Dark Tide (27 page)

The attempted assassination and the anarchist plot cast a grim pall over Wilson’s return to America and led to extraordinary security precautions for his Boston visit. Warships escorted the
George Washington
through the harbor when it arrived at the city’s Commonwealth Pier on Monday morning, February 24. Once Wilson set foot on Boston soil, a contingent of Secret Service, troops, police, and detectives guarded him and his entourage for the entire length of his visit. A solid line of troops, led by the Massachusetts State Guard Cavalry, maintained vigilance on horseback along Wilson’s parade route, as he made his way to Mechanics Hall to deliver his remarks.

More than five hundred thousand people lined Boston’s streets to cheer the president, and Bostonians greeted Wilson warmly, but there was something disquieting about Secret Service agents armed with rifles lining the rooftops, and windows being ordered closed during the president’s drive by. His visit to Boston was brief and nothing untoward occurred, but Francis Russell noted, “the fear remained, a fear that Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson gave voice to when he warned an apprehensive middle-class audience that ‘recent events at Lawrence, Seattle … and other places were not industrial, economic disputes in their origin, but were results of a deliberate, organized attempt at a social and political movement to establish Soviet Governments in the United States.’”

Two days after President Wilson left Boston, Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani, himself awaiting deportation, delivered an incendiary speech in Taunton, Massachusetts. The next evening, in the nearby town of Franklin, four Italian anarchists, all ardent Galleanists, blew themselves up in what police believed was a botched plot to destroy the mill of the American Woolen Company where they worked and where a strike was in progress. Federal authorities arrested three other men in the conspiracy on March 1. The newly sworn-in U.S. attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, promised a nationwide crackdown on “aliens and Bolsheviks, radicals, and anarchists” who were roaming the country, disrupting its peace, and terrorizing its people.

Martin Clougherty made the most difficult decision of his life with little fanfare and a clear conscience.

For nearly three months, his mentally deficient brother, Stephen, had been living with a cousin. But Stephen’s condition had deteriorated so profoundly that the normally docile young man had been hallucinating and prone to violence. The latest incident had occurred yesterday, when the afternoon shadows had fallen across his bedroom. Stephen screamed inconsolably, babbling that the building was about to collapse and crush him and that he would be smothered in molasses. Martin had witnessed the panic attack and had made the decision on the spot to commit Stephen to the Boston State Hospital for the insane in the city’s Mattapan section.

He had no choice. Stephen had been visibly upset since he had been rescued from the molasses on January 15, but now he was uncontrollable.

This afternoon, Martin had accompanied his brother to the hospital and signed the commitment papers. He stayed with Stephen while they prepared his room. When the nurse tried to take his temperature, Stephen Clougherty hurled the thermometer across the floor.

Martin retrieved the thermometer, apologized to the nurse, and touched his brother’s shoulder. He left then, promising Stephen that he would visit soon.

As May Day approached, anarchists grew bolder. Angry about economic conditions and Galleani’s impending deportation, they mailed package bombs to some of the nation’s most prominent and influential citizens, most especially those who had spoken out against aliens, radicals, IWW members, and labor leaders.

On April 28, a package containing a homemade bomb was sent to Seattle mayor Hanson, who, after the general strike in his city, had railed against “scoundrels who want to take possession of our American Government and try to duplicate the anarchy of Russia.” Hanson was in Colorado, fulfilling a speaking engagement, when the parcel arrived. Luckily, his assistant opened the package from the wrong end; the bomb failed to go off and the assistant summoned police. Another bomb, sent to the home of Georgia’s former senator Thomas Hardwick, co-sponsor of the 1918 deportation bill, did find a target, exploding as the Hardwicks’s maid opened the package, blowing off both of her hands.

The Hardwick bombing made headlines across the nation, and on April 30, orders went out to all post offices to be on the lookout for suspicious packages. In all, inspectors discovered thirty-four “May Day” bomb packages in the mail before delivery, addressed to people such as Attorney General Palmer, Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson (who had banned radical literature from the mail), U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (who had sentenced Big Bill Haywood and other IWW leaders), Commissioner General of Immigration Anthony Caminetti, and multimillionaires John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan. Not a single bomb harmed its intended victim. No one was killed, and the Hardwick maid was the only person to suffer serious injury. Postmaster General Burleson attributed the outcome to the vigilance of his department’s employees.

Americans were outraged, and newspapers clamored for action. The
New York Times
called it the “most widespread assassination conspiracy in the history of the country.” Law enforcement responded with immediate crackdowns. Police and citizens, including ex-soldiers and ex-sailors, rousted and disrupted radicals who gathered to commemorate May Day in Cleveland, New York, and Boston, according to historian Paul Avrich. The worst of these disturbances occurred in Boston, where parading radicals in Roxbury were set upon by indignant bystanders, “chased through the streets, beaten, trampled, and kicked.” Shots were exchanged, a police captain died of a heart attack during the melee, and all told 116 demonstrators were arrested, including followers of Galleani.

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.

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.

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.