Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  Miller praised the police commissioners for their successful efforts and opined that the State of New York supported them. The comment drew pockets of passionate clapping, scattershot hisses, a low rumble of tepid applause. The reaction was decidedly mixed.

  Miller, occasionally pounding his right hand down on the lectern, informed the crowd that a citizen’s personal liberty should hold little weight in “great moral questions” such as observing the Sabbath.

  Voters should never receive a “local option” vote for the “Sunday saloon,” or for “gambling” or the “social evil” or for “every crime that breaks the Decalogue.” The audience was warming to his theme.

  He played once again on xenophobia. “We welcome every good immigrant to our shores, but we are a mature people, with fixed habits and customs, to which those who come here are expected to conform. They come here to escape the tyrannies of monarchial governments. We claim that as an American government we must ask all who come here to become Americans and be Americanized.”

  The crowd erupted in its first foot-stomping all-out cheers of the night.

  He called the saloon “the rendezvous of every evil element of the community” and said that having it open six days a week was enough. He even wondered aloud whether the Germans who joined Tammany might not be anarchists or socialists. By the event’s end at 11 p.m., half of the mostly Republican crowd had drifted out; the other half surged forward to congratulate Warner Miller on his speech.

  Under a headline SUNDAY BEER FOR NONE, the New York Times stressed that Miller had championed the very points that the local Fusion ticket was trying to avoid, so as to woo the Germans. “Not only was [Miller] not ‘bottled up’ but he fairly spouted cold water,” commented the paper with uncharacteristic playfulness.

  The following day’s Times headline was REPUBLICANS IN GLOOM. The World ran a front-page cartoon of the Tammany tiger standing with a paw on Roosevelt’s head to get a boost over the wall. The caption read: “ ‘I don’t care a rap for the consequences.’—Theodore Roosevelt.”

  A few days later, Roosevelt sat down for a long interview with a New York World reporter. He was asked if a Tammany victory in the election “will be due to the rigid Sunday closing under your administration?”

  Roosevelt demurred: “Why, of course, it would not be due to that. If the Sunday closing brought about a defeat of the reform party the defeat would be due to those reform politicians and reform newspapers which have departed from the issue and have encouraged the forces of evil by taking the position that one set of law breakers are entitled to immunity at the hands of the police because they are politically powerful. If the men who believe in honest government had stood straight up to the issue of honesty in public office we would have won this fall hands down. I think we are going to win anyway. If we do not, why, all I can say is as I have said before, that I would rather lose on the issue of the honest observance of the law than win at the cost of a corrupt connivance with law breakers.”

  Around this time, Mayor Strong called Roosevelt in for a meeting. He tried to reason with him about letting up on enforcement; he tried to order him; finally he made a veiled threat of dismissal.

  Roosevelt wrote Lodge of the incident. “[Mayor Strong] was terribly angry; but when he found I would not change, and the crisis came, he was more afraid of me than of all the Germans who were pushing him from behind; and he said he would do nothing until after election. I care very little what he does after election.”

  Roosevelt followed Lodge’s advice and muzzled himself regarding his own party but his spleen spilled over regarding the Goo-Goos. In a published letter, he compared their ticket to a “crank vote,” that is, a futile protest carried out by campaigning for an unelectable slate, such as the Socialist Workers Party. “In the case of the Good-Government people, it is the conscience vote gone silly.” He called them the “best allies of Tammany Hall.” He was deeply disappointed because he was a member of a Good Government club and regarded their work as very important.

  Roosevelt again and again confided in Cabot Lodge, his father confessor.

  “It has been an awful struggle, and I have been very lonely. I have not had one political friend of any weight from whom I could get a particle of advice or of real support. Now it seems as though, through no fault of mine, we are to meet defeat in this City.”

  Coincidentally, Lodge wrote to TR that same day from Paris, delivering a very perceptive, though obviously partisan, précis on New York City’s 1895 election.

  “The Germans behave very badly. They prefer beer to principle. What amazes me most about the [Republican] machine is not their being wrong but their utter stupidity. The issue was their chance and they neither rejected you nor sustained you. Anything more idiotic I have never seen. The Goo-Goos have behaved as they always do. I am amazed at what you tell me of Strong. Meantime the substantial victory is with you. The convention stood by you, you have a good Fusion ticket and even the city Republicans did not dare officially throw you over. You are strong with the people, you have their ear, your party standing before the country is unimpeachable, you are right and you have made a very big national reputation. All this will bear fruit besides being worth while itself.”

  Lodge’s letters helped sustain him, but the strain of the election was finally catching up to Roosevelt. His wife, Edith, worried about his health. Even TR admitted to his sister: “Thank Heaven there is only one week more.” As the election approached, Roosevelt, buoyed by all the enthusiastic crowds in the small venues, sensed a subtle changing of the tide; he allowed himself a sliver of optimism. He also had an ace in the hole. He believed a police crackdown on voter fraud would hurt Tammany far more than the Republicans.

  The police department, through its own bureau of elections, handled the regulation of the polls. In recent years, the Tammany police work—to put it nicely—was purposely sloppy.

  Though he received much less publicity for it, TR decided to put as much effort into ensuring fair elections as he did into closing Sunday saloons. “I have made the police force work like beavers to prevent fraudulent registration,” TR wrote to Henry White (an American in London) on October 28, “and in consequence the Tammany registration in the worst wards has fallen off nearly a third.” Purge the rolls of enough Tammany repeaters, prevent bullying near the polls, and the Fusion Republicans just might snatch victory.

  Roosevelt also raised the standards for the 11,000 Election Day poll workers provided by the two dominant parties. He wrote in an article for Cosmopolitan timed for release before Election Day that the police department had rejected almost 1,000 poll workers on either intelligence or moral grounds. He instituted a literacy test. Elsewhere, he joked that this year “two plus two” would not equal “minus one.”

  Officials expected about 250,000 registered male voters in a city of 2 million men, women, and children to cast ballots on Tuesday, November 5. Roosevelt started early to make sure each and every voter was legitimately registered.

  The first day of voter registration was October 8. All that basically was required was for a man to go to a polling place and swear to his name, his citizenship, and his place of residence. In this age before photo I.D. or hologram logos, double-checking a man’s identity could prove difficult.

  The hotspot for voter fraud was the lodging house. Men would be paid in cash, liquor, or cigars to wander all over town, use multiple fictitious names, and claim to reside at various lodging houses. Then on Election Day those men or others would vote under those names.

  Tammany’s Paddy Divver, a former alderman, could deliver hundreds of such votes through names registered at his seamen’s lodging, and so could Mike Callahan with his Progress joint on Chatham Square. Big Bill Devery’s uncle, Stephen Geoghegan, admitted during a congressional investigation that he invented voters and assigned them to various mud hovels on Dutch Hill in the East Forties, and that 25 percent of votes in his district were fraudulent.

  Roosevelt shrewdly ordered the
police in all precincts to go to the lodging houses on the three nights before October 8 registration. The patrolmen tramped up the dank stairs and copied down the names scribbled on the ledger. Anyone not on the lists who tried to register from those addresses would be arrested. He later bragged to Lodge about cutting down the “mattress vote.” Roosevelt also directed the police to check on any address that claimed more than one registered voter. Patrolmen again walked to the buildings and demanded to see the persons registered or made inquiries about them.

  The New York World reported on October 28 that voter registration had fallen by 30,000 names from the last election and that 23,000 of those lay in Tammany strongholds below 14th Street.

  On October 29, Chief Conlin announced the long-rumored shakeup of the police force; he reassigned more than 200 men and transferred several captains “for the good of the service.” In addition, the captains assigned many men on Election Day to polling places outside of their usual precinct. This juggling of men was designed to nix too-cozy relationships.

  The law called for two officers to be stationed all day at each of the 1,392 polling places, a law that had previously been rarely honored for all ten hours from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. It dawned on many of the 2,784 policemen that they would be unable to vote. (Tammany, recognizing its constituency, was not pleased, and hired a lawyer.)

  Roosevelt defended the assignments, ultimately stating that the fulfilling of the election law for the whole city trumped the rights of the individual policemen. Commissioner Grant suggested hiring 2,800 temporary polling guards for three hours to spell the officers so they could vote. But the Police Board rejected the suggestion as too expensive and likely to cause chaos through the hiring of untrained men.

  On Monday, November 5, at 6 p.m. Roosevelt called Chief Conlin and gave him the surprise order to enforce the Election Day excise law closing all saloons within a quarter mile of a polling place from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday. In a densely packed city such as New York, this would shutter almost all the saloons, the traditional gathering places for repeaters and fraudsters.

  The order was given so late that Conlin had to send telegrams to all the captains ordering them to come down on Monday night to 300 Mulberry. General orders were repeated: two officers must patrol within a 100-foot radius of the polls and make sure no electioneering or bullying occurred inside that circle. Roosevelt and Conlin promised that any bad behavior that day by policemen would be severely punished. Every man—except 115 on the sick list—would be on duty: 2,784 at the polls, a skeletal staff of 276 in the thirty-eight precincts, and 100 emergency policemen at headquarters, with horses and patrol wagons ready to ferry them. Each of the four inspectors would hire a hansom cab and rove the city looking for problems.

  Conlin also ordered the men to crack down on boys setting patriotic bonfires, a pastime that had blossomed into a New York City Election Day tradition; last year the fires had caused $12,000 worth of damage to brand-new asphalt.

  At dawn on Tuesday, November 5, the city staggered to life as usual. The sun glinted off Diana’s thigh. Drowsy workmen hoping to start the day with an eye-opener at their local saloons encountered oddly closed doors. Hundreds of veteran policemen, unused to the dog shift, found themselves tramping up and down near polling places, chatting with their partner, preparing for the very long day.

  The 21st Precinct police discovered that the Slimy Back boys’ gang had filled a vacant lot at 34th Street and Second Avenue with huge stacks of castoff wood, barrel staves, cracked kegs, and firkins. The Slimy Backs’ last election bonfire had roared so far into the night sky it damaged the tracks of the El; the gang had also rolled a stolen wagon into the fire and “danced the war dance of the great eastside.” Now, before Election Day, the boys showered stones down onto the seven policemen loading their wood onto a rented wagon; they chased the laden truck, trying to ambush the driver and leap aboard to rescue the wood. A policeman collared one red-haired boy and dragged him kicking and screaming into the station house. “The sergeant gave him a lecture, and his father appearing and promising to spank him, he was allowed to go home.” Policemen confiscated wood all over town.

  The mild temperatures favored a large turnout. The front-page “Weather Prediction” called for “fair and warmer,” with few clouds and mild southwesterly breezes. Roosevelt voted early. But thanks to Roosevelt, many fewer people voted often. Observers would later call this perhaps the cleanest election in New York City voting history. Roosevelt, in the name of fairness, had negated two of Tammany’s weapons: voter fraud and strong-arm electioneering.

  Roosevelt spent much of his day defending the board’s decision to assign cops to new precincts and schedule them for the entire Election Day with no break to vote. Tammany lawyer Blumenthal claimed this violated the state law requiring all employers to grant at least a two-hour break so employees could vote. The judge, though sympathetic, decided that the problem didn’t rate court interference. It could be handled by the legislature after the election.

  Women, though deprived of the vote, tried to help at the polls. Mrs. Mary Hall in the Tenderloin handed out glasses of milk for “soberin’-up” and gave a meal ticket to all men exiting the polls. Mrs. Stephen King, up in new Little Italy on 110th Street, handed out cigars, food, and lead pencils for marking ballots. Tammany doled out $70,000 in small bills to get out the vote, while reformers ponied up about one-tenth that amount.

  In that era, the police counted the votes at 300 Mulberry. Far and away, election night ranked as the building’s busiest hours of the year, with the floors lit from top to bottom and men clattering up and down the stairs.

  First, the local election district counted the results and ran them over to the nearest police precinct house, which then relayed that rough unofficial tally by telephone or telegraph to police headquarters. Then policemen rushed the sealed satchels full of votes to police headquarters. Downtown, mounted policemen galloped with the bags; in uptown neighborhoods, policemen boarded the El trains and a troop of officers waited on horseback at the Houston Street station of the Third Avenue El and the Bleecker Street station of the Sixth Avenue line to race the ballots the last few blocks.

  The first sack of returns reached police headquarters at 4:50 p.m. and votes flowed in steadily from then on; hundreds of winded patrolmen tramped up the front steps.

  Bald-headed chief clerk William Kipp, with twenty-six accountants to aid him, tabulated the results in the trial room. Usually on election night, the room was packed with greater and lesser dignitaries but this year—either due to the reform board’s earnestness or the nearby cordoned-off streets around a fire on Houston Street—plenty of seats remained vacant. The commissioners including Roosevelt mostly stayed in their offices, and messengers from Kipp brought handwritten updates.

  At 5:20 p.m., a reporter caught Roosevelt for a quick comment. “It looks as if the godly are on top,” he said excitedly, “and I am of the godly.”

  In that era before radio or television, tens of thousands of New Yorkers filled the streets foraging for the latest election results. Newspapers dashed off quick “Extras,” but people wanting to know first swarmed down to so-called newspaper row on Park Row, which housed the buildings of the great papers. The major dailies then stood alongside the colossal tower of Pulitzer’s World, which at 309 feet ranked as the city’s tallest skyscraper. The barroom joke ran that World reporters could lean out the window and spit on the Sun.

  The New York Times, capitalizing on Edison’s inventions, draped a large canvas across the lower floors of its building and projected images of political cartoons, photographs, and updated election results. The operators even did a sequence of rapid-fire colored comics “in which the characters were made to perform absurd feats.” This herky-jerky proto-animation proved especially popular.

  One cartoon showed a German Hamlet in lederhosen holding two full steins of beer in one hand and nothing in his other hand, with a caption saying: “Two beers or not two beers?” The Times also deli
vered on its promise to its advertisers that it would intersperse copies of print ads.

  Inside the news buildings, telegraph operators wrote down results on a piece of paper, shoved it into a container, and slid it down a wire to the men handling the projectors.

  The Times drew a big enough crowd to awake the sniping of the nearby leviathan World, which peckishly rated the Times’s display as “a kaleidoscopic jumble of stale cartoons, advertisements and photos of utterly incomprehensible figures from everywhere in the Union.” The World claimed that thousands of people migrated from the Times over to the Pulitzer Building, which had separate bulletin boards, organized to display updated results from each of the important races—and, in addition, announced results spelled out in lightbulbs in the dome.

  At 7 p.m., Theodore Roosevelt said: “Really, the returns as yet are not unfavorable. I still predict a Republican success.”

  Over the next half hour, the votes of more than 300 election districts were tabulated and spread via “special” telegraph to the executive offices of Tammany Hall, to Republican Party headquarters, to Gilsey House, where the wealthy Fusion “Committee of Fifty” gathered, to a storefront on Broadway where the Good Government men and their wives waited.

  And the news, district by district, showed an inexorable Tammany march forward, a bubbling up of the big Democratic machine. The reform police commissioners and their friends in various offices made quick grim tallies on backs of envelopes and notepads.