Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [954]
In 1896 Roosevelt ordered an investigation of the decades-old practice of police stations offering shelter to the homeless—urged on by Riis, who had unpleasant memories of his experiences in them when still a penniless immigrant. The filthy condition of the lodgings was apparent. And his chief of police swore that 98 percent of the more than sixty thousand homeless people who had resorted to them during the past year were the “lazy, dissipated, filthy, vermin-covered, disease-breeding and disease-scattering scum of the city’s population.” So Roosevelt adopted the Charity Organization Society’s long-standing position that the lodgings were “a fruitful encouragement to vagrancy” and shut them down. After the pitching of thousands into homelessness in mid-depression generated cartoons in the popular press of hearthless men shivering outside closed police stations, the city set up a Municipal Lodging House in a rented factory, but it sheltered only two hundred men. In the meantime, Roosevelt had established “tramp and beggar squads” to harry habitual mendicants.
Roosevelt also kept a close rein on labor activists as part of his determination to “keep in order the turbulent portion of the population.” Lincoln Steffens reported on “brutal clubbings of East Side strikers,” and Roosevelt himself applauded his police for “clubbing right and left” in the course of breaking up a horsecar strike. Compared to Byrnes-era attacks on strikers, however, the Strong regime was relatively mild. TR was willing to hold discussions with labor leaders, an openness that won him points.
Roosevelt and Strong’s comparative evenhandedness was glaringly underscored by the actions of the reform regime across the East River, where Mayor Schieren presided over the most violent labor conflict in Brooklyn’s history, the closest the metropolitan area came to such gunslinging affairs as Homestead, Pullman, and Coeur d’Alene.
Brooklyn’s notorious trolley companies had long imposed execrable pay and working conditions, in part to wring out enough profits to pay dividends on mountains of watered stock, in part to recoup the massive investments they’d made converting from horsepower to electricity. Finally, in January 1895, Knights of Labor motormen and conductors walked out, bringing passenger service to a complete halt. The companies advertised for replacement workers in cities across the country. Soon men made desperate for work by hard times flocked to Brooklyn, and a few cars began running. Now thousands of strike supporters in working-class communities came forward—the trolley firms were widely hated—and crowds began sabotaging the newly vulnerable electric lines. The mayor deployed the police, who protected scabs and raided union headquarters, but they didn’t act quickly enough to suit the companies, in part because many policemen sympathized with the Knights, in part because protecting the far-flung operations stretched them thin.
Strike supporters went to court to demand the companies be required to resume full service, on pain of having their charters revoked. Judge Gaynor, who had often denounced the trolley firms for greed and corruption, issued the requested writ. Public service corporations, he ruled, had a duty to the people that transcended their obligation to stockholders. “If they can not get labor to perform those duties at what they offer to pay, then they must pay more, and as much as is necessary to get it.” The strikers were overjoyed; the New York Times denounced Gaynor’s decision as “anarchistic”; and the Brooklyn City Council moved to revoke the charters. But Mayor Schieren—whose company, it was noted, supplied the trolleys with electric belts—vetoed the measure.
He also called in the militia, for the first time in Brooklyn’s history, and then drew in the First Brigade from New York City,