July 5, 1914
ANARCHIST BOMB, BELIEVED FOR ROCKEFELLER, KILLS THREE I. W. W. MAKERS
AND A WOMAN—INJURES MANY—WRECKS TENEMENT HOUSE
Infernal Machine Planned for Use at Tarrytown Tomorrow. Say Police.
BODIES OF TWO ARE BLOWN TO PIECES
Arthur Caron Dead on Fire Escape—Thirty-four Families in Peril.
ONE CONSPIRATOR HAS MARVELOUS ESCAPE
Mike Murphy Drops With Bed Through Two Floors and Escapes Unhurt.
A dynamite bomb of terrific. strength, supposed to have been completed
early yesterday morning for use at Tarrytown when the dozen or more I. W. W.
agitators recently arrested near the summer home of John D. Rockefeller will be
arraigned, exploded a few minutes after 9 o'clock yesterday morning in the top
floor rooms of the flathouse at 1626 Lexington avenue, between 102d and 103d
streets, on the west side of the avenue.
Three young anarchists, all identified with the recent disturbances of
the unemployed and all implicated in the fights near Mr. Rockefeller’s Tarrytown
home, and a woman living in the rooms next to theirs were killed. The body of
one anarchist was shattered so that the pieces were gathered up in newspapers.
THE DEAD:
CARON, ARTHUR, 24 years old,
unmarried; lived in apartment 35, sixth floor front.
BERG, CHARLES, lived with
Caron.
HANSON, CARL, about 30 years
old, also lived with Caron.
CHAVEZ, MRS. MARIE, 35 years
old; lived in adjoining apartment.
THE INURED:
ALBIN, Mrs. Lillian, a
widow, 45 years old; body bruises, taken to Harlem Hospital.
CASAMENTE, Peter, 29 years
old, a salesman; lives at 2416 Belmont avenue, the Bronx; head and body badly
cut, may die; taken to the Reception Hospital; was buried for three hours in
wreckage in the basement of the house.
LEBEN, Isidor, 129 East 102d
street, a tailor; body bruises; taken to Harlem Hospital.
D’ANGELO, Vincent, 29 years,
top floor rear; right arm fractured, lacerations of body; removed to
Metropolitan Hospital from Reception Hospital.
MAAS, Mrs. Ella, of 129 East
102d street, 30 years old; suffering from hysteria.
METROPOLO, Max D., 68 years
old; left leg hurt; taken to Flower Hospital.
ROCKLEY, Lena, 20 years old;
feet cut; in care of friends.
All three of the men who were killed and a woman who lived in the flat
with them had attended a meeting the night before at the Francisco Ferrer
Association’s school at 63 East 107th street, where, with Leonard Abbott,
president of the Free Speech League; Alexander Berkman, the anarchist, who
served time for shooting Henry C. Frick and others who have been making
demonstrations against the Rockefellers in Broadway and at Tarrytown, they
talked over the visit to Tarrytown tomorrow.
Bits of Wire in Fingers.
Imbedded in the thumb and fingers of part of a hand found by Assistant
District Attorney Walter R. Deuel and the police late last evening in a room
adjoining the one in which the explosion occurred were bits of copper wire such
as might be used to set off a bomb.
The bomb literally blew off the southern part of the three upper floors
of the sick story building and hurled the right shoulder and part of the scalp
of one man over the room of the German Evangelical Church next door and onto
the pavement of 103d street, half a block north.
Amid the wreckage of the room, where portions of bodies were found,
Inspector Cahalane and detectives dug out of the debris a printing press, piles
of books and pamphlets in various languages on anarchistic subjects, a loaded
magazine pistol, a blackjack, a quantity of large caliber rifle cartridges and
the tops of two storage batteries.
One leaflet, evidently printed on the hand press in the anarchists’
rooms, was headed “Bulletin No. 2” and read: “Why wait longer for these money
tyrants to come to our terms? We must employ force. Force is our remedy.”
July 5, 1914
I.W.W. BOMB KILLS FOUR—WRECKS BUILDING
When the dust of the explosion had settled slightly the crowds of panic
stricken people in the streets cold see the body of the man thought to be the
bomb maker. Arthur Caron, an agitator who was arrested during the Union Square
riots of the unemployed and who was to have been arraigned with the I.W.W.
prisoners at Tarrytown tomorrow.
Caron, who was born of French parents in Connecticut twenty-four years
ago, lay dead across the fourth floor fire escape, or what was left of it, two
floors below his own room on the front of the Lexington avenue side of the
building. The back of his head was badly shattered and the bones of his arms
and legs were broken. The dynamite had blown away all of his clothing except a
shirt, collar and tie and a pair of garters.
Charles Berg, with Caron, Carl Hanson, Hanson’s stepsister, Louise
Berger, and a man who calls himself Mike Murphy, but is thought to be Michael
Auspenti, occupied the three room apartment together. Bits of ribs and pieces
of flesh found later are thought to be all that the explosion left of Berg.
Alexander Berkman later identified by the hair the piece of scalp and
armless shoulder picked up in 103d street as a part of Carl Hanson.
Rescuers soon after the explosion found the body of Mrs. Marie Chavez,
who occupied the adjoining rooms to Caron and the others down on the fourth floor,
where it had fallen from the sixth floor through holes in the flooring.
Louise Berger, Hanson’s stepsister, had left the flat a few minutes
before the explosion and was talking to Alexander Berkman at the publication
office of Mother Earth, which is also the home of Emma Goldman, who is away and
Berkman, when the bomb exploded.
Auspenti, or Murphy, was in bed at the time. Bed and sleeper dropped
through two floors where wreckage formed an arch over Auspenti. The police and
firemen dug him out dazed, but unharmed.
A leg supposed to have been Hanson’s was found on the roof of 129 East
102d street, a block south of where part of his torso was found. The back of
his head was lying in 103d street near Lexington avenue, about thirty feet from
the torso.
Injured May All Recover.
The injured all are expected to recover. Mr. and Mrs. Forgang and two
children, who lived on the first floor, and Mr. and Mrs. Schauber, who had a
flat on the third floor, were missing last night. There is a probability,
however, that these occupants of the building, in which were about 140 people
at the time of the explosion, may have gone to the home of friends unharmed.
With the aid of the District Attorney’s office the police immediately
began an examination of all the anarchists and members of the I.W.W that they
could lay hands on.
Anarchists Rounded Up.
Marie Ganz, just out of prison where she served sixty days for
threatening to kill the Rockefellers, was questioned at length by Assistant
District Attorney Walter R. Deuel and Deputy Police commissioner Joseph Rubin.
Alexander Berkman, leader of the local anarchists; Julius Salmon, one of his
followers, and others were rounded up outside the Ferrer School and elsewhere
and taken to the East 104rh street police station to be cross-examined.
The preliminary work of the police and the District Attorney’s office
had not succeeded in establishing any connection between Caron and the
explosion. Berkman, Marie Ganz, Salmon and others declared that if Caron was
working with dynamite or other high explosives they had no knowledge of it.
They were inclined to scout the idea.
The explosion occurred at 9:25 o’clock in the morning, when many of the
thirty-four families in the house were hardly out of bed for the holiday.
Policeman Thomas Lamb, who was at the southeast corner of 104th street
and Lexington avenue, and Policeman Berg were thrown to the ground by the
shock. They ran to the tenement house as soon as they had regained their feet. Other persons for blocks around had been overturned by the force of the explosion.
Just before they entered the house, still enveloped in a tremendous
dust cloud, they met Policeman Sammons and McGarvey, both off duty. All four
men entered in face of imminent peril.
They got most of the families out of the house with the aid of firemen
who were called. Reserves from three stations, 100 men in all, had to be
summoned to keep back the big crowds.
Woods at the Scene.
Police Commissioner Arthur Woods, Inspector Schmittberger, Deputy
Commissioner Rubin, Inspector Cahalane, Borough President Marks, officers of
the Building Department, Fire Chief Kenlon, Coroner Helenstein with two Coroner
physicians and a half dozen ambulances arrived within the half hour following
the disaster.
What the first comers saw when, after five full minutes, the dust had
swept aside, was half of a six story tenement still standing. The south half
toward 102d street, had apparently vanished in air. The part of the house which
remained standing was throbbing and swaying.
On a front fire escape on the fourth floor hung the body of a man, his
head caught between two iron scantlings. This was Arthur Caron. On the sixth
floor—or what was left of it—under a heap of debris lay the body of Mary
Chavez, with whom Caron boarded. Next door to the tenement is a little red
brick church, the German Evangelical edifice of the neighborhood. An iron pipe
eleven feet long had pierced its room and shattered a pew inside.
In the midst of the wreckage a man’s straw hat dangled from a front
fire escape. A cheerful canary piped and trilled indoors. Its song was
interrupted by screams of women.
Arthur Caron was not identified until his body had been lifted from the
fire escape and taken to the East 104th street station. In his packets were
found skeleton keys and a note book containing the names and addresses of
several women in Lowell and Lawrence, Mass. It contained also the name of
Leonard Abbott, head of the Free Speech League. This lead to the
identification. Newspaper men who have had occasion to follow the doings of the
I.W.W. and the anarchists here and at Tarrytown recognized the body.
It appears that Caron boarded with the Chavez family. An Anarchist
known as “Mike” Murphy, a young fellow with black hair and quick wits, is
probably the only person who can tell what Caron was doing at the time of the
explosion.
A “Miraculous Escape.”
Murphy had what Assistant District Attorney Rubin called “a miraculous
escaped—only work for it.” When the corner of the building was obliterated at
one stroke and Caron was flung to his death below Murphy sank right down with
the debris, landing in a heap of it near the ground in a [little] pocket which
saved him from anything worse than a severe jolting.
He went to the police station, identified Caron’s body and left to tell
Alexander Berkman. Berkman told Murphy to go over to the anarchist picnic at
Westfield, N.J. where Leonard Abbott and others of the Tarrytown raiders were
assembled, to tell them the news. That was why, when the police recognized the
dead man as an I.W.W. leader and began hastily looking for Murphy, alert young
Mike was some distance away. We will be brought to the city and questioned as
soon as possible.
The police do not hesitate to say that they believe Caron had a large
quantity of dynamite stored in his room, perhaps for use at Tarrytown. They
figure that Caron was either making some of it up into a bomb or handling it in
some way when it exploded.
Inspector Owen Eagan, the explosive expert and chief of the Bureau of
Combustibles, who surveyed the tenement directly after the explosion, said that
it was undoubtedly caused by dynamite in a large quantity.
Eagen Explains Theory.
“Dynamite explodes downward,” Eagen explained. “The resistance of the
air above causes that. Here there was half a boxful of the stuff on the top
floor or just under the roof, maybe, and something set it off. Half a boxful of
dynamite is a quantity you don’t often find outside an explosive factory or a
storeroom for blasting purposes. The box would be about the size of a beer
case.
“When the stuff exploded its force was exerted directly downward and it
made dust of the building from the sixth floor down to the third on that corner
of the house. You can see that none of the force was exerted sideways—the other
half of the house is only slightly shattered and the wall of the six story
tenement adjoining on the south is almost unmarred.
“The only possible conclusion is that some one was making, or was going
to make, high explosive bombs.
The Building Department investigated as soon as the firemen were
through with a preliminary survey and decided that after shoring and bracing
Lexington avenue surface cars might operate safely in front of the wrecked
house. Pedestrians were still to be barred from the block. The tenement, which
is owned by the Taxpayers Realty Company, will eventually have to be
demolished, it is thought. It was of the new construction, erected since 1902.
As soon as the police learned the identity of Arthur Caron and the
nature of the explosion they sent around to the Ferrer School to get all of
Caron’s acquaintances they could. The Ferrer School is closed and the police
learned that many members of the Francisco Ferrer Association had gone to
Westfield, N.J. on the anarchist picnic. Julius Salmon, who totes the soap box
which is the rostrum at anarchist meetings and peddles Mother Earth, Berkman’s
magazine, at such meetings, was found and taken to the East 104th street
station to be questioned by the Assistant District Attorney Deuel and Deputy
Police Commissioner Rubin.
Salmon said he knew Caron, of course from talking with him at the
anarchist street meeting and meeting him elsewhere, but he was not well
acquainted with him and had never heard or thought of Caron as a possible
dynamiter.
Caron Awaiting Trial.
“We had a meeting at the Ferrer School last night at which Caron was
present,” Salmon said. “It was a meeting of all the Tarrytown prisoners and
their friends to discuss going up to the trials at Tarrytown on July 11, next
Saturday. The cases of Caron and others arrested there for their street meeting
to denounce the Rockefellers come up next Saturday.
“We just talked over the prospects of the trials and how we should all
get up there and that was all the meeting was about. There was no talk or hint
of violence at Tarrytown or elsewhere.”
Marie Ganz, who had just been let out of Queens County Jail in the
morning her sixty-day sentence expiring was next examined.
“Of course I knew Arthur Caron,” she said. “I have known Arthur since
the unemployed agitation last winter. I didn’t know him before, didn’t know him
closely, and know hardly anything about his earlier life.
“He was just a working man when he got into this agitation. Once he
told me that he had lost his mother, his wife, and his child, one right after
the other, in a short time. This blow first stunned and then embittered him.
Then he lost his job and couldn’t get another. He began to attend unemployed
meetings and became a speaker at some of them and it was there I first met him.
“I had never visited him in his home. He was a quiet fellow but not a
dynamiter. When wrought up he spoke bitterly, but that was the end of it.”
Protégé of Upton Sinclair.
At this point Upton Sinclair’s description of Arthur Caron who was one
of Sinclair’s protégés, was recalled. Sinclair spoke enthusiastically of Caron
to a Sun Reporter at Tarrytown one night recently.
“Arthur Caron,” said Sinclair. “was just a plain working boy who had no
part in the unemployed or other agitations until the day of that meeting in Union
Square, where the police attacked the I.W.W.
“Caron was crossing the square and saw a policeman smashing ‘Wild Joe’
O’Carroll over the head with his club. This sight made Caron nearly frantic. He
ran over to the policeman and O’Carroll and cried out: “What are you doing to
that man? What are you doing that for? Let him go!”
“Another policeman seized Caron and struck him in the face with his
club. This blow smashed Caron’s nose and he was in the hospital for some time.
“That made him an embittered man and an agitator.”
Berkman Identifies Bodies.
Alexander Berkman came to the East 104th street station of his own
accord and was questioned by Commissioner Rubin and Assistant District Attorney
Deuel. It was about 3 o’clock when he arrived. He identified the body of Caron
and later that of Hanson. Berkman said he was pretty certain of his
identification.
Berkman told Mr. Rubin that Miss Louise Berger had come to his house,
the Mother Earth headquarters, at 74 West 119th street, about 9 o’clock in the
morning and talked with him about the Tarrytown plans for tomorrow. Some one
called up, he said, it might have been Mike Murphy, and told him about the
explosion. Later Berkman said he telephoned to the Francisco Ferrer School and
told Murphy to go out to Leonard D. Abbott, who was at his country place at
Westfield, N.J. and tell him about the death of Caron.
Abbott had planned to give a picnic yesterday at Westfield to the
anarchists, I.W.W.s and the Tarrytown prisoners at which plans for the
demonstration at the Rockefeller’s home town were to be discussed. Berkman and
Murphy told him he thought it was a subway explosion in the street which had
wrecked the house.
Berkman was very frank in his story of the meeting on Friday night at
the Ferrer School. He was entirely composed and emphatically declared that it
was intended to employ no force in Tarrytown. The meeting, he said, was held in
the upper floor of the school after a lecture in the courtyard on single tax.
Caron, Murphy, Abbott, Beckie Edelsohn, Berg, Louise Berger, the prisoners and
other sympathizers were present and ways and means of defending the prisoners
at their trials tomorrow were laid out. They also had a telephonic conference
with their counsel. Justus Scheffield, during the meeting.
It adjourned soon after midnight, but most of the conferees went to a
café at Lexington avenue and 114th street, Berkman said and had some drinks and
more discussion. A few girls were there, too, Berkman did not stay long as he
had business to attend to. It was after 1 o’clock when the second meeting broke
up.
The plans for tomorrow, according to Berkman, were these: The
defendants were to go up to Hastings about 7:30 in the morning and thence to
Tarrytown by train, because that was the cheapest way. It was to be a peaceful
demonstration. Berkman said they intended to wait for the outcome of the trials
before making any other demonstration.
“Did you plan to take any ammunition of any kind with you?” asked Mr.
Rubin.
Berkman fiddled with his cane, looked angry and declared that the
question was an insult to his intelligence, but when pinned down to an answer
replied “No.”
Denies Threats at Tarrytown.
Berkman denied that he had ever made any threats to Tarrytown
authorities, but admitted sending wires to authorities in Paterson, N.J.,
expressing sentiments of a meeting called to consider possible jail sentences of
agitators in that city.
Berkman was then asked to look at the parts of the body which had been
picked up from nearby roofs and the sidewalk at the 103d street. He was being
examined in the detectives’ room in the rear of the station house above the pen.
He went downstairs to where the three bodies were laid out covered with sheets
in the station house prison and when he returned declared he was pretty certain
from the hair and size of the body that it was Carl Hanson’s. The police were
satisfied with this identification.
About the same time that Berkman reached the station, Miss Louise
Berger, Hanson’s stepsister, who lived with the “boys” and escaped the
explosion by just 14 minutes came to the station house with Miss Eleanor
Fitzgerald of 79 West 114th street, a teacher in the Ferrer School, who was at
the Mother Earth office with Miss Berger and Berkman when news of the explosion
was received.
When Miss Berger saw Caron’s body she exclaimed, “My God, it’s Arthur!”
and fainted. The police did not let her see the fragments of Hanson’s bod. The
woman, who is thirty-two years old and looks worn and worried, had to be
supported by Miss Fitzgerald while she sat in the chair in the detectives’ room
with Mr. Rubin and Mr. Deuel. She spoke in a soft low tone.
Tells of Morning in Flat
Miss Berger told Mr. Rubin that it was late when Berg, Hanson, Caron,
and Murphy returned from the meeting. She was in bed. She slept in one of the
two bedrooms and the four men in the other. The arrangement that night was
Caron and Berg on the floor and Murphy and Hanson in the bed. She got up before
eight o’clock with her brother and got the breakfast. She had hers, but the
others who were all dressed, she said, did not eat, but went back to bed and
were asleep, she thought before she left. She left about five minutes to nine
and went to the Mother Earth office. She reached there just a few minutes
before the explosion.
Mr. Rubin questioned Miss Berger about the apartment and its contents,
but she declared she had seen no dynamite and no revolvers in the three rooms
which the five of them occupied. She never went through the men’s pockets, she
said. She said she had planned to go to Tarrytown with the rest of “the boys.”
Caron, she said, was teaching her English, which language she could not speak
very well.
Sinclair Disclaims Caron.
Upton Sinclair, whose protégé Caron was believed to be, because at
several Tarrytown meetings Sinclair was loud in his praise of Caron, last night
denied that Caron was his protégé, but admitted that he had taken great
interest in him after the silent parade in front of 26 Broadway.
“For God’s sake!” exclaimed Sinclair when told Caron had been killed by
his own dynamite.
“I don’t know what to think. What can I say. I did not know the bunch
in Caron’s apartment. I know him. He was with us at 26 Broadway, but I am loath
to believe that he contemplated violence. If Caron was doing anything of that
sort it was of his own accord. He did not impress me that way. He has been up
here to see me and my wife and he assured us that he would follow the peaceful
method to obtain free speech in Tarrytown. If I thought he was planning
anything like force I would have had nothing to do with him. But I suppose when
he was beaten up lately at Tarrytown he became embittered.”
Caron had among other names in the little note book found in his pocket
the names and addresses of Mrs. Upton Sinclair, Leonard Abbot and others
prominent in the free speech and I.W.W. agitation.
Marie Ganz, who just got out of jail yesterday morning after serving
her two months for threatening John D. Rockefeller at a meeting denied all
knowledge of the causes leading up to the explosion. She seemed to be at the
outs with leaders of the anarchist and I.W.W. movement, because they had
deserted her in the Queens county jail.
Joseph O’Brien, secretary of the International Workers Defence League
of the anarchists and I.W.W., which aided in the defence of Caron and another
man arrested during the I.W.W. demonstrations, especially at Union Square,
where Wild Joe O’Carroll and Caron were beaten up, also had a denial to make.
“I am positive,” he said, “that there was no understanding between the
I.W.W. leaders or representatives that bombs were to be made or thrown. The
I.W.W. is opposed to bomb throwing. If shocked and surprised me when I heard
what had happened to Caron, and if he was really employed in making the bomb it
was a matter for his own soul and conscience.
There was no plot to blow up any of the Rockefeller family, and the
I.W.W. is as much opposed to anything of the kind as the Police Commissioner
could be. From my knowledge of Caron no one could be further removed from the
idea of dynamiting than he was, and this makes the manner of his death more
remarkable to me.”
As soon as the knowledge of the explosion spread, the Ferrer School
shut up tight, and when the police went there looking for some of the leaders
no one was to be found. Mother Earth headquarters at 74 West 119th street, also
closed up soon after.
It was just light enough to see last enough to see last night when
Assistant District Attorney Deuel, Inspector Cahalane and Capt. Jones led the
way down the broken stairways of the wrecked building with Detective William
Cruise in their wake caring grewsome [sic] bundles wrapped in newspapers.
Great crowds stood still on the top of the steep incline at 102d street
and the corner to the north also was jammed with men, women and children who
pressed against the police lines until late last night. Men from the Building
Department and policemen were left in charge of the building with orders to
admit no one until the police and county officers return this morning to resume
the work of digging for evidence or parts of bodies in the debris on the top
floors.
