Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [108]
Decades later, as he sat down to write his memoirs in 1913, Roosevelt remembered the terrible heat wave and the suffering it caused among the poor. He remembered the streets being flushed and his own contribution in suggesting and supervising the distribution of free ice in the Lower East Side. The fact that Roosevelt could recall such scenes in vivid detail, nearly two decades after they occurred, illustrated what a profound effect they had on him.
While history has forgotten Roosevelt’s role during the heat wave, his actions foreshadowed his progressive presidency. His direct contact with the poor heightened his sense of noblesse oblige he had inherited from his father. Those in a position to help should help, and that included the government, if only during times of extreme emergency. Roosevelt was one of the few city officials even to suggest taking direct measures for relief of the poor. Moreover, he supervised those measures himself in order to ensure fair play. He also followed up on the ice giveaway and witnessed firsthand how families used the ice to cool their drinks or the brows of sick children. Finally, his actions were prompted by the ice trust represented by Morse’s Consolidated Ice Company. Here was a clear case of a trust fixing higher prices that had direct impact on the city’s suffering poor. Giving away free ice helped bust this particular trust.
Late August found Roosevelt the urbanite heading west to hunt and camp and Bryan the westerner watching the boat traffic along the Hudson River. Their vacations left much time for recalling the historic week just finished. That single week in August 1896 witnessed a unique convergence of quintessentially American politics and personalities, with a great, urban natural disaster as the backdrop. In the blink of an eye Bryan had all but lost the presidential race by the time he finished his Madison Square Garden speech. Roosevelt himself had given up on New York politics and hoped instead for a post in a McKinley administration.
The heat wave shaped their careers and characters in unexpected ways. Perhaps Bryan might have given a rousing speech, if traveling to New York during a heat wave had not rendered him hoarse and exhausted. Maybe a New York crowd would have cheered his long speech, had the heat not driven them from their seats. For Roosevelt the heat wave marked another step along the path to a progressive presidency. He ordered city initiatives on behalf of the poor, personally supervised them to make sure all received fair treatment, and witnessed firsthand the suffering of the tenement dwellers.
Finally, the heat wave helped shape the history of America’s greatest city. It ended a strike among the tailors of the Lower East Side, while forcing reluctant city officials to take positive measures to aid its suffering citizens. It also encouraged housing reform, as the tenements themselves indirectly caused hundreds of deaths.
The heat wave cut a swath of death through the immigrant laborers and their families, killing well over 1,000. While the smallest children suffered terribly, as they always did during the summers, in the end it was those children’s fathers who literally worked themselves to death in order to provide a living for their families. The average victim of the heat wave was a workingman, probably Irish, living in the most impoverished and squalid of conditions. As he and his brethren died, the philanthropists of the Progressive Era called for reform on all levels: of working conditions and work hours, of housing conditions, of sanitary conditions, of government conditions that allowed corruption,