But Harlem was actually on the precipice of ruin. Barely more than a decade later it was becoming the ghetto of the future. The main cause of decline was the construction of too many apartment houses. There simply were not enough tenants to occupy all the houses developers had built. When Philip Peyton, a Negro real estate salesman, offered to fill the apartments with black families, the landlords on some streets readily agreed. Of course, as blacks moved in whites moved out, and soon every street began being abandoned by whites. By the early 1920s, Harlem was virtually completely black.
Oddly enough, land values, which had been dropping in the 1910s, rose dramatically in the 1920s. Although whites had taken needed money out of the area, the entrance of blacks had eliminated the surplus of housing that had caused the original decline. Unfortunately, the flow of poor blacks into Harlem, swelled by great numbers of Negroes just then emigrating from the South, resulted in high demand for apartments and extravagant charges for rent. Inevitably, tenants began packing more people into their apartments than was healthy, landlords began to neglect their buildings, and unsanitary conditions developed. High rents had caused Harlem to become a congested ghetto.
SOURCES: Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), passim; Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973), pp. 294–95.
HOW ONE MAN FORCED ALL NEW YORKERS TO STAY AT HOME
James Gordon Bennett, Gilded Age publisher of the New York Herald, once bragged to a group of friends that he could make the public do anything he wanted. To prove his claim, he boasted that the very next day he would make every New Yorker stay at home.
The following morning the city’s streets were completely empty. Bennett had carried out his claim.
How had he done it? That morning the Herald had carried banner headlines announcing the escape of dangerous animals from the zoo. The headlines told of “Terrible Scenes of Mutilation” and “A Shocking Carnival of Death.” Reportedly, animals were prowling everywhere, terrorizing the city. Finally, after several long, frightening hours, people realized they were the victims of a hoax. Slowly the streets filled up in the normal way and the city came to life.
SOURCE: Scoundrels and Scalawags (New York: Reader’s Digest, 1968), p. 21.
CARNEGIE GIVES 16¢
“Andrew Carnegie was once visited by a socialist who preached to him eloquently the injustice of one man possessing so much money. He preached a more equitable distribution of wealth. Carnegie cut the matter short by asking his secretary for a generalized statement of his many possessions and holdings, at the same time looking up the figures on world population in his almanac. He figured for a moment on his desk pad and then instructed his secretary, ‘Give this gentleman 16¢. That’s his share of my wealth.’”
SOURCE: Edmund Fuller, ed., Thesaurus of Anecdotes (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing Company, 1943), p. 362.
THE $50 ILLNESS
Even the great are not above pecuniary concerns. Oliver Wendell Holmes returned the following message when asked to deliver a lecture: “I have at hand your kind invitation. However, I am far from being in good physical health. I am satisfied that if I were offered a $50 bill after my lecture, I would not have strength enough to refuse it.”
SOURCE: Homer Croy, What Grandpa Laughed At (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1948), p. 131.
VICTORIAN SELF-ABUSE
Masturbation in the Victorian era was not acceptable behavior. It was a sin that robbed the spirit, decayed health, and led to insanity. In a report presented to the Massachusetts state legislature in 1848, the superintendent of the lunatic asylum at Worcester estimated that 32 percent of the asylum’s patients were insane because of self-pollution. Similar figures were released by asylums around the country until the twentieth century.
The masturbator was easily identified. Plague spots, dark or blue spots under the eyes, were telltale evidence of a self-polluter. As one doctor put it, “they were the outward sign[s] of a morally bankrupt individual.” But to the knowledgeable, many other clues indicated a possible self-abuser. Precocious physical development in an adolescent might very well have been triggered by masturbation. Children sliding on poles or trees were suspect. Tight-fitting clothes, dancing, or working long hours without proper exercise were also evidence of possible physical mistreatment.
The best preventive for masturbation was careful supervision by parents. Pure-minded parents were advised especially to watch their children during the vulnerable moments when a child goes to the bathroom, sleeps, or bathes. “Watch his motions as the child lies with covered head,” suggested one specialist, “listen to his breathing. Is it quick, hurried, gasping, sighing? There is danger lurking there.” Some boarding schools installed transoms above bathroom doors to enable the schoolmaster to keep an eye on suspected abusers.
Cures for the masturbator were more complicated. Sleeping in straitjackets or tying the practicer’s hands either to the bedpost or to rings on the wall were usually effective. Special beds were designed which prevented a sleeper from turning over. A few ingenious Americans took out patents on the “genital cage,” a metal truss that held the penis and scrotum with springs. To complement the effectiveness of the cage, it was recommended that people wear clothes which opened only from behind. But ingenuity did not stop there. One cage, patented in 1900 by a Mr. Joseph Lees of Pennsylvania, featured an electrical alarm that was triggered in the unfortunate event of an erection.
What today would be considered barbaric cures for the self-polluter were recommended and practiced by Victorians. According to some doctors, leeches placed around the sexual parts helped remove “congestion.” Bloodletting also quelled a masturbator’s appetite for sin. Other cures were more extreme. Some specialists prevented masturbation by perforating the foreskin of an uncircumcised penis and inserting a ring through it. Drugs were applied to the sexual parts to make a would-be abuser too sore to masturbate. After a strong dose of red iron or Spanish fly was applied to the genitals, masturbation was no longer a great temptation.
But some doctors resorted to even more radical measures. Hypothesizing that one-half of the females who masturbated did so because of an irritation of the clitoris, one Chicago doctor recommended clitoral circumcision as a sure cure for female self-abuse. An Ohio doctor told in 1896 of the success he had experienced with an operation on habitual male abusers in which he removed from half an inch to an inch of the dorsal nerves in the penis. The operation rendered patients sexually impotent for approximately a year and a half, enough time to permit, in the doctor’s words, the “restoration of the physical and mental health.”
Occasionally, nineteenth-century specialists prescribed marriage as the cure for male and female masturbation. Individual self-abuse, it seems, was practically eliminated by this surest of all Victorian remedies.
SOURCE: John S. Haller Jr., and Robin M. Haller, The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), p. 223.
WOMEN ARE DUMBER
In the late 1900s many physicians regarded increased female education as a primary factor in a general decline of female health. A woman’s brain was simply not capable of assimilating a great deal of academic instruction. Education past high school, many specialists warned, was both physically and mentally destructive to the female. A study published in the Medical Record in 1892 illustrated the problem. Of 187 high school girls diagnosed, 137 constantly complained of headaches—clear evidence, concluded the report, of female inability to deal with the complexities of a rigorous academic program.
The rising number of neurotic girls, young women afflicted with emotional or psychic disorders, was directly linked to increased female education, many doctors believed. The affliction was often characterized by fatigue, depression, feelings of inadequacy, and other physical and mental ailments. Young women, commented one physician, “whose mental powers are overtaxed before their brains are sufficiently develop
ed,” were the most likely individuals to break down in nervous exhaustion.
Even though a high percentage of specialists believed the female brain was simply not made to perform intellectually, a woman’s natural constitution did make her much less susceptible to many physical abnormalities that commonly afflicted men. Senility, loss of sight or hearing, and a host of other ailments were primarily associated with men. Doctors warned, however, that female efforts to imitate the male would destroy a woman’s inherited immunity to certain maladies. Already, doctors reported, male afflictions such as paralysis, insanity, alcoholism, and crime, which were caused by overwork or prolonged worry, were on a frightful upswing among the gentler sex.
SOURCE: John S. Haller Jr., and Robin M. Haller, The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), p. 37.
An advertisement from 1892. (Edgar R. Jones, Those Were the Good Old Days [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959], p. 56.)
AN OLD STORY: WARNINGS AGAINST SMOKING
WEIRD WHITE HOUSE RULES
A few of the rules and maxims appearing in the 1887 edition of the official White House book of etiquette:
• “A gentleman should not bow from a window to a lady, but if a lady recognizes him from a window, he should return the salutation. It is best, however, for a lady to avoid such recognitions. It is not in the best taste for her to sit sufficiently near her windows to recognize and be recognized by those passing on the street.”
• “Cleanliness is the outward sign of inward purity. It is not to be supposed that a lady washes to become clean but simply to remain clean.”
• For men: “Do not indulge in long hair, thinking it gives you an artistic look. Except in painters and poets, flowing locks are a ridiculous affectation.”
SOURCE: Janet Halliday Ervin, The White House Cookbook (1887; rpt. Chicago: Follett Publishing Company, 1964), passim.
CLEVELAND THE EXECUTIONER
Before he became president, Grover Cleveland served as sheriff of Erie County, New York. Twice during his tenure the future president was called upon to hang convicted criminals. Cleveland, who would be president only fourteen years after accepting the job as sheriff, actually placed the noose around the necks of the convicted men, tightened the rope, and sprang the trapdoor.
SOURCE: Joseph Kane, Facts about the Presidents, 2d ed. (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1968), p. 151.
THE PRESIDENT’S SECRET OPERATION
On the evening of June 30, 1893, the President of the United States quietly slipped on board a yacht anchored at Pier A on the East River in New York City. Mystery surrounded his appearance. The crew had been told the President would be having two teeth pulled the next day, but the extreme measures taken to keep his presence a secret seemed strange.
Some time earlier Grover Cleveland had complained about a rough spot on the roof of his mouth. His doctors had examined it and found it to be cancerous. They had advised that he have an operation to have it removed. Part of his jaw would have to be cut out, but within a few weeks Cleveland would be fully recuperated. There would be no sign of an operation, since the surgery would all be done from the inside of his mouth.
The operation took place on July 1 and went smoothly. The upper part of the jaw was removed, and within two days Cleveland was up and about. But he could not speak well, and after the cotton that had been placed in the excavated area had been taken out, his speech became completely unintelligible. He recovered quickly, however, though a second operation had to be performed on a remaining area of cancer.
The public was not told about the operation, since Cleveland believed news of his illness might lead to uncertainty and worsen the financial crisis that was then developing. Congress was about to begin debate on the repeal of the Sherman Silver Act and nerves on Wall Street were tense. On August 29, however, an amazingly accurate report of the operation in all its details appeared in the Philadelphia Public Ledger. Apparently one of the doctors had broken his oath and revealed everything.
But by then Cleveland looked just as he always had. An artificial jaw made of vulcanized rubber preserved his familiar jowly expression and made the story seem ridiculous. His doctors condemned the report, and friends asserted that the President never looked better in his life. Newspapers around the country published attacks on the Ledger’s story, and in a few weeks it was virtually forgotten.
For almost twenty-five years the public heard nothing more about the operation. Then, in 1917, nine years after Cleveland’s death, one of his doctors told all, in an article published in the Saturday Evening Post.
SOURCE: Rudolph Marx, Health of the Presidents (New York: Putnam, 1960), pp. 253–62.
MARK HANNA’S PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE
When a young Republican prosecutor from Ohio began a suit in 1890 to void the charter of the Standard Oil Company, Mark Hanna, the Republican party’s Mr. Moneybags, became irate. To the young prosecutor Hanna condescendingly wrote: “You have been in politics long enough to know that no man in public office owes the public anything.”
SOURCE: Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934), p. 353.
NEW YORK PRIEST BATTLES TAMMANY HALL
On February 14, 1892, a Sunday, Charles Parkhurst, pastor at a New York City church, delivered a sermon against venality in municipal government. Without naming names, Parkhurst insinuated that virtually every bigwig in the city was corrupt. The politicians? They were a “damnable pack of administrative bloodhounds . . . fattening themselves on the ethical flesh and blood of our citizenship.” The Tammany bosses? “They are a lying, perjured, rum-soaked, and libidinous lot” in league with the Devil himself.
It was the kind of sermon seldom heard in America, at least in the cities, during the last third of the nineteenth century. A sermon full of fire and brimstone, burning exclamation points, and searing indictments. It could not be ignored.
And it wasn’t. Within a few days a grand jury was impaneled; nine days later Parkhurst was called to testify; by the fifteenth day the jury issued a report.
Their conclusion? The city’s problems could all be blamed on one person: Charles H. Parkhurst. Because of him the people of the city were seething with indignation. He had tempted them to distrust their leaders and had made charges he could not prove. When the pastor had faced the grand jury, he had brought with him a balloon filled with nothing but hot air. The New York Sun suggested that Parkhurst be sent to prison.
The fact was that Parkhurst had not been ready to talk when called before the grand jury. All he knew was what everyone knew: the city was a cesspool of corruption. Was the district attorney in on it? Was the mayor? How about the justices of the court? Which ones? Parkhurst couldn’t say. And so nothing changed.
SOURCE: E. M. Werner, It Happened in New York (New York: Coward-McCann, 1957), pp. 36–116.
MURDER AT THE COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION
Herman Webster Mudgett, alias H. H. Holmes, killed more young women than anyone else in American history. In 1892 Holmes purchased a vacant lot across the street from his Chicago drugstore. On the site he designed and constructed a three-story home and office building that would later be known as “Murder Castle.” Firing work crews as they finished each individual part, Holmes was able to keep the master plan of the house a secret. When finished, the house contained secret rooms, concealed stairways, trapdoors, false walls and ceilings, doors that opened to solid brick walls, an elevator shaft with no elevator, an elevator with no shaft, and a hidden chute descending from the third floor to the basement. Holmes, a former medical student at the University of Michigan, equipped the basement with a mammoth dissecting table, a stone crematory, and large vats of quicklime and acid.
Once the house was built, Holmes began looking for victims. At employment agencies throughout the city he advertised for secretaries. “He liked nice, green girls fresh from business college,” one account later reported. It was the summer of 1893, and the Chicago Columbian Exposition was rolling into fu
ll swing. The bustling, excited city provided the perfect environment for Holmes’s criminal activities. To each new secretary Holmes would promise marriage and love forevermore. In return, the beguiled female would gladly sign over all insurance policies and savings accounts, and write out a will naming Holmes as beneficiary. The “budding romance” would culminate in Holmes’s third-floor bedroom, where the loving couple would spend the night. The next morning, however, Holmes would awaken early and, with chloroform from his laboratory, deepen the sleep of his lover. Carefully removing the girl to the elevator shaft, he would then wait for her to wake up. Next he would gleefully watch as lethal gas was pumped into the chamber, causing the betrayed girl to claw and gasp for help. When it was all over, he would throw the dead body down the secret chute to the basement.
After a year or so Holmes grew tired of killing women and began working at other things. The hapless girls simply were not bringing in enough money. “Lord knows I’ve worked hard,” he once admitted to an accomplice, “but the damnable place has cost me $50,000 to operate. I’m going broke in this business.”
In 1895, Holmes was arrested in Philadelphia in an insurance swindle involving murder. Searching for clues in that investigation, detectives opened “Murder Castle” and discovered over two hundred corpses, in varying stages of decay.
H. H. Holmes confessed all, but his memoirs, which he was dictating to the newspapers, were cut short when he was only up to his twenty-seventh victim. At that point, May 7, 1896, he was hanged for the crime of murder.
SOURCE: Jay Robert Nash, Bloodletters and Badmen (New York: M. Evans and Company, 1973), p. 382.
One-Night Stands with American History Page 16