by Thai Jones
“I cannot but feel,” King confided to Abby at the end of the three weeks he had traveled with her husband, “that this visit is epoch-making in his own life, as it will also prove epoch-making in the industrial history of this continent.”
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LESS THAN ONE month after the Lexington Avenue explosion, on August 1, 1914, Commissioner Arthur Woods announced a major shake-up of the police department. Using the bomb to justify his claims that the city required a real secret service, he announced the creation of a new force: the anarchist and bomb squad. Finally, he was able to complete the task Commissioner Bingham had begun a decade earlier. Following his mentor’s opinions, he explained to the city that the infiltration and surveillance of dissident organizations would be a powerful deterrent against future terror threats. The unit went to work immediately. Officers of “various nationalities” took up “residence among the various groups” of radicals and set out to “secure evidence against anarchists and followers of the I.W.W.” They employed the most modern techniques, as well as elaborate disguises and subterfuges. Anything was acceptable if it allowed the secret operators to insinuate themselves among their dangerous quarry. “Detectives were carefully instructed how to act,” since everyone knew that “it was the custom of the I.W.W. and anarchists to investigate carefully all new members.”
Despite this specialized instruction, the new division was unsuccessful at preventing further anarchist attacks. As it happened, the most virulent bombing campaign in the city’s history occurred in the squad’s first years. On October 13, bombs targeted St. Patrick’s Cathedral and St. Alphonsus’ Church, where Tannenbaum had been arrested. On November 11, the anniversary of the Haymarket executions, unknown bombers attacked the Bronx County Courthouse. A few days later, a bomb was disabled before it exploded underneath a seat in the Tombs police court: The presiding magistrate was the same judge who had sentenced Tannenbaum to a year in prison. Despite the apparent links to radical causes and the Anarchist Squad’s relentless efforts, no one was ever arrested for any of these attacks.
The secret police made their impact in other ways. New York’s radicals found themselves targeted by “mosquito spies” and provocateurs. Ever since Caron’s death, Mother Earth complained, “the Anarchist, the I.W.W. groups and the Ferrer Center have been infested by mesmerists in search of fit subjects.” The school and community meeting place at the Ferrer center, plagued by informants, relocated from 107th Street to a rural farm in Stelton, New Jersey. And for those who stayed, a spreading distrust made even simple activities difficult. Undercover detectives would sidle into peaceful assemblies and declaim violent speeches advocating the use “of violence, bombs, and dynamite,” trying to instigate some attack that could then be thwarted. For the most part, their presence was little more than an annoyance for the veteran agitators. “Naturally they dared not approach experienced people,” Emma Goldman wrote. “But when they were told to get out, they turned to the young.” One member of the bomb squad convinced two youths, Carmine Carbone and Frank Abarno, to detonate a bomb in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The provocateur planned the attack, provided the explosives, and, according to the radicals, even lit the fuse, only to have other detectives race in and “prevent” the attack. Despite the obviousness of the frame-up, a judge sentenced the two defendants to six to twelve years in Sing Sing.
Other infiltrators inadvertently revealed themselves. The anarchists discovered one when he failed to stamp a report, and his letter, addressed to the Burns Detective Agency, was returned to the Ferrer Center. Another gave himself away when his dentist noticed a revolver under his jacket. A third agent, Dave Sullivan, had served a prison sentence during the Free Silence agitation and had gone further into the radicals’ confidence by becoming Becky Edelsohn’s lover. He was discovered only after his outraged wife finally caught on and exposed him. Despite the clumsiness of these attempts, at least one spy did manage to inflict actual damage. Donald Vose, the son of one of Goldman’s closest friends, had lived in the Mother Earth offices for most of 1914. Unbeknownst to the anarchists, he was a paid informant of the Burns detective agency, and information he gleaned from their conversations allowed him to lead police to arrest two suspects who were still wanted from the 1910 Los Angeles Times bombing case.
Even as the conflict with radicals intensified, police investigators found themselves distracted by a new and greater threat. In spite of Mayor Mitchel’s pleas, it was proving impossible for New Yorkers to avoid entirely the repercussions of the Great War in Europe. By 1915, panicky reports were already warning of German saboteurs in the city. Police prepared for draft riots. “Plans have been laid by the Commissioner for almost any emergency that might arise out of alien plots or the exigencies of war,” Edward Mott Woolley informed the readers of McClure’s. “Every block in the city has at least one citizen who is a special agent of the police, and whose duty it is to communicate instantly any evidence of danger from enemies.” The Anarchist Squad became the neutrality squad. Just as the old Italian detectives had tried to find links between radicals and the Black Hand, the new division came to understand its various enemies as part of one single conspiracy. Inspector Thomas J. Tunney, the unit’s chief, told his men to divide their attention between “the Prussian, the Bolshevik, and the Anarchist.”
The breath of the Hun.
WHILE OVERSEEING THESE infiltrations, Commissioner Woods continued his public agitation for free speech. During 1916, when a traction strike in the city brought streetcars, elevated trains, and subways to a halt, he insisted that the police had a responsibility only to keep the peace, and that the department would not allow itself to serve as hired muscle for corporate bosses. “The question [of] who won the strike” did not interest the police, Woods wrote: “Their duty, and their sole duty, was to maintain order, to protect life and property, to ensure to all concerned—the companies, the workers, the public—the enjoyment of their full legal rights.” As he had done two years earlier, and in strikingly similar language, the commissioner stressed the sanctity of free speech; “there was no law to prevent one man from talking to another on the street,” he wrote. Only if strikers “became disorderly the police would take action.”
As usual, however, Woods’s defense of constitutional rights reflected just one aspect of his method. Two months before the transit strike, he had testified before state legislators in defense of his use of wiretaps in criminal investigations. “Eavesdropping—the most objectionable sort of thing is eavesdropping,” he admitted. “We all object to it, we all revolt at the very idea of it.” And yet, he argued, it was absolutely necessary in certain cases. The politicians worried that surveillance might accidentally be used against respectable citizens. But Woods said that he personally decided when the technique could be used, and, of course, he was confident in his own discretion. When it came to more abstract concerns about civil liberties, he was simply dismissive. “There is altogether too much sappy talk about the rights of the crook,” he scoffed. “He is a crook. He is an outlaw. He defies what has been put down as what shall be done and what shall not be done by the great body of law-abiding citizens. Where does his right come in?”
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IN ONES AND TWOS, by elevated train and limousine, the gathering massed along the piers at Fifty-third Street along the East River on the morning of March 10, 1915. Chatting and laughing, the good-humored crowd kept its attention focused on the water. Shortly after nine a.m., their eyes were drawn to an approaching ferry; then, as the boat drew nearer, someone spotted a thin figure on the upper deck, madly waving a handkerchief. “It’s Frank!” they shouted. “It’s Frank!” As he stepped onshore, looking pale and, thanks to his spectacles, older than they remembered him, the welcoming committee thrust a bouquet of red carnations in his hand. After minutes of hugs and exclamations, they all departed for a celebratory breakfast; no one had noticed the member of the Anarchist Squad who had been lurking nearby the entire time.
“Tannenbaum was, I guess
, a rather unruly prisoner,” Lincoln Steffens reluctantly conceded. In total, he had served three stints in the cooler and had spent his final two months in solitary confinement. At a reception in the Mother Earth offices on his first evening of freedom, Frank described for the reporters some of the abuses he had seen. “For monumental ignorance allow me to commend Warden Hayes,” he said. Not only had he overseen beatings and starvations; the tyrant of Blackwell’s Island had proven to be more or less illiterate, at least in his role as censor. He had banned Goethe’s Faust, as well as various works of bourgeois history and the Nation magazine, while obliviously allowing Frank to read the entire Kropotkin library in his cell. “I see no reason why any remarks of Tannenbaum should call for comment from me,” Commissioner Davis had indignantly replied when reporters contacted her for a response, “and I am not going to enter into any controversy with Tannenbaum.”
But she was mistaken. Frank went to work for the Masses magazine; in the summer of 1915 he published a series of exposés revealing the worst of what he had seen. Spurred to outrage, the state launched an investigation into conditions on the island. Warden Hayes testified to turning pressure hoses onto inmates and forcing them to sleep on the soaked floor, and he seemed surprised by the idea that healthy prisoners should be separated from those with syphilis or tuberculosis. The cooler he defended as a necessary evil. When Commissioner Davis was called in for questioning, she scolded the examiners and questioned their expertise, confronting them face-to-face, refusing to remain seated. Asked if she agreed with the warden’s tactics of shattering an inmate through punishment, she replied, “Not until the prisoner’s spirit is broken, but until he behaves.”
Davis defended her subordinate’s integrity, though she admitted his ideas of penology had not quite kept pace with the times. The damage was done, however, and a week after she testified, the Department of Correction announced that Warden Hayes was out: He had been put on leave through the end of the year, at which point he would retire. On Blackwell’s Island, the prisoners gave three cheers for Tannenbaum. “The state prison commission has found Warden Hayes unfit for his position,” the Masses cheered. “By how many months do we anticipate the findings of another commission when we say that Commissioner Davis is unfit for hers?”
TANNENBAUM’S COMRADES IN the Industrial Workers of the World, who believed that prison improvements were a distraction from the real work of factory struggle, worried that his success as a reformer might dull his agitations. “Am glad you are ready for work on ‘The Masses,’” Jane Roulston wrote soon after his release, “but am sorry you have no time to affiliate with the I.W.W.” Frank retained fond memories of his time with the One Big Union. “The I.W.W. that I knew I shall always look back upon with the greatest reverence,” he would later write. “Nowhere have I found that idealism, that love of one’s kind, that social mindedness and sincerity.” In his first week of freedom he spoke to a rally in Union Square. But even though conditions in the city remained desperate—unemployment and homelessness had only increased since the previous year—the context had changed. Thanks to his agitations, there were now jobless commissions and church-organized bureaus for those who were out of work. A whole infrastructure of relief was beginning to emerge. “That may not be much to accomplish,” Frank modestly conceded, “but it at least means that a little bit of conscience has been awakened.”
Tannenbaum’s time as a revolutionist was over; still smarting from a feeling of intellectual inadequacy, his consuming interest was to further his education. Most of his entire first day of freedom was spent on the campus of Columbia University, in Morningside Heights in northern Manhattan. With the assistance of friends he was allowed to pass the “character test,” and he enrolled for classes in the summer of 1915. Not surprisingly, his former associates were aghast. “I hear you intend going to Columbia,” wrote Alexander Berkman, who was in San Francisco. “Of course, advice, is never in place, but I’m sure you are going to waste several years in learning things mostly not worth knowing, partly that ‘ain’t so’, + a small balance of which worth knowing you could acquire more thoroughly with much less expenditure of time, effort + money. In other words, it’s a relic of ignorance to worship a ‘college education.’“
But Frank ignored all remonstrance. Every morning he woke up at five a.m. to study. Through “work—everlasting plugging,” he managed to make up for the reading he had missed out on and started to catch up with his colleagues. It was a struggle at first. In his first two semesters, he received a D in English composition, a C in German, and a B for various courses in history. The former revolutionist received his best mark—an A—in Business.
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“I THINK YOU have the town with you,” Mayor Mitchel’s secretary wrote to Katharine B. Davis in early August 1914. The commissioner had just quelled the Independence Day prison riots, and she was on her way to resolving Becky Edelsohn’s hunger strike. But within a year most of that support had vanished. Criticism made Davis defensive; it amplified the authoritative tendencies that had already made her despised among her prisoners. Whatever goodwill she retained was eroded by shocking revelations of maltreatment and neglect within the city’s jails. Tannenbaum’s investigation had exposed the worst of Blackwell’s Island, the Department of Health condemned conditions in the Tombs, and the state Board of Charities did the same for Hart Island. Having begun her tenure with such headstrong ambition, Davis now spoke of the necessity of gradualism. “I am, I assert, a conservative radical,” she explained. “Changes have to be made slowly. I have tried to conduct an educational campaign, and I have been reorganizing slowly … I have to move slowly.”
Not all of these failures were hers alone. Like her colleagues in the administration, she had come to her post with advanced ideas about social science but scant experience in governing. Her main problem had nothing to do with temperament, caution, or conservatism: It was a matter of money. All the grandiose visions of the Mitchel government’s earliest days had been concocted without the slightest care for appropriations and budgeting. The jails in particular needed enormous improvements, and most should have just been demolished. Davis had pleaded for increased funding. “I shouted until I was hoarse,” she explained. “I know how to economize, but I can’t do the impossible. It is the same proposition that Charities Commissioner Kingsbury is up against. The population we care for has increased 50 per cent. and the appropriation 4 per cent.”
But public opinion, outraged by the stories of abuse, focused its anger on Davis herself. Her sex only accelerated her fall. At the time of her appointment, most people had approved of the idea of a female prison commissioner. Now the doubters appeared. “Admirable women, put in places of authority and long retained there,” theorized the editors at Life, “are often seen to cripple the lives they dominate by excessive exercise of control. They get over-development of the will, scare off the people who ought to work with them and come lonely to saddened ends.” Militant feminists were skeptical, too, but for different reasons. “Women,” argued Margaret Sanger, “have been too ready to admire other women who, with inflated ideas of self-importance, are willing to degrade themselves and their sex by assuming the barbaric posts that decent men are giving up—in short by becoming detectives, policewomen and commissioners of correction. Let us proclaim such women as traitors and enemies of the working class!”
In the end, the prediction by the Masses about Davis’s imminent removal proved accurate. In December 1915 she resigned as commissioner of correction and took a new position as the head of the newly created Board of Parole. Press releases once again lauded her as the “best-fitted person” for the job. And Mayor Mitchel supported her to the last. But the tenure of the first woman to hold a cabinet post in a New York City administration had ended in failure and controversy after only two years.
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JOHN ADAMS KINGSBURY had been a perpetual headache to the mayor, his Department of Charities “the storm centre” of the administration. Sure of
his ideas, the commissioner had scythed the malefactors and wastrels from his jurisdiction, cutting costs, improving care—and amassing enemies. “There was this fatal streak in him of no compromise,” thought Frances Perkins. Another member of the government recalled how every one of his manic initiatives created “some new little gang of people that had their knives out for him.” But no confrontation in his tenure had proven so damaging as his clash with the Sisters of Mercy.
The city spent millions each year in public subsidies for private orphanages. The Catholic Church was the largest benefactor from these payments, receiving $2.50 a week for each of the twenty-three thousand children enrolled in its parochial schools and orphanages. In former years, Tammany administrations had disbursed this largesse without much in the way of accounting and oversight. Kingsbury changed that. Scrutinizing every dormitory, bathroom, and kitchen, he discovered the inevitable disgrace: “Beds were alive with vermin,” he reported to the mayor at the end of 1914; “antiquated methods of punishment prevailed … the children were given little else save religious instruction.” In one institution, two hundred children were said to be sharing the same toothbrush and cake of soap. What they had seen, investigators concluded, was “worse than anything in Oliver Twist”.
Although his investigations had not focused solely on Catholic facilities—more than half of the criticized schools had been run by Protestants—the diocese nevertheless detected “a nasty anti-Catholic animus” in the inquiry and responded with a campaign in self-defense. Mitchel was denounced as a betrayer of his own faith; Kingsbury and his fellow social scientists were accused of operating a “highly-organized agency of paganism.” Taking a lesson from the practices of Ivy Lee, hundreds of thousands of pamphlets were printed and distributed on church steps each Sunday after mass. “The Church is from God,” parishioners read. “Modern sociology is not.”