Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  The crackdown continued, with renewed zeal. Bushy-whiskered captain George S. Chapman, one of the rare reform zealots among the highest-ranking police officers, sneaked into a cellar under a saloon on Sunday, July 21, and poked open the trap door with his nightstick. Patrons stood on the door, until he threatened to shoot them off. Patrolman O’Malley grabbed one Cornelius McCarthy near a saloon carrying a pitcher of beer. “I’ll sit in the electric chair before giving you a drop of this beer,” shouted McCarthy. He was arrested.

  “King” Callahan came up for a license hearing in front of the excise board in the wake of his two arrests. Roosevelt’s favorite, young officer Bourke, testified against him. But Callahan had brought 200 neighborhood supporters and after the first few witnesses—including a female Christian missionary who called the bar more “orderly” than others nearby—the Tammany-friendly excise board cut off testimony and unanimously renewed Callahan’s license. Callahan, in the flush of victory, told a reporter he was most proud that he had punched Bourke in the face. Excise commissioner Julius Harburger later commented that the reform movement should “raise its voice against this wholly un-American doctrine of subjecting the people to a system of espionage and restraint unprecedented in the history of our great city.”

  Roosevelt had promised to start cracking down on soda water sales, but calmer members of the board found a loophole so the shiny silver spigots could continue dispensing seltzer in drugstores. Parker noticed that the “syrups” that were often added made the drink “confectionary” and therefore legal under the Sunday sweets exemption. No one chose to ponder too deeply about plain seltzer.

  Maybe it was the “lynchers” line, maybe it was thirst in humid July, but TR’s speech and stance brought a renewed flurry of ridicule from his opponents.

  The Herald described Sunday in Manhattan as “Roosevelt’s Deserted Island.” Tammany Hall veteran Colonel Tom Coakley used a circus metaphor for the Washington Post: “Roosevelt don’t know how to lift the canvas and let his friends in and out.” Cartoonists portrayed him as a buckle-shoed Puritan out with a lantern looking for sinners.

  Town Topics complained: “New York is rapidly becoming a jay and hayseed village such as had the supreme felicity of giving birth to Dr. Parkhurst.”

  The turmoil energized Roosevelt, who sounded defiant in all his letters, but it also was beginning to wear him down. Edith wrote of her husband having a nagging chest cold and indigestion, and that the midnight strolls, with forty hours awake, had taken a toll. “For some time he has had such a worn and tired look as if he really needed rest that I hardly knew what to do about it,” she wrote to sister-in-law Bamie in England. “Every night that he is at home he is in bed before 10 o’clock.”

  Roosevelt tried to move out to Oyster Bay for the summer but found the one- to two-hour commute each way by bike, train, ferry, train, and foot too grueling. Also, he would have to leave the office at 4:30 p.m. to catch the last train, so he was staying one or two weeknights at Bamie’s empty house in the city. Edith, however, discovered drawbacks in that arrangement as well. “If he spends a night alone in town, he comes back to Sagamore so worried and fussed that it is some time before he calms down.” She devised a fix.

  “Edith, of course, persists in regarding me as a frail invalid needing constant attention,” he wrote to Lodge, “and when I spend a night or two in town, she comes and spends it with me. In one way, however, I think this does her good because she gets away from the children and usually spends a quiet day in the Society Library.”

  The four-man Police Board until then had remained remarkably unified despite newspaper attempts to organize feuds. And it wasn’t Sunday saloons that split them.

  It was the Eakins trial, which was entering its third month, racking up large clerical expenses, and devouring swaths of the commissioners’ time.

  On Friday, August 2, Joseph Eakins, resplendent in gold-braided uniform, entered the witness box. Despite the open windows, the trial room was stiflingly hot; pitchers of water, infrequently replenished with ice, stood in one corner. Spectators cramming onto the benches made the room even stuffier.

  The verdict, to be decided by the panel of four reform commissioners, looked like a foregone conclusion. Eakins wasn’t even on trial for accepting bribes, but merely for failing to close brothels in the well-known brothel district, Frenchtown. Lincoln Steffens in the Evening Post called the case the “strongest and most hopeless” against a captain, with police insiders rating Eakins “as a goner,” especially after the ample early testimony about “scores of houses of assignation.” Also, Eakins’s precinct had stayed bad after even the notorious 11th (Devery’s Lower East Side) and the 19th (Tenderloin) had been significantly cleaned up.

  But Joseph Eakins—a captain for two decades, one of the highest-ranking Freemasons in the city, a Civil War veteran—saw it differently. Indignant at the self-righteous questions hurled by Parkhurst’s Frank Moss, the captain stated repeatedly that he had worked very hard to stop prostitution. He blamed certain judges for demanding that two different officers on two different days pay for and witness nudity before they would issue a warrant. He blamed Superintendent Byrnes for telling him not to list any suspected brothels. He asserted that his men had performed seventy raids during his eighteen months in the precinct. He displayed a thorough knowledge of the neighborhood, leading the listeners in the courtroom on a tour, building by building, mentioning names, nicknames, occupations, family histories. He confided that sometimes the most effective method of fighting vice was for him to go to the landlady and say to her: “You have got one of those daisies up here on the third floor, and you had better get rid of her or I will take you over to court.”

  He pointed out that one officer had made 468 arrests for street solicitation. He also said he worried about the accidental arrest of a respectable woman. “One mistake of that kind would do more damage than arresting a thousand of the others.” He noted that very few men wanted the job of investigating prostitution because they were called “whorehouse detectives” and worse. In any case, his undercover men often became recognized, especially on Thompson Street. “Those colored wenches are just like a dog, they know a policeman just as far as they can see him whether he is in civilian’s clothes or in uniform.”

  Prosecutor Moss wasn’t buying any of it; he brought out the fact that most of those streetwalkers arrested had paid five dollars each to be bailed out by a 3rd Street saloon owner named Gus Blumenthal, and that most of the women were never convicted. He uncovered that Captain Eakins had never pursued a single landlord. Most damning of all, he maneuvered Eakins into admitting that he and his undercover officers knew the exact whereabouts of brothels. Moss continued to hammer the point block by block.

  MOSS: You and Zimmerman knew the location of the tainted houses, didn’t you?

  EAKINS: Of course, we did.

  MOSS: And talked them over?

  EAKINS: I cannot say we had any particular conversations about them.

  MOSS: He told you what he discovered?

  EAKINS: I had something else to talk about except whorehouses. I had other police business to talk about and I did not spend all my time talking about whorehouses. Now that is all. I done the best I could.

  The angry word whorehouse echoed in the hot courtroom but of course never made the newspapers.

  When he calmed down, Eakins stressed that he did a fine job. “Law and order was my motto; I spent 18 hours out of 24 there.” And he told Moss that he didn’t know of any other organization besides Parkhurst’s “that would do anything like what your Society has done.”

  MOSS: What do you mean by that?

  EAKINS: Making charges of this kind against me.

  MOSS (WITH SARCASM): You think this is a crime?

  EAKINS: I think it is a crime and you cannot blame me for it.

  Around 7:45 p.m., after a very long day, during a brief break as the testimony was winding down, Captain Eakins walked over to the pitchers and poured himsel
f a glass of ice water and when he returned his eyes were red, almost brimming with tears. Commissioner Grant, who had stayed largely silent, noticed that and stepped in to ask Captain Eakins a few questions.

  GRANT: How old are you?

  EAKINS: Fifty-one.

  GRANT: How long have you been on the force?

  EAKINS: 29 years.

  GRANT: And you have had only two charges preferred against you?

  EAKINS: Both dismissed.

  Grant, always sympathetic to military veterans, then asked what real estate Eakins owned and found out he had a 125th Street building, valued at $24,000, but a mortgage of $12,000 on it. He had rental tenants on the top floors of his home.

  GRANT: That $12,000 represents the savings of 29 years?

  EAKINS: That and about $2,000 more.

  GRANT: How much has the trial cost you?

  Lawyer Charles Hess said, “Tell the commissioner, I have no objection; in fact I am very glad he asked the question.”

  The tears brimmed again. The New York Journal claimed several spilled down Eakins’s cheek.

  EAKINS: I have paid $1,000 to the stenographer and $3,000 to Mr. Hess.

  GRANT: That is a quarter of your life savings, is it not?

  EAKINS: (faintly) Yes, sir.

  GRANT: I think I heard you say that you thought this trial was a crime. Did you not say that?

  EAKINS: I did.

  Commissioner Grant rose from his seat, slowly buttoning his frock coat. “Well, I agree with you,” he said, then walked out of the room. The phrase lingered in the air.

  Commissioner Andrews and prosecutor Moss looked at each other in stunned silence. Hess came over and patted Eakins on the shoulder.

  Grant’s words split the board for the first time. Roosevelt was “astounded” when he read them in a newspaper the next morning. So was Parker.

  Grant arrived first at 300 Mulberry on Saturday morning for the board’s usual half day and was unrepentant. He answered the newspapermen’s questions. He said not only was it a “crime” to bring charges against Captain Eakins, but that he thought Eakins deserved to be promoted to inspector. He blamed himself for not “sifting” through the charges more thoroughly. He apologized that he was “not a good talker” but he still stood by his words.

  Grant regarded it as impossible for a police captain to clean up some districts and he found it absolutely intolerable to ask respectable plainclothes officers to go into brothels to witness immoral acts. “I would not do it if I were a policeman.”

  Grant spent most of the day holed up in his office working on a plan to merge the steamboat squad and the harbor patrol; he expected to free up sixty-one officers for other duties.

  Parker, Andrews, and Roosevelt did not seek out Commissioner Grant; they met privately from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., drafting a statement.

  At 5 p.m. Commissioner Parker read their breathless, angry joint statement to the press.

  “We deeply regret the necessity of making public the circumstances attending any difference of opinion among us as Commissioners but as Commissioner Grant, one of the judges of Captain Joseph B. Eakins, now on trial, has seen fit, while so sitting as judge, and during the pendency of the hearing, publicly to announce his opinion of the inquiry, and, without having heard the evidence, to declare beforehand his verdict and inferentially to designate his colleagues as criminals, we consider it our duty to make public the following facts.”

  They pointed out that Grant had personally signed the paperwork against Eakins on May 28, adding—a bit cattily—that Grant once said he would vote to dismiss without even reading the voluminous trial record (already 3,000 pages) and that he had seemed to grow more, not less, convinced of Eakins’s guilt. The trio estimated that Colonel Grant had heard less than 10 percent of the testimony, a low water mark shared by only Roosevelt, but the statement stressed that Roosevelt “has not given an opinion.” They also alluded to the fact that Grant had been approached by Eakins for sympathy as they were both Republicans, war veterans, and Methodists. The three commissioners said they were not to blame for Eakins’s trial expenses, and they, for their part, all promised to read and carefully weigh all the evidence before rendering a decision. This statement was also clearly aimed at any appeals judges.

  Roosevelt, who had nodded emphatically during the reading, dashed for his train to Oyster Bay; he invited Commissioner Andrews to join him.

  Reporters raced from the boardroom to Commissioner Grant’s office to read him the joint statement. He seemed dazed and disappointed, calling it “not a fair interpretation.” Grant repeated that he meant no slight on his colleagues and considered them “gentlemen of the highest order.” He said his earlier comment about voting Eakins guilty without reading several thousand pages had been a “joke.”

  That night a reporter for the Herald knocked on Grant’s door on 62nd Street. “I spoke perhaps with more warmth than I should have,” said the commissioner. “It seemed to me a piteous thing that a man of near 30 years service should be deprived of a third of the savings of his life through no fault of his.” Grant also resented the prosecution’s tone, and he repeated that he would vote for acquittal. “If my means permitted it, I would refund to the Captain all the costs of his trial for I realize he has been put to this great expense through my fault.”

  On Monday morning at 10:45 a.m. as the scheduled board meeting was about to begin, Commissioner Grant requested a private meeting with Board President Roosevelt. The two men remained in TR’s office for almost three hours. When they left the room, Colonel Grant looked grim and Roosevelt was perspiring.

  While announcing he had no intention of resigning, Grant did issue a partial apology. “I admit it was wrong to express my feelings in the Eakins matter at the time I did … It was injudicious for me to do so but I said what I felt and gave expression without thinking.” But he said he still believed Eakins should not have gone to trial.

  All four commissioners attended the long-delayed board meeting and put on a brave show of harmony. “I am sorry that all of you reporters have been disappointed,” Roosevelt said as the meeting ended, “if you expected a sensation here today.”

  From then on, all four commissioners tried to downplay the incident. Roosevelt, however, was extremely candid about it in a later letter to Henry Cabot Lodge.

  Grant is a good-natured, brave, generous fellow but he is certainly very dull and at times very obstinate, and his wife makes him very jealous of me. Moreover he is inflated to a very extraordinary degree with the idea of his own powers and his career in the future. He told me he thought it a “degradation” that he, who had been Minister to Austria, should accept this Police Commissionership; and only his good nature and genuine sterling honesty save him from being intolerable. All of his bad qualities combined with one good quality, his sympathy for an old soldier in distress, to make him go wrong in the Eakins business. I had treated him with extreme deference and gentleness up to that time. I thought it necessary then to give him a thorough dressing down. So all three of us joined, publicly first, and afterwards privately, to give him the plainest talking to that I have ever taken part in; I told him the exact truth. For forty-eight hours he was furious; but it had a most healthy effect. He has been entirely tractable ever since. He will, undoubtedly from time to time, make very foolish breaks and will leave us on important issues, and especially when we come to make war on some corruptionist; but he has neither the wit nor the wickedness to go into a course of steady opposition to us. Indeed I think he rather likes me and wishes to work with me.

  But Roosevelt misread his man. He would learn that he had inflicted a deeper wound than he realized and that Grant—in very crucial moments—would be primed to split off from him.

  The August heat made those thirsty on Sunday even testier. Roosevelt’s righteous, unbending stance provoked many. A suspicious package arrived at the post office Monday addressed to “Mr. Theodore Roosevelt.” A young female postal inspector performing her routine job of insp
ecting Fourth Class mail for illegally enclosed letters and contraband opened the five-inch by two-inch by two-inch box. As she slid off the wooden cover, three parlor matches hit a sandpaper strip and sent up a curl of smoke.

  She screamed and called a supervisor. Inside he found a two-and-a-half-inch-long gun cartridge, with an Irish shamrock glued to it. Two police detectives carried the package to the inspector of combustibles, who observed that the cartridge shell was filled with an odd light-colored powder. “Inspector Murray pinched it, thumped it, smelled it and tasted it on suspicion that it might have nitroglycerin in it, and then solemnly said: ‘Saw dust!’ ” The assembled officers laughed.

  When Roosevelt was told of the “infernal machine,” he flashed his piano-key grin and said, “I don’t care a snap of my fingers for any bomb.” The World ran a front-page cartoon showing TR holding an exploding cigar-shaped bomb in his teeth; he stands unharmed in a dapper outfit with a sash while two of his three colleagues lie near-dead on the floor and all that can be seen of Grant are the soles of his shoes, as he has been blown out the window.

  The Eakins trial resumed at 2:45 p.m. that Monday afternoon for the final day of testimony. Avery Andrews presided and the other three commissioners stayed safely out of the room. The Parkhurst Society unveiled a secret witness they had been hiding for almost two weeks: streetwalker Gertie Long. Long had told the Society that she had been paying off cops in the 15th Precinct for more than twelve years.

  Gertie Long was a “stout, gaudily dressed woman.” She wore a pinch-waist striped dress with puffy sleeves, high collar, hem to the floor, and a flouncy hat with three cascading plumes; she had on gold and diamond earrings and rings and a glittering heart-shaped brooch. She also wore a veil until defense attorney Hess asked her to remove it. She admitted to having celebrated her fortieth birthday but grew irritated at repeated questions about her forty-first.