Jailbird (3 page)

•   •  •

When the strike came in October, he was able to guess many of the things that should be done, even though he had never been through a strike before. Harvard was a million miles away. Nothing he had ever learned there would get the factory going again. But the Pinkerton Agency would, and the police would—and perhaps the National Guard. Before his father and brother said so, Alexander knew that there were plenty of men in other parts of the
country who were desperate enough to take a job at almost any wage. When his father and brother did say this, he learned something else about business: There were companies, often pretending to be labor unions, whose sole business was to recruit such men.

By the end of November the chimneys of the factory were belching smoke again. The strikers had no money left for rent or food or fuel. Every large employer within three hundred miles had been sent their names, so he would know what troublemakers they had been. Their nominal leader, Colin Jarvis, was in jail, awaiting trial on a trumped-up murder charge.

•   •  •

On December fifteenth the wife of Colin Jarvis, called Ma, led a delegation of twenty other strikers’ wives to the main gate of the factory, asking to see Daniel McCone. He sent Alexander down to them with a scribbled note, which Alexander found himself able to read out loud to them without any speech impediment at all. It said that Daniel McCone was too busy to give time to strangers who had nothing to do with affairs of the Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron Company anymore. It suggested that they had mistaken the company for a charitable organization. It said that their churches or police precinct stations would be able to give them a list of organizations to which they might more appropriately plead for help—if they really needed help and felt that they deserved it.

Ma Jarvis told Alexander that her own message was
even simpler: The strikers would return to work on any terms. Most of them were now being evicted from their homes and had no place to go.

“I am sorry,” said Alexander. “I can only read my father’s note again, if you would like me to.”

Alexander McCone would say many years later that the confrontation did not bother him a bit at the time. He was in fact elated, he said, to find himself such a reliable “… muh-muh-muh-machine.”

•   •  •

A police captain now stepped forward. He warned the women that they were in violation of the law, assembling in such great numbers as to impede traffic and constitute a threat to public safety. He ordered them to disperse at once, in the name of the law.

This they did. They retreated across the vast plaza before the main gate. The façade of the factory had been designed to remind cultivated persons of the Piazza San Marco in Venice, Italy. The factory’s clock-tower was a half-scale replica of San Marco’s famous campanile.

It was from the belfry of that tower that Alexander and his father and his brother would watch the Cuyahoga Massacre on Christmas morning. Each would have his own binoculars. Each would have his own little revolver, too.

There were no bells in the belfry. Neither were there cafés and shops around the plaza below. The architect had justified the plaza on strictly utilitarian grounds. It provided any amount of room for wagons and buggies and horse-drawn
streetcars as they came and went. The architect had also been matter-of-fact about the virtues of the factory as a fort. Any mob meaning to storm the front gate would first have to cross all that open ground.

A single newspaper reporter, from
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
, now a RAMJAC publication, retreated across the plaza with the women. He asked Ma Jarvis what she planned to do next.

There was nothing much that she could do next, of course. The strikers weren’t even strikers anymore, but simply unemployed persons being turned out of their homes.

She gave a brave answer anyway: “We will be back,” she said. What else could she say?

He asked her when they would be back.

Her answer was probably no more than the poetry of hopelessness in Christendom, with winter setting in. “On Christmas morning,” she said.

•   •  •

This was printed in the paper, whose editors felt that a threatening promise had been made. And the fame of this coming Christmas in Cleveland spread far and wide. Sympathizers with the strikers—preachers, writers, union organizers, populist politicians, and on and on—began to filter into the city as though expecting a miracle of some kind. They were frankly enemies of the economic order as it was constructed then.

A company of National Guard infantrymen was mobilized by Edwin Kincaid, the governor of Ohio, to protect
the factory. They were farm boys from the southern part of the state, selected because they had no friends or relatives among the strikers, no reason to see them as anything but unreasonable disturbers of the peace. They represented an American ideal: healthy, cheerful citizen soldiers, who went about their ordinary business until their country suddenly needed an awesome display of weapons and discipline. They were supposed to appear as though from nowhere, to the consternation of America’s enemies. When the trouble was over, they would vanish again.

The regular army of the country, which had fought the Indians until the Indians could fight no more, was down to about thirty thousand men. As for the Utopian militias throughout the country: They almost all consisted of farm boys, since the health of the factory workers was so bad and their hours so long. It was about to be discovered, incidentally, in the Spanish-American War, that militiamen were worse than useless on battlefields, they were so poorly trained.

•   •  •

And that was surely the impression young Alexander Hamilton McCone had of the militiamen who arrived at the factory on Christmas Eve: that these were not soldiers. They were brought on a special train to a siding inside the factory’s high iron fence. They straggled out of the car and onto a loading platform as though they were ordinary passengers on various errands. Their uniforms were only partly buttoned, and often mis-buttoned, at that. Several had lost
their hats. Almost all carried laughably unmilitary suitcases and parcels.

Their officers? Their captain was the postmaster of Greenfield, Ohio. Their two. lieutenants were twin sons of the president of the Greenfield Bank and Trust Company. The postmaster and the banker had both done local favors for the governor. The commissions were their rewards. And the officers, in turn, had rewarded those who had pleased them in some way by making them sergeants or corporals. And the privates, in turn, voters or sons of voters, had it within their power, if they felt like using it, to ruin the lives of their superiors with contempt and ridicule, which could go on for generations.

There on the loading platform at the Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron Company old Daniel McCone finally had to ask one of the many soldiers milling about and eating at the same time, “Who is in charge here?”

As luck would have it, he had put the question to the captain, who told him this: “Well—as much as anybody, I guess I am.”

To their credit, and although armed with bayonets and live ammunition, the militiamen would not harm a single soul on the following day.

•   •  •

They were quartered in an idled machine shop. They slept in the aisles. Each one had brought his own food from home. They had hams and roasted chickens and cakes and pies. They ate whatever they pleased and whenever they
pleased, and turned the machine shop into a picnic ground. They left the place looking like a village dump. They did not know any better.

Yes, and old Daniel McCone and his two sons spent the night in the factory, too—on camp cots in their offices at the foot of the bell tower, and with loaded revolvers under their pillows. When would they have their Christmas dinner? At three o’clock on the following afternoon. The trouble would surely be over by then. Young Alexander was to make use of his fine education, his father had told him, by composing and delivering an appropriate prayer of thanksgiving before they ate that meal.

Regular company guards, augmented by Pinkerton agents and city policemen, meanwhile took turns patrolling the company fence all night. The company guards, ordinarily armed only with pistols, had rifles, and shotguns, too, borrowed from friends or brought from home.

Four Pinkerton men were allowed to sleep all through the night. They were master craftsmen of a sort. They were sharpshooters.

It was not bugles that awakened the McCones the next morning. It was the sound of hammering and sawing, which gabbled around the plaza. Carpenters were building a high scaffold by the main gate, just inside the fence. The chief of police of Cleveland was to stand atop it, in plain view of everyone. At an opportune moment he was to read the Ohio Riot Act to the crowd. This public reading was required by law. The act said that any unlawful assembly of twelve persons or more had to disperse within an hour of
having the act read to it. If it did not disperse, its members would be guilty of a felony punishable by imprisonment for from ten years to life.

Nature sympathized again—for a gentle snow began to fall.

•   •  •

Yes, and an enclosed carriage drawn by two white horses clattered into the plaza at full speed and stopped by the gate. Into the dawn’s early light stepped Colonel George Redfield, the governor’s son-in-law, who had been commissioned by the governor, and who had come all the way from Sandusky to take command of the militiamen. He owned a lumber mill and was in the feed and ice businesses besides. He had no military experience, but was costumed as a cavalryman. He wore a saber, which was a gift from his father-in-law.

He went at once to the machine shop to address his troops.

Soon after that wagons carrying riot police arrived. They were ordinary Cleveland policemen, but armed with wooden shields and blunt lances.

An American flag was flown from the top of the bell tower, and another from the pole by the main gate.

It was to be a pageant, young Alexander supposed. There would be no actual killing or wounding. All would be said by the way men posed. The strikers themselves had sent word that they would have their wives and children with them, and that not one of them would have a
gun—or even a knife with a blade more than three inches long.

“We wish only,” said their letter, “to take one last look at the factory to which we gave the best years of our lives, and to show our faces to all who may care to look upon them, to show them to God Almighty alone, if only He will look, and to ask, as we stand mute and motionless, ‘Does any American deserve misery and heartbreak such as we now know?’”

Alexander was not insensitive to the beauty of the letter. It had, in fact, been written by the poet Henry Niles Whistler, then in the city to hearten the strikers—a fellow Harvard man. It deserved a majestic reply, thought Alexander. He believed that the flags and the ranks of citizen soldiers and the solemn, steady presence of the police would surely do the job.

The law would be read out loud, and all would hear it, and all would go home. Peace should not be broken for any cause.

Alexander meant to say in his prayer that afternoon that God should protect the working people from leaders like Colin Jarvis, who had encouraged them to bring such misery and heartbreak on themselves.

“Amen,” he said to himself.

•   •  •

And the people came as promised. They came on foot. In order to discourage them, the city fathers had canceled all streetcar service in that part of the city that day.

There were many children among them, and even infants in arms. One infant would be shot to death and inspire the poem by Henry Niles Whistler, later put to music and still sung today, “Bonnie Failey.”

Where were the soldiers? They had been standing in front of the factory fence since eight o’clock, with bayonets already fixed, with full packs on their backs. Those packs weighed fifty pounds and more. They were Colonel Redfield’s idea of how to make his men more fearsome. They were in a single rank, which stretched the width of the plaza. The battle plan was this: If the crowd would not disperse when told to, the soldiers were to level their bayonets and to clear the plaza slowly but irresistibly, glacially—maintaining a perfectly straight rank that bristled with cold steel, and advancing, always on command, one step, then two, then three, then four …

Only the soldiers had been outside the fence since eight. The snow had kept on falling. So when the first members of the crowd appeared at the far end of the plaza, they gazed at the factory over an expanse of virgin snow. The only footprints were those they themselves had just made.

And many more people came than had spiritual business to conduct specifically with Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron. The strikers themselves were mystified as to who all these other ragged strangers might be—who also, often, had brought their families along. These outsiders, too, wished to demonstrate to simply anybody their misery and heartbreak
at Christmastide. Young Alexander, peering through his binoculars, read a sign a man was carrying that said, “Erie Coal and Iron unfair to workers.” Erie Coal and Iron wasn’t even an Ohio firm. It was in Buffalo, New York.

So it was against considerable odds that Bonnie Failey, the infant killed in the Massacre, was actually the child of a striker against Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron, that Henry Niles Whistler was able to say in the refrain of his poem about her:

Young Alexander read the sign about Erie Goal and Iron while standing at a second-story window in an office wing abutting the north wall of the bell tower. He was in a long gallery, also of Venetian inspiration, which had a window every ten feet and a mirror at its far end. The mirror made its length appear to be infinite. The windows looked out over the plaza. It was in this gallery that the four sharpshooters supplied by Pinkerton set up their places of business. Each installed a table at his chosen window and set a comfortable chair behind that. There was a rifle rest on each table.