For me, the anarchists came first. I was surprised to discover that three young radicals had been killed in New York City in 1914 when a bomb they were constructing had prematurely detonated inside their apartment. The accident had come in the midst of a national crisis over unemployment and labor rights; contemporaries believed that the dynamite—if it had served its handlers’ intended purpose—would have been used to assassinate John D. Rockefeller.
No one I talked to had ever heard of the incident, which had occurred on Lexington Avenue, in East Harlem. This was not far from where I lived, and so it was easy to go and see the building where the blast had struck. The façade had been rebuilt, but a vicious scar still marked the line of devastation where the bricks had come cascading down, along with glass, pieces of furniture, and bits of flesh. Each day, for decades, hundreds of people had walked past the site. Many must have noticed the evidence of damage, but few—if any—could recall its origins or significance. It had taken less than a century for this history to be lost.
At the time, the Lexington Avenue explosion had been the largest dynamite disaster in the city’s history. But others would follow. In 1970, a similar accident cost the lives of three young members of the Weather Underground. Their device had been meant for an officer’s dance at Fort Dix, in New Jersey, and when its sudden power tore up from the basement, the force destroyed an entire townhouse on West 11th Street, in Greenwich Village.
Whatever differences of ideology and purpose separated the two sets of would-be bombers, I was struck by the similarities that linked them. Having written about the 1960s generation—my parents’ generation—I immediately recognized their kinship with the radicals of a half century earlier. These were demonstrations by the young and desperate against the old and entrenched. They were provocateurs. More than anything else, the extremists in these movements had been brought to the same pitch of anger by social injustice. Whether it was the Vietnam War or the daily horrors of industrial violence, both the anarchists and the Weathermen had been prepared to kill in response. And in these two instances—separated by ninety-two blocks and fifty-six years—it was they who died in the attempt.
Investigating the anarchists’ deaths unveiled a broader history that had itself largely been effaced by time. As it happened, they were not the only insurgents in New York in 1914. A new mayor had taken office that year, a reformer determined to implement the latest ideas in government, who had surrounded himself with a coterie of nonconformists and social scientists. In Washington, D.C., a sympathetic leader, Woodrow Wilson, had recently begun his presidency. These were the officials tasked with anarchy’s containment: not some corrupt political machine that could resort to violence without a qualm, but progressive administrations constrained by their own ideals of civil liberties and impartial justice.
And then there were the Rockefellers. The patriarch had retired but remained the richest man on earth. His son had quit the family business to focus on works of charity. He dedicated his energies to disbursing the money his father had earned, hopeful, perhaps, that if he could do enough good in spending his inheritance, then Americans might forget the ruthlessness that had acquired it in the first place.
Finally, there was New York City itself. Residents saw ball games and went to the movies, rode the subways and watched planes pass overhead. They were assailed by advertisements, and bustled by skyscrapers without caring to look up. They were jammed in the Times Square crush; they cursed the traffic on Broadway. It was, in fine, a modern city. And yet, that same year, a large proportion of tenement apartments lacked private toilets; hundreds died from typhoid, tuberculosis, and diarrhea. Tens of thousands of children labored in sweatshops and factories instead of attending school.
“We live in a revolutionary period,” Walter Lippmann, a young journalist, wrote in 1913, “and nothing is so important as to be aware of it.” Despite conflicting outlooks for what the nation should become, every political person understood the intensity of the moment. Drastic transformation would come—it was stirring already. On those New York streets, these three blocs—radicals, plutocrats, and progressives—each struggled to impart their own visions of the future onto society as a whole. The issues being contested—free speech, corporate power, industrial democracy—have remained at the storm center of American politics ever since.
In the opening years of the twentieth century, these partisans tested the possibilities and limits of what it would mean to be a modern citizen. Either violent protest would forcibly create a truly democratic society, or the combined restraints of reform, philanthropy, and scientific expertise would prove to be more powerful than dynamite.