More Powerful Than Dynamite

by Thai Jones

  He was one of the few passengers who had not succumbed to seasickness. The Buford, a thirty-year-old transport that had seen service in the Spanish-American War, shipped water with every wave. It poured through the hatches and sloshed the floors in steerage, where the 246 male deportees bunked in three overcrowded compartments. Emma Goldman and her two female companions were isolated in a separate cabin above. Hostile sentries, their minds filled with dreadful stories about the prisoners, guarded the doors and patrolled the decks.

  By January 1, eleven days out from New York Harbor, enough comrades had recovered for Berkman to call a meeting. His fellow passengers were mainly Russian and Ukrainian immigrants who had been gathered by Attorney General Palmer from across the United States: miners, bakers, factory workers, anarchists, socialists. They represented a variety of trades and creeds, but all had been forcibly detained by government agents, held incommunicado, and then deported without forewarning. Some had been completely surprised by these dislocations—shipped to Ellis Island with just the suits they were wearing—while others had been given enough time to gather a trunk filled with clothes. Such inequality could not stand. A committee was named to assess everyone’s belongings. The “possessing” members donated their excess clothing to the general supply; “suits, hats, shoes, winter underwear, hosiery, etc.,” piled up in the center of the cabin for redistribution. “There is much shouting, laughing, and joking,” Berkman wrote. “It’s our first attempt at practical communism. The crowd surrounding the committee passes upon the claims of each applicant and immediately acts upon its verdict. A vital sense of social justice is manifested.”

  The Buford.

  After another stormy week, the Buford lurched from the Bay of Biscay to the Kiel Canal. By the time the vessel entered the North Sea, Berkman had converted most of the soldiers to anarchism, and the worried officers requested a British destroyer to escort them for the rest of the journey through the North Sea. Afterward, the radicals alighted in Finland for another harrowing trip, this time locked inside unheated train cars, across the frozen wastes of Scandinavia. Finally, on January 19, the deportees stepped out into the frigid air and found themselves separated from the Soviet frontier by an icy stream and a few hundred meters of hard-packed snow. No one was exactly sure how they would be received, but the Finns wanted them gone, and the anarchists were desperately eager to see the revolution for themselves.

  Alexander Berkman was chosen to serve as delegate for the party. Shouting “Comrades!” he crossed over into revolutionary Russia.

  Afterword

  John Purroy Mitchel’s body arrived in New York by train a few days after his death. For one night, he lay in state within the City Hall rotunda. The coffin had to be closed, thanks to a botched autopsy at the airfield, but nevertheless fifty thousand people had filed silently past by morning, when it was loaded onto a flag-draped caisson and led through the streets. His former commissioners marched together as a group in the procession. Residents who had impatiently rejected the mayor’s leadership less than a year earlier now filled the sidewalks to proffer their respects. Airplanes dropped flowers from above, so that the parade followed a path of roses to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Riflemen clipped three volleys toward the gray sky, a bugler sounded taps, and the casket lowered into the grave.

  A “brilliant and valiant knight of civic virtue,” said eulogists of Mitchel, and so he had been. But the qualities of a knight-errant are not often those best suited to a mayor. The personae had been in conflict within him from the start: the diligent bookkeeper who was also a daring sportsman, the politician who abhorred the public, the long-suffering victim of physical pain who had no patience for contradiction or debate. Four years of coping with the frustrations of the mayoralty had accentuated his volatile side. The Great War offered him a tantalizing escape. To fight became his fixed idea; he craved the totalizing experience of action. And then, when that opportunity was blocked, he lost what remained of his self-possession. The man who forgot to buckle his safety belt twice in a row while piloting a skittish, unfamiliar scout plane was not the poised and steady Mitchel of 1914.

  Dedicated to economy, he had died a profligate death, the victim of a careless accident incurred on behalf of an unworthy cause. To achieve such prominence so young only to be cheated of his future meant that Mitchel was denied the privilege of regretting his own mistakes. Unlike those who had survived the Great War, he would never realize the folly of the crusade that had cost his life. Nor could he redeem himself for his other failures—acquiescence in the repressive measures of wartime, defeat in a humiliating election. His record would have to stand incomplete. When people mourned, therefore, they were grieving for his lost chance to mature and improve. “A brilliant career was finished off before it was over,” Frances Perkins would later recall. “He would have ripened with life. He should have been Governor of New York. He should have been a Senator. He should have been various things. He had a very great future and he would have been a tower of strength.”

  Soldiers load Mitchel’s coffin onto a carriage.

  Mitchel had helped pioneer a modern form of governance that would eventually become the ideal for striving cities across the nation. Many of the young officeholders who got their start in his service would go on to prominent careers, furthering the good work that he had begun. But in the short term, his hard-won gains were easily effaced by a Tammany machine devoted to old ways of business. The new mayor, John Hylan, had assured the voters he would not put experts into positions of power, and this was one campaign promise he kept. “Cigar-Smoking, Top-Hatted, Frock-Coated” loyalists returned to their jobs. Investigations lapsed; regulations went unenforced. In the first twelve months of the new administration, the city’s budget rose by $100 million, or one third of the total. Three years later, the voters gleefully reelected Hylan by a margin of nearly two to one.

  Efficiency in and of itself—the motto emblazoned on Mitchel’s banner—had proven to be of dubious value politically. Even a friendly observer acknowledged that the mayor and his commissioners were “scientific highbrows” who “got up early in the morning and counted one-hundred and sixty-six superfluous jobs in the Department of Bridges, and abolished them and made one-hundred and sixty-six enemies, and put it into a report quite unintelligible to nine out of ten citizens, and went home and called it a grand day’s political work.”

  Robert Moses, the future parks commissioner who had worked on civil-service reform for the Fusion administration, had little but scorn for his former boss. “Almost all the … Mitchel proposals were pipe dreams,” he wrote. “It was an honest outfit committed to saving rubber bands, using both ends of the pencil and similar efficiency devices, and to the impossible promise of making vast physical improvements without spending more money.”

  Mitchel and Moses at Lake Placid.

  Working families knew all about efficiency. Their lives depended, to a degree that affluent reformers could never know, on constant calculations of income and expenditure. It was not frugalness they objected to, therefore, but the biased forms it took under Mitchel’s control. Streamlining was unfairly applied. Again and again excesses of the working masses were targeted while the extravagance of the wealthy was preserved. Police inspectors enforcing the Lid begrudged the poor their saloons, but condoned the glittering all-night cabarets of the Tenderloin. Moving-picture houses were subjected to perpetual scrutiny, while the Broadway stage, though far more lascivious, escaped notice. Fireworks were banned on Independence Day, while Mitchel and his peers escaped the city to blast away in the Catskills or Adirondacks. The administration had tried to uplift New York from the top down. Few of its policies had ever considered the perspective of the people toward whom they were directed. Perhaps the reformers themselves acted without quite realizing the partiality inherent in their works, but the people knew. Spied upon by Woods’s men, prodded and questioned by Kingsbury’s experts, brutalized by the prison officers under Davis’s direction: Really, there co
uld be little doubt.

  The Fusion leaders had attempted to separate governance from politics, but that does not work in a democracy. Mitchel’s cabinet had been something like Walter Lippmann’s dream of administration by experts—by the trained few whose greater knowledge entitled them to guide the masses toward the light. There was no talk of reallocating society’s wealth, nor of guaranteeing the dignity of work or the security of health and well-being. It was a parsimonious philanthropy, offering moral injunctions but little else.

  IT TOOK A full decade after Mitchel’s death for supporters to overcome Tammany obstructionism and complete a civic monument to his memory: a gilded bust of the mayor, affixed to the reservoir embankment near Central Park’s East Ninetieth Street entrance. Among the most faithful visitors to the memorial was a man whose career simultaneously honored and repudiated Mitchel’s legacy. Fiorello La Guardia won the mayoralty in 1933 as a Fusion candidate, ending sixteen uninterrupted years of Democratic control in City Hall. He had also joined the air service during the Great War, and every Memorial Day he led the commemorations held before the Mitchel monument in Central Park. Though a Republican, he considered his predecessor an inspiration and was conscious that his tenure was continuing the work that the earlier reformers had begun. “The La Guardia administration,” his secretary believed, “would have been impossible if it had not been for ‘the trail Mayor Mitchel blazed.’”

  But La Guardia was superb at the sort of politics that Mitchel had scorned. He cultivated a persona as the people’s champion. Even though his own upbringing had been cosmopolitan and solidly middle-class, his background—Italian and Jewish—helped make him a friend to the city’s immigrant population. But the main difference between the two administrations was La Guardia’s willingness to spend. Freed from the dictates of economy, he took advantage of New Deal disbursements to make sure that the city received more than its share of the federal largesse. Parks, playgrounds, schools, hospitals, housing developments: Pipe dreams for Mitchel became reality under La Guardia.

  The role of benefactor, which had once been filled by Tammany’s informal networks, was assumed by the government in the 1930s as well. People who were homeless or out of a job no longer asked a favor from the local ward heeler, they went to the Housing Authority or the Works Progress Administration. Mitchel’s work had suggested an important element that would lead to success, but it was left for La Guardia to discover the working formula for governing a twentieth-century metropolis. Roughly speaking, it was a combination of the two previous models, incorporating the professionalism and management of experts with the political savvy and welfare services of Tammany Hall. With this arrangement in place, La Guardia was able to accomplish something that no reform mayor in New York City had ever done before. He was reelected—twice.

  * * *

  ARTHUR WOODS NEVER stopped telling his two favorite stories—the one about his successful handling of the Union Square demonstration, the other concerning the time when his patrolmen had defended a female radical’s right to speak against a hostile audience. But by the end of the war, these homilies were sounding increasingly implausible.

  During the conflict, New York’s bomb squad had utilized every manner of subterfuge and coercion in its campaign to rid the city of anarchist, Prussian, and then Bolshevik influence. As commissioner, Arthur Woods had overseen these investigations. And when his subordinate, Thomas J. Tunney, published Throttled!, a melodramatic account of the unit’s activities, Woods contributed the introduction. “I believe the police methods in these times were wholesome and effective,” he wrote. The agents “proved themselves to be Americans all the way through, aggressive, loyal, bound to put the job through, no matter what the difficulties might be.” He then proceeded to elaborate his mature views on the subject of national security. “The lessons to America are clear as day,” he wrote: “We must not again be caught napping with no adequate national Intelligence organization. The several Federal bureaus should be welded into one, and that one should be eternally and comprehensively vigilant. We must be wary of strange doctrine, steady in judgment, instinctively repelling those who seek to poison public opinion.”

  For all Woods’s success in quashing revolutionary saboteurs, he knew he could not take on Tammany Hall. He had already seen a secret police force undone by a machine administration—in 1909, Bingham’s Italian squad had been disbanded soon after the commissioner’s termination—and he was not planning to let it happen again. Therefore in December 1917, just a few weeks before Mitchel’s tenure ended, Woods engineered the transfer of the municipal bomb squad to the control of the federal government: Twenty-four out of the thirty-four officers, including Tunney, enlisted in the army together. The move, explained the Tribune, was made out of “the fear that when the Tammany regime takes over the affairs of the city Tammany’s favorites would be placed in charge of the bomb squad.”

  Forming the core of military intelligence in New York, which was considered the center of radicalism nationwide, Woods’s former disciples were strategically placed to affect postwar policy. With memories of the 1914 anarchist street demonstrations formative in their experience, they intended to prepare the federal government against future subversive threats. The army amassed information about the nation’s dissidents, overstating the strength and influence of leftist organizations and seeing threats everywhere. A catalog of “Red and Pink” publications for censorship included the New Republic, the NAACP’s Crisis, the Survey, and Upton Sinclair’s. Convinced that an insurrection was imminent and assuming they were “in no way restrained by any statute,” the general staff compiled War Plan White, an armed response to domestic protests that called for the requisition of transportation networks, the declaration of martial law, and the mass arrest of dissident leaders.

  While his protégés busied themselves applying his methods in ever widening fields, Woods himself emerged from the Great War with a colonel’s rank and national renown for his successful tenure as police commissioner. “The best New York ever had,” declared Theodore Roosevelt, who had personal experience with the position. “I used to think that honor belonged to me, but it no longer does—Woods has been a better man than I was.” What he did not have was a job. He moved between temporary positions with the American Legion and the Automobile Club of America, never finding a perfect match for his skills. He came close to being appointed Prohibition commissioner, and then during the first years of the Depression, his unemployment expertise was called into service by President Hoover, who named him to lead an Emergency Committee for Employment. But nothing permanent emerged.

  It was not until Arthur Woods began to work for John D. Rockefeller, Jr., that he finally found a career. They had known each other since the Free Silence agitations, when Woods was attempting to placate the city’s businessmen while still allowing the radicals to vent their anger. At their very first meeting Rockefeller had been so impressed with him that he had promised to hire Woods if he ever returned to private life. In the late 1920s, Woods accepted the offer, serving as trustee and director for several Rockefeller philanthropies. In 1934, he became chairman of the board of Rockefeller Center.

  But these official posts were secondary to the personal connection that developed between the two. Over time, Woods became Rockefeller’s trusted private adviser and confidant, serving his new boss in much the same capacity as he had once done for Mayor Mitchel. “The association,” Junior recalled, “was one of the happiest of my life and one of the most productive.” Both men had been born on January 29, though Woods was almost half a decade older, and each year they playfully wished one another “many a happy return of our birthday.” There was a serious side, too. Whenever Rockefeller had a problem requiring a discreet response, he turned to the former police commissioner. Over the years, a steady succession of con men and blackmailers tried to bully or threaten Junior and his family, and Woods handled these affairs, hiring several of his former associates from the force—including Thomas Tunney, th
e former head of the bomb squad—to track down potential dangers and silence them.

  Arthur Woods was in his early seventies when he died in 1942. Known for his early commitment to civil liberties, he was rarely credited with the other innovations of his policing career: surveillance of citizens, infiltration of dissident organizations. His commitment to tolerating free speech had been a tactic rather than an ideal. He believed that allowing agitators to discuss their grievances was the most effective way to ensure that their protests would not escalate into violence. He also realized that the overt police repression favored by his predecessors was the surest means of attracting sympathy of such independent types as Mabel Dodge and Walter Lippmann to the radicals’ causes. By espousing freedom of expression in public while silently working to undermine threatening movements, Arthur Woods had devised a blueprint that would be put into practice again and again in American politics for decades to come.

  WOODS AND HIS police associates were by no means alone in finding Junior a worthy successor to Mitchel. Katharine Davis, who had collaborated with Rockefeller in the years before her appointment with the city, returned to his employment afterward, pursuing a groundbreaking study of female social behavior. The resulting monograph, Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women, was published in 1929 and was shocking enough that the Bureau of Social Hygiene immediately distanced itself from its findings and its author. Although Kingsbury did not find a place among the Rockefeller philanthropies, in 1921 he became director of the Milbank Fund, a foundation focused on the implementation of socialized medicine in the United States. The same “stormy petrel” he had been as a commissioner in New York City, Kingsbury parted ways with his employers in the 1930s.