Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow [96]
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 officers 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 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.
Goldman did not know of course that one of the Coalhouse band was the young man she had pitied as the bourgeois lover of an infamous whore. In front of the sergeant’s desk at police headquarters on Centre Street, she made a statement to reporters as she was booked for conspiracy. I am sorry for the firemen in Westchester. I wish they had not been killed. But the Negro was tormented into action, so I understand, by the cruel death of his fiancée, an innocent young woman. As an anarchist, I applaud his appropriation of the Morgan property. Mr. Morgan has done some appropriating of his own. At this the reporters shouted questions. Is he a follower of yours, Emma? Do you know him? Did you have anything to do with this? Goldman smiled and shook her head. The oppressor is wealth, my friends. Wealth is the oppressor. Coalhouse Walker did not need Red Emma to learn that. He needed only to suffer.
Within an hour extra editions of the newspapers were on the streets featuring the news of the arrest. Goldman was liberally quoted. Whitman wondered if it had been wise to give her a forum. But he did derive one clear benefit from the move. The president of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Booker T. Washington, was in the city to do some fund-raising. He was delivering an address downtown at the great hall of Cooper Union on Astor Place and he departed from his prepared text to deplore Goldman’s remarks and condemn the actions of Coalhouse Walker. A reporter called Whitman to tell him of this. Immediately the District Attorney got in touch with the great educator, asking if he would come to the scene and use his moral authority to resolve the crisis. I will, Booker T. Washington replied. A police escort was sent downtown and Washington, apologizing to the hosts of the luncheon in his honor, left to ringing applause.
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Booker T. Washington was at this time the most famous Negro in the country. Since the founding of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama he had become the leading exponent of vocational training for colored people. He was against all Negro agitation on questions of political and social equality. He had written a best-selling book about his life, a struggle up from slavery to self-realization, and about his ideas, which called for the Negro’s advancement with the help of his white neighbor. He counseled friendship between the races and spoke of the promise of the future. His views had been endorsed by four Presidents and most of the governors of Southern states. Andrew Carnegie had given him money for his school and Harvard had awarded him an honorary degree. He wore a black suit and homburg. He stood in the middle of 36th Street, a sturdy handsome man with all the pride of his achievement in the way he held himself, and he called out to Coalhouse to let him in the Library. He disdained the use of the megaphone. He was an orator and his voice was strong. There was nothing in his manner to indicate any other possibility than that the desperadoes would grant him his demand. I am coming in now, he called. And he stepped around the crater in the street and walked through the iron gates. He climbed the steps between the stone lionesses and stood in the shadow of the arched portico between