Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  All his old friends came to the funeral; the church was filled; it was very very sad and behind it followed the usual touch of the grotesque and terrible, for in one of the four carriages that followed to the grave went the woman, Mrs. Evans and two of her and his friends, the host and hostess of the Woodbine Inn…

  Katy Mann came in to Douglas’ office with the child which she swears was his; I have no idea whether it was or not; she was a bad woman but her story may have been partly true. But we can not know. Well, it is over now; it is fortunate it is over and we need only think of his bright youth … Poor Anna and poor Elliott!

  For the rest of his life, TR almost never mentioned Elliott. But seeing all those empty liquor bottles beside the bed of his only brother must have made a profound impression.

  Theodore Roosevelt had already suffered many tragedies in his life; he had seen his father die suddenly of stomach cancer at age forty-six and then his mother of typhoid fever at forty-eight and his first wife of Bright’s disease at twenty-two, both on the same day, February 14, 1884. He couldn’t blame those diseases but he could blame moral weakness and alcohol. He had witnessed close up how hard liquor had sped the ugly downfall of his brother Ellie.

  uring the sweltering summer of 1895, Commissioner Roosevelt intensified his efforts to shut down the saloons on Sunday. The more embattled he became, the louder and longer he talked about his commitment to absolute enforcement of law and order.

  The small-circulation New York Times ran an editorial praising Roo- sevelt’s “determined attitude” but most of the papers competed to show the people’s outrage.

  The New York Herald stationed reporters to tally figures from transit executives at the thirty-plus ferry boat and excursion lines heading to the likes of Coney Island, Staten Island, New Jersey, up-Hudson, and Connecticut, and estimated that one-quarter of the city’s residents departed on Sunday. “Blue laws and blue skies conspired to attract the multitude to places where … the winds blow fresh and cool and where it is no sin to drink a glass of beer.”

  The World investigated whether the rest of New York State observed the Sunday law, and found that twenty-four of the twenty-nine largest cities ignored the law, either blatantly or at the side door. ALBANY’S MAYOR BLIND and NO THIRST AT NEWBURG ran typical headlines. As for the rest of the nation, the World found only six major cities bone dry on Sundays: Boston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Savannah.

  In New York, thirsty citizens tried to outsmart the police, using ruses that would become popular thirty years later during Prohibition. Desperate people wandered to crowded restaurants and tried with a wink and a bit of code to finagle a drink.

  For lager beer, they asked for “Weiss” beer; for whiskey, “cold tea”; for gin “plain soda”; and for Rhine wine “lemon soda.” The New York Advertiser added: “If the drought continues, the proprietor will supply his patrons with a dictionary of the language of dry Sunday.”

  Desperate times called for desperate measures. A Tammany Hall politician, Colonel Tom Coakley, heard about a clever dodge: medicinal alcohol.

  Go into a drug store and tell the member of the Lucrezia Borgia family behind the soda water outfit that you want “Rainbow Syrup.” Well, that licensed assassin will deal you out about three fingers of the rottenest whiskey this side of Flatbush. It’ll keep you walking when you get it: you’re afraid if you lay down, you’ll die … I knew a man that drank some of it and he didn’t do a thing but go over to Jersey City and stay all day. Thought he was having a good time, mind you, and hopped over there looking for fun. Well, when a man goes to New Jersey looking for fun, his mind is failing.

  Beyond the jokes and clever anecdotes, the absolute proof of the crackdown’s effectiveness could be measured in beer deliveries. By mid-July, a leading brewer reported that wholesale beer sales in New York City had fallen off by 92,000 quarter-kegs a week. That meant bartenders were selling about 3.6 million fewer five-cent beers every Sunday. He expected the industry to lose $4 million in revenue over the twenty-four weeks until the earliest time the legislature could reconvene in January and change the law. He estimated that 500 brewery workers would lose their jobs, and that 2,000 of the city’s 8,000 saloons would fail, putting at least 4,000 bartenders out of work.

  The heart of the Sunday crackdown fell along class lines. The poor couldn’t afford bottled beer or liquor, couldn’t chill it, and had nowhere pleasant to drink it. On the other hand, the “privileged few” could drink at their private clubs, with amenities such as bars, restaurants, reading rooms, pools, gyms, sleeping quarters. According to a tally in the World, 37,737 New Yorkers belonged to the city’s premier clubs, including Roosevelt at the Union League, J. P. Morgan at the Century, and various other bluebloods at the Harvard Club or the Knickerbocker. Atop the white marble palace of the Metropolitan Club stood a magnificent roof garden “overlooking the Plaza and Central Park” where members and their guests enjoyed a “breeze that never reached the pedestrians on the avenue.” The rich, “in easy chairs at low tables” could just ding the silver bell at the center of each table and waiters in white appeared to take their orders. Downstairs at the bar “a colored youth turned a crank to crush the ice and a mixologist concocted cocktails with dashes of cordials, liqueurs and imported bitters.”

  The World delighted in contrasting that oasis with conditions in the East Side tenements, where “the sun beat down” and turned any room into a “Russian bath”; the heat “made the water run lukewarm at the faucets,” soured the milk, and “even sapped the moisture and coolness from the overnight watermelon.”

  Saloon owners such Mike “King” Callahan tried dodges to serve their customers. He hired carpenters to cut four new entrances to his joint: through Wing Lee’s laundry on Doyers Street, through a doorway at No. 1 Doyers Street, through a paint shop, and through his “Progress” roominghouse. The plan was working well until a policeman thought he heard a cash register ring inside the saloon and noticed Wing Lee was doing a bustling “washee” business. On Sunday, July 7, at 7:30 p.m., patrolman Price barred the entrance to Wing Lee’s. Callahan, who had once been a bouncer at Koster & Bials, came rushing out and cursed the officer: “I am not going to take any blank from any blankety-blank blank man.” Callahan was arrested again. He sing-songed: “I suppose you want to shake Roosevelt’s hand.”

  That same day, the owner of Quinlan’s Saloon at 138 Park Row hauled all liquors, beers, and wines from his shelves and offered only soda water and sarsaparilla for sale. His sign proclaimed SOFT DRINKS ONLY; his place was packed. He was arrested twice that day and the precinct captain threatened to repeat the raid every Sunday.

  Quinlan applied to Judge David McAdam for relief. The judge ruled on Friday, July 12, that selling fizzy water was not against the excise law, but clearly violated the Sabbath law. He quoted New York State statutes 266 and 267, which stated that food could be sold before 10 a.m. and prepared meals sold in restaurants all day Sunday but that it was forbidden to sell anything else with the exception of “prepared tobacco, fruit, confectionary, newspapers, drugs, medicines and surgical appliances.” The penalty for the first offense: up to a $10 fine or imprisonment in a county jail, with escalating punishments for repeat violations.

  “It is as much the duty of the police to arrest lemonade peddlers or druggists selling soda water on Sunday as it is to arrest saloon-keepers selling whiskey,” explained the judge. McAdam was a Tammany Democrat with a sense of humor; he belonged to the “Thirteen Club,” dedicated to defying triskaidekaphobia and to hosting dinners with coffin-lid menus, tombstone wine lists, and guests entering under stepladders.

  The Herald explained it would now be illegal on Sunday to sell “soda water, mineral water, sarsaparilla, ginger ale, milk or buttermilk,” and the paper feared the city would turn into “an arid desert” if the Roosevelt board fulfilled its promise to enforce all laws.

  Newspapers now delighted in unearthing every dead-letter law imaginable to show the absurdi
ty of Roosevelt’s doctrinaire enforcement of all laws: no barber poles taller than five feet; no kite-flying south of 14th Street; no boarding a streetcar in motion (arrest half the men in the city); no placing of flower pots on windowsills (arrest half the women); no fishing off docks on Sunday (arrest the boys); no 5 p.m. opening of delicatessens to serve the “comfortable classes” who give their servants Sunday nights off; no ball playing within two miles of a church service on any day.

  The World pointed out that it was illegal to bring oysters into New York City from May 1 to September 1 and wondered why Commissioner Roosevelt did not arrest Delmonico’s for wanton violations. The fine was five dollars for the first hundred bi-valves and two dollars every hundred thereafter. Why weren’t all beggars booked? Why could peddlers shout morning and night? What about Sunday organ grinders? The editors, perusing the 2,323-page New York State Revised Statutes, discovered that cursing was punishable by a dollar fine. (“Under this law, no doubt many millionaires have rendered themselves liable to the forfeiture of their entire fortunes.”) They found it illegal to have a deck of playing cards in a college or on a ship. “The average citizen … has been leading a life of crime,” the paper pointed out.

  More ominously for the city’s poorest workers, almost all sidewalk street vendors apparently lacked the proper licenses. Tens of thousands of New York’s hardest-working citizens, those selling newspapers and flowers, suddenly feared the police would shut them down.

  Roosevelt confided to Henry Cabot Lodge: “It is an awkward and ugly fight, yet I am sure I am right in my position and I think there is an even chance of our winning on it.”

  Around this time, he received the surprising news that his forty-year-old spinster sister, Bamie, would be marrying a U.S. navy man in London. Roosevelt regretted “dreadfully” that he could not attend her wedding in London, even though his sister Corinne and close friend Henry Cabot Lodge would be there. “I have plunged the [New York City] Administration into a series of fights,” wrote Roosevelt. “To leave now would be to flinch; when you appreciate the situation here you will be the first to say that I could not honorably have left.”

  Roosevelt was growing used to attacks by newspapers, but almost no elected officials had dared to criticize him directly for enforcing the law. Then, one of the most prominent Democratic politicians in the state did just that in an open letter to the press. David B. Hill—a two-time former governor and current United States senator, and a Democrat not aligned with Tammany Hall—complained about the “narrow, harsh and unreasonable construction” of the law “now being enforced by the busy-body and notoriety-seeking Police Commissioners.”

  He argued that the Police Board’s interpretation also made it illegal for people to hand a glass of wine to a friend in their homes on Sundays, or have a drink at a private club. He demanded that if the police commissioners were lenient enough to allow drinks at, say, a clubhouse, then they should be equally lenient regarding drinks with meals all over town. “A glass of beer with a few crackers in a humble restaurant is just as much of a poor man’s lunch or meal on Sunday as is Mr. Roosevelt’s elaborate champagne dinner at the Union League Club on the same day.”

  Hill advised against asking the Republican governor to call an immediate special session of the legislature because “the Puritans are ‘in the saddle’ now both in Albany and in New York City” and would not change the law. Not surprisingly, he advocated electing Democrats to fix the law.

  The World on Monday gave Hill’s attack favorable front-page coverage, and added sidebars about the reform police arresting boys for selling candy on Sunday. It dug up more forgotten laws and hammered on the issue of selling seltzer.

  Hill’s words and the World’s coverage lit Roosevelt’s fuse. “It is a waste of time for the criminal classes and their allies to try to prevent us from enforcing the vital laws by raising a clamor that we are not enforcing other laws of less importance.”

  Pulitzer’s newspaper was furious that Roosevelt lumped together all who opposed Sunday closings as villains, and the World called him “a little tin Czar” in an editorial and wondered what entitled him to judge one law more “vital” than another.

  On the evening of Tuesday, July 16, Theodore Roosevelt stood in an obscure, overcrowded hall in Harlem, aiming to rebut the naysayers. He not only gave a rousing speech but took a surprisingly meaningful baby step onto the national stage of politics. His oratory captured his core values and hammered his law-and-order message—and it was picked up by many newspapers around the country.

  The night began inauspiciously enough. Both Commissioners Roosevelt and Parker were running late. Six policemen tried to control an overflow crowd of at least 300 people packing the hall of a Good Government Club in East Harlem at 115th Street near Lexington Avenue. Hundreds of others milled outside; the ground-floor rooms “were as full as an L [train] at six o’clock and as hot as a bake shop.” Perspiring well-dressed men sat elbow to elbow, whispering.

  After almost an hour’s delay, the club’s leaders, Dr. Robert Kunitzer and Gustave H. Schwab, opened the meeting with speeches in German. The city coroner followed. Beloved but almost mascot-like at four feet ten with thick glasses and a thick German accent, sixty-two-year-old Dr. Emile Hoeber said he had great respect for “Rousss-ah-velt” but that no “policeman should spy around and entrap people to sell him a glass of beer.” Loud applause filled the room. “What is right in the Union Club is not wrong in Terrace Garden; what is right in the Century Club is not wrong on the Bowery.” More hearty applause. Around this time, Commissioners Roosevelt and Parker inched their way forward to the podium. Dr. Hoeber observed that a groundswell was building to repeal the Sunday law. “I know many Americans who are as enlightened as any Germans who are opposed to it.” He uttered that final sentence “as solemn as an undertaker,” according to the World, and received a huge unexpected laugh.

  Dr. Kunitzer then introduced Commissioner Roosevelt, who received sustained clapping. (Except for the excise issue, the Good Government clubs were thrilled to have a reform administration in power.) Roosevelt turned to Dr. Hoeber. He said the doctor’s remarks contrasting Germans and American-born citizens made him want to emphasize something before he began his prepared speech. “I come here to speak caring nothing for your creed or your birthplace,” he said slowly. “I speak as one American to his fellow-Americans.”

  Then Roosevelt—with great enthusiasm, with his staccato hand gestures and broad smiles—painted a picture of the United States as an all-embracing land where the native-born and foreign-born citizens work together to elect officials in fair elections to pass laws that would be equally enforced on rich and poor, where fair play and hard work are rewarded.

  Roosevelt excoriated Senator Hill for in any way advocating that city officials should ignore a clear-cut law closing saloons. “A more humiliating position was never taken by a public man,” he said. “The question is merely: Are the laws to be enforced? The question to me is so simple, so easily answered, that I can hardly understand how any man who is both honest and intelligent, can fail to give us his support.” Roosevelt stated any law selectively enforced “demoralizes” the community. “It is not possible to give the young a more dangerous impression than that the law has side-doors or back-doors.”

  He said this Sunday law was the single biggest corrupting influence on the police force; he promised that in future weeks, as manpower allowed, the police would tackle other ignored laws, such as Sunday soda water sales or street vendor licenses. He also vowed that enforcing Sunday excise laws would never deter the force from catching burglars or suppressing riots.

  He struck again at his main theme: he and his fellow commissioners took seriously their oath to enforce the law “honestly and impartially.” He said their opponents wanted to cherry-pick laws. Exercising his growing penchant for extreme rhetoric, he compared them to “lynchers and white-cappers” (i.e., white-hooded Klansmen) who claim that “popular sentiment” allows them to hang and mut
ilate Negroes accused of crimes. “For an official to permit violation of law whenever he thinks that the sentiment of a particular locality does not favor its enforcement inevitably leads to anarchy and violence.”

  Roosevelt hailed the movement that had swept reformers into office. He said it was a slur that some claimed this Sunday crackdown was motivated by race hatred or prejudice or class differences. “I am incapable of discriminating against any man … so long as he is honest and a good American citizen.”

  The hall erupted in cheers.

  In those days, speech makers often supplied copies of their speeches in advance to newspapers. Roosevelt was certain that he had written a very fine speech, his cannon shot back at Senator Hill, at the World, at the “criminals and their allies.”His words were reprinted around the country, especially in newspapers favoring reform. To many regions—far from “dry” New York—his vision of absolute unflinching law and order sounded desirable and plausible and very American.

  He received a telegram from Senator George F. Hoar of Massachusetts. “Your speech is the best speech that has been made on this continent for thirty years. I am glad that I know that there is a man behind it worthy of the speech.”

  The implication was that it was the best oration since Abraham Lincoln. Roosevelt wrote that Sunday to his pal Lodge, the other senator from Massachusetts, “that was pretty good for the old man” and he was “greatly flattered.” Letters of support began pouring in … even some from New York City.