Whitman called for the plans of the Library from the architectural firm of Charles McKim and Stanford White. After a study of these he authorized a reconnaissance by a single athletic patrolman who was to gain access to the Library roof and look in the domed skylight over the central hall and the East Room to determine how many niggers were in there. A patrolman was found and dispatched through the garden that separated the Library from the Morgan residence. Whitman and the other officials waited in the improvised headquarters. No sooner had the officer entered the garden that the sky flashed and there was a loud report followed by an agonized scream. Whitman went pale. They’ve got the goddamn place mined, he said. An officer came in. From what anyone could tell, the patrolman in the garden was dead, which was his only bit of luck because nobody could have gone in to get him out of there. The police officials were grim. They looked at Whitman. He now knew that the numerical strength of Coalhouse’s band was not crucial intelligence. But he called the press around and announced that they numbered a dozen and perhaps as many as twenty men.
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n the hours following, District Attorney Whitman conferred with several advisers. The colonel in command of the New York militia in Manhattan urged a full-scale military action. This so alarmed one of Mr. Morgan’s curators, a tall nervous man with a pince-nez who held his hands clasped at his chest as if he were a diva at the Metropolitan, that he began to tremble. Do you know the value of Mr. Morgan’s acquisitions! We had four Shakespeare folios! We have a Gutenberg Bible on vellum! There are seven hundred incunabula and five-page letter of George Washington’s! The colonel waved his finger in the air. If we don’t take care of that son of a bitch, if we don’t do in these and cut off his balls, you’ll have every nigger in the country at your throat! Then where will you be with your Bibles? Whitman paced back and forth. A city engineer told him that if they could repair the broken main they might be able to tunnel in through the Library foundations. How long would that take, Whitman asked. Two days, the engineer said. Someone else thought of poison gas. That might get him, Whitman agreed. Of course every one else on the East Side would die, too. He was beginning to feel fretful. The Library was built of fitted marble blocks. You couldn’t get a knife blade between the stones. The place was wired for dynamite and a pair of watchful coon eyes looked out of every window.
Whitman now had the good sense to ask for ideas from the police officers in the room. An old sergeant with many years on the street, a veteran of Hell’s Kitchen and the Tenderloin said The crucial thing, sir, is to get this Coalhouse Walker engaged in conversation. With an armed maniac, talking calms him down. You get him taking and keep him talking and then you have a wedge into the situation. Whitman, who was not without courage, took a megaphone and stepped into the street and shouted to Coalhouse that he wanted to speak with him. He waved his straw hat. If there’s a problem, he cried, we can solve it together. He repeated such sentiments for several minutes. Then for a moment the small window adjacent to the front entrance opened. A cylindrical object came flying into the street. Whitman flinched and the men in the house behind him dropped to the floor. To everyone’s astonishment there was no explosion. Whitman retreated to the brownstone and only after several minutes did someone using binoculars make the object out as a silver tankard with a lid. An officer ran into the street, picked up the tankard and sprinted back up the brownstone stairs. The object, now dented, was a medieval drinking stein of silver with a hunting scene in relief. The curator asked to see it and advised that it was from the seventeenth century and had belonged to Frederick, the Elector of Saxony. I’m really please to hear that, Whitman said. The curator then raised the lid and found inside a piece of paper with a telephone number that he recognized as his own.
The District Attorney himself took the telephone. He sat on the edge of a table and held the speaker in his left hand and the receiver attached by a cord in his right. Hello, Mr. Walker, he said heartily, this is District Attorney Whitman. He was stunned by the calm businesslike tone of the black man. My demands are the same, said the voice on the phone. I want my car returned in just the condition it was when my way was blocked. You cannot bring back my Sarah, but I want for her life the life of Fire Chief Conklin. Coalhouse, Whitman said, you know that I as an officer of the court could never give over to you for sentencing outside the law a man who has not had due process. That puts me in an untenable position. What I can promise is to investigate the case and see what statutes apply, if any. But I can’t do anything for you until you’re out of there. Coalhouse Walker seemed not to have heard. I will give you twenty-four hours, he said, and then I will blow up this place and everything in it. And he rang off. Hello, Whitman said. Hello? He ordered the operator to get the number again. There was no answer.
Whitman next sent off a telegram to Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish in Newport. He hoped she read the newspapers. His eyes, which tended to bulge when he was excited, were now quite prominent. His face was florid. He removed his jacket and unbuttoned his vest. He asked one of the patrolmen to find him some whiskey. He knew that red Emma Goldman, the anarchist, was in New York. He ordered her arrested. He stared out the window of the brownstone. The day was overcast and unnaturally dark. The air was closed and a fine rain made the streets glisten. The lights of the city were on. The compact white Grecian palace across the street shone in the rain. It looked very peaceful. At this moment Whitman came to the realization that the deference shown by Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo and everyone else in the Police Department had tricked him into identifying himself with a politically dangerous situation. He had on one hand to guard the interests of Morgan, whose various Simon Pure reform committees of wealthy Republican Protestants had funded his investigations of corruption in the Democratic Catholic Police Department. He had on the other hand to preserve his own reputation as a tough D.A who dealt handily with the criminal classes. For that nothing would do but the speediest unhorsing of the colored man. A glass of whiskey was brought to him. Just this one, to calm my nerves, he said to himself.
In the meantime police knocked at the door of Emma Goldman on West 13th Street. Goldman was not surprised. She always kept packed and ready to go a small bag with a change of clothes and a book to read. Ever since the assassination of President McKinley she had been routinely accused of fomenting by word or deed most of the acts of violence or strikes or riots that occurred in America. There was a national obsession of law enforcement officials to connect her to every case just as a matter of principle whether they believed she was guilty or not. She put on her hat, picked up her bag and strode out of the door. She rode in the police wagon with a young patrolman. You won’t believe this, she said to him, but I look forward to a spell in jail. It is the one place where I can get some rest.