His intoxication studies demanded both a test group and a control group. In one experiment, Gettler gave the test group—a dozen dogs—a mixture of water and alcohol to drink, while the control group—another dozen dogs—got water alone. It took some doing. Because dogs dislike the taste of alcohol, Gettler denied the test group all liquids until they became so thirsty that they welcomed anything put before them. Soon they were lapping down a concoction equivalent to 100-proof whiskey and behaving like “common drunks” as they “staggered about the laboratory…howled in lieu of weeping or singing [and] sometimes…even hiccupped.”
Gettler next provided equal amounts of alcohol to both groups—his “habitués” and his “abstainers”—to measure their tolerance. Not surprisingly, the “abstainers” became inebriated more quickly, with lesser amounts, than the “habitués.” After destroying the dogs, Gettler discovered why: the organs of the “habitués” contained lower levels of alcohol, meaning “they oxidized it at a faster rate.” With further study, he provided some of the key measurements of the modern sobriety test, such as the concentration of alcohol in the blood.
There were objections to experiments like this one—less from fellow researchers than from antivivisection groups that had begun targeting Bellevue’s pathology labs for their liberal use of animal subjects in the Norris era. The trigger had been the publicity surrounding the suicide in 1920 of a longtime lab worker named Ernest Goetz, a favorite of Norris, who had retired after forty years at Bellevue, a span in which he’d done almost every menial task the hospital had to offer, from shoveling coal to washing glassware to caring for the animals in the pathology building. At seventy, badly hobbled and almost blind, Goetz was found dead while on a periodic visit to the hospital’s animal quarters. His body lay on the floor with the gas jets turned on.
The press had a field day. Headlines like “TOO OLD TO CARE FOR PETS, TURNS ON GAS” accompanied stories hinting, not too subtly, that Goetz had been tormented by visions of his beloved Bellevue animals being destroyed. It reached the point where a furious Charles Norris felt obliged to “set forth the true facts” in a letter to the New York Times. Goetz hadn’t committed suicide “out of deep sympathy for white mice,” Norris fumed. He’d taken his life because he was desperate and depressed at having to live on a city pension of less than a dollar a day following four decades of loyal service—a proud man, barely able to walk or to see, found dead with 45 cents in his pocket.
The criticism faded quickly, overwhelmed, in part, by news of Gettler’s successes. Flattering features in Time and Harper’s called him the “Test-Tube Sleuth” and “The Man Who Reads Corpses.” Years later, a forensic expert claimed that Gettler “sent more criminals to the electric chair through his tests than any police detective applying all of the police department’s methods of investigation.” This wasn’t hyperbole. Gettler averaged close to fifty court appearances a year, rarely on the losing side. In one case, he nailed a killer by tracing the grass and soil in his trouser cuffs to the terrain at the murder scene. In another, he linked a piece of string on a dead woman’s body to the upholsterer doing work in her apartment. (Both men were found guilty and executed.) Gettler’s methods became the gold standard for detecting intoxicants, barbiturates, and poisons. He even testified for the “radium girls” in a celebrated civil suit, settled in 1928, which revolutionized occupational safety laws, demonstrating that years of swabbing wristwatch dials with a luminous radium-based paint had caused an assortment of deadly cancers. The women won, though few of them lived long enough to collect the settlement. The press called it “The Case of Those Who Were Doomed to Die.”
His office bulged with memorabilia. Among the exhibits on display were the charred remains of the captain of the ill-fated Morro Castle, a cruise ship that had run aground on the beach at Asbury Park, New Jersey, in 1934, following a fire that took more than 130 lives. Many of the survivors had been rushed to Bellevue by ambulance, a two-hour drive, suffering from burns, exposure, and smoke inhalation. Also delivered by police car was a metal plumber’s box containing the ship captain’s remains. With rumors flying that he’d been fatally poisoned, and the fire deliberately set to cover up the crime, public attention turned to the medical examiner’s investigation.
A banner headline perfectly captured Gettler’s dilemma: “WILLMOTT ASHES IN POISON TEST.” There was reasonable suspicion of foul play, but precious little to work with. Captain Willmott had been incinerated—the plumber’s box contained no bone fragments, no clothing fibers, just ash.
It was, in the days before modern chromatography and DNA testing, an impossible task. Since volatile poisons burn off quickly, only the milder ones could be detected. Gettler did find traces of lead, copper, and barium, but that meant little because the captain’s quarters contained piping and wiring that had probably contaminated the ash. Put simply, there was no way to determine the cause of death or the time it had occurred. That is why Gettler kept the captain’s remains in plain sight until the day he retired: not as a reminder of failure, but of the work that lay ahead.
No one was ever indicted for the Morro Castle fire. It remains an open book, though suspicion later pointed to the chief radio operator, George Rogers, who had a criminal record, a history of mental illness, and a grudge against the captain. (He was convicted of murder in a separate incident and died in prison.) Ironically, Rogers spent several weeks recovering at Bellevue, just a building away from the laboratory where Gettler was examining the captain’s remains. “I recall that one victim, the ship’s radio operator, was specifically assigned to the Third Medical Division and to my ward,” a Bellevue intern recalled. “I came to know him very well. As a result of having imbibed large amounts of seawater, he arrived in a very edematous condition [but] was restored to good health. Some years later…we heard the arson was committed by an aggrieved member of the crew, the ship’s radio operator.” Where else but at Bellevue? the intern remarked—“the most exciting hospital in the world.”
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In 1926, The New Yorker ran a piece on the current “liquor market” in the city, noting that the price of good gin and Scotch in the midst of Prohibition was “up slightly after a post-holiday drop.” This was more than simple supply and demand, the article said. It reflected the preference of discerning consumers for spirits of guaranteed quality—foreign brands like Cutty Sark, Dewar’s, and Haig & Haig. Why drink American “squirrel whiskey” that “makes men talk nutty and climb trees” when finer (if costlier) blends could be had?
There was another advantage to foreign distilleries. Their products were safe. The “hip-flask, fur coat” crowd could drink their gin martinis and whiskey sours without worrying about the hidden dangers of the booze. Later that year, the New York Times captured the reality of Prohibition for those unable to afford a case of Dewar’s or Cutty Sark. “23 DEATHS HERE LAID TO HOLIDAY DRINKING,” the headline screamed. “89 ILL IN HOSPITALS.”
The culprit was poisoned whiskey. When alcohol sales were legal, few had questioned the safety of the main ingredients—corn, grain, hops, and grapes—or the final product itself. Starting in 1906, however, the federal government had mandated two categories for processing alcohol—one for human consumption, the other for industrial use—to ensure that sales of “potable spirits,” a key source of federal revenue, were properly taxed. And to enforce this separation, the government required that industrial manufacturers “denature” their alcohol with additives that made it unpleasant, even poisonous, to drink.
When Prohibition began in 1920, the supply of drinking alcohol dried up. With domestic breweries and distilleries now shuttered, bootleggers took to producing spirits with whatever was at hand—mainly denatured alcohol bought on the black market or stolen from factories. The larger bootlegging operations were able to remove some of the poison by redistilling it. Others added sweeteners to soften the taste. Many did nothing. The profits were so large, and enforcement so lax, that illegal stills cropped up everywhere. Barely a m
onth went by during Prohibition without an explosion in a New York City tenement caused by the mixing of “bath tub gin.”
Despite the risks, millions of Americans continued to drink. Federal officials had to do something—but what? Ignoring the problem would enrage the anti-liquor forces responsible for Prohibition, yet stepping up enforcement was expensive and guaranteed to fail. Instead, the government decided to scare the public into compliance by increasing the levels of poison in the denatured alcohol produced for industrial purposes but now being used in illegal whiskey as well. If more Americans got horribly sick or died—well, that choice was theirs to make.
The Times’s “holiday drinking” headline well described the result. Bellevue’s emergency department overflowed that Christmas with the casualties of Prohibition. According to Charles Norris, the Medical Examiner’s Office had discovered three new poisons added by federal chemists to the denatured alcohol commonly used by bootleggers. The government, he charged, was poisoning its own people.
Protected by his wealth and Social Register contacts, Norris had no concerns about the liquor he personally imbibed. But Prohibition offended him as both a health catastrophe and a misguided crusade reminiscent of Mark Twain’s popular adage: “Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.” Before long, Norris had found a kindred spirit in Mayor Jimmy Walker, who viewed Prohibition much the same way. When Norris proposed to investigate the full impact of poisoned alcohol on New Yorkers, Walker told him to go ahead and send the results directly to City Hall.
The Norris Report of 1927 became a medical bible for the anti-Prohibition forces. Official deaths from alcohol poisoning in New York City had jumped from 47 in 1919 to 741 in 1926—a likely undercount because many doctors were loath to embarrass the families of their private patients. Norris claimed that alcohol poisoning was the greatest health menace currently facing the city, and he wasn’t shy about saying so: “The mortality rate from this cause, in my opinion, is larger than the vehicular accidents and the illuminating gas poisoning cases combined.”
And, he warned, it was going to get worse. A close study by Gettler’s laboratory of more than a dozen bootleg whiskeys showed each one of them to be contaminated with deadly substances. Some reeked of shellac and antifreeze; all contained denatured alcohol. In addition, there’d been “a striking increase” at Bellevue of patients suffering from “alcoholic psychosis” marked by hallucinations and delirium tremens. Gettler attributed this to the enormous potency of the bootleg liquors he’d tested, some reaching 140 proof. The stuff not only was poisonous, it was astonishingly strong.
Who was most at risk? The answer was self-evident. The rich needn’t worry, Norris told the press. “No one having good wines, beers, and whiskeys is going to drink denatured alcohol.” Small wonder that the city morgue was overflowing with the bodies of poisoned New Yorkers “from the poorer classes,” alongside bullet-riddled corpses of thugs from the ranks of organized crime.
Some political leaders, including President Calvin Coolidge and soon-to-be President Herbert Hoover, had described Prohibition as “a noble experiment.” Norris thought them delusional. Prohibition hadn’t stopped the consumption of alcohol; it had simply made it deadlier. “It is common knowledge that at least all the people who drank before Prohibition are drinking now,” he said, “provided they are still alive.”
Though Norris was correct in addressing the dreadful toll of poisoned alcohol caused by Prohibition, he was wrong—perhaps even disingenuous—in claiming that drinking remained as popular as ever. Indeed, statistics from his own hospital showed that the number of alcohol admissions had dropped from 11,307 in 1910 to 2,091 by the end of 1920, the year Prohibition officially began. These numbers would rise again at Bellevue during the 1920s—to about 6,000 annually—but only because Mayor Walker, first elected in 1926, refused to enforce the law.
Some Bellevue staffers actually saw an upside to Prohibition. Mary E. Wadley, the hospital’s director of social work, insisted that it had lowered alcohol consumption in immigrant neighborhoods across the city—a claim that turned out to be true. Historians of this era are virtually unanimous that most Americans resented Prohibition as a violation of their rights, and that millions of them simply ignored its provisions. But all agree that drinking went down by as much as 30 percent across the country during the 1920s, and probably more.
Wadley didn’t take issue with Norris regarding the dangers of poisoned alcohol. But she did view Prohibition as something of a savior for New York’s poorer classes, when enforced, by providing social benefits that followed naturally from lower drinking rates. “We almost never see now a pile of furniture on the sidewalk with a starved, dispossessed family sitting on it,” she wrote, with some hyperbole. “Instead the children are decently clothed, the men are keeping their jobs better and paying their bills. They do not have to pass the inviting door of the corner saloon on payday.”
Prohibition ended early in 1933, with the Twenty-first Amendment to the U.S. Constitution repealing the Eighteenth. The carnage in New York City would stretch into the final months of the ban, one late headline reading: “16 KILLED IN 4 DAYS BY POISONED LIQUOR.” That same year, Charles Norris established the nation’s first academic department of forensic medicine at NYU, staffed by his Bellevue colleagues, including Alexander Gettler. It would blossom into an elite training ground for generations of medical examiners, turning a once primitive pursuit into a rigorous scientific discipline.
In an odd way, Prohibition had strengthened the bond between Bellevue and City Hall. Mayor Walker had relied heavily on Norris and Gettler to document the fatal consequences of bootleg alcohol. And Walker had become particularly close to Dr. Menas S. Gregory, the longtime director of Bellevue’s Insane Pavilion, who’d been relentless in publicizing the severe brain damage caused by Prohibition whiskey, despite the falling numbers of alcoholics in his wards. In Jimmy Walker, Bellevue had found an ally of convenience.
Gregory had an agenda. A relentless sort, he’d been lobbying one city administration after another to move forward with plans for the new psychiatric building envisioned by McKim, Mead & White in 1904. And he’d hit a brick wall until Walker took office and vowed to make the project a reality. The bond between the psychiatrist and the mayor would produce a remarkable edifice—the largest single structure on the Bellevue grounds—though each would resign in disgrace before it became fully operational.
15
THE SHOCKING TRUTH
The checkered career of Mayor Jimmy Walker is an enduring part of New York political folklore. No urban history is quite complete without a description of his lightning rise to power and breathtaking fall. The son of an Irish-born Tammany Hall ward leader, Walker gave up a budding career as a songwriter to enter politics at his father’s insistence. Elected to the New York State Senate, he became a protégé of Governor Al Smith, the first Catholic to run for president, who cleared the way for Walker’s mayoral election in 1925. Handsome, witty, immensely charming, Walker “seemed to be New York brought to life in one person,” the columnist Ed Sullivan marveled—someone equally at ease in an immigrant barroom or a suite at the Waldorf. As mayor, Walker pushed the Tammany line, which included social programs for the poor and massive building projects for the city. Above all, he worked tirelessly against the enforcement of Prohibition, which he considered a bigoted assault upon the cultural habits of urban America. And that, in turn, served only to increase his standing among the masses.
Walker governed New York City at the height of the Roaring Twenties. Times were prosperous, on the whole, and personal excess seemed more a virtue than a hindrance for the mayor, whose playboy lifestyle became daily fodder in the press. His elegant wardrobe, extensive vacations, and relentless womanizing offended few, it appeared, beyond the ranks of political reformers and the cardinal of New York.
“During his first two years in office,” an observer noted, Walker spent “143 days” visiting London, Paris, Rome, Hollywood, Bermuda, and o
ther far-flung destinations. When the fawning City Council raised his salary from $25,000 to $45,000 a year—almost quadruple the pay of a U.S. senator—Walker quipped: “That’s cheap! Think what it would cost if I worked full time.”
There was another side to the mayor, however. While reveling in the image of someone too busy enjoying himself to bother with the humdrum details of governing a city, Walker ran a tighter ship than he cared to let on. In regard to Bellevue’s future, he had created a citywide entity, the Department of Hospitals, to oversee the eighteen public institutions spread over the five boroughs, a move that centralized control in the mayor’s office. And he regularly relied on leading physicians from the medical colleges to advise him on policy matters that didn’t restrict the business interests of Tammany Hall. In fact, Walker had a soft spot for Bellevue. His friends and relatives had been patients there, and he viewed the hospital as an unfinished project, ripe for completion. Among his medical advisors was Dr. Menas S. Gregory.
An Armenian refugee, Gregory had fled to America to escape the Turkish genocide that slaughtered much of his family. After earning a medical degree and interning at various state asylums, he arrived at Bellevue’s Insane Pavilion in 1902 as an assistant “alienist” and became its director the following year. It was a job no one else wanted. The wards were absolute bedlam, a staffer recalled—“despairing persons of both sexes and all ages” packed together like cattle in “a never-ending kaleidoscope of human misery.”
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