Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [21]
Hanna’s backing of McKinley had always represented his faith in the need for a sound American financial system based on the gold standard and a high tariff wall surrounding the United States. Now the McKinley campaign would face a worthy opponent in Bryan and have the opportunity to defeat the Populist forces of chaos and anarchy that so many business interests felt a Bryan presidency would herald.
The late nineteenth century had already witnessed the power of anarchy: the Chicago Haymarket bombing that killed eight policemen in 1886; the Homestead steel strike of 1892, which left sixteen dead and steel magnate Henry Frick wounded by an assassin; and the Pullman strike of 1894, which had left thirty-four dead. For men like Mark Hanna, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan, what lay behind the violence was not inequity in the workplace or frustration at the impoverishment of the worker. No, the forces of socialism, communism, and anarchism seemed to threaten the very Republic itself. A McKinley presidency would strike these forces a deathblow.
MONDAY, AUGUST 3, was not unusually hot for the time of year. This made Officer Wiebers’s suffering all the more peculiar. Assigned to keep order during cases brought before the judge at Jefferson Market Court, Wiebers perspired all through the day, barely making it to the end of the proceedings. True, Wiebers was a large man, tall and fairly stout, and tended to suffer during warm days. But the temperature inside the court was not at all exceptionally high. Still, by the end of the day Wiebers was close to collapse and had to be helped out of the courtroom.
Wiebers’s fellow court officers commented on his condition as they helped their nearly overcome comrade out of the chamber. Fetching some cold water, one of the other officers poured it over Wiebers’s head in an effort to revive the prostrated policeman. Opening his uniform to make his breathing easier, Wiebers’s fellow officers saw the cause of his suffering: He was wearing a heavy flannel shirt over an undershirt of homespun wool, nearly a quarter of an inch thick. The clothing was “suitable for an arctic campaign,” one man noted.
Once Wiebers was revived, the other court officers teased him. “Did you think it was Christmas?” “Has your best girl given you the cold shoulder?” “Are you training to be a jockey? You only need to sweat off about 200 pounds.”
Wiebers asked his partner, Mahoney, to send the other men away, and confided to his friend that all his summer underwear had been stolen from the clothesline in back of his home on West Twelfth Street. The thieves had even taken Wiebers’s much-prized sets of silk underwear sent to him by his cousin, an officer in the German army. Not having the money to replace the underwear, Wiebers had decided to try to make it to his next paycheck at the end of the month wearing his woolen winter underwear.
The other officers offered him their advice on how to recover the underwear. The recommendations ranged from the use of blood-hounds to trapping the thief by setting out even more underwear. “And mind you, sew them to the line,” Officer McGuckin advised. But they all stopped to listen as the most senior man present, Officer Carr, cleared his throat and prepared to speak. “I think,” he said slowly and with great deliberation, “that there can be no doubt that some dishonest persons took those things.”
Exasperated, Wiebers told the men, “I want the clothes, and if you fellows can’t help me, shut up.” With that he stood up and stormed out of the room. “It is a fact,” the court reporter from the Times observed, “and a rather curious fact, that no one suggested reporting the matter to the police.”
AFTER MORE THAN A year of trying to make the New York City police a serious crime-fighting organization, Theodore Roosevelt could