Burning boy, p.51
Burning Boy, page 51
I am much obliged to you for “George’s Mother” with your own autograph on the front. I shall keep it with your other books. Some day I shall try to get you to write your autograph in my “Red Badge of Courage”, for much though I like your other books, I think I like that book the best. Some day I want you to write another story of the frontiersman and the Mexican Greaser in which the frontiersman shall come out on top; it is more natural that way!
W.R.H. One day after receiving Hearst’s telegram, Crane went to Madison Square Garden to watch (and perhaps write about) William Jennings Bryan’s first major address as the Democratic candidate for president. Bryan had been nominated a few weeks earlier at the party convention in Chicago, where he had delivered his famous “Cross of Gold” speech (which denounced the gold standard as a tool of the rich in suppressing the interests of the laboring class) and the incumbent president, Grover Cleveland, had been dumped by his own party—the same Grover Cleveland who had been elected (according to Crane’s former boss at the Tribune, Whitelaw Reid) because of Crane’s 1892 JOUAM article. A spell of hot, dog-day weather was pounding New York (temperatures in the nineties), and with a large crowd expected at the Garden that night, it was Roosevelt’s job to ensure that adequate police protection was on hand. The one thousand cops he provided should have been enough to maintain order in a twelve-thousand-seat arena, but forty thousand people turned up, and mayhem ensued as the undermanned security force allowed in people who had no tickets and barred others from entering who did, causing a great commotion on the street outside the Garden, where two different waves of incensed Bryan supporters crashed through the police lines.
T.R. There was much criticism in the press the next day, and Crane, uncommonly irked by what he had seen, wrote to Roosevelt about it soon after—not to complain so much as to inquire about how and why things had gotten out of control. On August eighteenth, in the second paragraph of the letter that began with Roosevelt thanking Crane for the gift of the book and the story, he addressed the problem directly:
This evening I shall be around at the Madison Square Garden to see exactly what the Police do. They have a very difficult task with a crowd like that, because they have to be exceedingly good humored with the crowd, and they also have to please the Managers of the meeting who know nothing about crowds, and yet they have to control twenty thousand people. I will say one thing for them at the Bryan meeting; we have not had a single complaint of clubbing or brutality from any man claiming to have suffered; the Managers of the meeting and the Manager of the Garden have both written us in the warmest terms.
Earlier in the same letter, Roosevelt announced that he was “leaving in a few days for a three weeks trip to the West,” and Crane took advantage of that absence to hammer home his irritation in print. Why he should have been so angry at the police department is unclear. He had witnessed numerous injustices in New York and elsewhere in the past without taking the trouble to write about them, and only once earlier, in the coal mine piece from 1894, had he ever let himself go in a full, splenetic outburst over a political or economic issue—paragraphs that were later cut from the text by McClure. Now, for whatever reason (a long-smoldering resentment that had ignited into fury after what he witnessed at the Garden? a personal grievance against the patrolmen of the Tenderloin?), he was riled up again, agitated enough to sit down and vent his feelings on paper, and yet, not wanting to attack his friend Roosevelt in the New York press, he cautiously hedged his bets and published his complaints in a series of articles for the remote Port Jervis Evening Gazette over three successive weeks in late August and early September, burying his remarks about the police in a column entitled “From the Metropolis” (tidbits from New York, not unlike the tidbits he had once written about Asbury Park) and then protecting himself still further by using his initials in the byline rather than his full name. The first piece is far and away the most vituperative. Before moving on to such topics as the fatalities from the current heat wave in New York (record numbers of people, fifteen hundred horses), the growing fad for bicycles, and the opening of a new department store, Crane kicks off the piece with a one-paragraph rant:
The wretched mismanagement which marked the police arrangements at the recent Bryan and Sewall notification at Madison Square Garden has occasioned a great deal of unfavorable comment, finding an echo in the columns of the daily press. The brutality and unnecessary harshness with which the large crowd was handled would have been inexcusable at any time, and on the evening in question it was simply shameful. Such blundering as was painfully in evidence on the night of the 12 inst. would not have been possible under the Byrnes regime [the former police superintendent, who had been dismissed by Roosevelt], and that fact is another reminder that what we have gained in official honesty through administrative reforms is more than counter-balanced by the effects of official incapacity and inexperience.
The article from the following week contains eight items, two of which take on other examples of police misconduct. After describing the spread of delicatessens in Manhattan to serve the growing need for “the hasty lunch,” Crane adds:
For some unexplained reason the reformed police administration, early in its career, singled out the harmless and petty traders as subjects whom they could annoy with impunity. An obnoxious sanction of blue laws regulating the time of opening and closing the shops was made the basis of a systematic police persecution, and violators were promptly hauled before a city magistrate, to be promptly discharged. The dealers are now strongly organized for protection, public opinion is with them, and they will probably have something to say on Election day.*
In the sixth item, he is at it again:
It is to be hoped that an example will be made of the policeman who arrested an unoffending and innocent woman on 6th avenue the other night. This is a form of outrage that has become very frequent of late, and the disgrace and exemplary punishment of some of the official brutes would have a beneficial effect in serving as a warning to over zealous policemen.
The innocent party in question was a prostitute named Ruby Young (a.k.a. Dora Wilkins and Dora Clark), and how odd, or prescient, or downright spooky that Crane should mention her in his column. He still hadn’t met her at that point, but this was the woman who would cross paths with him in the early morning hours of September sixteenth, triggering the controversy that led to the longest police trial in the city’s history, public humiliation for Crane, and his eventual departure from New York.
Finally, in the article from September ninth, he alludes to one of the most contested policies of Roosevelt’s administration: strict enforcement of the recently enacted Raines Law, which banned saloons from operating on Sunday. Almost all men with jobs worked six days a week, and by denying them the small pleasure of gathering with their friends for a casual drink on their one day off, the law was seen as an unwarranted punishment of the working class and generally despised throughout the city. Only hotels with ten or more rooms were allowed to sell liquor on Sunday now, but only to guests, and only if accompanied by sandwiches. To circumvent these restrictions, saloon keepers expanded their establishments by renting out back rooms and upstairs rooms in order to qualify as hotels. Because most of the “guests” were prostitutes, one of the unintended results of the Raines Law was to increase the number of brothels across the city.*
After returning to New York on September eleventh, Roosevelt organized a lunch with four of his male friends, and whether planned or not, each happened to represent one of his abiding interests: Crane (literature), Jacob Riis (tenement reform), Hamlin Garland (the West), and big-game hunter William Chanler (killing large animals). In his memoir from 1930, Roadside Meetings, Garland recalled that Roosevelt chatted comfortably with everyone but Crane, who scarcely said a word throughout the meal and sat there looking “like a man in trouble.” Could Roosevelt have known about the Port Jervis articles? Unlikely. But it could be that Crane thought he did, or at least suspected he did, which was enough to put him on edge. Several times in the war novel, Henry Fleming is so overcome by guilt that he fears his fellow soldiers can see that guilt written across his face. Was Crane in a similar kind of quandary with Roosevelt? Perhaps. If nothing else, he must have felt embarrassed to be sitting at the table with a man he had just attacked in print, the same man, as it happened, who was no doubt paying for his lunch.
W.R.H. The Tenderloin was given its name in 1876 by police captain Alexander “Clubber” Williams. Following his transfer to the Twenty-ninth Precinct, one of the most corrupt areas of the city, he is reported to have said: “I’ve been having chuck steak ever since I’ve been on the force, but now I’m going to have a bit of tenderloin.” Williams seized the opportunity he had been given, and over the next nineteen years he built a fortune that included a house and other properties in New York, a second house in Connecticut, real estate in Japan, and enough money collected from graft to invest the loot and turn several hundred thousand dollars into millions.
A midtown neighborhood with fluctuating borders over the years, the Tenderloin originally encompassed the east-west blocks between Fifth and Eighth Avenues and the north-south blocks between Twenty-third and Fifty-seventh Streets. By the time Crane began writing his pieces for Hearst, it had shrunk somewhat and now extended between Fourth and Seventh Avenues on one axis and between Twenty-third and Forty-second Streets on the other. But as Crane put it in one of his Journal sketches: “The Tenderloin is more than a place. It is an emotion.” Along the avenues of that emotion were the majority of theaters and hotels in the city, and down its darkened side streets nearly all the gambling houses, opium dens, and brothels—yet one more double world in which light rubbed shoulders with darkness and virtue pretended to ignore its fraternal bond with sin.*
Crane started his investigations for Hearst in the middle of September (around the same time as the awkward lunch with Roosevelt), but for some weeks before that he had been dropping in at the Jefferson Market Police Court to observe the arraignments, hearings, and trials of various Tenderloin figures brought before the bench, one of whom was probably Dora Clark, which would account for her mention in the Port Jervis article from August twenty-eighth. On the night of September fifteenth, he conducted a prearranged interview with two chorus girls who worked in the neighborhood. Whether they were legitimate theatrical performers or something else is not known, since in local jargon the term “chorus girl” also meant prostitute, and the names (and identities) of the two young women were never made public. The three-way conversation began at one of the area’s “Turkish smoking parlors,” a euphemism for low-end drug establishments where hashish (inexpensive, widely available, and not illegal) was regularly sampled by the customers, but sometime before midnight Crane and the two women left the smoking parlor on West Twenty-ninth Street, wandered over to the Broadway Garden, “a notorious hangout for prostitutes,” and went on talking for another two hours. Toward the end of those hours, Dora Clark, an acquaintance of one of the chorus girls, walked over to the table to say hello and was invited to sit down with them. Not long after, they all decided to go home. They left the Broadway Garden together, and while Crane accompanied one of the chorus girls to an uptown cable car, Dora Clark and her acquaintance waited for him on the corner of Broadway and Thirty-first Street. As Crane strolled back to them after putting the first chorus girl on the car, he saw that they were deep in conversation. Two men walked quickly past them, no doubt headed for home after a long night out, and when Crane was within a few feet of the corner, another man unexpectedly sprang from the shadows and grabbed hold of the women. They both began to scream. An instant later, Crane understood that the man, evidently a plainclothes cop, was in the act of arresting his companions for soliciting the two men who had just walked by.
That was the beginning of the sordid tangle known as the Dora Clark Affair, the prelude to the first act of a play in several acts that dragged on through the end of October and continued to hover around Crane for the rest of his life and even beyond. In his written account of that night and the following morning (published in the Journal as “Adventures of a Novelist” just four days later), it was “a plain tale of two chorus girls, a woman of the streets, and a reluctant laggard witness.” Crane fudges some of the preliminary details by reducing the smoking parlor and Broadway Garden to a single “resort on Broadway where the two chorus girls and the reluctant witness sat the entire evening” and disclaiming any prior knowledge of Clark, when in fact he had already written about one of her previous arrests, but those are small matters, even insignificant matters compared to Crane’s decision to stick out his neck and involve himself in Clark’s defense. He knew that standing up for her could cause serious damage to his reputation, and yet he went ahead and did it, in spite of how important that reputation was to him—as shown by his reluctance to speak out boldly against the police actions that had so infuriated him, planting his remarks in a busybody news column of metropolitan trivia published in a paper so far from the metropolis that his voice was bound to go unheard. This time was different, however, and therein lies the nub of the affair.
Ink portrait of Crane accompanying “Adventures of a Novelist,” New York Journal, September 20, 1896.
In Crane’s telling, after the policeman announced why he was arresting the two women, he, the reluctant witness, cried out: “What two men?” The men who had just passed by, said the cop, at which point the girls began to sob “hysterically” and try
to pull their arms away from the grip of the policeman. The chorus girl seemed nearly insane with fright and fury. Finally she screamed:
“Well, he’s my husband.” And with her finger she indicated the reluctant witness. The witness at once replied to the swift, questioning glance of the officer, “Yes, I am.”
If it was necessary to avow a marriage to save a girl who is not a prostitute from being arrested as a prostitute, it must be done, though the man suffer eternally. And then the officer forgot immediately—without a second’s hesitation, he forgot that a moment previously he had arrested this girl for soliciting, and so, dropping her arm, released her.
But he still had the other one, declared the cop (“as picturesque as a wolf”), and then the nonsensical conversation started up again in much the same spirit as before, with the reluctant witness asking why bother to arrest either one of them and the officer answering it was because of the two men she had solicited, but no, the reluctant witness replied, “she didn’t solicit those two men.” Rather than trouble himself by responding to that assertion, the cop changed the subject and asked Crane and the chorus girl if they knew “this woman.” Yes, the chorus girl answered, she’d seen her two or three times, but “the reluctant witness said at once that he knew nothing whatever of the girl.”
“Well,” said the officer, “she’s a common prostitute.”
There was a short silence then, but the reluctant witness presently said: “Are you arresting her as a common prostitute? She has been perfectly respectable since she has been with us. She hasn’t done anything wrong since she has been in our company.”
“I am arresting her for soliciting those two men,” answered the officer, “and if you people don’t want to get pinched, too, you had better not be seen with her.”
Then began a parade to the station house—the officer and his prisoner ahead and two simpletons following.
The officer, whose name was Charles Becker, told the desk sergeant at the station house that he had seen the arrested woman “come from the resort on Broadway alone” (not true) and that as she was approaching Broadway and Thirty-first Street, she solicited the two men (also not true), at which point (that is, only afterward) she ran into a man and a woman at the corner (Crane and the chorus girl) and started talking to them as they stood on the curb (again not true), all the while neglecting to say anything about his temporary arrest of the chorus girl. On the strength of this account, the desk sergeant had the prisoner removed to one of the cells at the rear of the building. As she was being led away, she “screamed out a request to appear in her behalf before the Magistrate.”
Meanwhile, as Becker told his untrue story, the chorus girl went on sobbing in “a paroxysm of terror,” and Crane was fully occupied in trying to calm her down and prevent her from “making an uproar.” After Dora Clark was locked up, the two of them left the station house, but once they were outside, the still-weeping girl shouted at him: “If you don’t go to court and speak for that girl you are no man!” Thrown back by her words, Crane stammered out in protest: “By George! I cannot … I can’t afford to do that sort of thing. I—I—-”
After seeing the girl home, however, he began to have second thoughts. The arrest was wrong, he said to himself, and even if the girl was a prostitute, she had not been arrested for prostitution but for solicitation. As Crane reflects:
“If I ever had a conviction in my life, I am convinced that she did not solicit those two men. Now, if these affairs occur from time to time, they must be witnessed occasionally by men of character. Do these reputable citizens interfere? No, they go home and thank God that they can still attend piously to their affairs.…
