The Conquest of America: Dystopian Classic. Moffett Cleveland
Chapter V.
General von Hindenburg Teaches New York City a Lesson
On May 24, 1921, the situation of New York City was seen to be desperate, and most of the newspapers, even those that had clamoured loudest for resistance and boasted of American valour and resourcefulness, now admitted that the metropolis must submit to a German occupation.
Even the women among the public officials and political leaders were inclined to a policy of nonresistance. General Wood was urged to surrender the city and avoid the horrors of bombardment; but the commander replied that his first duty was to defend the territory of the United States, and that every day he could keep the enemy isolated on Long Island was a day gained for the permanent defences that were frantically organising all over the country.
It was vital, too, that the immense stores of gold and specie in the vaults of the Federal Reserve and other great New York banks should be safely transported to Chicago.
All day and all night, automobile trucks, operated under orders from William G. McAdoo, Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank, loaded with millions and millions of gold, passed unprotected and almost unheeded through the crowded section between Wall Street and the Grand Central Station. The people stared at them dumbly. They knew what was going on. They knew they could have a fortune by reaching out their hands. But at this moment, with their eternities in their eyes, they had no thought of gold. Hour after hour the work went on. Finally, subway trains and street cars were pressed into service as treasure-carriers.
By night $800,000,000 had started West and the next morning Chicago was the financial capital of America.
At midnight General Wood gave final orders for resistance to the last gun and the last man; and, when early the next morning the German general again sent officers with a flag of truce demanding the surrender of Manhattan Island, Wood’s reply was a firm refusal. He tried, however, to gain time in negotiations; and a few hours later I accompanied a delegation of American staff officers with counter-proposals across the East River in a launch. I can see von Hindenburg now, in his high boots and military coat, as he received the American officers at the foot of the shattered Brooklyn Bridge. A square massive head with close-cropped white hair, brushed straight back from a broad forehead. And sad searching eyes—wonderful eyes.
“Then you refuse to surrender? You think you can fight?” the Field Marshal demanded.
At which the ranking American officer, stung by his arrogance, declared that they certainly did think they could fight, and would prove it.
“Ah! So!” said von Hindenburg, and he glanced at a gun crew who were loading a half-ton projectile into an 11.1-inch siege-gun that stood on the pavement. “Which is the Woolworth Building?” he asked, pointing across the river.
“The tallest one, Excellency—the one with the Gothic lines and gilded cornices,” replied one of his officers.
“Ah, yes, of course. I recognise it from the pictures. It’s beautiful. Gentlemen,”—he addressed the American officers,—“I am offering twenty-dollar gold pieces to this gun crew if they bring down that tower with a single shot. Now, then, careful!...
“Ready!”
We covered our ears as the shot crashed forth, and a moment later the most costly and graceful tower in the world seemed to stagger on its base. Then, as the thousand-pound shell, striking at the twenty-seventh story, exploded deep inside, clouds of yellow smoke poured out through the crumbling walls, and the huge length of twenty-four stories above the jagged wound swayed slowly toward the east, and fell as one piece, flinging its thousands of tons of stone and steel straight across the width of Broadway, and down upon the grimy old Post Office Building opposite.
“Sehr gut!” nodded von Hindenburg. “It’s amusing to see them fall. Suppose we try another? What’s that one to the left?”
“The Singer Building, Excellency,” answered the officer.
“Good! Are you ready?”
Then the tragedy was repeated, and six hundred more were added to the death toll, as the great tower crumbled to earth.
“Now, gentlemen,”—von Hindenburg turned again to the American officers with a tiger gleam in his eyes,—“you see what we have done with two shots to two of your tallest and finest buildings. At this time to-morrow, with God’s help, we shall have a dozen guns along this bank of the river, ready for whatever may be necessary. And two of our Parsevals, each carrying a ton of dynamite, will float over New York City. I give you until twelve o’clock to-morrow to decide whether you will resist or capitulate. At twelve o’clock we begin firing.”
Our instructions were to return at once in the launch by the shortest route to the Battery, where automobiles were waiting to take us to General Wood’s headquarters in the Metropolitan Tower. I can close my eyes to-day and see once more those pictures of terror and despair that were spread before us as we whirled through the crowded streets behind the crashing hoofs of a cavalry escort. The people knew who we were, where we had been, and they feared what our message might be.
Broadway, of course, was impassable where the mass of red brick from the Singer Building filled the great canyon as if a glacier had spread over the region, or as if the lava from a man-made Aetna had choked this great thoroughfare.
Through the side streets we snatched hasty impressions of unforgetable scenes. Into the densely populated regions around Grand and Houston Streets the evicted people of Brooklyn had poured. And into the homes of these miserably poor people, where you can walk for blocks without hearing a word in the English tongue, Brooklyn’s derelicts had been absorbed by tens of thousands.
Here came men and women from all parts of Manhattan, the rich in their automobiles, the poor on foot, bearing bundles of food and eager to help in the work of humanity. And some, alas, were busy with the sinister business of looting.
Above Fourteenth Street we had glimpses of similar scenes and I learned later that almost every family in Manhattan received some Brooklyn homeless ones into their care. New York—for once—was hospitable.
In Madison Square the people waited in silence as we approached the great white tower from which the Commander of the Army of the East, unmindful of the fate of the Woolworth and the Singer buildings, watched for further moves from the fortified shores of Brooklyn. Not a shout greeted our arrival at the marble entrance facing the square, not even that murmur of expectancy which sweeps over a tense gathering. The people knew the answer of von Hindenburg. They had read it, as had all the world for miles around, in the cataclysm of the plunging towers.
New York must surrender or perish!
Scarcely three blocks away, the Committee of Public Safety, numbering one hundred, sat in agitated council at the Madison Square Garden, while enormous crowds, shouting and murmuring, surged outside, where five hundred armed policemen tried vainly to quell the spirit of riot that was in the air. Far into the night the discussion lasted, while overhead in the purple-black sky floated the two Parsevals, ominous visitors, their search-lights playing over the helpless city that was to feel their wrath on the morrow unless it yielded.
Meantime, on the square platform within the great Moorish building, a hundred leading citizens of Manhattan, including the ablest and the richest and a few of the most radical, spoke their minds, while thousands of men and women, packed in the galleries and the aisles, listened heart-sick for some gleam of comfort.
And there was none.
Among the Committee of Public Safety I recognised J. P. Morgan, Jacob H. Sehiff, John D. Rockefeller, Charles F. Murphy, Andrew Carnegie, Vincent Astor, Cardinal Farley, Colonel Jacob Ruppert, Nicholas Murray Butler, S. Stanwood Menken, Paul M. Warburg, John Finley, Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont, James E. Gaffney, Ida Tarbell, Norman Hapgood, William Randolph Hearst, Senator Whitman, Bernard Ridder, Frank A. Munsey, Henry Morgenthau, Elihu Root, Henry