The Epic of New York City (90 page)

The greatest of all these charlatans was Father Divine. Although his origin is shrouded in mystery, he is thought to have been born in Georgia about 1877 and named George Baker. After growing up, he drifted to Baltimore, where he worked as a handyman. Sometime during this period he decided to become a minister and started calling himself the Reverend M. J. Divine. Then he headed farther north, settling in Sayville, Long Island.

Squat, only about five feet tall, bald as a balloon, with a flashing grin and sparkling eyes, Father Divine had a magnetic personality. His preaching was so rhythmical that it hypnotized ignorant people. Seeking something greater than themselves, they drank in nonsense such as: “It is personifiable and repersonifiably metaphysicalizationally reproducible—” Besides being a spellbinder, Father Divine was a shrewd organizer and manipulator. He attracted disciples and bewitched them into giving him their earnings. With this money he founded cooperatives where all true believers could live in peace and comfort. “Peace” was the slogan. His followers, called “angels,” regarded him as God, and when they got together they chanted, “He has the world in a jug and the stopper in his hand.” In 1931 the Sayville police arrested him for maintaining a public nuisance. A
judge sentenced him to a year in jail, but the conviction was reversed.

In the pit of the depression, Father Divine arrived in Harlem, where he established the first of his many “heavens.” Unemployed Negroes turned in growing numbers to his promise of security and dignity. No other Negro since Marcus Garvey had attracted such a large following. Forbidding his disciples to accept public relief and providing living quarters and food with the money supplied by employed believers, Father Divine became a power. The trademark of his movement was the banquet. Devotees would sit down to the table at his most important “heaven,” located at 152 West 126th Street, and feast on twenty kinds of meat, five salads, eleven relishes, fifteen kinds of bread, six desserts, six different beverages, and cheeses and cakes “as big as automobile tires.” For all this each disciple paid only fifteen cents.

Father Divine demanded that his “angels” give up sex, tobacco, alcohol, and their money, but in those hard times this didn't seem too much to surrender. Husbands and wives slept in separate dormitories for only two dollars a week. Those joining the movement sacrificed their names and took others, such as Angel Flash, Blessed Mary Love, Peaceful Dove, Love Note, and Gladness Darling. In spite of the fun poked at them, they made good workers and were rarely involved with the police.

While Father Divine tackled the depression in his own self-rewarding way, others began questioning the worth of an economic and political system that could result in such mass misery. The dean of the Harvard Business School admitted, “Capitalism is on trial and on the issue of this trial may depend the whole future of Western civilization.” Heywood Broun, a syndicated columnist for the Scripps-Howard newspapers, became a Socialist, but this was too tepid a change for those who wanted deeds, not words. In 1932 John Dos Passos wrote: “Becoming a Socialist right now would have just about the same effect on anybody as drinking a bottle of near-beer.” Wherever the unemployed looked, they seemed to see Communists in action—taking part in jobless demonstrations, leading strikes, suffering beatings, going to jail, and sometimes being killed. Granville Hicks later wrote: “What impressed us about American Communists was their absolute devotion to the cause. We didn't like them very well, but they did get results.” Besides, the Communists glorified the poor and in those days nearly everyone was poor. Clifford Odets,
who wanted to become a playwright, was trying to live on ten cents a day. In 1935 he joined the Communist party but resigned eight months later because its leaders tried to regiment his writing.

The American Communist party increased the number of its members. They were organized into three categories of clubs—community clubs, shop clubs, and industrial clubs. Above the clubs were sections and state organizations. The area embraced by a club or section depended on the density of membership. New York had city, county, and section groups. Because this was a vast city, a local club might embrace only a neighborhood, whereas in a small town there might be only one club in the entire community.

In the Coney Island area of Brooklyn there were several clubs. They were known collectively as the Coney Island section. This, in turn, was part of the boroughwide Brooklyn organization. As David A. Shannon wrote in
The Decline of American Communism
: “In some parts of New York there were enough party members in one apartment building to constitute a club. Isadore Begun, Bronx county chairman, gloated over one building in which there were ten members: ‘Just think, if you want to call a meeting all you have to do is knock on the steam pipe.' ”

Russian periodicals exaggerated the American depression. A Moscow paper published pictures of holes dug in Broadway by repairmen, the captions declaring that the pits were caused by “bombings” and “riots.” The Third International, a worldwide organization set up by the Bolsheviks with the aim of conquering the world, ordered that March 6, 1930, be observed as International Unemployment Day. According to Benjamin Gitlow, an American Communist official who quit the party, the Comintern commanded the comrades to provoke police. The Soviet plan was to touch off bloody riots in an attempt to prove that capitalistic nations were oppressing the workers.

Grover Whalen was police commissioner of New York in 1930. His intelligence squad reported that 100,000 postcards had been mailed to Communists and sympathizers in the New York area, summoning them to a rally at noon on March 6 in Union Square—sometimes known as Red Square because Communist orators harangued crowds there. Whalen had little patience wtih radicals. According to Socialists Norman Thomas and Paul Blanshard, he said publicly that Communists, “these enemies of society, were to be driven out of New York regardless of their constitutional rights.”

Whalen asked William Z. Foster, Robert Minor, and Israel Amter to come to Police Headquarters to confer. Foster was the nation's No. 1 Communist, Minor was editor of the
Daily Worker
, and Amter was a local Communist organizer. Whalen told them that under a city ordinance it was necessary to obtain a permit three days in advance of any outdoor meeting. Having been ordered by Moscow to antagonize American officials, the Communist leaders snarled that they did not respect the laws of the United States, of New York State, or of New York City. Curtly they refused to apply for a permit for the Union Square rally. Then they turned on their heels and strode out of Whalen's office. He later wrote: “I doubt if any police commissioner has ever been more openly defied.”

The biggest Communist demonstration in the history of New York City was held on Thursday, March 6, 1930. It was a clear and windless day. By 10
A.M.
a crowd had begun to gather in Union Square. Police spies within Communist ranks had told Whalen that there were exactly 9,567 Communist party members in New York City. They provided the hard core of the Union Square crowd, which was reinforced by thousands of sympathizers and curiosity seekers.

The dapper Whalen wore a dark overcoat and light homburg. He set up emergency headquarters in a garden house inside the square. A wall three feet high surrounded the park. Whalen did not interfere with newspaper photographers and silent movie cameramen, but he forbade picture taking by photographers for the new talking pictures. Whalen later explained: “I saw no reason for perpetuating treasonable utterances, and I don't mean to engage in censorship. But why glorify these people?”

Ever more overcoated men and women thronged into Union Square. By noon, according to Whalen, more than 100,000 people had congregated in and around the square. New York
Times
reporters estimated the size of the crowd at 35,000. Five speakers' platforms had been erected in the center of the park, and diehard Communists clustered around them. These party members carried placards declaring that they wanted no charity, protesting evictions of the jobless, and insisting that public buildings be used to house the unemployed.

Congestion became so great at subway entrances near the square that Whalen arranged for all subway trains on the line to skip the stations between Brooklyn Bridge and Grand Central. Just before the rally started, he ordered Foster, Minor, and Amter brought to
his temporary office. Accompanying the three Red leaders were a Negro sailor and a white soldier. The five men announced that they constituted a committee of workers, soldiers, and sailors. Trying to control his Irish temper, Whalen said that although their meeting was illegal (since they had failed to get a permit), he would let it go on, provided that it ended promptly at 1
P.M
. Again the Communist leaders stamped out.

As they dived back into the massed throng in the square, a Soviet flag was run up on a flagpole over the Stars and Stripes. Police told the Communists to reverse the sequence, declaring that no one would be allowed to speak until Old Glory fluttered over the Soviet banner. The flags were reversed. Then five Communist orators climbed onto the portable stands and began haranguing the multitude about “Whalen's cossacks” and their “brutality.”

All of Manhattan's daily newspapers had censured the police for the way they had handled an earlier demonstration in City Hall Park. Now Whalen stood on the porch of the garden house in Union Square and heard himself denounced again and again. One speaker urged that when the rally broke up, everyone should march once more to City Hall to demand that Mayor Walker remove Whalen as police commissioner.

Whalen wasn't concerned about his job, but this was a turn of events he hadn't anticipated. Now he called for reinforcements to prevent a march on the seat of city government. Soon more than 300 patrolmen, detectives, mounted cops, and motorcycle policemen were gathered in and around Union Square. Also summoned to the scene were firemen under orders to turn fire hoses on demonstrators if they got out of hand.

The time was now 12:50
P.M.
The temperature stood at 50 degrees. With everything in readiness, Whalen told police officers to bring the five Red leaders back to his temporary headquarters. The commissioner then told the quintet to break up the rally in exactly 10 minutes. They reviled Whalen. He offered to send Foster and a Communist committee to City Hall in his own car to present Mayor Walker with whatever grievance or petition they wished. The Communists spurned the compromise.

Foster and his cohorts turned their backs on Whalen and again plunged into the crowd. Foster jumped onto a stand and exhorted the tens of thousands to march down Broadway to City Hall. Then
he and his lieutenants faded from the scene, found a taxicab, and drove to City Hall to await the throng.

Two thousand disciplined Communists moved west out of Union Square and turned south on Broadway. A squad of mounted police advanced, maneuvering their horses in an attempt to disperse the marchers. A police emergency truck drove into Broadway and stopped in the middle of the street to serve as a barrier. Hundreds of cops and detectives, swinging nightsticks and blackjacks and bare fists, now rushed into the marching columns, flailing about on all sides and chasing many Communists into side streets.

Some marchers fought back. According to the
Times
: “This only served to spur the police, whose attack carried behind it the force of an avalanche.” A
World
reporter saw a patrolman hold one girl while another cop crashed his blackjack into her face three times. Francis Rufus Bellamy, editor of the sedate magazine
Outlook
, watched from an office window as a dozen plainclothesmen and uniform cops beat and kicked two unarmed men until they nearly fainted. Women screamed. Men shouted. Blood began to trickle down faces. Soon a score of men sprawled on the ground.

After fifteen minutes of spectacular fighting the riot was over. Later that afternoon the five Communist leaders were arrested outside City Hall. The soldier and sailor were freed; but Foster, Minor, and Amter were arraigned upon Whalen's testimony, convicted of inciting to riot, and sentenced to three years in jail.

By provoking the police, all too eager to crack skulls, the Communists had incited the riot they sought. It was the worst disorder New York had seen in many years. More than a score of people, including 4 policemen, had been severely injured, and 100 others had suffered assorted cuts and bruises.

Although Red leaders blamed Whalen, an undiplomatic statement was issued by Herbert Benjamin, secretary of the local Communist party. Benjamin called the riot “a great success.” He described the demonstrations in Union Square and elsewhere in the world as the prelude to the “overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a revolutionary workers' and farmers' government.”