More Powerful Than Dynamite by Thai Jones

Author:Thai Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walker Books
Published: 2012-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

The Tarrytown train station.

* * *

WORKMEN AT POCANTICO HILLS reported glimpsing “a pale and haggard” Rockefeller on the occasions when he left his father’s mansion. The chances to see him were rare; he had hardly strayed more than a few hundred feet from the house in weeks. He had spent years meticulously landscaping the grounds, choosing the fountains and statuary, making the gardens into places of comfort and introspection. With Caron and his threatened anarchist militia expected hourly, that serenity had vanished and the family estate had become a militarized encampment. Four guards, armed with automatic pistols, were stationed at every gate; rifles were stacked and ready in the guardhouse. Sixteen of Tarrytown’s new special deputies were posted to Pocantico Hills on rotating twenty-four-hour shifts. Burns detectives loitered in the shadows.

Letters continued to appear, and not all of them offered solicitous encouragement:

You fooled us last Sunday + the Sunday before but you wont fool us much longer we will get you & your father yet Maybe next Sunday in Tarrytown, Yonkers, or wherever you go look out.

I.W.W.

Dear Sir,

I have fully made up my mind to assassinate you … As I am an expert rifle shot I guess I can pick you off regardless how many detectives or guards you have around you …

Yours, A Sufferer of Capital

These were filed away, or passed on to the Burns investigators. But letters from sympathetic strangers could be just as upsetting. People he had never met offered to commit violence in his cause. Several writers offered unsolicited advice, almost all of it corrupt and repellent. A businessman informed Junior that he was on the verge of purchasing Century—“the most influential, and in many respects the greatest, magazine in the country”—and in exchange for Rockefeller financing, he could promise sympathetic coverage of the Colorado events. “There is such tremendous pressure brought on writers just now to inflame class hatred,” the author explained, “that it might be worth while to have a big sane organ voice the truth.”

Another proposition came from Isaac Russell, the New York Times correspondent who had drawn the unwelcome assignment of insinuating himself among the protesters. “As a reporter for the Times,” he clarified, apologetically, “I have had, of course, to keep in close touch with all the various groups who have created disorder hereabouts for several months.” They, in turn, had come to accept him. Considering Russell a friend and “an honest man,” Upton Sinclair had even entrusted him with secret correspondence divulging some of the future plans of the Free Silence League. Now the reporter forwarded this document to Rockefeller. “I have not shown the letter to anyone,” Russell wrote to Junior, “and I shall never tell anyone that I have sent it on to you.”

After all these months of passively accepting the facts that Bowers presented to him, Junior had finally lost faith in the Colorado executives. He began to cultivate alternate lines of intelligence, receiving telegrams from trusted sources in Denver that gave a more critical view of the operators’ actions.

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