Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [107]
At the railroad station the New York Central offered Bryan the use of a special car. Just as he had after the Chicago convention, he declined the offer, saying he was much too poor to afford it, and he did not wish anything he could not pay for. The party paid the regular fare and sat together in the regular passenger car, beginning a journey out of the city that must have come as some relief to Bryan. It also began a two-week stay in upstate New York that afforded the candidate much-needed rest but also effectively removed him from the campaign only ten weeks before election day. Until early September, the normally verbose Boy Orator would remain virtually silent.
While the Bryans settled down for a long rest, the campaign did not stop. As the Democratic candidate sat looking at the Hudson River from the Walker veranda, the Republicans kicked off the Ohio campaign with enormous rallies in McKinley’s home state. With special trains bringing people from all over the state, Senator John Sherman and former Ohio governor Joseph Foraker addressed thousands in Columbus, while McKinley stayed in Canton. Sherman—he of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act—ripped into the Democratic monetary policy as “the doctrine of the Populist and the Anarchist.” Sherman even stooped to “wave the bloody shirt” by noting that “570,000 Union soldiers, their widows and orphans,” would be paid their pensions “with money of less purchasing power than gold coin.” Sherman believed the free coinage of silver to be “a fraud and a robbery, and all the worse if committed by a great and free people.”
By remaining in seclusion in Irvington, Bryan forfeited the field to the Republicans. In the days that followed, no Democrat stepped forward to rebut the Republican attacks. The failure of Bryan’s Garden speech continued to have far-reaching ramifications, as the Democratic Party appeared to concede much of the country and the campaign to the Republicans.
This was good news for Theodore Roosevelt. Soon after the Cockran speech Roosevelt departed for North Dakota and remained there for the rest of August and early September. Hunting and camping in the “Bad Lands” had always restored Roosevelt’s body and spirit after difficult periods in his life. In 1884 this had meant fleeing west after the deaths of his wife and his mother. In 1896 Roosevelt escaped over a year’s worth of criticism concerning his saloon-closing crusade, the hostility of the press and his own party leaders, and, finally, the deadlock on the police commission caused by his feud with Parker. That August, of course, he also escaped the awful heat of the month that had caused so much work for his police and even contributed to officers’ deaths.
Roosevelt had done more than just visit the police stations to supervise the distribution of ice. In a scene that recalled his trips with Jacob Riis into the tenement districts in the early 1880s, and his more recent midnight patrols as police commissioner, he set out to see what people actually did with the free ice. Commissioner Roosevelt visited a number of alleys and rear tenements along Mulberry Street, some of the poorest residences of the city’s poorest street. He expressed being “agreeably surprised” by the way families used the ice. Roosevelt watched as fathers and mothers of large families cracked the ice into small pieces. Some pieces were then placed in a handkerchief or towel and tied around the foreheads and heads of sick infants. While this took place, Roosevelt watched as some people made cooling drinks, while others simply held the chunks of ice in their hands, “from which they bit and chewed constantly.” With some pride, Roosevelt noted that the city’s distribution of free ice was