Hot Time in the Old Town

May 24, 2010
For 10 hellishly hot days in August 1896, the poorly ventilated tenement blocks of immigrant New York were transformed into massive ovens: horses dropped dead in the streets and nearly 1,300 people perished. That same week, William Jennings Bryan, a promising prairie populist from Nebraska and the Democratic Party's choice for president, launched his opposition to William McKinley and set out on a cross-country campaign tour, and a police commissioner named Theodore Roosevelt hosed down the streets, desperately trying to bring down the temperatures. Kohn (The Kindred People), professor of American studies and literature at Bilkent University in Turkey, splices these stories together, but the union feels forced, and any correlation of Bryan's downfall (a clumsy, momentum-killing speech at Madison Square Garden) with the heat wave is tenuous. "It is in the nature of heat waves to kill slowly," writes Kohn, "with no physical manifestation, no property damage, and no single catastrophic event that markets them as a disaster." He succeeds in bringing this little-known tragedy to light, but it is weakened rather than strengthened by the addition of an election narrative.