Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [38]
While much might still be made today of Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign travels, his interest in nature, his historical writings, and particularly his time spent in the West, his brand of progressivism was clearly shaped by his intimate contact with New York’s working poor. One of the great ironies of Roosevelt’s life was that while he was the Harvard-educated, brownstone-born scion of one of New York’s great old Dutch families, he knew the tenement districts and their inhabitants more intimately than any other prominent Republican politician of the day—certainly more than any other president of the Progressive Era.
Roosevelt had a long history of investigating the tenements. Beginning with his investigating the cigar-rolling trade conducted in the tenements while he was an assemblyman, followed by his midnight ramblings with guide Jacob Riis while police commissioner, Roosevelt balanced his evening-dress dinners at Delmonico’s with forays into the most notorious, impoverished, and dangerous parts of Manhattan. There were perhaps few federal avenues open to Roosevelt while he was president to foster change at the local level in a city like New York. But as governor between 1899 and 1901, he became partly responsible for further tenement reform efforts, supporting the efforts of housing reformers, an assembly investigating committee, and subsequent legislation.
Roosevelt consistently supported tenement reform as governor. Right after his election in early 1899 he hailed the work of the Mazet Committee in revealing shoddy building practices and dangerous conditions. He backed Lawrence Veiller’s Tenement House Exhibition in early 1900 by speaking at its opening. He sent an urgent plea to the state assembly to pass the Tenement House bill, which appointed a new commission to revise the laws. With past commissions dominated by real estate and building interests, Roosevelt ensured real progress in tenement reform by appointing reformers as well as health and safety experts.
All of this would occur in the few years following the heat wave and his time as police commissioner. That week in August 1896 would have tremendous impact on his knowledge of tenement conditions and the plight of the city’s poor. His experiences during that time would have concrete results in the new Tenement House Law of 1901, and in general would help shape the opinions and actions of one of the leading figures of the Progressive Era.
ROOSEVELT’S INTEREST IN REFORM shaped his early political career, from the governor’s mansion to police headquarters on Mulberry Street. By August, however, criticism of his saloon-closing crusade and the Parker-inspired deadlock on the commission had brought any efforts at reform to a standstill. On Wednesday, August 5, a meeting of the New York Police Board illustrated that the deadlock remained.
A precinct captain reported on the various ways liquor sellers continued to break the Sunday Excise Law forbidding the sale of liquor on Sundays, over a year after Roosevelt began this particular “crusade.” In 1896 the new Raines law attempted to limit Sunday liquor selling to hotels. Now, however, phony hotels known as “Raines law hotels” were springing up all the time, and the number of fake private clubs was “increasing daily.” Saloon owners often simply transferred their stock to these establishments in order to continue selling liquor on Sundays and late into the night. Even when arrests had been made, the magistrates or grand jury dismissed the cases.
Roosevelt could not have been happy to hear this. Here was the one aggressive stance he had taken to see that the law was applied evenly and fairly. He had been blamed for Republican losses as a result of the law’s unpopularity, almost had his position on the Police