Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  LAWYER: When you did touch these women, what part of their person did you touch?

  PARKHURST AGENT: Their breast.

  LAWYER: If you didn’t want to have intercourse with them, why did you touch their breast?

  PARKHURST AGENT: We have got to make a bluff sometimes.

  The veteran police lawyer representing the disgraced captain aimed to drag out the case and force testimony lurid enough to make the board think twice before pressing charges against a captain wanting to retire.

  The ushering out of Eakins was taking months. Meanwhile ex-captain Devery was fighting his way back in, with the help of his high-priced lawyer Colonel James. The city’s corporation counsel, Francis Scott, advised on Tuesday, June 25, that it would be fruitless to appeal a recent Court of Common Pleas ruling reinstating Devery. He pointed out that the judges had called the two key witnesses, Rhoda Sanford and Katie Schubert, “notorious liars” and had stated that a defendant in America had a right to attend his own departmental trial. The board nonetheless voted to delay restoring Devery. (It would reinstate him on July 19, give him $2,237 for ten months’ back pay, then promptly suspend him over a pending criminal charge of accepting a $100 construction site bribe.)

  To offset the disciplinary trials, the board sought to reward heroism. It handed out an award and promoted lanky redheaded patrolman William H. Duggan, who had leaped into the Fourth Avenue railway tunnel to catch a burglar. It also honored harbor policeman Michael Gorman, who had saved his twenty-fifth drowning victim.

  Roosevelt headed off to Boston, and the New York World prepared a little mischief. The newspaper staff knew that Roosevelt had Harvard meetings there at the Hotel Brunswick on Wednesday, so it seemed safe to assume that TR would not return in time for what was now his regular Thursday midnight ramble. (He had gone the previous week and caught Officer Bill Rath mid-slurp in an oyster house.)

  Pulitzer’s editors decided to fill that Thursday gap. They assigned cartoonist Walt McDougall, who resembled Roosevelt in age, height, mustache, spectacles, and most importantly, horse teeth. McDougall was the proper imp for the job.

  He routinely inflated J. P. Morgan’s nose to such gargantuan proportions that the plutocrat stooped to beg mercy from Pulitzer. (At the publisher’s request, the cartoonist had agreed “to moderate” his “zeal.”) His later caricature of the supreme court justices landed the newspaper in such trouble that McDougall not only had to apologize but had to “listen to a lecture by one of the justices on an off day that took the wave out of my hair and made a better man of me.”

  After midnight on Thursday, McDougall donned a floppy hat and set off with a reporter to walk down Sixth Avenue. He affixed a “wide toothsome grin” to his face and steered toward as many cops as possible. He found it “a very surprising sensation to be treated with such overpowering courtesy and respect” by large men who usually told him to “move on!” The cartoonist admitted misgivings about deceiving policemen but then he reasoned that he couldn’t be blamed for being “handsome” like Roosevelt.

  McDougall found his biggest problem in spooking cops was finding any cops actually walking their beats: “I had begun to think the police were on strike.” He buoyed himself with the thought that Roosevelt outweighed him by fifteen pounds, so the commissioner’s feet must have hurt even more than the cartoonist’s.

  McDougall, with his grin and small talk, succeeded in prying loose one cop from a bevy of adoring attractive streetwalkers. But when he walked up to two other officers, he was miffed when neither budged and both kept on chatting near a bicycle shop at Columbus Circle. They even gave him the polite brush-off, mentioning the late hour. The irritated World men decided to send the reporter accompanying McDougall circling back to try again.

  “Say, old man, do you know who that was?” he asked one of the cops.

  “Nah,” the officer [badge No. 2206] replied. “What t’ ’ell.”

  “Well, that’s ol’ Roosey out on another lark,” said the World reporter.

  “Holy smoke, is that right?” Officer No. 708 jumped as if a cannon cracker had gone off under him. “Now we are in for it.”

  “Aw, come off it,” retorted No. 2206. “I know the cove. He’s bigger than that.” Then in a less confident tone. “Say is that straight goods? Been followin’ him all the way up from the Ninth? Just my ——luck.”

  No. 708 jumped back with: “The duffer’s coming back. The cabby’s giving us the tip. Sneak, old man!” and officer No. 708 made a dash westward along Fifty-Eighth Street while No. 2206 with great dignity strolled down the avenue.

  Cartoonist McDougall and the reporter wrote up their exploits for the Sunday World. McDougall was surprised that Roosevelt bore him a grudge for the impersonation lark for almost two years, since TR had “none of the false dignity of most great men,” and “no man knew better the value of such advertising.”

  The real Roosevelt returned from Boston late Thursday quite pleased; he had been elected to Harvard’s Board of Overseers, garnering 200 votes more than several prestigious candidates such as Charles Francis Adams. “Not only all my class, but all the alumni and undergraduates gave me a royal reception,” he wrote to his sister. His New York exploits—saloon closings, midnight rambles, reform agenda—were vaulting him onto the national stage in a broader way than his gadfly years at civil service. That Friday night in Manhattan he found the energy for another midnight ramble, his fourth that month, wandering through the Tenderloin and other neighborhoods till three in the morning, catching seven cops shirking, including one walrus-sized patrolman belly up to the bar hoisting a frothy mug. The ginger ale excuse didn’t wash.

  The following morning, Saturday, at 11 a.m., several hundred angry Germans marched on City Hall. They paraded up the wide marble steps to complain directly to the mayor about the loss of their Sunday beer. Roosevelt, summoned from Mulberry Street headquarters, was rushing to City Hall to stand shoulder to shoulder with the sixty-eight-year-old mayor, but had not yet arrived there.

  The meeting had been scheduled in advance, but the size of the delegation was unexpectedly large. The Germans trailed only the Irish in terms of population, and the massive German community in New York, spreading far beyond Kleindeutschland, prized its “Continental Sunday” at the biergarten with an almost religious fervor. “They quietly sip their beer as they listen to strains of an orchestra, and between steins munch pretzels, frankfurters and sauerkraut, Limburger sandwiches and other German delicacies,” stated Zeisloft’s guidebook. “On every side are family groups, father, mother and children, all merry, all sociable, all well-behaved,” concurred another city guide. The Astors were originally German as were dozens of other leading mercantile families; the Metropolitan Opera favored performances of Wagner. There were still places in the city, such as Tompkins Square Park or the German Catholic Church on 3rd Street and Avenue A, where a passerby might overhear nothing but German.

  Fifty representatives of the German American Reform Union reached City Hall first to confront the mayor. This was no fringe political club; this organization, a part of the anti–Tammany Hall movement, had supplied the key political puzzle piece that had helped elect Mayor Strong on the Fusion ticket of reform Republicans and Democrats.

  The first speaker complained that in his campaign the mayor had promised a liberal approach to the Sunday law—such as allowing legal sales of beer and wine from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m.—but was now supporting Roosevelt’s “harsh” and “tyrannical” enforcement.

  Mayor Strong, trying to take a conciliatory tone, said he wished he could make an exception for the beer gardens but “it is impossible to discriminate” and, as consolation, he promised to lobby the legislature for a new excise law when it returned to session … six months later, on January 1.

  Sheriff Edward Tamsen, a native of Hamburg and an influential book publisher headquartered at 52 Avenue A, asked what they should do until then. The mayor, known for his “dry sense of humor,” said, “Honor the Sabbath.” Tamsen, not
amused, asked, “What’s next? Shutting down the street cars on Sundays?”

  Minutes later, at 11 a.m., Otto Kempner, a passionate former assemblyman with impressive thick swept-back black hair, arrived, marching in front of 200 perspiring followers of the United Societies for Liberal Sundays, a newly formed protest group of mostly German organizations. Roosevelt reached the white marble building just after them and jostled his way forward to the mayor’s side.

  “When the front door of the saloon is closed and the blinds are drawn, the law is enforced as much as it should be,” stated Kempner, a native of Austria and a fierce opponent of Tammany. “This is the foremost city in America and it is up to date. You, nor no one else, Mr. Mayor, can put us in a spiritual strait jacket.” He demanded the opportunity to read out loud candidate Strong’s campaign promises for a liberal law.

  The mayor, conspicuously looking at his watch, snapped, “I have something else to do but listen to you.”

  Kempner, his voice rising, accused the mayor of never having time for the needs of 125,000 voting German Americans in New York City. “You now attempt to enforce, by drastic means, antiquated and bigoted laws,” he shouted. “Only bigots could enforce such laws. It is an asinine exercise of authority.”

  The mayor grew “flushed and Mr. Roosevelt glared through his eyeglasses in utter astonishment,” according to the New York Herald. The raucous crowd was yelling encouragement in German and English.

  Roosevelt could stand no more. He motioned for silence. “You people want me to enforce the law only a little bit, a little teeny bit. Well, your honor,” said Roosevelt, turning to the mayor, “I do not know how to do such a thing and I shall not begin to learn now.”

  Then he turned back to Otto Kempner and the howling crowd. “You have threatened that it means political disaster to me to enforce this Excise Law. Now listen! If it meant a hundred political deaths for me to obey my duty, I would do it. I would not move an inch. It is true I may never be heard of again, but I will have kept my oath of office. You, Mr. Kempner and Mr. Grosse, stand here as the champions of a vicious and corrupt system of enforcement of the law.”

  Grosse, a fifty-year-old lawyer and popular German newspaper editor, shouted that the charge was not true. The crowd chanted, “Nein, Nein, he doesn’t!” and someone yelled, “We are as good and law-abiding as you!”

  Roosevelt tried to shout down the crowd. “You know the greatest source of corruption in the city is the partial enforcement of the laws. You are advocating a return to that system.”

  Grosse, also once an assistant district attorney and currently an Internal Revenue Service collector, shouted another denial.

  Roosevelt, reddening, shook his finger at him and said, “You can deny it but it is true.” Grosse replied that he wouldn’t stand for such an accusation and began moving toward Roosevelt.

  Mayor Strong slammed a gavel down on the podium and called for order. The rumblings of the German faction petered out. Roosevelt repeated his mantra that as long as the law was on the books, he would enforce it. He executed the laws; he did not legislate them. A huge groan filled the room. Later, as the angry crowd filed out, the mayor, with mock congeniality, smiled and said to the departing Germans: “Glad to have seen you, gentlemen.”

  Roosevelt kept his word and immediately met with Chief Conlin about increased enforcement. He pressed Conlin on Sunday vigilance and the chief conceded that probably about half the saloons had been closed the previous Sunday; he promised Roosevelt the police would shut down another third that weekend. He intended to assign 1,000 officers to work in plainclothes to supplement the 2,000 in uniforms. The two men also agreed on a very literal interpretation of the Sunday excise law, deciding that Sunday began precisely at 12:01 a.m.

  Roosevelt, in effect, was trying to shut down Saturday night for the city at the stroke of midnight.

  Sunday, June 30, was hot. A double shift of policemen on duty since 12:01 a.m. set out to close the saloons. Barkeeps were forced to seek out more clever ruses. An owner downtown let patrons enter through a private house next door, climb to the roof, then walk across a wooden plank three floors up over an alley and then down into the bar’s back room. “Those who went to the trouble [decided] the risk of falling off the plank was greater than the satisfaction … from … one drink or even two.”

  By 10 a.m., some thirsty German Americans up in Harlem had convinced a bartender named Kirby to open up his side door at 125th and Third Avenue. A policeman locked the crowd inside until reinforcements came. All over town the blinds were raised, rooms remained empty. The poor had a much harder time this Sunday finding a beer, while the wealthy could go to a private club or a hotel for a meal and a drink.

  The Sun reporter discovered that many hotels that rarely charged below twenty-five cents had created a low-price menu of ten-cent lobster salad and five-cent roast-beef sandwiches to satisfy the law. “A group of men sat around a table with a bottle of whiskey that supplied round after round of drinks, while three untouched sandwiches withered on plates pushed out of the drinkers’ way.”

  On the poor East Side, even the “growler,” or fill-it-up-and-tote-it-home, trade was quashed. New York had a long-standing tradition of families “rushing the growler,” that is, fetching quarts of beer in various vessels to drink at home on Sundays. “Men, women and children with ‘growlers’ concealed in hat boxes, baskets and under aprons went from saloon to saloon until compelled to give up in despair.”

  The World tracked down a policeman who was willing—anonymously—to give an honest assessment. “The law is no good anyhow. These poor people like to have a glass or two of beer on Sunday, which without it is no Sunday at all to them. They can’t afford to buy beer in bulk or in bottle to keep it on ice. I guess this crusade today is causing more suffering in poor families than anything else they have to bear.”

  That same day, Commissioner Andrews turned the crackdown into a family outing. He and his wife climbed into a carriage pulled by a pair of dapple grays and whirled around upper Manhattan to see whether the saloons were closed. (They were.) Elsewhere in town, some New Yorkers made a protest display on a fire escape on 1st Street, draping black crepe onto those pails that families used to fetch beer. Nearby a sign in a deserted saloon announced: WE VOTED FOR REFORM AND THIS IS WHAT WE GET.

  The Sun summed it up: “So dry a Sunday and so dull a Sunday as yesterday has not been known in New York for years, if indeed such a day was ever known here.”

  For many New York newspapers, the honeymoon with Roosevelt was drawing to a very sudden close. Even that champion of reform the New York Times worried that the crackdown might sweep Tammany back into office. To most newspapermen, the idea of cutting off beer to the masses on Sunday was cruel and inhumane, especially with a hot New York summer approaching.

  “If the Sunday laws were properly adjusted to the habits and reasonable wants of the people, they would be cheerfully obeyed,” opined the editorial writer at the New York World. “There would then be no weekly repetition of the farce of pretending to enforce laws that cannot be enforced.”

  A cartoonist at the New York Evening Telegram portrayed Roosevelt happy at his Union League Club bar with a liquor menu on the wall behind him, listing “Champagnes, Claret, Burgundies, Sauternes, Sherry, Rhine, Ales, Porter, Brandies, Whiskies, Liqueurs, Cordials.”

  Town Topics, a tart weekly aimed at the upper class, wrote: “After making a tour of the beer saloons on Sunday last, disguised in pink whiskers and an Old Guard bearskin hat, Mr. Roosevelt repaired, I presume, to the Union League Club and bought a drink.”

  On that Sunday, June 30, the day of the most recent crackdown, Roosevelt found time at Oyster Bay to write a chatty letter to his sister in England, recounting his week. He mentioned his Tuesday trip to Harvard and his overnight stay with his pal Senator Lodge and joked about how one fellow alumnus, “Winty,” drank too much at the Harvard dining club Porcellian. He also made a rare confession, one that he would never repeat to the gener
al public of New York. “I have now run up against an ugly snag, the Sunday Excise Law. It is altogether too strict but I have no honorable alternative save to enforce it and I am enforcing it to the furious rage of the saloon keepers and of many good people too; for which I am sorry.”

  The citizens of New York would never hear the word “sorry” uttered by Roosevelt concerning Sunday liquor laws.

  Neither would they ever hear about something else that was perhaps driving the commissioner to this crackdown: the recent tragic death of his brother Elliott, an alcoholic.

  ne year earlier, Theodore Roosevelt’s younger brother, Elliott, was living under an assumed name on West 102nd Street with another man’s wife, and drinking from wake‑up to pass-out day after day. He teetered from charming to suicidal, one moment singing popular tunes, the next trying the window on the fourth floor.

  And almost weekly, Elliott had to fend off requests for money from a former house servant named Katy Mann, who carried in her arms a baby—their child, so she said—whom she had named Elliott Roosevelt Mann. Though he had been married to a society belle, a woman so strikingly beautiful that poet Robert Browning had requested permission to gaze at her while she had her portrait painted in London, he now preferred to live in an alcoholic and opiate-filled haze with a woman identified as Mrs. Evans. To top it all, recently Elliott had drunkenly crashed his carriage into a lamppost and hurtled headfirst onto the pavement. “Elliott has sunk to the lowest depths,” wrote Theodore’s wife, Edith, in July 1894. “[He] consorts with the vilest woman, and Theodore, Bamie and Douglas receive horrid anonymous letters about his life.”

  Born sixteen months apart, the two brothers had often been exceptionally close growing up. For the first decade or so, Elliott had seemed the far more promising one: more outgoing, more charming, more confident, more athletic, more handsome.