Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [46]
As president of the Police Commission, Roosevelt might have taken the lead in preparing the police for Bryan’s visit to New York, if not actually directing security himself. After all, the Bryan speech was shaping up to be a fairly enormous affair, with thousands of ticket holders expected to pack the Garden and thousands more listening outside. Providing adequate and effective security for so many people would be almost akin to launching a military operation, deploying perhaps hundreds of officers to man the doors, control the crowd, and watch for pickpockets. Furthermore, based on recent experience in the city, the night of the speech was going to be hot. Having an adequate police presence to prevent a crush of people might actually save lives.
Yet apparently Roosevelt was content to leave these matters to subordinates. It may have been a symptom of his general ennui with being police commissioner and his greater preoccupation with his political future. He planned to stay in New York Friday before departing for Oyster Bay, where he would remain for the duration of Bryan’s arrival and big speech. In other words, while Roosevelt would be one of the few city officials to take steps to address the heat-wave crisis, he actually avoided the city during the worst of the weather in favor of cooler, breezier Long Island.
Friday morning found the police commissioner dealing with the tedious minutiae of his position. For a man with his sights set on Washington, it could be grim and demeaning work. In a short ceremony, Roosevelt officially commended Officer Charles Haas, a policeman who instead of shooting a mad dog had clubbed it to death with a cane. After giving a short speech, Roosevelt presented Haas with a cane a manufacturer had made for the policeman as a reward for his apparently heroic act.
During the night Roosevelt again conducted one of his midnight inspections of the city’s police force. “Roosevelt Sleuthing Again,” a New York World headline would announce the next day. At 11:00 PM he had walked in the rain to the Nineteenth Precinct Police Station, examining the records of several applicants for promotion and inspecting the station. Roosevelt shook hands with Mrs. Linner, the matron of the women’s block, and conversed with a number of women “who were locked up for various offenses.” After visiting the men’s cells and declaring that he would visit several other police stations during the night, Roosevelt went back out into the rain.
WHILE THE UNITED States Weather Bureau representative marked down what would become the official record of New York temperatures during the heat wave, most New Yorkers probably paid more attention to the giant thermometer in Herald Square. The “Herald thermometer,” a fixture of the New York Herald at Thirty-Fourth Street, offered thousands of pedestrians grim visual confirmation of what they already knew. At 6:00 AM the temperature was already 78 degrees, accompanied by high humidity. Over the next two hours the Herald thermometer registered an almost 20 degree rise in temperature, hitting 96 degrees at noon. “There was a rise in temperature and humidity until it seemed as though the safety valve of the weather would be blown sky high,” one paper observed. Yet the temperature did not peak until about 3:30 in the afternoon, when according to the Herald thermometer it hit 101 degrees, exactly 10 degrees hotter than the official record of the day. Deaths were sure to follow the hottest day of the week so far.
Faced with the fourth day of blazing heat, the city might have taken some simple steps to save lives. One step would have been