Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  Over and over, New Yorkers chafed at the purity crusade. It was as though the spirit of the city—some inarticulate force of hundreds of thousands of European immigrants mixed with locals, all of it long marinated in Dutch tolerance—refused.

  The inconclusive Parker trial—twinned with the mounting Raines Law fiasco—seemed to mark a turning point for Roosevelt. He had served fourteen months as commissioner.

  Besides hinting to Lodge about his need for a new job, TR began taking three-day weekends at Oyster Bay; and he decided to spend almost three weeks out west in late summer, including a long stay at his ranch in the Badlands of North Dakota.

  Roosevelt’s restlessness was getting the best of him. He rushed three long letters on three consecutive days to Henry Cabot Lodge at the very end of July, complaining about his frustrations with the police job and longingly analyzing presidential politics.

  Roosevelt had recently met with gruff personable Mark Hanna, Ohio mining magnate and McKinley campaign manager, and TR enjoyed relaying it all to Lodge. He told him that he advised Hanna to contact Lodge and Massachusetts Republican State Committee chairman George H. Lyman for “money help,” which he needed in the Northeast. Hanna had replied that Lodge topped his list of people to consider, both now and after the election. “Of course, I can only tell you what he said he would do, not what he will do.”

  TR also wrote that Platt—still smarting from his New York presidential candidate’s demise—refused to reach out to Hanna, and awaited an invitation. TR was enlisting an intermediary to send Platt a message to drop the “point of punctilio” and contact Hanna.

  Roosevelt met a second time with fifty-eight-year-old Hanna, long known as a champion of moneyed interests. “He is a good natured, well meaning, rough man, shrewd and hard-headed but neither very far-sighted nor very broad-minded, and as he has a resolute imperious mind he will have to be handled with some care.”

  Roosevelt, insightfully, suggested that Lodge throw a “small” dinner party for Hanna, as the man hated pomp and fuss.

  The end of the week found TR bickering viciously with Parker again over the promotions to inspector. Roosevelt, Grant, and Andrews had banded together and vowed to consider only Brooks and McCullagh. Parker promised a fight. “No spoils politician ever dared to do in this department what these men have done,” he told the press, comparing the actions to a Tammany fix for a favorite.

  Amid the battles over promotions, the board remained united against vice, and yet it couldn’t gain much traction in its fight. That week the police tried to shut down Hope Booth for her striptease, “Ten Minutes in the Latin Quarter; or, a Study in the Nude” at the American Roof Garden.

  New Yorkers, in the un–air conditioned summer heat, flocked to half a dozen gargantuan roof gardens for the cooler fresher air, overpriced drinks, and easy, playful entertainment.

  The “Latin Quarter” skit, which looked like the hit of the season, was a pantomime showing a French painter holding auditions for nude models; first, he rejects one (clothed) woman as too fat, another as too skinny, then he allows a young female (Hope Booth) who arrives in beggar’s rags to pose. (Remember the craze of that era about Trilby, a poor pretty model transformed by a hypnotist named Svengali.) Hope Booth goes behind a large red Japanese umbrella on a darkened stage to remove her tattered garments; she tosses them aside one by one; the umbrella rolls away as high-beam calcium lights flash on to reveal her wearing nothing but a long silk cape about her shoulders. To the drunks in the back rows, she appears naked. (An astute reporter for the Sun, however, stated that she had on an “exceptionally thin covering of flesh-colored stockingnet.”)

  The Police Board contacted Chief Conlin, who sent acting inspector Harley to investigate.

  When Harley went, accompanied by a roundsman, on Tuesday, July 21, he found the roof garden’s entrance jammed, scalpers hawking tickets at triple the price; the program listed the sketch as last in the lineup, to allow “spare time to buy drinks.”

  The next day, the two policemen pronounced themselves “shocked” and Harley testified at Jefferson Market Court House that he had never seen “as much of the female form before during any theatrical performance.”

  At the hearing, Hope Booth shrewdly handed into evidence a pair of “double thick” shoulder-to-toe tights. She stressed their uncommon thickness. Magistrate Deuel refused to convict on public indecency; the district attorney brought the case to the grand jury, but it too refused to indict.

  Roosevelt announced to the press that he was deeply disappointed by the verdicts, and also over the likelihood that Hope Booth would reprise her role. So was Town Topics. “Where she ought to be slender, she is too thick; above all, her ankles are ponderous,” complained the editor. “I protest again she ought not to be allowed to reappear upon the stage unless submerged in bloomers and shoulder-of-mutton sleeves.” “Latin Quarter” returned and helped launched Hope Booth’s long career.

  Frustrated by Parker and permissive judges, TR raced to Oyster Bay late Friday, July 31. His houseguests that weekend were Mr. and Mrs. Bellamy Storer, close Ohio friends of candidate McKinley.

  The clannish Roosevelts did not invite houseguests cavalierly. Two Sundays earlier, TR had hosted Jacob Riis; the previous weekend, fellow commissioner Avery Andrews. TR also mentioned a friend of his late brother Elliott, a “conscienceless adventurer with no morals of any kind,” fresh from Nyasaland in Africa, “but of such a varied past as to be rather entertaining for twenty four hours.”

  The Storers were presumably welcome for the entire weekend or longer.

  Bellamy Storer, two-time congressman from Ohio, had stood in D.C. as godfather to Roosevelt’s son Archibald (“Archie”), born April 9, 1894, when TR was still a civil service commissioner. The Storers hovered on the edge of that clever D.C. circle of the Lodges and Roosevelts, historians Henry Adams and John Hay, and British diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice. Lawyer Bellamy Storer, age forty-eight, had impressive bona fides, having attended Boston Latin and Harvard (class of ’67), but his political career did not flourish until he married Maria Longworth, a clever, entertaining, and very wealthy widow.

  Roosevelt knew well that very few people in Ohio had more influence with McKinley than the Storers. When McKinley had lost his fortune three years earlier and scandal loomed, Mr. and Mrs. Storer had quickly volunteered $10,000 to help save him and his political career. A friendship was cemented; McKinley supposedly cried on hearing of the financial pledge. The Storers, leviathans in Ohio, were looking forward to visiting the Roosevelts in the weeks following the presidential nomination of their state’s circumspect governor. “The [Roosevelts’] life [at Oyster Bay] was ideal in its simplicity and nobody could be more amusing than the host—one never knew what he would say next.”

  Maria later remembered TR as being especially edgy during that summer of 1896 but she said they also found him very funny; they laughed a lot. “His vituperation was extremely amusing and he had a most extraordinary vocabulary.” TR, selecting a Storer, took Maria out for a row on the bay. She recalled feeling a tad nervous as Roosevelt was rowing “spasmodically and sometimes absent-mindedly.” Their conversation drifted to his current job, and she recalled that TR sounded “much depressed.” He expected the political machine to force him out soon. “I don’t know what I shall do next,” he told her. “I have no future; I shall be the melancholy spectacle to the bunnies [the Roosevelt children] of an idle father writing books that won’t sell.”

  A steam vessel passed them and the wake almost capsized the small boat. “Please row back,” Maria told him. “We can talk better on dry land.”

  As the two walked toward Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt told Maria that one job did appeal to him but “McKinley will never give it to me, I should like to be Assistant Secretary of the Navy.” Roosevelt added that McKinley did not like him; Maria later conceded she knew that to be accurate but she opted at the time not to confirm TR’s suspicions. She promised that she and Bellamy would both directly ask M
cKinley, if elected, to appoint him to the post.

  Days after the weekend visit, Roosevelt wrote Bellamy that “it would be well for me to accept Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the very improbable event of it being offered” but that first the Storers must land a cabinet post for Bellamy. He added a postscript: “Need I say how we enjoyed your visit?” To Maria, he wrote that he had personally lobbied Mark Hanna for Bellamy. “He listened attentively, spoke very warmly of Bellamy, but said that at present he was considering nothing but how to elect McKinley.”

  While the Roosevelts enjoyed the offshore breezes at Oyster Bay, a ferocious heat wave rolled in slowly and relentlessly, stifling the city.

  Four people died in Manhattan from heat prostration on Wednesday, August 5. The “heated term,” as Roosevelt called it, began as the typical muggy miserableness of August in New York City but then day followed day with no breeze, no fresh air, no rain; the unpleasantness metamorphosed into a kind of suffocating blanket draped over the sweat-soaked city.

  New Yorkers slept on roofs, on fire escapes; they camped out on piers and snuck past policemen into the parks. The deepest suffering occurred in the overcrowded tenements where four families sometimes shared a handful of rooms. After a while, it was hard to breathe indoors. “The heat did not reach 100 degrees at any time during this period,” explained one contemporary observer. “It was rather the continuance of it night and day, the absolute stagnation of the air and the oppressive humidity, that made these days so trying to all and fatal to so many.”

  Roosevelt, his vacation two weeks away, remained in the city out of a sense of duty night after night and explored the misery. He watched horses dying in the streets and horse carcasses rotting in a welter of flies and maggots; he wrote it gave the city “a genuine flavor of pestilence.” Roosevelt later in his autobiography recounted that a dray carrying eleven horse corpses collapsed in front of a shop. The owner repeatedly begged city officials to come cart away the pile of rotting oozing horse flesh. Finally after several days he implored the police to “remove either the horses or his shop, he didn’t care which.”

  The heat crept up on the city … everyone daily expected relief that never came; hospitals became overwhelmed. The initial death count rose to forty-five on Sunday, August 9, then seventy-two on August 10. The death toll kept rising. (More than 900 people would die in New York from the heat.) Police shot dozens of mad dogs; more than the usual quota of New Yorkers went insane; several died by sleeping on overcrowded roofs and rolling off the edge.

  Officials rushed offers to relocate the poor to homes in rural areas upstate but almost no one took the opportunity. To spare sanitation workers from the sun, their work hours were shifted to start at 2 a.m. The public baths, including the floating swimming pools in the rivers, were switched to staying open round the clock with the women’s hours greatly expanded. The Moderation Society operated several ice-water wagons; the sign read ONE QUART PER FAMILY.

  Exhausted horses bruised their flanks crushing toward the single large trough at Greeley Square at 34th Street. Down on the Bowery, no public troughs existed, leading shrewd saloon owner Steve Brodie to offer free water to horses of any teamsters. An eleven-year-old was caught swimming nude in Rutgers Square Fountain on the East Side; a vagrant was caught sleeping nude in Central Park. The sanitation department, after sunset, opened the fire hydrants of one neighborhood after another, and exhausted half-naked men, women, and children crowded into the streams in the streets.

  Eight policemen passed out. The oldest animal at the Central Park Zoo, an eighteen-year-old buffalo, died and its body was carried to the Museum of Natural History to be stuffed.

  The weather forecast remained bleak.

  All this heat spelled disaster for a barnstorming presidential candidate.

  On August 12, day seven of this horrific heat wave, Democratic hopeful William Jennings Bryan was scheduled to give a speech at Madison Square Garden. Pundits had long marked the date as a prime opportunity for the Nebraska orator to spread the spark of his populist message and make key inroads in the Northeast. (Republican McKinley, on the other hand, was choosing to stay in Canton, Ohio, and let others do the talking for him.)

  Thirty-six-year-old Bryan had not even been expected to win the convention in July over Richard Bland, but his fiery “Cross of Gold” speech had captivated blocs of delegates; horse-trading had done the rest.

  The organizers of the Bryan event in New York expected a tidal wave of support; the Garden would have to add extra seats to near-double its capacity to 15,000; perhaps an equally large crowd would gather outside. Bryan could ride this throng and the coverage of the hoopla to gain momentum.

  The presidential contest seemed to be shifting from the candidates themselves to the fiscal policy planks of their message. Bryan supported the silver standard and McKinley endorsed gold. Strong opinions on the topic fractured the nation.

  Roosevelt, dubbing the election the most important since the Civil War, grew rabid in his letters about the silver craze. “Not only do [Bryan supporters] wish to repudiate their debts, but they really believe that somehow they are executing righteous justice on the moneyed oppressor.” He then condescendingly analyzed the psyche of Bryan’s supporters. “They feel the eternal and inevitable injustice of life, they do not realize and will not realize how that injustice is aggravated by their own extraordinary folly, and they wish, if they cannot lift themselves, at least to strike down those who are more fortunate or more prosperous.”

  Thomas Beer, author of The Mauve Decade, had a more Town Topics–style take on the bitter fiscal divisions. “It was now understood that some numerical incantation known as the silver standard would either make everybody sixteen times richer or would ruin the United States. Few minds were strong enough to comprehend the reasoning of this process but a plain case of the people against the wicked rich had been made out.”

  Roosevelt, surrounded by loyal Republicans, expected the Northeast to back McKinley but he still worried about the appeal of Bryan. “[He] is a personally honest and rather attractive man, a real orator and a born demagogue, who has every crank, fool and putative criminal in the country behind him, and a large proportion of the ignorant honest class.”

  Though wilting under the oppressive heat of August 12, New Yorkers by the thousands flocked by streetcar and El toward Madison Square Garden. The organizers had decked the north end of the arena with two enormous portrait banners of Bryan and Arthur Sewall. Workmen added seats; they draped red-white-and-blue bunting; bands practiced patriotic songs.

  In the sweltering heat, the New York police were key to it all going smoothly; they would have to control the immense crowds of perspiring Democrats. The police assigned 400 men for crowd control. The police plan—not well coordinated with the Garden officials or the campaign heads—called for the officers to cordon off a block-wide protective buffer around the Garden long before the 8 p.m. start of the speech.

  The police that evening let through thousands—perhaps enough to fill the Garden—and then sealed the barricades at 7 p.m. when the Garden opened its doors. The massive flaw was that many of the ticket holders, including many of Bryan’s most passionate supporters and more than a few important members of the press, were locked on the wrong side of the barricades. No cajoling or browbeating swayed any police officers, and several indignant dignitaries were arrested trying to bullrush the gates. Patrolman Charles Becker arrested lawyer J. Brownson Ker, who was carrying a “Special Invitation” and refused to stop.

  Inspector Cortwright, a Republican, who was overseeing all in Conlin’s brief absence, called for mounted police to charge the surging crowds at several places, eventually forcing the masses into Madison Square Park. Acting inspector Brooks commanded inside the building; acting inspector McCullagh fought the toughest crowds on Fourth Avenue. Both happened to be loyal Republicans, as, of course, was Roosevelt.

  The headlines the next day regarding the runup to the speech would complain: INEFFICIEN
CY OF TEDDY’S RECRUITS. A New York Sun editorial would dub it “the most remarkable exhibition of mismanagement seen in this city in many years.” An article in the New York News would call the riot police “as utterly useless as a row of tin soldiers.”

  The World estimated that one-quarter of ticket holders were turned back into the howling, sweating, swirling mob on the fringes of Madison Square Park. The Democrats could see nude Diana but they couldn’t get under her and into the building. The Sun gauged the police as “remarkably adept at letting gate-crashers in and keeping ticket-holders out.”

  The Garden was full by 7:30 p.m. A World reporter pulled out a thermometer; the inside of the Garden, despite open windows and roof ventilation, stood at ninety-seven degrees, with 2,000 electric lights aglow.

  The nearly 14,000 men in the perspiring audience almost immediately began removing their coats and vests until the Garden seemed a sea of ghostly white, except for the occasional woman’s bonnet. Men smoked cigars. Tall, strong-looking Bryan, the youngest presidential candidate ever of a major political party, strode to the lectern, and the crowd, hats and handkerchiefs waving, engulfed him in an eight-minute tidal wave of ovation. Passionate enthusiasm emanated from the young crowd, mostly under thirty.

  Then Bryan began to read his speech. The “Orator of the Platte,” who had mesmerized the Democratic convention in Chicago, was not moving his arms or modulating his voice or showing his passion. The man who had delivered the memorable “Cross of Gold” speech was reading a detailed, complicated diatribe on the silver standard; the mesmerizer was droning on in the kickoff speech of his campaign.