A City in Terror Read online

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  In the faces that you meet.

  Wilson, delivering his war message in the chamber of the House of Representatives, had called the German submarine warfare a warfare against mankind. “There is one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making,” he told the assembled senators and congressmen, almost all of whom were wearing or carrying small American flags, “we will not choose the path of submission.” At those electric words Chief Justice Edward Douglass White, old Confederate soldier and Ku Klux Klan night-rider of Reconstruction, rose from his front-row seat in exultation, the tears streaming down his cheeks. Following his spontaneous gesture, all the others in the chamber stood up. Almost everyone in the country felt the same patriotic surge. In the weeks that followed, Harvard’s Professor Francis Peabody returned his Order of the Prussian Crown to the Kaiser via Switzerland. Not to be outdone, the trustees of Brown University revoked the honorary degree they had earlier conferred on the German ambassador, Count von Bernstorff. Let’s Keep the Glow in Old Glory! Several state legislatures passed laws forbidding the teaching of German. Others banned the use of any language but English in telephone conversations. Sauerkraut was reborn as liberty cabbage, and even German measles was transmogrified to liberty measles. Small boys took to stoning dachshunds. Wagner’s music gave way to the strenuosities of John Philip Sousa, and the German-born conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Karl Muck, was driven from the podium.

  There was of course a dissenting if diminished minority that declined to wave flags. Six senators and thirty-one congressmen had voted against Wilson’s war resolution, and Wisconsin’s Senator Robert La Follette spoke for three hours against it. Nevertheless, a few days later, House and Senate backed the war unanimously by passing the loan bill—the largest financial measure in the history of the country. Dissent, peripheral though it might be, found itself confronted with vigilante patriotism. In September 1917 government agents raided the headquarters of the Wobblies, the anarchist-oriented Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), in twenty-four cities, confiscating their records and making ten arrests. Two months later seventeen Wobblies were tarred and feathered and then whipped near Tulsa, Oklahoma, by the “Knights of Liberty.” Wisconsin patriots hanged Senator La Follette in effigy, and the American Defense Society urged his expulsion from the Senate.

  Socialists and their sympathizers had remained the chief opponents of the war, but after America’s entry many—perhaps most of them—caught the patriotic fervor as long-time party members resigned to support the war effort. Those who refused, who remained intransigently unpersuaded, were led by the dynamic and voluble Eugene V. Debs, as ingrained a Hoosier as his friend James Whitcomb Riley. Most of these stubborn holdouts, however, were the foreign-born socialists of New York and other big industrial cities, brought up in the European tradition of the class struggle, for whom the war was merely the ultimate capitalist deception that Debs denounced so boldly in a speech at Canton, Ohio, in June of 1918.

  In response to this challenge from the left, Congress passed laws against espionage and sedition, prescribing stringent penalties for speaking, printing, or otherwise expressing contempt for the government or the Constitution or the flag or the uniform of the army or navy, using language calculated to aid the enemy’s cause, using words favoring any country with which the United States was at war, or saying or doing anything likely to restrict the sale of United States bonds. Under this draconian legislation—unparalleled since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798—Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison for his Ohio speech. The IWW leader Big Bill Haywood and ninety-eight other Wobblies were also tried and found guilty under the same statute, receiving sentences ranging from ten days to twenty years, with fines amounting to $2,300,000. To most Americans such men were slackers if not downright German agents and spies, deserving of far worse. The genteel Princeton essayist and versifier Henry van Dyke spoke for the flag-waving majority when he announced that he was ready to “hang everyone who lifts his voice against America’s entering the war.”

  Professor van Dyke would have found few to disagree with him in Boston. For the Massachusetts capital was one of the most perfervidly patriotic of American cities, the headquarters of the Twenty-sixth Yankee Division, the pride of New England, in whose ranks the Irish and the Old Yankees had managed to suspend if not bury their animosities. Formed from units all over New England but with its nucleus in Boston, officered by Back Bay Brahmins and South Boston politicians, the Yankee Division had been the first of the American Expeditionary Force to be organized, the first to cross the Atlantic, the first to be committed to battle. Professional military men considered the Twenty-sixth mediocre, handicapped by its Saturday-night soldiers and its amateur officers, whom for political reasons it was impossible to remove. Not so the citizens of Boston, who had absorbed the belief that their own Yankee Division was vital in winning the war. This the local papers proclaimed day after day. The Boston Globe even sent its star reporter, Frank Sibley, overseas as a special divisional correspondent.

  Boston dissent huddled obscurely in the Roxbury side streets among the members of the Lettish Workmen’s Association, Russian-born revolutionaries, many of whom had served with bands of Lettish terrorists in the 1905 Russian insurrection. The Boston Letts, belonging to the pro-Bolshevik Russian Federation of the Socialist party, were a tough-minded group who provided Soviet Russia with secret couriers, propagandists, and at least two leaders who at various times were in charge of illegal Communist operations in the United States. They owned a hall and a printing plant in Roxbury and had brought Louis Fraina from New York to edit the underground weekly Revolutionary Age. Fraina, an Italian-born left-wing intellectual, was one of the more extreme Socialist leaders, fanatically devoted to the Bolshevik revolution and looking to a similar revolution in the United States with himself playing the role of the American Lenin.

  There was no consciousness of dissent in the city on that first armistice morning. The first rush of cloth caps was followed an hour later by felt-hatted clerks and tellers and salesmen funneling in from the inlying suburbs of Dorchester and Roxbury to the elevated stations at Forest Hills and Egleston Square and Dudley Street, or moving by ferry and streetcar from East Boston, Winthrop, and beyond. Still later the more solid middle-class commuters began arriving by train at the North and South Stations from outlying Winchester and Medford and Melrose, Dedham and Needham and Wellesley and the Newtons. They were succeeded within the hour by staid brokers and bankers and lawyers of the Back Bay and Beacon Street, walking with prissy briskness through the Public Gardens and across the Common under the shadow of Bulfinch’s gilt-domed State House, where the 160-year-old bell that had rung out during the Revolution had been pealing since daybreak. A day unlike any other, for no one was intent on job or office; yet in contrast to the usual holiday exodus, more people thronged the narrow Boston streets than ever before, packing into Newspaper Row on lower Washington Street, milling in front of City Hall and the State House, jamming together to the despair of traffic in an atmosphere of furious festivity, relief, joy, triumph, and hope. The War to End Wars was over.

  It was an incandescent moment that could not last much beyond the impromptu parades that marked the war’s end. Americans had sustained their patriotic ardor by imagining a postwar country of

  Peace, prosperity and health

  Private bliss and public wealth.

  Soldiers, shortly to be demobilized with a bonus in their pockets—$50 for a private, $200 for an officer—looked forward to home as they had pictured it in the tedium of barrack and trench. Industrial workers, who had never been so well off in spite of the sharp price rises, expected that their wages would stay at the peak. The many whose income had remained stationary in the face of the High Cost of Living—as inflation was then more naïvely called—expected that prices would recede to their prewar level. Middle-class suburbanites expected industrial peace. Those who had made fortunes out of the war expected t
o be let alone.

  “WHOLE WORLD IN DELIRIUM OF JOY” the Globe headlines of November 11 proclaimed, and “Uncle Dudley” in that same paper editorialized that “it is victory, victory at last. The old day is over; its long, dreadful night of war is past. A new day dawns.” The day was climaxed by an impromptu victory parade featuring an effigy of the Kaiser carried on a stretcher by white-aproned market men and led by Mayor Andrew J. Peters and his small son, each holding a flag. The parade as it passed the State House was reviewed by flint-faced Governor-elect Calvin Coolidge. Yet even by the week’s end, even as the city celebrated the return to a familiar routine beyond the shadow of war, there were other shadows darkening the landscape. War industries, employing nine million workers, were now preparing to shut down abruptly. Four million soldiers and sailors would soon enter a labor market already swollen by the unemployed of closed or reconverting factories. Four days after the armistice President Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor, uneasy at the industrial prospect, warned that any reduction in wages or increase in hours would mean a bitter fight from organized labor. Two weeks later the Boston Elevated Street Railway Company announced a raise in fares from seven to eight cents. Two years earlier it had been five cents. El ticket collectors won a fourteen-cent increase to forty cents an hour. The price of coal jumped overnight from nine dollars to ten dollars a ton. Though the war was over, the High Cost of Living was obviously not.

  On November 27 the Boston horizon lightened briefly when the Yankee Division’s former commander, Major General Clarence Edwards, arrived from overseas. The plodding, too-talkative General Edwards had fallen foul of his superiors in the late months of the war and had been relieved of his command. His removal had caused much indignation in the city and the state. Governor Samuel McCall, as one of his last gestures in office, designated November 27 as General Edwards Day. At a public reception at the State House the general reassured a large group of mothers, troubled by rumors of their sons’ conduct overseas. “Your boys,” he told them, “were so good and pure I was afraid they wouldn’t fight, but they proved the greatest of soldiers.”

  On December 4 President Wilson sailed for France and the peace conference. Even before he landed, the police and firemen of Montreal had gone on strike for higher wages and union recognition. For several days the Canadian city was in the hands of rioters, who wrecked fire stations, looted the stores along St. Catherine Street, and beat up and robbed those who stood in their way. By New Year’s of 1919 the bright promise of Armistice Day had noticeably dulled. That surly and troubled year—as it would seem in retrospect—ushered in a wave of strikes. There was the great steel strike, there were railroad and transit strikes, strikes of factory workers, carpenters, pressmen, butchers, cigar-workers, actors, bank clerks, even rent and buyer strikes, and strikes against the High Cost of Living. Wherever one turned, in industry or transportation or public service, there seemed to be a strike or threatened strike. To add to the malaise, prices, instead of falling, continued to rise. The value of the 1914 dollar had dropped to only forty-five cents. Food costs had gone up 84 per cent, clothes, 114 per cent. For the average American family the cost of living was double what it had been five years earlier, and income had lagged behind. Professional classes from clergymen and professors to clerks, state and city employees, firemen and police, found themselves worse off than at any time since the Civil War.

  Veterans of the AEF marched off the troop ships amidst the blare of brass bands to a homeland riven with strikes and protests. What ex-soldiers and civilians alike expected—with some improvements—was to resume the pattern of life that the war had interrupted. The bumbling Harding would soon sum up the mood in his neologism “normalcy.” Normalcy meant 1914 with a halo. But by 1919 it was disillusioningly apparent that normalcy was not just round the corner. During the first postwar year there would be thirty-six hundred strikes involving some four million workers.

  Nineteen hundred and nineteen, that year of strikes and lockouts, was led off the second week in January by a walkout of New York harbor workers. On January 25, thirty-five thousand dress and waist makers—most of them young women—struck in New York for a forty-four-hour week and a 15 per cent pay increase. Such strikes, whatever bitterness they may have aroused, were in the familiar pattern. The Seattle general strike of February 6 was something else again. When news of it splashed across the headlines of the country’s press, many uneasy Americans saw the shutdown of an American city as a prelude to revolution. Such was certainly not the intention of the strikers, whatever the inclinations of some of their leaders. The strike developed from a walkout of thirty-five thousand ship workers who, in spite of the fact that their contract with the Emergency Fleet Corporation still had two months to run, struck for higher wages and shorter hours. Then the radically minded Seattle Central Labor Council, whose secretary was close to the Wobblies, decided on a sympathy strike to aid the ship workers and to challenge the growing militancy of the generally antiunion Northwestern employers. On February 3 the Central Labor Council issued a proclamation for a general strike to begin on February 6. The Seattle Union Record, spokesman for the council, tried to reassure the public, promising that everyone would be fed, that babies and the sick would be cared for, that all industries necessary for the public health and welfare would continue to run, and that law and order would be preserved. But a Record editorial concluded ominously: “We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by LABOR in this country…. We are starting on a road that leads—NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!”

  On February 6, sixty thousand workmen struck, and the seaport city was at a standstill. Streetcars lay idle in the car barns, schools closed, business shut down. Vital services did continue to function and the city was never without food, coal, water, heat, or light. The strikers remained orderly. There was no violence. Not a single arrest occurred while it lasted. Nevertheless Seattle’s businessmen and middle-class inhabitants were badly frightened. The Wobblyhating Mayor Ole Hanson, a former Progressive who had supported Wilson in 1916, declared that it was not a strike at all but a plan to establish a Soviet and kindle a flame of revolution in America. That same day, at the mayor’s request, soldiers from Camp Lewis moved into the city. The next day Hanson notified the strike committee that unless the strike was called off by eight o’clock on the following morning, he would use federal troops to crush it and to operate all essential enterprises. However some of their leaders may have felt, the rank-and-file strikers had no larger interest than to aid the ship workers and to assert labor’s strength in the Seattle area. Seattle’s American Federation of Labor locals, who had hesitantly backed the strike at the beginning, now feared that any prolongation would destroy unionism in the city, and they brought pressure on the strike committee to end it. On February 11 the strikers capitulated. Though the hostility of the public and lack of support from the AFL really brought the strike to an end, Mayor Hanson absorbed most of the credit. Across the nation he was hailed in the press as “the man of the hour,” becoming overnight a national hero.

  The Seattle general strike focused public attention sharply on domestic radicals. They in turn had been revitalized by the success of the Russian Revolution, which they saw as a preliminary to world revolution. “Follow Russia’s lead!” the anarchist leader Emma Goldman had urged anticonscription audiences in New York in 1918. If the “people’s government” had already come to Russia, could it be far behind in America? That was the question Socialists, anarchists, and IWWs asked themselves belligerently as they met in grubby back halls. John Reed had returned from Russia to thrill Socialist activists, most of whom nursed bitter memories of czar and kaiser, with his incandescent account of the ten October days that shook the world.

  Not all Socialists were prepared to follow the red star in the East. The Bolshevist seizure of power had, in fact, split the Socialist party into the “Slowcialists,” who believed in reaching their Socialist goal legally through the ballot, and the Left Wing, direct-action revol
utionaries, who scorned such bourgeois democratic notions. Led by determined radicals like Reed, Jim Larkin, the pugnacious hawk-nosed Irish organizer, and the persuasively earnest Ben Gitlow, the Left Wingers—who before the end of the year would break away to form the Communist and Communist Labor parties—were resolved to re-enact the October Revolution across the Atlantic as soon as a suitable revolutionary situation could be created. In February 1919 the Left-Wing faction of the Socialists’ Greater New York local issued a manifesto calling for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of socialism through proletarian dictatorship. A month later, after the founding of the Third International, Carl Sandburg, returning from a surreptitious trip to the new Russia, smuggled in a copy of Lenin’s letter, “To the American Workers.” It was printed in Fraina’s Revolutionary Age, and some five million copies were then distributed in the United States, urging the American workers to follow their Russian brethren and shake off the shackles of capitalism.

  To this challenge of a militant minority, the American majority reacted with fear and hatred. As Ben Gitlow noted, “The anti-Red hysteria was fanned into a high pitch of frenzy by reactionary politicians who hoped thereby to gain political advancement, by all the open shop and anti-labor interests of the country, by a large section of the press and by labor spy agencies, who now saw a splendid chance to sell their stock-in-trade to the industrial interests.” The affinity of domestic radicals for Bolshevism gave the National Security League, the American Defense Society, and the National Civic Federation a new target in their drive for patriotic conformity. Supporters of Soviet Russia were labeled variously “criminals,” “anarchists,” “Wobblies,” “beasts,” and “economic imbeciles.” Almost overnight the bristling term “Bolshevik” became synonymous with “treason.” Shortly after the Third International came into being in Moscow, the American Legion was founded in St. Louis “to foster and perpetuate a one hundred per cent Americanism” and by the year’s end had enrolled a million ex-soldier members.