Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [923]
The reformers’ war on gambling garnered only modest victories. In 1877 the state legislature had banned the old auction pool betting system, but succeeded mainly in promoting bookmaking, a system in which bettors selected a horse at publicly posted odds. Now neighborhood bookies sprang up, offering their services to gamblers who couldn’t afford a trip to the track, at such male bastions as newsstands, barbershops, saloons, and “poolrooms” (off-track betting parlors). Results were received immediately throughout the city via Western Union, which in 1890 paid sixteen hundred dollars a day to each New York track for the exclusive right to transmit results. Despite this overhead Western Union’s racing department became the most profitable part of the company.
In 1887 the Rev. Thomas de Witt Talmage, minister of the Central Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn, teamed up with Comstock (along with New York racetrack interests) in winning passage of the Ives Anti-Poolroom Law, which forbade off-track betting but authorized thirty days of wagering at tracks each year. Despite the Ives law, and the Saxton Act of 1893, which made keeping poolrooms a felony, they continued to operate with virtual impunity. Comstock managed to instigate the occasional police raid, but poolroom clerks were usually forewarned of such events and, if caught, usually acquitted by Tammany judges. Indeed, by the mid-1890s Big Tim Sullivan and other Tammany honchos ran organized bookmaker and poolroom syndicates.
Those out to purify civic life made more headway against boxing. Influence and payoffs enabled “exhibition” bouts in the early 1880s—John L. Sullivan began fighting in such events at Madison Square Garden in 1882—but in 1884 and 1885 reformers got police to break up Sullivan’s fights there, local promoters gave up the business, and the sport’s locus shifted to New Orleans. In the early 1890s, however, local prizefighting revived, mainly at Coney Island, under the auspices of boss John Y. McKane. The Gravesend politico also owned the Coney Island Athletic Club (organized in May 1892 by Kings County machine politicians), which became the leading boxing club in the United States (though in 1893 public pressure did force it to cancel a world championship heavyweight bout between Jim Corbett and Charley Mitchell).
Efforts to ban alcohol made limited progress, despite the emergence of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). In the 1880s the WCTU employed a missionary evangelist to meet immigrants as they landed in New York City and distribute temperance literature in sixteen languages. But despite some local strength in Brooklyn, the WCTU’s attitude toward immigrants—Willard in the 1890s advocated immigration restriction to block the “influx into our land of more of the scum of the Old World, until we have educated those who are here”—foreclosed support in New York’s ethnic wards. Teddy Roosevelt’s old City Reform Club—down by 1887 to a dozen active members, including Henry Stimson—struggled to enforce a law requiring saloons within two hundred feet of polling places be closed on election day, with minimal success. Liquor interests were deeply imbricated in local politics, and vice versa: of the 1,002 political meetings held in New York City on the local level in 1886, nearly eight hundred were held in saloons. The best reformers could manage was passage of a Temperance Education Law that provided for compulsory drug education in the schools.
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