Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  The Central Liquor Committee met at the law office of Friend, House, and Grossman on Thursday night, approved the deal, and scheduled it for a vote at a mass meeting on Tuesday, August 27. The saloon men—fearing TR’s hounding and the judges’ sentences—voted aye.

  When TR was informed, he cried: “I am deeee-lighted. I’m really deee-lighted.” (This marks an early instance of his irrepressible catchphrase.) TR went out of his way to thank two judges: John Goff and William Travers Jerome.

  On Friday, August 30, the final day when excise violators could plead guilty, Justice Jerome set up a “Bargain Day,” allowing them to pay a fine of $25 to clear their cases. Newspapers noted the courtroom that day more resembled a bank, as almost 500 liquor dealers jammed in and waited on long lines to plead and pay. The World reporter saw so many men fishing out small stacks of dollar bills and waving them about, he said the room took on a “distinct greenish hue.” Coins jangled, piles of greenbacks grew mountainous. The court collected a one-day record $8,050 in small fines.

  Judge Jerome, amidst the din, loudly and repeatedly promised $200 fines and three-month prison sentences for violations after September 1. Judge Goff mentioned up to $1,000 and one year in prison.

  Just as the deal was going down, Pulitzer’s Evening World pulled one last yellow journalism stunt, perhaps hoping to derail the saloon owner Sabbath surrender. It ran a piece about an unnamed mother trying on Sunday, August 25, to buy a five-cent chunk of ice to cool the fever of her seriously ill child. And as the unnamed iceman was handing it over, an unnamed policeman arrested them both for violating the Sabbath and hauled them off to an unnamed precinct house. The bluecoat dismissed her excuses about a sick child.

  She hurried back to the tenement where she lived. She ran upstairs and entered her room. “I was kept away and couldn’t get back sooner, darling,” she said. “I couldn’t get the ice because …”

  Suddenly the words died on her lips. She knelt down by the bed and took a little wasted hand in hers. Then, raising her face, she gazed up with dry eyes that yet saw nothing and whispered: “Thy will be done, O God! Thou knowest best!”

  For the child was dead.

  Roosevelt later read the story and was appalled by the fraud and dishonesty of the newspaper. The writer deserved the severest punishment, he said. Nothing would sully the righteousness of the reform movement’s Sunday saloon victory. “I am doing my best to … manage [the police force] in accord with the Decalogue [Ten Commandments] and the Golden Rule,” he told a political gathering. “Be assured that the principles of public honesty and public decency will win in the end.”

  After all the hyperbole and fireworks, Sunday, September 1, had truly ranked among the driest in New York City history. This sudden resolution of the excise battle marked a huge victory for Roosevelt.

  Others around the country were observing him as well. “Undeniably Theodore Roosevelt is the ‘biggest man’ in New York today, if not the most interesting man in public life,” enthused the Chicago Times-Herald.

  “You are rushing so rapidly to the front that the day is not far distant when you will come into a large kingdom,” wrote Henry Cabot Lodge from London, “and by that time I will probably be a back number and I shall expect you to look after me and give me a slice.”

  lections loomed two months away, and would mark yet another crucial test for Police Commissioner Roosevelt. Although his name was not on the ballot, his strict policies dominated the political discussion. Would New York City voters on Tuesday, November 5, 1895, elect reform-minded candidates for the legislature and for key judgeships? Would they elect Republicans? Or would they miss their Sunday beer and stampede back to Tammany?

  This local election—although the mayor would stay in office for two more years—would reveal whether the voters wanted to continue high-minded reform or preferred to backslide toward seamier, more tolerant ways.

  Publicly, Roosevelt wrote in articles and repeated in forceful speeches that his law-and-order crackdown would rally voters away from Tammany. But very privately, to the likes of Cabot and Bamie, he expressed his doubts.

  In mid-September, Republicans from every corner of New York State boarded ferries and trains and horse carriages to flood into the racetrack town of Saratoga, New York, for the convention.

  One politician looked poised to dominate the September 17 event, and that man had decreed that Theodore Roosevelt be banned.

  Thomas Collier Platt, a former elected official and currently the president of a shipping company, was the Republican party boss for New York State. Though largely forgotten today, Platt was matter-of-factly identified in the Boston Daily Globe in May of that year as “one of the half dozen best-known men in the United States.” Joked a Tammany man: “When Platt takes snuff, every Republican sneezes.” He was a rainmaker who by controlling New York’s various representatives could sway national politics.

  As American political bosses go, Platt, then sixty-two, certainly did not fit the back-slapping, domineering stereotype. His limp, damp handshake surprised well-wishers; his shy demeanor, subtle smiles, and whispered suggestions earned him the nickname “Easy Boss.” But Platt had the ear—and interests—of the plutocrats of the age such as J. P. Morgan, whose contributions helped bankroll his power. Skeletal and stoop-shouldered, the former Yale divinity student from Owego, New York, made so many crucial decisions on Sundays in a corridor of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where he stayed, that it was dubbed “Amen Corner.”

  Reverend Parkhurst found Tammany’s boss Richard Croker an unapologetic rascal but he called Platt “such a mixture of good and bad that nobody ever knows where he stands.”

  Issuing orders from Cottage number 9 of the U.S. Hotel in Saratoga, Platt dictated to his minions that the name of Roosevelt should not be uttered and that the issue of Sunday excise laws should be ignored. They obeyed.

  This election, like so many in the Empire State, was shaking out to be two elections: New York State races and New York City races. With its capital parked in a relative backwater, a former fur-trading post called Albany, the state in broad strokes—with the exception of upstate cities such as Buffalo and Syracuse—broke down into the homogenous churchgoing native-born upcountry folk versus the two-million-strong ethnic stew of Manhattan.

  Upstate, Republicans looked poised to keep both houses of state government, although the Democrats saw an outside chance. In New York City, Tammany Hall Democrats hoped for a comeback, riding a wave of anti-Roosevelt feeling.

  Since the Republicans appeared heavily favored to win statewide, Boss Platt chose to orchestrate a cautious platform packed with safe platitudes: kudos for the Republican governor, Levi Morton, darts for the Democratic president, Grover Cleveland, and … don’t forget to blame the recent state tax hike on the cost of caring for New York City’s vast population of mentally deficient vagrants.

  Platt was convinced that Mayor Strong had reneged on preelection promises to appoint Republicans, and he dismissed Roosevelt as a strong-willed reformer.

  Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Roosevelt’s friend and mentor, had hoped that Platt would embrace Roosevelt and Sunday saloon laws “but [Platt] is singularly lacking in political sense of the large kind.” One political observer summed up Platt’s philosophy as: “Whoever pushes you up the apple tree is the boy to share the apples with.”

  Saratoga was packed with party faithful dressed in their Sunday best, entering the hall under canopies of fall foliage. Small-town lawyers jostled big-city full-time politicians. By noon on the second day of meetings, the delegates had reached their seats for the main event. At 12:15 p.m. Platt, walking alone and slowly, entered the convention hall to band music and sustained passionate applause and foot stomping. The convention, which the New York Times labeled “tame, thin, indifferent,” briefly flickered to life. Then it settled back into Platt’s low-key script. The World compared Platt to a puppeteer.

  A few hours later, when the topic of the party’s platform—already written
in committee—was brought up for ratification, half a dozen men clamored for the attention of the convention chairman, Senator Clarence Lexow. (Platt had rewarded him for his namesake committee that had helped topple Tammany the year before.) Lexow ignored them. They shouted demands to read a minority report complaining that the Sabbath and Sunday excise laws—in their view, the most important issues in the state—were being back-burnered.

  Lexow, following Platt’s commands, ordered the minority report tabled and was moving swiftly forward to the next item of business. The hubbub filling the hall seemed to be subsiding when from the very back, a stout mustachioed man began bellowing something, demanding to be heard. The voice of former U.S. senator Warner Miller eventually pierced the din. “There should be no gag law in this Republican meeting,” he shouted.

  A bit flustered, Chairman Lexow hesitated, then said there would be no gag law and granted the man the floor. Hundreds of heads swiveled toward the back. Warner Miller—a longtime supporter of temperance and the Sabbath—abruptly recited a brief resolution to add to the party platform. “We favor the maintenance of the Sunday law in the interest of labor and morality.”

  The puppets were rebelling against the puppetmaster.

  Platt, earning his reputation as “Easy,” whispered to Edward Lauterbach, the chairman of the New York County [i.e., City] Republican Committee, and Lauterbach—a Jewish corporate lawyer from New York City—stood and endorsed the resolution. “That is the sentiment to which I am sure every Republican will subscribe.” Lauterbach’s nickname was “Smooth Ed.” (He was as anti-Roosevelt as Platt but equally pragmatic in a crisis.)

  Warner Miller, an upstate churchgoing man, took the Lauterbach endorsement as his cue to make a speech. He stressed it was key for the Republican Party not to retreat from its historic values of enforcement of the law and observance of the Sabbath.

  And he explained that the Democratic Party was backing an “infamous” brand of personal liberty. “That kind of liberty is opportunity to evade the laws, liberty to levy blackmail, liberty to make contracts with certain men if they support Democracy and Tammany Hall.”

  He drew his biggest ovation when, with more than a hint of xenophobia, he singled out the foreigners of the City as clamoring for change. “The people who come into our country must recognize our laws and our customs. The demand for liberties for these people such as they had abroad cannot be considered by the American people. We have a Sabbath that all recognize.” The hall erupted in cheers.

  Another Platt crony, Hamilton Fish of the platform committee, leaped to his feet and endorsed the plank. He claimed—implausibly—the committee had steered away from the issue because they thought it pertained only to New York City.

  Chairman Lexow put the plank up for vote by acclamation. The convention in one full-throated voice, with plenty of foot stomping and hand clapping, added the Sunday enforcement plank to the platform. WARNER MILLER STAMPEDES PLATT’S STATE CONVENTION ran one headline.

  Somewhat surprisingly, when Roosevelt learned of the doings of the convention, he was a bit disappointed. In letters to Lodge, he couldn’t stop fuming over Platt trying to bury him, and though he was pleased with Warner Miller, he considered it an “ill drawn and ill considered” resolution. “I have the courageous and enthusiastic support of the men who make up the backbone of the Republican party but I have no hold whatever on the people who run the Republican machine.”

  With genuine distance, Henry Cabot Lodge, an astute political observer, drew quite a different conclusion. Lodge, then traveling in Europe, interpreted the Saratoga convention as the New York State Republican Party courageously defying the boss to endorse Roosevelt. In very prescient words, Lodge explained: “You do not realize how you have impressed the popular imagination and that means getting what you want.”

  Lodge was genuinely enthused. He knew that his friend had languished a bit in the backwaters for six years as a civil service commissioner; he knew TR currently served as a high-ranking appointed official in the nation’s largest city, but Lodge judged it time to dangle the bigger prizes. “There are to be two Republican Senators from New York soon—one very soon. There is a good chance for you to get the first one if you put yourself at the head of the element which forced your issue on the convention. I do not say you are to be president tomorrow. I do not say it will be—I am sure that it may and can be. I do say that the Senate, which is better, is well within reach. Stump the State. Get to know the people and insist everywhere on the vital importance of electing a Republican legislature to choose a Republican Senator.” (The New York State legislature chose U.S. senators until 1914.)

  Back in Manhattan, Roosevelt persevered with his reform agenda. Judge Jerome kept his word about tough excise verdicts after September 1, and sentenced widow Mary O’Hearn, who ran a small saloon (140th Street near the East River), to three months in the penitentiary for a Sunday violation. Sundays would be dry through the election.

  The reform board continued trying to weed out bad cops; in four months, it had fired thirty-five and would tally eighty-eight dismissals by year’s end, which might seem few, but that dwarfed forty-one the previous year or eleven the year before that. The board dismissed Edward Hahn for drinking in uniform; it dismissed his brother Frank for living in and aiding a brothel at 70 Eldridge Street; it also axed twelve-year veteran Edward Rothschild, after Lena Bendiener, twenty-two years old, holding her baby, testified that the officer had seduced her with promises of marriage. She said that they had set up house together on East 6th Street and he came home most days to eat and every fourth night to sleep. The biggest impediment to their happiness was that Rothschild was married with three children.

  Hiring new cops, however, hit a snag. The new higher standards tripped up reform’s effort to fill 325 vacancies for patrolmen. Of the first 1,497 applicants, more than half were rejected for being either undersized (less than five feet eight inches and 140 pounds) or medically defective (from flat feet to foreskin phimosis). Then only one-third of the survivors, that is, 148 recruits, passed the inaugural police civil service exam—“Multiply 252 by 504 and divide the product by 378”—and twenty-five of these men were excluded, some for cheating on the exam, others because the commissioners found “their personal characteristics or their antecedents” objectionable. (“Antecedents” presumably referred to close relatives convicted of crimes.)

  Undaunted by the delays, Roosevelt in an interview described the ideal kind of police recruit. First and foremost: excellent character. “He must not be a drinking man,” Roosevelt told the Herald. “He must not be a man of loose habits of living.” Roosevelt expected the man to be a good son or a father; he must not have “evil” companions; he would prefer a man of great courage, someone alert, obedient, and with good judgment. He categorically denied all men who had ever worked in saloons.

  The Washington Post said he was looking to hire “saints.”

  A little after midnight on the unseasonably hot Sunday, September 22, four friends, including a circus acrobat named William Coleman, who had spent the day outside of “dry” Manhattan, were walking west on 34th Street after disembarking from the Long Island ferry. One was boisterously telling a story that involved mentions of “this officer” and “that officer” when two strangers suddenly confronted him: “Who you talkin’ to?” said one. Coleman sassed back: “Not you!” The stranger didn’t like Coleman’s tone. “That’s a fresh duck; a good kick wouldn’t do him any harm.”

  The words escalated, and they began fighting. During the fracas, one of the strangers fell hard onto the pavement. (He would never regain consciousness.) The two strangers, it would also turn out, were plainclothes cops working undercover excise.

  The surviving officer asserted that his partner Delehanty had told the young men to be quiet but that acrobat Coleman had bull-rushed Delehanty and hit him hard with a sandbag (a small leather sack of sand) and tossed it away. It was never found. (A bystander would later testify he saw no sandbag, nor di
d Coleman’s friends.)

  Officer Delehanty was carried to nearby Bellevue Hospital. Coleman was arrested. The police version of events, of an officer brutally attacked with a sandbag, was quickly relayed to headquarters and spread through the force.

  The following day, Monday, a messenger arrived with a note from doctors that, despite surgery to relieve pressure on the brain, Delehanty was dying. The Police Board rushed into an “executive session” closed to reporters and voted immediately to bring back the nightstick, which Superintendent Byrnes had banned three years earlier in favor of a smaller lighter billy club.

  This sudden reintroduction of the symbol of the old days of “Clubber” Williams surprised many reformers.

  The New York Police nightstick—a fearsome weapon especially effective during riots—measured twenty-four inches long and one and three-eighth inches in diameter; it was carved of hard locustwood and carried in a socket outside the coat. Chief Byrnes’s billy club—or day stick—measured fourteen inches, tapering out from a one-inch handle to one and five-eighth inches at the business end, of granadilla wood, and could be slipped into a special pocket in the seam of the trousers.

  “The skull-crushing, bone-breaking night club is not needed in any American city,” opined one newspaper. “The policeman who cannot make an arrest without making a deadly assault on the citizen is not fit for the force.” A veteran sergeant in the 1890s explained to then rookie Cornelius Willemse that once an officer gets a reputation for hammering crooks with his club, they’ll avoid his turf. “There’s more religion in the end of a nightstick than in any sermon preached to the likes of them,” explained the sergeant. “That doesn’t mean you’ve got to beat up drunks and boys, but when you’re dealing with real criminals, let ’em have it. It’s the only language they understand.” Lincoln Steffens discovered that some cops also played a cruel game with the big club: they tried to levitate a sleeping vagrant with one swat, hitting both feet simultaneously and sending a shock up the spine. “That bum rose, stiff like a stick,” one cop fondly reminisced to Steffens, “didn’t bend a knee or move an arm. I think he didn’t wake up. He just rose up running.”