One-Night Stands with American History

by Richard Shenkman

  HE MADE A CRIME WAVE

  In his autobiography Lincoln Steffens, the great nineteenth-century reporter, made the following statement: “I enjoy crime waves. I made one once.”

  It happened this way. One summer day in New York City in the 1890s, Steffens was wiling away the afternoon sitting in the cool basement of police headquarters listening to stories told by criminals, cops, and reporters. Suddenly a bored detective interrupted and said that he had a really interesting story to tell.

  A prominent family living on Fortieth Street and Madison had gone away for the summer and entrusted their house to a caretaker, named Billy Bones. Unfortunately, Billy was not very trustworthy and had connived to become caretaker in order to rob the family blind. Accordingly, shortly after the family left the city, he and a friend, Mr. Busy-Bee, who arrived at the house with a wagon, began clearing things out. There was one small problem, however: two policemen standing on a nearby corner. “Oh, well,” Billy said when Busy pointed out the cops, “they’re not Chicago bulls; they’re only New Yorkers. If they come up, we’ll ask ’em to help us. See?”

  “All right, Billy,” Busy said. “We’ll try it; I don’t want to hire the wagon twice for nothin’. Let’s get some heavy things down on the sidewalk so as to give them something to do.”

  Sure enough, soon one of the cops walked up and questioned the two thieves about the clutter on the sidewalk. Billy identified himself as the caretaker and explained that they were trying to get the furnishings out of the house as quickly as possible. Would the policeman, he asked, be so good as to help them load up the things?

  The man in blue hemmed and hawed and said he had not joined the force to be someone’s moving man. “Ah, come on,” Billy implored, “be a sport an’ give me a boost with this trunk.” The cop finally relented. He helped with the trunk and a few other items, and then loaded up a parlor clock all by himself. Soon everything was in the wagon and the two men bade farewell to their well-meaning public servant.

  Ordinarily Steffens never bothered with crime news, but this story concerned an important family connected with Wall Street. So he wrote up the account for his paper, the Post, though he good-naturedly omitted the joke played on the cops.

  The story immediately created a sensation, not so much on the streets as in the offices of the city’s other papers. At this time the practice of the city’s papers had been to obtain all their news about crime from court records. Thus, all the papers always carried the same stories about criminal activities. Suddenly, however, one paper had got a scoop. This led editors at the other newspapers to demand that their reporters also come up with stories which no one else had.

  In no time, of course, every paper was outscooping the other, reporting all types of crimes that before would have gone unnoticed. Particularly adept at finding new crimes was Jacob Riis, who had a source in the Police Department that supplied him with virtually every report of illegal activity anywhere in the city. Every day Riis would report on three or four new crimes, while Steffens would tell about one or two more that he had discovered, with other newsmen contributing a few stories of their own.

  After a few days the people of New York began to think, naturally, that their city was suffering from a major crime wave. Were the criminals taking over the city? Respect for the newly appointed police board declined dramatically. Its head, Theodore Roosevelt, a friend of both Steffens and Riis, began worrying that his attempts to clean up the city had somehow started it. Under the old, corrupt system police had an informal agreement with the city’s criminals not to harass them too much if they kept criminals from other cities out of the metropolis. T.R. had broken this long-standing agreement, demanding that anyone found breaking the law be arrested. Now he wondered if he had been right.

  At a secret meeting of the police board, the police commissioner told T.R. that Roosevelt could stop the crime wave anytime he wanted.

  “I! How?” Roosevelt stuttered.

  “Call off your friends Riis and Steffens. They started it, and—they’re sick of it. They’ll be glad to quit if you’ll ask them to.”

  “I don’t understand,” T.R. replied.

  The commissioner explained that he had checked the record of arrests and found that city crime had not increased one bit. The only thing that had increased was newspaper reports of crime. After learning this, the commissioner had talked with some newspaper friends of his and asked about the increase in crime news. They had informed him that it was all the fault of Riis and Steffens, who had started competing for the most stories about crime.

  T.R. ended the meeting and called Riis and Steffens to his office. “What’s this I hear?” he shouted wildly. “You two and this crime wave? Getting us into trouble? You? I’d never have believed it. You?”

  Riis and Steffens explained what had happened, and T.R. told them to stop competing for stories. Neither reporter liked rushing around to get a scoop, so they both quickly agreed to Roosevelt’s suggestion. And that effectively ended New York City’s great crime wave.

  SOURCE: Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (New York: Literary Guild, 1931), pp. 285–91.

  IDAHO ELECTS A SENATOR?

  The Seventeenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, provided that U.S. senators be elected by a statewide popular vote. Before that time senators were selected by the state legislatures. This arrangement led occasionally to curious politics, as in the case of the 1896 election of Henry Heitfeld to the U.S. Senate from the state of Idaho.

  The 1896 Idaho legislature consisted of Republicans, Democrats, and Populists. Normally, the Democrats and Populists formed a coalition, but this particular year there were so many aspirants for the Senate seat that no one could build a strong base of support. Heitfeld was a Populist who at times received a number of votes himself. But Heitfeld personally seemed to be a rather unambitious candidate, always voting for another man. One day there was a particularly large vote cast for Heitfeld, but no one dreamed he might be close to being elected. Heitfeld sat quietly at his desk, voted for someone else, and made his own personal tally of the votes. When the roll call ended, however, he stood up and addressed the chair: “Mr. President, I desire to change my vote. I vote for Heitfeld.”

  A loud roar of laughter filled the chamber, and Heitfeld immediately became the butt of a great deal of chafing from his fellow legislators. Meanwhile, the clerks compiled the official tally, and before anyone, except Heitfeld, realized what was happening, the presiding officer declared: “Henry Heitfeld having received a majority of all the votes is hereby declared elected United States Senator for the term of six years.”

  Heitfeld, of course, had tallied his votes and seen that chance had thrown him to within one vote of the Senate chair. So he changed his vote and earned a trip to Washington, D.C.

  SOURCE: Arthur Wallace Dunn, From Harrison to Harding (New York: Putnam, 1922), p. 219.

  The Full Dinner Pail, the Bull Moose, and the Great War

  “I want to be a Bull Moose

  And with the Bull Moose stand

  With Antlers on my forehead

  And a Big Stick in my hand.”

  —BULL MOOSE PARTY JINGLE

  SCRAPBOOK OF THE TIMES

  • When it became clear that William McKinley had been elected president over William Jennings Bryan in 1896, campaign manager Mark Hanna wired McKinley: “God’s in his Heaven—all’s right with the world.”

  • In 1897 the federal government recalled $26 million worth of one-hundred-dollar bills when a counterfeit hundred-dollar bill appeared that was so accurate it almost could not be distinguished from the real thing. This was the only time in history that fake money was so well designed that legitimate currency had to be withdrawn.

  • Whenever his wife suffered an epileptic seizure in public, there was always one thing William McKinley would do: throw a napkin over her face.

  • McKinley did not want to be the first president to leave the boundaries of the United States during his term. So
when he took a walk in 1901 on the bridge connecting the United States and Canada at Niagara Falls, he was careful not to go more than halfway.

  • Until 1900 the state of Rhode Island had two capitals, at Providence and Newport.

  • During the Spanish-American War, Americans were portrayed in Spanish cartoons as pigs—because the United States was a big exporter of pork to Cuba.

  • The safety razor, the subway, the long-distance telephone, and the movies all made their appearance during the Progressive Era.

  • During the first five years of the twentieth century a Negro was lynched almost every other day.

  • Despite the primitiveness of the practice of bleeding, it was still resorted to as late as 1905, when the Sears catalogue carried this advertisement: “Spring Bleeding Lance. The only practicable, safe and convenient instrument for bleeding on the market. Used almost exclusively by old school physicians for the purpose.”

  • One C. K. G. Billings held a dinner party at which everyone dined while sitting on a horse. The party cost $250 per person, much of the expense going for custom-made trays used to hold the food on each animal.

  • When Douglas MacArthur left home to attend West Point, his mother went with him—to keep an eye on the future soldier. To make sure he studied, she took an apartment that had a perfect view of his dormitory room.

  • J. P. Morgan gave this answer when asked about the cost of maintaining his yacht, the Corsair: “Nobody who has to ask what a yacht costs has any business owning one.”

  • In 1906, Maxim Gorky and wife were ousted from a New York apartment building when they could not persuade the proprietor that they were married.

  • Upon entering the Senate in 1906, the insurgent Republican Robert LaFollette was appointed by the Old Guard to a committee that had never met: the Committee to Investigate the Condition of the Potomac River Front.

  • Stopping in Nashville at the Hermitage, the home of Andrew Jackson, after a bear-hunting trip in 1907, Theodore Roosevelt coined a famous phrase when, after drinking a cup of Maxwell House coffee, he remarked—according to the General Foods Corporation—“Delighted—this coffee is good to the last drop.”

  • When the Great White Fleet, which T.R. sent around the world in 1907, returned to America in 1909, it was immediately painted gray.

  • One of Teddy Roosevelt’s sons once remarked, “When father goes to a wedding, he wants to be the bride; when he goes to a funeral, he wants to be the corpse.”

  • In 1908 the New York Giants lost the pennant to the Chicago Cubs because player Fred Merkle, in rounding the bases, missed second.

  • The Sears catalogue of 1909 carried an advertisement for a horseless buggy that was “guaranteed to go 100 miles in 24 hours if good care is taken of it.”

  • When King Edward VII of England died in 1910, the New York Stock Exchange closed for the day.

  • In 1910 a down-and-out young Italian named Mussolini almost emigrated to the United States.

  • After his first night with his second wife, Woodrow Wilson broke into a dance and sang out the lines to the song, “O What a Beautiful Doll.”

  • America’s first self-service grocery store, the Piggly Wiggly, opened in 1916. The store was so organized that customers had to go up and down every aisle before reaching the checkout counter.

  • During World War I, Wilson raised $100,000 for the Red Cross by selling the wool of White House sheep. The sheep had been purchased at the beginning of the war to replace the gardeners who were drafted by the army.

  • After listening to a Senate debate on what the needs of the country were, Vice President Thomas Marshall coined the memorable expression: “What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar.” (In the 1930s, Franklin P. Adams gave the phrase a twist when he remarked: “What this country needs is a good five-cent nickel.”)

  • In the fall of 1918 the Justice Department arrested 75,000 civilians in two days on suspicion of draft dodging. It turned out that only 3 percent of the men were illegally out of uniform.

  • John D. Rockefeller: “God gave me money.”

  • On September 1, 1918, the secretary of war ordered the baseball season cut short on account of World War I.

  • World War I ended at precisely eleven o’clock on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year 1918.

  • When a militaristic congressman asked a woman testifying for peace at a congressional hearing, “Who won the World War?” colleague Maury Maverick shouted out the famous line: “Who won the San Francisco earthquake?”

  • When Georges Clemenceau was told about Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, he exclaimed: “Le bon Dieu n’avait que dix!” (The good Lord had only ten!)

  • At the White House, through the early years of the twentieth century, a man calling on the president had to present two visiting cards, one for the president and one for the first lady. A woman visitor had only to present one card, since she was presumably calling only on the president’s wife.

  HEINZ’S 57 VARIETIES

  In 1896, Henry John Heinz was riding on an elevated railway in New York City when he saw an advertisement for twenty-one varieties of shoes. The sign gave him an idea. He would advertise his own company’s products with a number—any number, so long as it was catchy. Finally he decided upon fifty-seven, which he believed people would remember. The number itself was meaningless, of course. Even in 1896 the Heinz company sold more than fifty-seven varieties.

  SOURCE: Alex Groner, The American Heritage History of American Business and Industry (New York: American Heritage Publishing Company, 1972), p. 255.

  THE CURE FOR AMERICAN ILLS

  In 1898 the Bayer pharmaceutical firm introduced into drugstores across the country its new medication for bad coughs—heroin. It was not the first “hard” drug to be pushed on the American market. Lack of government regulation, easy accessibility, and medical ignorance made drug abuse a major social problem in the late 1800s. Common pharmaceutical products included many dangerous substances. Cocaine tablets for throat and nerves; baby syrups spiked with morphine; miscarriage-producing Portuguese Female Pills, “a great and sure remedy for married ladies”—were all readily available, either by mail or at the local drugstore. The base of most liquid medications was alcohol. Consumption was so great that experts have estimated that nineteenth-century Americans imbibed more spirits from patent medicines than from bottled liquor. Not until 1909, with the enactment of the Narcotics Drug Act, did the government begin to regulate the quality of medications.

  An advertisement from 1923. (Edgar R. Jones, Those Were the Good Old Days [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959], p. 336.)

  Drug advertisements were as plentiful as the products they promoted. The pages of Life, Harper’s, the Sears catalogue, and the New York Times were filled with a virtual onslaught of drug-touting notices. According to Congressman William Everett of Massachusetts, one church congregation found the advertising barrage to be especially trying. New hymnals were needed, but the church had little money to buy them. To economize, the congregation contracted with a patent-medicine manufacturer who agreed to defray a large percentage of the hymnal cost in return for advertising space in the new books. The songbooks arrived on December 24. On Christmas Day the churchgoers filled the sanctuary only to find in their new hymnals:

  Hark! The herald angels sing

  Beechan’s pills are just the thing.

  Peace on earth and mercy mild

  Two for man and one for child.

  SOURCES: Otto L. Bettmann, The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 152; Edward Boykin, ed., The Wit and Wisdom of Congress (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1961), p. 376.

  Advertisement from an 1880s edition of Life magazine. (Life, January 21, 1886, p. 56.)

  ANYTHING YOU WANT FROM MONTGOMERY WARD

  In the late nineteenth century Montgomery Ward’s catalogue offered an astonishing variety of merchandise. Many people believed they could order anything
they wanted from Ward. Even a wife. One man wrote: “As you advertise everything for sale that a person wants I thought I would write you, as I am in need of a wife, and see what you could do for me.” Another man, more demanding, wrote: “Please send me a good wife. She must be a good housekeeper and able to do all household duty. She must be 5 feet 6 inches in height. Weight 150 lbs. Black hair and brown eyes, either fair or dark. I am 45 years old, six feet, am considered a good-looking man. I have black hair and blue eyes. I own quite a lot of stock and land. I am tired of living a bachelor life and wish to lead a better life and more favorable. Please write and let me know what you can do for me.”

  SOURCE: Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973), pp. 123–24.

  HEARST’S WAR

  William Randolph Hearst was looking around for a way to boost sales of his newspaper when he discovered Cuba. A war in Cuba would excite the public and would, in turn, create a great demand for newspapers. Late editions . . . extras . . . irresistible headlines. So Hearst sent the great Western painter, Frederic Remington, to Cuba to get pictures of “a gallant revolution.” Remington went but found that there was no revolution. “Everything is quiet,” he wired. “There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return.” “Please remain,” Hearst cabled back. “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”

  SOURCE: Curtis MacDougall, Hoaxes (New York: Macmillan, 1940), p. 244.

  YANKEES DEFEATED IN SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR

  General Joseph Wheeler, who had been a Confederate cavalry officer in the Civil War, served admirably in the Spanish-American War, but he had a hard time remembering who the enemy was at the Battle of Santiago. He went into the battle though he was very sick and had to be carried in an ambulance. When the battle seemed to be going badly, he bravely left the ambulance, dramatically leaped on a horse, and led a charge. The charge was succeeding when Wheeler, slipping back into his youth, shouted exultantly to his men, “The Yankees are running; they are leaving their guns!” “Oh, damn it,” he corrected himself when he remembered where he was and what uniform he was wearing, “I didn’t mean the Yankees, I meant the Spaniards!”