Dark Tide Page 17

  Tried before Judge Albert F. Hayden at the Roxbury Municipal Court, fourteen demonstrators were found guilty of disturbing the peace and sentenced to several months in prison. After sentencing, Hayden blasted “foreigners who think they can get away with their doctrines in this country … if I could have my way I would send them and their families back to the country from which they came.”

  As it had been for the past three years, Boston remained the hot-bed for Italian anarchist activities. In the spring of 1919, the nerves of citizens and police were frayed and the city had become a powder keg. Bostonians wondered when and what kind of spark it would take to set off an explosion.

  May 12, 1919

  Nearly four months after the molasses disaster, the body of Cesare Nicolo was pulled from the water, out from under the wharf near the Boston & Worcester Commercial Street freight station. His wife, Josie, identified his body.

  The flood had claimed its twentieth victim.

  Monday, June 2, 1919

  Malcolm Hayden, the twenty-year-old son of Roxbury District Court Judge Albert F. Hayden, was walking home just before midnight when a touring car traveling in the other direction sped past him, nearly climbing the sidewalk and sideswiping him as it turned the corner and raced away down Blue Hill Avenue. The car had appeared suddenly out of the darkness, from the direction of the Hayden home on Wayne Street. In the few seconds that he saw the vehicle as it flashed by him, Malcolm wondered why the roof was up, considering the late-night humidity. A heat wave had gripped Boston for the past week. The temperature had approached 100 degrees today, and even now, had to still be pushing eighty. A beautiful night for a walk or a drive, Malcolm thought, until the careening automobile had missed him by inches.

  The car disappeared and the night stillness returned. The street was dark and deserted at this hour, the only sound the snap of Malcolm’s shoes on the pavement as he continued down Wayne Street. He had enjoyed dinner and drinks with friends (how many more such nights would they enjoy with Prohibition approaching?) and he was so tired he expected to be asleep in minutes. He was alone now on the street and would be alone when he reached his house; his parents and sister had been away for the past week at the family’s summer home in nearby Plymouth.

  Malcolm was two hundred feet from his front door when the midnight quiet was shattered by a deafening explosion ahead of him. He felt the searing heat from the blast sweep across his face, and the explosion’s concussive force pound his eardrums and knock him off his feet. From the ground, he watched the front of his house crumble, the second-level piazza shudder and crash to the lawn.

  Scrambling to regain his feet, the first thought that entered Malcolm Hayden’s head—before he consciously wondered why the Haydens had been targeted and by whom—was how thankful he was that the house was empty.

  As his neighbors streamed onto the street in their nightclothes, Malcolm sprinted toward his house to see how much damage the bomb had done.

  Had he left the saloon and arrived home two minutes earlier, Malcolm Hayden would have been blown to pieces. The entire front of the Hayden house had been destroyed by the bomb that had been placed against a main support column, just under Malcolm’s bedroom window. The blast also had blown out windows and ripped shingles from the roof of the house next door. Both homes, among the finest in Boston’s Roxbury section, sustained thousands of dollars in damage.

  What the Wayne Street neighborhood would find out the next day was that the dynamite bombing of the Hayden house was part of an organized anarchist conspiracy unleashed in Boston and six other major cities, including Washington, D.C., when powerful bombs exploded almost simultaneously, all going off within an hour of midnight, all planted at the homes of prominent persons who were involved in antiradical or anti-anarchist activities. This included United States Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, whose home in the fashionable northwest section of Washington, D.C., was destroyed while he and his family slept on the second floor. The bomb, planted under the steps of Palmer’s home, destroyed most of the dwelling and smashed in windows of houses as far as a block away, but miraculously did not injure Palmer, who was reading near a front window of an upstairs bedroom and was showered with glass, or his wife, asleep in a rear bedroom.

  Within minutes an army of policemen, firemen, and federal agents were at the scene, according to historian Paul Avrich. At the same time, policemen and soldiers were placed at the homes of other officials in possible danger, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy, who lived in Palmer’s exclusive neighborhood.

  While searching the scene around Palmer’s house, police made a remarkable discovery: The bomb had blown to bits the man who had planted it. Police believed that the bomb exploded prematurely before it could be planted under the house. Fragments of the bomber’s body were scattered all over the neighborhood. An intact Italian-English dictionary was also discovered near the Palmer house. While police never identified the dead bomber, Avrich concluded that the evidence pointed to Carlo Valdinoci, a dedicated follower of Galleani. Avrich also surmised that both Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, militant anarchists, were involved in the conspiracy.

  At each bomb site—Boston, Washington, New York, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Paterson, New Jersey—police also found leaflets, printed on pink paper, bearing the title Plain Words and signed by “The Anarchist Fighters.” The leaflet, in style and content, resembled the Go-Head! flyer that police had found near the Boston waterfront at the time of the molasses disaster. The message of the text was indeed plain enough: “There will have to be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder; we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we shall not rest until your downfall is complete and the laboring masses have taken possession of all that rightfully belongs to them … Long live social revolution! Down with tyranny.”

  In Boston, Judge Hayden was defiant, acknowledging that he was targeted because of the stern sentences he imposed on the May Day rioters, and his harsh anti-anarchist comments in the courtroom. “I cannot be intimidated,” he said the morning after the explosion destroyed his home. “It was not done to intimidate me, but to intimidate the whole community. We have got to defeat the Bolshevists; we have got to deport them. They should not be allowed in this country. They should all be deported at once. I do not believe they know what they want. It is force, force, force. That’s all they want.”

  True to his word, Hayden was not intimidated. When police arrested a Russian anarchist, Ernest Graudat, and charged him with being one of the bombers of the judge’s Roxbury home, Hayden presided over Graudat’s arraignment.

  The brazen nature of the June 2 bombings sent another wave of fear and anger rippling across the country, particularly after the Secret Service announced that they believed the same group of anarchists had sent the May Day bombs through the mail. “These obviously coordinated explosions, their shocking, outrageous character, the bloodthirsty language of the leaflets, fueled passions that had been building for months and gave powerful impetus to the unfolding Red Scare,” noted Paul Avrich.

  Nor did federal spokesmen allay the panic. The Department of Justice declared the bombings to be part of an organized, nationwide conspiracy to overthrow the American government. Further explosions were predicted. A campaign had been launched, as one official put it, to start a “reign of terror in the United States.” Attorney General Palmer said those, “who can not or will not live the life of Americans under our institutions … should go back to the countries from which they came.” The day after the bombings, he said: “The outrages of last night … will only increase and extend the activities of our crime detecting forces. We are determined now, as heretofore, that organized crime directed against organized government in this country shall be stopped.”

  Palmer wasted little time. He beefed up the Justice Department, especially the Bureau of Investigation, whose General Intelligence Division was supervised by J. Edgar Hoover
. This set the scene for the notorious “Palmer raids” during the fall of 1919 and winter of 1920, in which more than three thousand aliens would undergo deportation proceedings, and eight hundred, including many anarchists, would be evicted from the country.

  Most Americans supported Palmer’s actions, but many abuses occurred. “Arrests were made without warrant, men were beaten without provocation,” said Avrich. “The raids were carried out with utter indifference to legality. Thousands of aliens were taken into custody and subjected to brutal treatment.” But a law journal cited the more popular view that national safety was the priority: “There is only one way to deal with anarchy and that is to crush it, not with a slap on the wrist, but a broad-axe on the neck.”

  Bostonians, for the most part, shared the majority view, especially when Boston Police announced that the city was the nation’s “Bolshevist headquarters” and that some of the Boston Anarchists were involved in the June 2 explosions in other cities. “I would ask every citizen—man, woman, and child—to be mindful of his duty and to report anything of a suspicious nature that he might discover,” Police Superintendent Michael Crowley requested. “Secret meetings in any part of the city must be watched closely, and information regarding such gatherings should be communicated to police.”

  As the summer of 1919 approached, the terror and suspicion that gripped the nation was felt most acutely in Boston, where residents believed that anarchists had burrowed deep into the fabric of their city, and worse, that they were capable of anything.

  July 7, 1919, Washington, D.C.

  Lt. Col. Hugh Walker Ogden sat in the prestigious Cosmos Club lounge, his pen poised above a sheet of the club’s stationery. The club was located on Lafayette Square, the social headquarters for Washington’s intellectual elite, in the former Dolly Madison House, named after the wife of the fourth president. It had a shabby elegance, and a comfortable charm, and it suited Ogden well.

  He had a simple note to write to his friend Horace Lippincott at the University of Pennsylvania, but the occasion had him reviewing his past and pondering his future. He had spent the last two years preaching and instilling discipline—into soldiers at the front, into the Rainbow Division’s command structure, and for the last two months, into the Army’s court-martial procedures as part of a review committee appointed by the secretary of war. The committee had just recommended that court-martial procedures remain stringent, despite criticism that penalties handed out during the European war were often too harsh for the crimes that soldiers committed. He and his two colleagues, both major generals, believed that relaxed court-martial standards would lead to a breakdown in overall discipline, morale, and battlefield unity.

  Now, days after the commission had issued its report and three weeks before his discharge and his return to private practice in Boston, Ogden believed discipline in civilian life was crumbling. The country was in turmoil, its fundamental values being battered by anarchists, labor unionists, and other radicals. The sense of order he had relished as a soldier, the order he craved, had given way to a frightening chaos across America.

  He had been in Washington during the bombing of Attorney General Palmer’s house and had read about the damage to Judge Hayden’s home in Boston. It angered him that two sentinels of law and order could come so close to death, without provocation, simply by virtue of their positions. He had been anxious for months to return to civilian life and make a fundamental difference as a lawyer, make a contribution that extended beyond mundane corporate work and encompassed some of the moral nobility of his military service; today, in a country whose moral compass appeared to be broken, it appeared that his commitment was needed more desperately than ever.

  Ogden’s review of his recent past was not without a sense of satisfaction. He had just been awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for “exceptionally meritorious services” as judge advocate with the Rainbow Division. “He rendered valuable services and exhibited ability of a high order throughout the operations of the division,” the citation read. “Later assigned to the Bureau of Civil Affairs for the Third Army, he performed his task with marked success.”

  As a Distinguished Service Medal recipient, he was in good company. The medal was confirmed by an Act of Congress in July 1918, and awarded to those who distinguished themselves with outstanding service “in a duty of great responsibility” in a combat or noncombat role. At the direction of the president of the United States, the first recipients of the medal were the commander of the Allied armies, including General John J. “Blackjack” Pershing, “as a token of gratitude of the American people to the commander of our armies in the field.”

  Ogden thought the news of his Distinguished Service Medal award was worth sharing with Lippincott and the University of Pennsylvania community. “The enclosed War Department order just published containing the citation for my DSM may be of interest to my friends,” he wrote simply on Cosmos Club stationery, no embellishment or other comment needed.

  Ogden loved soldiering, loved serving his country, and he felt that it was his duty to set a good example. He believed he had accomplished this during his service in France and Germany, and with the work he had done in Washington, D.C. The Distinguished Service Medal seemed to him fitting confirmation of and recognition for his contributions, and an appropriate way to close an important and rewarding chapter in his life.

  Ogden sealed the envelope to Lippincott and headed for the door of the Cosmos Club. It was time to go home to Boston, to a city and a nation that he no longer recognized, and begin the next chapter.

  August 1919

  United States Industrial Alcohol reported to authorities in mid-August that two of its molasses steamers had vanished without a trace—and without any distress calls—en route from the Caribbean to the northeast. Both steamers had full loads, and USIA assumed both had sunk to the bottom of the ocean. The disappearances were bizarre and unprecedented.

  Though it was never proven, the company blamed the disappearance of both vessels on anarchists. USIA executives said that only the sudden and powerful explosion of bombs could have obliterated any evidence of the ships and prevented either captain from issuing a call for help.

  USIA said the destruction of its ships was a continuation of the attacks against the company by anarchists, attacks that had begun with the bombing of its Boston molasses tank seven months earlier.

  September 1919

  September would be the darkest month of all.

  It had been eight months since the molasses flood had ushered in a year of turmoil: a year when labor battled business; when the cost of living rose and workers demanded that their wages rise, too; when anarchists preached and practiced violence in the name of justice; when xenophobia exploded and isolationist declarations boomed through the halls of Congress.

  A torrid and turbulent summer in Boston had provided a preview of a bleak September. Even as record heat and humidity smothered the city, tensions smoldered among the workers and the general public.

  In late June, anarchist leader Luigi Galleani was deported to Italy as scheduled, along with eight associates. The anarchist leader had escaped arrest when federal agents, after questioning the men, were unable to prove their suspicions that Galleani had orchestrated the June bombings.

  On July 4, five thousand New England fishermen began a job stoppage that would last more than a month, tying up shipping and driving the price of fish skyward. Then in mid-July, a storm of protest greeted Boston Elevated’s announcement that fares would increase to ten cents. Two days later, the trains and streetcars stopped running when more than seven thousand members of the Carmen’s Union went on strike for four days until their demands for an eight-hour day and payment of seventy-three cents per hour were met.

  Nationally, rail workers threatened to strike in August and paralyze the nation’s transportation system unless Congress took actions to deal with the high cost of living and increase wages. President Wilson asked Congress to defer its planned five-week summer
recess to consider the demands and hammer out legislation to avert a nationwide rail shutdown.

  The widespread summer storminess set the stage for September, which started on a hopeful enough note. President Wilson left Washington, D.C., on September 4 for a thirty-city, twenty-five-day, eight-thousand-mile tour of Midwestern and Western states to generate support for the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, a journey described as “longer than (his trip) to France and back and more strenuous.”

  But the country’s brief optimism and promise over Wilson’s commitment to peace were dashed on September 9, when the national spotlight focused on Boston once again.

  Nearly 1,400 Boston police officers went on strike after the 5:45 P.M. roll call, angry that their wage demands had not been met. That night, riots broke out across the city, and mobs smashed windows, looted more than fifty stores, and threw stones at striking police officers. “Wave of crime sweeps city,” the Boston Herald’s headlines shouted the next day. During a second night of rioting, three men were killed and another fifteen injured. In all, eight people died in the strike, seventy-five were injured or wounded, and an estimated $300,000 worth of property was stolen or destroyed. Mayor Peters called in the State Guard to restore order in downtown Boston and surrounding neighborhoods.

  The unprecedented strike of public safety officers shocked the nation and drew angry denunciations. Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge flayed the striking policemen, calling their actions a “deliberate intention to intimidate and coerce the government of this Commonwealth … No man has a right to place his own ease or convenience or the opportunity of making money above his duty to the state.” Supporting the use of troops to restore order, The Boston Herald added in a blistering editorial: “The police of Boston, having mutinied, stood by and saw the hoodlums loot the city, in some instances abetting the violence and disorder …” Speaking in Montana on September 11, an outraged President Wilson said that for the policemen of a great city to go on strike, “leaving the city at the mercy of thugs, was a crime against civilization. The obligation of a policeman was as sacred and direct as the obligation of a soldier.”