“People are simply ignorant of conditions on the East Side [of New York City]. If those conditions existed in some other communities there would be a Vigilance Committee speedily organized, and somebody would get lynched. The continued greed and extortion of the Police Captains who charge five hundred dollars for a disorderly resort to open in their precinct, and then collect fifty to a hundred [dollars] per month, has, however, made even vice unprofitable. Details, I know, are revolting and not nice to read, but yet the people ought to know about them. Just yesterday I sentenced to six months in the penitentiary the keepers of one of the most depraved houses of the East Side. I firmly believe that they were merely the agents of the man who owns not one but many of such places. He is well known as a politician in a certain notorious district. “That house is but one of hundreds within a radius of one mile of this building [the Criminal Court House] where criminals are sometimes brought to justice. I will stake my reputation that there are scores within less than that distance from here in which there are an average of ten or twelve children from thirteen to eighteen years old.”[2] Nominated for District Attorney of New York County by the anti-Tammany forces, Mr. Jerome’s speeches on these existing conditions made a keen impression and excited the deepest feeling, especially among the people of the East Side. Intricate questions of taxation and arrays of figures proving an exorbitant budget and the waste of public funds could not make the same appeal to their indignation as the portrayal of conditions menacing their home life and polluting their environment. The facts thus spread forth caused the most intense resentment against Tammany. In reply Tammany Hall sought to represent that the traffic thus described was largely mythical--and that at all events it was greatly exaggerated. It was no fiction, however, nor was police connivance and corruption a fiction, either. So far as the open flaunting of vicious conditions was concerned, Tammany Hall had itself been forced to recognize them; as a concession to public opinion Mr. Croker had, in November, 1900, appointed an Anti-Vice Committee with orders to investigate vice conditions and “clean up” the “Red Light” district. To impart a tone of good faith to the work of this committee, he had appointed Lewis Nixon, a naval academy graduate and a ship builder, its chairman. It was generally understood that this committee had been created as a clever campaign move to offset in the public mind the growing indignation against Tammany, many of the leaders of which, it was notorious, had profited richly from the system of police “protection” of vice.