More Powerful Than Dynamite: Radicals Plutocrats Progressives and New York's Year of Anarchy

About this book

In the year that saw the start of World War I the United States was itself on the verge of revolution: industrial depression in the east striking coal miners in Colorado and increasingly tense relations with Mexico. "There was blood in the air that year " a witness later recalled "there truly was." In New York the year had opened with bright expectations but 1914 quickly tumbled into disillusionment and violence. For John Purroy Mitchel the citys new "boy mayor " the trouble started in January when a crushing winter caused homeless shelters to overflow. By April anarchist throngs paraded past industrialists mansions and tens of thousands filled Union Square demanding "Bread or Revolution." Then on July 4 1914 a detonation destroyed a seven-story Harlem tenement. It was the largest explosion the city had ever known. Among the dead were three bombmakers; incited by anarchist Alexander Berkman they had been preparing to dynamite the estate of John D. Rockefeller Jr. son of a plutocratic dynasty and widely vilified for a massacre of his companys striking workers in Colorado earlier that spring. More Powerful Than Dynamite charts how anarchist anger progressive idealism and plutocratic paternalism converged in that July explosion. Its cast ranges from celebrated figures such as Emma Goldman Upton Sinclair and Andrew Carnegie to the fascinating and heretofore little known: Frank Tannenbaum a homeless teenager who dared to lead his followers into the citys churches; police inspector Max Schmittberger too honest for his department and too crooked for everyone else; and Becky Edelsohn a young anarchist known for her red tights and for spitting in millionaires faces. Historian and journalist Thai Jones creates a fascinating portrait of a city on the edge of chaos coming to terms with modernity.