Father slept through the incident. He was unable to sleep at night lately and had begun to nap in the afternoons. He was restless. He had read in the newspaper of the growing movement in the Congress for a national tax on income. This was his first presentiment of the end of summer. He took to making regular telephone calls to his manager at the plant in New Rochelle. Things were quiet at home. Nothing more had been heard from the black killer. Business was holding up as he would know from the copies of the orders sent out to him every day. None of this put him at ease. He was becoming bored by the beach and no longer cared to bathe in the ocean. In the evenings before bed he went to the game room and practiced billiards. How could they resume their lives if they remained in Atlantic City? Some morning he awoke and felt that time and events had gone on and left him more vulnerable than ever. He found their new friend, the Baron, a momentary distraction. Mother thought he was endearing but he felt no special sympathy from him or for him. He wanted to pack up and leave but was constrained by Mother’s security in the place. Here she believed it might be possible to wait for the Coalhouse tragedy to conclude itself and hope it could be outlasted. He knew this was an illusion. To the consternation of the hôtelier she had taken to having the brown child at her table in the dining room. Father gazed at the little boy with grim propriety. At breakfast the morning after the rainstorm he opened the newspaper and found on the front page a picture of the father. Coalhouse’s gang had broken into one of the city’s most celebrated depositories of art, Pierpont Morgan’s library on 36th Street. They had barricaded themselves inside and commanded the authorities to negotiate with them or risk having the Morgan treasures destroyed. They had thrown a grenade into the street to demonstrate the capacity of their armaments. Father crushed the paper in his hands. An hour later he was paged to the telephone for a call from the District Attorney’s office in Manhattan. That afternoon, borne by Mother’s anxious good wishes, he climbed aboard the train for New York.
35
ven 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.