have a public character. The memorial will be public because our comrades were interested in work of a public nature—that of bettering the human race.” The organist played “The Marseillaise,” and Caron’s face was uncovered for the final time. Then the coffins slid slowly toward the incineration room. “A match was applied to the jets in the ovens and flames licked the pine boxes. The furnace doors were closed and all filed out.”

  The caskets bearing Caron, Hanson, and Berg.

  A radical sculptor was commissioned to create a special urn for the ashes, but this hardly replaced the symbolic power of a coffin. And Woods knew it. Concerned with maintaining order, he was also determined to prevent a parade. Experience had shown that a gathering in Union Square could be monitored and contained, but a march through crowded streets presented innumerable opportunities for mischief. Couching their words as liberally as possible, officials stated their decision on Friday. “The free speech policy of the administration will be continued,” said Mayor Mitchel, “and these or other persons desirous of holding public assemblage in a peaceable manner, under conditions laid down by the statutes, will be protected by the police.” But the funeral cortege would not be tolerated. “The Police Commissioner and I agree that such a parade would lead to disorder and breach of the peace.” Again, Berkman had little choice in his response. Citing “evident discrimination” over the issue of the burial and police opposition to a “dignified and impressive” parade, the anarchists announced their decision “to abandon the funeral procession because we do not want to precipitate any violence at the present time, however justified resentment on our part may be.”

  All efforts turned to the memorial demonstration in Union Square, where police were expecting “as large a crowd as ever packed the historic spot.” Determined “to take no chances,” Woods had “made it clear to all that there would be no disorder if intelligent police work can prevent it.” He gave the job to the same trusted deputy, Inspector Schmittberger, who had successfully quieted the previous mass meeting, held exactly three months earlier. To avoid conflict on that day, the commissioner had intentionally minimized the police presence. This time, he did the exact opposite. Every available officer—around eight hundred in all, the largest detail assigned for such a duty in the city’s history—would be stationed within a few blocks of the anarchists’ rally.

  The crowd began to arrive around noon, hours before the speeches were to start. “They came in twos and threes and groups of a dozen and more,” wrote a Times reporter. “For an hour all streets, it seemed, led to Union Square.” Newspapers estimated attendance at between five and six thousand; Mother Earth claimed four times as many. The memorial finally began at two P.M. The stage was shaded by enormous floral bouquets. “Anarchists whose names are known the country over stood on or about the little platform of dry goods boxes which was constructed just north of the pavilion in the square.” The crowd pressed in, a field of straw hats protecting against the afternoon sun.

  Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Carlo Tresca, national leaders of the I.W.W., gave eulogies. Emma Goldman had been horrified by the news of the explosion and blamed Berkman for allowing things to escalate so far. “Comrades, idealists, manufacturing a bomb in a congested tenement-house!” she wrote. “I was aghast at such irresponsibility.” Nevertheless, for the public occasion she sent a telegram of solidarity, which was read aloud.

  “Yes, we believe in violence,” Becky Edelsohn told the crowd. “We will use violence whenever it is necessary to use it. We are not afraid of what your kept press says; and when we are murdered and cannonaded, when you train your machine guns on us, we will retaliate with dynamite.”

  Becky Edelsohn at Caron’s memorial rally.

  But it was Berkman’s moment to lead. “Comrades, Friends and Sympathizers,” he began. “We have come here this afternoon, not to mourn any calamity, but to pay our homage to three comrades whom we consider martyrs to the cause of humanity.” He speculated that the men might have fallen prey to a conspiracy. “I want to go on record here today as saying that I prefer to believe that our comrades were not victims,” he insisted.

  Why do I say this? Because I believe, and firmly believe, that the oppression of labor in this country, the persecution of the radical elements especially, has reached a point where nothing but determined resistance will do any good. And I believe with all my heart in resistance to tyranny on every and all occasions … When workers are shot down for demanding better conditions of living, when their women and children are slaughtered and burned alive, then I say that it is time for labor to quit talking and to begin to act.

  “Never in the history of the city has there been a greater play of ‘free speech,’” thought the Herald. Orations lasted for two and a half hours. The radicals “cried out that they were being crushed under the tyranny of wealth, and that revolution and dynamite are the only agencies by which the great mass of American people can come into their own.” Schmittberger acknowledged that Berkman had come close to crossing the line of “proscribed utterances,” but when the memorial was over, the masses drifted peacefully away. Woods had stressed the maintenance of order, and it had been preserved. Back at the Mother Earth offices, the special urn was on display until late in the night. It was a simple brass pyramid, not quite two feet high, topped with a clenched fist. Inscribed on one face were the words:

  Alexander Berkman at Caron’s memorial rally.

  KILLED

  JULY 4, 1914

  CARON

  HANSON

  BERG

  IV

  In no field of human relationships is the spirit of brotherhood on which the church was founded more profoundly needed than in industrial relations.

  —JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER, JR.

  9.

  The War Has Spoiled Everything

  When John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was a boy, his father used to walk with him in the forests around their home in Cleveland. Senior knew the species names for all the trees, and he would tell them off for his son as they went. All his life, Junior had cherished these moments; seeking solace in nature became his favored means of escaping the pressures of public life. In his youth, he had developed “a kind of passion for sunsets.” During his early years at 26 Broadway, he would hurry home from work, have his carriage readied, and then circle the lanes in Central Park until it was too dark to see. Even as an adult, every time he caught the scent of sap running from a freshly cut branch, his mind would be transported back to soothing childhood memories. Once he had watched reverently for half an hour as twilight turned to darkness; and when the sun finally disappea
red from view, he turned to his companion and asked, “How can people say there isn’t a God?”

  He had chosen to summer in Seal Harbor, Maine, because of its wild beauty. On the system of gravel roads he was constructing all over his property he could drive past stands of white birch, balsam fir, and red spruce trees. In the evenings, he might watch the approach of nightfall from the veranda on his cottage, the Eyrie, a mountaintop chalet with Atlantic views that stretched to the Mount Desert Light, twenty miles out to sea. But this summer the sun passed unobserved; the trees went unidentified. Junior’s time was dedicated to publicity. He spent day after day indoors, poring through newspapers and magazines, harassing his staff with suggestions, painstakingly drafting memos and rebuttals. A team of secretaries clipped articles from all over the country: two newspapers from Tarrytown, the Longmont Ledger, the Pueblo Chieftain, the Nashville Banner, the Monthly Bulletin of the American Iron and Steel Institute., the Christian Socialist. Junior compiled them into scrapbooks and forwarded everything to Ivy Lee, his recently hired public relations expert.

  No affront was too obscure to take offense at; no praise too faint to savor. He penned a full response intended to “correct some of the glaring and false” information in an article by Upton Sinclair. He sent this memo to Lee, who quietly set it aside as too confrontational. When the Times offered some critique, he complained about “the vacillating of the papers.” Having dealt with a number of individual publications containing “infamous statements,” Rockefeller obsessed over a wholesale strategy. No criticism should be allowed to stand. “We are wondering,” he wrote, “whether it might not be well to make a reply to all the papers which have printed misstatements of fact” regarding the Colorado strike. “This would be quite an arduous task,” he acknowledged, “and of course a good deal of time has passed since many of the articles were written.” Lee promised to consider the idea.

  When Rockefeller found something he liked, on the other hand, he demanded it be broadcast as widely as possible. Reading a strongly worded critique of unionism in Popular Science Monthly, he requested it be sent out to “every Governor and every Mayor in the United States; to the Members of every State Legislature, to every Member of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, to the leading officials and directors of all the great Industries of the Country, to every member of the faculty of every College and University, to every minister of prominence as well as to every newspaper editor both large and small, and all of the judges higher than magistrates in the Country.”

  Throughout the summer and into autumn, Ivy Lee’s series of pamphlets on Colorado continued to be published at weekly intervals. Printed to look like government reports, each installment was filled with important-sounding statistics, quotations from politicians or newspaper editors, and testimony by organizations with impressive names, such as the Law and Order League—all of which were more or less beholden to the mine operators’ interests. The “facts” contained within ranged from half-truths taken out of context to careless misrepresentations to willful fabrications. In the edition dedicated to correcting the false impression that a “massacre” had occurred at Ludlow, Lee asserted in bold capital letters, “BOTH SIDES AGREE THAT NO WOMAN WAS STRUCK BY A BULLET FROM EITHER SIDE.” Although this was technically true, it did nothing to explain the deaths of the two mothers and six girls who suffocated beneath the burning tents. Lee’s claim that “the elaborate rifle pits occupied by the strikers showed that they had made deliberate preparation for battle” glossed over the fact that both sides had been living in armed camps, and that sporadic violence had been a constant reality during the previous months of the strike. And, finally, the assertion that “no machine gun was at any time directed against the colony” was just an outright lie.

  Rockefeller convinced himself that this effort represented “a broad, educative campaign of publicity”—that he and his team of publicists were performing a public service akin to his other philanthropic works. By promulgating sound ideas, he believed, modern communications techniques could conceivably eliminate the class hatreds that had led to the Colorado strike in the first place. The potential for such work was just being realized, and Lee was already considering ways to use his powers constructively. “I feel that one of the important things to do as soon as possible is to get sounder teaching in our colleges,” he wrote to a Rockefeller aide, “for there is no doubt that there are a large number of young men coming out of college just now with ideas of engaging in social service work, and that these young men are usually socialistically inclined.” A few pamphlets detailing the “facts” about socialism and capitalism could redirect their energies along more profitable lines.

  Unlike Junior’s other philanthropies, however, this one had to operate in secret. Every week the bulletins went out to thousands of opinion makers, but the recipients were not supposed to know the true source of what they were receiving. They believed they were corresponding directly with the coal companies, not with a professional publicity bureau. To ensure this, Lee sent the Colorado executives a list of names, drafted cover letters, and then issued instructions regarding the precise procedure for the mailings. “I suggest that each letter be an original,” he wrote. “You can doubtless have these letters duplicated on a multigraph machine and the names and addresses inserted so that there will be every appearance of each letter being an original. I would suggest also that they be signed by you personally.”

  The effort to alter national opinion went to the highest levels. One plan involved drafting a note purporting to be from the governor of Colorado, and having him send it to President Wilson over his own signature. Far from protesting such tactics, Rockefeller eagerly contributed to the subterfuge. For one of the articles he wanted to distribute, he considered various means to mask its origin. “Perhaps it could go out under the auspices of some great Corporation,” he speculated, “perhaps through the Merchants Association or some similar organization … Possibly that would be entirely safe.”

  As July progressed, the effectiveness of their campaign became increasingly manifest. Newspapers were using the pamphlets as the basis for sympathetic editorials, and some were just plagiarizing them entirely. “Though we did not ask nor expect that our bulletins be reprinted,” Lee wrote to Junior, “you will observe from the enclosed clipping from the Chattanooga News that the leaven is beginning to work.” Even the experts were surprised by the response to a press release concerning a gift of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. “In view of the fact that this was not really news,” Lee reported with delight, “and that the newspapers gave so much attention to it, it would seem that this was wholly due to the manner in which the material was ‘dressed up’ for newspaper consumption. It seems to suggest very considerable possibilities along this line.” Having been pummeled and condemned for so long, Junior was profoundly excited to feel that the counterattack had finally begun. Responding to the latest sample of encouraging results, he wrote to Lee, “Let the good work go on.”

  Though his campaign to burnish the family name had cost him a sunset or two, the work gave Rockefeller an excuse to avoid the social life of Seal Harbor. He certainly had little interest in mixing with his neighbors in the summer colony—the Morgans, the Astors, and the rest. Even more than that, it allowed him to stay close to the house and keep a protective eye on his wife and children. Newspapers had reported that “not the slightest preparations had been made to guard the place against a visit from the I.W.W.’s,” and that Junior himself had “no fear that his tormentors will pursue him to Maine.” But this was not quite true. According to the Herald, Rockefeller had brought twelve “special guards” with him. In addition, “two men, believed to be detectives, have been seen daily to scan all arrivals at the steamboat landings.” Additional Burns operatives, supplemented by Tarrytown deputies, had increased the security at Pocantico Hills. And Pinkertons from the New York, Denver, and San Francisco offices were being paid six dollars a day, plus expenses, to gather information
“at I.W.W. places” in an attempt to preempt future conspiracies.

  Junior did not talk about his anxiety, refusing to discuss the bomb plot with reporters and alluding to it only obliquely in his correspondence. In this, as in so many other aspects of his personality, he was emulating Senior’s standard. “I have never known Father to show the slightest fear, physical or moral,” he once recalled. A few years earlier, when the Pocantico Hills estate was being constructed, Black Hand elements had appeared among the Italian workmen. Despite the presence of William Burns and his detectives, two people were killed, several more had been threatened or robbed, and an atmosphere of terror haunted the grounds. Junior was afraid for the safety of his children. “We should hesitate to have them ride or drive in the woods and would not want them to go out of sight of the house,” he confided to his father. “Until we have succeeded in getting rid of certain men among the Italians … I fear we shall not have a condition of perfect quiet and security on the place.” Since then, the sense of danger had never entirely dissipated. “We always had to live with the fear that something would happen to the children.”

  Senior had humored his son’s concerns, allowing him, during the Black Hand troubles, to move his family from Tarrytown to another of the Rockefeller homes in the winter resort of Lakewood, New Jersey. But in the aftermath of the Lexington Avenue explosion, it was Senior who quailed, devising a plan to surround his property with barbed wire. His son talked him out of it. “I am wondering whether so obvious an effort to make entrance to the place difficult at this time,” he wrote to his father, “may not challenge attention and suggest a fear and apprehension on our part which might induce, rather than help to keep out, intruders.” Letters threatening assassination continued to arrive, and Junior single-mindedly worked on. Family and friends marveled at his fortitude. Nothing could distract him from the self-appointed task of convincing the nation of his own decent sincerity. “I don’t know whether it is courage or not,” he reminisced later. “Often a man gets into a situation where there is just one thing to do. There is no alternative. He wants to run but there is no place to run to. So he goes ahead on the only course that’s open and people call it courage.”