Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  The judge got quickly down to business; he said he had reviewed the testimony and that it did not prove the charge of disorderly conduct. He said there was no evidence she was a “nightwalker,” or had loitered for evil purposes, or that her conversation with strange men was for evil purposes.

  “Putting the worst construction on the testimony given before the City Magistrate against this defendant I consider the evidence is not sufficient to warrant her conviction and therefore I order that she be discharged.”

  The courtroom erupted in cheers and scattered hisses. In the hubbub, Mrs. Foster wrapped her arm around Lizzie’s shoulder and hustled her out of the building by a side exit. She wanted to keep the girl away from her stepmother and father and from Uncle Henry Dittmeyer, still angry over his arrest in September. Mrs. Foster, dressed in black, took her by horse cab outside the city to Mrs. Foster’s own “Retreat for Young Women.”

  Most of the newspapers celebrated the freeing of an innocent.

  Commissioner Roosevelt—after reading a report by acting captain Woodruff—defended the arrest. “If the officers arrested her without cause, I should have them punished,” stated Roosevelt, “but from present appearances I believe the police were justified in making the arrest.”

  On that same day in another courtroom, the respectable parents of very pretty “May Daly,” alleged courtesan/hatmaker’s apprentice at the Grove Street brothel, arrived from Hoboken to vouch for their daughter. “Oh mama, you don’t believe the charge that has been brought against me, do you?” sobbed the girl as she clung to her mother’s shoulder. Her father stood by, blinking back tears. “I was always a good girl,” she said.

  Fighting her emotions, May haltingly testified to Judge Simms that one of the women of 39 Grove, Minnie Ross, had met her and asked her to come to the house to trim a hat. She was in the basement adding velvet to the crown of a chapeau when the police arrived. The judge agreed to release her to her parents and also abided by the lawyer’s request not to ask their true family name. However, he gave a short lecture. He was convinced “May” had been invited into the house as a subterfuge to recruit her to work in the brothel. “I have taught her a lesson that she will not soon forget,” said the judge to her parents. “It will keep her away from houses of this sort in the future.”

  On Wednesday, December 11, Roosevelt awoke to a New York World front-page cartoon of the Statue of Liberty under arrest for being an unaccompanied female out at night.

  n his tortured mood in December, Roosevelt offered to join a military expedition attacking Canada if Great Britain’s border dispute with Venezuela over British Guyana continued to escalate. “If it wasn’t wrong, I should say personally I would rather welcome a foreign war!” he would soon write to his sister.

  Early that month, he discovered the Republican boss Platt was cheating extensively over the voter registration for the Republican primary—even borrowing names from Tammany rolls and from street signs—but Roosevelt, with great exertion, muzzled himself, honoring his vow to Lodge not to publicly criticize the Republican Party. TR also ran headlong into Boss Platt over the selection of the next Republican candidate for president. He wanted to back Thomas Reed, Speaker of the House, but the boss was ordering all loyal New York State Republicans to support their favorite son, Governor Levi Morton. Making matters worse, Morton’s signature on a Police Board bill could ultimately determine whether Roosevelt still had a job or not.

  TR found himself boxed in on all sides.

  In this feisty frustrated mood, he learned that a race-baiting anti-Semite who had just arrived from Germany on a crusade to crush the Jews in America was scheduled to speak at Cooper Union on December 12. Herr Hermann Ahlwardt, a member of the Reichstag (Parliament), chose the second night of Hanukkah for his message of hate.

  In the late nineteenth century, a wave of anti-Semitism was surging both overseas and in vast swatches of America. The pogroms in Russia were chasing out hundreds of thousands of Jews; stereotypical Shylock portrayals of Jews as greedy moneylenders abounded. The Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs refused admittance to the Jewish financier Joseph Seligman in 1877. The Union League, which had counted Jews among its founding members, decided to ban Jews, such as Jesse Seligman’s son Theodore, in 1893. The famed Belmont family of New York found it convenient to convert away from its original name of Schonberg. Joseph Pulitzer so thoroughly hid his Jewish roots from his children that his son, Joseph Jr., didn’t discover his father’s past until he was a teenager.

  Pulitzer was trying to thrive in a society that increasingly ostracized Jews. The widely read trade publication The Journalist called him “Jewseph Pulitzer” and described him as combing his hair with his devil claws: “In the multiplicity of Nature’s freaks, running from Albino Negroes to seven-legged calves, there is one curiosity that will always cause the observer to turn and stare. This freak is a red-headed Jew.”

  Even in Roosevelt’s former D.C. circle, economics philosopher Brooks Adams dreaded the rise of Jewish bankers and gloomily predicted a “gold-ridden, capitalist-bestridden, usurer-mastered future.”

  In this climate, with anti-Semitism on the rise, it was feared in many quarters that Herr Ahlwardt, a chubby, articulate former schoolteacher, might find an enthusiastic audience on these shores.

  Jewish leaders approached TR at police headquarters and asked whether the commissioner would allow such a Teutonic hatemonger to address a mass audience in this great metropolis. “He has a perfect right to speak so long as he infringes no law,” Roosevelt told them matter-of-factly. “If you choose to speak against the Gentiles, you are at liberty to do so at any time, upon the same condition.” But the commissioner vowed the Cooper Union speech would be orderly and he told them that he refused to make a martyr out of Ahlwardt, either by some rioter harming him or by the police denying him his rights.

  Soon after the Jewish committee left his office, Roosevelt lit on a remarkable and provocative strategy: one he called “purely American,” one he judged feasible only in New York of all the world’s cities, one that he would proudly recall later in life.

  On the afternoon of Thursday, December 12, the day of the speech, Roosevelt told his roundsman, Michael Tierney, to go find a Jewish police sergeant. (Some accounts state it was Otto Raphael, but he was a rookie patrolman at the time; others state it was a “lieutenant,” but that rank did not yet exist in the New York police department.)

  “Pick out about forty good, true intelligent Jewish members of the force, men whose faces clearly show their race and order them to report to me in a body,” he told the unnamed Jewish officer. “I want them to keep order at this Ahlwardt meeting tonight.”

  Roosevelt had a plan that he believed “could undo much of the mischief which [Herr Ahlwardt] was trying to do.”

  The Jewish officers assembled that afternoon for the commissioner, and the group comprised “full forty of the longest beaked noses on the force!”

  Roosevelt told them: “I am going to assign you men to the most honorable service you have ever done … the protection of an enemy, and the defense of religious liberty and free speech.”

  Roosevelt was not in the least surprised that he could find—on such short notice—so many Jewish officers. TR estimated that Jews comprised the fourth leading “strain” on the force, after the Irish, Germans, and American-born Christians. According to Jacob Riis, Jews accounted for about 250,000 of the city’s nearly 2 million residents in 1895.

  In a later article, “The Ethnology of the Police,” Roosevelt briskly waded into ethnic generalizations commonplace in that era (Irish “fight well”; Germans are “thrifty”). “The great bulk of the Jewish population, esp. the immigrants from Russia and Poland, are of weak physique and have not yet gotten far enough away from their centuries of oppression and degradation to make good policemen; but the outdoor Jew who has been a [cable car] gripman, or the driver of an express wagon, or a guard on the Elevated, or the indoor Jew of fine bodily powers who has taken to
boxing, wrestling and the like, offers excellent material for the force.”

  TR added the Jews are “very intelligent,” at least equal in smarts to native-born Americans.

  Many New Yorkers feared Herr Ahlwardt’s Jew-bashing speech might spark riots. In the hours before the 8 p.m. start, a raucous, mostly antagonistic crowd gathered outside the large squat Cooper Union building at 7th Street and Broadway. The throngs thinned as word spread that the Institute—famed for its free classes in the arts and sciences—was charging a hefty fifty cents admission to hear Ahlwardt.

  At some point, Ahlwardt slipped into the building. “Down the main aisle passed the agitator between two rigid lines of Semitic profiles … those clean shaven helmeted Hebrew officers in mass like some ancient bas-relief on an Assyrian tomb … majestic in their bearing.” Forty Jewish policemen in blue uniforms guarded the back and sides of the stage, as well as the entrances and exits of the great hall. The New York Times reporter doggedly counted the audience: 150 men and three women barely filling the first twenty rows; that same reporter would later decide that almost one-third of these spectators were plainclothes detectives, basing his estimate on the fact that those stone-faced men never stood up, never cat-called or applauded.

  The New York World also did the math. “Rector Hermann Ahlwardt, the noted anti-semite, spoke in Cooper Union last night to an audience made up mainly of police.”

  Promptly at 8 p.m., Herr Ahlwardt, “round, fat, good-natured, shiny-faced,” wearing a monocle, strode out across an empty stage to the lectern. No one introduced him. The Tribune estimated the paying audience of non-policemen was equally divided between Jews and Jew haters. The hisses drowned out the tepid applause.

  Ahlwardt delivered his speech, “The Essence of Modern Judaism,” in German. Hecklers shouted in German. (The only English heard that night came from policemen.)

  Ahlwardt traced the history of the Jews as parasites. “In the Old Testament can you find a single Jew who worked? If you can find a single working Jew in those 4,000 years I am surprised.” He analyzed how Jews in Europe reaped the labor of workers until they controlled all wealth and industry.

  “Work is a curse for them,” said Ahlwardt.

  “Go down to the eastside and see if we don’t work,” shouted someone.

  Ahlwardt pressed on with his theme. He explained the Jew’s loyalty goes to his religion over his country.

  As he spoke, at times, a Jew here or there would rise up and shout something or laugh hysterically. Each time, a uniformed officer or a detective would confront the heckler until he stopped. “The crowd yelled ‘Pfui’ instead of ‘Rats,’ ” observed the New York Sun, “and their multi-syllabled [German] profanity rumbled like the final roll of the kettle drums in a Wagnerian opera.”

  About fifteen minutes into his speech, Ahlwardt moved away from the lectern and walked to the front of the stage. A man in the second row jumped up and with a “roar of rage” fired an egg at Ahlwardt, then hurled two more in quick succession. Ahlwardt, despite his pudginess and dress shoes, nimbly dodged all three, which cracked onstage, leaving yellow streaks. The police pounced on the man—Louis Silverman, it would turn out. Ahlwardt shook his finger at Silverman and yelled at him in German as a phalanx of New York’s Hebrew “Finest” hauled him off.

  “Gentlemen, do not allow this to disturb you,” said Ahlwardt, quickly regaining his composure. “I had allowed myself fifteen minutes to show you the differences between the Aryan and the Semitic races. This man has shown you the whole thing in a moment. No other man but a Jew could have done this.”

  A drunken voice from the back yelled: “Anyone else would have thrown straight.”

  The Sun reported that even a few Jews laughed. Ahlwardt, with frequent interruptions, spoke for two hours. He mentioned that he had walked the East Side of New York, and that after seeing all the street signs in Hebrew, he wondered why the city wasn’t called “New Jerusalem.” Loud boos filled the hall. Ahlwardt maintained his composure; he mentioned that the messiah Jesus was the first Jew baiter. “I am neither afraid of Jews nor of rotten eggs.”

  After his prepared remarks, Ahlwardt asked if anyone had comments or questions: all over the hall men stood up (except the detectives). Several angry New York Jews made speeches in defense of their race and religion, which Ahlwardt coolly answered. He even hinted at something that sounded more like a Final Solution than Zionism. “I’m here to do a certain work. God wishes to get all the Jews into one country someday.”

  When the meeting ended at 11 p.m., six burly Jewish policemen encircled Ahlwardt and convoyed him out.

  The police had squelched any riot, and had admirably handled the night. Editorialists citywide denounced Ahlwardt. Many New Yorkers were quoted uttering tolerant comments. Industrialist Gustav H. Schwab commented: “Some of my most intimate friends, some of the finest people I know, are Hebrews.” (Ahlwardt’s hate crusade petered out the following year in rural New Jersey, in a flurry of assault charges stemming from several fights.)

  But Roosevelt’s clever and humane strategy of setting Jews to guard a Jew-hater went largely unnoticed and unreported.

  Four days after his leadership gem went ignored, Roosevelt woke up to read a devastating front-page article in the New York World, the largest-circulation daily. Pulitzer’s paper charged that many of the nation’s elite professional criminals were flocking to New York because the police were tied up enforcing petty laws and guarding Sunday saloons. The piece—MECCA OF OUTLAWS—which covered half the front page and spilled over to page two, featured sixty biographical descriptions and twenty drawings of dangerous burglars, con men, bank robbers, and forgers, now “at large” in the city.

  The paper printed detailed drawings of these criminal masterminds—whose ordinariness made them more frightful—from bank thief Horace Hovan to swindler Colonel Alexander Branscom. “Scarcely a man of them would have been permitted to walk the New York streets in the old days.”

  The paper also charged that a shifting of manpower was putting the city at risk as detectives formerly stationed at ferries and train stations “who know the face of every notorious thief in the country” had been reassigned. It said convicts were bee-lining to the city from prisons such as Sing Sing, euphoric at opportunities to plot in secret since Byrnes’s stool-pigeon network had been dismantled. The article cited the previous week’s “Pope murder,” the “Brentano mystery,” and “the Harlem shooting” as crimes of “professional burglars or highwaymen.” It tallied 143 crimes against life and property, 19 murders, 39 felonious assaults, 9 incendiary fires, 13 highway robberies, 62 burglaries in the past ten weeks. And it rehashed a grisly five-week-old unsolved “umbrella murder,” in which a robber plunged the tip of an umbrella into the victim’s right eye.

  The World assured readers that a “most careful investigation” led to this exposé. “It is not to be doubted that Mr. Roosevelt will instruct those under him to find out the plans of these men nor is it to be doubted that he will want to know why he did not know of the presence of this galaxy of criminality before.”

  The following evening, on Tuesday, December 17, Commissioner Roosevelt attended a posh dinner that he expected to be a celebration of the reform movement’s remarkable year. Instead, it turned out to be something of a Roosevelt roast.

  Herbert Booth King—a socialite and advertising executive—hosted a dinner at the Waldorf for the mayors of New York, Brooklyn, and Boston. This A-list affair featured sixty guests, all male, the cream of local politicians, especially of the reform movement, including judges, district attorneys, parks commissioners, former mayors, senators, assemblymen, and police commissioners Roosevelt and Grant.

  They sat at a horseshoe-shaped table in a private banquet room. A Tyrolean orchestra featuring virtuoso mandolin players performed as “choice viands and rare old wines” were served. Waiters hovered to keep glasses filled.

  Around 10 p.m., Mayor Strong, smiling affably, rose to give an after-dinner talk about his firs
t year in office.

  Deciding to lighten things up for the holiday season, Mayor Strong recounted how a bevy of society ladies had cooed him into appointing eccentric colonel George E. Waring from Providence, Rhode Island, as sanitation commissioner. At first, during the snowstorms, everyone had been convinced Waring was a failure, but then they were shocked to discover that Waring was actually able to clean the formerly filthy, ash-strewn, muck-clogged streets and stop the overnight parking.

  “After that, I thought I would have a pretty easy time, until the Police Board came along [in May] and tried to make a Puritan out of a Dutchman. I tried to convince some of the Commissioners that it wasn’t possible but you know how it is when a man has got his commission … I went away on my vacation and when I got back the Police Commissioners were more than mayors in New York.”

  When the laughter died down, he continued: “I believe we have laws on the statute book for giving New York the best government any city ever had, if we only enforce them. If anything we have an excess of good laws.”

  He soon launched into an anecdote about whiskey. “A friend asked me how long since my grandparents were immigrants. I said about 1650. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘don’t you know that your ancestors left Scotland because they could not get a glass of Scotch Whiskey on Sunday?’ That friend advised that I toss out the police commissioners.”

  The New York Recorder reported that “[Roosevelt] laughed louder and longer than any one else at Mayor Strong’s first thrusts but as it became painfully apparent that the Mayor meant everything he said, the president of the police force became silent, then flushed, and finally paled with anger.”

  The mayor, basking in the laughs, blithely continued: “Why, a man wrote to me from Little Falls the other day, asking if I couldn’t spare one of the Police Commissioners to stop the sale of ginger ale up there. I told him I couldn’t, because all four of them were busy watching the girls who sell flowers and the poor devils who sell ice on Sunday.”