Dark Tide (28 page)

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.

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.

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 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.”

Unsurprisingly, in sharp contrast to Coolidge and Wilson, AF of L President Samuel Gompers told a Congressional committee that the Boston police strike benefited police across the country, “because it has moved city officials everywhere to devise plans for better pay for members of police forces.”

The Boston police walk-out acted as a catalyst for steelworkers, who, on September 20, declared strikes against the major steel companies. More than three hundred thousand workers in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Cleveland, and Youngstown, Ohio—demanding higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions—struck against Carnegie, Bethlehem, and U.S. Steel. Workers were looking to abolish the grueling twelve-hour workday, and improve what they saw as dangerous safety conditions in the mills and squalid living conditions in company-controlled steel towns. Riots marked the opening days of the strike, as workers threw bricks and rocks at state police, local officers, and replacement workers brought in by the companies. One striker was killed and seven wounded on the first day of striking when guards in Newcastle, Pennsylvania, fired into a mob of rioters who attacked nonstriking workers attempting to get into the mill.

The steel strike would last for months, pitting powerful men like Elbert H. Gary, the chairman of U.S. Steel, against John Fitzpatrick, chairman of the Conference Committee of twenty-four steel unions. In a fiery speech in October to the Illinois Federation of Labor, Fitzpatrick declared: “Out of this strike is going to come a consciousness on the part of the workers that they are a real force and factor in this industry … that even if the United States Steel Corporation can set itself up as bigger than the United States Government, there is still a greater power here, and that power rests with the workers themselves …”

But the companies held firm against worker demands, broke the strike, and effectively ended significant union influence in the steel industry until the mid-1930s.