Dark Tide (12 page)

Jell knew that this decision elevated the status of the industrial alcohol distilling business, ensured that red tape could be cut quickly if it jeopardized production or distribution activities, and virtually guaranteed USIA’s double-digit growth for as long as the war continued. He also believed that America’s entry into the war was a good chance for him to show the New York home office that the Boston tank and the Cambridge distilling plant could handle soaring production quotas.

But this morning, sitting in his tidy Cambridge office just ten days after he had hired his own guards for the Commercial Street site, Arthur Jell’s enthusiasm was waning and his irritation was increasing. The problem was Gonzales and his paranoia. USIA’s general man at the Commercial Street molasses tank stood to jeopardize Jell’s and the company’s success in the coming months if he could not be controlled.

First, there was his unauthorized visit a few days ago, complaining sanctimoniously about molasses leaking from the mammoth storage tank. Gonzales said the tank leaked from every seam every day, that workers on the dock had questioned him about it, and that the Italian neighborhood children gathered around the base of the tank each noon hour to collect molasses in their small pails. “The children also dip sticks into the pools of molasses and slurp it into their mouths; it even drips onto their clothes,” Gonzales had said. “I spread sand around the base of the tank to keep the molasses from flowing too far, but with my other duties, I can’t keep up with it.”

Gonzales then had thrust rusty steel flakes that he had collected from inside the tank into Jell’s hands, brushing the last bits from his own palms and into Jell’s as though they burned his skin. “These fall like snow into my hair and onto my clothes each time I go inside the tank,” he had said with a plea in his voice.

Jell told Gonzales there was nothing to worry about, that the tank was strong and sturdy, that some leaking was normal, especially after the large molasses shipment that the
Miliero
had delivered to the tank in February. He had ordered Gonzales to do a better job of running the trespassing children off of the property so they wouldn’t come back. He had not spoken angrily, though he
was
angry that Gonzales had traveled to Cambridge, had tracked cakes of mud from his work boots onto Jell’s office carpet, and had lectured Jell on the construction of molasses tanks, as though Gonzales were some sort of engineering expert rather than a manual laborer whose job it was to take direction from his supervisor each day.

The visit had been intrusive enough, but then Gonzales had revealed that he had been sleeping at the tank for several months, bedding down in the pump-pit shack. “I’m afraid the tank is not safe, and if it should start to fall, I can sound a warning,” he said to Jell. Shocked by his employee’s admission, Jell had told him to go home at the end of his work shift. He reminded Gonzales that the tank had been caulked completely last year. “The tank still stands—the tank will stand,” Jell had said.

Yesterday, Gonzales was at it again. In the late afternoon he had called Boston Police in a panic reporting that he had received a phone call from a man with a raspy voice threatening to blow up the tank. “Is this the supervisor of the molasses tank on Commercial Street?” Gonzales said the man asked. When Gonzales said he was merely a worker, the caller became angry and said: “You’re a damn liar and we’re going to dynamite the tank.” Much to Jell’s chagrin and that of tank supervisor William White, Gonzales had called police, who came to the wharf to investigate. White told Gonzales that calling the police had been a foolish thing to do, and Gonzales had the audacity to reply, “I don’t care whether it is foolish or not; the police captain sees fit to give help.” Two officers had even stayed on the site throughout the night. Jell knew anarchists were a threat, but he didn’t trust Gonzales and didn’t believe there actually had been any call.

Jell had stressed to White this morning that he must do a better job of controlling Gonzales. Firing him would be impractical at this time. Too many young men were enlisting and Jell had no time to train a new man now that alcohol production was on the upswing. But Jell thought Gonzales’s behavior was bizarre—
sleeping
at the tank, for God’s sake!—and that he needed to be watched closely for the sake of the business. It did not serve USIA’s purposes to have Gonzales complaining about leaks to anyone who would listen, nor did it help to draw further public attention to the tank through the presence of more police. When word got out that Boston Police responded to a phone caller who was threatening to blow up the tank with dynamite, and word spread quickly along the waterfront, it could give anarchists destructive ideas. Jell had enough pressure worrying about
real
dangers from violent men who hated that America was at war and hated even more those businesses that would become successful by feeding the war machine. He did not have the time or energy to worry about phantom phone callers.

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.

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.”

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 active 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.”