KAISER WILHELM II, the last emperor of Germany, said long afterward, “The visit of Colonel House to Berlin and London in the spring of 1914 almost prevented the World War.” President Wilson had sent his man from Manhattan to Europe in the hope of bringing about an understanding between Germany and England, which were rasping one another raw. On June 1, 1914, Colonel House was given a private audience by the Kaiser at Potsdam. House later wrote:
I found that he had all the versatility of (Theodore) Roosevelt with something more of charm, something less of force. He has what to me is a disagreeable habit of bringing his face very close to one when he talks most earnestly. His English is clear and well chosen and, though he talks vehemently, yet he is too much the gentleman to monopolize the conversation. It was give-and-take all the way through.
The Colonel was left with the impression that the Kaiser did not want war. House felt that Wilhelm, by trying a bluff, had put himself in a situation from which he could not back down.
New Yorkers were surprised when they picked up the New York Times of June 28, 1914, and read this headline:
HEIR TO AUSTRIA’S THRONE IS SLAIN
WITH HIS WIFE BY A BOSNIAN YOUTH
TO AVENGE SEIZURE OF HIS COUNTRY
Psychologically unprepared for war, New York’s citizens tended to shrug off the assassination at Sarajevo. They thronged to movie houses to see the latest episode of The Perils of Pauline, a serial in which actress Pearl White was often left dangling from a cliff—in actuality, the New Jersey Palisades, where much of the action was filmed. Europe had had no general war for ninety-nine years, or ever since the end of the struggle against Napoleon in 1815, so it seemed unlikely that the continent could now be ravaged by a new war.
Regardless of wishful thinking, events in Europe developed quickly. Austria sent Serbia an ultimatum. Serbia gave in to most of Austria’s demands. European stock exchanges collapsed. Despite peace efforts, Austria declared war on Serbia. Herbert Hoover said in his memoirs: “It is a curious commentary on a civilization in process of being blown up that so well informed a newspaper as the New York Times from July 1st to July 22nd carried no alarming European news on the front page.” An Austrian force attacked Belgrade. Russia, France, and Germany mobilized. A British fleet sailed under sealed orders. Germany ordered Russia to end its mobilization. The balance of power had been upset, and chaos was replacing order.
On July 31 the New York Stock Exchange closed. Two days later Secretary of the Treasury William G. McAdoo hurried from Washington to New York at the urgent request of Wall Street bankers. Among other pressing problems, $77,000,000 worth of New York City’s bonds and notes were held in Europe. McAdoo and his wife were met at Pennsylvania Station by harried financiers. She later wrote: “I was startled by their white faces and trembling voices. Could these be America’s great men?”
German troops goose-stepped into Luxembourg and demanded free passage across Belgium. Great Britain demanded that Germany observe Belgian neutrality. Germany refused. England then declared war on Germany. So did France. Here in neutral America, here in the port of New York, ships of the warring nations were strung out from Ellis Island to Tottenville, so close that crew members could exchange scowls and hard words.
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.
When Malone gave the signal, 600 waiting customs agents seized the vessels. In the anemic light of dawn Malone, accompanied by a group of his men, boarded the Vaterland, one of the world’s largest passenger ships. At the top of the gangway he was met by Commodore Hans Ruser, who knew Malone. They bowed and exchanged wispy smiles. The German officer said sadly, “We are ready.” Down came the flag of Germany, and up went the flag of the United States on this and the other German vessels thus interned. It was the first act of war.
The Twenty-second United States Infantry had slept on its arms awaiting the call. Army tugs nosed against Governors Island, took aboard the soldiers, and then posted them on piers throughout the city. A total of 1,200 German sailors and 325 naval officers were arrested and sent to Ellis Island. A company of American soldiers marched through the Hudson tubes to Hoboken, where they seized piers of the North German Lloyd and Hamburg-American lines, placing part of the Hoboken waterfront under martial law. About 200 Germans were rounded up in saloons and boardinghouses of the Hoboken dock area and interned on Ellis Island. New York City Police Commissioner Woods had organized 12,000 of his policemen into what he called “a fighting force.” Now he threw guards around all bridges and filled 180 trucks with machine gunners and sharp-shooters ready to put down any attempted demonstration. After all, the city still held many German army reservists.
A sunken steel net was stretched across the Narrows to prevent U-boats from sneaking into the Upper Bay. At the outbreak of war the United States ranked only ninth among the nations of the world in total tonnage of oceangoing vessels. New York now became the principal port for movement of cargo and shipment of troops, a total of 1,656,000 doughboys sailing from here for France. Before long German submarines sowed mines around Sandy Hook in the path of outbound ships, so 16 tugs were outfitted as minesweepers. Working in pairs, they found and exploded floating mines, which might have taken hundreds of lives and sunk thousands of tons of shipping.
Intolerance swept New York like a plague. A statue symbolizing Germany was one of twelve figures decorating the sixth-floor façade of the Customhouse just south of Bowling Green. A sculptor was hired to chip the imperial eagle from the breastplate of this Valkyrie. A Brooklyn pastor cried that “German soldiers are sneaking, sniveling cowards!” Dachshunds, a breed of dog well liked by Germans, were kicked on the sidewalks of New York and renamed liberty pups. Sauerkraut became liberty cabbage. German measles were called liberty measles. German-language lessons were banned in city schools. The Bank of Germany at First Avenue and Seventy-fourth Street changed its name to the Bank of Europe.
Theodore Roosevelt demanded that the German-American press be muzzled. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt urged the translation of a book about German atrocities—most of which later were proved untrue. Telephone wiretapping, first used in New York in 1895, was resumed on a large scale in 1917. The federal government set up a huge switchboard in the Customhouse, tapped the lines of hundreds of aliens, kept relays of stenographers taking notes on private conversations, and nabbed many enemies.
However senseless and cruel some of these acts may seem in retrospect, there was a very real danger of subversion and sabotage. Colonel House wrote President Wilson: “Attempts will likely be made to blow up waterworks, electric light and gas plants, subways and bridges in cities like New York. . . . Police Commissioner Woods tells me he has definitely located a building in New York in which two shipments of arms have been stored by Germans.” Mark Sullivan said: “Five German spies, taking up points of strategy and acting simultaneously, could paralyze the city of New York.” Mysterious fires broke out along the Brooklyn waterfront, fire bombs were found in ships heading for Europe, and in the first 7 months of the war more than $18,000,000 worth of food supplies was burned in the United States by German sympathizers. It must be added in all fairness, though, that only a few aliens interfered with our war effort.
After Herbert Hoover was appointed the nation’s food administrator, the all-out effort to conserve food was called Hooverizing. New York’s vacant land and some small parks were turned into vegetable gardens. No meat was served on Tuesdays. The Hotel Association of New York City gave Hoover a plan that called for adulterating wheat bread with cheaper flour and holding rolls to one ounce or less. Oscar of the Waldorf prodded his chefs into inventing desserts to be made without eggs, butter, or white sugar, and a recipe for War Cake à la Waldorf was distributed throughout the country.
Employment rose, and office space became scarce as industrial contractors poured into the city. The largest armory in America was erected in the west Bronx. Ten two-story buildings were constructed on Wards Island to serve as a military hospital. More than seventy structures and a temporary railroad system were installed on Governors Island. Schoolchildren collected fruit pits and nutshells for use in making gas masks, besides gathering twenty-five tons of clothing for the children of Belgium and France. And Broadway became a rehearsal hall for the League of Nations.
Colonel House was intimate with many of the most powerful men on earth, but the man who attracted him most, next to Woodrow Wilson, was Sir Edward Grey. A high-minded statesman, sincere and experienced, Sir Edward was Great Britain’s Secretary for Foreign Affairs. He and House soon discovered that they thought alike. Sir Edward believed that war might have been averted if the nations of the world had been organized into some kind of permanent international conference. As early as 1915, in a letter to the colonel, Sir Edward had used the phrase “League of Nations.” In later letters and conferences with Sir Edward, House agreed that an association of nations was needed to preserve the future peace. Looking forward to the years after this unfortunate war, the colonel transmitted Sir Edward’s idea to Woodrow Wilson. On May 27, 1916, in a major address the President first announced his belief in the establishment of such a league, saying that “the nations of the world must in some way band themselves. . . . ” In the summer of 1917 the President suggested that Colonel House organize a group of experts to draft a constitution for a League of Nations.
Since these men would concern themselves with postwar problems, they were wary of letting the Germans hear about the project, lest they think that the United States was considering surrender. Work therefore went forward in absolute secrecy. The League was given the non-committal name of the Inquiry. Colonel House named his brother-in-law head of the organization; this was Dr. Sidney E. Mezes, president of the College of the City of New York. Walter Lippmann was made executive secretary of the Inquiry. A native New Yorker and an editor of the New Republic, Lippmann had gone to Washington to help Secretary of War Newton D. Baker handle labor problems connected with war production. Only twenty-seven years old, Lippmann was brilliant and capable.
The State Department played no part in this project. The Inquiry’s expenses were met by private funds available to President Wilson. Colonel House and his associates recruited a small staff of specialists from academic circles and held their first meetings in the New York Public Library. But because of the lack of space and the fear that they might attract attention there, the new group soon moved its headquarters. Among the recruits was Dr. Isaiah Bowman, director of the American Geographical Society, the nation’s oldest such organization. It occupied a building on Broadway between 155th and 156th streets, and this is where the Inquiry really buckled down to work.
The nearly 150 scholars brought into the group included geographers, territorial experts, specialists on colonial possessions, historians, ethnographers, cartographers, economists, political scientists, and the like. Reading, writing, conferring, checking references, and blowing dust off ancient atlases, these dedicated men avoided any major conflict with the State Department and managed to keep their work a secret from the press. In their collective wisdom they compiled a suggested outline for a permanent association of nations. This, they hoped, would guarantee the territorial integrity and political independence of its members, ban the manufacture of munitions by private enterprise, and otherwise enforce disarmament. Their original draft consisted of twenty-three articles, which House offered to President Wilson. The President approved all but five. Wilson dropped the proposed international court but retained the suggested secretariat and an assembly of delegates. Thus did the League of Nations first take shape on upper Broadway in New York City.
Colonel House became suspicious of another New Yorker who had won the President’s respect. This was Bernard M. Baruch, a handsome long-legged Wall Streeter, who camouflaged his lightning-quick mind behind an easygoing manner. He made a fortune in the stock market and bluntly identified himself as a speculator. But Baruch’s definition of a speculator was “one who thinks and plans for a future event—and acts before it occurs.” In 1912 he had met Wilson for the first time in New York’s Plaza Hotel. Like Colonel House’s, Baruch’s life was changed from that moment on. He said reverently, “I have met one of the great men of the world.” As war deepened, Baruch was often seen at the White House, reporters noting his air of self-assurance, his high stiff collar, and the costly stickpin in his tie.
Baruch believed that “if you understand raw materials, you understand the politics of the world.” Baruch knew raw materials. He understood the sources of supply, production, and prices. Wilson appointed him chairman of the War Industries Board, thus bestowing on him perhaps the greatest power ever held by any American except a President. Granted the authority to mobilize industry and man-power, Baruch was expected to convert the entire nation into one huge factory. Henry Ford, during his anti-Semitic period, called Baruch “the most powerful man in the world.” Colonel House distrusted Baruch because of his Wall Street background and put a spy on his trail. The secret agent found nothing suspicious in his behavior; indeed he came to like Baruch so much that he finally confessed that he had been hired to watch him.
To conserve coal, the federal government ordered all big cities to cut down on the use of electric signs. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels later wrote:
New York responded with such howls and denunciations as can hardly be described . . . in some respects New York is more set in its provincialism than any “hick” town in America. Smaller cities obeyed the order to do without the White Way at night because of the exigency of war. Not New York. It raised such a row that coal operators doubled their energies to furnish enough coal so that the White Way could again blaze brightly and let New York City turn night into day.
New York was anything but a hick town. In 1917, for the first time ever, it contained more motor vehicles than horses. That water-shed of a year the city had 114,717 cars of various kinds and only 108,743 horses. New York’s last 2-horse streetcar made its final trip down Broadway on July 26, 1917.
In the municipal election of 1917 Mayor Mitchel’s talent for making enemies caused him trouble. Standing for reelection, he lost the Republican primary and ran on the Fusion ticket alone. His Tammany Hall rival for mayor was John F. Hylan.
A ponderous man lacking wit, warmth, or wisdom, Hylan was called Red Mike because of his red hair and mustache. Although he was only a mediocre lawyer, he had served as a Kings County judge. Hearst backed Hylan for mayor because both favored municipal ownership and operation of rapid transit and because Hearst knew that he could control Hylan. The campaign was vicious. Mitchel and other Fusionists tried to smear Hylan as pro-German, but Hylan himself was almost forgotten in the attack on Hearst, the so-called spokesman of the Kaiser. Bumbling empty-headed Hylan won, however, and Woodrow Wilson murmured, “How is it possible for the greatest city in the world to place such a man in high office?” Once again Tammany Hall sat in the saddle.
The defeated Mitchel enlisted in the army and was commissioned a major in the air service. He suffered from excruciating headaches, which may have been caused by an Indian poison that had got into his system when he was traveling in the wilds of Peru. The attacks would leave him temporarily blind. “If I get a real bad headache while up in the clouds,” he told a friend, “it will be all over with me.” On July 6, 1918, Major John Purroy Mitchel fell 500 feet from his single-seater scout plane and was killed at Camp Gerstner, Lake Charles, Louisiana. An investigation proved that his safety belt had been unfastened.
As other gallant youths spilled their blood in strange places with unpronounceable names, a horror as great as war itself visited New York City. This was the flu epidemic.
Influenza is an Italian word meaning influence. An acute infectious disease, it was called influenza because it was first believed to be caused by the influence of some mysterious agency. This was before the discovery of the filterable virus. In September, 1918, the flu was brought to the eastern seaboard by sick people disembarking from transatlantic liners. Americans and others called it Spanish influenza, but there is no proof that it originated in Spain. At first the disease was the subject of feeble jokes, such as this: “I had a little bird named ‘Enza.’ I opened the window and in-flu-enza.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t regard the illness as a jest. On September 19 the handsome Assistant Secretary of the Navy landed in New York after a two-month tour of overseas naval bases and the front lines. Stricken with the flu, he was carried off the transport Leviathan and driven by ambulance to his mother’s home at 47 East Sixty-fifth Street.
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.