Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [88]
Roosevelt was obviously moved by what he saw that night. In an August 15 letter to his sister, he recounted the “strange and pathetic scenes when the ice was distributed.” Such scenes would be repeated the following day as the ice giveaway reached 250 tons. Moreover, as Roosevelt had spent much of the heat wave out on Long Island, touring the Lower East Side that night while overseeing the ice distribution was his first opportunity to witness the suffering of New York’s poor from the heat.
He must have been shocked by the suffering of the police force as well. At Eldridge station he was perhaps told of the collapse of Patrolman William Williamson, who lay unconscious at Bellevue Hospital. He must also have seen a report that Patrolman Walter Bray of the West Forty-Seventh Street station had died only a few hours after suffering prostration. Black bunting and streamers marked the homes that had suffered deaths, as scores of hearses plied the streets. Roosevelt’s position as police commissioner offered him a unique perspective on the heat wave, as he witnessed the suffering of both the poor and his own police officers as they coped with the emergency.
Ice was not the only item in short supply. Alarmingly, newspapers reported a citywide shortage of coffins. In the New York factory of the Brooklyn Casket Company, clerks had been pulled from their desks to help manufacture new caskets. Nearly two hundred men had been working night and day to keep up with demand during the heat wave. Of these men one had been prostrated at work and died, and another lay critically ill from heat exhaustion. Still, the workers had not been able to keep pace with the orders from city undertakers. And the morgue was so overcrowded with bodies that many lay on the floor. Perhaps half of these bodies would not even require a fancy casket from the Casket Company, as they were destined for a mass grave at Potter’s Field. Of the more than fifty bodies at the morgue awaiting interment on Wednesday, twenty-eight of them had received a pauper’s burial. This was but another sign of the toll the heat had taken on New York’s poorest and most vulnerable residents.
BY THE TIME of the ice giveaway Thursday evening, a full day had passed since Bryan’s speech. Only now was the full enormity of what had occurred at Madison Square Garden dawning on pundits and politicos in New York and across the nation. While city newspapers had exhausted their vocabulary describing the heat wave—“blazing,” “scorching,” “searing,” “broiling,” “baking,” “burning”—they now turned to cooler terms to describe Bryan’s New York reception. The Evening Post noted the “chilling effect” of his failure on his managers, while the Times proclaimed in a headline: “FROST FOLLOWS MR. BRYAN.” (The headline for the Chicago Tribune read: “BRYAN GETS A FROST.”) New Yorkers continued to dissect the failure of his Madison Square Garden speech. The Nation mockingly noted that Bryan had now revealed his twin character, “that of a demagogue and that of a solemn economist.” The journal lambasted his “gross” and “incredible ignorance,” which placed him in the “booby class in business.” “He would do much better to stick to his crown of thorns and cross of gold,” an editorial concluded.
All observers blamed Bryan’s reading of his speech, and many noted the effect of the terrible heat. The Tribune noted the great surprise New Yorkers felt on hearing of the speech’s failure. “No one could remember a case where a man of prominence ever came to here with a similar reputation for the possession of great oratorical gifts,” one writer said, “and fell so far short of meeting the