New York at War (32 page)

With their Gothic towers and crenellated ramparts, armories became visual tokens of the social stresses besetting New York and other cities. While leftists like Boston’s B. O. Flowers denounced armories as “great storehouses of death” and “Plutocracy’s Bastilles,” journals of middle-class opinion, such as New York’s
Independent
, viewed them as necessary bastions against strikers who, by forcing other workers to join them, were “worse than wild beasts turned loose upon society.” In case of attack by proletarian masses, one reporter suggested in 1887, troops in the Twelfth Regiment Armory on Columbus Avenue at Sixty-First Street could defend its ramparts “in the mediaeval manner with boiling oil and melted lead, or even in the modern manner with musketry fire.” Armories became bases for National Guardsmen who sallied forth to quash the Brooklyn streetcar drivers’ strike of 1895 and other work stoppages, which appeared to many on both right and left as the first quiverings of an erupting class war. By 1910, some twenty armories—subsidized by the city and by Guardsmen’s contributions—loomed over neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs; the five-acre Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx, completed in 1917, was the nation’s, and possibly the world’s, largest such structure. Over time, the city’s armories would serve a wide range of purposes—as banquet halls, galleries for pathbreaking avant-garde art, showrooms for antiques, and homeless shelters, among others. But for Preparedness advocates in the mid-1910s, they continued to serve their original purpose, as forts arming those “ready to march forth for the defense of our homes and the upholding of the law,” as a Brooklyn Guardsman had once put it, especially if foreign agents stirred the pot of domestic discontent.
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While Preparedness advocates worried about class warfare, some among them went further, suggesting that the country’s national and racial heterogeneity was itself a threat, especially in a time of global crisis. In his 1916 book,
The Passing of the Great Race
, Madison Grant—Park Avenue lawyer, amateur anthropologist, Preparedness advocate—argued that the superior Nordic race in America (a group in which he included Anglo-Saxons and Germans) were being challenged for dominance by the oncoming swarm of inferior peoples from the far reaches of Europe: “Alpines,” “Mediterraneans,” and worst of all, Russian Jews, who now infested New York’s slums.
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Too often, the calls for Preparedness were barely concealing visions of a society in which “dangerous” Americans—immigrants, laborers, dissenters, racial and ethnic minorities—would be forced to obey the commands of a saving remnant of wealthy purebloods. Even Teddy Roosevelt—once celebrated as the immigrant’s friend and the foe of privilege—now barked out threats at “professional pacifists, poltroons, and college sissies who organize peace-at-any-price societies” and insisted that “the Hun within our gates is the worst of the foes of our own household.”
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The appeal of the Preparedness movement steadily grew in New York and across the country. When, on Flag Day in June 1916, 125,000 New Yorkers paraded down Fifth Avenue, they marched past a large electric sign that read, “Absolute and Unqualified Loyalty to our Country.” By that date, President Wilson—once so insistent a voice for moderation and reason—was also heartily endorsing Preparedness and something called “One Hundred Percent Americanism.” New Yorkers who still dared to champion Germany, or even to espouse neutrality and peace, watched somberly and tensely from the sidelines.
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By then, however, many New Yorkers had compelling practical reasons for being thankful for the war and for the Allied cause. During World War I, as in earlier conflicts, war was big business for New York. In 1915 and 1916, the Allied war machine became a great engine for American economic prosperity, with New York’s financial district the conduit making it possible. The austere marble edifice at 23 Wall Street that housed J. P. Morgan and Company became, quite simply, the most important building on the face of the earth for the Allied war effort; New York had become as vital to the Allied cause as London and Paris were.

The “House of Morgan” was already one of the most powerful entities in the American economy, and one of the most pro-English, well before the outbreak of the Great War. The bank prided itself on its Anglo-American persona, forged in the nineteenth century, when Junius Morgan and his son J. Pierpont linked Wall Street and the City of London, enabling British investors to fund America’s expanding industrial economy. It went without saying that the bank’s current head, J. P. Morgan Jr., would aid wartime Britain in its hour of need. “We were pro-Ally by inheritance, by instinct, by opinion,” Morgan partner Thomas Lamont later admitted. Morgan, a steadfast Preparedness man, described Germans as “Huns” and “Teuton savages” during the war, his animosity fueled by disdain for Jacob Schiff, Henry Goldman, and other German-Jewish rivals on Wall Street, some of whom were openly anti-Russian or pro-German.

Sympathies aside, Morgan and other Wall Street bankers soon anticipated great gain. Trench warfare consumed gunpowder, shells, bullets, guns, fuel, and food at a ferocious rate, and the English and French armies repeatedly faced shortages that threatened their hold on the Western Front. Wall Street loans proved to be the fuel that kept the English, French, and Russian war machines running. In 1915, Morgan organized the largest bond-underwriting syndicate ever created in order to raise $500 million in loans for the English and French governments. The bond issue foreshadowed even more massive American lending to the Allies, most of it by the US Treasury with Wall Street help, later in the war. By the war’s end, Wall Street had reversed the traditional flow of capital across the Atlantic; for the first time, England became the debtor and America the creditor nation.
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The loans initially troubled Woodrow Wilson, bent on maintaining neutrality in thought and deed. But the president soon understood that the loans promised to lift the American economy out of recession, as England and France used the credit to go on a transatlantic spree, purchasing Yankee shells, rifles, gunpowder, locomotives, steel, oil, grain, horses, mules, and a thousand other commodities. The money loaned abroad was coming back home to put Americans to work, a fact not lost on Wilson, busy contemplating a 1916 reelection bid. So the bond issue was permitted, despite its awkward ramifications for American neutrality.
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The Wilson administration also allowed Morgan to become the official purchasing agent for the English and French governments (and indirectly for the Russians, who used the English to buy for them). From the DuPont chemical plants in Delaware to steel mills in Ohio and Pennsylvania, from Montana wheat fields to Connecticut arms factories, the distant war started putting Americans to work. From his office at 23 Wall, Morgan purchasing czar Edward Stettinius sent forth an army of 175 agents to sign contracts throughout the country, while also negotiating with a daily flock of Manhattan agents for far-flung suppliers. By late 1915, war contracts were driving a vigorous bull market on the New York Stock Exchange. “The very atmosphere of Manhattan Island seems impregnated with ‘war contractitis,’” one journalist wrote. “We breathe it, we think it, we see it, we talk it. . . . Some have even slept it, the disease taking the shape of a nightmare.”
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War prosperity also lifted the fortunes of many on the lower rungs of the city’s economy. In the winter of 1914–1915, an estimated 398,000 New Yorkers—16 percent of the city’s workforce—were jobless, many of them inundating free soup kitchens and sleeping in cheap flophouses. But over the following year, factories and workshops began humming again; by October 1915, a reporter speculated that “every machine shop in New York and vicinity which can turn a few lathes must be engaged in making projectiles.” By mid-1916, three-quarters of all American munitions destined for Europe were being put aboard ship within a five-mile radius of New York’s City Hall. Clerks, warehousemen, truck drivers, longshoremen, and boatmen scurried around as thousands of tons of munitions and supplies poured off boxcars at Jersey City and Hoboken into storage pens and then onto barges for the excursion across the Upper Bay to the waiting holds of freighters bound for Liverpool, Le Havre, and Archangel. New York harbor, the Western Hemisphere’s busiest port, had become the principal outlet through which the material bounty of America reached the killing fields of Europe.
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But as always during New York’s wars, prosperity had a way of distributing itself unevenly. War contracts did not reach many corners of the metropolitan job market. In seasonal industries like garment production, and in families where illness or disability wreaked havoc on household budgets, poverty remained very real. “War contractitis” also drove up the costs of daily staples, while spurring suspicions that speculators were artificially inflating prices. By February 1917, working-class housewives had reached the limits of their endurance. Steeply rising prices for chicken, fish, eggs, milk, flour, and vegetables in open-air pushcart markets and shops prompted boycotts by thousands of women, many of them wives of garment workers, outraged by what they saw as illicit gouging by local retailers. In Brownsville, the Bronx, and on the Lower East Side, they overturned vendors’ carts, smashed store windows, and even physically attacked grocers. Most of the demonstrators were Jewish, but the “food strike” appealed to some Irish and Italian women as well. A Mothers’ Anti–High Price League, organized by the Socialist Party, demanded that the city and state sell food at cost to working families. Believing that New York governor Charles Whitman was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria, hundreds of female and male protestors battled policemen at the hotel’s entrance while shouting, “We are starving” and “Give us bread.” The boycott temporarily reduced prices in some neighborhoods, and the demonstrations ended. But little was done to alleviate the plight of families who felt mired in a recession that simply would not end.
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“Morgan’s war,” some called it—a war that made the rich richer, left too many poor, kept Ireland in chains and the czar on his throne, and slaughtered untold thousands of young Europeans. That war remained less than popular among many in the tenements and sweatshops of New York; even in prosperous districts it could pit brother against brother and neighbor against neighbor. Such was not a vision to make Theodore Roosevelt, Madison Grant, or—increasingly—Woodrow Wilson confident in the success of “One Hundred Percent Americanism.” Nor was it a vision to guarantee peace between New Yorkers as the distant war dragged on.

At 2:08 on the morning of Sunday, July 30, 1916, a deep roar “like the discharge of a great cannon” filled the air over New York harbor and resounded for miles in every direction. Carl Ramus, a doctor treating immigrants on Ellis Island, watched through opera glasses as “a great light went up. . . . From that great mass of fire there seemed to shoot out thousands of little stars.” Within seconds Ramus was running for cover, dodging “thousands of pieces of wood, pieces of sheet metal and a heavy muddy rain.” Falling shrapnel pockmarked the Statue of Liberty’s copper surface. The blast awakened the populations of Jersey City, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, where shock waves shattered thousands of windows. In Brooklyn, pedestrians were knocked off their feet. Phone service between New York and New Jersey went dead. The sound of breaking glass mingled with the bells of burglar alarms that went off automatically. Customers in an all-night restaurant near South Ferry were cut by fragments from mirrors and windows. Falling glass hurt people at Third Avenue and Eighty-Ninth Street. Scared, half-dressed guests filled lobbies and wandered into the streets outside hotels in midtown and Brooklyn Heights. Like a Fourth of July fireworks display gone awry, intermittent exploding rockets filled the southern sky with bursts of blinding light and sent peals of thunder rolling down the city streets. Newspapers claimed that as far away as Philadelphia and Maryland people called the police, asking about the strange vibrations they felt rattling their homes.
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Fire trucks, police cars, and pedestrians converged on Manhattan’s tip, where spectators grasped that the focal point of the explosions was Black Tom, a peninsula jutting out into the harbor from the Jersey City shore. Black Tom was the Lehigh Valley Railroad’s freight depot, where artillery shells and gunpowder arriving from factories across the Midwest and Northeast were unloaded from trains and then barged out to waiting merchant ships anchored in the Upper Bay. Over the previous year, nearly three thousand rail cars and barges had hauled ammunition to or from the facility’s ten piers. It was the largest transfer point in the country for supplying the Allied armies an ocean away—a warren of boxcars and sheds piled high with crates of foodstuffs, hardware, dry goods, guns, and shells intended for the English and French trenches of the Western Front and the czar’s armies on the Eastern Front.

By daylight on Sunday, fireboats had extinguished flames that threatened to ignite explosives on two hundred remaining rail cars. Investigators, scrambling through the smoking wreckage, found the flattened ruins of six piers and thirteen warehouses. In the yard where over eighty dynamite-filled freight cars had stood the previous day, they now looked down on a water-filled crater 300 feet long and 150 feet wide. A barge holding one hundred thousand pounds of TNT had also vanished into thin air. Smoldering piles of grain and sugar filled the harbor air with acrid smoke for a month.

Insurers tallied total property losses at about $20 million, a figure that included $300,000 for New York City’s broken window glass. The late hour of the explosion had spared many lives. The final death toll was announced as five: a barge captain, a Jersey City policeman, the Lehigh’s security chief, an unidentified man, and an infant thrown from his crib in Jersey City. Other casualties may have gone unreported among hundreds of poor families living on houseboats and barges nearby.
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