Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [105]
Having the Cockran meeting go off without a hitch was a boon for Roosevelt, allowing him to leave the city on a high note. He planned to take a three-week vacation in North Dakota, foreshadowing his leaving New York for good only a few months later. Just as his fight to uphold the Sunday saloon-closing law during the past two years had made any future career in the city virtually untenable, recent events had only confirmed his great desire to leave the city of his birth. The extreme heat, the criticism leveled against the police on the night of Bryan’s speech, and his ongoing feud with Parker must have made the prospect of putting half the country between him and his problems extremely inviting.
In a rare display of weakness, Roosevelt told his friend Lodge, in a letter dated August 19, that he looked forward to his trip West. “I am very glad to go for I think the endless strain and worry had told on me a little.” Despite the failure of Bryan’s speech and the rousing success of Bourke Cockran’s, he told Lodge he still worried that “the hatred of the East among many Westerners, and the crude ignorance of even elementary finance among such a multitude of well meaning, but puzzle-headed, voters, give cause for serious alarm throughout this campaign.” A political animal even when he was hunting in North Dakota, Roosevelt looked forward to having a better understanding of western opinion: “I shall be able to speak more intelligently when I come back from the West.”
His familiarity and even fame in parts of the West would eventually prove valuable to McKinley and the Republican National Committee, although not in 1896. By the 1900 election, however, Roosevelt’s New York origins, his “western-ness,” his reform credentials, and his heroism during the Spanish-American War all combined to make him the party’s choice for vice president.
THE KILLER HEAT wave of August 4–13, 1896, claimed approximately 1,300 victims in New York and Brooklyn alone, making it the deadliest urban heat disaster in American history. The lingering effects of the heat continued to kill even after cooler temperatures arrived by the middle of the month. The heat wave probably claimed its last victim as late as August 21. Seven-month-old Fannie Hertzberg fell ill from the heat on August 13 and died on the twenty-first from what the doctor called “insolation,” a full eight days after the heat wave’s end. Under the “Occupation” section of the death certificate, the doctor wrote “Infant.”
It was a common phenomenon among victims of heat exhaustion that few could remember when they had begun to feel sick. The early symptoms of heat exhaustion could easily be mistaken for normal discomfort, especially among laborers or the poor during an extended heat wave. Such symptoms include heavy sweating, paleness, weakness, tiredness, muscle cramping, and headaches, all of which a working person might regularly experience during a New York August.
During the 1896 heat wave, Frank McCoy gave a rare detailed description of what he had felt in the hours before he collapsed from the heat. “I was standing at the corner of Twenty-second Street and Third Avenue last Tuesday,” he said. “My pulse had been high all day and I was more or less oppressed by the humidity. A great many deaths had occurred in the morning and on the day before, and I thought the best thing to do was to keep cool. I drank a great quantity of ice water and perspired freely. All the time, though, my tongue was getting very dry. I could not keep my mouth cool.” Racing pulse was a classic early warning sign of heat exhaustion and the cause for many of the collapsed and overcome victims during the previous week. Drinking a large quantity of ice water was a good precaution, and sweating was a good sign that the body still had the means to cool itself off. Nevertheless, it is probable McCoy could neither sweat enough to cool down nor drink enough to replace the fluid lost by sweating. Feeling his tongue getting dry and unable to keep his “mouth cool” signified dehydration, a