Another thing that must not be forgotten is the “dramatic” attempt to blow up St. Patrick’s Cathedral last month, and all the deep plots to destroy the rich men of that city—what was it the headlines said? Everybody of normal intelligence who read those headlines suspected a police frame-up—which it proved to be. The psychology of the police is something I don’t understand, let alone being able to write about it so that any one else will understand. So I will quote the story of this quite unbelievable crime—police crime, I mean—as it appeared in The Masses. (The Masses, by the way, is one of the magazines indispensable to the living of an intelligent life). The story is called “Putting One over on Woods”:
When Commissioner Woods took office as head of the New York police force a year ago, he brought with him some enlightened ideas about the relation of the police to the public. A week before a meeting had been held at Union Square which by police interference had been turned into a bloody riot. A week later another Union Square meeting took place, with the police under orders to “let them talk.” The meeting passed off peaceably.
Thus the enlightened views of the new commissioner of police were vindicated. The right of free speech, and of free opinion, was conceded as not being a menace to civilization.
But a police force which is enabled to exist and enjoy its peculiar privileges by virtue of protecting the public against imaginary dangers, could not see its position undermined in this way. It was necessary to persuade the public that Socialists, Anarchists, and I. W. W.’s were plotting murder and destruction. The public was prone to accept this melodramatic view, but Commissioner Woods, being an intelligent man, was inclined to be cynical. So it became necessary to “put one over on Woods.”
They framed it up in the regular police fashion. A clever young Italian detective named Pulignano, it appears from the evidence, was promised a raise of salary and a medal if he would engineer a bomb-plot. Pulignano got hold of two Italian boys—not anarchists or socialists, but religious fanatics—and urged them on to blow up St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He planned the deed, bought the materials of destruction for them, and shamed them when they wanted to pull out of the plot the night before. The next morning, at great risk to an innocent public, the bomb was carried into the cathedral, lighted, and then the dozens of policemen and detectives, disguised as scrubwomen, etc., rushed in to save civilization.
And Woods fell for it. He swallowed the whole sensational business. They have got him. He is their dupe, and henceforth their faithful tool.
Reaction is in the saddle. “All radicals to be expelled from the city,” says a headline. A card catalogue of I. W. W. sympathizers. Socialism under the official ban. Free speech doomed.
So they hope. At the least it means that the fight has for the lovers of liberty begun again. But one wonders a little about Arthur Woods. He is on their side now—the apologist of as infamous and criminal an agent provocateur as ever sent a foolish boy to the gallows. But will Woods fail to see how he has been used by the police in this latest attempt to crush freedom in the interest of a privileged group? Is he as much a fool as they think?
Giovannitti’s Italian magazine, Il Fuoco, states that the bomb was made of caps and gravel—the kind of thing children use on the fourth of July. I know that Mother Earth has started a fund to prevent the two boys from being railroaded. Will there never be an end of these ghastly things?...
As too much light may blind the vision, so too much intellect may hinder the understanding.