The Epic of New York City (86 page)

The onset of sickness was rapid. A victim felt chilly and weak, suffered pains in his eyes or ears or head or back, complained of dizziness, coughed, clutched his throat because it felt sore, and in a few hours was prostrated. Anyone in close contact with a flu patient could expect to be stricken within the next few hours or days, so quickly did the plague spread.

After the first few cases of influenza had been diagnosed in New York, Dr. Royal S. Copeland, city health commissioner, declared, “The city is in no danger of an epidemic.” He was wrong. More and more New Yorkers sickened and died from the flu. Incoming ships were fumigated. It was too late. The death toll in the city quickly climbed to more than 800 persons within 24 hours. Some hysterical people claimed that the disease had been sent here deliberately by the Germans, possibly by U-boats. Hospitals filled up, overflowed, and turned away patients. Doctors urged everyone to stay home. So many staff members at Bellevue Hospital succumbed that a few doctors
suggested the place be closed, a proposal voted down by the trustees. Nurses dragged about their duties, eyes black-ringed with fatigue.

Two thousand telephone operators, about one-quarter of the city's staff, were stricken. Municipal services slowed down as transit workers, garbage collectors, firemen, and policemen failed to report for work. Cops lucky enough to stay on their feet directed traffic wearing masks over their faces. Children enjoyed the cheesecloth masks their mothers fitted over their faces but gagged on poultices made of garlic and camphor. City welfare workers were pressed into unfamiliar jobs such as carrying stretchers, scrubbing floors, and digging graves.

A worried Mayor Hylan told city engineers to plan the excavation of many graves. He said he would punish any doctor who overcharged, but apparently few did. To be sure, some undertakers gave special consideration to the rich, and in one tenement a corpse was not removed for four days. By contrast, a certain prostitute gave such tender care as a volunteer nurse that she was praised by patients and authorities alike.

As the epidemic mounted, business firms, cultural institutions, and places of entertainment closed down. From September to November, 1918, the city's hubbub was hushed. The flu killed more New Yorkers than any plague in the city's history. In relative numbers, however, it was by no means the most deadly epidemic. In 1832, 1849, 1854, and 1866, when the population was smaller, cholera killed proportionately more.

The final death toll from the flu epidemic of 1918 was New York City, 12,562; New York State, 20,000; the United States, 500,000; and the entire world, 21,000,000. The disaster struck a heavy blow at New York's insurance firms. They paid more money to the beneficiaries of flu victims than they did to survivors of soldiers killed in battle during World War I.

About the time the plague waned, the war itself came to an end. When the United Press wrongly reported on November 7, 1918, that an armistice had been signed, New Yorkers celebrated wildly. Elderly brokers danced in Wall Street, J. P. Morgan threw ticker tape out of his office window, strangers hugged one another, pushcart peddlers gave free candy to children, girls kissed the first uniformed men they saw, and a French general was carried triumphantly up Fifth Avenue. A roll of toilet paper tossed from the Waldorf-Astoria landed in the lap of a dowager, and motion-picture star Mary Pick-ford
looked and listened as Italian tenor Enrico Caruso stepped onto a balcony of the Hotel Knickerbocker and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” to the multitudes massed in Times Square. When the real armistice was announced on November 11, much the same scenes were reenacted.

America emerged from World War I as a creditor nation and thus the strongest country on earth. New York superseded London as the world's foremost financial mart, and Wall Street became the pinpoint of power the globe around.

Chapter 42

W
HEN THE DOUGHBOYS
got back to New York, they were feted and petted and soon forgotten. Shedding their uniforms for civilian clothes, the veterans began asking themselves, “What price glory?” which became the title of a fine Broadway play. People were tired. They felt that it was time for fun and games. Between 1919 and 1929 a change in emotional weather swept over the country. After spilling so much blood and offering up sacrifices that seemed to count for little, with the overthrow of traditions and conventions, many people wallowed in a vacuum of cynicism and intellectual anarchy. Now they threw themselves wildly into the Jazz Age, also called the Lawless Decade, the Era of Wonderful Nonsense, and the Roaring Twenties.

The cost of living in New York City had risen 79 percent between 1914 and 1919. A depression set in. The federal government bought fewer goods that it had during the war. There was a sharp drop in domestic purchasing power, which had been partly financed by federal money. Private bankers curtailed loans. Interest rates rose. In 1919 the average worker had an income of only $1,144. President Wilson addressed a joint session of Congress about the high cost of living. As New Yorkers suffered from a housing shortage, Henry Clay Frick died and left a $17,000,000 mansion filled with $30,000,000 worth of art treasures. Strikes flared across the nation. When New York's streetcar workers walked off the job, people were amazed to see Broadway trolleys armed with bulletproof screens to protect motor-men still on the job. The city also endured strikes by dress- and waistmakers, cloak- and suitmakers, engineers and firemen, American Railway Express drivers, cigarmakers, longshoremen, printers, subway employees—and actors.

On August 7, 1919, New York's actors and actresses walked off the boards, as Actors' Equity Association struck against the highhanded methods of theatrical producers. The public and press supported the performers. They were led by Frank Bacon, a character actor and playwright. Opposed to Bacon was George M. Cohan, actor, playwright, songwriter, dancer, and one-half of the producing team of Cohan and Harris. He hastily organized a rival union called the Actors' Fidelity League, which sided with the producers. Life-long friendships broke up. There were street brawls and arrests and speeches and suits and countersuits. About 250 chorus girls staged a rally on Wall Street. Comedian Ed Wynn performed stunts at street corners. Ethel Barrymore, John Drew, Al Jolson, and Marie Dressler addressed the performers. Tallulah Bankhead, then only sixteen years old, coaxed her father out of $100, which she donated to the strikers. On September 7, Equity won the strike and has since remained the undisputed spokesman for legitimate actors.

During the war an alarming tendency to suppress civil liberties had developed; it was born of fear of sabotage and espionage. Now the federal government overreacted and indulged in some of the very tyrannical acts it condemned. In 1919 a reactionary lawyer named A. Mitchell Palmer was appointed U.S. Attorney General. At the time President Wilson was a very sick man and out of touch with affairs. Left pretty much on his own, Palmer launched a reign of terror.

At 2
A.M
. on April 29, 1919, Charles Caplan, a clerk in the
parcel post division of the New York Post Office, was on his way home when he read a newspaper story. This told about a Negro servant who worked for Senator Thomas R. Hardwick in Atlanta, Georgia. She had opened a package addressed to the Senator, and a bomb inside it blew off her hands. Before this happened, Senator Hardwick had urged the restriction of immigration as a means of keeping Bolshevism out of America. The news story described the Atlanta package as being about six inches long and three inches wide, wrapped in brown paper, and marked with the return address of the Gimbel Brothers' department store in New York City. Now this struck a chord in the mind of the postal clerk. Suddenly he remembered.

Changing trains, he hurried back to the post office and found what he was looking for. He had put sixteen brown-wrapped packages on a shelf, because they didn't have enough postage. One was intended for Attorney General Palmer, another for J. P. Morgan; all, in fact, were addressed to highly placed federal officials and capitalists. Each bore the deceptive Gimbel label. Caplan notified his superior, who called the police. The packages were taken to a nearby firehouse, gingerly unwrapped, and found to contain bombs. Besides these sixteen packages, twenty others had been mailed elsewhere in the nation. Fortunately, none of the intended victims was injured. Officials never discovered the identity of the person or persons who mailed the bombs.

Another unsolved mystery resulted in a monumental tragedy. Late in the morning of Thursday, September 16, 1920, all seemed to be business as usual at the corner of Wall Street and Broad Street; which narrows into Nassau Street at this spot. The southeastern corner was occupied by the House of Morgan. The southwestern corner held the New York Stock Exchange and a fenced-in hole where a twenty-two story addition to the exchange was about to be erected. On the northwestern corner stood the thirty-nine-story Bankers Trust Company Building with its pyramided peak. The northeastern corner was occupied by the Subtreasury Building.

One block west, at the head of Wall Street, the Trinity Church clock began chiming the noon hour. Clerks and brokers, messengers and telegraphers prepared to leave for lunch. Hundreds of persons already strolled the streets. Up Wall Street from the east came a brown wagon covered with canvas. Drawn by an old dark-bay horse, it stopped at Wall and Nassau streets. The driver tossed his reins across the
horse's back, jumped to the pavement, and walked away. As the twelfth bong of the Trinity clock reverberated through the autumn air, horse and wagon vanished in a tremendous explosion.

Eyewitnesses told different accounts. Some said that the blast gave off a bluish white glare. Others described it as a white ball of fire emitting acrid yellow flames that changed color, spat tongues of green flame, and soared skyward in a pillar of thick brown smoke. Higher and higher soared the smoke, darkening from brown to black and flattening mushroomlike above nearby skyscrapers. Awnings burst into flames a dozen floors above the street. The roar of the explosion bounced from building to building like a cannonball rolling free in the hold of a foundering ship. Iron fragments zinged through the air. They gashed pedestrians' arms and smashed legs and crushed skulls. The shower of metal was followed by a shower of glass, cascading onto the pavement. The blast knocked out windowpanes within a half-mile radius. A man walking along John Street, five blocks north, was felled by a four-inch length of pipe crashing on the base of his neck.

Like the eye of a hurricane, an ominous hush followed the first roar. Then people screamed. Fatally stricken girls stiffened, sagged, and slumped to the pavement. Blood seeped from them and spread fanlike over the concrete. Up from the street leaped a fountain of flame that clawed the façades of buildings on both sides of Wall Street. Desks caught fire. Officeworkers suddenly found their hair flaming torches. People in offices as high as the sixth floor were badly burned.

Among those who died in the explosion was Edward Sweet, a millionaire who once owned the famous Sweet's seafood restaurant at Fulton and South streets; all they ever found of him was one finger with his ring still on it. On Bloody Thursday 35 persons were killed, and 130 others injured. Property losses amounted to almost $3,000,000. The House of Morgan suffered the worst damage, and Junius Spencer Morgan, a grandson of J. Pierpont Morgan, sustained a slight gash on one hand. Apart from young Morgan, no other important Wall Street figure was hurt. Despite a protracted and far-flung investigation, the perpetrators of this crime were never discovered.

Prohibition was scheduled to go into effect at midnight on January 16, 1920. New York's weather that night was bitterly cold, the temperature sinking to six degrees above zero. In saloons, bars, cafés, restaurants, and supper clubs all over town the dry era was ushered
in on a melancholy binge. Waiters dressed as pallbearers carried coffins. Some establishments had mailed black-bordered invitations to patrons to take part in “Last rites and ceremonies attending the departure of our spirited friend, John Barleycorn.”