Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [62]
Unfortunately, Roosevelt’s first meetings with Hanna had not gone exactly as planned. With any possible McKinley administration still seven months away, Hanna had apparently given Roosevelt—and probably every other office seeker—something of a brush off. Now he tried to explain this to the Storers. In his letter to Mrs. Storer, Roosevelt related that Hanna had said “at present he was considering nothing but how to elect McKinley . . . I thought it wise not to press the matter further at the moment.” Even so, Roosevelt tried to make clear he had made his best effort. Clearly it was not up to him alone to secure a post for Bellamy Storer, an Ohio lawyer and congressman whom McKinley had known well for years, as opposed to the young police commissioner from New York. Roosevelt’s goal, instead, was to secure a quid pro quo from the Storers. Now that he had raised the topic of a Storer appointment with Hanna, it was up to the Storers to bring their own influence to bear with their close friend McKinley.
WITH THE STREET temperature hitting 95 and the humidity at 70 percent, the heat settling over the city on this seventh day of the heat wave felt like 120 degrees. Hospitals reported twelve infant deaths from the heat, although many more died inside the suffocating tenements. Sixty death certificates were filed that day in Manhattan for children under the age of two, including Charles Bellman, age seven months, and Gladys Shields, age six months.
Before departing the city for Long Island on August 10, Roosevelt had issued an order that may have saved many lives during the last few days of the heat wave. With the city hospitals complaining to the police that their ambulances were “taxed to the utmost caring for heat cases,” Roosevelt ordered that police wagons be pressed into service.
Like flushing the streets or changing work hours, this was a seemingly simple order that nevertheless depended on the individual judgment and initiative of a city official like Roosevelt. Quick treatment for heat victims in a hospital’s ice baths was the best way to save the heat-stricken. Making enough transportation available to carry the sick to hospitals, or to cart away dead horses, might have been the most basic of measures taken by the city, thus saving lives and removing the “flavor of pestilence” that Roosevelt would later describe to his sister. This did not happen—even Roosevelt’s order to provide police wagons was not adequate to handle the body count. Supply wagons, coal trucks, and even the morgue’s “dead wagon” ultimately had to be pressed into service taking heat victims to the hospital.
Meanwhile the heat wave continued to dominate newspaper headlines. “An Epidemic of Sunstrokes,” the Herald declared, as the Tribune announced “DEATHS BY THE SCORE.” Every paper on Monday, August 10, dedicated several pages to the tragedy, listing the victims and often giving an hour-by-hour accounting of the temperature. “The plague of high temperature and high humidity on the city,” the Journal reported, “is eating out its life at a never before equaled speed.” Outside of New York, much of the country continued to suffer through the heat wave. Across the Hudson in New Jersey, many people died from the heat, and the Botany Worsted Mills in Passaic shut its doors so as not to endanger the lives of its 3,000 employees. Even in the farming districts it was reported that farmers had left their fields to escape the heat. With the streams drying up, cattle and other livestock were suffering gravely. In Connecticut deaths were reported in Hartford and New Haven, while Providence, Rhode Island, registered the record temperature of 97. Philadelphia reported a slight easing