The Epic of New York City (84 page)

Sixty-three days before the Sarajevo assassination that triggered World War I, an attempt had been made to assassinate New York's new mayor. This was tall, long-legged, brown-eyed John Purroy Mitchel. As president of the board of aldermen, Mitchel had served as acting mayor during Mayor Gaynor's recuperation from his bullet wound, and after Gaynor died, the administration of city affairs fell on Mitchel. On November 4, 1913, Mitchel was elected mayor in his own right. A Democrat, Mitchel was the candidate of the Republicans and the Fusion party, which resented, among other things, Gaynor's attitude toward the Becker case.

Taking office at the age of thirty-four, Mitchel became the youngest mayor in the city's history. At noon on Friday, April 17, 1914, Mitchel started to leave City Hall to go to lunch. With him were Frank Polk, the corporation counsel; Arthur Woods, the police commissioner; and George V. Mullan, the tax commissioner. An elderly man stepped up to the mayor and fired at him point-blank. The bullet grazed the mayor's ear and slammed into Polk's left cheek, lodging under the tongue. The corporation counsel's wound was painful but not critical, and he quickly recovered. The attacker was seized. Mayor Mitchel walked beside his assailant as the small group of excited men crossed City Hall Park and entered a nearby police station.

The would-be killer was identified as Michael P. Mahoney, a psychotic with imagined grievances against the city administration. He was sent to an insane asylum. When the public read about this assassination attempt, it also learned for the first time that Mayor Mitchel always carried a revolver for his own protection.

Next to LaGuardia, Mayor Mitchel gave New York the best government it has ever known. Brilliant, well educated, and honest, Mitchel did his work extremely well. His election as a Fusion candidate was one of Tammany Hall's most decisive defeats. Theodore Roosevelt said that Mitchel had “given us as nearly an ideal administration . . .
as I have seen in my lifetime, or as I have heard of since New York became a big city.” Oswald Garrison Villard, president of the New York
Evening Post,
wrote of Mitchel's regime: “Never was the fire department so well handled, never were the city's charities so well administered, nor its finances grappled with upon such a sound and far-sighted basis. . . . Under him the schools progressed wonderfully, while prisons were carried on with some semblance of scientific and humanitarian management.” The gangs that had terrorized the city for nearly a century were broken up, Police Commissioner Woods declaring that “the gangster and the gunman are practically extinct.”

For all of Mayor Mitchel's accomplishments he lacked tact and sometimes seemed downright unfair. When State Senator Robert F. Wagner tried to delay the federal government's acquisition of property needed for coastal defense, Mitchel attacked him as “the gentleman from Prussia.” The remark antagonized New Yorkers of German birth or descent. Himself a Catholic, Mitchel also incurred the enmity of Catholics by insisting that the city had the right to examine the books of Catholic charities subsidized by the city.

The outbreak of World War I intensified unemployment in New York, and young Harry Hopkins was named executive secretary of the city's board of child welfare. Iowa-born Hopkins was now launched on the career that reached a climax when he became to Franklin D. Roosevelt what Colonel House was to Woodrow Wilson.

New York's large German population worried officials who favored England, France, and Russia. On August 1, 1914, when Germany declared war on Russia and the Kaiser made a rousing speech from the balcony of his Berlin palace, a German-American newspaper called the
New Yorker Herold
printed the story under this headline: “ALL GERMAN HEARTS BEAT HIGHER TODAY.” William Randolph Hearst owned a New York German-language periodical, called the
Deutsches Journal.
He opposed any help to the Allies. The Germans praised Hearst in the Berlin
Vossische Zeitung,
saying that “he has exposed the selfishness of England and her campaign of abuse against Germany, and has preached justice for the Central Powers.” Federal officials scanned Hearst's papers for sedition, a Secret Service agent infiltrated Hearst's home disguised as a butler, and a woman in a restaurant hissed,
“Boche!”
at him. Hearst is said to have bowed toward her and murmured, “You're quite right, madame, it is all bosh.” Still, Hearst newspapers were banned in England, Canada, and France.

Some men living in New York were reservists in the German army, and they paraded the streets with German flags. Occasionally they brawled with New Yorkers of British and French descent who displayed flags of their mother countries. Mayor Mitchel finally banned all foreign flags. President Wilson officially proclaimed the neutrality of the United States and called on all Americans to remain impartial in thought and action, but there was little neutrality. Colonel House believed that “civilization itself” could not afford to see the British “go down in the war,” and he preached preparedness to Wilson; but the President hesitated.

In 1914 the private banking firm of J. P. Morgan & Company moved into a new gray five-story building at 23 Wall Street. Soon after the outbreak of the European war Henry P. Davidson, a Morgan partner, telephoned the State Department in Washington and asked for a ruling on loans to belligerent governments. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan told President Wilson that “money is the worst of all contrabands because it commands everything else.” The State Department told the House of Morgan that it had no objections to loans to neutrals, but that “loans by American bankers to any foreign nation which is at war are inconsistent with the true spirit of neutrality.” Yet at the same time the State Department sanctioned unlimited sales of munitions to all nations.

On September 10, 1915, a joint English-French commission arrived in New York, hoping to float an Allied war loan in America. More than a year had passed since the State Department forbade American bankers to lend money to belligerent nations. Ties between the United States and the Allies had grown closer. Thomas W. Lamont, another Morgan partner, admitted many years later: “Our firm never for one moment had been neutral; we didn't know how to be. From the very start we did everything we could to contribute to the cause of the Allies.” The Morgan bank now was allowed to sign a contract for a loan of $500,000,000 to be floated by 61 New York banks. Obviously, America had abandoned strict neutrality. Before the war ended, the House of Morgan bought $3,000,000,000 in war supplies for the Allies and realized a commission of 1 percent, or $30,000,000

In 1915 a German submarine sunk the
Lusitania
10 miles off the coast of Ireland. Among the passengers were 188 Americans, 114 of whom lost their lives. The day after the disaster the largest crowds since the outbreak of war gathered in front of New York newspaper
offices to read about the
Lusitania
on bulletin boards. Many spectators cried that America should declare war on Germany. Frank Munsey, the newspaper magnate, telephoned from his New York office to Jay Edwin Murphy, managing editor of his Washington
Times.
“Has Wilson declared war yet?” Munsey shouted. “No, Mr. Munsey.” Furiously, Munsey screamed, “Tell him to declare war against Germany at once!” Here in New York, as elsewhere in America, the sinking of the
Lusitania
did much to destroy the considerable pro-German sentiment which had existed during the earlier part of the war. When the French composer Saint-Saëns arrived in New York, he was welcomed at the pier by, among others, a Wagnerian diva. The old man shrank from her in horror, crying, “No! No! Away! You are a German!”

Now the United States stepped up the shipment of war matériel to the Allies. The most important spot in this nation for the transfer of munitions to Allied ships was Black Tom, a mile-long peninsula jutting into the Hudson River from Jersey City just behind the Statue of Liberty. Originally an island, Black Tom had been connected to the Jersey shore by a fill about 150 feet wide. Freight cars were nosed along a network of tracks to piers, where their supplies could be unloaded onto barges for transfer to waiting vessels in the harbor. The night of July 30, 1916, 2,000,000 pounds of explosives were stored in the railway cars, on piers, and in barges tied alongside docks.

At 2:08
A.M
. the New York area was rocked by a mighty explosion. All 2,000,000 pounds of munitions erupted in a series of blasts that demolished the Black Tom terminal. New York skyscrapers and apartment houses quivered. People were thrown out of bed. Bridges trembled. Half the windows in the Customhouse were shattered. In the nearby Aquarium all the skylights were smashed, but the fish tanks remained intact. Every window was broken in the House of Morgan, and a total of $1,000,000 worth of damage was done to windowpanes throughout the Wall Street area. In Brooklyn and as far north as Forty-second Street in Manhattan, windows shattered into glassy splinters. Damage estimated at $45,000,000 was done within a radius of 25 miles, and the shock was felt as far away as Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Connecticut. For more than 3 hours shrapnel and shells burst through the heavens like skyrockets.

Surprisingly, only 7 lives were lost. Damage at Black Tom itself came to $20,000,000. New Jersey clapped an embargo on the transit of munitions through the state, but this ban remained in effect only
10 days. Most people regarded the disaster as an accident. The theory was not accepted by businessmen who suffered financial loss. For the next 14 years investigators conducted a worldwide hunt for the German agents they believed responsible for the blast. However, in 1930 the Mixed Claims Commission sitting at The Hague ruled that it had not been established beyond a reasonable doubt that Black Tom was the work of German saboteurs.

Nevertheless, New York had become undercover headquarters for a gigantic ring of German saboteurs and spies. This was financed in part by Count Johann von Bernstorff, the German ambassador to the United States, who brought $150,000,000 in German treasury notes to this city and deposited them in the Chase National Bank. Perhaps the favorite rendezvous for German agents was a four-story brown-stone, at 123 West Fifteenth Street. This old-fashioned dwelling, with its big dining room and its wine cellar, was rented by Martha Held, who called herself Martha Gordon. A handsome buxom woman, with dark-blue eyes and glossy black hair, she herself did no spying but provided a haven for secret operatives. So many of them skulked in and out of her home at all hours of the night that neighbors whispered that she ran a bawdyhouse. This gossip probably suited her because it kept snoopers away. Bombs and dynamite were stored in her place, and the destruction of ships and munitions and factories was discussed in guttural German accents over beer and wine.

Colonel House learned that one German agent in New York was involved in a plot to kill President Wilson. By a series of notes to Germany the President caused that nation to restrict its U-boat attacks awhile, and largely because of his skillful diplomacy and the slogan “He Kept Us Out of the War,” Wilson won the Democratic nomination and in 1916 ran for the Presidency a second time.

His Republican opponent was Charles Evans Hughes, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. The November election was so close that Hughes fell asleep in the Astor Hotel thinking that he was the next President, only to awaken the following morning to learn that Wilson had been reelected. New York newspapers actually published extras bearing huge portraits of “The President-Elect—Charles Evans Hughes.” Tammany, dominated by Irish Catholics who were angered because Wilson had not helped Irish rebels, did little, if anything, to keep him in the White House. A straitlaced Presbyterian, Wilson considered New York “rotten to the core.”

When Germany notified the United States that it was going to resume
unrestricted warfare, the President asked Congress to arm American merchant ships. The Senate refused, but Wilson armed them by executive order. New Yorkers braced themselves for the worst. A cavalry force began guarding the city's water supply, and other soldiers patrolled the East River and its bridges. James W. Gerard, the American ambassador to Germany, was recalled and happened to be in New York on the evening of April 2, 1917. He went to the Metropolitan Opera House for a performance of De Koven's
The Canterbury Pilgrims.
Between acts he heard news-boys shouting on the streets outside that the President had asked Congress to declare war on Germany.

Gerard darted for a phone and called Herbert Bayard Swope of the
World,
who told him that the news was indeed true. Just as Gerard hung up the receiver, an opera company director passed by. Excitedly, Gerard broke the news and demanded that the director do something—“order the news read from the stage, for example, and have
The Star-Spangled Banner
played.” The director replied coolly, “No, the opera company is neutral.” Shocked and angered, Gerard hurried back to his private box, shouted the news to the audience, and called for a cheer for President Wilson. Startled by this announcement, the opera-goers sat in silence a moment and then broke into cheers. On its own initiative the orchestra swung into the national anthem. Some people in the audience were still yelling and applauding when the curtain went up on the last act to reveal, among others, a German singer, named Margarete Ober, who played the Wife of Bath. It was obvious to all that she was nervous. About two minutes later she fainted and had to be carried off stage; the opera finished without her.

On April 6, 1917, Congress voted for war, and the President signed a resolution declaring that hostilities existed between the United States and Germany. At 5
A.M
. that day Dudley Field Malone, collector of the port of New York, got a crucial phone call from Washington. Word also was flashed to the army installation on Governors Island. In port at the time were eighteen German ships, five of them anchored in the Hudson just off West 135th Street.