More Powerful than Dynamite Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York’s Year of Anarchy Thai Jones Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2012 © 2012 Thai Jones All rights reserved ABSTRACT More Powerful Than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York’s Year of Anarchy Thai Jones The year had opened with bright expectations, but 1914 quickly tumbled into disillusionment and violence. For John Purroy Mitchel, New York City’s new “boy mayor,” the trouble started in January, when a crushing winter caused homeless shelters to overflow and dozens of the city’s homeless froze to death. By April, anarchist throngs had paraded past industrialists’ mansions, and tens of thousands filled New York’s Union Square demanding “Bread of Revolution.” Then, on July 4, 1914, a bomb destroyed a six-story Harlem tenement. It was the largest explosion the city had ever known. Among the dead were three bomb-makers; incited by anarchist Alexander Berkman, they had been preparing to dynamite the estate of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., son of a plutocratic dynasty and widely vilified for a massacre of his company’s striking workers in Colorado earlier that spring. More Powerful Than Dynamite charts how anarchist anger, progressive idealism, and plutocratic paternalism converged in that July explosion. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Prologue December 31, 1913 22 PART ONE Chapter 1: So the New Year Opens in Hope 37 Statistical Abstract 68 Chapter 2: The Jobless Man and the Manless Job 73 The Social Evil 104 Chapter 3: A New Gospel 110 PART TWO The Possibility of a Revolution 142 Chapter 4: “Three Cheers for the Cops!” 151 Chief-Inspector Judas 182 Chapter 5: Somebody Blundered 191 PART THREE The Lid 223 Chapter 6: Free Silence 230 A Film With a Thrill 258 Chapter 7: A Sleepy Little Burg 265 Safe and Sane 294 Chapter 8: His Own Medicine 309 PART FOUR Chapter 9: The War Has Spoiled Everything 327 Chapter 10: Who’s Who Against America 349 December 31, 1919 388 Afterword 403 Bibliography 427 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Committed archivists are essential to any work of nonfiction, and I was fortunate to benefit from the assistance of great researchers at numerous libraries. I would like to thank Eric Wakin and Susan Hamson at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Lea Osborne at the New York Public Library, Candace Falk at the Emma Goldman Papers Project, James Folts at the New York State Archives, Fernanda Perrone at Rutgers University Special Collections, Kathryn Kulpa at the Fall River Public Library, Bonnie Coles at the Library of Congress, Sara Mascia at the Sleepy Hollow Historical Society, and Patti Fink at the National Personnel Records Center. I was also aided by librarians at the UCLA Special Collections library, the Western Reserve Historical Society Library, and the International Institute of Social History, in Amsterdam. I thank Robert Plunkett and Thomas Krieg for their willingness to confide their family histories to me. In particular, I wish to acknowledge the generous assistance given to my research by the late Kenneth Rose at the Rockefeller Archive Center. Important sections of this book were developed in Columbia University seminars conducted by professors Elizabeth Blackmar, Kenneth T. Jackson, Alice Kessler-Harris, Sarah Phillips, and Simon Schama. Chelsea Szendi Schieder read the manuscript as it was being written, and then reread the whole after its completion. Her perspective was always sharp and inspiring, and she made the work seem fun. My fellow doctoral candidates in Columbia’s Department of History have provided guidance and solicitude in equal measure. Jessica Adler, Melissa Borja, Victoria Geduld, Elizabeth Hinton, Sarah Kirshen, Justin Jackson, Ben Lyons, Tamara Mann, Yuki Oda, Nick Osborne, Matt Spooner, Mason Williams, Mike Woodsworth – thank you all – and now get back to work! ii A book on anarchism would be mere chaos without constructive feedback from critical readers. Zayd Dohrn, Rachel DeWoskin, Chesa Boudin, Jonah Hoyle, and Nick Miroff read parts of the manuscript and offered useful suggestions. Samuel G. Freedman, mentor and role model, read and edited the entire proposal – seemingly overnight – and his notes were keen and erudite, as always. Billy Herbert and the profoundly missed Margaret Black Mirabelli were insightful and enthusiastic supporters. Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Kathy Boudin, and David Gilbert provided their political acumen and experience in ways that fundamentally shaped my understanding of the street demonstrations and prison conditions of the past. Sean and Hudson Jacke provided expert technological assistance. Harry Kellerman, Tom Meredith, Aisha Ayers, Camila Piñeiro Harnecker, Carole Armel, Jane Hirschmann, Richard Levy, Michael Ratner, and Karen Ranucci all graciously offered their homes as places for me to write, research, and revise. Finally, the people who have contributed the most to this effort. Eleanor Stein, my mother, whose erudition continually amazes me, and Jeff Jones, my father, a political thinker without peer, offered loving support and priceless encouragement at all times. My brother, Arthur Bluejay, not only had to read each and every word, but was often forced to read them out loud, More Powerful than Dynamite never could have been written without him. iii PREFACE For me, the anarchists came first. I was surprised to discover that three young radicals had been killed in New York City in 1914 when a bomb they were constructing had prematurely detonated inside their apartment. The accident had come in the midst of a national crisis over unemployment and labor rights; contemporaries believed that the dynamite – if it had served its handlers’ intended purpose – would have been used to assassinate John D. Rockefeller. No one I talked to had ever heard of the incident, which had occurred on Lexington Avenue, in East Harlem. This was not far from where I lived, and so it was easy to go and see the building where the blast had struck. The façade had been rebuilt, but a vicious scar still marked the line of devastation where the bricks had come cascading down, along with glass, pieces of furniture, and bits of flesh. Each day, for decades, hundreds of people had walked past the site. Many must have noticed the evidence of damage, but few – if any – could recall its origins or significance. It had taken less than a century for this history to be lost. At the time, the Lexington Avenue explosion had been the largest dynamite disaster in the city’s history. But others would follow. In 1970, a similar accident cost the lives of three young members of the Weatherman Underground. Their device had been meant for an officer’s dance at Fort Dix, in New Jersey, and when its sudden power tore up from the basement, the force destroyed an entire townhouse on West 11th Street, in Greenwich Village. Whatever differences of ideology and purpose separated the two sets of would-be bombers, I was struck by the similarities that linked them. Having written about the 1960s generation – my parents’ generation – I immediately recognized their kinship with the radicals of a half-century earlier. These were demonstrations of the young and desperate against the old and entrenched. They were provocateurs. More than anything else, the extremists in these iv movements had been brought to the same pitch of anger by social injustice. Whether it was the Vietnam War, or the daily horrors of industrial violence, both the anarchists and the Weathermen had been prepared to kill to combat them. And in these two instances – separated by ninety-two blocks and fifty-six years – it was they who died in the attempt. Investigating the anarchists’ deaths unveiled a broader history that had itself largely been effaced by time. As it happened, they were not the only insurgents in New York in 1914. A new mayor had taken office that year, a reformer determined to implement the latest ideas in government, who had surrounded himself with a coterie of nonconformists and social scientists. In Washington, D.C., a sympathetic leader, Woodrow Wilson, had also recently begun his presidency. These were the officials tasked with anarchy’s containment: not some corrupt political machine that could resort to violence without a qualm, but progressive administrations constrained by their own ideals of civil liberties and impartial justice. And then there were the Rockefellers. The patriarch had retired but remained the richest man on earth. His son had quit the family business to focus on works of charity. He dedicated his energies to disbursing the money his father had earned, hopeful – perhaps – that if he could do enough good in spending his inheritance then Americans might forget the ruthlessness that had acquired it in the first place. Finally, there was New York City itself. Residents saw ballgames and went to the movies, rode the subways and watched planes pass overhead. They were assailed by advertisements, and bustled by skyscrapers without caring to look up. They were jammed in the Times Square crush; they cursed the traffic on Broadway. It was, in fine, a modern city. And yet, that same year, a large proportion of tenement apartments lacked private toilets; hundreds died v from typhoid, tuberculosis and diarrhea. Tens of thousands of children labored in sweatshops and factories instead of attending school. “We live in a revolutionary period,” Walter Lippmann, a young journalist, wrote in 1913, “and nothing is so important as to be aware of it.” Despite conflicting outlooks for what the nation should become, every political person understood the intensity of the moment. Drastic transformation would come – it was stirring already. On those New York streets, these three blocs – radicals, plutocrats, and progressives – each struggled to impart their own visions of the future onto society as a whole.