Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [69]
AS BRYAN HAD entered New York, the Democratic National Committee had finalized arrangements for the meeting at Madison Square Garden at last. Over 30,000 applications for tickets had been made, with most of them turned down. Organizers worried that many New Yorkers assumed that the Madison Square Garden meeting was a political rally and thus open to all. They still remembered Grover Cleveland’s notification in 1892, when a crush of people seeking admission had caused women to faint and almost led to a mass panic. To avoid such a calamity, organizers had requested a large police presence, and Chief of Police Conlin had also announced the presence of a police surgeon to care for anyone stricken by the heat.
On the stage with Bryan would be a scattering of leading Democrats, with many prominent absences such as Senator Hill and Tammany politicians. Their places would be taken by leading silver advocates, like Richard Bland, Senator Joe Blackburn of Kentucky, and Senator Ben Tillman of South Carolina. Indeed the city seemed to be awash in southern and western politicians. “The buffalo herd is coming,” one fervent free-silver advocate shouted in the Fifth Avenue Hotel corridor. “The stampede is making its way east!”
V.
BRYAN FELL WITH A BANG
Come along get you ready wear your bran, bran new gown,
For dere’s gwine to be a meeting in that good, good old town,
Where you knowed ev’ry body, and they all knowed you,
And you’ve got a rabbits foot to keep away the hoodoo;
Where you hear that the preaching does begin,
Bend down low for to drive away your sin
And when you gets religion, you want to shout and sing,
There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight, my baby.
FROM THE SONG “A HOT TIME IN THE OLD TOWN,” 1896
DURING THE 1896 campaign Mary Bryan recorded in a small notebook the many gifts her husband received from well-wishers. These included: “One pair of suspenders. One cane. One band wagon. One mule. One silk bed quilt. . . . One ostrich egg.”
Canes were the most frequent gift, made from materials such as petrified wood, fish vertebrae, and antelope horn. The head of one cane represented an eagle with diamonds for eyes—after one large public reception the Bryans found the diamonds had disappeared. A fungus that bore a resemblance to Bryan was sent, as well as an egg with a shell formation that suggested the candidate’s initials. Rabbits’ feet arrived in large quantities. “If there be virtue in the hind foot of a rabbit procured under the most favorable circumstances,” Mary wrote years later, “Mr. Bryan should have won this election. It is difficult to imagine that his opponent was more adequately supplied with rabbits’ feet; plain, furry little feet, feet mounted in every ingenious form . . . came to us with such frequency that they are not included in the notebook record.” As a Christian, William Jennings Bryan likely rejected such totems, although at the speech on the night of August 12 he would need help from every quarter to “keep away the hoodoo.”
In Brooklyn, the Russell family of Huron Street particularly suffered on the day of the big meeting. Patrick Russell, seventy-three years old and a retired merchant, visited his eldest daughter in Manhattan on one of the hottest days of the year, returned home, and died. His youngest daughter, Mary, was prostrated in the city and taken to Presbyterian Hospital, where she later died. Finally, Russell’s son, Patrick Russell Jr., a clerk in