In New York, a city of heavy drinkers, Theodore Roosevelt’s diligence didn’t go down easily…

March 23, 2012

Tom and Jerry’s Bar, New York City, 1890s

From Barnes and Noble Review:

In the 1890s, New York “reigned as the vice capital of the United States, dangling more opportunities for prostitution, gambling, and all-night drinking” than any other American city, explains Zacks, author of History Laid Bare and The Pirate Hunter, at the outset. The Democratic Party’s corrupt Tammany Hall political machine had run the city since the 1860s, and the police force made no attempt to curb crime of a victimless nature. When Reverend Charles H. Parkhurst took to his pulpit one Sunday in 1892 and denounced the mayor and the police as “a lying, perjured, rum-soaked and libidinous lot,” he wasn’t entirely off the mark: in the seediest precincts, the police not only tolerated but regulated vice, demanding stiff payments from brothel and saloon owners who hoped to stay in business and even settling turf wars among criminals.

Parkhurst’s campaign led to a state probe of the police force, and its astounding findings about the breadth of corruption helped pave the way for a Republican victory in the 1894 election. When Roosevelt was appointed police commissioner by the new mayor, William Strong, he was met with an immense amount of goodwill by the city’s people and press. He almost immediately squandered it by deciding that his first major reform initiative would be enforcing the city’s Sabbath laws, which required saloons to be closed on Sundays. Roosevelt, Zacks writes, framed his crusade as a fight “against selective enforcement of the law,” but in New York, a city of heavy drinkers, his diligence didn’t go down easy. Worse yet, Roosevelt declared that Sunday began at precisely 12:01 a.m.

Police fight with drunks, New York City, 1890s

Because loopholes in the law allowed hotel guests or members of private clubs to drink on the Sabbath, “the heart of the Sunday crackdown fell along class lines.” While, in a preview of Prohibition, people found imaginative ways to drink their beer seven days a week, the New York newspapers still pilloried the commissioner. “To show the absurdity of Roosevelt’s doctrinaire enforcement of all laws,” they “delighted in unearthing every dead-letter law imaginable,” including those prohibiting flying kites south of Fourteenth Street and placing flowerpots on windowsills. The unbending Roosevelt responded by cracking down further, expanding his reform efforts to prostitution and gambling, and he chafed when the papers suggested that dangerous criminals were flocking to New York City because the police were tied up with the enforcement of vice laws.