The Stalwart Companions

by H. Paul Jeffers

  It is interesting to note that even at the young age of twenty-two Roosevelt already held beliefs that were to mark his public life – that the privileged classes bore a special responsibility to set a moral tone for the nation, telling Hargreave that it is not the common man who damages society but wealthy members of American society when they leave scruples aside.

  The references to the weather at this time lend validity to Roosevelt as the author of this remarkable document. July 2, 1880, was, in fact, a rainy day.

  The rapid expansion of Manhattan ‘uptown’ as noted by Roosevelt’s description of the ‘Rialto’ section below Forty-second Street is evidence that Roosevelt was very much concerned about the deterioration of the city of his birth as evidenced by the worsening morality he saw all around him, a development he deplored throughout his life and which he tried to do something about when he was Police Commissioner, attacking, particularly, the sordid people and life-styles flourishing around Manhattan’s saloons.

  Back to chapter two

  CHAPTER THREE

  The progress of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge was a matter of fascination for all New Yorkers. A wonder of engineering and American know-how, the great bridge was, at this time, three years from completion.

  President Ulysses S. Grant had rewarded the faithful Chester A. Arthur in 1871 with appointment as Collector of the Port of New York, then the most important federal job in New York City because it controlled more than one thousand employees of the Customs House, every job a ripe political plum. For eight years, Arthur used this position to build his own political base and, it is alleged, to line his own pockets. Hayes removed Arthur from the post in 1879 in his efforts to rid the civil service of politics. It was a political dismissal deeply resented by some Republicans and one more reason for them to deny Hayes a chance for a second term. This anger at Hayes must have been, as Roosevelt supposes, a weighty matter on Hargreave’s mind during Hayes’ visit to the city.

  The location of Holmes’ dressing room “in steerage” was not unusual. Actors suffered generally at the hands of producers and theater owners, then as now.

  Roosevelt’s account of Holmes meeting Hargreave is at odds with the excellent biography of Holmes by Baring-Gould, who writes that Holmes and Hargreave collaborated in the case of “Vanderbilt and the Yeggman” in January 1880. Of course, when Baring-Gould wrote his biography he did not have access to the Roosevelt manuscript published here for the first time. That Holmes and Hargreave continued their professional relationship is beyond question. In “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” Holmes remarks, “I therefore cabled to my friend, Wilson Hargreave, of the New York Police Bureau, who has more than once made use of my knowledge of London crime.”

  Holmes’ reference to the Harper’s Magazine article on the book by Noah K. Davis indicates, along with his subsequent references to the popular publications of the day, that Holmes was already the avid reader of the daily periodicals we find in Watson’s stories. Holmes’ demonstration of an intimate knowledge of the existence of New York’s homeless newsboys also points up his passion for collecting papers to obtain the crime news that clogged the columns of New York’s penny papers, flourishing by the score at this time. Roosevelt’s observation of the clutter of Holmes’ rooms at 39 East Twenty-second Street–stacks of newspapers everywhere – inevitably inspires comparisons to the clutter Watson deplored at 221B Baker Street, years later.

  Back to chapter three

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The farewell for Edwin Booth at Delmonico’s was unquestionably a notable social occasion, and the presence of Holmes, who may have been regarded as a two-bit actor by some, indicates he had entrée to high society. His previous connection with the Vanderbilts is apparently the reason for his familiarity with society. Holmes states that he was seated between the celebrated showman P. T. Barnum and Chief Justice Shea. Others at the affair, the Times reported, were Cyrus West Field and Joseph Jefferson. The breakfast was held on June 16, 1880. This conversation is interesting, as well, because it shows that Holmes did not meet Hargreave in the Vanderbilt case. Indeed, Hargreave is amazed to learn that one of the city’s best families had been victimised by a crime. In keeping with his sense of confidentiality regarding his clients, Holmes does not mention that the case of which he speaks is that of “Vanderbilt and the Yeggman,” but the solution of the crime accords with that described in Baring-Gould’s biography. The after-dinner chat with Hargreave is pure Holmes, as anyone familiar with ‘the canon’ will recognise. Beginning with a bit of name-dropping. Holmes then discourses on one of his favorite subjects – tobacco, noting Hargreave has taken up smoking cigars wrapped in Sumatran leaf, which had been imported to the United States for the first time as a wrapper and filler in 1876. He mentions his tobacco monograph, the one which had impressed Roosevelt. Then he touches lightly on ways of identifying individuals by their tobacco ash, the shape of the ear, fingerprints, watches and bootlaces. (Holmes always paid close attention to individuality, of course, noting in “The Sign of Four” that you can never foretell what any one man will do, although “you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant.”) In “A Case of Identity” Holmes delivered a similar lecture on observing the commonplace: “I can never bring you to realise the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumbnails, or the great issues that may hang from a bootlace.” Holmes sounds rather cold-blooded in his dismissal of emotion as a factor to be admitted into his personality when dealing with crime, but it was a lesson he learned painfully in those rare lapses when he permitted emotion to raise its head. In those instances, he usually ran into difficulties: “I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money,” he laments in “The Sign of Four.” In the same tale he warns, “Love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true, cold reason, which I place above all things. I should never marry myself, lest I bias my judgment.”

  Here, as so often in the Watson writings, Holmes speaks passionately about his belief that the most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious because, as he states in “A Study in Scarlet,” “it presents no new or special features from which deductions may be drawn.”

  It appears that Holmes, in his intervention in the Vanderbilt case, recommended that the culprit – the family footman – not be prosecuted, a decision probably based on a desire to keep the family’s name out of the newspapers. How the Vanderbilts knew of Holmes and of his special abilities remains a mystery, especially in view of the fact, as indicated by Roosevelt’s manuscript, that Holmes was not called into the case by Hargreave as suggested by Baring-Gould.

  Gramercy Park was and is a fashionable address. Besides being the New York City home of Tilden, it was the address of Cyrus West Field, builder of the Atlantic Cable. A block away lived Peter Cooper, inventor and philanthropist and founder of the Cooper Union. As a frequent stroller in the neighborhood, Holmes surely visited these men. Holmes was living in a rooming house at 39 East Twenty-second Street. (The address is now encompassed by a larger apartment house.) Strolling around New York seems to have been Holmes’ pastime when he was not acting. That he did not know that 15 Gramercy Park was Tilden’s house underscores the fact that Holmes was not interested in politics and political personages except when they were involved in his cases. The Tilden house was really two houses remodelled into one large townhouse by architect Calvert Vaux, one of the famed designers of Central Park. After his election loss in 1876, Tilden spent much of his time out of the city at his country residence.

  The restored Theodore Roosevelt house is maintained by the National Park Service and is open to visitors who may see the stately mansion as it was when Roosevelt was a youth.

  Holmes often used the device of asking someone to comment on a fact that seemed obvious by its omission. In this case, the lack of powder marks. In another case, “Silver Blaze,” Holm
es has an exchange with a police inspector, who asks:

  “Is there any point to which you wish to draw my attention?”

  “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

  “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

  “That was the curious incident,” remarked Holmes.

  In “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor,” Holmes again laments the effect of the American Revolution: “It is always a joy to me to meet an American... for I am one of those who believe that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in fargone years will not prevent our children from being some day citizens of the same worldwide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.”

  Back to chapter four

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “No, no: I never guess. It is a shocking habit – destructive of the logical faculty,” insists Holmes in “The Sign of Four,” as frustrated in that later adventure as he appears in this one at the assertion by Hargreave that Holmes’ abilities stemmed largely from guesswork.

  Roosevelt, who had read Holmes’ monograph on tobaccos, must have been amused to see Holmes, as a detective, seize upon the cigars as a vital clue in the case.

  Holmes’ lodgings appear to have been at 39 East Twenty-second Street for quite some time for him to have accumulated the things which Roosevelt describes, having moved to the boarding-house, one of many which flourished in the east twenties at this time, from the Union Square Hotel, mentioned previously by Roosevelt (Chapter 1: “... in a note from a hotel in Union Square...”). One imagines that the hotel management suggested to its guest that his smelly chemical experiments were disturbing the other guests!

  Holmes’ discussion of the architecture of New York, his knowledge of the chemistry of alloys, and his familiarity with the methods of breaking and entering indicate that in the years after he gave up formal education he had, indeed, spent his time studying anything and everything that the world’s first consulting detective would need to know. His prediction that Manhattan island would give birth to high-rise buildings was made based on his familiarity with the introduction of steel skeleton construction and electricity – which made the elevator both necessary and possible, although it would be eight years before the Tower Building was put up at 50 Broadway on the design of Bradford Lee Gilbert, thus becoming Manhattan’s first ‘skyscraper.’

  The identification of himself as William Escott to the newspaper reporter at the scene of the Tebbel murder shows again that Holmes wished to avoid having his name in the papers. This young newspaperman was, apparently, the writer of the item which set in motion the events that led to my discovery of Roosevelt’s manuscript. His article was in error on one point: he wrote that Escott and Hargreave had been at dinner at Roosevelt’s home when, as we know, they had been at the Hoffman House. In the conversation recorded by Roosevelt it is evident that the reporter was not told that Escott was an actor, so we may assume that he obtained that knowledge elsewhere in order to write that Escott was appearing in Twelfth Night. Perhaps the earnest young crime reporter also covered the theatrical beat, a not uncommon occurrence in the era of American journalism before the invention of that journalistic specialist – the dramatic critic.

  Even the most casual reader of Holmes literature knows of Holmes’ dabbling in cocaine. “Which is it today?” Watson asked in “The Sign of Four.” “Morphine or cocaine?” It was cocaine, Holmes admitted. “A seven per-cent solution.” To which Watson delivered a lecture on the evils of the snowy powder which Watson believed would “risk the loss of those great powers” which Holmes had spent his life developing. There is no way of knowing from Roosevelt’s manuscript if Holmes was already a user of cocaine in 1880 or simply a student of it.

  Back to chapter five

  CHAPTER SIX

  Father John Christopher Drumgoole devoted himself to the plight of homeless and wayward children, supporting the work of his growing home for newsboys by publishing his own newspaper, The Homeless Child, beginning in 1883. Later, Drumgoole founded Mount Loretto on Staten Island, one of America’s largest childcare institutions. While he worked hard for Mount Loretto, he did not abandon his interest in the newsboys’ home, visiting it daily. However, in the Great Blizzard of 1888, when Father Drumgoole attempted to reach Manhattan, he contracted pneumonia. He died two weeks later at the age of seventy-two. The good people of New York remembered him by naming a boulevard for him on Staten Island. Obviously, Holmes’ experience in recruiting an army of ‘irregulars’ from Father Drumgoole’s newsboys proved a useful device which Holmes adopted successfully in later years in the form of the Baker Street Irregulars, led by the indomitable Wiggins.

  It seems obvious that Roosevelt’s exposure to the corruption and vice of New York’s saloons, including those that catered to children, was uppermost in his mind as Police Commissioner in 1895 when he launched a campaign against the saloon businesses in New York City.

  The resourceful Wakefield of this tale must, of course, be compared to the remarkable Wiggins of the Baker Street Irregulars who are prominent in the resolution of cases in “The Sign of Four” and “A Study in Scarlet,” where Watson wrote, “The spokesman of the street arabs, young Wiggins, introduced his insignificant and unsavoury person.” It is a most uncharitable way for Watson to refer to a lad who was obviously of great help to Holmes, and it is amusing to wonder if Watson might not have been a little jealous of others – especially a boy – assisting Holmes with his problems. In pursuing whether Wakefield ultimately followed Holmes’ advice and entered upon a career in the police, the author has made an exhaustive study of the rolls of the NYPD for the decade of the 1880s but to no avail. Wakefield appears to have faded into the same obscurity as Wiggins, although each of the lads has attained immortality by being part of the chronicles of the sleuth of Baker Street! For details on what was located at 24 State Street, see the Notes on Chapter 9.

  Back to chapter six

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Five Points district, located, roughly speaking, between Park Row, Centre Street, and Grand Street (in the vicinity of the modern Chinatown), was very much like the Seven Dials of London. The area took its name from the intersections of streets and was but one of a number of very rough neighbourhoods of New York City in the latter half of the nineteenth century. These sections had wonderfully exciting names: Satan’s Circus, the Tenderloin area that blossomed between Broadway and Ninth between Twenty-third and Forty-second streets; The Bowery, the mainstay of lower East Side gangsters; the Gashouse District, which got its name from the huge round gas storage tanks, in the east thirties; and the West Side’s notorious Hell’s Kitchen, just west of the Tenderloin. In the 1893 publication of Baedeker’s United States, travellers were warned of these rough neighbourhoods and were cautioned at one point not to visit Chinatown unless accompanied by a detective. Each of these neighbourhoods contained the tenements and slums to which immigrants were relegated. Immigrants were cheap labour for the industrial concerns that flourished beside the rivers of the East and West sides of Manhattan.

  In a speech at Durham, North Carolina, on October 19, 1905, Roosevelt, discoursing on courage, said, “Good weapons are necessary, but if you put the best weapon that can be invented in the hands of a coward, he will be beaten by a brave man with a club.” In another address he spoke of the need for citizens who would “fight valiantly alike against the foes of the soul and the foes of the body,” indicating that Roosevelt deeply believed – as did Holmes – that the fight against crime was not to be won unless men first achieved a victory over moral corruption.

  In “The Sign of Four,” Holmes again mused on the “little immortal spark” concealed in every man, no matter what sort of rascal he might be, and, in “The Retired Colourman,” Holmes says, “Is not all life pathetic and futile?” Holmes was to express the same thought in “The Cardboard Box” as Watson pondered the meaning of misery: “What is the meaning of it, Watson? What object is s
erved by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.”

  Holmes discourses on the rose as evidence of the goodness of Providence, again, in “The Naval Treaty.”

  Holmes expounded his theory about sin in the city as compared to that in the country in “The Copper Beeches,” an adventure played out in the most beautiful of countrysides. “It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest of alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside... the pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor, ignorant folk who know little of the law.

  Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser,” Holmes said.

  Holmes’ maxim on the effect of appearances appears in a somewhat different form in “A Study in Scarlet” as Holmes observes that what you do in this world is a matter of little consequence. Rather, he states, the question is, “What you can make people believe that you have done.”