Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [47]
As it was, laborers of New York continued to drop from heatstroke. William Meehan, a longshoreman, died at St. Vincent’s Hospital. Patrick Ronan, described by newspapers as “a laborer,” was prostrated at work on Wednesday but died two days later. A twenty-six-year-old clerk named Thomas O’Brien was overcome on the sidewalk and died before the ambulance arrived, his body then taken to the local police station.
Of the forty cases of heatstroke reported in New York City on Friday, August 7, nearly all were men under the age of fifty. Although the occupation of the victim was not listed in every case, those instances where occupation could be determined lend credence to the idea that mostly young men were struck down after working in the extreme heat.
For the following week, this pattern would be repeated on a daily basis. Relatively young men became overheated at work and either received treatment on the spot or returned home to their baking tenements. Because of their age and fitness, those who received immediate medical treatment still stood a good chance of recovering. For those who simply went home hoping to feel better with some rest, the prognosis was often poor, and the most common result was death.
THE FOLLOWING DAY, Saturday, the street-level Herald Square thermometer hit 103 degrees at 3:30 PM, with 90 percent humidity. “The sun did the broiling and the humidity did the basting,” the New York Herald said. “Perspiration even gave up the terrific struggle and remained within the pores and boiled.”
The police and hospitals reported that only ten people died from the heat, but this figure is deceptive. Overall, about forty more people died on August 8, 1896, than had died on the same date the year before. Once again urban laborers suffered a heavy toll. Henry Rapp, a forty-eight-year-old cabinetmaker, was overcome by the heat on the way home from work and died even before a doctor could attend to him. Twenty-seven-year-old Matthew Murphy died while working on Pier 35. Philip Frank, a mailman, died at Fordham Hospital after becoming exhausted along his route.
New York’s travails on Saturday were not unusual, as much of the rest of the country continued to suffer as well. St. Louis reported twenty deaths from sunstroke; officials declared the morgue full, and hundreds of horses died in their harnesses. Evansville, Indiana, suffered its third day of temperatures 102 degrees or higher in the shade. Webster, Massachusetts, reported that the mercury hit 104. Kansas City, Missouri, also experienced a record-setting day of heat over 102 degrees. Perhaps the greatest suffering was in Chicago, which experienced a doubling of the death rate. Fifteen persons died of sunstroke, with nearly eighty people prostrated, many of these in serious condition and unlikely to fully recover. Moreover, with so much of the city’s work having been suspended, garbage crews had not picked up the refuse that now sat and decayed in the alleys, “filling the air with fearful, deadly smells.” The city’s drinking water had been rendered largely unfit for consumption, contributing to the high mortality rate.
The situation in Chicago was dire as Bryan’s train rolled into town.
THE BRYANS HAD risen at 5:30 that morning, and at seven o’clock they boarded the Rock Island train in Des Moines bound for Chicago. It was the start of a day that would see Bryan give nineteen individual speeches along the way, as the thermometers in Iowa and Illinois registered close to