by Thai Jones
During the final rush of events, when he had been hurried from prison to prison with little chance to gather his things or make arrangements, there had at least been one satisfying moment. In the midst of his farewell gala in Chicago, a clutch of reporters had burst in with startling news: Henry Clay Frick, the ancient nemesis, had died. Pressed for a quote, Berkman replied, “Just say he was deported by God.”
* * *
TWO PAIRS OF boots, medium-weight socks, olive drab breeches and shirts, a pair of leggings and a campaign hat: Mayor Mitchel had the clerk wrap these purchases before departing for a month-long vacation in Plattsburg, in the Adirondack Mountains near the Canadian border. On August 9, 1915, he arrived and received the rest of his gear—canteen, poncho, pup tent—while the first of more than a thousand others joined him. Like the mayor, they were not quite young, of the gentry—lawyers, brokers, bankers, journalists, college men, “our kind of people”—and all toting the same unlikely equipage.
Although he had urged neutrality on the citizens of New York City, the mayor had not personally been satisfied by that policy for long. In 1914 he had been frustrated by Wilson’s vacillation toward Mexico, but standing aside during the Great War was proving to be far worse. There was something dishonorable in remaining aloof in a time of crisis. With his close proximity to Wall Street, which had loaned millions to the allies, Mitchel understood that each day found American interests more tightly linked to the fortunes of England and France. He was certain that the nation would be drawn into the struggle, and yet the pretense of impartiality kept Wilson from taking the necessary measures. New York’s defenses were a travesty, but the national government declined to invest in their improvement; the army was undermanned and ill equipped, but nothing was done about it—all because the president, looking ahead to his postwar role as peacemaker, feared any step that could “destroy the calm spirit necessary to the rescue of the world from a spell of madness.”
So Mitchel went to Plattsburg for a month of army drills to publicize the need for universal military training, to urge preparedness on an unwilling president, and, most of all, to prove his mettle to himself. Reveille was 5:45 a.m., followed by calisthenics and maneuvers that lasted till evening. The schedule featured a nine-day hike, which the privates undertook while carrying forty-two pounds of gear on their backs. Arthur Woods was present, along with forty of his police officers, and when the mayor bested them all in a riflery competition, the whole country heard about it. Newspaper photographers captured every blister and jumping jack, publicizing the activities of the gentlemen soldiers—and annoying the president with every story. “We are having a thoroughly enjoyable and I believe a thoroughly useful time of it here,” Mitchel wrote to a colleague in the city. “The spirit of the camp is fine, and all of us believe that the experiment is going to prove thoroughly worth while.”
By the time New York’s 1917 municipal election approached, Wilson had abandoned what the mayor had come to see as a “painful neutrality,” and the nation was fully engaged in wartime exertions. Mitchel pined to go to France with the army; he “chafed under the responsibility of his office because it prevented him from enlisting.” Four years of political service had sapped his health; with a salary that hardly covered his expenses, he was in financial trouble as well, and his work had forced him to turn down several lucrative positions. No reform mayor had ever won reelection against Tammany Hall, and Mitchel’s own chances were hardly certain. Only the thought of what Tammany boss Charles Murphy and his chosen candidate, John Hylan, would do to the metropolis kept him from abandoning politics altogether. Finally, picturing his office as a kind of “Western front” in the fight against corruption—and himself “as a good soldier”—he realized there was no choice but to go over the top once more.
Once again, as in 1913, all of America awaited the result. “The whole Nation has an interest in the New York City election which it feels in no other municipal contest,” editors at the World’s Work explained. “This is not only because New York is our largest city … but because it has for a generation symbolized all that is worst and also all that is best in American local government.” The boy mayor transformed himself into the fighting mayor; campaign posters featured him in his Plattsburg khakis with the motto A VOTE FOR MAYOR MITCHEL IS A VOTE FOR THE U.S.A. He made loyalty and patriotism the center of his platform, promising to “make the fight against Hearst, Hylan, and the Hohenzollerns,” as well as anyone else “who raise their heads to spit venom at those who have taken a strong, active stand with America against Germany.” Trying to court an electorate that was largely of Irish and German descent, it was a disastrous strategy. President Wilson, recalling the mayor’s criticism of his neutrality stance, refused to endorse him. After the uproar over the orphanages, Catholic voters were already his implacable enemies—during the campaign, opponents referred to Mitchel as the “ear-at-the-telephone candidate” in reference to the wiretapping scandal—and his association with the elite soldiery of the Plattsburg camp allowed Tammany spokesmen to accuse him of being a silk-stocking leader who had ceded “control of the city to the Rockefeller and the Morgan interests in Wall Street.”
In 1913, John Purroy Mitchel had been elected mayor with the largest plurality in the history of Greater New York. Four years later, he was defeated by an even greater margin. Though it had spent more than a million dollars on the campaign—an unprecedented sum, raised mostly in large contributions from rich donors—Fusion earned less than half of the votes it had received in the previous election. John Hylan’s victory was crushing. Mitchel had only avoided the ultimate ignominy of finishing behind the Socialist Party candidate by a few thousand votes. Tammany Hall, which reformers had once thought beaten, now mocked their efforts, returning to power as if nothing had changed. “We have had,” the new mayor said to his constituents, “all the reform that we want in this city for some time to come.”
There were several explanations for Mitchel’s failure: He had barely campaigned, and had never been able to connect personally with his constituents. But the most important objection to him was his insistence on extending the administration into the private lives of the city’s residents. They had never asked for the mayor’s guidance. They did not want to be studied and tested at the Municipal Lodging House. They resented having their saloons shut down at one a.m. while the cabarets stayed open till dawn. They did not want to be told how to clean their homes, or worship, or raise their children. “The humbler people of New York revolted against the consequences to themselves of government by capable and disinterested experts,” the New Republic concluded after the election. “Mr. Mitchel’s downfall was greeted by a wild outburst of popular enthusiasm on the East Side. It was interpreted as the overthrow of an autocracy of experts which interfered egregiously and unnecessarily with the customs and the privacies of the common people.”
Eager as the voters were to have him gone, their relief hardly matched his own impatience to depart. Mitchel had campaigned only out of a sense of duty, and now his one ambition was to get himself to the fighting lines in France. Citing his Plattsburg training as qualification, he applied for an officer’s commission to every branch he could think of—infantry, artillery, cavalry. All turned him down. He even considered enrolling as a private soldier in the army. The War Department tenaciously blocked his appointment: President Wilson was taking his revenge. With all other options exhausted, Mitchel had no choice but to accept an invitation to join the air service. A thirty-eight-year-old mayor was still youthful, but a pilot trainee at that age was already past his peak. Friends worried about how the competitive enlistee would react to the sudden reversal. “Don’t break your silly neck trying to be young,” cautioned Frank Polk, the former corporation counsel who had been shot in April 1914. The air service lacked the cachet of the older military divisions. Worst of all, it meant months of preparation before he could go overseas. But it was the only route to combat. “Isn’t it a damnable style of uniform?” Mitchel said,
sighing, as he gazed in the mirror at the airman’s costume he had purchased from Brooks Brothers. “Ugly and uncomfortable.”
Mitchel in uniform.
In February 1918, he and Olive journeyed to an airfield near San Diego, where Mitchel had been sent for his primary flying course. He approached his first takeoff with trepidation, exuding a fatalistic sense of “resolute courage without cheering hope.” His early ascents were accompanied by an instructor; then he began to solo. Occasionally he would experience bouts of nausea or a migraine in the air, but otherwise it was not so terrible. “The thing really goes much better than I had expected,” he reported. “If you don’t hurry, and keep your head,” he wrote, reassuringly, to his mother, “there is practically no danger in this business of learning to fly as they teach it here.” By April, he had graduated from basic flight to stunt work. Reporters watched in amazement as he “successfully executed the side slip, full loop, half loop, Immelmann turn, and tail spin.” With increasing confidence, he looked forward to the pending opportunity to prove himself in battle. “At all events,” he wrote to a friend in May, “flying is really pretty good fun and as I have more or less unexpectedly lived through the initial stages I believe I am now likely to be preserved for the Hun.”
With a pilot’s degree in hand, Mitchel could brook no more delays. He expected orders imminently that would send him overseas. But days, and then weeks, passed. “I thought they wanted flyers,” he complained, “but apparently killing time is the prime objective. Inscrutable are the ways of military administration.” In the meantime, he had the galling experience of seeing his former subordinates all engaged in useful service. Frank Polk had a position at the State Department. Katharine Davis was with the War Department, coordinating women’s work. As a colonel in the air service, Arthur Woods now outranked his former chief. But these people all had office jobs. If Mitchel had wanted to remain deskbound, there would have been no difficulty; that, however, was not what he had in mind. “It is not so bad to be lost in the fighting end of the game,” he wrote to his former fire commissioner, “but God protect me from being sunk in the dust of a Bureau at Washington.”
Finally, in mid-June, he received his orders, but they were not the ones he had been counting on. Instead of sending him to France, they directed him to Gerstner Field in Lake Charles, Louisiana, for advanced pursuit training. He hated it from the first. The temperature reached 120 degrees at noontime, with no shade to be found. Suffocating in the heat, Mitchel was stricken by a series of migraines. He and Olive rented a bungalow near the base and he obsessed about her health. “This place is an unmitigated hell,” he wrote in a letter home. “It was a crime to put a field here. It is a crime to keep men in such a climate.” Hurricanes, malaria, and dysentery were a constant threat. Frequent accidents and a dissolute atmosphere had lowered morale; the officers’ mess was deep in debt, and instructors verged on nervous collapse. Mitchel flew thirty-three times at the field, logging more than twenty-three hours in the air. Despite illness and a growing sense of foreboding, he tried to keep focused on his goals. “If I live through the next two weeks of acrobatic flying,” he wrote on June 28, halfway through his course, “I guess I can live through most anything.”
MAJOR MITCHEL REPORTED to the airfield a few minutes after seven a.m. on the morning of July 6, 1918; he had been sick the previous day and had awakened with a headache. He appeared high-strung and mentioned in the mess hall that he did not feel like flying. But when the instructor called his name, he dutifully followed him outside. All the machines had been assigned, so they walked to the center of the landing zone to wait for one to return. The Thomas Morse scouts, lithe biplanes used for advanced training, roared in circles above. As he stared upward at the others, his mood improved; he “laughed and joked when the men in the air made a false move.” One of the officers, a New Yorker, apologized for having voted against him in 1917. “That’s all right,” Mitchel replied, “it’s all over now.”
The ships from the first group started coming down. Mitchel hurried to the nearest one and clambered in, but the instructor called him back: The mechanic had reported it unsuitable for flight. About a hundred yards off they found a second plane, but this one had a malfunctioning engine valve. Then another craft landed nearby; they hurried over as the pilot extricated himself from the cockpit. This one was in good order. Mitchel climbed into the seat and looked over the unfamiliar controls of the scout.
This was only his third time in this type of machine. He had taken two short flights the previous day, and they had not gone well. The first time, he had forgotten to buckle his safety harness. The experience had rattled him, and his second attempt had been nervous and indecisive. Both landings had been “exceptionally poor.” After the previous day’s unpromising start, the other pilots were surprised to see him back in a scout plane the next morning. Actually, they thought most of his attempts were below standard. In their opinion, only his social connections had allowed him to qualify for advanced training. Alternately headstrong and overcautious, “he was not sure of himself when in the air and always seemed to be worried.” Another veteran flyer agreed, saying “he was a bunch of nerves, and nerves are bad things for aviators to have.” Not that Mitchel himself harbored any illusions about his own expertise. Despite investing months in training, he was still trying to find a way to transfer to the army.
The Thomas Morse scout plane.
While a flustered Mitchel was trying to orient himself for takeoff, the instructor was distracting him with final guidelines: Climb to six or seven thousand feet, he shouted, and then execute some glides and spirals in order to get a thorough feel for the craft. Don’t try anything tricky. Mitchel throttled up the 100-horsepower engine and the plane began to skip across the grassy field. He lifted into the air and banked left, rising steeply as he circled the base. It would have taken several spirals before he could achieve the required altitude, but after one single circuit, at about a thousand feet, he turned back, shut off the engine, and attempted to glide to a landing. The unusual movement caught the attention of several mechanics and officers on the ground.
As they watched, the plane dived and then began to plummet. There was a sudden lurch—a “peculiar quick snap” that occurred when a panicking or inexperienced pilot pushed the stick forward with too much force—and a dark form catapulted from the cockpit. With horror, the onlookers realized it was the pilot. For five infinite seconds, the figure writhed uselessly, “struggling and grasping and clutching with his hands in the air.” The body struck and tumbled twenty feet across the earth. John Purroy Mitchel, the former boy mayor of New York City, died on impact. For the second time in two days, he had forgotten to fasten his safety belt.
December 31, 1919
With more defiance than joy, the city confronted one last New Year’s Eve. Even the preparations were businesslike. Instead of the usual kick of anticipation, the afternoon streets were filled with brisk travelers, anxiously clutching satchels and valises. “The number of suitcases and traveling bags in sight was extraordinary,” noted a reporter. Men in evening dress were spotted by the Sun “carrying paper parcels of unmistakable shape, or handbags for which there could be no use except a certain one.”
In less than a month—on January 17, 1920—the Eighteenth Amendment would become official, perpetual, law. And there were those who blessed the day. “For twenty years we Prohibitionists have labored ceaselessly and prayed God incessantly that this rum demon might be cast from our midst,” a letter writer exulted in the World. “At last our efforts are crowned with glory; our prayer is heard.” A partial ban on the sale of alcohol had already been in effect since July. But the legislation did not forbid the consumption of liquor, a loophole that made it legal for patrons to bring their own supply to a restaurant and drink it there. Hence the parcels. All those suspicious packages were filled with spirits.16 At cabarets and theaters, coat-check rooms overflowed with precious bundles. “Automobiles filled with cases of wet goods rolled up
to hotels,” a World reporter observed, “and thousands of bottles of champagne and fine whiskies were carried into the supper rooms and roof gardens.” At Shanley’s, near Times Square, the head waiter sprained his arm carrying suitcases. Reisenweber’s nightclub, in Columbus Circle, hired private detectives to keep its customers’ stock under twenty-four-hour guard.
Toward 1919, there was a collective feeling of good riddance. “The year just past,” a Times editor ruefully declared, “to which so many of us looked forward as the portal of enduring peace, and of a prosperity more deeply grounded in righteousness, has seemed a devil’s garden.” Nearly eight hundred New Yorkers had been felled by automobile accidents; the city’s infant-death rate remained abominably high, at eighty-four per thousand. President Wilson had suffered a stroke that left him housebound and helpless. His cherished peace treaty languished in the Senate, and hopes were fading for its eventual passage. Returning soldiers had found little work available to them, and the grinding industrial conflicts that resulted had become another source of disillusionment. “1919 will have few mourners,” editors at the World concluded. “It has been a year of disappointed hopes and frustrated ideals, a year of the profiteer and the reactionary, a year of greed and sordidness and base partisanship.”
Agents pour liquor into the sewer.
The malaise was compounded by a sense of betrayal, tinged with repentance, for the excesses of the war. Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, along with the hundreds of other radicals aboard the Soviet Ark, had sailed from Ellis Island during the previous week. Their departure had evoked sarcastic parting shots from the press. “Briefly summed up,” a World reporter wrote in an unintentionally fitting tribute, “Alexander Berkman spent 33 years in this country. Eighteen and a half of them were spent in jail. He is now 49 years old, quite bald, and his eyesight is very poor. But he still believes in anarchy.” But such sophomoric exultations were no longer so universal as they had recently seemed. They were countered by a growing resistance to continued governmental persecutions. The war was over, after all, and eternal warnings about national security sounded less credible each day. “We have heard a great deal of the Reds in this country,” wrote editors at a midwestern labor journal. “The capitalistic press has done its best to paint for us a crimson situation. In our view, pale pink is the more suitable color.” Even the Times tended to agree. “A few bombs, with pamphlets and speeches of the long familiar kind, have afforded material for a multitude of sensations,” noted its increasingly skeptical editors. “We have never been a people inclined to anarchy and are not likely to become so.”