The Preparedness Debate and Bombing
“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco,” Mark Twain once reportedly quipped about the Bay City. July 1916, though, surely seemed different. In recent days, during the summer, the weather turned fair and pleasant, and local weather forecaster T.R. Reed happily reported only a light west wind for July 22.
A great deal of excitement surrounded San Francisco. A far cry from the devastation of the famous 1906 earthquake a decade earlier, the revitalized city had just hosted a world’s fair. Republican presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes visited the city that Friday, July 21, and promised party loyalists he would win in California by an “overwhelming majority.” Just that weekend, the Alaska Steamship Line announced new service from San Francisco to New York, utilizing the new and revolutionary Panama Canal. As early as 1914, a quick glance would have seemed to indicate that a wartime economic boom had helped the city and its workers. The city, which had experienced labor ferment, seemed at peace, while the world was at war.1
San Francisco buzzed, in no small part, because the city hosted the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition. Taking place out of the revitalization after the earthquake and triumph in the Spanish-American War and the recently completed Panama Canal, it was a moment of national and imperial celebration. Across 635 acres of grounds, on repurposed and previously marshy land, it offered a chance to display a national bravado. Chosen, in part, due to the endorsement of President Taft, who said, “San Francisco is the city that knows how,” organizers broke ground in 1911. It also offered a chance to claim the spotlight from Los Angeles, a rising city with a less volatile labor climate. After all, in his profile of America during the 1912–1917 era, historian Henry May dubbed San Francisco of lower culture than its neighbors in Southern California, who “looked askance at corrupt, Bohemian San Francisco.”2
The fair opened on February 20, 1915, and would welcome 19 million visitors during its 10 months. Included in the $.50 admission (half price for children) was a Heinz condiment tower, a working model of the Panama Canal, and a living “Pueblo Village” with Zuni and Hopi families. The Tower of Jewels stretched as high as a 43-story building. Audrey Munson, considered America’s first “supermodel” (and first movie star to appear nude on film that same year, in Inspiration), inspired three-fourths of the statues inside the Jewel City built at the fair. Before the exposition closed in December, the fair welcomed many famous attendees, including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Buffalo Bill Cody, Theodore Roosevelt, Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, Helen Keller, and more.3
San Francisco, according to historian Richard Frost, had always been “cosmopolitan” with “relatively tolerant traditions.” It was, according to him, “less susceptible to hysteria” than other cities. Yet, there certainly was a festering radical climate. After all, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman had settled in California by the 1910s, as part of a wider cross section of anarchists, socialists, and labor organizers in the city. When a friend rented a place for Goldman and kindly volunteered that the new tenant was an anarchist, the landlady replied, “Well, as long as she does not practice it in the apartment, it’s all right.” And “practice” she did, though sometimes Goldman took to causes outside of anarchism in the city. According to one paper, she “threw a few bombs” at a meeting of the Pacific Coast Federation for Social Hygiene in San Francisco, declaring that prostitution was “the direct result” of poverty.4
Berkman had moved to California, too, not only because of his fondness for the natural charms but also with the hopes of helping the defense of Matthew Schmidt and David Caplan, implicated in the 1910 LA Times bombing. He spent time in Los Angeles, working on their defense, before moving north. He wasted no time attending to his causes, often agitating against the idea of compulsory military service. He also founded a “Current Events Club” in February 1916. Announcing “no lectures,” the club, with Berkman presiding, met Fridays at Averill Hall on Market Street and offered “discussion of the important events of the week in the political, industrial, social, educational, and literary life.”5
As the two most recognizable anarchists in town and with such outward activism, Berkman and Goldman, as Jewish immigrant radicals, were long the scourge of conservatives and the press. Playing on stereotypes, some newspapers were quick to paint the pair as interested only in their own financial security. For the New York Sun, Berkman was a “jack-in-the box … who bobs up in every kind of radical movement that promises financial returns,” and Goldman was described as “shrewd … who for many years has made anarchy a well-paying profession.” The article further spoke of their “money grabbing proclivities.” In 1916, Emma Goldman chaired a large gathering of what the New York Times dubbed “socialists, anarchists, and other ‘ists.’” Words used to describe the meeting included “tumult, contentious, belligerent, and more.” The gathering, attended by “eighty organizations, representing every radical party,” featured two hours of speakers “in five different languages.” The paper, which clearly imitated anti-immigrant feelings, took special care to point out that some of the speakers, such as Bernard Seneken, “talked in Yiddish” as they spoke about and critiqued the war.6
Berkman always dreamed of his own radical journal, ever since assuming the editor’s chair of Mother Earth in 1907. He “longed for something of his own making, something that would express his own self,” Goldman recalled. By the winter of 1915, at the urging of his friend and San Franciscan Eric Morton, he acted and founded The Blast in San Francisco. So enthusiastic about the project, Berkman even created a masthead, which he shared with friends, well before funding or an official launch. Berkman published 29 issues from January 1916 until June 1917 for 5 cents an issue or $1 for a year’s subscription. The paper remained a key forum for antiwar anarchist and leftist positions. In its pages, The Blast centered on a number of themes outside explicit anarchism, such as women’s rights and broader international revolutionary activity. Another common leftist refrain that appeared was an attempt to shift from pronouncements of radicalism and idle talk to tangible activism. “You know it is not enough to curse the capitalist … That may be good to relieve your feelings. But it does not get you anywhere,” it urged. Berkman and The Blast quickly enjoyed the support of anarchists far and wide, and radicals in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and Los Angeles raised funds to support the paper.7
In addition to Goldman’s persistent presence, Berkman surrounded himself with like-minded radicals in San Francisco. Mary Ellen Fitzgerald, known as “Fitzi,” lived with Berkman at 569 Dolores Street in the city’s Mission District and served as managing editor of The Blast. Carl Newlander, a young Swedish anarchist, served as an assistant for The Blast. Eric Morton worked as its Associate Editor. Finally, Robert Minor came to San Francisco, at Berkman’s urging, to work on The Blast. Minor brought with him experience as a well-known contributing author and cartoonist for organs like the International Socialist Review, though he had also worked for papers with far less radical reputations like the St. Louis Dispatch and The San Antonio Gazette. The staff, calling themselves “Blasters,” also ran a small bookshop out of the Dolores Street home. The Blast advertised a number of leftist pamphlets and books for sale, such as Theodore Schroeder’s “Free Speech for Radicals,” copies of Mother Earth, “Speeches of the Chicago Anarchists,” and Berkman’s own “Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist.”8
On the eve of San Francisco’s famed parade, another anarchist attack had already made national headlines. On February 10, 1916, over 300 guests filed into Michigan Avenue’s University Club, in the heart of downtown Chicago. They were there to celebrate George William Mundelein, who, fresh from service in Brooklyn, had just been named the city’s third Archbishop. A carefully orchestrated arrival and installation in the city included several welcome receptions. Current and former governors, mayors, and other local dignitaries were in attendance for the University Club event. Inside, they dined on oysters, caviar, fish, soup, and wine.
Yet, the unsuspecting guests did not know that the assistant chef, Jean Crones, employed at the Club since September, ominously worked in the kitchen. During the dinner a number of guests fell ill with serious stomach pain. The first victim, Henry E. Legler, the librarian for the Chicago police library, fainted just after the conclusion of the soup service. A chain reaction followed, and according to accounts, as countless guests turned pale, the scene in the rooms and corridors and rooms of the University Club “resembled hospital wards.” One of the guests, Dr. John Murphy, attended to the sick in the next room’s impromptu hospital, administering a mixture of mustard and lukewarm water as an emetic. A number of other doctors on the scene included Dr. Howard Adler, Dr. Alanson Weeks, Dr. George Chesney, and Dr. W.C. Eidenmuller, Jr.9
The city breathed a sigh of relief when its citizens heard there were no fatalities and all of the poisoned guests recovered over the next few days. Mundelein gave a rousing speech just days after the attack at the Auditorium Theater, closely guarded by 150 police to “guard against cranks.” He emphasized the Church’s capacity to fight terror.10
On the scene were investigators Hinton C. Clabaugh, the FBI division chief, and Sergeant Mike Mills, a former member of Petrograd’s imperial police with “much experience” with anarchists. The authorities scrambled to look into the bizarre incident. Science—increasingly employed for investigations during the time—stepped in. Dr. John Robertson, head of Chicago’s Health Bureau, and others studied soup samples and the chemical tests determined “unmistakable” traces of arsenic in the soup stock. As the event had over 100 extra guests, it was surmised, the soup may have been diluted enough not to prove deadly.11
While explosives were an obvious choice for anarchist acts, arsenic was an increasingly common tool for a subtler murder. On August 30th, 1895, Evelina Bliss was the heir to a notable New York family fortune built on generations of land acquisition in the state, was poisoned. That fateful summer day, Bliss had a bowl of clam chowder delivered to her by a pair of ten-year-olds: granddaughter Gracie and Gracie’s friend Florence King. Evelina’s daughter, Mary Alice Fleming, staying six blocks away at the Colonial Hotel, sent daughter Gracie and her friend to deliver the left over chowder. Evelina suffered much of the day and eventually died that evening. The attending physician, Dr. William Bullman, noticed a residue in the soup bowl and suspected foul play. Authorities arrested Mary Alice and it began a high profile trial. Reports quickly confirmed Dr. Bullman’s suspicions: that some kind of contaminant, probably arsenic, may have caused gastritis and was the culprit in Evelina’s death. The famed chemist Dr. Walter T. Scheele emerged as one of the key witnesses for their case. Arsenic, he claimed, was at levels well beyond the lethal amount, which reinforced the testimony of Dr. Bullman, who confirmed the culprit as an “irritant poison.” Another chemist testifying for the prosecution, Columbia’s Dr. Henry Mott, concluded that the contents of Evelina’s stomach contained three times the fatal amount of arsenic. So Crones did not take an unprecedented approach for his deed in Chicago.1
As it turned out later, Crones was believed to really be Nestor Dondoglio, a notoriously anticlerical anarchist. Details of his background were fuzzy, but he had been born in Cologne, Germany, to Belgian parents, and he had become a disciple of none other than Luigi Galleani. Crones disappeared the night of the poisoning around 11:20 pm, and around 400 men were part of the search. At his home on Prairie Avenue, Crones had a room filled with bottles of poison, various chemical experiments, bomb-making materials, and anarchist and Industrial Workers of the World literature. The Wobblies denied any association with him.12
The news out of Chicago began a national manhunt for Crones. Cleveland and St. Louis, both cities where he had lived and worked, were of particular interest, yet investigators there remained puzzled. Crones even sent taunting letters, one allegedly from New York, telling police “you’re really not clever at all … no one can catch me.” Convinced that the world would be better without Church influence, Crones proudly wrote in his letters that “a good clean up” at the banquet was needed. Police even used Pathe News, visiting manager H. C. Holah of their Chicago branch film office to review clips of gatherings attended to document Crones’ appearances. Despite their dutiful pursuit, police never caught Crones.13
“Hatched in Chicago,” as some papers put it, this was presumed, unsurprisingly, to be part of a much wider conspiracy. Clabaugh and the FBI needed no convincing of this. According to Chicago’s Day Book, Gaetano Bresci, the anarchist responsible for killing Italy’s King Humbert in 1901, was a “pal” of Crones. In Chicago, the First Deputy Superintendent of Police Herman Schuettler refused to admit Crones acted alone and was described to be “hot on the trail” of a “wholesale plot” conceived by anarchists in his city. Of particular interest, there was John Allegrini, held under a $25,000 bond, who claimed that he and Crones went to hear Emma Goldman speak together and that Crones did not seem dangerous. Chicago police also closely watched, according to reports, “50 Reds” throughout Chicago and raided half a dozen homes, seeking to uncover a larger conspiracy, they believed, to attack countless buildings of note in Chicago and elsewhere. In the pages of The Blast, Alexander Berkman claimed not to know Crones or if he was even an anarchist. Yet, as he pointed out, “it is always apropos to start a man-hunt against anarchists.” He concluded by praising the deed and reminding readers that, without knowing Crones’ affiliations or intentions, “tyranny breeds tryannicide.”14
Tensions only heightened when a couple of weeks later, at a gathering of Methodist ministers in San Francisco, a similar scene unfolded. More than 40 ministers and their wives fell ill at a President’s Day banquet at the Howard Street Methodist Church. Once again, no fatalities occurred, but authorities in San Francisco, like the Chicago events, suspected foul play, this time with the ice cream served.15
San Francisco underwent more labor tension during 1916. In April, unionized sailors, marine firemen, cooks, and stewards demanded a $5 per month wage increase. As a condition of a wartime economic boom, the demand was met, resulting in the first victory for offshore workers since 1906. While labor peace and negotiation seemed to prevail early on during the war, the city’s tensions between capital and labor remained strained as the summer of 1916 arrived. In two separate incidents, moreover, two Bay Area cops were killed eight months apart. The suspects were believed to be Russian anarchist immigrants, speaking to the tensions surrounding the assumed connections between immigrants and anarchism.16
That summer, the city’s Machinists Union led a strike, when their demand of a $4.50 wage increase fell on deaf ears. About 200 auto mechanics, disappointed by the lack of acquiescence from repair shops and car dealers to the ask, began the action on May 1. The biggest auto brokers felt the sting over the coming weeks, as work stoppages, picket lines, and even violent disruptions occurred against them. An important personality in the strike was none other than Warren Billings. Fresh out of jail after his 14-month stint in jail for his involvement in the PG&E strike, he again displayed his talent for infiltrating corporate structure and giving information back to union leaders. One of his key go-betweens was his (and Tom Mooney’s) friend Ed Nolan, a former member of the Wobblies and not one to shy from direct action.
On June 1, another, and larger, walkout happened. Approximately 10,000 longshoremen walked off the job along the west coast’s waterfronts, showing solidarity for around 4,000 that struck on San Francisco Bay. Workers asked for $.55 more per hour and an extra $1 for shifts longer than nine hours. Led by the International Longshoreman’s Pacific Coast District, the strike debilitated local shipping. It turned tragic with the shooting of an International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) member in Oakland on June 17, at the hands of a guard for strikebreakers. The next day, on June 18, a strikebreaker shot and killed a union man in San Francisco.17
On Monday, July 10, approximately 2,000 members of the business community gathered on the floor of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and organized the “Law and Order Committee.” Organized amid the longshoremen’s walkout, F.J. Koster made plain that those gathered had to rid the area of “that disease permeating this community, of which the waterfront situation is at present the most outstanding manifestation.” They claimed to have raised first $200,000, then $600,000, and finally $1 million.18
At first glance, the committee’s formal written mission—in the book they published titled Law and Order in San Francisco: A Beginning—seemed benign, if not altruistic. It hoped to improve the overall welfare of the community, “with serious-minded determination without hostility, and free from any class spirit.” Yet, Koster and his colleagues revealed their true intentions elsewhere, when they talked of the “industrial and political disease” that must be met with “intelligent and constructive leadership”; it was clear where the lines were drawn and who was who among the “diseased” and the “intelligent.” Their mission seemed obvious: to keep the open shop, discredit labor, and run ads supporting anti-labor candidates, for example a three-quarter page ad backing the D.A. Charles Fickert.19
Among labor circles, the tome was dubbed “the scab book.” Working people alleged that the book retold San Francisco’s labor past, “actuating the most vicious element of reactionary employers.” Business interests, they said, lied throughout the book, especially in their account of the Waterfront and Culinary Workers’ Strikes, where the deaths of two union picketers were curiously omitted. What was included, however, was a celebration-worthy pledge by Captain Robert Dollar of the Law and Order Committee to “break the strike by filling the hospitals with union men.” Nary a mention in the “history,” these labor critics claimed, were “the numerous crimes perpetrated by hired thugs of the Chamber of Commerce” in the city’s labor battles. Put simply, laborer representatives considered the book’s publication “a declaration of ruthless warfare upon the Labor Unions.”20
Certainly, labor wars continued to be a reality in San Francisco and the United States. In Europe, though, actual war raged. Since 1914, the Great War dominated headlines, as the continent witnessed horrific casualties. The United States had managed to maintain neutrality for two years. The death of 128 Americans aboard the British liner Lusitania, however, slowly shifted some American attitudes and U.S. involvement seemed like a more realistic possibility.
Despite the victory in the Spanish-American War, the conflict revealed that the United States had a comparatively small and ill-equipped army that needed reorganization. When the war erupted in Europe in 1914, the nation’s army remained underwhelming, ranking 19th (or worse, depending on the survey) in both size and competence among the world’s forces.21 The idea of preparedness, then, gained significant momentum during the 1910s, heeding the sentiment of individuals like ex-President Theodore Roosevelt that a large and ready military remained critical to international prowess.
Early on, Elihu Root, who served as the Secretary of War from 1899 to 1904 under Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, emerged as a leading advocate of preparedness and led the way in these early efforts to maintain a larger and better-trained military. Also at the center of the preparedness movement was former President Theodore Roosevelt, himself a proponent of a strong military and veteran of the Spanish-American War. T.R. famously, or infamously, “won” the battle of San Juan Hill in Cuba with his regiment of “Rough Riders,” though later accounts made clear that he had considerable help from African-American troops, a.k.a. the “Buffalo Soldiers” in the battle, who, according to some accounts, actually “saved the day” for T.R. Still, military record in tow, Roosevelt, as both a former President and soldier, carried considerable clout and after his time in the White House, he remained active in advocating for a strong military and a draft.22
According to historian John Barsness, the Rough Riders were actually in a supportive role for the black cavalry units like the 9th and 10th Cavalry, who led the charge. The 10th was “frequently credited with having ‘saved Teddy’s bacon’ at the battle of Las Guasimas.” It was reported that the 10th “saved the day on San Juan Hill, at a time when the rough riders under Roosevelt were about to be chopped to pieces …. The rough riders got the glory; the regulars of the Tenth the danger and the brunt of the battle.” According to historian John Barsness, the Rough Riders were actually in a supportive role for the black cavalry units like the 9th and 10th Cavalry, who led the charge. The 10th was “frequently credited with having ‘saved Teddy’s bacon’ at the battle of Las Guasimas.” It was reported that the 10th “saved the day on San Juan Hill, at a time when the rough riders under Roosevelt were about to be chopped to pieces …. The rough riders got the glory; the regulars of the Tenth the danger and the brunt of the battle.”
Another architect of the idea of preparedness was General Leonard Wood. A Medal of Honor winner for his service against Geronimo, his military record also included co- commanding the “Rough Riders” with Roosevelt. A persuasive and intelligent person (he was also a Harvard-trained physician), Wood emerged as one of President Wilson’s closest military advisors. He advocated military reform and universal male suffrage. His most lasting legacy, though, was as the “prophet of preparedness,” and he advocated it in speeches and writings like his 1916 book Our Military History: Its Facts and Fallacies, where he said the nation needed to “appreciate the defects of our military organization” or the result would be “unnecessarily costly.” As early as the Taft Administration, Wood partnered with Secretary of War Henry Stimson to advance the idea that the army was too small and ill-equipped to defend the nation. They pointed it out that the country only had about 100,000 soldiers and those troops were strewn across the globe.23
Wood, Roosevelt, and Elihu Root, Jr. were particularly miffed by what they perceived as an inadequate response from President Wilson in the wake of the Lusitania sinking in 1915. They gathered many Ivy League and other well-off young businessmen and professionals in New York for a new and distinctive civilian training camp. In the summer of 1915, they found a site to begin training approximately 1,300 for military life in Plattsburg, New York, beginning what became known as the “Plattsburg movement.” Similar camps sprung up elsewhere, and about 16,000 participated by the next fall.
The 1912 Presidential campaign had not highlighted military issues and neither the new President Wilson nor the Democrat-controlled Congress were overly interested in preparedness initiatives. Yet, a series of events, such as the 1913 Mexican insurgency and the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, began creating new unease and further discussion of military readiness. During the middle of 1916, an alarmingly unimpressive military campaign, ordered by Wilson to protect U.S. citizens from raids by Pancho Villa, showed the inadequacy of National Guard units.24 Powerful voices like Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts and Admiral Fiske now joined the preparedness chorus. Leading the way, again, was Theodore Roosevelt, who, in the summer of 1915, gave a talk that was “vigorous in tone on military preparedness.” Even Woodrow Wilson swayed to this attitude. Isolationism was a long-standing, valued American tradition, and while European war in 1914 hardly meant automatic U.S. involvement, the preparedness movement swelled. Indeed, the war in Europe seemed to signal an uncharacteristic departure from a long isolationist mindset for the United States. By early 1916, though, Wilson seemed to arrive at a preparedness position, saying that the United States needed a revamped presence on the high seas, in his words, “incomparably the greatest navy in the world.” He meant business; later that year, in August 1916, Congress earmarked the money for three new—and expensive—battleships.25
A key component of preparedness, and a simultaneous sticking point for leftists, was the idea of conscription. Wood and others, who even cited Ralph Waldo Emerson’s assertion that “Our culture must, therefore, not omit the arming of men” maintained the need of a draft. Wood and others, in line with the Progressive ideas of societal reform of the time, also thought “military discipline would develop citizens morally, physically, and politically.” Indeed, supporters said that military service and conscription would bring swift Americanization and even “yank the hyphen out of America,” according to one supporter, and bring societal advantages. The Chicago Tribune went as far as to say how service would “reduce the criminal rate, produce a higher type of manhood, and level class distinction.” The road to war for the United States and the path to U.S. intervention was a rocky one, sometimes with serious consequences for civil liberties.26
Yet preparedness seemed to take hold legislatively and culturally. The 1916 National Defense Act and organizations like the Navy League and the National Security League institutionalized military and national readiness. Local branches of the Chamber of Commerce also supported preparedness in many communities. In the pages of the Los Angeles Herald, E. D. Horkheimer, secretary and treasurer of the Balboa Amusement Producing Company, announced, “Preparedness is in the air.” He had just returned from the east coast and could not believe the momentum preparedness seemed to be gaining, particularly after being in New York during its preparedness parade. A witness to the McKinley funeral, the declaration of war against Spain, and world’s fairs, he believed “nothing to date in our country has caused the people to rally like these preparedness demonstrations.” To him, they showed the American people were “awake” and the movement stood for “protection … not … militarism.” Preparedness parades sprung up across the nation. In May 1916, 135,000 marched down Fifth Avenue in New York City as part of a 12-hour demonstration of preparedness. In Chicago the next month, on June 3, 130,000 took to the streets.27
This swelling movement became a national reality, much to the chagrin of many on the political left. For them, “preparedness” represented something much different than patriotism—it displayed militarism run amok. The march to war, they claimed, had come far too quickly, and in the end, war would mean the working class in the trenches. A broad coalition of reform voices from labor, women’s groups, and religious groups viewed preparedness with mistrust, sensing that the idea represented a menacing and overreaching government.
Randolph Bourne, one of the country’s most prominent young progressive intellectuals, busily outlined his antiwar positions in the pages of the New Republic and elsewhere. Bourne had been involved in the Intercollegiate Socialist Society and attended the mass meeting at Madison Square Garden. While many of his essays had to be published posthumously (he died of flu, as did many Americans during 1918), he offered a strong intellectual critique of the war. None of his phrases voiced stronger concern than the statement “war is the health of the state.”28
During 1916, the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM) also mobilized against preparedness. Speakers and pamphlets addressed the nation and warned against militarism. AUAM members even had an audience with Wilson in May 1916, though they left disappointed. The WWI debate raised issues surrounding conscription, the meaning of “loyalty,” and the later ability of government to restrict speech.29
Wartime dissent certainly came to San Francisco, as Berkman’s Blast ran a flurry of editorials lambasting the thought of American involvement or conscription. The Blast cautioned against the drumbeat of “preparedness” and what it would mean for the working class in the city. The paper instead appealed to workers and what it called “Labor Preparedness”—“to prepare the workers against their real and only enemy: the capitalist vampire.” So, for its editors, and Berkman, preparedness was flipped to mean a prolabor exercise and to rally against militarism and eventually take charge of industries. That was the “right” kind of preparedness, he argued.
Conscription remained a frequent topic in The Blast’s pages, too, exemplified by its celebration of recent action by the Butchers’ Union of San Francisco condemning enlistment of union men in the militia. Berkman even began a group along with Goldman called the No Conscription League to fight the draft idea. At the time of the “selective draft law” and its passage, Goldman predicted an uprising. According to the Sun, she appeared at many meetings “where she did much talking … Berkman was her ever present satellite.” The paper skeptically claimed that donations to the No Conscription League were used to pay bills, cover lodging for Berkman and others, and even summer rentals.
Berkman urged those eligible for conscription not to register with the government in an issue of The Blast:
The war shouters and their prostitute press, bent on snaring you into the army, tell you that registration has nothing to do with conscription. They lie. Without registration, conscription is impossible … to register is to acknowledge the right of the Government to conscript.
New York’s Sun reprinted his pleas and observed that the comments “may interest the government.”30
Indeed, the government was very interested in just this kind of leftist and “disloyal” speech. The Labor World cited seven attacks in 90 days on the “liberty of the working class press” during early 1916. Authorities arrested Margaret Sanger for “misuse of the mails,” and the arrests of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Emma Goldman quickly followed. The government crackdown included suppression of three papers: Revolt, The Alarm, and a spring 1916 issue of Berkman’s Blast. For Berkman, this marked “an era of commercial imperialism backed by the bayonets of ‘preparedness.’” The Blast could never boast a large circulation, but authorities certainly kept a watchful eye on the paper. After only three months, the U.S. Post Office halted its authorization for second-class mailing status.31
Across the country, and especially in California, as colleges and universities became de facto housing for the imminently conscripted, many young men waited for their number to be called. Part of this government plan was the expectation that a “War Issues Course” would be offered at institutions of higher learning. Without a proscribed curriculum, many professors took it upon themselves to emphasize the importance of the war effort. At nearby Stanford University, noted Civil War historian and head of the history department Ephraim Adams devised his “indirect treason” theory, where he concluded that through their varied resistance, “Socialists, the Land Tax reformers, and Pacifists” stand guilty of disloyalty. Adams, never shy about his support of the war, also published articles on its behalf. In a piece titled, “Why We Are at War with Germany,” Adams contended that “the German military autocracy” was “afraid of the spread of democracy” and determined to “conquer the world.”32
Preparedness and patriotism came to San Francisco, too, and the city’s inhabitants busily prepared for its own preparedness parade, which was being dubbed a “patriot’s pageant.” There was a Preparedness Day committee that planned the event, and they did their work in an office on the north side of Market Street. The San Francisco Chronicle published the planned July 22, 1916, parade route that was to run from the Ferry Building up Market Street before turning to the west toward Van Ness. Those planning to attend bought flags and buttons, items readily available in city shops along Market Street.33
It was a scene that had already played out in dozens of American cities. Thousands marched that summer at Seattle’s 1916 Preparedness Day Parade, for example. On June 14, 1916, President Wilson headed Washington D.C.’s Preparedness Parade in front of an estimated 60,000 men, women, and children. Papers billed it “the most remarkable patriotic spectacle the capital has ever seen.” By his order, all federal offices closed for the day, allowing a wide array of individuals to join the march, including Cabinet officials, members of Congress, scientists, suffragists, boy scouts, and more. At the front sauntered Wilson, confidently marching with his head erect, shoulders back, and donning a straw hat. The President even carried an American flag over his shoulder. He smiled broadly and often raised his hat to the cheers from the crowd before stopping and reviewing the rest of the parade from a grandstand. At one point, handlers released several hundred carrier pigeons into the air in front of the President—“to take the message of preparedness all over the capital.” In February, Wilson had asked the crowd of 18,000 at Convention Hall in Kansas City to join him in a singing of “America.”34
The increasingly common patriotic parades also became a target of war objectors. Advocates of preparedness parades, for The Blast, were “shrewd psychologists,” well aware of the influence held by a marching mass. “Size, large bulk, great numbers are imposing, convincing arguments to the average individual,” wrote The Blast. In the same way that Randolph Bourne issued warnings against the swift patriotic march to war, The Blast, too, pointed to the “mob psychology” afoot. The journal The Advocate of Peace echoed this critique in its pages the very month of the San Francisco parade. Parade attendees, it argued, endorsed militarism by default and with little real sense of war’s human and financial cost (the magazine cited, for example, a $240 million naval bill alone). Patriotism, its editors stated, during these kinds of marches was as “artificial as it is ineffective.”35
As a similar spectacle in San Francisco was imminent for July 22, objections to this new brand of hyper-patriotism and heightened militarism increasingly appeared in the city. On July 20, the city’s leftists held a meeting of approximately 4,000 unionists and war critics at the Fillmore’s Dreamland Rink. The very night of San Francisco’s parade on July 22, Emma Goldman prepared to deliver an antiwar address across town. For $.25, the interested could hear Goldman deliver a talk at Averill Hall on Fillmore Street titled: “Preparedness: The Road to Universal Slaughter.”36
More threatening than rallies and rhetoric, though, were outward threats. The city’s major newspapers all received ominous anonymous postcards that read:
Editors:
Our protests have been in vain in regard to this preparedness propaganda, so we are going to use a little direct action on the 22nd, which will echo around the earth and show that Frisco really knows how and that militarism cannot be forced on us and our children without a violent protest.
Things are going to happen to show that we will go to any extreme, the same as the controlling classes, to preserve what little democracy we still have. Don’t take this as a joke or you will be rudely awakened. Awaken! We have sworn to do our duty to the masses, and only send warnings to those who are wise but who are forced to march to hold their jobs, as we want to give only the hypocritical patriots who shout for war, but never go, a real taste of war. Kindly ask the Chamber of Commerce to march in a solid body, if they want to prove they are no cowards. A copy has been sent to all papers. Our duty has been done so far.
The determined Exiles from Militaristic government. Italy, Germany, United States, Russia.37
Police Commissioner James Woods received one of the warnings and a personalized note. Poisoned soup, the letter promised, would kill him for his role in organizing the parade. The St. Francis Hotel’s headwaiter, M. Lee, received a note begging him to do the deed, particularly saying how easy it would be, given his position.38
Still, these types of threats from disgruntled labor radicals and/or anarchists remained a rather common occurrence in American cities during this period and failed to halt the preparedness celebration or dampen spirits. Instead, thousands (anywhere between 25,000 and 50,000) gathered during the day on Saturday, July 22, determined to march in the parade and celebrate American readiness for war. Among the participants were 52 bands and 2,134 different groups. And the day began benignly enough, as all former members of the National Guard were invited to participate in a watermelon-eating contest prior to the parade’s official start.39
While San Francisco remained unquestionably a union town, labor participation was curiously absent in the day’s events. In response to the Chamber of Commerce and its fundraising on behalf of the open shop and fighting unionism, labor boycotted the event. While the parade could have had around 150,000 laborers in its ranks, instead only about 22,000 employers and nonunion workers participated. Organized labor considered this a victory. The parade did not include a single union.40
Organizers cleared the length of Market Street for the planned columns of marchers, dubbed a “human river” by the San Francisco Chronicle. Set to begin at the Embarcadero at 1:30 that afternoon, organizers expected the parade to take up to six hours. There would be a climactic moment, the parade’s arrangers hoped. When Grand Marshal Thornwell Mullally reached the viewing stand the parade would pause, ominously, at “the crash of a bomb.” At that instant sirens would ring out, all of the bands were to play the “Star Spangled Banner,” and whistles across the city would create a demonstrative din.
With the parade crawling westward, exultant participants filed up Market Street, the famed San Francisco boulevard. Billed as a “tremendous demonstration of San Francisco’s interest in preparedness for the Nation,” it was to be a patriotic affair, indeed, as representatives of First California Volunteers brought their tattered battle flag from the Philippines campaign of the Spanish-American War all the way from display cases in Sacramento to fly during the march. The “official” count of participants was 51,319.41
But shortly after 2 pm, just as the First California Infantry, a group of veterans of the Spanish-American War, filed past spectators standing in front of the Ferry Exchange Saloon, a bomb ripped through the crowd. The devastation was horrifying. The blast took the foot of one child completely off and body parts were said to have scattered at least 100 ft. A marcher carrying a “big” American flag saw the explosion throw it from his grip and drive it into his leg. “It looked as if the sidewalk went straight up in the air,” said Colonel Thomas Neill, the former Sheriff of San Francisco. “There was a loud noise,” he recalled, “lots of smoke and dust, and cries of the wounded and shouts.” The top of the sidewalk broke with such force that it looked “as though pounded by a hammer.” Other startling reports of the explosion’s power surfaced. One piece of the bomb settled two blocks away in the waiting room of the Northwestern Pacific Railroad. Bystanders even discovered a gold woman’s watch, presumably from a blast victim, in a fruit stand a block and a half away.42
The precise timing of the bomb was purportedly 2:06 pm. Some witnesses spotted a white vapor rising into the skies. Others said they saw a large cloud of black smoke. The precise timing of the bomb was purportedly 2:06 pm. Some witnesses spotted a white vapor rising into the skies. Others said they saw a large cloud of black smoke.
An immediate and understandable panic occurred in the seconds after the explosion, as the authorities scrambled to recover and one police officer was thrown from his horse. The bomb, it was discovered, was a 4-inch pipe stuffed with various “missiles”: steel rivets, sections of steel auto tire, and .22 and .33 caliber bullets. The pipe fragments and bullets that shot around caused the casualties that came quickly. The case that housed the bomb, which experts later discovered, partially destroyed on the sidewalk, was of the “cheap leatherette” variety. It had contained clock materials and metal pieces, and police discovered these remnants 400–500 ft. from the explosion.
The carnage, as the guilty party or parties intended, spread to bystanders near and wide. Still, many showed remarkable poise. A group of graying Civil War veterans—from the battlefields of Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Gettysburg—helped restore order after the blast. One aged commander called for “attention,” and the Civil War veterans marched stoically ahead. Also, approximately 100 nurses marching in the parade rushed to the aid of victims. Dr. Mora Moss, who marched with the Spanish-American War veterans, jumped into action to help the wounded. He later thought he had seen something cylindrical, seconds before the blast, fall from above, and he phoned police to tell them. He never heard back.43
The initial reports were 6 dead and 44 injured. The victims included Thomas H. Turnbull, the former manager of the Family Club. The bomb fractured his skull and responders sent him to Central Emergency Hospital, though there was little hope for him. Others killed included Adam A. Fox, a 78-year-old Civil War veteran, and O.H. Lambert, a printer from nearby Alameda. The blast also claimed the lives of others, like local lumber salesman George Lawler of Mill Valley and Dr. George Painter of Berkeley. Described in the press as one of the most “pathetic” results of the explosion was the fate of Oakland’s Mrs. Wymore. Eight died before August 1 and 10 perished in total.44
The next day, investigators exposed ominous signs of the destruction. The explosion tore a hole more than 1 ft. deep in the concrete sidewalk in front of the saloon. It also gashed a hole in a nearby wall and left ominous white powdery burn marks on the building. Macabre souvenir hunters collected handfuls of pistol shells, scattered by the blast, from the street. They also grabbed fragments of glass, marble, pipe, rocks, and nails. Also complicating things during the cleanup and in the immediate hours after the attack, was that police or workers washed the street, possibly destroying valuable evidence.45
Authorities immediately scrambled in search of those responsible. Residents were told to remain vigilant despite the rising climate of fear. The day after the attack, a Sunday, many “sermons were preached” to the city’s population about the tragedy, and the threat of anarchy within the city, which now demanded “the strictest sort of preparedness.”46
In the years immediately before and after U.S. entry into World War I in 1916, the city, with a long tradition of trade unionism, labor extremism, and anarchist agitation, stood at the center of western, and American, radicalism. As the events of July 22, 1916 sharply demonstrated, that confluence of radical forces could hold disastrous results. The press described it as a “dastardly act,” and the carnage certainly incited an immediate desire to place blame and seek retribution, with chilling effects.
1 James D. Livingston, Arsenic and Clam Chowder: Murder in Gilded Age New York (Albany: State University Press of New York, Albany, 2010), 101; Chicago Tribune, February 10, 2016; Chicago Examiner, February 14, 1916; Thomas Haley & William Berndt, eds. Toxicology (Washington: Harper and Row, 1987), 12.
1 San Francisco Chronicle, July 22, 1916; Sausalito News (Sausalito, CA), July 29, 1916; Robert Edward Lee Knight, Industrial Relations in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1900–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 290, 299; Earlier versions of this chapter appeared as part of Jeffrey A. Johnson, “Closed Shops and Open Anarchism: Labor, Radical San Francisco, and the Great War,” Journal of the West 53 (Winter 2014): 32–41.
2 Sarah J. Moore, Empire on Display, San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), 3–4, 9; Henry F. May The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of our Own Time, 1912–1917 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964), 89.
3 San Francisco Chronicle, February 14, 1915; Vanity Fair, April 13, 2016.
4 Fred Rosenbaum, Cosmopolitans: A Social and Cultural History of the Jews of San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 189; San Francisco Call, September 11, 1901; Sasha and Emma, 136, 252–253; Kathy Ferguson, Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 291, 93; Day Book (Chicago, IL), July 17, 1914; Paul Kahan, The Homestead Strike: Labor, Violence, and American Industry (New York: Routledge, 2014), 95.
5 Rosenbaum, Cosmopolitans, 189; Gene Fellner, ed. Life of an Anarchist: The Alexander Berkman Reader (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 115; The Blast, January 29, 1916.
6 New York Times, April 3, 1916.
7 The Sun (New York, NY), January 6, 1918; Berkman conceived The Blast as a weekly organ but it saw bi-weekly publication (on the first and 15th of the month) and more infrequently as the Red Scare blossomed; Barry Pateman, “Introduction,” in Berkman, Alexander, What Is Anarchism? (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003), 4; The Blast, February 12, 1916.
8 The Blast, July 15, 1916.
9 Auckland Star (New Zealand), April 8, 1916; New York Times, February 14, 1916; Appellant’s Opening Brief, The People of California vs. Warren K. Billings (February 1917), Labadie/Michigan Collections, 27.
10 Chicago Tribune, February 14, 1916.
11 Auckland Star, April 8, 1916.
12 New York Times, February 13, 1916.
13 Washington Herald, Feb. 21, 1916. The Bendigonian (Bendigo, Australia), April 20, 1916; Motography, April 22, 1916.
14 Auckland Star, April 1916; Day Book, Chicago, Feb. 14, 1916. The Breckenridge News (Cloverport, KY), February 16, 2016. New York Times, February 16, 1916; Dominic A. Pacyga, Chicago: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 195–196.
15 Los Angeles Herald, February 29, 1916; New York Times, February 29, 1916; The Blast, February 26, 1916.
16 Rosenbaum, Cosmopolitans, 189.
17 Knight, Industrial Relations, 300–303.
18 Haldeman-Julius, “The Amazing Frameup,” UCLA, 16.
19 Forward, San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. Law and Order in San Francisco: A Beginning (1916); Knight, Industrial Relations, 305.
20 Minor, “Shall Mooney Hang?” MICH, 10; “Fickert Ravished,” 9.
21 Robert H. Ziegler, America’s Great War: World War I and the American Experience. (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 37.
22 John A. Barsness, “Theodore Roosevelt as Cowboy: The Virginian as Jacksonian Man,” American Quarterly 21 (1969): 616; The Park County News, April 18, 1930; Great Falls Daily Tribune, August 6, 1909.
23 Leonard Wood, Our Military History: Its Facts and Fallacies (Chicago: The Reilly & Britton Co., 1916), 9–10; Nancy Gentile Ford, The Great War and America: Civil-Military Relations during World War I (New York: Praeger, 2008), 2–3.
24 Ziegler, America’s Great War, 35, 38.
25 Ford, The Great War, 5, 9, 10; Ziegler, America’s Great War, 37.
26 Ford, The Great War, 8–9; Ziegler, America’s Great War, 34; See also David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
27 Los Angeles Herald, June 12, 1916. Ziegler, America’s Great War, 34; See also: Norman Angell, The Dangers of Half-Preparedness: A Plea for a Declaration of American Policy (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916).
28 Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of our Own Time, 1912–1917 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964), 327.
29 Ziegler, America’s Great War, 36; San Francisco Chronicle, July 22, 1916; Bisbee Daily Review, July 23, 1916.
30 Assistant U.S. Attorney Harold A. Content, in an interview with The Sun, traced Berkman and Goldman’s past, as they awaited, under “heavy bail” to hear if they would serve the two-year prison sentence mandated by Judge Mayer. The Sun, January 6, 1918; The Sun, June 3, 1917; Avrich and Avrich, Sasha and Emma, 253.
31 Labor World (Duluth, MN), April 22, 1916; Rosenbaum, Cosmopolitans, 189.
32 Kennedy, Over Here, 57–58; Pullman Herald (Pullman, WA), April 26, 1918.
33 McNutt, “Petition for Pardon,” 61.
34 New York Times, June 15, 1916, February 3, 1916.
35 The Blast, March 15, 1916, June 1, 1916; The Advocate of Peace 78 (July 1916): 192–193.
36 Rosenbaum, Cosmopolitans, 184; San Francisco Chronicle, July 22, 1916; Bisbee Daily Review, July 23, 1916.
37 New York Times, July 23, 1916; Bisbee Daily Review, July 23, 1916.
38 Medford Mail Tribune (Medford, OR), July 24, 1916; New York Times, July 26, 1916.
39 Carl Nolte, “Centennial of 1916 SF Bombing that Led to Infamous Convictions,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 16, 2016.
40 “Fickert Has Ravished Justice,” n.d. 13.
41 The New York Times, July 23, 1916; San Francisco Chronicle, July 22, 1916.
42 Sausalito News, July 29, 1916; Bisbee Daily Review, July 23, 1916. Appellant’s Opening Brief, The People of California vs. Warren K. Billings (February 1917), Labadie/Michigan Collections. 21, 26.
43 Appellant’s Opening Brief, The People of California vs. Warren K. Billings (February 1917), Labadie/Michigan Collections. 24–5; Cockran, “A Heinous Plot”; New York Times, July 23, 1916; Sausalito News, July 29, 1916; Evening Herald (Klamath Falls, OR), July 24, 1916.
44 Medford Mail Tribune (Medford, OR), July 24, 1916; Evening Herald, July 24, 1916; New York Times, July 24, 1916; Bisbee Daily Review, July 23, 1916; Ontario Argus (Ontario, OR), July 27, 1916; Tacoma Times (Tacoma, WA), July 25, 1916; Maxwell McNutt, “Petition for Pardon for Thomas Mooney. Before the Governor of California.” April 8, 1918, MICH, 2.
45 San Francisco Call-Bulletin, January 8, 1932.
46 Medford Mail Tribune, July 24, 1916; Tacoma Times, July 25, 1916; Bisbee Daily Review, July 23, 1916; New York Times, July 24, 1916; Sausalito News, July 29, 1916.