More Powerful Than Dynamite

by Thai Jones

  Around seven P.M. in the subway station beneath Grand Central Terminal, an unhandy traveler dropped his parcel. With a pop of shattered glass, the amber contents of his bottle—as well as any hopes for an amusing evening—rippled out across the concrete platform. When his fellow commuters raised their eyes back to their evening newspapers, they read of that day’s grand jury investigation into “Criminal Anarchism,” directed at progressive schools. In upstate New York, during the afternoon, police had ransacked several Communist Party headquarters, arresting scores of “Reds.” These were the last acts of paranoia to crown a year of raids and bombings.

  After everything that had passed in the interim, 1914, with its sufferings and chaos, had acquired a nostalgic luster that no one who had lived through it could ever have predicted. “There were times during 1919,” wrote an editor at the Times, “when the era leading up to the war seemed, in the casual retrospect, like some far-off Golden Age.” And so, stalked by Prohibition’s impending onset and dogged by regrets and fears, the city exerted itself to celebrate the holiday. For just one night, perhaps, what was lost could be recovered. A proper party was required to evoke the joyous recollections of a more innocent time, and people set out to celebrate “at least one final grand and glorious New Year’s Eve, such as there used to be before the war.”

  * * *

  ON DECEMBER 27, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had stood in a blue suit on the south-facing porch of the Breakers, the Palm Beach hotel where he and his daughter were vacationing, to watch the day’s expiry. “The setting sun was splashing its splendid colors on the sky in the west,” a local reporter wrote, “the cerulean of the sky was reflected among the hues in the gently moving waters of the ocean, the temperature of the air was at just that stage where no thought is given to temperature.” Asked to comment on the moment, Junior—lover of sunsets—had replied, “It is very beautiful.”

  For him, it had been another year of growth. His involvement with industrial relations had only deepened since Ludlow and his visit to the coalfields, so that now he was nationally known as an advocate of cooperation between bosses and employees. In October, when President Wilson had convened a national conference to bring labor, capital, and the public together to discuss possible solutions to the economic crisis, he had asked Rockefeller to attend. It was a testament to just how well Junior had distanced himself from the stigma of his fortune that he was asked to join the public delegation rather than to sit at the table alongside the other capitalists.

  During the war, the labor movement had been granted an unprecedented voice in economic planning; for the peace, its leaders intended to maintain that power and expand it. “We shall never again go back to prewar conditions and concepts,” insisted Samuel Gompers, president of the A.F. of L., who argued that his form of moderate trade unionism was all that stood between America and Bolshevism. The capitalist deputation, which included executives from Bethlehem Steel, General Motors, and Standard Oil, wanted to ensure the open shop and to ban union organizers from the factories and mines, hoping to go back not just to the circumstances of 1914 but to the conditions of autocratic feudalism that had reined before there even was a labor movement. After two futile weeks of rancorous accusations, the union men walked out and the conference disintegrated without having passed a single resolution.

  The squabbling delegations presented an unlovely picture to a nation truly in need of solutions. In contrast, Rockefeller’s dedication to reconciliation had looked especially attractive. Lillian Wald, a longtime advocate for social reform, thought he had “represented the true Christian spirit at the conference better than anybody else.” It was not only his ideas but his modest and frank sincerity that had impressed onlookers and the press. “He looked as though he might have gone down to the corner grocery and discussed the price of prunes with anybody,” remarked an observer. “He didn’t look like a stuck-up plutocrat at all.” From the wreckage of the summit, he emerged as the foremost voice for progress. “We believe that if it were left to John D. Rockefeller, Jr.,” wrote editors at the Mondavi Herald of Wisconsin, “he could produce a solution which would be equally satisfactory to Capital and Labor.”

  Rockefeller Junior in 1919.

  When the conference ended he had embarked on the southern vacation that took him to Palm Beach. The “happiest days” of the trip were spent at his father’s home in Ormond, Florida, two hundred miles up the coast. For Christmas they had exchanged the usual presents. Junior had given Senior two gold tiepins from Tiffany’s. In exchange, he received a check for a thousand dollars. But this little ritual of presents was dwarfed by the massive transmission of wealth that was actually occurring. During the previous months, hundreds of thousands of shares of stock had been transferred to Junior’s accounts, vastly increasing his personal fortune and making him, at last, the true head of the family. “As I review the year it seems as though it registered a continuous succession of wonderful gifts from you,” he would write to his father. “How deeply I appreciate them all … is beyond the power of words to express.”

  This largesse marked the ultimate proof of the old man’s trust. Junior had proved himself worthy of the responsibilities of his position. “There was reason,” his son David would recall, “for Grandfather to feel uncertain in terms of how much Father could handle until Ludlow came along. I think it was a searing but very much a learning experience for him as well as one that toughened him.” This was another sign of the distance Junior had traveled. He was the established philanthropist whose gifts, though still given in his father’s name, were continually growing more generous. For Christmas, the family had disbursed $100 million, the largest charitable donation in history, and he had received most of the credit. These days, when newspapermen attended his Bible class speeches, they no longer ridiculed his sentiments. “If John D. Rockefeller, Jr., does not look out,” a reporter wrote around the new year, “he is going to find himself clothed with a very attractive reputation one of these days.” Forty-six years old now, he was Junior no longer. When people referred to Mr. Rockefeller, at last, this was the man of whom they spoke.

  * * *

  ACCORDING TO THE White House, the president planned “no special observance” for the new year; he would be asleep long before the bells pealed midnight. This was true, insofar as it went. The announcement, however, obscured the reality of the situation: that Woodrow Wilson was bedridden, incapacitated, and in no way able to perform his public duties. In early October, a calamitous stroke had left him shattered and helpless. The public knew he was ill, but only close advisers realized the actual extent of the injury. His new wife, Edith, whom he had married in 1915, had spent the previous three months serving as intermediary between the government and her husband, keeping away all distresses and intrusions, handling transactions that couldn’t be postponed, and making sure the severity of his condition stayed secret.

  The crisis had come in September, when he had undertaken a national tour to rally support for the Versailles peace accords. While opponents in the Senate callously distorted the issues, claiming that to join the proposed League of Nations would mean the end of American sovereignty, Wilson and Edith had boarded the special train Mayflower to convey his own message directly to the nation. After three weeks, he had traveled eight thousand miles and delivered thirty-two major speeches in seventeen states. Again and again he described his position in the most intimate terms. He felt personally responsible for the casualties incurred in the war; to void the treaty now would be to betray the sacred trust of the dead.

  The tour reached Pueblo, Colorado, on September 25. Spectators jammed the depot long before the president arrived. Prominent among the crowd were thousands of steelworkers currently on strike against their employer—the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company. With Secret Service men on the running boards and others jogging along beside, Wilson’s motorcade visited the county fairgrounds and then pushed slowly through two dense lines of cheering onlookers toward the auditorium. Already that morning
, he had delivered a speech in Denver to fifteen thousand people. For nineteen days he had maintained this pace, but his strength was flagging. Words no longer came so gracefully. Bitterness at his enemies threatened to overwhelm the affirmations he was hoping to convey. Yet his venture appeared to be succeeding. He was welcomed everywhere he went; increasingly, he felt confident that the people were with him. But he stumbled as he stood on the platform in downtown Pueblo. When he began, he spoke indistinctly and he paused between phrases. But he gathered strength as he continued and carried on.

  President Wilson speaking from a train car.

  Molding his message to his audience, Wilson first stressed the relevance of his fight to working people. He was championing democracy: political democracy and industrial democracy. “We had a great international charter for the rights of labor,” he said to resounding cheers. “Reject this treaty and … there is no international tribunal which can bring the moral judgments of the world to bear upon the great labor question of the day.” Shifting emphasis, he revealed the toll the war had taken on himself. There were some people, he said, who “do not know to what extent it pained me to order the armies of the United States to the fields of France.” The isolationists in the Senate had not faced the anguish he had experienced during his stay in Paris when, for instance, he had visited a military cemetery. “I wish that some men in public life who are opposing the sentiment for which these men died could visit such a spot as that,” he said. “I wish that that feeling which came to me could penetrate their hearts.”

  And then he finished with the oratorical set piece that had been drawing sobs from Columbus, Ohio, to Reno, Nevada:

  Again and again, my fellow citizens, mothers who lost their sons in France have come to me and taken hold of my hand and shed tears upon it. Not only that, but they have added “God bless you Mr. President.” Now, why should they, my fellow citizens, pray God to bless me? I advised the Congress of the United States to create the situation that led to the death of their sons. I ordered their sons overseas … Why should they then, take my hand, and pray God to bless me? Because they believe their boys died for more than the ending of the war. They believe that their sons saved the freedom of the world, and they believe that this sacrifice was made in order that other sons should not be called upon for the same work.

  When he had finished, even his wife was crying. “Loud uproarious cheering” followed him from the stage to his automobile, where hundreds of people who had been unable to find seats inside the auditorium were awaiting his departure. His head was throbbing. His hands felt numb. Secret Servicemen had to fight back the crowds as the procession made its way back toward the depot. That night, in his train car, Wilson suffered “a severe nervous attack” and did not sleep until after four a.m. He rallied slightly in the morning but then collapsed again while trying to dress. By then they had arrived in Wichita, Kansas, and fifty thousand people were already gathering to hear him speak. The waiting crowds quieted when the physician appeared. “The tour’s off,” he said.

  All remaining appearances were canceled; the Mayflower sped directly back to Washington, D.C., and Wilson was driven to the White House through empty streets. A week later, he suffered his devastating stroke. Edith found him collapsed on the bathroom floor, with cuts on his face from where he had hit the fixtures. “My God,” exclaimed the doctor, after a brief examination, “the President is paralyzed!” For the next three weeks, the patient lay silently in bed, unable to rise or talk. The treaty fight in the Senate, which he had seemed to be winning, slipped further from his hands. By November he had made small gains, and a few highly choreographed visits were allowed. At Christmas, he took his first halting, cane-aided steps. On New Year’s Eve, he was able to spend more than an hour sitting in a chair out of doors. He had lost the use of his left arm; he could no longer speak clearly or follow complex arguments. Woodrow Wilson would never wholly be well again.

  * * *

  PAST SUNDOWN IN New York City that night, the religious-minded and sober at heart began to congregate at the churches. St. Patrick’s Cathedral and St. Marks-in-the-Bouwerie were holding late-night services. At Calvary Baptist, an evangelical preacher would highlight a full program of events. Thousands packed Madison Square Garden to hear a choir of three thousand voices perform the Hallelujah Chorus. Messages of somber humility came from the pulpits. “With unlimited money to squander and the will to spend it, New Yorkers refuse to be downcast,” ran one such homily. “Yet the passing thought may come to some few that in other countries misery and hunger reign among countless millions. It would be well if many to whom New Year’s Eve is a time for unrestrained merriment and excess paused to ponder the lesson.”

  A troupe of carolers from the military recruiting center paraded with a sign that read, THE ARMY WISHES A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO EVERY AMERICAN CITIZEN. Athletic events in Brooklyn and Staten Island entertained servicemen who had nowhere else to be. “For wounded soldiers (there still are lots of them, you know),” the Evening Post announced, “there is to be a special party at the Cheer Canteen given by the National League for Woman’s Service.” Carry-On Dances, held all week in the hotels, paired injured veterans with fashionable partners, including Olive Mitchel, who, since her husband’s death, had redirected her grief to volunteering with crippled survivors of the war.

  In the streets outside, two thousand uniformed police reserves idled on sidewalks from Madison Square to Columbus Circle. Hawkers found few customers for their rattles, ticklers, tin horns, or cowbells. The night was mild, and yet midtown was as quiet—or quieter, even—than it would have been on a typical Saturday evening. “Any one traversing the length of Broadway,” marveled a reporter for the Sun, “must have been struck by the entire lack of the New Year’s spirit of our predecessors in that same thoroughfare on New Year’s Eves of the past. Never was a crowd so decorous, so mirthless, so without noise.” More people attended special midnight moving-picture shows than caroused in the streets. Shortly after twelve o’clock, the souvenir vendors folded their tables and stomped off in disgust. The police, who in former days would have been on duty till dawn, were sent home at one a.m. “New Year’s Eve as an institution,” concluded the Times, “that caused thousands in other years to gather into a great Broadway maelstrom, has passed into the city’s history.”

  The cabarets, charging entrance fees ranging from seven to fifteen dollars, presented a different spectacle. “Only in the hotels and the restaurants,” a reporter observed, “was there any hint last night of the old prewar New Year’s Eve, with its ear-rending, noise-making machines, its feather ticklers, its confetti, its trumpets, its immovable crowds, and its good cheer.” Rector’s had closed its doors a year earlier, but the lid was off in the Café de Paris, which had opened at the same location on Forty-eighth Street. Maxim’s, Murray’s, and the Palais Royal quaked with music and fun; inside the Waldorf-Astoria there was not “space for another chair or another table.”

  But this was only a gilding of excitement; even these celebrations fell short of the deep insouciance of former nights. Everything was more expensive than it had ever been before. Rumors that deadly grain alcohol was being passed off as whiskey had tipplers nervous. Diners at adjacent tables scrutinized one another closely; it was said that revenue officers, and members of the Anti-Saloon League, had decided to dress in dinner clothes and infiltrate the hotels, taking note of anyone who violated the dry laws.

  The traditional acknowledgments of midnight passed, and a pall descended along with memories of auld lang syne. Bottles emptied; anxious eyes watched each draft pour out, all too aware that the morrow’s replenishment was not assured. Supplies diminished; parties begged cups of kindness from their neighbors, swearing to return the favor once Prohibition was repealed. A new decade had begun, and rarely had a change of years seemed so ominous. For those whose minds retained any clarity at that late hour, the thought of the moment went something like the Tribune’s verdict on the era: “Bohemia is passing, whether fo
r good or ill.”

  * * *

  WHILE OLD NEW York sought its youth in the dregs of a cup, Alexander Berkman stood at the rail of the Buford, squinting toward the horizon. “It is hard to be torn out of the soil one has rooted in for over thirty years,” he wrote, “and to leave the labors of a lifetime behind. Yet I am glad: I face the future, not the past.” New Year’s Day found the Soviet Ark tracking a ragged course through the North Atlantic. The horizon bobbed and tumbled, and somewhere beyond the swell lay his homeland. More than three decades had passed since Berkman had fled the most repressive empire of Europe; now he was returning to a nation in the thrall of revolution. “To think that it was given to Russia, enslaved and tyrannized over for centuries, to usher in the New Day!” he wrote ecstatically in his diary. “It is almost beyond belief, past comprehension. Yesterday the most backward country; today in the vanguard. Nothing short of a miracle.”