Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  Given the fierce rivalries among the dozen leading New York newspapers, it was astounding how near-unanimously positive remained the coverage of the new Police Board. “This [late night] work, Mr. Roosevelt is now performing … should win him the gratitude of every law-abiding citizen,” stated the New York Recorder. “It means greater security for life and property … the meaning of this intense energy and vigilance on Mr. Roosevelt’s part is that the police officer who desires to keep his place on the force must do his duty.”

  A cartoon ran of cowboy Roosevelt lassoing sleeping cops. “Mr. Roosevelt expects his dream of discipline to become a solid fact,” stated the New York Advertiser. “There will be no politics, no pull, no anything that can make a subordinate expect favors from his superiors.”

  Pal Jake Riis wrote a worshipful piece for the magazine The Outlook. “It is a long time since a New York policeman has been brought into contact with a gentleman so intent upon doing his work and making others do theirs.” Riis, along with the editors, praised Roosevelt for his zeal, his honesty, his efficiency, his writing, his character. “He is altogether a fine representative of the best type of the contemporary American.”

  Riding high in this honeymoon of favorable coverage, Roosevelt decided that the board should pursue the reform agenda “to the handle,” as he liked to say, evoking the image of a knife thrust all the way in.

  TR had plenty of political capital and newspaper backing; he could use it however he liked. His repeated words to the captains and to the press represented no mere political puffery. He meant them. He was opting for doctrinaire enforcement of all laws and, as a first crucial experiment, he chose to order the police to shut down all saloons on Sundays.

  It seemed a Herculean order in a city that liked to drink.

  heodore Roosevelt rarely drank more than a glass of white wine at dinner parties; he would allow himself a flute of champagne at those formal public tributes at, say, Delmonico’s. Already animated, he perhaps became a tad more so, according to friends, but no credible witness ever saw him drunk on the streets. He despised beer and red wine and never rushed to a saloon for a cocktail.

  Embattled ex–police captain Big Bill Devery no longer drank alcohol at all. Neither did former police chief Thomas Byrnes. Nor did most of the top men of Tammany Hall despite their Irish surnames.

  But by New York standards, Roosevelt and these Irishmen were the exceptions.

  New York City in the 1890s was a hard-drinking town, a place where a man was never far from one of its 8,000 saloons and hundreds of hotels and restaurants.

  An executive at a large local brewery estimated that he and fellow brewers delivered 460,000 quarter-kegs (nearly eight gallons each) of beer a week in Manhattan. That works out to about twenty pints or so per week per man and woman over the age of sixteen in the city.

  Roosevelt was aiming to cut off that tap on Sundays.

  New Yorkers also drank cheap California wines, which outsold imports five to one, according to Bonfort’s Wine and Spirit Circular. They sipped Hungarian and German wines far more often than French or Italian.

  They drank ten-cent shots of rye whiskey from Pennsylvania and Kentucky, shipped by barrel and blended, bottled, and watered down in New York. Among foreign imports, Holland Gin outsold the top Scotches such as Sanderson’s Mountain Dew.

  Roosevelt was corking all that on the Lord’s Day.

  He was ordering the mostly Irish and German police force to tell their kinsmen to skip the saloon on Sundays. He was sentencing workingmen to a sober Sunday with their families, on a day when the Sabbath law already forbade theater performances (except religious displays), all professional sports including baseball and football, circuses, minstrelsy, boxing, horse racing, “jugglers, acrobats … and rope-dancers.”

  Roosevelt intended to end the police blackmail and show the force that absolutely no bribes or blindness would be tolerated. Right from the start, he tried to frame it not as a crusade against liquor but rather against blackmail and selective enforcement of the law. Over the coming months, he would say loudly and repeatedly that he didn’t make the laws, he enforced them. Enforcing all laws was right; and ignoring any law was wrong. Black and white. Good and evil.

  Many parched New Yorkers, craving a beer, didn’t care to parse the distinctions.

  Another less publicized factor clearly played into Roosevelt’s decision. His magazine articles reveal that he knew many saloons acted as unofficial political clubhouses for Tammany Hall; therefore he also knew it would mark a fringe benefit for the Republican and reform parties if hundreds of saloons went out of business due to lost Sunday sales.

  “The saloons form on the whole the most potent factor in the political life of those Districts where the population is the most congested, where the people are poorest and most ignorant, and where the evils of machine domination are most acutely felt,” wrote Roosevelt in his brief book New York, for the “Historic Towns” series.

  “In consequence, the saloon-keeper is, nine times out of ten, a more or less influential politician. In Tammany Hall a very large proportion of the leaders are, or have been, saloon-keepers.”

  Roosevelt once again summoned police chief Conlin and told him—yet more forcefully—the police should now try very hard to close 8,000 saloons on Sundays across New York City, even though that would, in effect, deprive more than a million New Yorkers of beer on their only day off. “I do not deal with public sentiment,” he wrote in a statement released to the New York Evening Sun. “I deal with the law.” He promised: “If it proves impossible to enforce it, it will only be after the experiment of breaking many a captain … has first been tried.”

  This initiative may be seen as the official start of the civics experiment of dropping an incorruptible, by-the-book, no-compromises commissioner into the rough-and-tumble playground of bribe-happy New York. Commented one pro-reform magazine: “New York has never been so shocked and surprised in all its two hundred and fifty years of existence.”

  On Sunday, June 23, 1895, more than 2,000 policemen stood like slack sentries outside about half the saloons of New York. Another few hundred officers in plainclothes scattered to other watering holes.

  The temperature hit a mid-afternoon high of eighty degrees; the sweltering humidity of 85 percent made the torpid air feel like the “inside of a cow’s mouth,” as the expression went. Parched men wandered the streets in search of a beer. They quietly knocked at side doors of their neighborhood bars but most received no answer. Many descended to the Bowery, figuring those Tammany types would never cave, but a flood of bluecoats had already shut the district.

  An owners’ sign of surrender on a Sunday was raising the shades so the police could peer inside. A disgusted reporter discovered more than half the Bowery bars had shades raised by noon and dirty floors exposed to unwonted sunlight.

  Other drinkers tried the famed German brewery district, 74th to 94th Street on the East Side but found policemen at the doors of the biggest joints, such as Colonel Ruppert’s. The more desperate fled to Coney Island, where bartenders eagerly served beer and whiskey, and the cops of Brooklyn—still a separate city until the 1898 Consolidation Act—ignored it all. “The Excise Law didn’t bother us and we didn’t bother the Excise Law,” explained a sergeant on duty at the Surf Avenue police station. (The New York State excise law forbade the selling of liquor in saloons from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. daily and all twenty-four hours of Sunday throughout the state.)

  Many New York City voters deeply resented the Republican majority in the state legislature imposing its dour ways on the more convivial city. The respected Brooklyn Eagle estimated that 95 percent of New York City residents favored saloons being open at least part of the day on Sunday. “This city is ruled entirely by the hayseed legislators at Albany,” groused George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall. “The hayseeds think we are like the Indians to the National government—that is, wards of the State, who don’t know how to look after ourselves and have to be taken ca
re of by the Republicans of St. Lawrence, Ontario and other backwoods counties.”

  The original law dated back to 1857 but was revised many times over the years. Roosevelt himself, while an assemblyman in 1884, weighed in on the debate, opposing full Prohibition as “impractical”—being opposed by 19/20ths of the population—but he did favor a higher annual excise tax for bars selling liquor ($500) than for those offering only beer and wine ($100). He also drew a distinction between men having a beer while sitting down to a family meal in a restaurant or hotel as opposed to men standing at the bar tossing back shots of liquor.

  That distinction—shared by other legislators—eventually made it into the revised law, and the city’s hotels were now permitted to sell drinks to guests dining in the hotel restaurants or in their rooms on Sundays; also, the law didn’t specifically address private clubs.

  This pair of loopholes permitted the city’s wealthiest, and the affluent out-of-towners staying at the Waldorf or the Fifth Avenue Hotel, to drink outside their homes on Sundays. For the poor, Sunday was a day of enforced rest.

  Manhattan that Sunday, June 23, was dry, but not bone dry. Not all the pubs, wine rooms, and saloons submitted meekly to the crackdown. Many owners of the joints who were lucky enough not to have a bluecoat guarding the block tried to sneak loyal customers in at the side door. The “side entrance,” “family entrance,” or “ladies’ entrance” was usually a simple, plain door up the block leading to a back room, with tables, chairs, maybe a piano. Wives entered there looking for wayward husbands; during rare police crackdowns, owners could wave recognizable regulars in and screen out temperance spies and undercover cops. Most hoped this Sabbath day marked a temporary display of virtue.

  The commissioner himself spent the Sunday at his country estate, Sagamore Hill, at Oyster Bay, enjoying the breezes off Long Island Sound and playing with the “bunnies,” as he called his youngest children. “Archie loves me better than anything in the world. Ted is so sweet; indeed they all are dear,” Roosevelt wrote his sister. One Roosevelt niece, Corinne Robinson Alsop, recalled that the cousins adored “Uncle Theodore” and that one of his favorite games was to lead them, from toddler to teen, in traversing a dead straight line over all obstacles, no matter whether that meant climbing up a tree or over a barn. Dead straight. He also taught swimming by a swamp-the-canoe-and-rescue-the-sinkers method. His letters, even at his busiest, are filled with anecdotes about the children, whom he clearly loved. In calendar year 1895, from June on, he would spend every Sunday there except for a handful.

  All day Sunday, June 23, a steady stream of rough-looking workingmen headed to the side door of popular Callahan’s at 12 Chatham Square, at the southern tip of the Bowery, touching Chinatown. The massive twelve-foot-tall front doors were shut under the black-and-gold marquee that touted “Lager Beer, Ales and Porter.” Next door stood Callahan’s Progress Hotel, “Rooms 25 cents.”

  Late that night, the bouncer opened the side door to a familiar face, when that familiar face came flying inward, followed by a stranger pushing him headlong forward.

  Once inside, the stranger, a plainclothes rookie cop, found himself in the middle of the large square barroom, where he saw about forty men sitting around drinking. The clink of glasses and the laughter stopped abruptly. He heard the door slam behind him and the deadbolt slide into place.

  Edward J. Bourke, a twenty-eight-year-old navy veteran, a by-the-book new officer recently sworn in by Roosevelt himself, had already raided Callahan’s the previous Sunday, and while he was hauling the bartender under the shadows of the nearby Bowery El, the man had snarled: “Look here, you ______-______, the next time, you come here, we’ll bust your head open with an ax!”

  Bourke took that as an invitation; he was back. He grabbed the bartender by the collar and started wrenching him along the bar. Just as Bourke was moving his prisoner toward the door, a squat, angry man blocked his way.

  “Who the hell are you?” roared Mike Callahan, the owner. “King” Callahan had already been arrested several times for assaulting cops and detectives. The charges had always disappeared, since Callahan was an ex-assemblyman and a favored Tammany Hall stalwart whose cheap “Progress Hotel” next door could deliver 300 “floater population” votes to the Democrats.

  Officer Bourke informed Callahan that if he interfered any further he would arrest him also. “You ______-_____. You arrest me!” Callahan punched Bourke hard in the face.

  In that punch to the jaw, Tammany Hall Democrats began fighting back against Roosevelt’s Sabbatarian crackdown.

  Bourke reeled backwards and was disturbed to see Callahan’s rough clientele picking up beer mugs and circling in, “getting ready,” as he later recalled, “to play a prominent part in my funeral.” Bourke wrestled Callahan to the sand-strewn floor. The officer purposely rolled over so that the bar owner was on top of him, “clinging so tightly to his burly frame, for the reason that while he was held thus, no beer glass, nor big feet, nor brawny fists could reach me.”

  While they scrapped, someone in the crowd yelled: “Axe the cop.” Bourke managed to get a hand free and he pulled his revolver from his hip pocket and kicked Callahan away. “The first man who interferes, I’ll shoot down like a dog,” he shouted.

  Officer Bourke dragged his cursing prisoners outside into the darkness. He blew his cylindrical whistle to call for help. The bar owner suddenly grabbed Bourke’s necktie, and started yanking and twisting it. The bar crowd in the doorway was cheering. Bourke was losing air and couldn’t pry Callahan’s fingers loose so he smashed Callahan on the head with the butt of his pistol … twice. When the other officer showed up, he found the bar owner dazed and bleeding. The pair hauled Callahan and his bartender along the dark narrow streets to the jail at the Elizabeth Street precinct house.

  Callahan slept down in the jail; Bourke slept up in the barracks and the next morning, Bourke hauled his two prisoners before a police court judge at the Tombs. “King” Callahan, bruised and with a “plaster” bandage on his forehead, expected an easy ride. Tammany Hall sent a couple of neighborhood heavyweights to speed Callahan’s exit from justice: congressman-elect James Walsh and “Big Florrie” Sullivan, cousin of state senator Tim “Dry Dollar” Sullivan. They crowded around Clerk Solomon Rosenthal, also of Tammany Hall.

  The trio helped Callahan skip the line of usual Monday morning drunks and brawlers, and Clerk Rosenthal’s hearing seemed to give out when officer Bourke said he was adding a felony assault charge against Callahan on top of the excise misdemeanor. Rosenthal guided Bourke to speak to Judge Voorhis, who bounced him back to the clerk. The rookie cop Bourke was wavering, especially when he heard Callahan mutter he planned to charge the policeman with assault. Bourke was ready to skip the second charge, but then Lincoln Steffens, who happened to be covering arraignments, relayed to him that Police Commissioner Roosevelt had heard of his arrest and was hugely impressed.

  Another officer, overhearing the exchange, told Bourke that with the president of the Police Board’s backing, he should push the assault charge again. Rosenthal reluctantly did the paperwork, and Judge Voorhis approved assault charges and tripled the bail to $3,000 (which was paid by an uptown brewery).

  Roosevelt, soon after arriving at Mulberry Street on Monday morning, announced that he was indeed delighted that a greenhorn cop had taken down a Bowery king and that political pull, especially Tammany pull, had failed. “All this talk about the impossibility of enforcing the [Sunday drinking] law is all nonsense,” he told a reporter. “It can be done and it will be done.”

  This arrest sent the unmistakable message to the whole city that the board was not like other Police Boards. Editorialists started flinging the words Sahara and New York together. Roosevelt intended to press the excise board to revoke the licenses of places like Callahan’s.

  The president of the board once again called in the police chief, inspectors, and the entire press corps from across the street.

  “I do not thank you nor any
one for doing his duty but I wish to express my gratification at what was done. It reflects credit on all of you. It is a great pleasure for me to say this. It seems almost ungracious to say more but I am convinced that you will understand me when I say that yesterday set a standard below which we must not go … Through you and your subordinates, I want to have it understood that the excise law, like any other law, ‘goes’ in New York.”

  Chief Conlin attempted to reply. “I can assure you that we will not fail—” Roosevelt cut him off. “I am sure of it. You have set the low water mark yesterday. It is good. We will do better by and by.”

  The next day, TR wanted to personally congratulate young officer Bourke, and was impatiently waiting for him at headquarters. But Roosevelt had to leave to catch the 11 a.m. train to Boston; he had agreed to attend his first Harvard reunion in fifteen years since graduation. He bounded down the stairs and bumped right into Bourke, his face still bruised and puffy. After hearing a breathless version of the fight story and “final arrest of the pugnacious proprietor of Never Close Up,” Roosevelt praised the rookie—“You have done very well indeed!” And he promised: “This board is behind you, always remember that.” That promise would come in handy later when Roosevelt sat as judge and swiftly dismissed the brutality charges brought by a friend of Callahan against Bourke.

  The three other board members, though cast in the shade by Roosevelt, were working hard for reform as well. Commissioner Andrew, with help from Parker, presided all day on June 12, 14, 15, 18, 21, and 22 over the trial of Captain Eakins for not closing the Washington Square brothels. Roosevelt rarely lingered in the room, as the testimony often grew quite salacious.

  PARKHURST AGENT: WE GOT INTO THE BEDROOM AND SHE SAYS: “How do you want it, French or American?” With that she pushed me down on the bed and unbuttoned my pants quick. And I says “I am too full [i.e., drunk] now; I don’t want any just now.”