Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  McKinley won in a rout. He drew about 5 percent more of the popular vote but crushed Bryan 271 to 176 in the Electoral College. The states had fallen mostly as Roosevelt had predicted, with Bryan’s strength limited to the West (except California and Oregon) and the solid South. The orator from Nebraska carried just one fewer of the forty-five states than McKinley but unfortunately for him Texas then had fifteen electoral votes and Florida four compared to Pennsylvania’s thirty-two and New York’s thirty-six. The local bookmakers scooped up $6,000 when McKinley clobbered Bryan in New York State by 270,000 votes, grabbing almost 60 percent.

  Roosevelt, in the final frantic days leading up to the polls, had worked hard to guarantee another fair election. Tammany once again would not be stuffing any ballot boxes or registering vagrants on his watch. He again raised the standard for poll watchers and ordered interviews of hundreds of candidates for the low-paying job. He ensured that police would be allowed to vote, while still assigning them to distant precincts.

  Newspapers universally acknowledged a well-run election. The only slight quirk was that the Raines Law forbade the sale of liquor in saloons but allowed it in hotels on Election Day. Since New York City barkeeps had converted 1,500 saloons into Raines Law hotels, voters did not have to wander far for a drink. An inebriated electorate apparently didn’t harm Republican chances.

  Roosevelt was beyond ecstatic at the McKinley victory. He called it a “triumph of patriotism.” The Republicans toasted themselves in a series of lavish dinners at New York’s prime venues. Roosevelt rewarded himself by going to a boxing match on November 16.

  The election won, Lodge importuned McKinley again on Roosevelt’s behalf, and the pair weighed another trip to Canton. This time, Roosevelt strove mightily not to offend the Storers. He wrote Bellamy Storer on November 18 and 19, ultimately concluding that he would prefer to avoid the trip altogether.

  TR instead agreed to attend an event close to the Storers’ heart, a lavish dinner in Cincinnati, which the couple hosted for the local New England Society on December 22, celebrating the Pilgrims landing. (A year earlier, he had turned it down.)

  He pretzeled himself linguistically in a postscript trying to please and appease the Storers. “I should rather have you speak in my behalf than anyone in the United States, and I think you could do most good; but I rather hate to go there [to Canton] with you, for, somehow, it does not seem to me that it would be a good thing for you to speak for me before me.”

  Roosevelt tried to pull his weight in the job-hunting game; he wrote a letter to McKinley pushing Bellamy Storer for a high cabinet post or a plum diplomatic assignment.

  Just before Thanksgiving, the Storers visited McKinley at his home. They ran into Police Commissioner Grant, who was pitching himself for secretary of war, and Maria served up to TR a (now lost) anecdote of Grant’s bumbling self-promotion. At some point during their chat, Maria steered the conversation to the subject of TR and made an impassioned plea for him to be the next assistant secretary of the navy. She wrote Roosevelt and, treading delicately, suggested that he come to Canton to dispel McKinley’s final reservations. “He saw me when I went there during the campaign,” Roosevelt replied, “and if he thinks I am hot-headed and harum-scarum, I don’t think he will change his mind now.”

  Hackles up, TR added that he did not want to appear “as a supplicant” because he was convinced he would do “good work” for the U.S. Navy. (When word later leaked of his job quest, the rarely-friendly-to-TR Washington Post pointed out that Roosevelt had written a well-respected book on the War of 1812, was a lifelong student of the navy, and could easily decipher arcane reports on vessel displacement and armament.)

  McKinley around this time extended another invitation to Henry Cabot Lodge, who visited on Sunday, November 29. Lodge reported that he chatted for two hours with the president-elect, mainly about foreign policy, especially Cuba. (McKinley hoped to avoid war long enough to repair the U.S. economy first.) Then Lodge broached the subject of Roosevelt’s appointment.

  “[McKinley] spoke of you with great regard for your character and your services and he would like to have you in Washington. The only question he asked was this, which I give you: ‘I hope he has no preconceived plans which he would wish to drive through the moment he got in.’ ” That question implied that the battle-hardened major feared TR might be too belligerent in foreign affairs, too overeager to build a massive fleet. Lodge, without hesitation, replied that Roosevelt would strictly follow administration policies. To portray headstrong Roosevelt as an obedient bureaucrat took a practiced poker face and decades of Boston Brahmin breeding.

  Lodge discussed other topics with McKinley but then as he was preparing to leave, he added: “I have no right to ask a personal favor of you but I do ask for Roosevelt as the one personal favor.” McKinley replied that he carried no hard feelings from TR and Lodge supporting Reed. “You have a perfect right to ask a personal favor and I understand what you want.” He did not say he would grant it; he said he understood it.

  A few days later back in D.C., Lodge ran into Bellamy Storer, confided “my influence is nothing compared to yours,” and asked him to keep “steady pressure” on McKinley. Bellamy then—for the second time—invited Lodge to attend the Pilgrims landing banquet in Cincinnati on December 22 but Lodge begged off, explaining that his younger son was returning from Cambridge.

  Supplicant Roosevelt had no choice regarding the banquet invitation. Maria asked him to come out a day early, but he pleaded police commission business. She asked him to stay a day late, but he pleaded—as he had from the beginning—that he had to attend the Cove School Christmas Tree lighting in Oyster Bay on the morning of December 24.

  TR wrote again and again to thank Lodge. “The main reason why I would care to go to Washington is to be near you,” he penned once. TR added elsewhere that Cabot and wife Nannie were the “only people for whom I really care outside my own family.”

  Lodge also met with New York State Republican boss Thomas Collier Platt on Roosevelt’s behalf. With the Republican landslide, Platt decided he would orchestrate his minions in the Republican-dominated legislature to elect himself in January as the next U.S. senator from New York. Lodge informed TR he must go to Platt and promise not to make war on him.

  Unfortunately for Roosevelt, Platt’s only rival for senator was Roosevelt’s longtime Harvard friend and mentor Joseph Choate, who back in 1881 had helped launch Roosevelt’s political career by championing him for assemblyman. TR made a painful but pragmatic decision. He showed up at the Wednesday night Republican banquet and backed the inevitable Platt.

  In the reality of hardball politics, TR was discovering that he would need not only McKinley’s blessing but also Platt’s, since McKinley had decided that he could hand New York Republicans only so many plum appointments.

  And at that moment, Platt would not lift a finger for Roosevelt, except perhaps to toss him out of New York. Conveniently for TR, Washington lay 200 miles to the south.

  he rumor that Roosevelt was at a private party at Sherry’s with a nude belly dancer swept through the police department late on Saturday, December 19. Tammany cops were much amused. The story got even better when it was relayed on good authority that one of Roosevelt’s favorite reform captains was on his way to raid the restaurant and that he did not know that Roosevelt was there. Captain Chapman had heard that Little Egypt was performing “table tricks.”

  A dusting of snow gave the Tenderloin that night a rare patina of purity. Bawdy women still bustled into the dance halls but they looked less garish bundled in snowflake-flecked winter coats, swathed in scarves. Band music, with more than a smattering of sentimental songs to suit the Christmas season, drifted out through the open doors.

  Just after midnight, Captain George S. Chapman—a strict fifty-year-old officer, bald-headed with massive muttonchop sideburns—walked, wearing civilian clothes, from the West 30th Street precinct house over to Sherry’s Restaurant at 37th Street and Fifth
Avenue. He was heading to one of the most respectable, exclusive, expensive venues in New York City. Only in this reform era under Roosevelt could a captain even consider barging in there, on a tip of “indecent behavior” from a theatrical agent. In season, the cream of the city’s youth attended Monday and Thursday “Dance Classes”—orchestrated by Mrs. William C. Whitney and dubbed “The Swells”; and on Sundays, the traditional night off for domestic servants, Sherry’s Restaurant, along with Delmonico’s and the Waldorf, attracted a very large following among the Four Hundred.

  Chapman and two detectives found the building locked but saw lights on the second floor and faintly heard music through the closed windows. He pressed the buzzer but no one answered. A quarter hour later, Chapman, who considered it his duty “to drive out crime and iniquity without fear or favor,” saw a couple rushing out of a door and slipped inside. He climbed to the second floor, heard voices, and entered a room. He was shocked.

  Chapman, a straight-arrow nineteen-year police veteran who didn’t “smoke, drink or chew,” saw nine women in various stages of undress, and four men clustered nearby. He saw a voluptuous woman “standing in her underclothes,” with one leg raised, rolling off a pair of tights; he saw a blonde with her “bosom exposed” and “no skirt” over her legs. He thought: “Orgy.”

  “It seems we are to have no privacy at all,” shouted the most naked of the women, who added yet louder: “Get out!”

  Chapman balled his fists; observers later said he turned white with rage. “You are a disgrace to your sex and you are not fit to call yourself a woman,” he yelled. “I know what you are going to do in this room with all these men. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” He identified himself as a police captain.

  The blonde ran behind some hanging tablecloths. Chapman turned to a young pretty brunette and asked: “Are you Little Egypt?” She indignantly said no.

  An elegantly dressed twenty-five-year-old man, with hair parted down the middle, came up to Chapman, smiling; he thought Chapman was part of the evening’s entertainment. His friend had threatened to hire a fake police officer to show up at midnight to “arrest” several guests. The man, host Herbert Barnum Seeley, thought Chapman, with bald head and abundant whiskers, was an actor hired to look just like vice crusader Anthony Comstock.

  He very quickly realized his mistake.

  Captain Chapman informed him that he had heard “immoral nude dancing” would be taking place here. Seeley, a grandson of P. T. Barnum, denied the accusation, pointing out to the captain that he had entered the actresses’ dressing room. He said he was throwing a bachelor’s dinner for his brother. Just then another guest, Horatio Harper, a partner in Harper & Brothers publishing house, rushed up to Chapman and grabbed him by the shoulder. He threatened to “toss him” out, even if he was a police officer. Harper was slurring his words.

  Seeley tried to assure Chapman that a respectable show—banjoists, singers, dancers, monologuists—was going on in the other room, the dining room. He quickly introduced Chapman to a few of the celebrity performers, such as Minnie Renwood, who had played the ingénue Trilby for newfangled Vitascope moving pictures. Seeley added that the guests for this bachelor party were quite “prominent men”; did Chapman wish to meet them? The Captain angrily said he did not care how prominent they were.

  He eventually agreed to walk with Seeley into the dining room, where the guests, who had been drinking for several hours, applauded. They too thought Chapman part of the entertainment. (Fifteen courses of food and drink and entertainment were planned.)

  The dour Chapman quickly corrected them; he told them that his duty required him to investigate an accusation of “immoral” dancing. “A woman who would so degrade her sex to dance naked before a party of men …” his voice trailed off. “She is a direct insult to your wives and your mothers and your sisters,” he said, staring at each of the men.

  Harper tried to cut Chapman off but he refused to stop. He spoke of arresting any offenders. “I would not tolerate such a thing on Fifth Avenue any more than I would on Eleventh Avenue.” A gray-mustached man (Seeley’s father) rose and informed Chapman that no indecent behavior was planned. The others chimed in. (They were lying.)

  Perhaps hoping to intimidate Chapman, Seeley introduced some of the guests, with names such as Edward Fish of the New York Stock Exchange and H. H. Flagler, the son of H. M. Flagler, a Standard Oil magnate and Rockefeller partner. (Roosevelt was not among them.)

  They invited him to stay for the next act but he begged off, saying he had been awake since 7 a.m. and still had to tour the rest of his precinct. As he and his two detectives left through the dressing-room door, that first blonde, Cora Routt, who had been the least dressed, put her thumb to her nose and wiggled her fingers, and singsonged: “Good-bye, captain of the precinct.” Chapman didn’t reach his bed at the station house till 3 a.m. He thought the incident over.

  Theodore Roosevelt was spending the weekend at Oyster Bay, frantically trying to enjoy himself and forget his frustrations. He “played bear” so enthusiastically with the children that he had an attack of asthma; he was chopping a dead tree for firewood when a heavy rotten branch crashed down on him; he was so energetically feeding logs into the roaring fireplace that he crashed his forehead into the stone mantel.

  Amazingly in a city with more than a dozen active dailies, not a single newspaperman found out on Sunday about the Chapman raid. Word began trickling out Monday morning, creating a feeding frenzy just as Roosevelt arrived, banged up, at 300 Mulberry. Reporters descended on Herbert B. Seeley, on his father, and on Louis Sherry. All three expressed profound “indignation” and “outrage” over the “invasion” by a police captain “without a warrant,” interrupting and spoiling a harmless private party at a preeminent venue. Restaurateur Louis Sherry huffed to the Herald that he catered to the “very best people in the city and no others.”

  Reporters rushed back to police headquarters and the Tenderloin precinct with these quotes and confronted the commissioners, Chief Conlin, and Captain Chapman, who all quickly realized that the coverage would be overwhelmingly hostile. “A perfect whirlwind of denunciation and invective has broken over the hapless head of Capt. George Chapman who made a raid and found nothing,” wrote the World.

  Had Roosevelt attended the party, he would have been labeled a hypocrite; instead, he found himself and his police force flayed for excessive zeal and Puritanism.

  TR, one of whose great strengths was seeing all fights in black and white, found himself stuck in a decidedly gray fight. His lectures on morality and decency had led one of his captains to intrude on a possibly harmless private party and lecture the guests. Roosevelt uncharacteristically withheld judgment pending an investigation by Chief Conlin.

  Complicating matters, TR had to leave in a few hours to honor his commitment to attend the Pilgrim dinner in Cincinnati for his patrons, the Storers.

  With the Sherry’s news breaking all around them, the Police Board tried to squeeze in a routine board meeting in the early afternoon before Roosevelt’s departure.

  Commissioners Parker and Grant officially complained that Frank Moss of the Parkhurst Society—despite being hired by the board—was refusing to turn over any evidence against Captain “Big Bill” Devery. Moss had brazenly told the two commissioners that he felt he could not trust them to weigh the material but not let it color their opinion at a subsequent trial. (An unnamed police official told the Sun the “amusing” part was that Moss feared prejudging while he and Parkhurst despised Devery “as the devil hates holy water.”) Parker had retorted that if Moss didn’t turn over something, then the Rules and Discipline committee would never bring any charges, especially since Devery’s trial would cost the city even more than Eakins’s.

  The agenda turned to the board’s bread and butter: promotions. The name topping the eligible list for sergeant was Commissioner Andrews’s longtime helper, Roundsman John Tracy, the same man who had accompanied TR and Dr. Bigelow on a memorable mi
dnight ramble.

  Commissioner Parker—who had been amenable to the choices of Roosevelt and Andrews on more than a dozen recent captain and sergeant promotions—informed the board that he would vote against Roundsman Tracy. He claimed Tracy’s long service at headquarters “unfitted him” for the sergeant’s job at a precinct. Parker had originally agreed to a rating number that made the man eligible, but now he was blocking his promotion.

  Andrews’s thin waxed mustache vibrated with irritation. He and TR were furious. Colonel Grant—seemingly oblivious to the tension—smilingly suggested that the board jump around on the eligible list, that he had several other worthy candidates in mind.

  Roosevelt snapped. He called Grant’s suggestion “illegal” and stated that civil service rules required following the list in order. He also said he had read in a newspaper that a commissioner would try a ploy—jumping around the list—to promote men selected by the local Republican power brokers. (Days later, TR would write to Lodge: “That muttonhead Grant has suddenly gone in with Parker to carry out … the dictates of the Republican County managers, Lauterbach and Gruber; he is hoping to get something good from McKinley, and relies upon the backing of the local machine.”)

  Grant was flummoxed, but Commissioner Parker counterattacked for him. He once again accused TR of aiding Democrats. He said Tammany’s “Big Tim” Sullivan had told him that Roosevelt had privately revealed the ratings for Big Tim’s cousin.

  The needle found its mark. Roosevelt, turning red in the face, denied the charge and said all he told Sullivan was that if he found his cousin worthy, he would back him with a good rating but that he could not reveal to Big Tim the ratings numbers or promote his cousin out of turn.