More Powerful Than Dynamite

by Thai Jones

  * * *

  ON A PERFECT summer evening, scores of New York radicals received invitations to Rebecca Edelsohn’s funeral. Organizers announced the location of the service; mourners were told to congregate in Union Square. But the date was left undetermined, since Becky herself remained a “very healthy girl from all appearances.”

  She had been in fine bloom that morning—July 20—when she had appeared at General Sessions Court to stand trial for the time, back in April, when her speech against the Mexican war had so infuriated the audience that the police had taken her into custody in order to protect her from the fury of the mob. Three months later, she was just as eager to antagonize her class enemies. Dressed in mourning, carrying an enormous corsage of American Beauty roses, she playacted as if the whole thing was a great melodrama, sighing and swooning into her comrades’ arms. When the magistrate revealed her punishment—three months in the workhouse on Blackwell’s Island—she recovered her poise and replied sharply, “I think the sentence pronounced on me was unjust, and I announce that I intend to start a hunger strike.”

  Becky Edelsohn, at right, with Louise Berger.

  Officers led her to the Tombs prison. There she spurned a dinner of vegetable soup, boiled beef, potatoes, green peas, and bread. Supper, too—bread, tea, apple sauce—she turned away. Hunger strikes were frequent in England, where they had become a favored technique for militant suffragettes, but so far no prisoner in the United States had successfully attempted to starve themselves as a political act. Upton Sinclair had tried it for a few days, but now Becky planned to make an earnest effort to sacrifice herself for the cause. Berkman mailed the funeral invitations that evening; when she succeeded in starving to death, the memorial would then proceed. Newspapers, compelled by the novelty of the story, issued detailed descriptions of the menu at every meal.

  The next morning, when Edelsohn arrived at Blackwell’s Island, Katharine Davis was waiting to receive her. In the processing room, Becky refused to be examined or to answer the medical staff’s questions. “She was quite pleasant about it, but exceedingly firm,” declining even to give her age and background. Instead she reiterated her determination to starve. The commissioner stood by, smiling, and then left to consult with the newspapermen who had come to watch the confrontation. “Reba is an obstinate and obdurate girl,” she told them. “I’m going to find out just how obdurate and obstinate she wants to be.” If the fast began to threaten her health, then doctors would tie her down and force her to eat through a tube. Until then she would get no special privileges. Davis’s policy seemed sensible and practical. “She has handled hundreds of cases like Reba’s,” a reporter wrote, “and intends to handle this one without any fuss and feathers.”

  For the remainder of the day, Becky stayed in her cell. She returned breakfast, luncheon, and supper untouched, and didn’t drink any water. In Manhattan, Alexander Berkman hurried to form an “anti-torture committee” and hinted at the repercussions that would follow if his comrade was harmed. “We will not appeal to the law or any higher court,” he said. “We can handle the situation by our own strength.” City officials hired special bodyguards, and doctors stopped visiting Blackwell’s Island after a rumor circulated that anarchists planned to blow up the ferries. But Berkman’s private correspondence was considerably less bellicose. To Emma Goldman, touring the West Coast, he sent a telegram pleading, YOU AND FRIENDS EVERYWHERE WIRE PROTESTS FORCIBLE FEEDING TO COMMISSIONER DAVIS … CASE SERIOUS.

  This had never happened before—a female prisoner confronting a woman of high office—and newspapers eagerly aggravated the situation. Interest in the case inspired the New York Call to host a contest: Readers were asked to submit two-hundred-word essays on the subject “What Would You Do With Becky?” Across the country, editors printed articles and opinion pieces offering their own answer to the question. “Blackwell’s Island reveals two striking illustrations of the woman of the past and the woman of the future,” noted the Woman Rebel. “Katharine B. Davis is the woman of the past and Rebecca Edelsohn is the woman of the future.” But it was the Tribune that marked the story in the boldest ink, with the headline WOMAN VS. WOMAN.

  “AS A PIONEER,” an acolyte wrote, Katharine Bement Davis had “blazed a trail of precedents.” Born in 1860, she had been the first girl to attend the Free Academy in Rochester, New York. Then, because her family could not afford tuition, she had taught high school for a decade, saving money and pursuing her own education at night, before gaining admission to Vassar College in 1890 as a thirty-year-old freshman. She continued on to receive advanced degrees in Berlin and at the University of Chicago, under the tutelage of Thorstein Veblen. In 1901, having earned a doctorate in political economy, she became the first superintendent of the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills, in Westchester County.

  Under her direction, the prison developed into a proving ground for the newest criminological theories, and Davis herself became an acknowledged expert on crime and correction. When Mayor Mitchel announced that she would become the first woman ever to hold a cabinet post in New York, reporters had understood that history was being made. The editors at Outlook deemed her accession “A Revolutionary Appointment” and predicted “a new era in dealing with crime” in the metropolis. But in fact she had more than a decade of experience already and was among the most qualified candidates in the nation. “Her new position is not a woman’s job, nor a man’s job,” an advocate reminded the doubters. “It is a job for some one who knows how. Miss Davis knows how.”

  Fifty-four years old in 1914, she was described by one reporter as “a modest, motherly-looking, blue-eyed woman with brown hair plentifully sprinkled with gray, whom you could pick out at a glance as a crack housekeeper, if nothing more.” With rectitude and resolve, she had constructed a career. Intimates remarked on her kindness; her public statements often hinted at a wicked wit. As a professional woman she had to be both commanding and self-effacing: sufficiently masculine to put down jailhouse disturbances, but also feminine enough to set newsmen and politicians at their ease. “Her sex is always kept in the background,” a journalist recorded. “One can’t talk with her for five minutes without forgetting entirely that she is a woman.” She had been a renowned social scientist for years, yet still, because of her sex, she would never be judged by her work alone. Praise from men always carried an element of latent mockery. “She has not gotten her ideas about criminals from reading novels and seeing plays,” marveled an editor at Current Opinion, “nor by making an occasional visit to a jail. Not at all.”

  As commissioner of correction, she had taken command of the city’s most retrograde department. There were five district prisons, three city prisons, and penitentiaries on Riker’s Island, Hart Island, and Blackwell’s Island—each in a state of decrepitude, and most about a century or so behind the times in their practices and regulations. As they stood, the jails overflowed with 4,602 prisoners, and none was worse than the women’s workhouse, where as many as 730 occupants jammed a facility designed for 150. “Everybody knows New York’s prison institutions to be little better than medieval,” Davis had acknowledged at the start of her tenure. “I hope to bring them up to something nearer to the highest modern standard.” She had already dealt with a succession of radical prisoners. The uprising on Blackwell’s Island had just been quelled. And now here was Becky.

  Katharine Bement Davis.

  EDELSOHN HAD NOT eaten for several days. She took pleasure in taunting the keepers who watched her movements, eagerly joining the mess-hall lines and then sitting quietly at the table without taking a bite. In the hospital ward, where she had been transferred from her cell, she energetically helped out with the patients and remained infuriatingly positive. “She walks around cheerfully,” an exasperated observer noted, “drinks lots of water and thoroughly enjoys the publicity her alleged ‘strike’ has caused.” So far she had been seen ingesting the juice from one lemon, but nothing else. Authorities had no idea how long it woul
d take for someone to weaken from a fast; they expected her to be prostrate within a week. When four days passed, Davis, without any evidence, concluded, “I am now convinced that she has been getting food ever since she went to the Island.” After nine days, when Becky still appeared to be in “perfect” condition, baffled officials accused her of smuggling “milk tablets,” or taking some other form of “tabloid nourishment.”

  Everyone was waiting for her to start suffering so that they could administer the force-feeding. Davis had mentioned the possibility of using this procedure on the very first morning of the hunger strike, and it had been discussed constantly ever since. Edelsohn’s opponents took a prurient glee in the thought of having her strapped down and fattened on liquid food. The World typographers composed a graphic to celebrate the process:

  Recipe of Dr. Katharine B. Davis, Commissioner of Correction, for treatment of a woman hunger-striker:

  Roll her tightly in blankets, with arms at sides, like Indian papoose, leaving only head protruding.

  Pin blankets fast with safety pins, so that limbs are immovable.

  Insert one-third inch rubber tube through nose. Pour through

  this, by means of funnel, warm soup or broth.

  Operation can be performed by two persons …

  Repeat as frequently as necessary.

  The joking masked the fact that force-feeding an unwilling subject was an ordeal equivalent to torture. Prison authorities claimed that only two female nurses would be necessary to hold down the prisoner. “It will not hurt her,” Davis insisted, “not even cause her discomfort.” But if Becky resisted—and she had once fought off a group of police officers who were trying to take her into custody—far more strength would be required. So interested were readers in this procedure that a female reporter for the World volunteered to be force-fed in order to describe the sensations. She was tied down with tape by three men.15 While she was immobile, the doctor sprayed her nostrils with cocaine and disinfectant. “As it reached my throat, it burned and burned.” Then he inserted the tube into her nose. “It is utterly impossible to describe the anguish of it,” she wrote. “An instant that was an hour, and the liquid had reached my throat. It was ice cold, and sweat as cold broke out upon my forehead.” And she had volunteered to suffer this. “If I, playacting, felt my being burning with revolt at this brutal usurpation of my own functions,” she wrote, “how they who actually suffered the ordeal in its acutest horror must have flamed at the violation of the sanctuaries of their spirits.”

  To Edelsohn’s supporters, the act became a metaphor for the arbitrary powers of the state. “I haven’t seen in the papers anywhere that organized or unorganized anarchy, whatever it is, has threatened to forcibly feed ‘Kitty’ Davis,” a socialist reader wrote to the Call. “Rebecca only advocated violence, while ‘Kitty’ says she’s going to carry it out.” Speaking for his anti-torture committee, Berkman railed against the authorities. “I believe that no humane and right-thinking person,” he said, “can retain his self-respect if he fails to voice a vigorous protest against such official violence and worse-than-Russian brutality practiced upon a defenseless prisoner.” But no one summarized the situation better than Becky herself. “Capitalism,” she wrote in a letter smuggled off the island, “means forcible feeding in prison and forcible starvation out of prison.”

  Force-feeding prisoners was considered by some to be a form of torture.

  Every day, for the first week of the hunger strike, Davis had appeared to be on the verge of resorting to force-feeding. New rumors were constantly reported: The prison doctors had procured the hose; a wooden bit had been built in the penitentiary workshop; Edelsohn—though she didn’t know it—was sleeping on a bed that could be equipped with straps and used for the operation. Davis had used the method many times on recalcitrant inmates at Bedford Hills. She would employ it again just as soon as Becky began to falter.

  On July 31, the tenth day, Edelsohn was finally starting to flag. “Can’t write much—feel very weak,” she scribbled in a note that morning. That afternoon, her report was: “Very weak. Expect collapse any time.” The moment was coming for Davis to fulfill her threat. “They will be forced to either forcibly feed me or let me go,” Becky speculated. “They are waiting until the very last and that won’t be long.” Her letters to Berkman, carried off the island in secret by other prisoners, became fatalistic, morose. “Don’t worry, dear,” she wrote, “even if the worst comes to the worst. I can only die once. And it will make tremendous propaganda.”

  The time had come for Davis to make a decision. Edelsohn was weakening, and the public scrutiny was intense. For more than a week, the confrontation had received constant attention in the press. The commissioner had contributed to this by offering statements to reporters, but she had also complained of the publicity it was giving to the protest. On July 30, she made her choice, issuing a circular to the city’s editors: “Hereafter I must decline to give information as to the health or conduct of Miss Edelsohn and the other members of the I.W.W., who are inmates of the institutions of the Department of Correction … It is not in the interest of discipline or in the interest of the democratic conduct of our institutions that these prisoners should receive consideration over that accorded to other prisoners, or be singled out for newspaper notoriety.”

  The anarchists were outmaneuvered. Realizing that Becky’s protest relied on exposure, Davis had just ignored the controversial question of force-feeding, and had simply shut off the prisoner’s access to her public. In a confidential letter to the mayor’s secretary, Davis seemed as relieved at avoiding reporters as she was to have quelled the demonstration. “They have tormented the life out of me for the past two weeks for bulletins as to ‘Becky’s’ health,’ she complained. As for Edelsohn and the other inmates, “the least said about them in the papers the better. If any of them die or any other catastrophe happens I will give out information. It seems to me that the I.W.W. and their ilk simply gather strength for their cause from any material whatever expressed about them in the newspapers.”

  Following the commissioner’s decree, the headlines ceased. The Call quietly canceled its contest. Reporters moved on to other sensations. And even if Davis had not sealed off access to the press, focus on the hunger strike would have diffused anyway. It was August 1, 1914, and there was news from across the Atlantic.

  * * *

  THE POTENTIAL FOR a European conflict had grown increasingly alarming throughout July. BRIGHT PROSPECT FOR PEACE, a headline that ran at the start of the month, had become A THREAT OF WAR a few weeks later. Then there had followed a period of anxious uncertainty: STILL IN THE BALANCE, CRITICAL DAYS. Despite the onrush of crisis, observers refused to acknowledge what they were witnessing. “A general European war is unthinkable,” editors at the Times declared on July 28. “Europe cannot afford such a war, the world cannot afford it, and happily the conviction is growing that such an appalling conflict is altogether beyond the range of possibility.” But within days, Germany and Austria, France, England, Russia, and a drove of smaller states all bound themselves for hostilities. On August 4 at six A.M., the Kaiser’s field-gray infantry crossed the frontier into Belgium. At last the headlines read, THE GREATEST OF WARS.

  Forthwith, the struggle spread to New York City. Two ocean liners, the Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and the British Olympic, both raced into the harbor at full steam, with portholes covered and deck lights extinguished, bearing stories of escaping enemy cruisers. A wireless report announced that the Lusitania had been sunk off the New Jersey coast. This story proved groundless, as did the repeated rumors of foreign navies operating in American waters. A village fireworks display became a burning vessel. And the residents on Riverside Drive were certain they had heard the sound of cannon. “The phantom fleet is off our coast again,” the Times quipped. “The last time it was reported lurking near Sandy Hook it flew the Spanish flag. That was during our war with Spain. Now the fleet flag is either French, German, or British, acc
ording to the observer.”

  Ashore, citizens of every combatant nation intermingled with one another. Residents marched by the hundreds and thousands to their national consulates—all located on the same stretch of Lower Broadway—to volunteer for duty to their respective fatherlands. Impromptu performances of “The Marseillaise” and “Die Wacht am Rhein” arose wherever beer was poured or a street pianist played. Teutonic newsboys fought bloody combats with Slavic newsboys. Crowds massed before the bulletin boards on Park Row and in Times Square, debating each successive communiqué from Europe. “English, French, Russians, Germans, all met on common ground and argued in the language of Manhattan,” a reporter wrote. “Belgian neutrality was attacked and defended. Serbs talked of what they would do when the Hapsbourgs were driven back to Budapest, Frenchmen expiated on the need for wiping out the wrong of 1870.”

  Occasionally bystanders erupted into arguments or minor scuffles, but if someone went too far, they were usually shouted down with the cry: “Shut up! You’re in America.” There had been every reason to expect worse. “Here is a general European war at white heat,” newspapers marveled—yet comity prevailed. “Probably we should be amazed if we realized the seething hatreds which surrounded these new Americans at home,” a Tribune editor observed. “But such animosities are a long way from Broadway.”