Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  By anyone’s math, Tammany Hall, thanks to the strong right arm of the Germans, was carving out a landslide victory in the city. The satchels of votes—unsealed and counted—showed it on pace to elect all the judges of the supreme court and the Court of General Sessions, ten out of twelve candidates for state senate, and thirty of thirty-five for state assembly.

  At around 7:30 p.m., a suddenly deflated Roosevelt conceded the election to Tammany. His words were spelled out in lights around the dome of the World. The commissioner avoided the press for the rest of the night by sitting in the office of Frederick Grant, his fellow Republican on the board. The usually voluble Roosevelt was tight-lipped.

  Lodge had sent TR a telegram from Europe pleading with him to avoid bad-mouthing Republicans on election night. TR obeyed but he couldn’t resist taking a potshot at the Goo-Goos. He blamed defeat on “the folly of the Good Government Clubs in running a ticket of their own and compelling the Fusionists to run alone.”

  As Tammany’s victory was becoming clear, the Times showed a Sunday saloon cartoon of TR in a policeman’s keystone helmet, swinging a nightstick and dancing a jig while shouting “I did it!” The crowd found it hilarious. A reporter overheard someone mutter sarcastically: “Tammany ought to do something substantial for Roosevelt.”

  Over at Tammany Hall itself on 14th Street, the braves were celebrating with a very open bar and a mood of “riotous hilarity.” A fellow named McGoldrick, who often bellowed out the returns, interspersed the numbers with snide comments aimed at Roosevelt, the Goo-Goos, GAZOOs, and various other losers. The crowd loved it. A regiment band “tooted and blared.”

  The Tammany Times later gleefully reported: “Teddy Roosevelt was at Police Headquarters watching the returns; he became bewildered at the figures for Tammany and it is said that an ambulance was called to take him to his home.” The paper added: “However, at the hour of going to press, he is convalescent and in all probability will confer with William Strong in reference to closing the park this Sunday.”

  Town Topics, that soused society weekly, interpreted the election as being a victory of the “thugs” over the “quarreling psalm-singers,” and an indication that New Yorkers prefer to be “crazy and reckless” than “crazy and religious.” They dubbed Roosevelt “Idiot Boy.”

  To cap the indignities, the city also elected the most recent Tammany Grand Sachem, Frederick Smyth, as a supreme court judge for a fifteen-year term at an annual salary of $17,500. (Judge Smyth would deliver key rulings on the reinstatement of “Big Bill” Devery.)

  Tammany also defeated Clubber Williams, who blamed the lies of Lexow.

  Outside the city, however, in the rest of New York State, the Republicans achieved a solid victory, gaining 80,000 more votes than the Democrats in most statewide races. This marked a ringing vindication for Warner Mil- ler’s Republican strategy trumpeting law-and-order and sober Sundays. The party retained its absolute control of both the state assembly and senate; it promptly announced that liquor laws would be made stricter. “Smooth Ed” Lauterbach immediately declared the local Republican party would abandon the Fusion platform plank of “local option.”

  On election morning-after Wednesday, every newspaper in New York City, to some degree, blamed Roosevelt for the local defeat of Fusion and the defection of the Germans. “But for the exasperating effect of Mr. Roosevelt’s uncalled for, unjust, harsh and oppressive execution of the Sunday excise law, a union of all the anti-Tammany forces would have been as easy and as triumphant as it was last year.” So stated the World.

  The New York Tribune, a staunchly Republican paper, ran a letter from a longtime Republican, hoping to use a “gigantic foghorn” to implore TR: “Do your duty, Teddy, and keep your mouth shut.”

  Local Republican politicians loudly hinted of a movement afoot to legislate Roosevelt out of office by changing the configuration of the Police Board. “It will be argued that Roosevelt has risen from a municipal sensationalist to a national mischief-maker and that another year of his Puritanical administration will increase the Tammany majority so that NY State will be lost to the Republicans.”

  Roosevelt tried hard to ignore it all, to keep a brave face; he requested that Chief Conlin gather the police captains on Wednesday as well as the men running the Election Bureau. They crammed into his office at headquarters; many entered smiling. He praised them highly for administering a “most orderly and honest election.” He said civilian complaints were way down from previous years. His tone was quiet and earnest; the flamboyance of the election was gone.

  “Now, in conclusion, I wish to say some things that I don’t think it necessary for me to say but which I wish you, Chief, and you, the Inspectors, and every Captain and Acting Captain, to hear. The board will not tolerate the slightest relaxation in the enforcement of the laws, and notably of the excise law, and the board will hold to the most rigid accountability any man in whose precinct any such relaxation occurs. I know that that is needless for me to say. I know that you gentlemen understand it thoroughly already. Good evening.”

  At TR’s request, Friday’s board meeting was moved up to Thursday morning, and by Thursday night TR was out at Oyster Bay, to spend a rare four consecutive days there, recuperating. That Sunday, TR wrote to his sister Bamie that “every single [newspaper] has attacked me” and that the comments “do not affect me in the least.” He said he was enjoying “riding, chopping, walking with Edith and the children to the full.”

  For the next week, politicians and pundits treated Roosevelt as a political piñata.

  The following Sunday he wrote to his sister. “The political outlook is rather discouraging; it is entirely in the cards that I shall be legislated out of existence in a couple of months.”

  hallenged, cornered, beleaguered, implored to lighten up, Roosevelt cracked down further.

  The police—after notching a tentative victory in the saloon war—were devoting more manpower to suppressing the other main recreational vices: prostitution and gambling. The newspapers reminded readers that Roosevelt had told a sympathetic crowd in Boston just before the election, “I have got the screws on pretty tight now, but if we get whipped, I shall take another twist.” TR’s very strong right arm was now twisting; the Germans and others found the extra quarter-turn vindictive.

  Some police captains—to curry favor with the board president—began arresting poor peddlers selling flowers in the streets on Sundays. The World, milking the outrage, cited the case of a father unable to buy roses to put on his child’s grave. Selling flowers on Sunday was clearly illegal unless a buyer ate the flowers, which then might qualify for the “confectionary” exemption.

  In addition, since apparently no law existed to license bootblack stands on the sidewalks, some patrolmen began threatening to arrest anyone—Italians mostly—shining shoes for a few cents. The head of the bootblack association hoped the officers were kidding, “as the police belong to a humorous race [i.e., Irish] prone to look upon the Italian as a ‘dago’ and as such the proper object of practical jokes.”

  This mid-November post-election gust of repression led to rumors that young girls would no longer be allowed to dance in the streets to organ-grinder music. Roosevelt found himself in the awkward position of wanting to postpone some of the crackdowns—on, say, flower sellers and bootblacks—without admitting to selective enforcement.

  Roosevelt was working eight to ten hours a day at police headquarters—interviewing job applicants, fielding citizens’ complaints, arguing with the press, handling his share of disciplinary hearings—and he was also devoting himself nights and weekends to finishing the fourth volume of Winning of the West by year’s end. Toss in a two-hour daily commute. In stressful times, he often worked harder, chopped more wood at Oyster Bay.

  Sometime late in the week of November 18, in the post-election doldrums, TR dined with an old friend visiting from Boston, the very perceptive doctor and Asian art collector William Sturgis Bigelow. Eight years older than TR, Bigelow, a
fellow alumnus of Harvard, fit that vanishing breed of Victorian aristocrat scholar. The two men enjoyed each other’s company, dined together every other month or so, and visited each other’s country homes in the summer.

  After this most recent New York meal, Dr. Bigelow wrote a very concerned letter to their mutual Boston friend Senator Lodge, part diagnosis, part prescription.

  Theodore Roosevelt dined with me the other night. He has grown several years older in the last month. He looks worn & tired, for him, and has lost much of his natural snap and buoyancy. At this rate it is only a question of time when he has a breakdown, and when he does it will be a bad one.

  He is in a wholly false position & ought to be got out of it. Those cusses put him in there in order to shield themselves, behind his reputation for absolute integrity, against the charge of not doing the impossible. To the amazement of everybody, friends & foes alike, he has met the situation by doing the impossible. The result is that New York City is about the only Democratic spot on the map & he gets all the blame.

  The Sunday liquor law is a dead letter. You might as well try to enforce the law against smoking in the streets in Boston. More than that, it was never meant to be enforced. It was a blackmail law from the start. And the New Yorkers would rather be blackmailed than give up their Sunday beer. That’s the whole story.

  Roosevelt ought to have a solid rest of several months. They can’t remove him. He can’t resign without putting himself in the light of giving up, beaten, which he will never do till he drops. The only thing is to get him shifted, somehow to an easier place that he can hold till the next Presidential year when he ought to have anything he wants. The State will agree because it is with him. The City Rep[ublican]s will agree because they will be glad to get rid of him. If he keeps on with this job he will break down, & we shall lose one of the very few really first-class men in the country.—Think this over.

  Lodge did think it over, and he soon had an opportunity briefly to spend some time with TR at the dock as he passed through New York when he returned from Europe. Lodge sent a worried letter to TR’s sister Bamie, whose wedding he had recently attended in London.

  [TR] looks very well, but yet I am anxious about him, not from physical but mental signs. He seems overstrained & overwrought—That wonderful spring and interest in all sorts of things is much lowered. He is not depressed but he is fearfully overworked & insists on writing history & doing all sorts of things he has no need to do. He has that morbid idée fixe that he cannot leave his work for a moment else the world should stop.

  On November 26, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Roosevelt called the board meeting to order. One item topped the agenda. The board—after waiting out preliminary court appeals—was now ready to vote on the guilt or innocence of Captain Joseph Eakins. The reform board had invested much time and effort. Commissioner Grant requested permission to read a 10,000-word legal brief defending Captain Eakins. (Eakins’s lawyers had no doubt written it.)

  Impatient, frazzled, TR abruptly refused him, snapping out: “Call the roll.”

  Chief Clerk Kipp intoned: “Are the charges proved?” Roosevelt—along with commissioners Andrews and Parker—sang out “Aye,” deeming Eakins guilty of neglect of duty for failing to shut numerous brothels and trysting places. Commissioner Grant, with unaccustomed firmness, boomed out a “No,” the lone vote for acquitting the twenty-nine-year veteran. Besides the public disgrace, Eakins would not now receive his half-salary pension of $1,375.

  Roosevelt, or a clerk under him, collected newspaper clips for a police scrapbook. The person with the scissors and glue pot often pasted in the most rabidly anti-TR articles, almost as though Roosevelt—just as he had collected the “Czar” banner from the parade—were dead set on being amused by his foes. Dead set, teeth gritted, damned amused.

  The New York Mercury called the verdict “as gross an act of injustice as was ever seen at a Massachusetts witch burning … Roosevelt is one type of American—the blue-blooded Knickerbocker Puritan gone to seed. Thank God they are fast dying out … Grant is another type of American, sturdy, magnanimous—the generous, justice-loving American of today, who is fast becoming the noblest type of man like his father, Ulysses … No Roosevelt was ever President; no Roosevelt ever led an army to victory—and none ever will.”

  In the legal brief that Commissioner Grant later handed to newspapermen, the writer argued that the Parkhurst Society case against Eakins was more of an ambush than a genuine attempt to clean up vice. The Society had informed the captain of alleged brothels on May 15 and the charges they brought against him specify conditions existing from January 1 to May 17. In other words, Eakins had two days to correct five months of problems. Grant’s main point was that in order to gather evidence against brothels that was admissible in court, police officers had to perform morally reprehensible masquerades, paying to watch sexual performances. (The officers couldn’t burst in without a search warrant and spot couples engaged in fornication or adultery, since neither act was illegal in New York State.)

  “The board is striving to attract to the ranks young men of ambition, of wholesome clean minds, of temperate habits, of truth, of honor, and self-respect. What parent would be willing that a son should engage in such work? What wife would not seek separation from a husband whose regular business was to drink in low saloons with black and white harlots of the streets, to accompany them to their resorts, to witness their shamelessness and then tell of his conduct in open Court?”

  Grant’s genuine outrage reverberates here (and he would eventually quit the Police Board over this issue). Eakins’s lawyers vowed more court appeals.

  For his part, Roosevelt, president of the board, never shared any public or private doubts about the Eakins verdict. Though he was generally reticent on the topic of sex, TR did finally elaborate his views on policing prostitution in his autobiography, written almost twenty years later.

  Roosevelt endorsed the novel idea of treating men and women alike caught in raids; he also wanted harsher punishment for brothel owners: “they should never be fined; they should be imprisoned.” His disgust with the “infamous” men who coerced unwilling women into the trade was so great he thought they should be whipped. “The only way to get at them is through their skins.” He also wanted to publish the names of any owners whose property was proven to be used for prostitution. He strongly opposed any stopgap approach such as cordoning off red-light districts.

  While TR allowed that stingy employers paying inadequate wages to women contributed to the problem, he regarded morality as the more decisive factor. Girls who are “strong and pure” will resist while “girls of weak character or lax standards readily yield.” Girls “who crave cheap finery and vapid pleasure” are “always in danger.”

  Ultimately, his fix for vice was simply virtue. Roosevelt saw the solution in the American home and American marriage. He envisioned virgin brides and virgin grooms, and faithful husbands and faithful wives, and a contented marital bed.

  The day after the Eakins guilty verdict, Reverend Parkhurst advocated passing a law that would make it mandatory to dismiss any captain in whose precinct—or any patrolman on whose beat—brothels, streetwalking, or gambling joints flourished. “If this intention were put into effect,” the New York Recorder dryly noted, “it would remove three-quarters of the present force.”

  Roosevelt’s private views on prostitution—communicated discreetly to acting chief Conlin—as well as Reverend Parkhurst’s more public views, seemed to be fostering a new attitude on the police force toward the world’s oldest profession. The marching orders were not to look the other way but to arrest. The policemen and detectives started casting a much wider dragnet, and, as any fisherman will tell you, there are sometimes surprises when you cast a very wide net.

  Saloons dotted the run-down German and Irish neighborhood around 1st Street, a couple blocks east of the Bowery. On the blustery cold night of December 4, streetlamps cast feeble pools of light onto cracked sidewal
ks. Around 10 p.m., a young woman, perhaps eighteen years old, climbed the stoop at 16 East 1st Street and inquired if the Dittmeyers lived there. She was dressed in a long skirt and long-sleeved shirtwaist with a high collar, a typical outfit for a shopgirl, but she had no coat or wrap. Thin, almost frail, she was also quite pretty, with blue eyes and a small delicate mouth.

  The Dittmeyers didn’t live there, someone yelled down to her. She walked around that dark neighborhood just north of Devery’s dangerous old 11th Precinct for a while trying to figure out what to do; she wondered if she had jumbled the address, so she tried to rouse somebody at 11 East 1st Street. Knocking, stage-whispering, and more knocking finally led her to discover the Dittmeyers didn’t reside there either, but a tenant thought the name sounded familiar.

  A bit panicked, she accosted a stranger and asked him if he knew the Dittmeyers. The man ignored her and kept walking. A little while later, she accosted another man and asked him if he would go into a nearby saloon and ask if anyone knew Henry and Rose Dittmeyer, her uncle and aunt. She was fairly certain her uncle drank there. The stranger agreed, and since she had no coat, she waited in the doorway of the building next door. She was tired, scared, and shivering.

  The man came back and, standing with her in the doorway, told her that someone in the bar thought Henry Dittmeyer lived in the rear tenement at 16 East 1st Street. They kept talking as they stepped out into the cold wind on the sidewalk.

  Just then, a big blue-coated policeman grabbed her by the arm and ordered her to come along. She shouted, “Don’t, don’t!” and tried to explain but Officer Reagan twisted her arm, treating her like a typical streetwalker. With her free hand, she grabbed an iron railing; then she went jelly-legged and refused to walk. Reagan blew his whistle three quick toots for backup.

  Amelia Elizabeth “Lizzie” Schauer frantically resisted the officers over the four blocks to the East 5th Street station house; she kept telling them that she was merely asking directions. She repeated that to the sergeant and the acting captain, neither of whom were impressed. They consigned her to a cell; in the morning, Officer Reagan hauled her before Police Magistrate Mott at the Essex Market Court House.