Jailbird (4 page)

The sharpshooter nearest Alexander had put a sandbag on his table and had hammered a groove into it with the edge of his hairy hand. There his rifle would rest, with its butt tucked into his shoulder, as he squinted down his sights
at this face or that face in the crowd from his easy chair. The sharpshooter farther down the corridor was a machinist by trade, and had built a squat tripod with a swiveling oarlock on top. This squatted on his table. It was into this oarlock that he would slip his rifle if trouble came.

“Patent applied for,” he had told Alexander of his tripod, and he had patted the thing.

Each man had his ammunition and his cleaning rod and his cleaning patches and his oil laid out on the table, as though they might be for sale.

All the windows were still closed now. At some of the others were far angrier and less orderly men. These were regular company guards, who had been up most of the night. Several had been drinking, so they said “… to stay awake.” They had been stationed at the windows with their rifles or shotguns—in case the mob should attack the factory at all costs, and nothing but withering fire would turn them away.

They had persuaded themselves by now that this attack would surely come. Their alarm and bravado were the first strong hints young Alexander received, as he would tell young Walter F. Starbuck decades afterward, again stammering, that there were “certain instabilities inherent in the pageant.”

He himself, of course, was carrying a loaded revolver in his overcoat pocket—and so were his father and brother, who now came into the corridor to approve of the arrangements one last time. It was ten o’clock in the
morning. It was time to open the windows, they said. The plaza was full.

•   •  •

It was time to go up to the top of the tower, they told Alexander, for the best view of all.

So the windows were opened and the sharpshooters laid their rifles in their cradles of different kinds.

Who were the four sharpshooters, really—and was there really such a trade? There was less work for sharpshooters than there was for hangmen at the time. Not one of the four had ever been hired in this capacity before, nor was he likely, unless war came, to be paid for such work ever again. One was a part-time Pinkerton agent, and the other three were his friends. The four of them hunted together regularly, and had for years praised one another for what unbelievably good shots they were. So when the Pinkerton Agency let it be known that it could use four sharpshooters, they materialized almost instantly, like the company of citizen soldiers.

The man with the tripod had invented the device for the occasion. Nor had the man with the sandbag ever couched his rifle on a sandbag before. So it was, too, with the chairs and tables and the tidy displays of ammunition and all that: They had agreed among themselves as to how truly professional sharpshooters should comport themselves.

Years later Alexander McCone, when asked by Starbuck
what he thought the principal cause of the Cuyahoga Massacre had been, would reply: “American am-am-am-amateurism in the muh-muh-matters of luh-life and duh-duh-duh-death.”

•   •  •

When the windows were opened, the oceanic murmurs of the crowd came in with the cold air. The crowd wished to be silent, and imagined itself to be silent—but this person had to whisper a little something, and that one had to reply, and so on. Hence, sounds like a sea.

It was mainly this seeming surf that Alexander heard as he stood with his father and brother in the belfry. The defenders of the factory were quiet. Except for the rattles and bumps of the opening of the windows on the second floor, they had made no reply.

Alexander’s father said this as they waited: “It is no dainty thing to shape iron and steel to human needs, my boys. No man in his right mind would do such work, if it were not for fear of cold and hunger. The question is, my boys—how much does the world need iron and steel products? In case anybody wants some, Dan McCone knows how they’re made.”

Now there was a tiny quickening of life inside the fence. The chief of police of Cleveland, carrying a piece of paper on which the Riot Act was written, climbed the steps to the top of the scaffold. This was to be the climax of the pageant, young Alexander supposed, a moment of terrible beauty.

But then he sneezed up there in the belfry. Not only were his lungs emptied of air, but his romantic vision was destroyed. What was about to happen below, he realized, was not majestic. It would be insane. There was no such thing as magic, and yet his father and his brother and the governor, and probably even President Grover Cleveland, expected this police chief to become a wizard, a Merlin—to make a crowd vanish with a magic spell.

“It will not work,” he thought. “It cannot work.”

It did not work.

The chief cast his spell. His shouted words bounced off the buildings, warred with their own echoes, and sounded like Babylonian by the time they reached Alexander’s ears.

Absolutely nothing happened.

The chief climbed down from the scaffold. His manner indicated that he had not expected much of anything to happen, that there were simply too many people out there. It was with great modesty that he rejoined his own shock troops, who were armed with shields and lances, but safe inside the fence. He was not about to ask them to arrest anyone, or to do anything provocative against a crowd so large.

But Colonel Redfield was enraged. He had the gate opened a crack, to let him out so he could join his half-frozen troops. He took his place between two farm boys at the center of the long line. He ordered his men to level their bayonets at those in front of them. Next, he ordered them to take one step forward. This they did.

•   •  •

Looking down on the plaza, young Alexander could see the people at the front of the crowd backing into those behind them as they shrank from the naked steel. People at the back of the crowd, meanwhile, had no idea what was going on, and were not about to depart, to relieve the pressure some.

The soldiers advanced yet another pace and the people retreating put pressure not only on those behind them, but on those beside them, too. Those at either end found themselves squashed against the buildings. The soldiers facing them had no heart for skewering someone so hopelessly immobilized, so they averted their bayonets, opening a space between the blade tips and the unyielding walls.

When the soldiers took yet another step forward, according to Alexander when old, people began “… to squh-squh-squirt around the ends of the luh-luh-line like wuh-wuh-water.” The squirts became torrents, crumpling the flanks of the line and delivering hundreds of people to the space between the factory fence and the undefended rears of the soldiers.

Colonel Redfield, his eyes blazing straight ahead, had no idea what was happening on either side. He ordered yet another advance.

Now the crowd behind the soldiers began to behave quite badly. A youth jumped onto a soldier’s pack like a monkey. The soldier sat down hard and struggled most comically, trying to rise again. Soldier after soldier was brought down in this way. If one got back to his feet, he
was pulled down again. And the soldiers began to crawl toward each other for mutual protection. They refused to shoot. They formed a defensive heap, instead, a paralyzed porcupine.

Colonel Redfield was not among them. He was nowhere to be seen.

•   •  •

No one was ever found who would admit to ordering the sharpshooters and the guards to open fire from the windows of the factory, but the firing began.

Fourteen people were killed outright by bullets—one of them a soldier. Twenty-three were seriously wounded.

Alexander would say when an old man that the shooting sounded no more serious than “puh-puh-popcorn,” and that he thought a freakish wind had blown across the plaza below, since the people seemed to be blowing away like “luh-luh-leaves.”

When it was all over, there was general satisfaction that honor had been served and that justice had been done. Law and order had been restored.

Old Daniel McCone would say to his sons as he looked out over the battlefield, vacant now except for bodies, “Like it or not, boys, that’s the sort of business you’re in.”

Colonel Redfield would be found in a side street, naked and out of his head, but otherwise unharmed.

Young Alexander did not try to speak afterward until he had to speak, which was at Christmas dinner that afternoon.
He was asked to say grace. He discovered then that he had become a bubbling booby, that his stammer was so bad now that he could not speak at all.

He would never go to the factory again. He would become Cleveland’s leading art collector and the chief donor to the Cleveland Museum of Fine Arts, demonstrating that the McCone family was interested in more than money and power for money’s and power’s sakes.

•   •  •

His stammer was so bad for the rest of his life that he seldom ventured outside his mansion on Euclid Avenue. He had married a Rockefeller one month before his stammer became so bad. Otherwise, as he would later say, he would probably never have married at all.

He had one daughter, who was embarrassed by him, as was his wife. He would make only one friendship after the Massacre. It would be with a child. It would be with the son of his cook and his chauffeur.

The multimillionaire wanted someone who would play chess with him many hours a day. So he seduced the boy, so to speak, with simpler games first—hearts and old maid, checkers and dominoes. But he also taught him chess. Soon they were playing only chess. Their conversations were limited to conventional chess taunts and teasings, which had not changed in a thousand years.

Samples: “Have you played this game before?” “Really?” “Spot me a queen.” “Is this a trap?”

The boy was Walter F. Starbuck. He was willing to spend his childhood and youth so unnaturally for this reason: Alexander Hamilton McCone promised to send him to Harvard someday.

—K.V.

Help the weak ones that cry for me, help the prosecuted and the victim, because they are your better friends; they are the comrades that fight and fall as your father and Bartolo fought and fell yesterday for the conquest of the joy of freedom for all the poor workers. In this struggle of life you will find more love and you will be loved.

L
IFE GOES ON
, yes—and a fool and his self-respect are soon parted, perhaps never to be reunited even on Judgment Day.

Pay attention, please, for years as well as people are characters in this book, which is the story of my life so far. Nineteen-hundred and Twenty-nine wrecked the American economy. Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one sent me to Harvard. Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-eight got me my first job in the federal government. Nineteen-hundred and Forty-six gave me a wife. Nineteen-hundred and Forty-six gave me an ungrateful son. Nineteen-hundred and Fifty-three fired me from the federal government.

Thus do I capitalize years as though they were proper names.

Nineteen-hundred and Seventy gave me a job in the Nixon White House. Nineteen-hundred and Seventy-five sent me to prison for my own preposterous contributions to the American political scandals known collectively as “Watergate.”

Three years ago, as I write, Nineteen-hundred and Seventy-seven was about to turn me loose again. I felt like a
piece of garbage. I was wearing olive-drab coveralls, the prison uniform. I sat alone in a dormitory—on a cot that I had stripped of its bedding. A blanket, two sheets, and a pillowcase, which were to be returned to my government along with my uniform, were folded neatly on my lap. My speckled old hands were clasped atop these. I stared straight ahead at a wall on the second floor of a barracks at the Federal Minimum Security Adult Correctional Facility on the edge of Finletter Air Force Base—thirty-five miles from Atlanta, Georgia. I was waiting for a guard to conduct me to the Administration Building, where I would be given my release papers and my civilian clothes. There would be no one to greet me at the gate. Nowhere in the world was there anyone who had a forgiving hug for me—or a free meal or a bed for a night or two.

If anyone had been watching me, he would have seen me do something quite mysterious every five minutes or so. Without changing my blank expression, I would lift my hands from the bedding and I would clap three times. I will explain why by and by.

It was nine in the morning on April twenty-first. The guard was one hour late. A fighter plane leaped up from the top of a nearby runway, destroyed enough energy to heat one hundred homes for a thousand years, tore the sky to shreds. I did not bat an eyelash. The event was merely tedious to old prisoners and guards at Finletter. It happened all the time.

Most of the other prisoners, all of them convicted of nonviolent, white-collar crimes, had been trundled away in
purple schoolbuses to work details around the base. Only a small housekeeping crew had been left behind—to wash windows, to mop floors. There were a few others around, writing or reading or napping—too sick, with heart trouble or back trouble, usually, to do manual work of any kind. I myself would have been feeding a mangle in the laundry at the base hospital if it had been a day like any other day. My health was excellent, as they say.

Was I shown no special respect in prison as a Harvard man? It was no distinction, actually. I had met or heard of at least seven others. And no sooner would I leave than my cot would be taken by Virgil Greathouse, former secretary of health, education, and welfare, who was also a Harvard man. I was quite low on the educational ladder at Finletter, with nothing but a poor bachelor’s degree. I was not even a Phi Beta Kappa. We must have had twenty or more Phi Beta Kappas, a dozen or more medical doctors, an equal number of dentists, a veterinarian, a Doctor of Divinity, a Doctor of Economics, a Doctor of Philosophy in chemistry, and simply shoals of disbarred lawyers. Lawyers were so common that we had a joke for newcomers that went like this: “If you find yourself talking to somebody who hasn’t been to law school, watch your step. He’s either the warden or a guard.”