ON TEDDY ROOSEVELT

thelivyjr
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Re: ON TEDDY ROOSEVELT

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ELLIOT, continued ...

TR would later reminisce about “dancing class” where Elliott far outshone him.

“He was distinctly the polished man of the world from the outside, and all the girls from Helen White and Fanny Dana and May Wigham used to be so flattered by any attention from him.”

They summered together, first in New Jersey, then at Oyster Bay; they rode horses bought for them by their father.

Elliott excelled at sailing, while Theodore became the relentlessly determined rower.

Both suffered severe childhood illnesses that upended family outings, provoking immense worry by their parents and perhaps jangling relations between them.

Theodore from age three endured frightening deep-gasping bouts of asthma, which he later combated with extraordinary gym workouts.

Elliott seemed the golden child until suddenly at puberty he started having seizure-like attacks, diagnosed as “nerves/hysteria,” with fainting, headaches, and night terrors.

Their philanthropist father, Theodore Roosevelt Sr., tried hard to prevent them from turning into the frivolous boys of Fifth Avenue.

Father, known as “Great Heart,” preached and also practiced an active Christianity that demanded good works.

He founded the Newsboys’ Lodging House to shelter hundreds of orphans sleeping in alleyways and gutters; during the Civil War he had helped create the Allotment Commission, which encouraged soldiers to send their pay home to their families instead of squandering it on whores and saloons.

Theodore seemed challenged to live up to his father’s lofty aspirations; Elliott often seemed chafed by them.

As part of a cure for Elliott’s fits, the family sent him at age sixteen to a military outpost, Ft. McKavett in the wilds of Central Texas.

Elliott wrote about bunking with a genuine cowboy in a tumbledown hut, sharing a blanket with the stranger, and deciding to use a dog as a pillow “partly for warmth and partly to drown the smell of my bed fellow.”

Theodore was very jealous.

Together, they weathered the sudden shock of their father’s death in 1878.

As they grew older, the lives of the two brothers intertwined less, with Theodore off at Harvard and Elliott still too troubled to study, but Elliott took his brother — just before Theodore’s marriage to his first wife, Alice Lee — on a kind of extended bachelor party, a hunting trip out west as far as the Red River in Minnesota.

Though they had no Indian adventures, the brothers shot more than 400 birds — geese, snipe, plovers, ducks — and nearly drowned, after upending a rowboat in Iowa.

“I enjoy being with the old boy so much,” Theodore wrote, and Elliott echoed the sentiment: “All the happier we are solely dependent on each other for companionship.”

TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
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Re: ON TEDDY ROOSEVELT

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ELLIOT, continued ...

Elliott appeared to be outgrowing the anxiety attacks, or perhaps he had discovered how to blot them out with cocktails.

Theodore described his twenty-year-old brother reaching Chicago during their trip: “As soon as we got here, he took some ale to get the dust out of his throat; then a milk punch because he was thirsty; a mint julep because it was hot; a brandy smash ‘to keep the cold out of his stomach’; and then sherry and bitters to give him an appetite.”

TR’s flippant tone makes it unlikely he recognized his brother’s incipient alcoholism, but clearly Elliott was downing more than a few.

He obviously wasn’t sloppy about it yet because Theodore asked Elliott to serve as best man at his Boston Brahmin wedding to Alice Lee on TR’s twenty-second birthday.

“She is so pure and holy, it seems almost profanation to touch her,” Roosevelt wrote in his diary, but added that nonetheless he couldn’t stop hugging her.

As a newly married man, Theodore embarked on his plans to be a writer and enter politics in New York.

Meanwhile, best man Elliott sailed for India.

Cavalier and footloose, Elliott hunted tigers south of Hyderabad, traveling by elephant, by horse, by servant-hoisted palanquin.

Camp meals rivaled the catered baskets of Delmonico’s as they dined on an assortment of curries, chicken, veal, salmon, duck, and tongue, washed down by a cool pitcher of beer.

Elliott proudly recorded that he had shot a nine-foot-long Bengal tiger as it was making its final lunge toward him.

He wished his “brave, old Heart of Oak brother” could have been there.

“It is the life, old man."

"Our kind."

"The glorious freedom, the greatest excitement.”

A London taxidermist deftly fashioned the tiger’s skin into a rug that would cover the floor of the Roosevelt family parlor for years.

Elliott circled the globe, then returned to join the polo-playing, hard-carousing fellows of Long Island.

On December 1, 1883, he married the regally beautiful debutante Anna Hall in “one of the most brilliant weddings of the season,” attended by Astors and Vanderbilts.

A crescent of diamonds held her veil in place.

Anna, who almost a year later gave birth to daughter Eleanor and then five years after that to son Elliott, would remain beautiful enough to win accolades at society dinners.

Elliott belonged to several prestigious Manhattan clubs and was working as a stockbroker.

Theirs seemed the perfect marriage, only it wasn’t.

Elliott “drank like a fish and ran after the ladies,” later commented a Roosevelt family member, “I mean ladies not in his own rank, which was much worse.”

He also began having bizarre athletic accidents, probably from his recklessness and drinking.

He fell attempting a double somersault during an “amateur circus exhibition” in Pelham, New York, in 1888 and cracked his ankle; a doctor’s misdiagnosis of the injury as a sprain led to the ankle having to be rebroken to be set, all of which dragged out his recovery and probably accelerated his use of opium-based painkillers.

TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
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Re: ON TEDDY ROOSEVELT

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ELLIOT, continued ...

In late June of 1890, the twenty-nine-year-old German-born live-in house servant Catharina “Katy” Mann informed Elliott that she was pregnant with his child.

Weeks later, Elliott and his wife Anna, their two children, and several servants (not including Katy) headed off to the elegant spas and hotels of Europe.

The family’s plan was for him to dry out.

Count Bismarck entertained them in Berlin, as did Count Sierstorff, who intervened when Buffalo Bill, then touring there, offered Elliott a shot glass of whiskey.

Anna became pregnant again; Elliott remained sober for two months, feeding the pigeons in Piazza San Marco in Venice, sailing every morning with his two children near Naples.

Then he cracked.

Wife Anna wrote and asked if the most efficient member of the Roosevelt clan, unmarried older sister Bamie, would come over to Vienna to tend to her till she gave birth and try to convince her brother to dry out in a sanitarium.

Elliott had other ideas; he soon headed to Paris, inviting the family to tag along.

Once there he would disappear for days, one time hunting boar with the Duc de Grammont.

“The horns played a little, then we galloped in a single file up and down miles of beaten forest road,” he wrote to one of his polo chums on Long Island.

He complained that the only excitement possible in such a stage-managed hunt could occur if someone fell asleep and tumbled off his horse.

Back in New York, Katy Mann — pregnant, abandoned, and living at home in Brooklyn with her mother — approached the Roosevelt family, told her story, and demanded money.

Older brother Theodore, then in D.C. serving on the Civil Service Commission, and brother-in-law Douglas Robinson (married to his younger sister, Corinne), in New York, handled the negotiations.

TR at first did not believe the servant, until she said she had a locket and witnesses who had heard Elliott in her room.

She claimed it was common knowledge that the other servants “chaffed” her about the master’s attentions.

“It is like a brooding nightmare,” wrote TR to his sister Bamie in Europe, painting the adultery in stark Victorian terms.

“If it was mere death one could stand it; it is the shame that is so fearful.”

TR wanted Bamie to convince Elliott to allow himself to be locked up in an asylum for a long cure.

In any case, he expected his brother’s living arrangements to change drastically.

“Personally, I regard it as little short of criminal for Anna to continue to live with him and bear his children."

"She ought not to have any more children and those she has ought to be brought up away from him.”

He advised his sister that as soon as Anna gave birth and recovered, she should bring the family home to the United States and leave Elliott in a foreign asylum, preferably a long-term, or possibly “permanent,” arrangement.

He added that if she couldn’t persuade Elliott to go to one in Europe, he would have him locked up as soon as Elliott returned to America.

“His curious callousness and selfishness, his disregard of your words and my letters and his light heartedness under them, make one feel hopeless about him.”

TR feared that “the Katy Mann affair is but the beginning.”

TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
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Re: ON TEDDY ROOSEVELT

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ELLIOT, continued ...

Theodore regarded Elliott’s drunken infidelity in black-and-white terms: Elliott was either “insane,” that is, not responsible and deserving of treatment or ... his brother was sane, responsible, and a “selfish, brutal and vicious criminal.”

Katy Mann gave birth and demanded the large sum of $10,000.

TR and his brother-in-law Douglas sent an investigator, carrying a picture of Elliott, to Brooklyn to examine the baby.

He confirmed that it was probably a Roosevelt.

“It is his business to be an expert in likenesses,” wrote TR.

They mulled a counteroffer of $3,000 or $4,000 in exchange for a quit-claim.

The Dutch Roosevelts, one of New York’s oldest families, had never been touched by scandal.

Most family members preferred to keep this quiet as long as possible, certainly not volunteer it to the press.

Nonetheless, Theodore and Bamie — convinced they needed to protect Anna and the family fortune — applied to the New York courts for a writ of insanity against Elliott.

With that filing, the scandal finally broke, with front-page headlines: DEMENTED BY EXCESS, WRECKED BY LIQUOR AND FOLLY, and PROCEEDINGS TO SAVE THE ESTATE.

In his affidavit Roosevelt stated his brother had threatened suicide several times and had lost his power of self-control.

Bamie stated that Elliott had been drinking to excess for the past three years but had turned irrational and violent in the past year.

However, Roosevelt’s younger sister, Corinne, the flightiest and most emotional of the four siblings, refused to join in the court proceeding.

Years earlier, she had written: “Dear Elliott has been such a loving tender brother to me ..."

"How different people are ... there is Teddy, for instance, he is devoted to me too but if I were to do something that he thought very weak or wrong, he would never forgive me, whereas Elliott no matter how much he might despise the sin, would forgive the sinner.”

The judge appointed a three-person commission of lunacy to evaluate the thirty-one-year-old bon vivant, currently in Paris.

If he was ruled a lunatic, the court would appoint an executor to oversee his immense $175,000 estate.

TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
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Re: ON TEDDY ROOSEVELT

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ELLIOT, continued ...

Throughout his letters, TR sounded a recurrent theme of wanting to preserve the estate for Elliott’s wife and children, as Elliott was apparently blowing through about $1,500 a month skittering around Europe, which would exceed his annual investment income.

Each of the four Roosevelt siblings had received approximately $125,000 from their father and $62,500 from their mother.

Following his boyhood cowboy dream, TR had invested $85,000 to buy two ranches and herds of cattle in North Dakota; in one letter describing a sudden ice storm, he stated that he hoped to lose “less than half” the money.

He had bought property and built a home for $45,000 in Oyster Bay.

Thanks to his financial decisions, TR had seen his annual income drop from about $14,000 a year in the mid-1880s to $7,500 in 1894 prior to taking the police commissioner job.

In one recent year, wife Edith’s account books revealed an annual shortfall of more than $1,000.

Roosevelt was eventually forced to sell off land in Oyster Bay.

He even feared losing Sagamore Hill.

He was famously impractical about money.

Decades later, his daughter Alice noted that every morning her mother pinned a $20 bill in his pocket, and her father had no idea how he spent it.

On the other hand, the bulk of younger brother Elliott’s inheritance — despite his highjinks and immorality — remained intact and was being invested through a stockbrokerage managed by his uncle by marriage James Gracie.

Elliott had voluntarily parked himself at a retreat, Château Suresnes, outside Paris,where he somehow learned of the writ of lunacy.

He issued a denial to the Herald: “I wish emphatically to state that my brother Theodore is taking no steps to have a commission pass on my sanity, either with or without my wife’s approval."

"I am in Paris taking the cure at an établissement hydro-therapeutique, which my nerves, shaken by several accidents in the hunting field, made necessary.”

His words sounded quite sane and his lawyers in America quickly found a jurisdictional flaw — an incorrect address — in Theodore’s lunacy application.

Elliott seemed in the clear once again to pursue the life of a wealthy, hard-drinking, adulterous husband.

In fact, he was already living with Mrs. Evans in Paris.

His brother could not abide that.

Theodore said he feared for the well-being of Elliott’s children and wife.

His own wife, Edith, later admitted a further motive: “I live in constant dread of some scandal."

Boarding a steamer, Roosevelt headed for Europe in January of 1892 to confront his younger brother.

They had a brutal meeting in which Elliott tried to laugh off TR’s “stern” lectures, until he finally caved in, “utterly broken, submissive and repentant.”

He agreed to sign over two-thirds of his estate to his wife and to undergo two years’ probation with no drinking before earning the right to rejoin his family.

TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
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Re: ON TEDDY ROOSEVELT

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ELLIOT, continued ...

His rehabilitation would start with Dr. Keely’s five-week Bi-Chloride of Gold cure in Dwight, Illinois.

“This morning, with his silk hat, his overcoat, gloves and cigar, E. came to my room to say goodbye,” wrote Mrs. Evans.

“It is all over ..."

"Now even my loss was swallowed up in pity — for he looks so bruised, so beaten down by the past week with his brother."

"How could they treat so generous and noble a man as they have."

"He is more noble a figure in my eyes, with all his confessed faults, than either his wife or brother.”

Although Elliott returned to the United States, stopped drinking, and was ruled sane later that same year, TR was adamant that his younger brother should not yet see his wife or children.

His brother-in-law, real estate investor Douglas Robinson, gave Elliott a job managing properties and staff down in rural southwest Virginia, and Elliott thrived.

Still dazzling, wife Anna Hall Roosevelt attended a “beauty dinner” hosted by the Turkish minister in Bar Harbor in September 1892, and was regarded as the “belle of the occasion.”

Elliott kept writing letters, bragging of his sobriety to his mother-in-law.

But a few months later at age twenty-nine, Anna Hall Roosevelt suddenly and shockingly fell ill and lay dying of diphtheria; Elliott wanted to see her one last time but her mother sent a terse telegram to him in Virginia: DO NOT COME.

Elliott, still exiled from his family by his brother and his mother-in-law, began drinking again; he tipped over an oil lamp while reading naked and severely burned himself.

He moved back to New York City and wound up on West 102nd Street living with that same married woman, Mrs. Evans, as “Mr. and Mrs. Elliott.”

“He is now laid up from a serious fall,” Roosevelt wrote to his sister Bamie on July 29, 1894.

“Poor fellow! if only he could have died instead of Anna!”

TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
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Re: ON TEDDY ROOSEVELT

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ELLIOT, concluded ...

Two weeks later Elliott did die, with only a doctor and his uncle James K. Gracie at his bedside.

He had started using “stimulants” again and while suffering from delirium tremens had tried to jump out of a fourth-floor window, but a policeman had restrained him.

During his last hours he had called out for his daughter, Eleanor.

“The terrible bloated swelled look was gone,” wrote sister Corinne to Bamie in London, “and the sweet expression round the forehead made me weep bitter tears ... Theodore was more overcome than I have ever seen him — cried like a little child for a long time.”

In death, the raw emotions finally battered down Roosevelt’s stout moral fortress and he wrote an extraordinary letter.

[Elliott]would have been in a strait jacket had he lived forty eight hours longer.

His fall, aggravated by frightful drinking, that was the immediate cause.

He had been drinking whole bottles of anisette and green mint — besides whole bottles of raw brandy and champagne, sometimes half a dozen a morning.

But when dead the poor fellow looked very peaceful and so like his old generous, gallant self of fifteen years ago...I suppose he has been doomed from the beginning.

The absolute contradiction of all his actions and of all his moral — even more than his mental — qualities is utterly impossible to explain.

For the last few days he had dumbly felt the awful night closing in on him; he would not let us come to his house, nor part with the woman, nor cease drinking for a moment but he wandered ceaselessly everywhere, never still and he wrote again and again to us all sending me two telegrams and three notes.

He was like some stricken hunted creature and indeed he was hunted by the most terrible demons that ever entered into man’s body and soul.

His house was so neat and well kept with his bible and religious books and Anna’s pictures everywhere, even in the room of himself and his mistress.

Poor woman, she had taken the utmost care of him, and was broken down at his death.

Her relations with him had been just as strange as everything else.

Very foolishly, it had been arranged that he should be taken to be buried beside Anna but I promptly vetoed this hideous plan, Corinne who has acted better than I can possibly say throughout, cordially backing me up and he was buried in Greenwood [in the Roosevelt plot] beside those who are associated with only his sweet innocent youth, when no more loyal, generous, brave, disinterested fellow lived.

All his old friends came to the funeral; the church was filled; it was very very sad and behind it followed the usual touch of the grotesque and terrible, for in one of the four carriages that followed to the grave went the woman, Mrs. Evans and two of her and his friends, the host and hostess of the Woodbine Inn ... Katy Mann came in to Douglas’ office with the child which she swears was his; I have no idea whether it was or not; she was a bad woman but her story may have been partly true.

But we can not know.

Well, it is over now; it is fortunate it is over and we need only think of his bright youth ... Poor Anna and poor Elliott!

For the rest of his life, TR almost never mentioned Elliott.

But seeing all those empty liquor bottles beside the bed of his only brother must have made a profound impression.

Theodore Roosevelt had already suffered many tragedies in his life; he had seen his father die suddenly of stomach cancer at age forty-six and then his mother of typhoid fever at forty-eight and his first wife of Bright’s disease at twenty-two, both on the same day, February 14, 1884.

He couldn’t blame those diseases but he could blame moral weakness and alcohol.

He had witnessed close up how hard liquor had sped the ugly downfall of his brother Ellie.

TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
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Re: ON TEDDY ROOSEVELT

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LONG HOT THIRSTY SUMMER

During the sweltering summer of 1895, Commissioner Roosevelt intensified his efforts to shut down the saloons on Sunday.

The more embattled he became, the louder and longer he talked about his commitment to absolute enforcement of law and order.

The small-circulation New York Times ran an editorial praising Roosevelt’s “determined attitude” but most of the papers competed to show the people’s outrage.

The New York Herald stationed reporters to tally figures from transit executives at the thirty-plus ferry boat and excursion lines heading to the likes of Coney Island, Staten Island, New Jersey, up-Hudson, and Connecticut, and estimated that one-quarter of the city’s residents departed on Sunday.

“Blue laws and blue skies conspired to attract the multitude to places where ... the winds blow fresh and cool and where it is no sin to drink a glass of beer.”

The World investigated whether the rest of New York State observed the Sunday law, and found that twenty-four of the twenty-nine largest cities ignored the law, either blatantly or at the side door.

ALBANY’S MAYOR BLIND and NO THIRST AT NEWBURG ran typical headlines.

As for the rest of the nation, the World found only six major cities bone dry on Sundays: Boston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Savannah.

In New York, thirsty citizens tried to outsmart the police, using ruses that would become popular thirty years later during Prohibition.

Desperate people wandered to crowded restaurants and tried with a wink and a bit of code to finagle a drink.

For lager beer, they asked for “Weiss” beer; for whiskey, “cold tea”; for gin “plain soda”; and for Rhine wine “lemon soda.”

The New York Advertiser added: “If the drought continues, the proprietor will supply his patrons with a dictionary of the language of dry Sunday.”

Desperate times called for desperate measures.

A Tammany Hall politician, Colonel Tom Coakley, heard about a clever dodge: medicinal alcohol.

Go into a drug store and tell the member of the Lucrezia Borgia family behind the soda water outfit that you want “Rainbow Syrup.”

Well, that licensed assassin will deal you out about three fingers of the rottenest whiskey this side of Flatbush.

It’ll keep you walking when you get it: you’re afraid if you lay down, you’ll die ... I knew a man that drank some of it and he didn’t do a thing but go over to Jersey City and stay all day.

Thought he was having a good time, mind you, and hopped over there looking for fun.

Well, when a man goes to New Jersey looking for fun, his mind is failing.

TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
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Re: ON TEDDY ROOSEVELT

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LONG HOT THIRSTY SUMMER, continued ...

Beyond the jokes and clever anecdotes, the absolute proof of the crackdown’s effectiveness could be measured in beer deliveries.

By mid-July, a leading brewer reported that wholesale beer sales in New York City had fallen off by 92,000 quarter-kegs a week.

That meant bartenders were selling about 3.6 million fewer five-cent beers every Sunday.

He expected the industry to lose $4 million in revenue over the twenty-four weeks until the earliest time the legislature could reconvene in January and change the law.

He estimated that 500 brewery workers would lose their jobs, and that 2,000 of the city’s 8,000 saloons would fail, putting at least 4,000 bartenders out of work.

The heart of the Sunday crackdown fell along class lines.

The poor couldn’t afford bottled beer or liquor, couldn’t chill it, and had nowhere pleasant to drink it.

On the other hand, the “privileged few” could drink at their private clubs, with amenities such as bars, restaurants, reading rooms, pools, gyms, sleeping quarters.

According to a tally in the World, 37,737 New Yorkers belonged to the city’s premier clubs, including Roosevelt at the Union League, J.P. Morgan at the Century, and various other bluebloods at the Harvard Club or the Knickerbocker.

Atop the white marble palace of the Metropolitan Club stood a magnificent roof garden “overlooking the Plaza and Central Park” where members and their guests enjoyed a “breeze that never reached the pedestrians on the avenue.”

The rich, “in easy chairs at low tables” could just ding the silver bell at the center of each table and waiters in white appeared to take their orders.

Downstairs at the bar “a colored youth turned a crank to crush the ice and a mixologist concocted cocktails with dashes of cordials, liqueurs and imported bitters.”

The World delighted in contrasting that oasis with conditions in the East Side tenements, where “the sun beat down” and turned any room into a “Russian bath”; the heat “made the water run lukewarm at the faucets,” soured the milk, and “even sapped the moisture and coolness from the overnight watermelon.”

TO BE CONTINUED ...
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Re: ON TEDDY ROOSEVELT

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LONG HOT THIRSTY SUMMER, continued ...

Saloon owners such Mike “King” Callahan tried dodges to serve their customers.

He hired carpenters to cut four new entrances to his joint: through Wing Lee’s laundry on Doyers Street, through a doorway at No. 1 Doyers Street, through a paint shop, and through his “Progress” roominghouse.

The plan was working well until a policeman thought he heard a cash register ring inside the saloon and noticed Wing Lee was doing a bustling “washee” business.

On Sunday, July 7, at 7:30 p.m., patrolman Price barred the entrance to Wing Lee’s.

Callahan, who had once been a bouncer at Koster & Bials, came rushing out and cursed the officer: “I am not going to take any blank from any blankety-blank blank man.”

Callahan was arrested again.

He sing-songed: “I suppose you want to shake Roosevelt’s hand.”

That same day, the owner of Quinlan’s Saloon at 138 Park Row hauled all liquors, beers, and wines from his shelves and offered only soda water and sarsaparilla for sale.

His sign proclaimed SOFT DRINKS ONLY; his place was packed.

He was arrested twice that day and the precinct captain threatened to repeat the raid every Sunday.

Quinlan applied to Judge David McAdam for relief.

The judge ruled on Friday, July 12, that selling fizzy water was not against the excise law, but clearly violated the Sabbath law.

He quoted New York State statutes 266 and 267, which stated that food could be sold before 10 a.m. and prepared meals sold in restaurants all day Sunday but that it was forbidden to sell anything else with the exception of “prepared tobacco, fruit, confectionary, newspapers, drugs, medicines and surgical appliances.”

The penalty for the first offense: up to a $10 fine or imprisonment in a county jail, with escalating punishments for repeat violations.

“It is as much the duty of the police to arrest lemonade peddlers or druggists selling soda water on Sunday as it is to arrest saloon-keepers selling whiskey,” explained the judge.

McAdam was a Tammany Democrat with a sense of humor; he belonged to the “Thirteen Club,” dedicated to defying triskaidekaphobia and to hosting dinners with coffin-lid menus, tombstone wine lists, and guests entering under stepladders.

The Herald explained it would now be illegal on Sunday to sell “soda water, mineral water, sarsaparilla, ginger ale, milk or buttermilk,” and the paper feared the city would turn into “an arid desert” if the Roosevelt board fulfilled its promise to enforce all laws.

Newspapers now delighted in unearthing every dead-letter law imaginable to show the absurdity of Roosevelt’s doctrinaire enforcement of all laws: no barber poles taller than five feet; no kite-flying south of 14th Street; no boarding a streetcar in motion (arrest half the men in the city); no placing of flower pots on windowsills (arrest half the women); no fishing off docks on Sunday (arrest the boys); no 5 p.m. opening of delicatessens to serve the “comfortable classes” who give their servants Sunday nights off; no ball playing within two miles of a church service on any day.

TO BE CONTINUED ...
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