The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [260]
IT SOON BECAME CLEAR that Roosevelt’s order to close the saloons had very little to do with temperance principles. It was the logical consequence of his mandate—as he saw it—to root out corruption in the police force.91 Ill-advised as such a crusade against “nineteen-twentieths of the people” might seem in retrospect, his basic reasoning was in the public interest.
Of all the wellsprings of illicit funds in New York City, the corner saloon was the most copious, and the most profitable to all concerned. It profited the liquor sellers with $160,000 worth of “found money” every Sunday. It profited the police, who accepted bribes in order not to enforce the law against them. In particular, it profited Tammany Hall, not only with a percentage of the take, but with a rich harvest of votes upon request—for the saloon was the traditional political center of every neighborhood.92 A Tammany boss could, with a word to his precinct captain, force the Sunday closing of any establishment which failed to support him; arrests of this kind always increased dramatically in the weeks before Election Day. Sometimes, to make the situation more Byzantine, boss and saloonkeeper were one and the same person. Roosevelt never tired of pointing out that “nearly two-thirds of the political leaders of Tammany Hall have, at one time or another, been in the liquor business.”93
In 1895 there were between twelve and fifteen thousand saloons in New York City, most of them occupying corner sites with elaborate displays of mahogany and engraved glass. In thirsty neighborhoods, such as Paddy’s Market and Germantown, the saloons often occupied all four sides of an intersection. This architectural phenomenon was directly related to the Sunday Excise Law. A corner site meant that even when the front door was locked on Saturday at midnight, there would be at least one open door down the side-street, ostensibly connected with the saloonkeeper’s living quarters. The flow of “friends” through this door on Sundays was prodigious. Policemen pretended not to notice the foam on the mustaches of departing guests, although they would conscientiously rattle the front lock and check that all shutters were drawn. Within, under flickering gaslights, business went on as usual.94
ROOSEVELT WAS NOT the first authority to invoke the law that year. Ex-Chief Byrnes, for example, had arrested a record 334 saloonkeepers on one Sunday in January. But as Roosevelt pointed out, his victims had been chosen carefully: “The law … was enforced with corrupt discrimination.” Byrnes would never have permitted the booking of a King Callahan. Now “everybody was arrested alike, and I took especial pains to see … that the big men and the men with political influence were treated like every one else.”95
As a result, 30 June was voted “the Dryest Sunday in Seven Years.”96 Ninety-seven percent of the city’s watering-holes were closed, slowing to a trickle the normal Sunday flow of three million glassfuls of beer. Roosevelt bluecoats seemed to be everywhere, waving aside bribes with loathing and writing out summonses at the slightest sign of resistance. Some enterprising saloonkeepers sought to evade the law by serving “meals” with their drinks, in the form of token sandwiches. These were placed on barroom tables, on the tacit understanding they were for display purposes only, and left to curl up at the edges while relays of patrons “washed them down” with liquor.97
Roosevelt was sternly disapproving, and ordered his plainclothesmen to monitor all aging sandwiches in future. The legal ratio, he said, was one drink per sandwich, and they were meant to be consumed simultaneously. He congratulated an exhausted Chief Conlin on his success in closing so many saloons, and urged him to even greater efforts. “This must be kept up!”98
The following Sunday,