New York at War (33 page)

Authorities considered the possibility of sabotage. Indeed, by the summer of 1916, New York police and federal agents had had ample experience of German plotting. Within weeks of the war’s outbreak, Ambassador von Bernstorff’s key subordinates, including commercial attaché Heinrich Albert and military attaché Franz von Papen, had embarked on a campaign to hinder the aid flowing to the Allies from North America. From his office in the Hamburg-Amerika Building at 45 Broadway, Albert ventured forth with von Papen to find operatives within the nation’s largest German population. At the Hofbrau House on Twenty-Ninth Street and the German-American Club on Central Park South, they screened possible recruits—young immigrants loyal to the fatherland, reservists angered by their inability to get back to Germany, seamen from German ocean liners immobilized on the Hoboken and Brooklyn waterfronts, where they would not have to face the Royal Navy’s guns.
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Several of these German efforts played out as comic opera. Von Papen himself blundered by trying to buy American and Norwegian passports from jobless sailors and Bowery derelicts. He intended to have them doctored and given to German reservists, who might then sail from New York as neutrals and pass muster with Royal Navy boarding parties on the Atlantic. But the Justice Department’s New York office soon got wind of the scheme and dispatched Secret Service men to trail von Papen and his associates around Manhattan. They hit the jackpot on July 24, 1915, when a federal agent stole a portfolio of documents from a dozing Heinrich Albert on a Sixth Avenue elevated train. The documents, turned over to Treasury Secretary McAdoo, showed how Germany was paying to disseminate propaganda throughout the United States and detailed Albert’s efforts to set up a munitions plant in Connecticut for the purpose of siphoning munitions materials away from the Allies. While embarrassing to Germany, the documents did not prove illegal acts. Wilson’s advisor, Colonel Edward House, suggested that the administration leak the documents without attribution to Frank Cobb, editor of the New York
World
, the city’s staunchest pro-Wilson paper. In mid-August, headlines decried a plot by “Secret Agents” on American soil to “Block the Allies.” Wilson demanded that Germany recall von Papen in December. The attaché went home, where he would later play a crucial role in helping Adolf Hitler to power.
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Not all of the schemes hatched by von Bernstorff’s operatives, however, were failures. By early 1915 one of von Papen’s contacts, an admiralty staff officer from Berlin named Franz von Rintelen, was busy enlisting and paying Irish longshoremen on the West Side docks to launch a series of dockside strikes and slowdowns to delay the loading and departure of ships bearing desperately needed munitions to the Allied Western Front. Meanwhile, Frederick Hinsch, a Maryland agent of von Rintelen’s, hired black Baltimore stevedores to inject draft animals destined for the Allied armies with deadly glanders and anthrax germs supplied by a German American chemist in Chevy Chase. One of the stevedores, Edward Felton, came north to the Bronx, where he wandered, unwatched, among horses corralled in Van Cortlandt Park and jabbed them with the anthrax bacillus.
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Most ominously, in spring 1915 the cargo holds of ships bound from New York to England, France, and Russia began unaccountably to burst into flames, causing hundreds of tons of goods to be ruined when captains flooded their holds to quench the fires. The mystery was soon explained. When the steamer
Kirk Oswald
docked in Marseilles with sugar and grain, French stevedores discovered strange metal “cigars” in her hold. Before leaving New York, the
Kirk Oswald
had been tied up next to the German liner
Friedrich der Grosse
at the foot of Thirty-First Street in South Brooklyn. Inspector Thomas Tunney of the New York City Police Bomb and Neutrality Squad put the missing pieces together. They led to a Hoboken chemist, Dr. Walter Scheele, whose house turned out to be a bomb factory. Working for von Rintelen, Scheele was filling one end of small lead pipes—the “cigars”—with picric acid and the other end with sulfuric acid. When the acids ate through a time-delay disk placed between them in the middle of the tube, they ignited a blaze that could fill a cargo hold with flames. German sailors stuck on board the
Friedrich der Grosse
were using the vessel’s machine shop to cut the tubes and disks for Scheele; von Rintelen’s Irish longshore friends, glad to strike a blow against England, placed the bombs in the ships they were loading. Scheele ended up in the Atlanta penitentiary. Von Rintelen tried to slip back to Europe aboard a Dutch liner but was arrested by British agents when the ship touched at Dover.
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In 1916, however, after Black Tom, investigators ultimately concluded that the blast was probably a careless accident, and they accused the depot’s owners of criminal negligence. Legally, the Lehigh Valley Railroad was supposed to move explosives out of Black Tom within twenty-four hours of arrival, regardless of the war-induced bottleneck that slowed the port’s traffic. Authorities determined that a discarded cigarette, or possibly a fire set by night watchmen to keep mosquitoes away, had ignited a depot crammed with far more than its safe capacity of ammunition. Jersey City police arrested several Lehigh Valley Railroad officials for manslaughter and threatened to arrest E. B. Thomas, the line’s president. “It is not right for millions of people to be imperiled for the benefit of foreign warring nations and for the profits of munitions dealers,” declared Robert Hudspeth, Hudson County’s prosecutor. Even after the Black Tom explosion, there were still enough explosives left on the Jersey City shore “to blow New York to pieces.”

Despite the arrests and allegations, munitions continued to flow from the harbor’s docks and rail yards onto waiting ships. As the
New York Times
noted, any plan to remove “the thousands of tons of condensed destruction . . . would divert millions of dollars from New York.” E. B. Thomas, none too worried about the posturing of prosecutors, announced in August that Lehigh had earned an unprecedented $7.6 million over the past year and spoke of “the encouraging outlook for a continuation of the heavy volume of traffic.” Charges against Thomas and his colleagues were not pressed. Business, and lax safety conditions, went on pretty much as before. Most believed with the
Times
that, while the explosion “must prove cheering news to Berlin and Vienna,” the event was an unfortunate freak accident. To Woodrow Wilson, it was “a regrettable incident at a private railroad terminal.”
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Only after the war did investigators uncover what really took place at Black Tom. In 1916, Frederick Hinsch had used a brownstone at 123 West Fifteenth Street in Chelsea as a safe house to plan the Black Tom attack. Two of the depot’s night watchmen had been bribed to look the other way. Under cover of darkness, Hinsch’s recruits—probably an immigrant from Austrian Slovakia named Michael Kristoff, a naturalized US citizen named Kurt Jahnke, and Lothar Witzke, a German naval cadet—snuck into the depot and set off detonators, making their escape before the stored ammunition exploded.
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In 1939, a joint US-German Mixed Claims Commission ruled that Germany owed $21 million in damages to the American claimants in the Black Tom and other sabotage cases, including the Lehigh Valley Railroad and Black Tom’s insurers. Adolf Hitler was in no mood to pay out money to Americans, and the Nazi government “boycotted” the commission’s decision. Following another war, the West German government made good on the claims, paying them on the installment plan. Not until 1979 were the reparation payments owed for the events of July 30, 1916, completed.
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Von Bernstorff ’s agents had scored a victory. Not only had they destroyed tons of munitions that would have been used against the kaiser’s troops, but they had disabled the key depot and gotten away with it. Yet their momentary success could not stop the flow of exports. The real casualty of their tactics was the security of the vast majority of German Americans who had nothing to do with such skullduggery. The kaiser’s officers and diplomats had been willing to sacrifice their American cousins in a vain attempt to limit the flow of American aid to their enemies. In New York and throughout the country, headlines about Albert’s portfolio and Scheele’s bomb lab raised doubts about the loyalty of anyone bearing a German name.

Months before the Black Tom explosion, President Wilson himself had pointed the finger of blame at German Americans without naming them directly. In his December 1915 State of the Union address, delivered a week after he demanded von Papen’s recall, Wilson had lauded those “virile foreign stocks” whose peoples had enriched the nation over recent decades. But he also blasted “infinitely malicious” foreign-born US citizens, “who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life” and sought “to destroy our industries” for the sake of “foreign intrigue.” Treachery, the president insisted, would not be tolerated. But how were Americans to tell the difference between manly, patriotic newcomers and disloyal intriguers? Here Woodrow Wilson offered his people no guidance.
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June 5, 1917, dawned fair and cool in New York. Through the morning and afternoon, thousands of men lined up outside neighborhood schools, barbershops, and storefronts to register for Selective Service. America had finally joined the Allied war against Germany. President Wilson had asked Congress to declare war in April, after the Germans resumed unrestricted U-boat warfare against all vessels, including American freighters and passenger ships, heading for Allied ports, and after British naval intelligence divulged intercepted cable messages that proved that German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann was secretly trying to lure Mexico and possibly Japan into a surprise attack on the United States. America’s war, Wilson intoned, would be a war “to make the world safe for democracy.”
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Now the test had come. Would America’s population of immigrants and their sons step forward to register for the nation’s first mandatory draft since the Civil War? Somewhat nervously, the
New York Tribune
recalled the Draft Riot of 1863. People recognized that neither Congress nor the public unanimously supported entry into the war. But the day passed without major problems. Although thousands of “slackers” failed to appear as summoned, six hundred thousand New Yorkers and over nine million others nationwide came forward to register.
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Never far below the surface, the city’s ethnic tensions caused scattered incidents, as thirty-eight thousand registrants were picked by lottery for the draft during the summer. While standing in line for his draft board physical, Russian Jewish immigrant Meyer Siegel joked about a gruff policeman nearby. “What did you say about me, you dirty kike?” the policeman shouted as he arrested Siegel for disturbing the peace. But a judge threw the case out of court, and Siegel was able to share the mix of excitement and bewilderment felt by millions of other young draftees. “Here I am,” he wrote, “one day, a student of law; the next day, learning how to kill my adversary and be killed. Some change-over!”
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Sixty miles east of Manhattan, in the woods of Yaphank, Long Island, thousands of drafted New Yorkers were training at the army’s newly built Camp Upton by the fall of 1917; other draftees occupied barracks at Camp Merritt in northern New Jersey. By the time Upton’s and Merritt’s troops started boarding transport ships at the Hoboken docks over the winter and spring for the passage to France, ethnic pride as well as American patriotism infused the esprit de corps of new units and traditional regiments alike. In addition to the Upper East Side “blue bloods” of the National Guard’s Seventh Regiment, and the tough Irish teamsters and stevedores from Hell’s Kitchen in the Fighting Sixty-Ninth, a mix of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants, Slavs and Italians, natives and immigrants filled the ranks of the Seventy-Seventh, or “Melting Pot” Division, whose insignia bore an image of the Statue of Liberty.
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Flag-waving crowds cheered the “hardy back woodsmen from the Bowery, Fifth Avenue and Hester Street” as they marched through Manhattan in preparation for the voyage to Europe. Among them were many bearing German names and some who spoke with a German accent. Immigrants set aside their reservations about joining the Allies. “I figured this country was different from Russia,” concluded Morry Morrison, a Jew from Brooklyn. “It was worth fighting for.” On Broadway, theatergoers hummed along with the war’s two signature songs, “Over There” by George M. Cohan, grandson of a County Cork emigrant, and “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” by the Seventy-Seventh’s own Sergeant Irving Berlin, who had passed through Ellis Island as a boy named Israel Baline. Perhaps, Preparedness advocates and liberal reformers both hoped, entry into the war was achieving the “Americanization” and unity they had long desired.
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With the federal government now putting its own money into the war effort, military contracts brought new jobs. Over eighteen thousand workers flocked to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where they built dozens of antisubmarine boats, barges, and scows, and serviced ships that would convoy the “doughboys” to France. Factories making gas masks and airplane motors opened in Queens. With drafted men leaving their jobs, women filled positions as trolley conductors and assembly-line laborers “for the duration.” Backed by the Wilson administration, which prized workplace harmony as a key to efficient war production, labor unions won higher pay and the right to organize, a circumstance many businesses accepted because the government also guaranteed cost-plus profits on war contracts. “We are all making more money out of this war than the average being ought to,” a steel manufacturer admitted.
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