Roosevelt—later known for his “speak softly and carry a big stick”—never wavered on this decision. In his autobiography two decades later, he wrote that he “consistently encouraged” the men to be polite to citizens and to use force on violent lawbreakers. “Of course where possible the officer merely crippled the criminal,” he added.
Roosevelt told reporters on September 24 that if Delehanty had carried a nightstick, he could have “easily overpowered” Coleman, with or without a sandbag. (In his eagerness to reintroduce the weapon, Roosevelt overlooked the fact that undercover cops did not hide twenty-four-inch clubs on their person.) TR noted that the nightsticks would first be given to officers in the 35th Street precinct, then gradually distributed citywide, roughest neighborhoods first.
Throughout September, private clubs were still flouting the excise law and serving members on Sundays. (Their lawyers argued that clubs were exempt.) During the summer Roosevelt had announced a crackdown on “rich as well as poor,” but then had uncharacteristically backed off. Police Chief Conlin waffled and an assistant district attorney lamely announced the impossibility of gaining admittance to gather evidence. Town Topics advised TR to go undercover at his own Union League. “He can hang about the clubhouse, hide in the toilet room or the cellar and burst forth like an official cyclone” or he can follow the “modern police policy of inciting the crime.” The society weekly explained: “He can cordially invite [members] to ‘take something’ with him and arrest them if they accept.”
The Democratic convention took place September 25 in Syracuse. Unlike the Republicans the Democrats spotlighted Sunday laws. After giving a respectful nod to “honest enforcement of the law” and to “orderly Sundays,” the Democrats shrewdly endorsed a “local option” solution, that is, a vote by individual cities to determine their own Sunday excise laws. “Shrewdly” because Democrats did not control either the New York State Assembly or Senate, and even if by some far-fetched miracle they gained narrow control of both houses, they would never have enough votes to override the veto of a Republican governor. Nonetheless, despite its dismal prospects, “Local Option” delivered a better rallying cry for the Democrats than “Drink Up and Violate the Law!”
The pundits touted Tammany as poised for a comeback.
That prospect deeply infuriated Roosevelt. He repeatedly confided to Lodge that he expected to be blamed for the defeat. The irony galled Roo- sevelt. He was running a strict law-and-order Police Board as an antidote to decades of corrupt city politics and now his stern enforcement might bring the most corrupt hustlers of Tammany back to power.
Tammany Hall, the local Democratic clubhouse, at the time ranked as one of the most dominant, most lucrative urban political machines in the nation. The secret to Tammany’s success was no secret: favors on a grand scale equal loyalty. Give me your vote to elect my pals and I will help you. The organization divided the city down to the door frames of the poorest shanty. Its ward heelers stood ready, especially eager to help the flood tides of immigrants.
Tammany had started innocently enough in 1789 as a patriotic club with faux Indian rituals; the members were still called “braves,” wore headdresses occasionally, did war chants. It had grown successful with the waves of immigrants, and had even survived the Boss Tweed scandal of the 1870s. Overweight, shaped like a pear on toothpicks, bald-headed, Tweed ranks as the most famous politician ever felled by a cartoonist. Thomas Nast’s wicked caricatures in Harper’s Weekly kept the scandal alive until the New York Times began printing city expense reports in 1871. The building of the three-floor New York County Court House cost $12 million, which vaguely translates to $240 million in twenty-first-century currency. One accounting item listed “brooms, etc.” for $41,190.95.
Tweed, a onetime U.S. congressman, had skimmed millions in kickbacks on inflated city contracts. He also bribed Democratic and Republican state legislators to frame sweetheart deals. One judge described pending legislation to authorize an additional $10 million in Erie Railroad Stock for Jay Gould and others as “a bill legalizing counterfeit money.”
Tweed’s crimes had horrified New York, or so the newspapers said. However, within two years, New Yorkers reelected Tammany Hall politicians to top offices when the new boss, “Honest” John Kelly, ran an anti-Tweed campaign for Tammany. In 1886, Richard “Dick” Croker replaced Kelly. This boss fell more into the central casting mold of a boss. Bearded, gorilla-like, he rose from running an East Side tunnel gang. His fierceness was proven when he was accused of murdering a rival during an Election Day brawl. After a hung jury, the case was never retried. (Reformer Carl Schurz wrote: “some old-fashioned people considered [the killing] an objectionable feature of his career.”)
Croker—in the mold of modern Mafia bosses—demanded absolute loyalty. Over time, he developed an understated but menacing demeanor; he had no interest in food, wine, music, or theater. He generally preferred the company of horses and dogs, this “mild-mannered, soft-voiced, sad-faced, green-eyed chunk of a man,” as one magazine writer put it.
Croker, who grew up in a shanty, had amassed at least $3 million by 1894, and owned a magnificent home amid the swells at 5 East 74th Street, built of Meadow Grey Stone with a window looking out to Central Park.
For this upcoming election, Croker had returned from his racing stables in Ireland (and self-imposed exile during Lexow) to run Tammany Hall.
He welcomed the rise of Roosevelt and the shuttered saloons as an opportunity.
In forty-one days, New Yorkers would decide whether to reembrace Tammany Hall and Croker. Roosevelt—ever the knight-errant—saw it as a battle of good versus evil, of law enforcement versus crime. “I do not think we have impaired our chances of victory in the least,” he wrote to Lodge, angling for a more upbeat tone. “There was risk either way; and only one way leads toward honesty.”
On the same afternoon as the Democratic convention, a workaday Wednesday, September 25, the thirsty Germans of New York City engineered an extraordinary tribute to beer and liberty. More than 30,000 marchers, most native Germans or German Americans, almost all carrying small American flags, joyfully paraded up Lexington Avenue, along with musical bands, glee clubs, costumed bicyclists, and horse-drawn floats. “What a jolly saucy procession it was, to be sure!” assessed the New York Recorder. “How it flaunted the foaming glass or amber colored bottle in the face of the spectators! How it waved the American flag and yelled for liberty, personal liberty—the liberty to buy one’s beer on Sundays and to drink it at one’s pleasure!”
The Agitation Committee of the United Societies for Liberal Sunday Laws had sent police commissioner Roosevelt an invitation but probably more as a taunt or a joke. Though relentlessly demonized in the city’s German-language newspapers, Roosevelt decided to take Carl Schurz’s advice and attend.
Accompanied by roundsman Michael Tierney, the commissioner reached the reviewing stand at 86th Street at about 3 p.m., well ahead of the paraders.
TR was escorted to a place of honor, front row center. The parade arrived around 3:20 p.m. and gradually word spread among the marchers that Roo- sevelt was there. He never stopped smiling and waving. When a parader lifted a glass or bottle to him, he shouted back, “Prosit!” (There was no “open container” law in that era.) When one uniformed veteran of the Franco-Prussian War hollered in a booming voice: “Wo ist der Roosevelt? Ich würde ihn sehen,” he leaned forward in the reviewing stand and shouted back, “Hier bin ich.” The crowd erupted in cheers. Roosevelt had spent five months in Dresden at age fourteen.
The passing paraders by the hundreds reacted to TR. Many smiled; some cheered (they might have thought his attendance meant a sudden endorsement of their cause). Roosevelt, who doffed his hat and kept a perpetual smile on his face, was the center of attention in a reviewing stand of Teutonic elite.
Interspersed amid the marchers were horse-drawn floats, such as Lady Liberty in mourning. A beautiful young woman, in a red-white-and-blue dress, wore a floor-length black veil.
But even she couldn’t resist nudging the veil aside and peeking out and smiling at Roosevelt.
Another float, a simple horse-drawn delivery truck with a large banner, WORKINGMAN’S SUNDAY, showed three men—in blue overalls and colored shirts—inside a simple wooden cage, sadly passing around an empty “growler” (a bucket for carrying beer home from the saloon). Every attempt to gulp some beer ended in a miffed discovery of emptiness.
The highlight of the floats, the biggest crowd pleaser, was the Millionaires’ Club. Four men in elegant black suits, with red silk handkerchiefs “and other signs of swelldom … sat around a marble topped table and quaffed champagne between puffs at large fat cigars.” One of them seemed a dead ringer for Roosevelt. At the other end of the float, a policeman was arresting a bartender who was just then filling two beers for a couple of dockworkers. The rich drink; the poor suffer.
The commissioner smiled relentlessly, even at this float, calling it the “best of all floats … an excellent conceit.”
Near the end of the parade, a man came by the reviewing stand and waggled his banner—ROOSEVELT’S RAZZLE-DAZZLE REFORM RACKET—within a foot of TR’s face, drawing a big laugh. TR suddenly asked the man if he could have the flag, and the fellow somewhat sheepishly agreed. Roundsman Tierney jumped down and broke the long handle off and rolled up the banner. A little while later, TR saw SEND THE POLICE CZAR TO RUSSIA and asked for that one too. “Tie those up, Tierney, and I will take those away with me as souvenirs.”
Roosevelt had warned the organizers that he would have to leave in time to catch the 4:45 p.m. train to Oyster Bay. “Good bye, it’s been great fun,” he told his hosts, rushing off to the 34th Street ferry to Long Island City. “I never had a better time in my life … I’m glad I saw it but a hundred parades wouldn’t swerve me from my duty in enforcing the law.” He apparently loudly repeated that last line to several of the dignitaries within earshot of several newspapermen.
With his infectious grin, Roosevelt had charmed some of the German marchers and dignitaries and most of the reporters, who liked the “Daniel in the lion’s den” angle, but the real proof would be in the election results.
The local Republican Party was taking no chances. The top men were convinced of Roosevelt’s unpopularity. So, “Smooth Ed” Lauterbach, the Republican leader in New York City, with Platt’s blessing, decreed that no Republican organization, from the smallest club upward, should invite Roosevelt to speak in any of the campaigns … not for judges, assemblymen, state senators, county clerk, secretary of state, not anything. Roosevelt would thereby be banned from all the massive rallies as well. Lauterbach also issued an unequivocal statement that the “Republican party was not in any way responsible for Rooseveltism.”
While the city Republicans tried to cast off Roosevelt, they embraced that retired policeman and poster boy for graft and excessive force, Alexander “Clubber” Williams. Piling up the irony, the Republicans, who had championed the Lexow Committee, which had exposed Williams’s misdeeds and ill-gotten wealth, were now touting him for state senator in the Twelfth District. With great difficulty, Roosevelt muzzled himself regarding Williams, struggling to honor his vow to Cabot not to criticize the Republican Party. “Smooth Ed” Lauterbach was a worthy adversary for TR. Born poor on the Bowery, he had risen as a corporate lawyer; he was especially refined in his tastes in the arts, fluent in French and German. His wife often hosted musical soirees at their elegant home at 2 East 78th Street. Clever, witty, five feet six, with a pointed black beard, he was portrayed by cartoonists as a glad-handing Mephistopheles.
Roosevelt was deeply irritated by Lauterbach’s renunciation of so-called Rooseveltism and planned on lashing out against him, at least after the election. (Lodge would later frantically try to talk him out of it. “Mr. Lauterbach looks important in N.Y. City—he is pretty small in the State and absolutely unknown outside of it. You are known all over the country and known as a Republican. What Mr. Lauterbach says is of no consequence. What you say and do is of vast consequence.”)
Never one to back down, Roosevelt refused to disappear, as the Republican machine so clearly desired, but instead accepted dozens of invitations from a ragtag collection of church, temperance, and reform groups, speaking sometimes two or three times a night. He even spoke at a Harlem Democratic club. Up in Boston, the Massachusetts Republicans allowed him to speak. His own party in New York was cold-shouldering him, in the hopes of winning the city.
In late September, Reverend Parkhurst returned refreshed from two months in the Swiss Alps. He found the Republicans and Good Government groups and independent Democrats all at loggerheads, each making noises about fielding its own slate of candidates.
With Sunday shutdowns and Roosevelt in the picture, Parkhurst would need to practice some rare political alchemy to create a Fusion ticket, blending all the anti-Tammany forces.
Roosevelt analyzed the problem for Lodge. “The cowardice and rascality of the machine Republicans; and the flaming idiocy of the ‘better element’ have been comic and also disheartening,” he wrote. “The Republican Machine men have been loudly demanding a straight [Republican] ticket, and those prize idiots, the Goo-Goos, have just played into their hands by capering off and nominating an independent ticket of their own.” Many reformers belonging to the Good Government clubs (i.e., Goo-Goos) were wealthy and had a reputation for adopting uncompromising stances that guaranteed high-minded defeat at the polls.
Parkhurst approached the Chamber of Commerce and other top-tier citizens to form a Committee of Seventy to broker a broad Fusion campaign. “A bomb exploding in Tammany Hall would not have caused more consternation among the braves,” proclaimed the New York World on the front page on October 2.
Parkhurst landed fifty wealthy prominent citizens—Gustav Schwab, Charles Stewart Smith, Joseph Choate, Elihu Root, J. P. Morgan—for the committee; they began negotiating with the Republicans and others to form a Fusion ticket. When compromise talks faltered, Parkhurst issued a statement threatening to run a campaign: “Down with Tammany. Down with Platt. Death to machine politicians in the city of New York.”
A mini-Fusion ticket finally emerged on October 7. The Republicans and the anti-Tammany State Democracy Party agreed to band together. Needing the skill of a circus contortionist, they tried to concoct an excise plank to satisfy all constituents, especially the Germans. The platform began ambivalently enough: “We insist that every citizen is entitled … to enjoy the largest measure of personal freedom, consistent with the welfare of the community, and not in conflict with the moral and religious convictions of his fellow citizens.”
The three-paragraph plank had enough “on the one hand, on the other hand”s for an eight-handed Lord Shiva. It culminated with an endorsement of the “local option,” but it also included a Republican plank encouraging the Republican legislature and governor to promptly revise the excise law, without specifying the revisions.
Now came the crucial tests: Would the Germans join the mini-Fusion ticket? Would the Goo-Goos switch course and join mini-Fusion? Would the GARUs (members of the German American Reform Union) and the influential Staats-Zeitung newspaper back the cause?
On October 8, the Goo-Goos’ meeting at the United Charities Building voted down Fusion, 63 to 47.
The GARUs met at Maennerchor Hall, 56th Street and Third Avenue, and voted by a shockingly large majority to endorse … Tammany Hall. “I’m no Tammany man,” said Herman Ridder of the Staats-Zeitung. “I never voted for Tammany in my life. But I will and we all will this time, so that there may be no more blue laws.” Key community leader Oswald Ottendorfer said he hoped the election of Tammany would send a strong message to the Republicans and Commissioner Roosevelt.
However, a faction of reform-minded German GARUs couldn’t squeeze their nostrils tight enough to embrace Tammany; so the splintering continued further as Carl Schurz helped organize the German-American Citizens’ Union, dubbed the GAZOOs.
The situation was hopelessly, ridiculou
sly muddled. Although Roosevelt soldiered on with his combative style and big smiles, he was chafing more and more privately. “The attitude of the Germans has caused a regular panic among our people, from Platt to Strong [to] run away from the issue.” He added: “It is almost comic to see the shifts of our State and City party managers in keeping me off the platform.”
Roosevelt was feeling increasingly isolated. “I can’t help writing you,” he wrote to Lodge on October 11, “for I literally have no one here to whom to unburden myself; I make acquaintances very easily but there are only one or two people in the world, outside of my own family, whom I deem friends or for whom I really care.”
The newspapers didn’t tire of blaming Roosevelt for the fractured election that would probably boost Tammany.
Roosevelt was truly banned by his own party. On October 15, the Republicans held a massive rally at Cooper Union, a sprawling building at 7th Street and Broadway. Some State Democrats and GAZOOs joined the Republicans on the platform.
The festive well-dressed crowd of several thousand, including only a handful of women, cheered on Republican causes. Then the keynote speaker, Warner Miller of Herkimer, New York, blindsided his New York City hosts. He hammered home with absolute clarity that the Republican Party wanted the “saloons to be closed on Sundays.” (He had turned down the local party’s request to “blue-pencil” his speech; he in effect defied Lauterbach and Platt.) Ample-bellied, mustachioed, dead earnest, Miller said Sunday excise had grown into the biggest issue in New York State. “The Republican Party had to meet it or run away like cowards,” he stated. Someone on the platform shouted: “You’re no coward!”
Island of Vice Page 21
