Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [25]
They would have to wait awhile yet. On August 3 the papers reported that McKinley was still working on his letter and that it would not be delivered for perhaps another three or four weeks. Meanwhile, Republican planners looked to kick off the official campaign with a mass meeting in Ohio on August 15, three days after Bryan’s speech at Madison Square Garden.
Even McKinley’s hometown was not safe from Bryan’s charismatic presence. It was expected that on his way to New York, Bryan would stop in Canton. The Democrats were making preparations for a grand reception at the railroad station to make a strong political statement of Bryan’s support even on McKinley’s home ground.
MEANWHILE, THE SILVER FORCES were finally staking out their territory in New York. William St. John, playing the role of treasurer for both the National Democratic and the National Silver Committees, opened his headquarters in the Bartholdi Hotel at Broadway and Twenty-Third Street on August 3.
St. John was a rare breed, a New Yorker and former banker who advocated bimetallism as the way for the number of dollars in circulation to keep pace with America’s growing population. St. John had chaired the National Silver Party’s convention in St. Louis at the end of July, and the delegates had consciously thrown in their lot with the Democrats by nominating Bryan and Sewall. Now occupying several large and luxurious rooms on the hotel’s second floor, St. John and his assistants readied for Bryan’s visit to New York.
Democrats across the country, however, continued to defect, and a third-party movement was growing, with sound-money Democrats expected in September to meet at an independent convention in Indianapolis. Many New York Democrats echoed William Bourke Cockran in questioning Tammany’s hasty endorsement of Bryan. Former mayor Abram Hewitt, who defeated Roosevelt for the office in 1886, called Tammany’s action “stupid, an extremely foolish thing.” Former New York governor Roswell P. Flower also called the endorsement stupid and foolish. When a reporter pressed him, asking if he also thought it was premature, the ex-governor brusquely replied, “I think ‘foolish’ and ‘stupid’ about cover the case.” Only weeks after his nomination, Bryan’s campaign was in serious trouble. His trip to New York would make or break his chances for election.
ALTHOUGH NO ONE REALIZED it at the time, the heat wave began on Tuesday, August 4.
Heat waves are not like other disasters. Heat kills slowly, over days. It does not leave marks on the victim’s body. Nor does it destroy buildings or leave any physical evidence of its destructive force. There is no single moment when a heat wave strikes, no specific time allowing survivors to recall the moment when it began.
Heat waves produce few dramatic photos or visual images like rubble and flames. Victims of heat can remain unaware that they are being slowly killed, suffocating alone in a closed, airless space. An assassin strikes quickly and flees, but heat lingers, remaining in the same room with its victim for days.
The city itself becomes an accomplice to heat’s murderous effects. Anyone who has ever lived in a city during extreme heat knows that cities bake their inhabitants in ways unknown to rural areas. In later years this would become known as the “urban heat island effect.”
In a 1967 article called “The Climate of Cities,” William Lowry noted the several factors that combine to elevate temperatures in cities. The concrete, brick, and stone of the buildings and the asphalt of the city’s streets can conduct heat three times faster than soil. Unlike the hills and trees of the countryside, urban walls, roofs, and streets act like a maze of