Dark Tide Page 8
The USIA operation was humming along smoothly. Jell had made his position clear to both Gonzales and White. He did not need anyone gumming up the works.
June–October 1917
With America at war, it was no surprise that socialists, the IWW, and anarchists became prime targets of the government’s antiradical crusade. Fears of radicalism, heightened by the recent Bolshevik revolution in Russia, fanned a “Red Scare” in America and a spirit of reaction that would mount as the war progressed, historian Paul Avrich noted. The U.S. government viewed radical agitation of every kind as obstruction of the war effort, and therefore anti-American, and increased its surveillance of anarchists and other militants. “Their uncompromising opposition to the war brought down on them the full panoply of government repression,” Avrich wrote. “Throughout the country, anarchist offices were raided, equipment was smashed, and publications were suppressed.” Law enforcement efforts reached a peak on June 15, 1917, when three of the leading anarchist leaders in America were arrested.
In New York, federal agents broke into the offices of the radical publication Mother Earth, and charged Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman with conspiracy to interfere with the draft. Longtime comrades and reportedly lovers, Goldman and Berkman were well known among anarchists and law enforcement officials. They had both emigrated from Russia in the 1880s, became involved with radical Jewish labor groups, and, following the Chicago Haymarket riots in 1886, both became active anarchists. Berkman and Goldman had conspired to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, chairman of Carnegie Steel, after the violent Homestead labor strike of 1892. Berkman, who actually shot and stabbed Frick, was convicted of attempted murder and served fourteen years in prison. He and Goldman founded and edited Mother Earth after his release, and in the intervening years, preached against capitalism, Big Business, worker oppression, and militarism. When the United States entered the war in April, they ardently opposed a forced draft. After their arrest on June 15, 1917, they were convicted and sentenced to two years in prison.
The other prominent anarchist arrested on the same day was Luigi Galleani in Massachusetts. The Justice Department considered him “the leading anarchist in the United States,” and described his radical newspaper, Cronaca Sovversiva (Subversive Chronicle), as “the most rabid, seditious and anarchistic sheet ever published in this country.” On June 15, following an editorial critical of draft registration, federal agents raided Cronaca’s offices in Lynn, Massachusetts, and arrested Galleani at his home in Wrentham, Massachusetts, where he lived with his wife and five children. He was charged with conspiracy to obstruct the draft, entered a plea of guilty, and was ordered to pay a fine of $300.
Galleani’s arrest led to police actions against other Italian anarchists, in Boston and elsewhere. Some were arrested and threatened with deportation for starting a defense fund for Galleani and his colleagues. Others found themselves tossed in jail for insulting the American flag or failing to register for the draft. Still others, including Boston’s Sacco and Vanzetti, fled to Mexico, where for several months during 1917, they conspired to retaliate against what they saw as repression in the United States through the use of bombings and other violence. A Justice Department agent later speculated that this group had gone to Mexico to receive instruction in the use of explosives.
By the fall of 1917, most of these comrades had returned to the United States. For the next three years they would live an underground existence and employ bombs as their primary weapon against government authority.
They would, as the title of a previously published Galleani collection of articles suggested, go Faccia a faccia col nemico—“face to face with the enemy.”
France, January 1918
With a flourish, Major Hugh Walker Ogden finished penning the letter to his friend, Horace Lippincott, secretary of the General Alumni Association of the University of Pennsylvania. Ogden had signed with his familiar “HWO,” rather than the “H.W. Ogden” or “Hugh W. Ogden” that he reserved for more formal correspondence. His note to Lippincott served as a cover letter to the Penn Alumni Society’s request for information about the war records of its graduates now serving in the military. Half a world away, sitting in war-torn France, Ogden had dutifully filled in every line of the form, and then written his personal note, complete with his usual bold penmanship and succinct, yet passionate, observations: “This is veritably the greatest thing on Earth and I would not exchange my present duty for any in the Army. These are wonderful days we are living in and over here is where all history is heading to its greatest climax.”
Perhaps more than anything else he had written in a long and distinguished legal and military career, Hugh W. Ogden believed these words with all his heart. Boston would send more than forty thousand of her sons overseas to fight this war that had begun with the assassination of a member of the Austro-Hungarian royal family, and had rippled across Europe, spreading death and destruction over the continent. Of all of those men, none believed more than Hugh Ogden in the rule of law and the strength of military—right and might—to achieve a just end. If history’s greatest climax meant the defeat of a Germany run amok with expansionist aggression and brutality, then Ogden would truly welcome victory as “the greatest thing on earth.”
Broad-shouldered, with a mustache, high forehead, and dark, wide-set eyes ablaze with a fighter’s intensity, Ogden was Boston’s most prominent citizen-soldier and one of the city’s best-known attorneys. A graduate of UPenn and an 1896 graduate of Harvard Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review, Ogden had enjoyed a career as a partner in the firm of Whipple, Sears & Ogden for nearly two decades, specializing in equity and corporate law, before America entered the war and Ogden answered his call.
For if his profession was law, his love was soldiering. Indeed, the latter was in his genes. He was the grandson of Isaac Ogden, a general in the New York Militia, and a descendant of John Ogden, who served with a colonial regiment after emigrating from England and settling in what later became Elizabeth, New Jersey. The son of Episcopalian minister Charles T. Ogden, Hugh Ogden was born in Bath, Maine, on December 7, 1871, six years after the end of the Civil War. He became interested in the military at a young age, and in 1897, shortly after his graduation from Harvard Law, he enlisted in the First Corps of Cadets, Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, as a private in Company A. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts dispatched the First Corps as part of the coast defenses during the Spanish-American War, but the unit was never mustered into active service. By 1900, Ogden had become a first-class marksman, and on June 2 of that year, he married Lisbeth M. Davis of Riverton, New Jersey. The couple had four children.
While practicing law with Whipple, Sears & Ogden, he became a second lieutenant in the 1st Troop, Massachusetts Provisional Cavalry, which was later absorbed by the Massachusetts National Guard. His fascination with things military would seem to be incongruous with not only his legal career, but with many of his other pursuits, including his interest in religion, and in particular, the Episcopal Church. Ogden served as clerk of the corporation of the Emmanuel Church in Boston and as a member of the vestry of Christ Church (the Old North Church) in the North End. He was described as one of the “outstanding Episcopal laymen” of Boston and an authority on canon law. One of his great delights was collecting rare books on church history. He was wealthy enough to do so, both in his own right, and through the $300,000 estate that he and his wife inherited when his father-in-law, John C.S. Davis, died in 1913.
It was this meshing of legal, religious, and military training that shaped Hugh Ogden’s character and beliefs, teaching him about fairness, preparedness, and a devotion to duty. When the Lusitania was sunk in 1915, Ogden assumed that America would become involved in war, and he learned to speak French in preparation for shipping out overseas. Though the United States remained neutral for nearly two more years, Ogden was ready when the call came. He enlisted and was commissioned a major in August 1917, at age forty-five, began act
ive duty in New York in September, and was shipped overseas shortly thereafter. “He arranged his business and personal affairs and packed up his effects within the brief space of 48 hours,” according to the Boston Globe. “His departure was very quiet, and little was said about the adventure upon which he was embarking. But he went nevertheless, to engage in an undertaking of very great importance to his country and its cause, and to fill a position of the highest dignity and service in that enterprise.”
His background and training had prepared Ogden for his current position, which was judge advocate of the celebrated 42nd Infantry “Rainbow” Division, responsible for virtually all legal issues and matters of punishment within the division. “His position demands a special endowment of the judicial temperament,” one writer noted in a profile after Ogden’s division had been shipped to the front. “Moreover, it is in practice a post of some little isolation, for the officer who is to be fair and unprejudiced cannot afford to be on intimate terms with his fellow officers or to have close friends among them—he must remain more than usually aloof, and he can have no favorites.”
The formation of the Rainbow Division had been the vision of a stern and feisty colonel named Douglas MacArthur. Amid the rush by America to mobilize, individual states had competed with each other for the honor to be the first to send their National Guard units to fight overseas. To minimize the negative implications of this competition, the Army decided to create a division composed of hand-picked National Guard units from twenty-six states and the District of Columbia. Thus, the 42nd was born, “a division that stretches like a Rainbow from one end of America to the other,” in the words of MacArthur—and the nickname had stuck. The 42nd had arrived in France in November 1917, and was scheduled to enter front-line fighting in March 1918.
Ogden’s service with the Rainbow Division would continue through the end of the war, through the division’s 175 consecutive days of virtually face-to-face combat with the enemy, through its courageous participation in the Luneville, Baccarat, Champagne-Marne, Aisne-Marne, Chateau-Thierry, Saint-Mihiel, and the Meuse-Argonne offensives. He would be promoted to lieutenant colonel in September 1918, and would be cited for “high ability and talents and valuable services” while with the division. When the war ended in November of that year, he would serve with the American Army of Occupation in Germany as a legal adviser. In 1919, he would be asked by the Army to serve on a committee investigating court martial procedures and articles of war.
After the war, Hugh W. Ogden would receive the Distinguished Service Medal of the United States, and years later, the decoration of the Officer of the Legion of Honor of the French government, honors he certainly could not have predicted in early 1918 when the outcome of the Great War was still in doubt.
Nor could he have predicted today—sitting at his desk in France and sealing the letter to his dear friend, Lippincott—that shortly after his return to Boston, he would preside over one of the country’s most celebrated civil lawsuits, stemming from one of the most unusual disasters in United States history.
Massachusetts, February 1918
As war raged in Europe’s muddy trenches, tensions smoldered at home between U.S. government authorities and anarchists. On February 22, a team of federal agents and local police again raided the office of the anarchist newspaper, Cronaca Sovversiva, in Lynn, Massachusetts. They seized thousands of documents, including a photograph of Bartolomeo Vanzetti with Luigi Galleani, and a mailing list of about three thousand names, including those of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Based on these raids, the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Immigration issued about a hundred arrest warrants for Galleanists considered “liable for deportation.” Nearly half of these lived in New England, mainly in the Boston area. Many of them were among the most active in the anarchist movement, and either wrote for Cronaca or raised money for the cause. Anthony Caminetti, the commissioner general of immigration in Washington, D.C., ordered Boston immigration commissioner H.J. Skeffington to take aliens into custody and to hold hearings aimed “to establish their anarchist views and activities.” Immigration officials and local police carried out the arrests throughout the region. Luigi Galleani himself was arrested in May, but released after he was questioned extensively. He would remain free for nine more months.
On July 18, 1918, authorities finally outlawed Cronaca Sovversina, on the grounds that it was subversive, undermined the American war effort, and in the words of the Justice Department, was “the most dangerous newspaper published in this country.”
Anarchists in the North End simmered at the decision.
Spring and Summer 1918
Nearly 5 million men served in the United States Armed Forces during the First World War, about five in one hundred citizens, but it was not until the major German offensive in March 1918 that America made its supreme contribution to the Allied effort, transporting 1.5 million soldiers to France within a six-month period. Of the more than 2 million men who reached France, 1.4 million of them saw active service on the front line.
The munitions industry kept pace. They supplied American forces with the ammunition, high explosives, and smokeless powder that the troops needed to fight and win on foreign soil, and provided employment in the United States for those whose efforts supplied the soldiers overseas. Between April 1917 and November 1918, more than 632 million pounds of smokeless powder was produced in the United States, equal to the combined production of England and France. As for high explosives—TNT, ammonium nitrate, picric acid and others—U.S. production was more than 40 percent larger than England’s and nearly double that of France for all of 1918. One expert pointed out that the remarkable success of America’s munitions production effort was best illustrated by the fact that “the artillery ammunition program was never held up for lack of either the powder which hurls the bullet or shell from the gun, or the high explosive which makes the shell effective when it reaches its destination.” As they had since 1915, the companies that produced munitions continued to reap unprecedented profits during 1917 and 1918.
Their suppliers did, too. USIA manufactured the industrial alcohol that was used in the production of fulminate of mercury, acetone, and cordite—critical components of high explosives and smokeless powders. The company continued to distill enormous quantities of molasses to produce the alcohol at its Cambridge plant. The Commercial Street molasses tank on the Boston waterfront reached the 2 million-gallon level seven times during 1918, beginning in March and continuing through December.
As a result, Isaac Gonzales worked harder during the spring and summer of 1918 than he ever had, but his exhaustion had less to do with the manual labor he performed at the tank during the day than it did with the stress and physical exertion he subjected himself to at night. For even as the big molasses steamers arrived from Cuba and the islands to unload their millions of gallons of cargo, the Commercial Street tank still leaked, and Isaac was despondent.
When July rolled around and the heat had baked into Boston’s streets and buildings, Isaac had begun his cross-city runs in the wee hours of the morning to check on the condition of the tank and make sure that it was still standing. At 2 A.M., at 2:30 A.M.—he never left the house later than 3 A.M., lest he linger too long at the tank and be spied returning home by puzzled neighbors who arose at first light. On the night of each of these runs, he had left his wife, concerned about him but also contemptuous, lying frustrated in the darkness of their tiny bedroom. Isaac knew of her feelings, but he couldn’t help himself. He had to check the tank.
During the day, the grueling work pace kept him from obsessing about the tank’s collapse. Helping to unload the molasses steamers, climbing into the tank to clear the outflow pipe, bolting the tank’s hose assembly to the flange atop the railroad cars—these tasks were enough to keep his mind and body occupied.
The torrid heat wave was also a distraction. The last week in July was the hottest on record in Boston, with temperatures climbing to the high 90s. Four people had die
d in the heat wave and several others were treated for heat exhaustion. Another death occurred the first week in August. Although some industrial plants had mechanical cooling systems for specific processes during this period, it would be several years before Willis Haviland Carrier, the “father of air conditioning,” would improve his product to the point where it could cool large buildings. Thus, Boston workers removed their ties and left their sweltering offices in droves by midday and headed to Revere Beach on the North Shore and Nantasket Beach on the South Shore. Firefighters flushed the streets by opening hydrants during the day, and Boston mayor Andrew Peters (who defeated Curley in December 1917) ordered that the “lightless nights” policy that had been implemented citywide to conserve energy during the war would not apply to Boston’s parks.
During these uncomfortable nights, most people in the city’s crowded neighborhoods abandoned attempts to sleep indoors, and in places like the North End, carried bedding to the tenement rooftops or fire escapes to find relief. Isaac had heard their nocturnal noises as he ran through the North End streets—a cough here, a sneeze there—and had been gripped by an irrational fear that they would try to stop him if they had awakened. Yet no one had ever called out to him.
The intense heat and work pace helped distract Isaac’s thoughts about the condition of the molasses tank, but never for very long. When he took a water break, or paused to wipe the sweat from his eyes with the back of his sticky hand, the tank filled his field of vision, and the molasses leaking from its seams looked like a series of brown waterfalls.