Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [32]
Roosevelt had a certain sympathy for the strikers, particularly because of the great poverty and historically bad working conditions of the tailors. Roosevelt frequently noted that he supported the workers’ right to organize but expected the law to be upheld. This included dealing firmly with any violence among the strikers. As police commissioner Roosevelt had witnessed strikes among New York metal workers, bookbinders, cab drivers, and street cleaners. He was very sensitive to the perception among New York’s political and business leaders that one of Roosevelt’s main tasks as police commissioner was to prevent riots among strikers. On almost every occasion afforded to him, whether speaking to the public or directly to the police, Roosevelt underscored his determination to see rioters “put down quick” and “keep in order the turbulent portion of the population.” Addressing newly promoted police captains at police headquarters that July, Roosevelt urged the police to do their duty “like soldiers on the field of battle,” since “sooner or later in this city there will be turmoil and riot.”
This same day 2,000 vestmakers joined the tailors’ strike, complaining that they worked fourteen hours a day for a weekly wage sometimes as low as $5. Now they demanded a fifty-nine-hour workweek—about ten hours a day not including Sunday—and a slight increase in their wages.
While they certainly deserved these modest improvements to their working conditions, the vestmakers’ timing was terrible. Newly unemployed men and women numbering 2,000 represented perhaps 10,000 more residents of the Lower East Side without any means of support. Already a marginal population living and working in horrible conditions, and vulnerable to any disaster or disease, the vestmakers made the decision to begin their strike on a day when the official temperature hit 87 degrees—the lowest high temperature New Yorkers would see for another ten days.
II.
SLAUGHTER ALLEY
A FEW MINUTES before four o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, August 5, Sergeant White of the Classon Avenue police station in Brooklyn sat lightly dozing on his watch. A slight young woman appeared suddenly before him, dressed in white, and wearing a straw hat. “I’ve chopped my sister’s head off with an axe,” the apparition announced calmly, although her dress remained unstained by blood. I’m dreaming, White thought, willing himself to wake up, but he was not asleep.
Looking at the petite woman dressed in white, and remembering the heat of the previous day, White assumed he must be dealing with someone afflicted by the heat. Even at that early hour the temperature remained in the high 70s.
Still, he dutifully dispatched an officer to the woman’s home, a tenement basement, the kind of dwelling occupied by the very poorest of New Yorkers. There the officer found Kate Larkin, a thirty-nine-year-old widow, unconscious and her head a mess of blood. The woman in white, her sister Alice Larkin, had struck her about the head with an axe seven times, breaking her nose, fracturing her skull in two places, and lacerating her scalp. According to doctors, her condition was grave.
Neighbors commented that while they liked Kate, they had never cared for Alice, whom they said “was of a peculiar disposition.” When asked why she had apparently tried to kill her sister with an axe, Alice replied, “Sister had not been treating me well.”
IN THE LATE nineteenth century, such stories were all too common. The very word “tenement” connoted to New Yorkers not just extreme poverty and disease but the worst and most senseless violence. Jacob Riis’s account of “The Man with the Knife” describes “a poor, and hungry, and ragged man” who from hopelessness and desperation sprang into a busy street one day and slashed about him, “blindly seeking to kill.”
Contemporary accounts of life in the tenements are marked by brutality: from domestic violence fueled by alcohol to the criminal violence of street gangs. The most famous case of domestic violence in New York was