Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [1]
It would take concerted preparations to defeat cholera. Epidemics recurred in the 1840s, ’50s, and ’60s. Finally in 1892, with a new epidemic sweeping across Europe, New York officials prepared to combat the epidemic on the basis of the latest advances in microbiology. Indeed, the city prepared as if for war, readying a special corps of doctors, hospital ships in the rivers for quarantine patients, and an army of workers to scrub and disinfect 39,000 tenements.
In the end, New York won the war. Although the epidemic of 1892 killed 2,500 Russians each day, only 9 New Yorkers died, and the dread disease would never menace the city again. Defeating cholera illustrated what steps a determined nineteenth-century city must take to prevent a catastrophe from killing its citizenry. In 1896, however, New York City made no concerted effort to combat the heat wave as it had cholera only a few years before. The results were tragic.
Yet it is difficult to entirely blame government officials for failing to respond to the crisis. The especially insidious and subtle nature of heat waves made it difficult to combat them. Furthermore, decades before the New Deal or Great Society reforms, there was simply no social safety net for the poor. During the depression of the 1890s government officials had once again eschewed any responsibility for the poor, the hungry, or the unemployed. “It is not the province of the government to support the people,” New York governor Roswell P. Flower sniffed. President Grover Cleveland proclaimed that “while the people should support their Government its functions do not include the support of the people.” Clearly “the people” were on their own.
No surprise, then, that the mayor of New York did not even bother to call an emergency meeting of department heads until more than a week into the heat wave, when it was almost over. Only a handful of city officials addressed the crisis. The commissioner of Public Works changed his men’s work hours to the coolest parts of the day and arranged for the streets to be hosed down—or “flushed”—to cool them off and wash away the filth and garbage. Theodore Roosevelt recommended that the city purchase and give away free ice to the city’s poor. This simple and relatively cheap measure may have saved many lives, and it marked Roosevelt’s continuing education as an urban reformer. Despite these small efforts, the heat wave illustrated the way New York failed to care for its neediest citizens during a great disaster.
THE SAME WEEK of the heat wave witnessed the start of the 1896 presidential campaign. While Republican nominee William McKinley stayed at home in Canton, Ohio, conducting his campaign from his front porch, his adviser Mark Hanna came to town to open the Republican National Headquarters. Hanna took time to consult with Republican Party leaders about campaign matters, including raising money and arranging campaign speakers. One Republican ready to take the stump for the party nominee was Theodore Roosevelt.
William McKinley was a former Ohio governor and congressman who had chaired the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. In 1890 he had made himself a household name after introducing a bill that raised tariffs to historically high levels. Both the McKinley Tariff and the bill’s namesake remained the favorite of American business interests. This remained especially true after the Panic of 1893, an economic meltdown caused by overbuilding and a contraction of credit. In February of that year the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad had been the first major American business to fall, sending shock-waves throughout the economic system. Credit froze, and by year’s end hundreds of banks and nearly 16,000 more businesses followed. With the current economic crisis occurring on the watch of Democratic president