More Powerful Than Dynamite

by Thai Jones

  Kingsbury was not patient with impediments. Finding his efforts thwarted, he immediately began to suspect a criminal conspiracy. With the assistance of Commissioner Woods and the consent of the mayor, he took the extreme step of having the police install wiretaps on the telephones of several prominent church spokesmen. When word of this measure inevitably leaked, the officials found themselves denounced everywhere. Civic and religious groups demanded Mitchel’s impeachment; the governor launched an investigation. William Randolph Hearst’s New York American was especially eager to press the assault; “in making this arbitrary and unlawful invasion and incursion upon the privacy of citizens’ homes and businesses,” its editors wrote, the government was “not one bit better morally than any thief who climbs in the window to steal a householder’s papers or money.” The administration—at first—denied any knowledge of the affair, then it clumsily attempted to destroy the evidence. But in May 1916 a Brooklyn grand jury indicted Kingsbury and considered doing the same for others. “If, as it does appear,” the court declared, “Mayor Mitchel and Police Commissioner Woods approved of the conduct of those responsible for the tapping of the wires … they merit severe condemnation.”

  After more than a year of controversy, Kingsbury was acquitted. But to his—and the mayor’s—list of enemies had been added many of the million Catholic voters who lived in New York City.

  * * *

  ALEXANDER BERKMAN WAS restless. He had hardly left New York in eight years, and with police spies everywhere, the city was less hospitable than ever before. Toward the end of 1914, he began to plan a crosscountry lecture tour. As the date to leave approached, the prospect shone brighter. “Too long in one place, at the same kind of work, has a tendency to stale one,” he wrote. “Again, living many years in New York one is apt to regard the Metropolis as a criterion of the whole country, in point of general conditions and revolutionary activity—which is far from correct.” Then, on the night before departure, his farewell party was interrupted by the cops. Berkman was arrested and missed his train. “Man proposes, and the police impose,” he wrote good-humoredly; this latest outrage delayed his start by only a single day.

  His first stop, Pittsburgh, brought old recollections hurtling back. Twenty-two years had passed since his attack on Frick. A lecture in the city was well attended. But in Homestead, site of the 1892 steel strike, he was depressed to find the workers cowed and dispirited; riddled with informers, they were unwilling, he concluded, to risk their jobs to hear his speech. Elyria, Detroit, Buffalo, Denver: At every destination he faced petty injunctions. Auditorium owners reneged on their contracts; police disturbed the meetings. Even when he was allowed to talk, the results tended to be disappointing. “The poor boy seems to have absolutely no luck with lectures,” Goldman wrote. “He is terribly discouraged, which I can readily understand.” His gloom transmitted itself to his impressions of the country. “Kansas City is depressing: the sky is drab, the air smutty, the streets haunted by emaciated and bedraggled unemployed,” he wrote. “Cleveland, Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Louis—everywhere I find the same situation.” His enthusiasm for travel rapidly diminished. After two months on the road, the city he had escaped with such relief had already been transformed by wistful memory into “dear old Gotham.”

  The life of the itinerant missionary did not suit him; he had to be agitating. But somehow anger—the rage that had driven his politics all along—no longer felt appropriate. Sorrow was the only appropriate response to the war and its effects. Just as he had foretold, the governments of every nation had used the conflict as an excuse to persecute its dissidents; the citizenry, in its patriotic fury, had acquiesced to assist in this effort. Lifelong advocates of peace and cooperation now joined the nationalists. Even Kropotkin, the greatest anarchist teacher, had succumbed to the fallacy of ethnocentrism, writing a pamphlet declaring the need for the Slavic Russians to defeat Prussian militarism. Berkman could only take it philosophically. “Time tempers the impatience of Youth,” he wrote. “Slowly, but imperatively, life forces us to learn to conceive of the Social Revolution as something less cataclysmic and mechanical, something more definite and humanly real.”

  He was in California during the summer of 1916, editing a magazine he had dubbed the Blast, when a new outrage relieved his stupor. The war was in its second year, and Americans were growing frustrated with neutrality. The Lusitania, which had escaped from New York Harbor in the first days of the conflict, had since been sunk by a German torpedo, costing more than a hundred American lives. A campaign for “Preparedness” found civilians marching and camping out, training themselves for the possibility of fighting. On July 22, a pro-military parade in San Francisco scattered in panic when a bomb, thrown by an unknown hand, detonated in the midst of the crowd, killing eight people and wounding dozens more.

  Berkman and Goldman learned about the attack over the telephone, and their initial thought was, “I hope we anarchists will not again be held responsible.” They were. Just like thirty years earlier in Chicago, the government indicted labor leaders for the crime—in this case Thomas Mooney and Warren Billings—ignoring the fact that no evidence linked them to the crime. When a hostile judge ordered Mooney to be executed, Berkman, who was himself facing imminent indictment, fomented national and international opposition. Most crucially, by using his contacts in Russia, he was able to organize street protests in Petrograd and Kronstadt. Word of the demonstrations passed from the American ambassador to Woodrow Wilson, who, mindful of the diplomatic impact on the war, personally requested that the California governor commute Mooney’s sentence to life imprisonment.

  That was a small but vital victory—and it was also the last.

  * * *

  ON APRIL 2, 1917, Washington, D.C., prepared for battle. President Wilson had called the Congress into extraordinary session, and it was widely expected that he would be asking the legislature to ratify a declaration of war. After all the years of hesitation—and a reelection campaign waged on the promise of keeping the United States out of the conflict—he was finally ready to make the dreadful decision. Antiwar groups had mobilized to show their disapproval, assaulting government offices with angry telegrams and sending thousands of delegates to the city. Outside, the Capitol was surrounded by encampments occupied by irate pacifists; inside, “the building swarmed with Secret Service men, Post Office inspectors, and policemen.” Protesters rallied through the streets wearing white armbands and waving streamers that read WE WANT PEACE and KEEP OUT OF WAR. Advocates for women’s suffrage, in an unrelated rally that had been ongoing since January, added their pickets to the general turmoil.

  Wilson’s speech was prepared; he was ready, and none could accuse him of taking this step lightly. After the disastrous occupation of Veracruz, he had kept steadfast in refusing to commit American arms to foreign soil. In 1916, he had reluctantly—and only after repeated provocations—agreed to send an expeditionary force into northern Mexico in an unsuccessful attempt to capture the renegade Pancho Villa. Since then, and despite the far greater pressures of the European war, he had dedicated himself to the moral righteousness of neutrality. “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight,” he had said after a German torpedo sank the Lusitania. “There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.” Always at the heart of his thinking was the remembrance of those coffins he had seen in New York City. “I have to sleep with my conscience in these matters,” he explained, “and I shall be held responsible for every drop of blood that may be spent.”

  Afternoon turned to evening, but the streets remained too chaotic for the president to appear. Onlookers jeered as police and army reservists were called in to clear a thousand pacifists from the stairs on the eastern side of the Capitol building. By nightfall, peace had finally been restored. The remaining spectators applauded as two troops of cavalry, their “sabres glittering under the arc lights,” cantered into the plaza. Behind them, the presi
dent’s automobile stopped by the entrance. Flanked by Secret Service agents and clutching a few sheets of typewritten notes, Woodrow Wilson strode inside. The senators, Supreme Court justices, and members of the diplomatic corps had only just found their seats in the chamber of the House of Representatives when the speaker rose to announce, “The President of the United States.” Everyone stood again; the congressmen “not only cheered, but yelled” an ovation unlike any he had ever before received in Washington.

  Wilson held his speech in both hands, concentrating on the words and not looking up from the pages. He began with a litany of German misdeeds, starting with the invasion of Belgium and ending with the recent belligerency on the high seas. “He spoke slowly at first,” a reporter observed, “then faster than usual. His voice was clear and grew stronger as he proceeded.” He built his case methodically, gradually approaching the decisive point. There were no interruptions; “the close attention deepened into a breathless silence, so painfully intense that it seemed almost audible.” Finally, he came to it. “With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the step I am taking,” he asked Congress to “formally accept the status of belligerent which has been thrust upon it.”

  Further on, nearly at the end of his oration, Wilson added one last justification for the choice that he had made. “The world,” he explained, “must be made safe for democracy.” This remark almost passed without notice. But one senator realized it was the keynote of the entire address. Alone, he clapped his hands—“gravely, emphatically”—and then the ovation spread. “One after another,” noted a Times reporter, others “followed his lead until the whole host broke forth in a great uproar of applause.”

  WORD OF THE president’s decision began spreading through New York during the midst of the evening’s entertainments. At the Metropolitan Opera, the audience stood throughout the intermission to sing the anthem and cheer the armed forces. News of impending war flashed onto the moving-picture screen at the Rialto, on Forty-second Street, and at other cinemas throughout the city. Crowds streamed from the cabarets and theaters, crying “Hurrah for Wilson!” and “Down with the Kaiser!” In the streets, vendors did a roaring business in flags; noisy impromptu parades materialized on Fifth Avenue and Broadway.

  Woodrow Wilson addressing Congress.

  No special announcements were made at Lüchow’s or the Hofbrau Haus, two of New York’s leading German restaurants. In the midst of the celebrations, socialists who spoke out against the conflict were beaten and arrested. At Rector’s, the orchestra broke into “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the patrons rose to their feet. When diners at one table refused to stand, they were attacked and had to be rescued by the waiters. For these residents of the city, it was not the part of Wilson’s speech about making the world safe for democracy that seemed to be the central issue, but another phrase that had gone largely unremarked upon. “If there should be disloyalty,” the president had told Congress, “it will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression.”

  Having entered the war, the United States rushed to outdo its European peers in the silencing of dissent. In the months following Wilson’s declaration, tyrannies of every degree and pitch undid the progress of decades of progressive agitations. Citizen vigilance committees instigated neighborly mob justice. Pacifists were attacked and jailed. The New York Tribune offered its readers a weekly column entitled “Who’s Who Against America,” which spotlighted William Randolph Hearst, Victor Berger, the entire state of Wisconsin, and anyone else who publicly doubted the virtues of the war. The Espionage and Sedition acts criminalized “disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the form of government of the U.S. or the constitution of the U.S.,” effectively ending free speech across the nation. Radical publications were banned from the mails, with Mother Earth and the Blast atop the list. Under the new statutes, almost every word spoken by anarchists, socialists, or progressives during the previous thirty years—as well as most of the works of Lincoln, Thoreau, and any number of quintessentially American thinkers—now constituted a criminal felony. “They give you ninety days for quoting the Declaration of Independence,” said Max Eastman, editor of the Masses, “six months for quoting the Bible, and pretty soon somebody is going to get a life sentence for quoting Woodrow Wilson in the wrong connection.”

  Public figures of every stripe had to reexamine their beliefs.

  Upton and Craig Sinclair, who had fled Manhattan soon after Caron’s death, were now living in a ramshackle house in Pasadena, California. Through 1916, they had collaborated on his new novel, King Coal, based on the Colorado strike. The book appeared in September 1917 and proved to be another commercial failure. By then the United States had entered into war. Unlike most socialists, Sinclair enthusiastically supported the president’s crusade against German militarism, a position that forced him to split from the party he had championed for the previous decade. Since radical publications, including the Call and Appeal to Reason, had been the only dependable outlet for his writings, he was left with no way to share his thoughts with the public. This was not acceptable, so he founded a journal of his own, Upton Sinclair’s magazine. But despite his prowar stance, his troubles continued even then. Citing his association with Caron, the post office refused to grant him a second-class mailing permit.

  Walter Lippmann had demurred, back in 1914, when Sinclair had tried to recruit him for the Free Silence League. “A man has to make up his mind what his job is and stick to that,” he wrote. “I know that agitation isn’t my job.” Three years later, with the country in the conflict, the twenty-seven-year-old found another role that would not suit his liking: that of soldier. “I’m convinced,” he wrote to the secretary of war, “that I can serve my bit much more effectively than as a private in the new armies.” Bored with his work at the New Republic and eager to be nearer to the center of power, he lobbied for and received an official post at the War Department. From the heights, he then watched as repressions struck at his former associates. As usual, he viewed the matter dispassionately. “So far as I am concerned,” he wrote to Colonel Edward House, adviser to the president, “I have no doctrinaire belief in free speech. In the interest of the war it is necessary to sacrifice some of it.”

  ON JUNE 15, 1917, New York City police arrested Berkman and Goldman in their Harlem offices. Even as repressions mounted, the two anarchists had never paused in their work, founding the No Conscription League and continually speaking publicly against the war. At their trial, they presented their own defense, turning the proceedings into an indictment of the persecutions that the war paranoia had engendered in America. Neither expected to be acquitted, and in fact they were both given long sentences in federal prison, to be followed by deportation. Their ordeal would be imposed on others again and again in the following months. Prosecutors had ceased to make any distinction between the varied gradations of protest, classifying all dissenters as “German auxiliaries in the United States.” Wobblies were pilloried and attacked; the Times editors demanded that the Ferrer School curriculum be scrutinized. Big Bill Haywood was jailed. Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate in 1912, was arrested for stating the obvious fact that Wall Street had benefited from the war.

  Berkman spent the next two years in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary; Goldman was held in Jefferson City, Missouri. Beyond the walls, the Russian revolution, in November 1917, offered a tantalizing hope that all their efforts had not been wasted. “The Boylsheviki alone,” Berkman wrote in Mother Earth during the early days of the new regime, “have the faith and strength of actually putting the program of the Social Revolution into operation.” At home, the armistice immediately brought the prewar antagonisms back into view. The conflict between capital and labor reemerged more dramatically than before. The tumultuous year 1919 began with a general strike in Seattle and a police strike in Boston. As May Day approached, a mail bomb exploded in a senator’s house; then thirty-six identical packages, each addressed to
a leading government figure, were discovered by a postal worker and defused. In June, dynamite exploded on the front porch of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s Washington townhouse. Gripped by a full-fledged Red Scare, the government instituted vicious retaliations. Palmer ordered a campaign of raids against any radical organization that was still standing; thousands were arrested.

  Alexander Berkman in 1919.

  On October 1, 1919, Berkman was released from prison and returned to New York City. For the next two months, he and Goldman joined together in a final agitation, but this time it was their own rights they were defending. Federal authorities demanded their deportation to Russia, and at the height of antiradical feeling, there was little they could do to fight it. “Now reaction is in full swing,” wrote Berkman. “The actual reality is even darker than our worst predictions. Liberty is dead, and white terror on top dominates the country. Free speech is a thing of the past.” After thirty years of living and working in the city, the anarchists could not even find a hall to rent, or a single benefactor to support them.

  For most of December, Berkman was held in a cell on Ellis Island while immigration officials made their arrangements. Then, on the twenty-first, he and Goldman, as well as about 250 other undesirables, were hustled down to the Buford, a leaky transport ship that would carry them to Russia. The press dubbed her the “Soviet Ark.” Before dawn their journey began; the vessel steamed past the Statue of Liberty and out toward the lower bay. “Slowly the big city receded, wrapped in a milky veil,” wrote Berkman of his last sight of dear old Gotham. “The tall skyscrapers, their outlines dimmed, looked like fairy castles lit by winking stars and then all was swallowed in the distance.”