March 3, 1915
I.W.W. AND REDS MORE DARING IN LAST 2 YEARS
Bombs Used Against Churches--Cathedral Damage by One.
ORATORS INCITED MEN TO VIOLENCE
Fiery Speeches Often Stopped--Many Demonstrations Aimed at the Rockefellers
The Industrial Workers of the World and various anarchistic
groups in New York have been extremely active here within the last two years.
Raids upon restaurants, church, invasions and the exploding
bombs—the latter costing at least four lives—have marked the trail of the
Manhattan “Red.” Just what has occurred since January 1, 1914, follows:
1914.
February 27—Second Avenue Baptist Church invaded by I.W.W.
Driven out by police reserves.
March 3—Frank Tannenbaum and 190 of his followers arrested
in St. Alphonsus’s Roman Catholic Church, which they invaded, demanding food
and shelter for the night. Taken to night court at a special sitting of the
court arranged by Chief Magistrate McAdoo, Magistrate Campbell held Tannenbaum
on $5,000 bail on charge of inciting a riot, and the rest of the mob were held
for disorderly conduct.
Tannenbaum’s trial was held before Judge Wadhome. He was
found guilty and sentenced to one year in the penitentiary and fined $300.
Tannenbaum asked for immediate sentence after making inflammatory speech.
March 8—A ten inch stick of dynamite was found eight feet
from St. Mark’s Church, Second Avenue and Tenth Street where I.W.W. had been
given shelter a few nights before.
March 9—All Saints’ Church, Henry Street, invaded by two
mobs of I.W.W. demanding food and beds for the night.
I.W.W. in Churches.
March 10—St. George’s Episcopal Church, of which the late
J.P. Morgan was a member, and where his song worships, sheltered 100 I.W.W. “unemployed”
in the Memorial Building, 209 East Sixteenth Street.
March 12—Riot in Cooper Union when I.W.W. attempted to break
up Socialist meeting. Cry of “We want to eat. Quit talking and do something”
brought the police and invaders were ousted.
March 28—Threats made against Madison Square Presbyterian
Church. Thirty patrolmen detailed to watch edifice.
April 4—Two riots in Union Square. “Wild Joe” O’Carroll,
Arthur Caron and six others arrested. Meeting called by the I.W.W. to discuss
the question of unemployment.
April 9—Philip Novick set to work house for ten days for
creating trouble during I.W.W. meeting. Of eight others arrested for were
discharged; one put on probation for a year; one sent to workhouse for fifteen
days and another for ten.
April 12—Jane Est, I.W.W. speaker, arrested while
interrupting service in Madison square Presbyterian Church, of which Dr.
Parkhurst is pastor. “This church has a minister who repudiates Christ!” she
cried. “He said Christ had nothing to do with the conditions of the poor in New
York.”
April 22—“Sweet Marie” Gans, I.W.W. agitator, arrested in
front of Tribune office while making a speech in provoking an angry outburst
from crowd. She was forced from the platform and finally rescued by police.
April 24—Becky Edelson found guilty of disorderly conduct
and placed under bond of $300 to keep the peace, with Samuel Hartman, a fellow
agitator. Sent to workhouse and immediately announced she would go on hunger
strike.
April 25—“Wild Joe” O’Carroll, I.W.W. agitator and member of
the Anti-Militarist League, in Union Square said: “if American workmen have to
go to Mexico to shoot Mexican workmen, just make a mistake and turn the guns on
your own officers. When you start killing them you will find that the war will
stop soon enough.”
May 2—Marie Gantz arrested near 26 Broadway on a warrant
charging her with uttering incendiary remarks against John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
Denunciation of Rockefeller, general disorder in meetings held in the open
marked one of the busiest May days known to New York police.
May 21—Mrs. J. Borden Harriman and members of the Industrial
Relations Commission listened to Vincent St. John, six years secretary of the
I.W.W., tell about sabotage.
No Respect for
Property.
St. John said: “The I.W.W. does not advocate the destruction
of human life to gain a certain point, but we are just coming to realize that
the wealthy have been supporting themselves by draining the muscle and energy
of the workers, without respect for their property, and we don’t intend to show
any respect for the property of the wealthy if its disregard will aid us to
gain our point.”
May 24—Alexander Berkman, Becky Edelson, Arthur Caron, and
several hundred followers, in a riot in front of 74 East Fourth Street. Rocks
thrown; police reserves called; two arrests made.
May 29—Judge Mulqueen sentenced David Shapiro, known to the
I.W.W. as “Edward Gibbons,” to twenty years at hard labor in Sing Sing. Two
accomplices were sent away, one for two years, the other for six months. The
three assaulted and robbed Morris Sandler on April 18.
May 29—Becky Edelson, Arthur Caron, Edward Plunkett arrested
in Tarrytown while attempting to hold a meeting and demonstration near
Rockefeller estate.
May 30—Fifteen prisoners taken to Tarrytown jail; result of
raid by town authorities upon I.W.W. and followers of Berkman.
June 1—Two followers of Berkman sentenced, one got three
months and the other thirty days for causing trouble in Tarrytown near Rockefeller’s
estate.
June 8-11—Tarrytown in turmoil, due to invasion of I.W.W.,
loudly armed men with automatic guns guard Pocantico Hills. Rifles stacked for
workmen to use at given signal.
Driven from
Tarrytown.
June 22—Alexander Berkman, Leonard D. Abbott and Arthur
Caron, with Charles Plunkett, Becky Edelson, Helen Goldberg, Jennie Berger,
Marie Yuster and Rose Yuster, leading a dozen sympathizers, driven away from
John D. Rockefeller’s estate in Tarrytown by townspeople who met them near the
station. Agitators were on their way to Croton Aqueduct to hold meeting which
had been forbidden by the police.
July 4—Carl Hanson, Charles D. Berg and Arthur Caron blown
to pieces while making bomb, believed to have been meant for Rockefellers. Six
story tenement house, 1626 Lexington Avenue, near 103d Street, wrecked. Thirty
families living there endangered; twenty persons injured; one woman killed.
Italian flag torn down and red flag put in place at Garibaldi celebration in
Rosebank, Staten Island. Attempt made to pull down American flag frustrated.
July 11—700 patrolmen with night sticks, also 50 mounted
men, stationed in Union Square while Anarchists paid tribute to memory of
Caron, Hanson and Berg; 9,000 in front of the speaker’s stand; red flag shown
and inflammatory speeches made. No disorder, although meeting was almost broken
up by militant peace advocates headed by Frank Urban.
September 19—Propaganda League I.W.W. held meeting in Union
Square. One hundred and fifty protest against the arrest of J.M. Rangel,
Charles Cline, and twelve other I.W.W. caught trying to take arms to Mexico.
Deputy Sheriff had been killed by one of the band. Joseph J. Ettor, Elizabeth
Gurley Flynn, Pietro Allegra, P. Korinsky and L. Nelson made fiery speeches.
October 13—Bomb explosions in St. Patrick’s Cathedral on
north side of church interior, directly in front of St. Bernard’s Chapel. Small
pieces of iron and screws, fragments of the bomb, marked one of the several
Italian panels back of the Crucifix. Doors of three pews wrecked. Hole one foot
in length and six inches in diameter made. Particles of the infernal machine
chipped ceiling. Explosion occurred toward dusk.
October 13 midnight—St. Alphonsus Roman Catholic Church
damaged by bomb which exploded near front entrance, West Broadway. Priests
shaken out of beds. Brother Patrick cut by flying glass. Windows broken. Damage
$1,000.
1915.
January 9—“Church worst enemy,” cry of I.W.W., headed by
Joseph Ettor, as they broke up meeting called by Interchurch Unemployment
Committee, Labor Lyceum, Fourteenth Street and Second Avenue.
January 16—Cardinal Newman, Father Bernard Vaughan and John
Mitchel quoted as in favor of defying law and order in speech of Elizabeth
Gurley Flynn at opening campaign of I.W.W. at 64 East Fourth Street.
February 4—Five I.W.W.’s fined $5 each for refusing to pay
for food, referring bill to Mayor Mitchel.
February 16—I.W.W. induce 125
workers in shop run by Mayor Mitchel’s Committee on Unemployment to quit work,
after demanding $2 a day in place of 50 cents for bandage rolling.
ATTACK INEXPLICABLE
SAYS MGR. LAVELLE
Mgr. Lavelle, rector of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, had little
to say about the attempt to wreck the edifice. “It is all inexplicable to me,”
he said.
“I cannot explain these attempted outrages in the cathedral
by any manner of reasoning, and they are all the more abominable and mysterious
because the cathedral stands for the very lifeblood of the people.
“We must face facts as facts, however, and try to guard
against such attacks, but that doesn’t mean that we can understand them.
“Sometimes it is said that the cathedral is attended by the
wealthy and cultured of the city, but it is the church of all the people.”
Since the attempt to explode a
bomb in the cathedral near the Fifth Avenue entrance last September, Mgr.
Lavelle said, a careful watch had been kept to guard against attacks by
dynamiters.
TERRORIST SYSTEM A MISFIT IN U.S.
Prof. Robinson Blames “Idea-Glimmerings” for Bomb Attempt.
CONDITIONS PROVE REDS IN ERROR
Pair That Planted Explosive Weak Criminals, Asserts One Analist
[sic].
“Foreigners, with idea-glimmerings not worked out, with a
terrorist philosophy that is a misfit in this country—that is how I would
describe the planters of the bombs in St. Patrick’s Cathedral yesterday and
anarchists of their type,” said John Harvey Robinson, professor of history in
Columbia University and an authority on his historical philosophical subjects,
in discussing last night, the arrest and frustrated plot of Abarno and Carbone.
“There is no justification for the existence of anarchists
in the social conditions of this country,” he maintained. “It is hard to
conceive the motives which impel such actions as theirs. One can understand the
thoughts of a Russian nihilist who is not a criminal in the true sense, but who
is working along the lines of a definite philosophy toward a definite end, or
of the terrorists of Paris who engaged in the fight for the Commune in 1871.
“But things are different in this country. I can trace no
analogy between conditions before the Commune of 1871 and the conditions in
this country today which precede what the two Italian anarchists are said to
have planned a commune of anarchy and riot in New York. There is no parallel of
effect.
“The idea of a Commune being established here by men of the
type of Abarno and Carbone is absurd. Even the most disreputable, the
most-down-and-out of the hoboes and the unemployed in the city, would never
follow such leaders to wholesale plunder and murder.
“The proof that conditions in this country do not justify
the actions of the two men and their kind—that anarchy and anarchism are not
natural outgrowths of existing society here is simple enough. Think what would
happen if anarchists tied up the subway for a day! The whole city would band
together for their suppression. Our civilization is too complex, too delicate,
too sensitive, to stand such shocks without retaliation. There are not enough
anarchists in the country to succeed in terrorizing New York for any length of
time, for the simple reason that the community is constructed in such an
orderly manner that no disturbance would be tolerated by it.
“The case of the Commune in Paris was different. The country
and the city were already in a state of semi-anarchy. Police power and the more
certain power of public opinion had vanished from Paris with the capture of the
city, the death of her best citizens in the war with Germany and the starvation
and suspension of business which followed. It can be said, in a general way, that the struggle of the Commune in
1871, during which the Hotel de Ville, the Luxemburg and other public buildings
were burned and thousands died before and behind the barricades of the
anarchists, was the more or less natural result of conditions in the community.
“But that cannot be said of any attempted Commune in New
York nor of the acts of the anarchists later. These can be attributed to
misapplication of half-formed ideas and ideals, fitted, perhaps, to Russia or
even to Italy, but not to conditions in the United States, which are totally
different.”
Speaking more definitely of the make-up of the Bresci
anarchists, A.T. Poffenburger, engaged in laboratory research and experimental
work with the department of psychology at Columbia University, spoke of the
terrorist plans revealed by yesterday’s arrests.
“There is no one positive type of mind that belongs to the ‘red,’”
he said. “It is always possible to trace the causes of the criminal bent or his
anarchistic instincts, if the facts of his birth and his life are known. It
resolves itself into a matter of heredity and environment. I have not yet seen
Carbone and Abarno, but I have known men of their stamp. Their mental attitude
may be best expressed by “The world owes me a living!”
“It is not surprising that the two are so young. Tendencies
which lead to crime usually show themselves between thirteen and twenty-five,
or even earlier.”
