Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [79]
Roosevelt wrote his friend Lodge with an explanation. “As I know you will see the Sun,” he began, “I wish to say that every other paper in New York, no matter of what politics, spoke in the highest terms of the way the Police handled the crowd at the Bryan notification meeting. The trouble with the Sun was that its reporter got there after the house was full, the notification people having issued just twice the number of tickets that there were seats, and after the house was filled the Police of course had no other alternative than to turn every one back.” The Herald actually defended this policy of the police as well, calling it a “wise” decision, “for had the rush within been permitted to continue there would have been many heat prostrations and a possible panic.”
With the Garden meeting finished, Bryan, Sewall, and their party departed for the Democratic headquarters at the Bartholdi Hotel. There Bryan gave a short, impromptu speech that had more passion, religion, and humor than his two-hour Garden speech. “Some of your financiers have boasted that they favor gold,” Bryan told the small crowd from the hotel balcony, “but you shall teach them that they must carry their ideas far enough to believe, not in gold, but in the golden rule that treats all men alike. I commission you as soldiers to fight and as missionaries to preach wherever you go from now on until election day.”
Bryan declared himself unafraid of the threat of a gold-standard Democratic Party organized to oppose him. “You will search the pages of history in vain to find a battle that was ever won by generals,” he asserted. “They have not a private in their ranks.” He ended with a rousing affirmation that in the United States “every citizen is a sovereign,” and every citizen owed it to himself and his country to exercise the right of suffrage.
The Bartholdi speech, although only a few minutes in length, contained all the religious militancy that the Garden speech lacked. Some in the Garden that night had paid $10 a ticket for the privilege of sitting inside for two hours on one of the hottest nights of the year, packed together with 15,000 other New Yorkers. Those standing for five minutes in the street in front of the Bartholdi Hotel heard a vastly more rousing and “Bryanesque” speech. It cost them nothing.
THE MUCH-ANTICIPATED Garden speech had been almost overshadowed by the week’s heat wave, and the heat wave itself contributed to Bryan’s failure in New York. Now just as the speech finished, the heat began to ease. Thursday, August 13, marked the final day of the heat wave. New Yorkers welcomed slightly cooler temperatures, as the official high recorded by Dunn dropped below 90 for the first time in seven days.
Still, deaths in both Manhattan and Brooklyn occurred at almost double their usual summertime rate, with approximately 170 deaths over the norm. Certificates were still being filed on August 13 for deaths that occurred on August 11. The death certificate for Garret Stephenson Kirwan noted that he lived in a tenement at East 143 Street with his parents, immigrants from Ireland. The doctor who had been attending Garret since Monday listed as the direct cause of death: “Exhaustion from Heat.” Garret was forty-four days old.
Eleven-month-old Mamie Brandy also died on Thursday, the daughter of Italian immigrants living in a tenement at East Thirty-Second Street. Her death was caused by “Heat prostration due to exposure.” The use of the term “exposure” was not at all common on death certificates during the heat wave, and it conjures very serious and heart-rending possibilities. The common late-nineteenth-century use of the word indeed meant “abandonment” of an infant, but the doctor may have simply meant that Mamie had been left in the sun or exposed to the heat in a particularly dangerous way. The coroner chided tenement dwellers for taking to the baking asphalt roofs every night; it is certainly possible that Mamie’s parents had in