The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  Following the Parkhurst investigation and Lexow hearings, Tammany was defeated in the election of 1894. William L. Strong—a Republican, a dry goods merchant, and a banker—was elected mayor with a mandate to reform the police department. He began by making a clean sweep of the board of police commissioners.

  The new mayor remembered die name of Theodore Roosevelt, who, as a member of the state legislature in 1884, had conducted an earlier investigation of New York’s police practices. By this time the thirty-six-year-old Roosevelt was working in Washington, D.C., as a member of the Civil Service Commission. Mayor Strong now offered to make him president of a new city police board here. Roosevelt accepted for three reasons: He found his civil service work rather routine, he wanted to return to his native state and enhance his image as a Republican reformer, and he was intrigued by the thought of ruling the police force in the nation’s largest city.

  The three other police commissioners chosen by the mayor were Colonel Frederick D. Grant, son of former President Ulysses S. Grant, a Republican, kindhearted, but a bit weak; Andrew D. Parker, an anti-Tammany Democrat, strong-willed and handsome, a former assistant district attorney, and a brilliant lawyer; and Major Avery D. Andrews, a Democrat and a West Point graduate who had recently left the army to practice law. Thus, the bipartisan board consisted of two Republicans and two Democrats.

  Among the police reporters curious about these new appointees were brash young Lincoln Steffens of the Evening Post and his sensitive friend, Jacob A. Riis of the Evening Sun. Riis was a Danish immigrant, who had investigated slum conditions and then written a book called How the Other Half Lives. Roosevelt was so impressed by Riis’ book that he had made a point of becoming friendly with the reporter-author. Riis said of Roosevelt, “I loved him from the day I first saw him.”

  On May 6, 1895, when they were to take office, Roosevelt actually ran down Mulberry Street to Police Headquarters, while his three fellow appointees walked sedately behind him. Roosevelt yelled, “Hello, Jake!” to Riis and then bounded up the stairs, waving to all the reporters to follow him. In a second-floor office the retiring commissioners were waiting to be replaced. Roosevelt seized Riis, who introduced him to Steffens, and Roosevelt fired questions at the two reporters: “Where are our offices? Where is the boardroom? What do we do first?” The reporters led him to the boardroom, where the outgoing and incoming commissioners faced one another uneasily. The new commissioners were sworn in, Roosevelt shook hands vigorously all around, the old commissioners departed, and Roosevelt called a meeting of the new board.

  As was prearranged, Roosevelt was elected president. Although the tide gave him no more legal authority than that of his fellow commissioners, Roosevelt assumed from the start that he was superior to them. In his zest to begin the job of cleaning out the stables, he gave an impression of arrogance, which split the board from the outset. Grant and Andrews knew nothing about police work. Although Parker was somewhat familiar with conditions, he resented Roosevelt’s domineering attitude. Roosevelt’s own study of the city police department as an assemblyman had equipped him in part for his new post, but he wisely chose to pick the brains of two men closer to the situation—Riis and Steffens. They became his kitchen cabinet, which further alienated his colleagues. Parker snarled, “He thinks he’s the whole board!”

  Under orders from the mayor to clean up the police department, Roosevelt began by demanding that every patrolman in the city must enforce the law. When some failed to do so, he fired them. Although Roosevelt had been born in New York City, at 28 East Twentieth Street, he had ranched in the West and associated with cowboys. Whenever he wanted to summon Riis or Steffens, he would bang open the window of his second-floor office, lean out and give his famous cowboy yell “Hi, yi, yi!” Because of his fondness for cowboys, Roosevelt actually made a few of them mounted policemen.

  Equally fond of what he called “the Maccabee or fighting Jewish type,” Roosevelt urged strong young Jews to become cops. With an ironic chuckle, he once assigned forty Jewish policemen the job of protecting an anti-Semitic agitator.

  For the first time in the department’s history, Roosevelt named a woman as his secretary. The press hailed this appointment as “another illustration of the onward march of women.”

  Young Roosevelt’s unorthodoxy extended even to his wearing apparel. He often wore a pink shirt, and instead of a vest he wrapped around his waist a black silk sash, whose tasseled ends dangled to his knees. His colorful attire and behavior delighted reporters. Brisbane wrote in the World: “We have a real police commissioner. His teeth are big and white, his eyes are small and piercing, his voice is rasping. He makes our policemen feel as the little froggies did when the stork came to rule them. His heart is full of reform and a policeman in a full uniform, with helmet, revolver and nightclub, is no more to him than a plain, every day human being.”

  Roosevelt’s swollen ambition led Riis and Steffens to believe he was aiming for the White House. One day they bluntly asked him if he was working to become President of the United States. Roosevelt leaped up behind his desk, ran around it with clenched fists and bared teeth, and almost attacked Riis. “Don’t you dare ask me that!” he roared. “Don’t you put such ideas into my head! No friend of mine would ever say a thing like that, you—you—” Riis, who adored Roosevelt, was shocked, and his face showed it. Regaining control, Roosevelt lowered his voice and said to the two astonished reporters, “I must be wanting to be President. Every young man does. But I won’t let myself think of it. I must not because, if I do, I will begin to work for it, I’ll be careful, calculating, cautious in word and act, and so—I’ll beat myself. See?” The three men remained friends.

  Eager to observe everything himself, Roosevelt asked Riis to lead him on nighttime expeditions throughout the city. They would meet at 2 A.M. on the steps of the Union League Club and prowl about, hunting for delinquent cops. They saw policemen chatting in saloons, found one asleep in a butter tub on a sidewalk, and discovered others far distant from their assigned posts. One night Roosevelt surprised a beer-quaffing cop outside a saloon on West Forty-second Street, chased him fifty yards, collared the culprit, and brought him up on departmental charges the next day.

  No policeman knew at what hour of the day or night Roosevelt’s spectacles and teeth might come gleaming around a corner. As word of his nocturnal adventures spread from the police force to the citizens themselves, he was nicknamed Haroun al Roosevelt. A mischievous reporter disguised himself in a broad-brimmed hat and skulked throughout town, scaring people by chattering his teeth at them in the Roosevelt manner. Peddlers sold whisdtles shaped like “Teddy’s teeth.” Able to laugh at himself, Roosevelt said, when shown one of these novelties, that they were “very pretty.” Then he added, “All shortsighted men have some facial characteristics of which they are unconscious. I cannot be blamed for having good teeth, or this characteristic of a shortsighted man.”

  Unwisely, Roosevelt kept saying “I” and “my policy,” disregarding the feelings and advice of his three colleagues. Relations among the four men deteriorated so badly that Roosevelt found himself fighting, not only corruption, but attacks within the police board itself. In bitter exchanges the commissioners called one another names, such as faker and crook. Despite the schism, Roosevelt instituted so many reforms that he became a national figure. Newspapers across the country wrote laudatory articles about him. Even the London Times gave considerable space to the doings on Mulberry Street.

  Roosevelt formed a police bicycle squad. He gave the police a telephonic communications system. He ordered training for police recruits before they were assigned to duty. He insisted that all policemen be polite to the public. He based promotions on merit. He fired “Clubber” Williams. Aware of the way the wind was blowing, Police Superintendent Thomas F. Byrnes, who had confessed to the Lexow committee that he was worth $350,000, voluntarily resigned.

  In spite of these achievements, Roosevelt became as unpopular with the public, as with ol
d-line cops on the force. He made die mistake of demanding the enforcement of all laws—good or bad. When he ordered the arrest of every saloonkeeper who sold liquor on Sunday, an uproar followed. Workmen, who liked to slip into bars by rear doors for a friendly glass on Sunday, were outraged. The newspapers turned on Roosevelt. So did Mayor Strong.

  Other blue laws also gave Roosevelt trouble. Among these were ordinances prohibiting soda fountains, florists, delicatessen owners, bootblacks, and ice dealers from peddling their wares on Sunday. Roosevelt vacillated between enforcing the ancient statutes and insisting that he was not interested in them. He did let the police close soda parlors. He gave the lie to a story that orders had gone out against flower selling, but the New York Times reported the arrest of a peddler who had sold five cents’ worth of violets to a detective. Arrests of the petty offenders probably were the work of Tammany politicians, eager to get even with Roosevelt.

  Citizens complained, policemen grumbled, the police board quarrels became ever more acrimonious, and Teddy Roosevelt soon found himself perhaps the most unpopular man in town. His life was threatened. He was shadowed day and night. An attempt was even made to catch him in a compromising situation.

  Circus impresario P. T. Barnum had left a fortune of $4,100,000 and exactly $444,444.40 of this went to his nephew, Herbert Barnum Seeley. This blithe young man, who flitted about the fringes of New York society, decided to give a bachelor party for his brother, Clinton Burton Seeley, who was engaged to a society belle. Herbert invited 22 dashing young blades, some of them married men, to gather at 9 P.M. on December 19, 1896, in a private ballroom of Louis Sherry’s fashionable restaurant, on Fifth Avenue at Thirty-seventh Street. That night, after the shades were drawn, champagne corks popped, and the revelry began. Three scantily clad girls undulated through sensuous dances. One already was notorious. Serious scholars of the belly dance can’t agree whether she was an Algerian, named Ashea Wabe, or an Egyptian, named Fahreda Mahzar, but at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago she had performed the hootchy-kootchy under the pseudonym Little Egypt. At the Seeley party this little lady wore diamonds on her garters, and the men watching her soon wore diamonds in their eyes. Then, just as the party was getting interesting, in burst a police captain and 6 detectives.

  Curiously, no arrests were made. In his autobiography Jacob Riis suggested an explanation for this omission. He said that Roosevelt’s enemies within the police department raided the Seeley party in the belief that they would catch him there. The plot failed because Roosevelt did not attend the affair.

  The young president of the police board finally wearied of his thankless job. He negotiated for an appointment as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and in April, 1897, resigned his New York post to return to the nation’s capital. Although Roosevelt failed to rid die city of all corruption during his two years in office, he greatly improved the police department.

  * From The Making of an Insurgent, An Autobiography: 1882-1919 by Fiorello H. LaGuardia. Copyright, 1948, by J. B. Lippincott Company. Published by J. B. Lippincott Company.

  Chapter 35

  HEARST WAGES WAR

  WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST galloped onto the New York scene in 1895 like a one-man cavalry charge. For the next several decades his influence was felt not only in this city but also throughout the entire world.

  He was born in San Francisco, the only child of a doting mother and of George Hearst, a multimillionaire mineowner, rancher, and Democratic Senator from California. Young Hearst studied at Harvard until he was expelled for sending every faculty member a chamberpot with his picture pasted on the bottom. After working briefly for the New York World, Hearst talked his father into buying the San Francisco Examiner for him in 1887.

  Senator Hearst died in 1891 and left his widow $17,000,000. When Mrs. Hearst learned that her beloved son wanted to invade New York’s world of journalism, she sold her seven-sixteenths interest in the Anaconda Copper Mining Company to the Rothschilds of London for $7,500,000 and gave the sum to him. For the bargain price of $180,000, Hearst bought the Morning Journal on October 7, 1895. The Journal occupied part of the Tribune’s shabby little building at Park Row and Spruce Street. Hearst soon outfitted a magnificent office for himself on the second floor.

  Only thirty-two years old when he took up residence in New York, Hearst was slender and stood six feet two inches tall. He had a long face, icy-blue eyes pinched together above a pointed nose, and blond hair. He behaved in a lordly, yet courteous, manner, spoke in a high-pitched voice, shook hands limply, and teetered back and forth on his heels while talking. He never smoked or drank or told dirty stories or swore in public. In private, though, he sometimes flew into tantrums. A megalomaniac, Hearst craved to become President of the United States.

  Now that he owned the Journal and had more than $7,000,000 left to operate and promote it, Hearst began a vicious circulation war with Pulitzer’s World, the leading newspaper in New York. Because the World always championed the underdog, Hearst decided to scrape up his own issues. He soon learned that Cuban patriots sought to free Cuba from Spanish tyranny. For more than a quarter century New York had been a haven for Cuban exiles plotting the downfall of the Spanish government on their island home. By 1898 the center of revolutionary intrigue in New York was 66 Broadway in the office of Horatio Rubens, a New York lawyer who sympathized with the Cubans. To this junta headquarters Hearst sent Journal reporters, and before long the Journal office itself was being frequented by swarthy exiles. Their tales about Spanish atrocities were only partly true, but Hearst believed them. In the fight for Cuban independence he thought that he had found the issue which would enable him to win his battle with the World.

  With an audacity seldom matched in American history, Hearst assumed the role of spokesman for the United States. In a letter to a Cuban who called himself the president of the republic of Cuba, Hearst began by saying, “Sir: Will you kindly state through the New York Journal, acting for the people of the United States, the position of the Cuban Government on the offer of autonomy for the island by the Government of Spain? . . .” Even before William McKinley was inaugurated President of the United States on March 5, 1897, Hearst demanded that McKinley openly declare himself in favor of the independence of Cuba. When McKinley failed to do so at once, Hearst charged that he was “listening with eager ear to the threats of the big Business Interests. . . .” It was true that Wall Street did not want war with Spain because of American investments in Cuba. It was equally true that McKinley was influenced by business leaders, but the President hesitated because of his humanitarian impulses.

  In one of Hearst’s earliest signed editorials in the Journal he had announced that newspapers had the power to declare war. Seeking fame and eager to eclipse the World, Hearst now tried to plunge the United States into open conflict with Spain. Pulitzer hung back at first, but when he saw the Journal increase its circulation by whipping up a war spirit, he succumbed. Pulitzer actually said, “I rather like the idea of war—not a big one—but one that will arouse interest and give me a chance to gauge the reflex in our circulation figures.”

  With both papers trying to outdo one another as warmongers, their circulation figures shot to record-breaking heights. They published one extra after another, and when the Spanish-American War actually broke out, the Journal sometimes printed as many as forty editions a day. The Journal faked stories and photographs and sketches. Hearst sent illustrator Frederic Remington to Cuba to report the atrocities allegedly occurring there. Remington soon cabled Hearst: “Everything quiet. No trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return . . . Remington.” Hearst sent to Havana this memorable answer: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I will furnish the war . . . Hearst.” As the Journal and the World piled one sensation on another, Edwin L. Godkin, editor of the New York Evening Post, declared:

  Nothing so disgraceful as the behavior of these two newspapers has ever been known in the history of journalism. Gross misrepresentations of facts, deliberat
e invention of tales calculated to excite the public, and wanton recklessness in the construction of headlines which outdid even these inventions, have combined to make the issues of the most widely circulated newspapers firebrands scattered broadcast throughout the community.

  Under pressure of the Journal and World and the war hawks in Congress, President McKinley slowly began to abandon his position of neutrality. The Prime Minister of Spain said in bewilderment to an American correspondent, “The newspapers of your country seem to be more powerful than the government.”

  On the recommendation of America’s consul general in Cuba the 24-gun battleship Maine sailed into Havana harbor as a “friendly act the Journal boasted in a headline: “OUR FLAG IN HAVANA AT of courtesy” to Spain. After she anchored there on January 25, 1898, LAST.” At 9:40 on the sultry night of February 15 the Maine blew up, killing 260 of her complement of 350 officers and men. Among the dead were 22 American Negroes, whom the Spaniards called Smoked Yankees. To this very day no one knows the cause of the explosion, but Hearst, Pulitzer, and other American jingoists seized on the tragedy as a reason for going to war. “Remember the Maine” became the slogan of the hour, and anyone voicing doubt that the Spaniards had blown up the battleship was branded a traitor.

  President McKinley still hoped to preserve peace. For his fair-mindedness he was denounced by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt as having “no more backbone than a chocolate éclair.” Roosevelt was a leading warmonger. At a private Gridiron dinner in Washington, McKinley’s closest adviser, Mark Hanna, spoke out against war. Roosevelt retorted, “We will have this war for the freedom of Cuba, Senator Hanna, in spite of the timidity of commercial interests.” In the absence of his superior, the Secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt deployed warships so that they could take up what he considered the best offensive posture. In regard to the naval strength of the United States and Spain the ratio was about three to two in favor of the United States.