Ragtime (20 page)

35

Even to someone who had followed the case from its beginning, Coalhouse’s strategy of vengeance must have seemed the final proof of his insanity. By what other standard could the craven and miserable Willie Conklin, a bigot so ordinary as to be like all men, become Pierpont Morgan, the most important individual of his time? With eight people dead by Coalhouse’s hand, horses destroyed and buildings demolished, with a suburban town still reverberating in its terror, his arrogance knew no bounds. Or is injustice, once suffered, a mirror universe, with laws of logic and principles of reason the opposite of civilization’s.

We know from Brother’s journal that the actual plan had been to make Morgan a prisoner in his own home. The band’s thinking had been that Conklin hiding in an Irish neighborhood was as undetectable as Coalhouse was in Harlem, and that therefore he had to be flushed out. What was needed was a hostage. Two nights of discussion had turned up the candidacy of Pierpont Morgan. More than any mayor or governor he represented in Coalhouse’s mind the power of the white world. For years he had been portrayed in cartoons and caricatures, with his cigar and his top hat, as the incarnation of power. The great fiefdom of New York could be made to pay an army of fire chiefs and a fleet of Model T’s for the ransom of its Morgan.

But Coalhouse had entrusted the reconnaissance of the Morgan home to two of the youths who knew little about the city below 100th Street and less about the ways of the wealthy. When they reconnoitered the Morgan establishments, the one a brownstone town house, the other a palace of white marble stone, they chose the white marble for the residence. Younger Brother would have seen the error. But he was the ordnance man; he lay in the back of a covered van loaded with explosives and supplies. He could hear the attack under way. The wan was backed up to the Library gates and he was given the signal to unload. When he lifted the canvas flaps and looked out he screamed that it was the wrong building. But at that point there was no turning back. A guard lay dead, police whistles were heard. The sound of gunfire had alerted the entire neighborhood. The conspirators unloaded the van, bolted the great brass doors and took up their assigned positions. Then Coalhouse made a quick inspection of the premises. Nothing is lost, he assured them. We wanted the man and so we have him since we have his property.

As it happened Pierpont Morgan was not even in New York. He was two days to sea on the S.S.
Carmania
bound for Rome. He was making a slow pilgrimage to Egypt. Coalhouse had not known this either. So the entire action, misdirected and poorly timed, seemed to enjoy some special grace.

Almost immediately aides of the J. P. Morgan Company were informed of the situation. They cabled the
Carmania
to receive the old man’s instructions. For some reason, possibly a breakdown of telegraphy equipment aboard the ship, they could not learn if their message had been received. With Morgan not available to tell them what to do the police did nothing but cordon off the block, from 36th to 37th Street, from Madison Avenue to Park Avenue. Traffic was diverted and mounted city policemen galloped back and forth to keep the crowds behind the lines. The sounds of the city, its traffic, its horns, its life, seemed walled out by the silence of the scene. The thousand that gathered were as quiet as people can be who are thoroughly engrossed. When night came, flood lamps run by portable generators were trained on the edifice. The rumbling of the generators were trained on the edifice. The rumbling of the generators was felt under the feet of the onlookers, like the growling of an earthquake. Police were everywhere, in their wagons, on foot, on their mounts, but they seemed to be as much spectators as the crowds they held back.

The grenade that was thrown, after the shouted warning by Younger Brother, had ripped up the sidewalk and left an enormous crater in the street in front of the Library gates. At the bottom of the crater a broken water main bubbled like a spa. Windows had been blown out all up and down the block. There was a brownstone across the street, a private residence, that had been particularly hard-hit by the blast. Its owners had fled and had given the Police Department permission to establish its headquarters on the ground floor. The police discovered that they could run up and down the brownstone steps with impunity and move freely along that side of 36th Street if they did not attempt to step over the curb. The house filled with Police Department officials and other city authorities, and gradually, as the nature of the confrontation became clear, one authority after another ceded his responsibility to one higher. Until finally, with lieutenants and precinct captains and inspectors and the Police Commissioner, Rhinelander Waldo, all present, the control of the operation fell to District Attorney of New York, Charles S. Whitman. Whitman had gained considerable fame prosecuting a corrupt police lieutenant named Becker and securing for him the death sentence for ordering four thugs—Gyp the Blood, Dago Frank, Whitey Lewis and Lefty Louie—to murder a well-known gambler named Herman Rosenthal. This monumental case had made Whitman a natural candidate for governor of New York. There was even talk of his eventual nomination for the Presidency. He had been about to leave New York with his wife for a vacation in Newport at the forty-room summer cottage of Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish. He had recently been introduced to society by Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont. He valued these connections but could not resist dropping over to 36th Street when the news reached him. He thought it was his duty as President-to-be. He liked to be photographed at the scene of the action. Upon his arrival everyone immediately deferred to his judgment, including an enemy of his, the choleric Mayor William J. Gaynor. He thought this was a significant acknowledgment of political realities. He looked at his watch and decided he had a few minutes to take care of this matter of the mad coon.

Whitman called for the plans of the Library from the architectural firm of Charles McKim and Stanford White. After a study of these he authorized a reconnaissance by a single athletic patrolman who was to gain access to the Library roof and look in the domed skylight over the central hall and the East Room to determine how many niggers were in there. A patrolman was found and dispatched through the garden that separated the Library from the Morgan residence. Whitman and the other officials waited in the improvised headquarters. No sooner had the officer entered the garden that the sky flashed and there was a loud report followed by an agonized scream. Whitman went pale. They’ve got the goddamn place mined, he said. An officer came in. From what anyone could tell, the patrolman in the garden was dead, which was his only bit of luck because nobody could have gone in to get him out of there. The police officials were grim. They looked at Whitman. He now knew that the numerical strength of Coalhouse’s band was not crucial intelligence. But he called the press around and announced that they numbered a dozen and perhaps as many as twenty men.

36

In the hours following, District Attorney Whitman conferred with several advisers. The colonel in command of the New York militia in Manhattan urged a full-scale military action. This so alarmed one of Mr. Morgan’s curators, a tall nervous man with a pince-nez who held his hands clasped at his chest as if he were a diva at the Metropolitan, that he began to tremble. Do you know the value of Mr. Morgan’s acquisitions! We had four Shakespeare folios! We have a Gutenberg Bible on vellum! There are seven hundred incunabula and five-page letter of George Washington’s! The colonel waved his finger in the air. If we don’t take care of that son of a bitch, if we don’t do in these and cut off his balls, you’ll have every nigger in the country at your throat! Then where will you be with your Bibles? Whitman paced back and forth. A city engineer told him that if they could repair the broken main they might be able to tunnel in through the Library foundations. How long would that take, Whitman asked. Two days, the engineer said. Someone else thought of poison gas. That might get him, Whitman agreed. Of course every one else on the East Side would die, too. He was beginning to feel fretful. The Library was built of fitted marble blocks. You couldn’t get a knife blade between the stones. The place was wired for dynamite and a pair of watchful coon eyes looked out of every window.

Whitman now had the good sense to ask for ideas from the police officers in the room. An old sergeant with many years on the street, a veteran of Hell’s Kitchen and the Tenderloin said The crucial thing, sir, is to get this Coalhouse Walker engaged in conversation. With an armed maniac, talking calms him down. You get him taking and keep him talking and then you have a wedge into the situation. Whitman, who was not without courage, took a megaphone and stepped into the street and shouted to Coalhouse that he wanted to speak with him. He waved his straw hat. If there’s a problem, he cried, we can solve it together. He repeated such sentiments for several minutes. Then for a moment the small window adjacent to the front entrance opened. A cylindrical object came flying into the street. Whitman flinched and the men in the house behind him dropped to the floor. To everyone’s astonishment there was no explosion. Whitman retreated to the brownstone and only after several minutes did someone using binoculars make the object out as a silver tankard with a lid. An officer ran into the street, picked up the tankard and sprinted back up the brownstone stairs. The object, now dented, was a medieval drinking stein of silver with a hunting scene in relief. The curator asked to see it and advised that it was from the seventeenth century and had belonged to Frederick, the Elector of Saxony. I’m really please to hear that, Whitman said. The curator then raised the lid and found inside a piece of paper with a telephone number that he recognized as his own.

The District Attorney himself took the telephone. He sat on the edge of a table and held the speaker in his left hand and the receiver attached by a cord in his right. Hello, Mr. Walker, he said heartily, this is District Attorney Whitman. He was stunned by the calm businesslike tone of the black man. My demands are the same, said the voice on the phone. I want my car returned in just the condition it was when my way was blocked. You cannot bring back my Sarah, but I want for her life the life of Fire Chief Conklin. Coalhouse, Whitman said, you know that I as an officer of the court could never give over to you for sentencing outside the law a man who has not had due process. That puts me in an untenable position. What I can promise is to investigate the case and see what statutes apply, if any. But I can’t do anything for you until you’re out of there. Coalhouse Walker seemed not to have heard. I will give you twenty-four hours, he said, and then I will blow up this place and everything in it. And he rang off. Hello, Whitman said. Hello? He ordered the operator to get the number again. There was no answer.

Whitman next sent off a telegram to Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish in Newport. He hoped she read the newspapers. His eyes, which tended to bulge when he was excited, were now quite prominent. His face was florid. He removed his jacket and unbuttoned his vest. He asked one of the patrolmen to find him some whiskey. He knew that red Emma Goldman, the anarchist, was in New York. He ordered her arrested. He stared out the window of the brownstone. The day was overcast and unnaturally dark. The air was closed and a fine rain made the streets glisten. The lights of the city were on. The compact white Grecian palace across the street shone in the rain. It looked very peaceful. At this moment Whitman came to the realization that the deference shown by Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo and everyone else in the Police Department had tricked him into identifying himself with a politically dangerous situation. He had on one hand to guard the interests of Morgan, whose various Simon Pure reform committees of wealthy Republican Protestants had funded his investigations of corruption in the Democratic Catholic Police Department. He had on the other hand to preserve his own reputation as a tough D.A who dealt handily with the criminal classes. For that nothing would do but the speediest unhorsing of the colored man. A glass of whiskey was brought to him. Just this one, to calm my nerves, he said to himself.

In the meantime police knocked at the door of Emma Goldman on West 13th Street. Goldman was not surprised. She always kept packed and ready to go a small bag with a change of clothes and a book to read. Ever since the assassination of President McKinley she had been routinely accused of fomenting by word or deed most of the acts of violence or strikes or riots that occurred in America. There was a national obsession of law enforcement officials to connect her to every case just as a matter of principle whether they believed she was guilty or not. She put on her hat, picked up her bag and strode out of the door. She rode in the police wagon with a young patrolman. You won’t believe this, she said to him, but I look forward to a spell in jail. It is the one place where I can get some rest.

Goldman did not know of course that one of the Coalhouse band was the young man she had pitied as the bourgeois lover of an infamous whore. In front of the sergeant’s desk at police headquarter on Centre Street, she made a statement to reporter as she was booked for conspiracy. I am sorry for the firemen in Westchester. I wish they had not been killed. But the Negro was tormented into action, so I understand, by the cruel death of his fiancée, an innocent young woman. As an anarchist, I applaud his appropriation of the Morgan property. Mr. Morgan has done some appropriating of his own. At this the reporters shouted questions. Is he a follower of yours, Emma? Do you know him? Did you have anything to do with this? Goldman smiled and shook her head. The oppressor is wealth, my friends. Wealth is the oppressor. Coalhouse Walker did not need Red Emma to learn that. He needed only to suffer.

Within an hour extra editions of the newspapers were on the streets featuring the news of the arrest. Goldman was liberally quoted. Whitman wondered it had been wise to give her a forum. But he did derive one clear benefit from the move. The president of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Booker T. Washington, was in the city to do some fund-raising. He was delivering an address downtown at the great hall of Cooper Union on Astor Place and he departed from his prepared text to deplore Goldman’s remarks and condemn the actions of Coalhouse Walker. A reporter called Whitman to tell him of this. Immediately the District Attorney got in touch with the great educator, asking if he would come to the scene and use his moral authority to resolve the crisis. I will, Booker T. Washington replied. A police escort was sent downtown and Washington, apologizing to the hosts of the luncheon in his honor, left to ringing applause.