The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  The Chief of Police was not afraid of righteous persecution. He had survived threats against himself, and against “the business,” as policemen were wont to call their profession, many times before. “It will break you,” he warned Roosevelt. “You will yield. You are but human.”50

  Yet, for a Colossus, he toppled with surprising ease. Nine days after Roosevelt’s declaration, Byrnes was out. The same law which had so recently elevated him to supreme command of the force, also permitted him to retire on full pension, along with any other officer who had served twenty-five years and wished to escape embarrassing questions from the reform Board. Threatened with public investigation, he handed in his resignation on 28 May, and strode heavily out of Police Headquarters. “Men stopped and stood to watch him go, silent, respectful, sad,” wrote Lincoln Steffens, “and the next day, the world went on as usual.”51

  A second symbolic departure in the last week of May was that of Inspector “Clubber” Williams. This notoriously brutal officer had earned his nickname cracking skulls on the Lower East Side, while also earning a fortune which he solemnly ascribed to real-estate speculation in Japan. Williams was the pet peeve of Steffens, who told Roosevelt he would love to see him fired. “Well, you will” was the answer.52

  A few days later [24 May] TR threw up his second-story window, leaned out, and yelled his famous cowboy call, “Hi yi yi.” He often summoned Riis and me thus. When we poked our heads out of my window across the street this time, he called me alone.

  “Not you, Jake. Steffens, come up here.”

  I hurried over to his office, and there in the hall stood Williams, who glared as usual at me with eyes that looked like clubs. I passed on in to TR, who bade me sit down on a certain chair in the back of the room. Then he summoned Williams and fired him; that is to say, he forced him to retire. It was done almost without words. Williams had been warned; the papers were all ready. He “signed there,” rose, turned and looked at me, and disappeared.53

  According to Commissioner Andrews, the resignations of Byrnes and Williams “shook the force from top to bottom.” Men in the ranks felt puzzled and insecure in the power vacuum that followed. They hesitated to accept Roosevelt’s authority until Acting Chief Peter Conlin, a quiet, colorless ex-inspector, revealed whose side he was on. In the meantime there could be no doubt that the president of the Board had scored a double personal triumph.

  Roosevelt boasted publicly that “the work of reforming the force was half done, because it was well begun.” The World agreed with him. “More than half the difficulty of police reform lay in the principle of corruption inherent in the old machine organization, and firmly established by years of toleration … the removal of [Byrnes and Williams] renders the further work of improvement comparatively easy.”54

  Roosevelt now turned his attention to questions of efficiency and discipline in the force. With shrewd flair for melodrama, he chose to begin his investigations at night.55

  SHORTLY AFTER 2:00 A.M. on 7 June 1895, a stocky, bespectacled figure emerged from the Union League Club and stood on the steps overlooking Fifth Avenue. Although the night was warm, he turned the collar of his evening coat up and pulled a soft hat low over his eyes. Presently a shaggy man in dark green glasses joined him, and the pair began walking eastward along Forty-second Street. Some suspicious club attendants, accompanied by a night watchman, followed them until satisfied that whatever mischief they planned was going to take place somewhere else.

  Turning down Third Avenue, Roosevelt and his companion, who was none other than Jacob Riis, walked south as far as Twenty-seventh Street without seeing a single policeman. Second Avenue was better patrolled, in that at least one officer was on the beat. But as the hours wore on, and the searchers continued to prowl around the East Side, it became apparent that New York’s Finest were also among its rarest. Roosevelt and Riis were standing outside an all-night restaurant when the owner came out, rapped the sidewalk with a stick, and gazed angrily up and down the deserted street. “Where in thunder does that copper sleep?” he asked, unaware that he was addressing the president of the Police Board.56

  Later Roosevelt swooped incognito upon a roundsman and two patrolmen conversing outside a corner liquor store. “Why don’t you two men patrol your posts?” The loiterers seemed inclined to respond violently until he introduced himself, whereupon they marched off in a hurry.57 Elsewhere Roosevelt discovered an officer snoring on a butter-tub, and another “partly concealed,” as the Tribune discreetly put it, “by petticoats.”58

  The result of this expedition was that the Commissioner had six names and numbers entered in his pocketbook by 7:15 A.M., when he returned to Mulberry Street to begin the next day’s work. A reporter noted that he looked “tired and worn” as he strode up the steps of Headquarters. Yet he was obviously in a good humor—so much so he could not bring himself to punish the offenders when they were brought before him at 9:30. However he announced afterward that “I certainly shall … deal severely with the next roundsman or patrolman I find guilty of any similar shortcomings.”59

  Newspaper coverage that afternoon and the following morning was everything he could have desired. “ROOSEVELT AS ROUNDSMAN” one headline declaimed. “Policemen Didn’t Dream the President of the Board Was Catching Them Napping,” read another. “He Makes the Night Hideous for Sleepy Patrolmen,” reported a third. Even more gratifying were fulsome editorials of praise, in other cities as well as New York. It was generally agreed that “a new epoch” had begun in the Police Department, and that Roosevelt, not Peter Conlin, was its real Chief.60 The Brooklyn Times rejoiced that wanton clubbing of New Yorkers would now decline; no cop would wish his nightstick “to collide with the head of the ubiquitous Theodore.” The Washington Star suggested that all members of the force should memorize Roosevelt’s features, so as to be prepared for trouble whenever teeth and spectacles came out of the darkness.61

  On his next “night patrol,” which took place in the small hours of 14 June, Roosevelt was accompanied by Commissioner Andrews and Richard Harding Davis, the roving correspondent of Harper’s Monthly.62 The three young men entered the Thirteenth precinct, on the Lower East Side, soon after midnight, and began a systematic search of its clammy caverns. This was distinctly ghetto territory: ill-lit, badly sanitized, the air around Union Market heavy with the smells of schmaltz and blood-soaked kosher salt. Roosevelt, who as president of the Police Board was also a member of the Board of Health, made a note to hasten the closing of the long-condemned slaughterhouse.63

  What policemen could be seen wandering through pale orbs of gaslight were all doing their duty conscientiously. “You are to be congratulated, sir,” said Roosevelt, materializing in front of a startled sergeant at 1:55 A.M., “this precinct is well patrolled.”64 He visited the station-house men’s room and emerged laughing: its graffiti included a sketch of himself prowling the streets.65

  Clearly the message was getting through to the ranks. The only delinquent discovered on the whole East Side that night was Patrolman William E. Rath, who forsook his beat for an oyster saloon on upper Third Avenue. Here, according to the Excise Herald, the following dialogue took place:

  ROOSEVELT RATH (entering) Why aren’t you on your post, officer? (deliberately swallowing oyster) What the——is it to you?

  COUNTER MAN You gotta good nerve, comin’ in here and interferin’ with an officer.

  ROOSEVELT I’m Commissioner Roosevelt.

  RATH (reaching for vinegar bottle) Yes, you are. You’re Grover Cleveland and Mayor Strong all in a bunch, you are. Move on now, or—

  COUNTER MAN (in a horrified whisper) Shut up, Bill, it’s His Nibs, sure, don’t you spot his glasses?

  ROOSEVELT (authoritatively) Go to your post at once.

  (EXIT patrolman, running)66

  At 3:00 A.M. the night-walkers retired to Mike Lyon’s all-night restaurant on the Bowery for steaks, salad, and beer. Little notice was taken of them at first, until an alert reporter identified the two Commis
sioners, and word spread quickly from table to table. Even the chef came out to stare. Roosevelt was obliged to hold an impromptu press conference before he could proceed with his steak.67

  Refreshed, he escorted his companions over to the West Side for a tour of the Fifteenth and Nineteenth precincts—the latter being the notorious Tenderloin district. Here things were much less satisfactory. No fewer than seven patrolmen were found to be off their posts, including three who had literally to be awakened to a sense of their duties. Roosevelt jotted down their names and numbers in his pocketbook, and, much later in the day, handed the list to Chief Conlin, saying, “This time there will be no mercy.” At the disciplinary hearing he himself appeared as complainant.68

  These and subsequent nocturnal jaunts delighted the citizens of New York, who for years had been starved of entertaining municipal news. No such eccentric behavior by a public official had ever been recorded. The somnambulant Commissioner was nicknamed Haroun-el-Roosevelt, after the caliph who liked to stalk unrecognized through Baghdad after dark. Cartoons were published of policemen trembling before drugstore displays of false teeth and spectacles.69 One enterprising peddler showed up on Mulberry Street with a sackload of celluloid dentures, each equipped with a toy whistle and wire tooth-grippers. “This is the way Roosey whistles!” the peddler cried, clipping on a set and hissing convincingly at passersby. The dentures sold as fast as he could fish them out of the bag, and Mulberry Street began to resound with shrilling noises.70 Whether “Roosey” heard the racket in his second-floor office is unknown, but a Captain Groo quickly emerged from headquarters and arrested the peddler for doing unlicensed business.71

  Roosevelt inspected the teeth later and allowed that they were “very pretty.”72 With his instinct for public relations, he must have known that the merchandising of one’s features, even those most regrettably prominent, is a sure sign of popular acceptance. He had won a wide reputation before, of course, but only in the sense that a few thousand editors, columnists, political observers, and sophisticated newspaper readers across the country knew who he was and what he stood for. But here, in his hand, was the first tactile proof that his “image” was working its way into the folk consciousness of America. These celluloid teeth grinned cheerful news, and he could not but delight in them.

  The exact number of midnight patrols Roosevelt took in the summer of 1895 is a mystery. Certainly there were others. But for some reason, after the first two or three, he discouraged the press from publicizing them. Avery Andrews mentions one expedition which Lincoln Steffens was allowed to attend on condition that he did not write about it.73 Possibly Roosevelt wished to keep the tactical advantage of surprise, knowing that a retinue of reporters would inevitably spread word of his coming and going around the precincts. In any case his daytime activities were by then so controversial as to preclude every inch of available column-space.

  Although the nights of vigilance wearied him (each involved going without sleep for about forty hours), he took great pride in them and saw many things that broadened his social understanding.74 Tramping along what must have been hundreds of miles of silent avenues lit only by corner lamps and the occasional flickering torch of an oyster-cart, he could sense, if not feel, the ache of homelessness and poverty. In alleys and courtyards to left and right, he could gaze through open windows at the hot intimacies of tenement life, and listen to the bedlam of alien conversation. Italian changed to Chinese, German to Yiddish, Russian to Polish as he moved from block to block, until it was a relief to hear even a few words of broken English. Sometimes he cast about for pearls of street wisdom, as when he asked an Italian fruit vendor what possible “monish” could be made selling his wares on a deserted street at dead of night. The vendor cheerfully agreed it was no way to prosper. “W’at I maka on de peanut I losa on de dam’ banan’.”75

  “These midnight rambles are great fun,” Roosevelt wrote. “My whole work brings me in contact with every class of people in New York … I get a glimpse of the real life of the swarming millions.”76

  As always when he was learning something new, he visibly swelled with pleasure and satisfaction. The waiters and patrons at Mike Lyon’s Bowery restaurant got used to seeing him drop in at two or three in the morning, tired and hungry yet wreathed in smiles. “It was ‘Hello Teddy,’ ‘How are you Roosevelt?’ all over the room,” one regular recalled many years later. “Beaming, buoyant, blithe … really happy he was in those days.”77

  ROOSEVELT’S HAPPINESS did not remain unalloyed for long. He very soon came up against “an ugly snag” in his efforts on behalf of municipal reform. This was the Sunday Excise Law, a thirty-eight-year-old statute which forbade the sale of intoxicating liquors by saloons on the Sabbath.78 The law had been reaffirmed in 1892 by a Democratic Legislature, as a gesture to New York State’s large but mainly rural temperance vote.79 In the city it was always honored more in the breach than the observance. Some New York mayors, including William Strong, had threatened total enforcement,80 but gave up in alarm when they felt the passions any such action aroused. Resistance came from all classes. Slum-dwelling workers were not to be denied their weekend refreshments, after six days and fifty-seven hours of grimy labor. To the large, prosperous German community, a stein of lager after Kirche was more than a pleasure: it was a folk ritual, hallowed by centuries of tradition in the Old World. As for the “dudes” and “swells,” quaffing champagne in the privacy of Fifth Avenue clubs, they could only sympathize with tenement kids scampering through the streets with buckets of ale for the family.

  Nevertheless the law existed; it was on the statute books, and Roosevelt, as New York City’s chief law enforcement official, sooner or later had to define his attitude toward it. He was not a prohibitionist—although he might well have been, given his own abstemious nature, and the frightful death of Elliott Roosevelt still fresh in his memory. As long ago as 1884, he had warned in the Assembly “that no more terrible curse could be inflicted on this community than the passage of a prohibitory law,” and by his deciding vote had killed just such a measure.81 His objection was practical rather than moral. “It is idle to hope for the enforcement of a law where nineteen-twentieths of the people do not believe in the justice of its provisions.” The Sunday Excise Act was only partially prohibitory, but he still considered it “altogether too strict.”82

  Yet suddenly, on 10 June 1895, the President of the Police Board called in his officers and instructed them to “rigidly enforce” the closing of all New York City’s saloons between midnight Saturday and midnight Sunday. “No matter if you think the law is a bad one; you must see that your men carry out your orders to the letter.”83

  Announcing his policy to the press, Roosevelt brushed aside suggestions that it was bound to fail and bound to make him personally unpopular:

  I do not deal with public sentiment. I deal with the law. How I might act as a legislator, or what kind of legislation I should advise, has no bearing on my conduct as an executive officer charged with administering the law … If it proves impossible to enforce it, it will only be after the experiment of breaking many a captain of the police …

  Moreover, when I get at it, I am going to see if we cannot break the license forthwith of any saloon-keeper who sells on Sunday … I shall not let up for one moment in my endeavor to make the police understand that no excuse will be permitted on their part when the law is not observed, and that Sunday by Sunday it is to be enforced more and more rigorously.

  This applies just as much to the biggest hotel as to the smallest grog-shop.84

  It was a declaration of war, harsh and uncompromising, expressed throughout in the first person singular—with the exception of one “we,” suggesting that at least a majority of Roosevelt’s Board backed him up. As a matter of fact, all four Commissioners believed that the law should be enforced. Roosevelt was particularly gratified by the public support of “my queer, strong able colleague Parker … far and away the most positive character with whom I have ever worked
on a Commission.”85

  Parker appeared to like him, and Roosevelt was by nature inclined to like everybody at first, so the two men got on excellently. They had many long discussions of the law at Headquarters, often continued over dinner in a nearby restaurant, and Roosevelt never doubted Parker’s sincere dedication to municipal reform. Yet something about the affable lawyer made him uneasy. “If he and I get at odds we shall have a battle royal.”86

  ALL HOPES THAT Roosevelt might have been indulging in excise rhetoric evaporated on Sunday, 23 June, when astonished saloonkeepers throughout the city found their premises being invaded and warrants served on them when they refused to close. Even the notorious “King” Callahan, an ex-Assemblyman with powerful political connections, was ordered by a rookie to lock up his establishment on Chatham Square. Callahan liked to boast that he had thrown his front door key into the East River the day he opened for business, and he assumed his visitor was joking. But the rookie, whose name was Bourke, decisively repeated the order; whereupon Callahan knocked him down. Patrons of the saloon joined in stomping the figure on the floor, but Bourke was a wiry youth, and rose to lay out all comers with his nightstick. The King was duly served with a summons to appear in Tombs Police Court.87