Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [955]
Commissioner Roosevelt won plaudits for avoiding such ferocity, but he drew furious condemnation for his efforts at enforcing Parkhurstian levels of social purity. Convinced, appropriately enough, that the core of police corruption lay in the system of extorting payments from illicit entrepreneurs for the privilege of noninterference, Roosevelt, though not himself a prohibitionist, declared war on Sunday sin. Beginning in June 1895, saloons, brothels, and gambling dens doing business on the Lord’s Day were raided, shut down, boarded up. Sabbatarians, whose campaigns since the 1850s had come to nought, were thrilled, and the Parkhurst-led wing of the Strong coalition cheered Roosevelt on.
But the campaign incensed the German community. They had not voted for Good Government to have their “Continental Sunday” afternoons—spent in beer gardens listening to Strauss waltzes—branded as immoral and banned. Labor unions noted pointedly that while there were over eight thousand arrests annually for excise violadons, only 104 violators of the factory laws were hauled off to jail in 1895, shrinking to twenty-one in 1896. The popular press, meanwhile, complained of Roosevelt’s shutting off the poor man’s recreation while allowing champagne suppers at the Union League Club. Teddy delighted in facing down “the wrath of the asinine herd.” On one occasion, having accepted an invitation to personally review a mammoth protest parade of outraged Germans, he bantered good-naturedly with the marching legions, who shook empty beer steins at him as they passed by.
Strong’s Jewish supporters were also outraged. Strict enforcement of blue laws penalized the thousands of sabbath observers who chose to work on Sundays, and Roosevelt’s insistence on cracking down on those who violated anti-pushcart laws generated much talk of abandoning reform and going back to corruptible Tammanyites.
The person most dismayed by TR’s vigorous efforts was Mayor Strong. Never an ardent moralist, he had led the city’s liquor dealers to believe he would accept a halfdry Sunday as a compromise. Now, fearing the destruction of his electoral coalition, Strong tried to rein in his appointee, only to find Roosevelt had the bit firmly between his formidable teeth. The best Strong could do, given the then-limited authority of a mayor, was to distance himself publicly from his rogue commissioner. “I found,” he told one gathering, “that the Dutchman whom I had appointed meant to turn all New Yorkers into Puritans.” Roosevelt’s response was to raid Sherry’s, a watering hole of the wealthy, thus alienating the rich as well as the poor.
In the end, the courts (deliberately) and the legislature (inadvertently) rode to the rescue of Sunday drinkers. Magistrates began interpreting very broadly indeed a statute that allowed liquor to be served if it accompanied a meal; one judge ruled that seventeen beers and a pretzel satisfied the law. The legislature, intent on shutting down this loophole, opened up a far bigger one. Senator John W. Raines achieved passage in 1896 of a bill that permitted Sunday sale of liquor with meals, but only in “hotels,” defined as establishments with at least ten bedrooms. Saloons swiftly added the requisite number of rooms and then, to cover remodeling costs, rented the cubicles out to prostitutes or unmarried couples. Roosevelt, indirectly, had managed to engineer a quantum leap forward in the city’s quotient of sin.
Denounced now from all sides—apart from the loyal Parkhurst—with a forced removal from office in the offing, the ever practical Roosevelt decided it was time to move on. In April 1897 he gratefully accepted the offer of an assistant secretaryship of the navy