The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King

by The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King- A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt

  “Sissy,” Edith said, “hold on to your father—there are ruffians around.”

  “Mother,” Sissy said, “I can take care of us all.”

  She’d brought a candlestick in her coat pocket as proof of her wisdom and her worth. She could have been a creature born in the Badlands—my little lady outlaw. But I had all this venom to deal with. The auditorium seated four hundred, and it was packed with a thousand souls, many with a grievance against me. They stood in the aisles, some like acrobats on other men’s shoulders. They nuzzled into the armrests of certain chairs, occupied the window ledges. It really was a tinderbox, a fire hazard in derbies and petticoats.

  The chairman of the club, a loathsome little rascal named Ashbel Grief, quieted the assembly with a patrolman’s cylinder-shaped whistle. The sound racked my ears, but it did its own shrill work.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we have with us today a man who has always been knee-deep in controversy. Theodore Roosevelt, son of the late philanthropist and banker who did so much to help the disadvantaged, who was known as Brave Heart, and who built hospitals and lodging houses. There isn’t a newsboy among us, past or present, who doesn’t owe a debt of gratitude to Brave Heart. But Theodore Jr. is our Police Commissioner rather than a philanthropist. He comes to us from the Civil Service, where he slept for six years. But now we have him on our doorstep. And what a blunder it has been. He’s denied workingmen their Sunday ambrosia, banished some of our very best Irish captains to ‘Goatsville,’ all the way in the Bronx, and ripped the gold bars off the sleeves of others. He was a sheriff in the Badlands, some say, captured vicious men. But does Manhattan desire a cowboy king? Is he not our tin czar, as Mr. Pulitzer says, the man who dictates terms at Police Headquarters? . . . Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, please welcome Commissioner Roosevelt, the cowboy king.”

  I rose up from my chair, could glimpse the terror that Edie wanted so much to hide. She clasped my hand for a second, to comfort me in this assembly of knaves. The jeers resounded off my back. Baby Lee would have accompanied her father to the platform had I not signaled to her. The jeering didn’t stop. Spittle flew around me as I climbed onto the platform. That runt, Ashbel Grief, was gloating. We’d sat on committees together, had settled grievances between cigar makers and their tyrannical bosses.

  “Ash,” I whispered in his ear, “I’m grateful for the introduction, but you shouldn’t have riled this cowboy king. You’ll find yourself a master without his domain—tattooed with summonses from head to toe. You’ll have to vacate within a month.”

  Ashbel was still pleased with himself. The din grew to a disheartening roar. The female firebrands in the audience tossed knotted handkerchiefs filled with crumbling bits of masonry gathered from tenement rooftops. The handkerchiefs exploded near my head, and soon my scalp and shoulders were covered in a patina of gray powder. The roaring wouldn’t stop until Senator Platt finally twirled his cane in the air and shouted perhaps for the only time in his life.

  “Enough! You invited the man. Let him speak.”

  Senator Platt seemed to have some sway among the socialists and saloonkeepers.

  I stood there with that dust on my shoulders. “I am your sheriff. That’s a fact. I have rooted out some of the rotten policemen in my department. Others still thrive. I’m not an infallible judge. I have been appointed to uphold the law. That is my mandate. I have no other. If you want your Sunday pail of beer, start your own crusade. Shake the lapels of your Assemblymen until the Sunday laws are banished from the books.”

  “It’s not our Assemblymen who are at fault,” shouted one of the female firebrands. “It’s the lads from upstate with their own private gospel. You’re Albany’s tool, you are.”

  “Madam, I assure you. I am not in Albany’s pocket. Whether I have failed or not, I have tried to reform the police.”

  “Yeah,” shouted King Callahan, “we now have a bicycle squad with nautical caps and yellow stripes on their pantaloons. Sublime they are, and admirable, sir, in the way they can peek under a woman’s petticoats. They are no better than Peeping Toms on the prowl.”

  There was a roar of laughter from Callahan’s compatriots, laughter at my expense.

  “King,” I said, demanding an immediate intimacy with this lord of the saloonkeepers, “we must live in different towns. I have heard nothing but good reports about the flying squad. They have retrieved an ample number of women’s purses and men’s wallets. These lads have been making war on pickpockets. And they have broken up many a riot.”

  “So you say,” answered the King, with his hands on his hips. “But Mulberry Street is a disconnected fortress—deaf, dumb, and blind. The bicycle squad is worse than Clubber Williams with their billies.”

  Clubber Williams was a notorious deputy inspector who had beaten vagrants half to death in the cellars at Mulberry Street. I “encouraged” him to resign during my first month in office.

  “Well, now, King,” I said, “if there are clubbers among the flying squad, why don’t you report them?”

  “We are not informers,” shouted one of the King’s kin, “we are not rats, kind sir.”

  And again there was that cruel roar of laughter.

  “Mr. Roseyvelt,” said the King, “never mind those lads—they’re a trifle. We can deal with them and their fancy pants. It’s my saloon that concerns me. You deny workingmen their Sunday pail, and you call that criminal justice. But the gentle folks like yourself sip Sunday aperitifs at their own saloons, and not a single one of them has been touched. I call that gross negligence.”

  I was cautious now among the riffraff. “Mr. Callahan, I am not aware of such saloons.”

  Callahan put on his spectacles and read from a crumpled slip of paper. “I have their handles, sir. The Jolly Corner, the Vestibule, Hatters’ Alley, Ambassadors’ Lane. . . . Should I read on, Mr. Roseyvelt?”

  “But these are private clubs,” I said, and I began to feel that I was standing on a precipice rather than the speaker’s platform at the Social Reform Club.

  “Private clubs, indeed,” said Callahan, playing with that infinite charm to all his cousins and fellow saloonkeepers. “They are public enough to the polo crowd—we’re the ones who are turned away at the door, the common folks.”

  And King Callahan had his chorus of chanters. “Hatters’ Alley, Hatters’ Alley, Hatters’ Alley . . .”

  I had lost the duel, and I couldn’t regain any ground. We did not really protect the weak, and our laws existed at the workingman’s expense. It was Tammany that reigned, with Boss Platt on his own bit of turf, and I was like a window dresser at Stern’s. I had prettified the police. I was stuck on this platform, as the crowd bolted from their seats and surged toward me.

  . . . Hatters’ Alley, Hatters’ Alley, Hatters’ Alley!

  I was prepared to wrestle the whole lot, but I did not want my wife and daughter trampled by these hooligans.

  “Edie,” I cried in a falsetto that seemed to strangle my windpipe in moments of crisis. “Edie! Alice!”

  I was buffeted about. I looked for the feather on Edie’s hat, that white flash of egret. But all I found was Ashbel Grief, who could not have planned this mêlée. He was a socialist with a private inheritance, who lived among the swells on Washington Square.

  “Ash,” I muttered, “are you satisfied?”

  But there was little mirth in that little man’s eyes. He’d been looking for the occasion to humiliate me in public, and had brought the Badlands into his den—sheer disquietude.

  A brick glanced off the side of my head. I saw a swirl of colors, and then I could hear that familiar whistle of the flying squad. I wondered if Boss Platt had been far shrewder than I and had telephoned the bicycle boys before my dialogue with the saloonkeepers began. They worked in a kind of wonderment with their billies. It was a marvel to behold, the dexterity and the selection. They did not attack any of the female firebrands, just led them aside with the lightest touch. They went after the Tammany thugs who had
sandbags in their fists, hitting them with lightning speed. They appeared and disappeared in a whirl of nautical caps. They weren’t out to crush a man’s skull. They didn’t want the ambulance brigade. I caught the yellow stripes on their pantaloons, and the wide arc of their matador capes, as their billies struck the shoulders, backs, and thighs of assorted hooligans.

  “Stop,” I said, but no one listened once that dance of billy clubs began. There might have been one or two bloodied heads, almost by accident, in the backlash of a billy. I was able to walk among the casualties, had to step over a few. I found Edith all in a froth. My wife stood there wild-eyed and bewildered. “Theodore,” she whispered, when she noticed specks of blood on my forehead—the work of that brick. “You must lie down—we’ll locate an ambulance.”

  “Darling, I’m fit as a fiddler.” And that’s when I saw Baby Lee, who was having the time of her life with that candlestick of hers.

  “Father, isn’t this grand? I’ve been taking care of Mother as much as I could.”

  Boss Platt must have fled the auditorium. He wouldn’t have relished this fight.

  The lad in charge of the flying squad came up to me in his nautical cap. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or twenty-six.

  “Commissioner, the wagons will be here any minute. Should we arrest the whole crew, male and female?”

  “No arrests,” I had to tell him. “We don’t want to create an incident. Have one of our doctors attend to the wounded. And if anyone can’t walk, ride with him to Bellevue. What’s your name, son?”

  “Raddison, sir, Sergeant Raddison.”

  He looked as if he’d stepped from the moon with his broad shoulders and slim waist.

  “And who summoned you here?”

  “No one, sir. I read the newspaper articles. And I figured there would be trouble.”

  I put this adventurous sergeant in charge of the whole misadventure at the Social Reform Club and told him to right whatever had gone wrong. And then I saw the King sitting in his chair, abandoned by all his kinsmen who must have fallen afoul of the flying squad and lay groaning somewhere like scattered bits of debris.

  The King had a glassy look, but still recognized me.

  “I did not want this, Mr. Roseyvelt. I wanted a true debate. But the lads were overeager . . . and then the bicycle boys.”

  “They aren’t here at my pleasure,” I told him, and Callahan wagged his head.

  I put my arm around Edith and limped out of this unfortunate club with her and Baby Lee, glowing like a lioness after a magnificent escapade.

  CHAPTER 9

  POLICEMAN’S PARADISE, PART TWO

  1897

  SHE WAS PULITZER’S STAR, THE FIRST FEMALE ON HIS little fleet of crime reporters who was permitted a byline. Pulitzer himself had redeemed her, rescued her from a life of crime, taught her to write the terse copy he admired. Having gone undercover, she slipped into Blackwell’s Island, mingled with the lunatics, and exposed the island’s utter rot—the bribes, the barbarism, the sexual plunder. She was the only one on Pulitzer’s staff at the World who didn’t attack me outright, and it was a mystery until I read her byline and realized she was the same Nancy Fowler who had once been Manhattan’s most notorious bunco artist. Her previous intimacy with the underworld had given her an advantage over Pulitzer’s other star reporters. None of them could compete with Nan. And it wasn’t much of a miracle that she had her own distinct style—her “bite,” as crime reporters liked to say. With a little push from Pulitzer, Nan Fowler had developed a flair for the piquant.

  And while Pulitzer’s other crime reporters were relentless in their attack on my stewardship at Mulberry Street, Nan softened her bite marks. She asked to accompany me on one of my midnight rambles, and I knew she might roast me alive, but I took the risk.

  Her troubling height and pale blue eyes conjured up an image of my dead wife—I’d met Nan while Alice Lee was still alive. She had Alice’s winsome beauty, even if she was much older now and wrinkles had surfaced at the edge of her mouth.

  “I don’t intend to flatter you, Roosevelt. I’m here to learn.” And then she smiled. “But how could I forget the Cyclone Assemblyman? You knew that Long John McManus had hired me to rub your nose in the dirt, and you still walked right into his den.”

  “I couldn’t relinquish a damsel in distress.”

  Her eyes fluttered with a disturbing intelligence. “I was hardly a damsel. I was paid a handsome sum to lead you into a trap. But I had never met a man as willful as you. It destroyed my equilibrium and my notion of a rube. . . . I’m glad you agreed to this ramble.”

  Pulitzer had plucked her right out of the demimonde. But I wondered about Nan’s earlier incarnation as a banker’s wife with a brownstone and two tots, a boy and a girl. I was reluctant to meddle, but meddle I did. Here was a sad tale, more than sad, since her husband wouldn’t permit her to see her own children, who were still under his custody.

  “But you have Pulitzer on your side. He can shake the whole court system. And I’m not powerless.”

  Her face hardened, and she was the duchess I recalled from our first encounter in that maison close.

  “I abandoned them,” she said. “I left them in their cribs, with the little toys and the wallpaper I had picked out at Lord & Taylor. I walked away. I was a madwoman looking for a madwoman’s delights, and I created my own circus of hell. But we are not here to discuss my domestic situation, Roosevelt. It’s your probity I’m after, not mine.”

  She’d shunned the hydraulic elevator, recently installed, and climbed two flights to my office. I went into the armoire, pulled out a black sombrero and a red sash with tassels, and put them on. I must have amused her.

  “I never realized that Mulberry Street was near the Badlands.” And she let out a full-throated roar. “Commissioner, you look like a Dakota cowboy who got lost in a snowdrift.”

  I stared into her pale eyes, one bunco artist to another. “Well, isn’t that the whole point of a disguise? To create confusion and ample camouflage.”

  “Mr. Roseyvelt,” she mumbled, mimicking my own roundsmen, “you are a Manhattan miracle.”

  We marched down the stairs, almost like a bride and groom.

  The roundsmen and stragglers from the Detective Bureau ogled us both. “Evenin’, Miss Nan, evenin’, Commissioner Ted.”

  We walked east, into the darkness, the corner lamps a distant glow. But I wasn’t the Lighting Commissioner, at least not yet. I couldn’t control the eerie sense of danger that lurked after dark. Lower Manhattan had become a land of shadows. It wasn’t like the electric panorama along Fifth Avenue, with its constant carriage trade. Down here, we had thieves who masqueraded as roundsmen, and roundsmen who had their own little company of pickpockets. Policing was a “business” rather than a code of honor, rife with corruption and all the privileges of patronage. Corruption flourished, even under “the Reign of Terror,” as Democratic and Republican reporters dubbed my tactics. I’d barely made a dent. But I continued my midnight rambles, and I continued harrowing the other Commissioners. I had a dual purpose. As President of the Police Board, I also sat on the Board of Health. I could write summonses and shut down tenements that had turned into firetraps. The landlords feared me more than my own inspectors did. I was everywhere at once, as I went into the doss-houses and storefront distilleries with Nan, looking for coppers who were on the “coop,” snoring away amid the bedlam around them. We uncovered a dozen, and woke them out of their stupor. I gave each lad a summons to appear before my tribunal, while Nan scribbled her notes.

  The corner lamps were like a blind man’s beacon. The fire in the globes had turned a pale winter blue, as we went into more doss-houses and distilleries. Roundsmen arrived out of nowhere and saluted me. Suddenly Lower Manhattan was brimming with as many coppers as cockroaches.

  “Commissioner,” Nan said, “it’s a travesty. The roundsmen have rung the alarm. They know you’re out on a ramble. We have to try the right saloon if we wan
t to catch a copper.”

  I surveyed her under my pince-nez. Nan was right about the saloons. The ones with ties to Tammany never bothered to close. Roundsmen used these watering holes as their neighborhood nests, and completely forgot about errant patrolmen. So I decided on the most delinquent saloon in the district, the King’s Table, owned by King Callahan himself.

  He had the grandest emporium on Third Avenue, a prince of a place, with gold spittoons and hammered silver on the walls. His zinc bar, the pride of Callahan’s saloon, was shipped over from a Dublin hotel. His clientele was predominantly German and Irish, with some uptown natives who preferred the raucous fun and flights of peril that might erupt any moment at the King’s Table. King was an ox of a man. He’d been a deputy inspector who made his fortune on Mulberry Street and poured it into the saloon.

  I didn’t enter Callahan’s through the side door with Nan. I barreled into the front hall in my black sombrero. I’d been disingenuous with Pulitzer’s star reporter. I wasn’t wearing a disguise. I wanted Callahan’s lowlifes to recognize their pirate of a Police Commissioner. The six roundsmen who slept at the corner tables suddenly grew alert. A bully boy who must have been a recent recruit said, “King, should I dust this feller in the fancy hat?”

  “Hush, now,” said King Callahan. “It’s His Nibs.”

  “Then why is he bringing a chippie into a decent establishment, and him not using the ladies’ door? That’s a criminal act.”

  Callahan knocked the bully boy off his barstool. “Pardon, Commissioner Ted. This imbecile failed to notice that the ‘chippie’ belongs to Mr. Pulitzer, but I remember when she was a thief, remember her well.”

  “Stuff it, King,” Nan snarled, “or I’ll have His Nibs arrest the whole lot of you, with all your rotten deals under the table.”

  Callahan bowed to her. “Didn’t mean to offend Your Highness.” He was having a rip of a time with the one man who was out to ruin him. “I rang the night bell, Commissioner, but it takes a while to clear the King’s Table of every lout.”