The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  The seriousness of this gaffe—and Roosevelt’s real motive in ordering the saloons closed—became evident when Bourke arrived at the courthouse a couple of days later and found the chamber packed with professional politicians. A Congressman and State Senator stood ready to testify on Callahan’s behalf; senior police officials were conspicuously absent. Lincoln Steffens urgently sought out Roosevelt at Headquarters. “Pat Callahan is a sacred person in the underworld, a symbol,” he warned. Roosevelt must defend his rookie—even promote him, if the judge found Callahan guilty.88

  Roosevelt immediately left for the courthouse, but word of his coming preceded him, and Callahan’s defense collapsed. Patrolman Bourke was upheld; the witness waived examination and was remanded for trial on two charges of violation and assault. Overjoyed, Roosevelt pumped his rookie by the hand. “Bourke, you have done well. You have shown great gallantry … the Board is behind you.” He promised to make him a roundsman at the first opportunity.89 For weeks thereafter Roosevelt boasted about the downfall of King Callahan, with what one reporter described as “a castanet-like ecstasy of snapping teeth.”90

  IT SOON BECAME CLEAR that Roosevelt’s order to close the saloons had very little to do with temperance principles. It was the logical consequence of his mandate—as he saw it—to root out corruption in the police force.91 Ill-advised as such a crusade against “nineteen-twentieths of the people” might seem in retrospect, his basic reasoning was in the public interest.

  Of all the wellsprings of illicit funds in New York City, the corner saloon was the most copious, and the most profitable to all concerned. It profited the liquor sellers with $160,000 worth of “found money” every Sunday. It profited the police, who accepted bribes in order not to enforce the law against them. In particular, it profited Tammany Hall, not only with a percentage of the take, but with a rich harvest of votes upon request—for the saloon was the traditional political center of every neighborhood.92 A Tammany boss could, with a word to his precinct captain, force the Sunday closing of any establishment which failed to support him; arrests of this kind always increased dramatically in the weeks before Election Day. Sometimes, to make the situation more Byzantine, boss and saloonkeeper were one and the same person. Roosevelt never tired of pointing out that “nearly two-thirds of the political leaders of Tammany Hall have, at one time or another, been in the liquor business.”93

  In 1895 there were between twelve and fifteen thousand saloons in New York City, most of them occupying corner sites with elaborate displays of mahogany and engraved glass. In thirsty neighborhoods, such as Paddy’s Market and Germantown, the saloons often occupied all four sides of an intersection. This architectural phenomenon was directly related to the Sunday Excise Law. A corner site meant that even when the front door was locked on Saturday at midnight, there would be at least one open door down the side-street, ostensibly connected with the saloonkeeper’s living quarters. The flow of “friends” through this door on Sundays was prodigious. Policemen pretended not to notice the foam on the mustaches of departing guests, although they would conscientiously rattle the front lock and check that all shutters were drawn. Within, under flickering gaslights, business went on as usual.94

  ROOSEVELT WAS NOT the first authority to invoke the law that year. Ex-Chief Byrnes, for example, had arrested a record 334 saloonkeepers on one Sunday in January. But as Roosevelt pointed out, his victims had been chosen carefully: “The law … was enforced with corrupt discrimination.” Byrnes would never have permitted the booking of a King Callahan. Now “everybody was arrested alike, and I took especial pains to see … that the big men and the men with political influence were treated like every one else.”95

  As a result, 30 June was voted “the Dryest Sunday in Seven Years.”96 Ninety-seven percent of the city’s watering-holes were closed, slowing to a trickle the normal Sunday flow of three million glassfuls of beer. Roosevelt bluecoats seemed to be everywhere, waving aside bribes with loathing and writing out summonses at the slightest sign of resistance. Some enterprising saloonkeepers sought to evade the law by serving “meals” with their drinks, in the form of token sandwiches. These were placed on barroom tables, on the tacit understanding they were for display purposes only, and left to curl up at the edges while relays of patrons “washed them down” with liquor.97

  Roosevelt was sternly disapproving, and ordered his plainclothesmen to monitor all aging sandwiches in future. The legal ratio, he said, was one drink per sandwich, and they were meant to be consumed simultaneously. He congratulated an exhausted Chief Conlin on his success in closing so many saloons, and urged him to even greater efforts. “This must be kept up!”98

  The following Sunday, 7 July, was not quite so dry, due to a growing awareness of legal constraints placed upon the police. They were forbidden, for example, to search persons or premises without visible evidence of alcohol being drunk and bought. Consequently a strange epidemic of traveling-bags, grip-sacks, and market baskets was observed in the streets of Gotham. Many hundreds of them were carried out of a cigar-store that backed up against Pat Callahan’s saloon on Chatham Square. The police knew that a walled, awning-shaded garden connected the two establishments, but they were denied permission to enter. It was announced that the King was entertaining his “friends,” and no longer included cops in that category.

  In more sophisticated parts of town, coffee-vendors found that a heavy infusion of cognac in every cup greatly increased their sales, while at a German Biergarten on Lexington Avenue, requests for “lemon soda,” “plain soda,” and “cold tea” were met with Rhine wine, gin, and whiskey respectively.99

  Despite all these ingenious evasions, it soon became apparent that Roosevelt’s stranglehold on the saloons was beginning to hurt. The Wine, Beer, and Liquor Sellers’ Association, until recently the richest organization in New York, reported that one quarter of its members were facing bankruptcy for lack of Sunday sales; The New York Times estimated their average weekend loss as over $20,000 each.100 Economic shock-waves were felt all over the country. “In his eagerness to close the New York saloons,” remarked the Chicago Tribune, “Mr. Roosevelt has interfered with the hop-raisers of New York and Washington, with the corned-beef ranchers of the plains, the pigs’ feet producers of the West, and the barley-growers of the North. He is in a fair way to cost the American people millions.”101

  Anguished protests came in from Tammany politicians, most notably from ex-Governor David B. Hill, now a United States Senator. In an open letter widely seen as a keynote for the upcoming Democratic state campaign, Hill excoriated New York’s “busybody and notoriety-seeking Police Commissioners” for “arbitrary, harsh, and technical” enforcement of the Sunday Excise Law. “A glass of beer with a few crackers in a humble restaurant is just as much a poor man’s lunch on Sunday as is Mr. Roosevelt’s elaborate champagne dinner at the Union League Club.”102

  On 12 July a Democratic judge handed down the alarming decision that the law, interpreted literally, forbade the sale of all drinks on the Sabbath, including milk and lemonade. “ONLY WATER TO DRINK NOW,” mourned the Herald.103

  Roosevelt’s chance to reply came on 16 July when he faced a large meeting of German-Americans in the Good Government Club at 134 East 115th Street. His audience represented the second-biggest ethnic community in New York City. From Houston Street north to Yorkville, from Third Avenue east to the river, one might walk for miles and not see so much as an English shop-sign. Here lived some 760,000 industrious, beer-drinking burghers, mostly middle-class, sentimentally attached to the Old World, yet fiercely loyal to their adopted country. Economically and politically their votes counted for as much as, if not more than, those of Irish-Americans. Their reaction to Roosevelt’s speech—his first major statement as president of the reform Police Board—was therefore eagerly awaited as an indication of how things might go at the next municipal election. Reporters came from as far away as Chicago and Boston to hear it.104

  The evening began with a complai
nt, voiced in garbled, guttural English by City Coroner Hoeber, about the Police Board’s attitude to the “Continental Sunday.” Commissioner Parker (also on the platform) had said immigrants were “welcome” to obey American laws. “He has not got any business to velcome us! Ve are here by right!” Hoeber’s language grew so incoherent, as passion took him, that even his fellow Germans laughed; but Roosevelt listened with grave courtesy. Before giving his own prepared speech, he dispelled the specter of ethnic prejudice quickly and bluntly: “I care nothing for the birthplace of those whom I address … I speak as an American to fellow-Americans.” There was a scattering of shocked applause.105

  He was always at his best in situations of this kind. Something about united opposition stimulated his adrenaline and accelerated the natural rapidity of his mind. As he launched into the main body of his speech, beginning with a ferocious attack upon Senator Hill, he gave off a clean glow of health and strength. His skin stretched brown and taut around the muscular neck; his eyes shone clear blue through flashing pince-nez; he crouched slightly forward, as if posing for a spring. There was something canine about his eager alertness. A Chicago correspondent, searching for similes, tried “mastiff,” but then settled on “greyhound, crossed with a terrier.”106

  Senator Hill has done me the honor to take me as the antitype of his political methods and political views, and has singled me out for attack in connection with the Excise Law. Senator Hill’s complaint is that I honestly enforce the law which he and Tammany put on the statute books … [His] assault upon that honest enforcement is the admission, in the first place, that it never has been honestly enforced before, and, in the next place, that he never expected it to be … It is but natural that he and Tammany should grow wild with anger at the honest enforcement of the law, for it was a law which was intended to be the most potent weapon in keeping the saloons subservient allies to Tammany Hall.

  With a law such as this, enforced only against the poor or the honest man and violated with impunity by every rich scoundrel and every corrupt politician, the machine did indeed seem to have its yoke on the neck of the people.

  But we throw off that yoke, and no special pleading of Senator Hill can avail to make us put it on … Where justice is bought, where favor is the price of money or political influence, the rich man held his own and the poor man went to the wall. Now all are treated exactly alike.107

  With Commissioners Parker and Andrews nodding approval on either side of him, and applause mounting as his sincerity filled the room, Roosevelt argued that honest enforcement of an unpopular law was the most effective way to bring about its repeal. Legislators should think twice in future about passing laws to favor some voters, then neglecting them to please others. Abuse of the statute-book was a mockery of civilization. Inevitably it led to anarchy and violence. Using one of his typically brilliant, if far-fetched analogies, he compared the excise phenomenon with the lynchings phenomenon in the Deep South. In each case the tyranny of a small, powerful mob had brought about a perversion of the law; in each case the authorities accepted the perversion on the grounds that it represented “popular sentiment.” To those who advised him to pay heed to the latter, Roosevelt cried: “My answer is that I have to do with popular sentiment only as this sentiment is embodied in legislation.” Insisting that he was not against the Germans, nor the Catholics, but acting on behalf of all good Americans, he concluded emphatically: “It is the plain duty of a public officer to stand steadfastly for the honest enforcement of the law.”108

  It was a classic Roosevelt performance: aggression, vehemence, frankness, and authority, expressed in sentences a child could understand. The applause was long and respectful, and he sat down looking “exceedingly pleased” with himself.109 Commissioner Parker rose to make a few remarks of support, and the evening ended with three hearty Teutonic cheers for the reform Police Board. The Chicago correspondent went home to report that Theodore Roosevelt was “undeniably the biggest man in New York, if not the most interesting man in public life.”110

  AMONG OTHER SUPERLATIVES lavished on Roosevelt next morning was a telegram from the venerable Senator George F. Hoar, patriarch of the Republican party:

  YOUR SPEECH IS THE BEST SPEECH THAT HAS BEEN MADE ON THIS CONTINENT FOR THIRTY YEARS. I AM GLAD TO KNOW THAT THERE IS A MAN BEHIND IT WORTHY OF THE SPEECH.

  “That was pretty good of the old man, was it not?” Roosevelt exulted to Cabot Lodge. “I was really greatly flattered.”111

  In the same letter he acknowledged that his uncompromising attitude had sharply polarized the press. For a couple of months virtually every newspaper in the city had eulogized him—but now, almost overnight, “the World, Herald, Sun, Journal and Advertiser are shrieking with rage; and the [German-American] Staats-Zeitung is fairly epileptic.” He could still count on the support of the Tribune and Times, and also, to his ironic amusement, E. L. Godkin’s Evening Post. “However I don’t care a snap of my finger; my position is impregnable; I am going to fight whatever the opposition is.”112

  If the “yellow,” or working-man’s press was shrieking then, its clamor rose to levels of real bedlam in the weeks that followed, as the weather grew hotter and the Sunday spigots ran drier. The World and Herald devoted page after full page to “Teddy’s Folly,” caricaturing him as a Puritan Dutchman bent on driving innocent citizens out of New Amsterdam. With such active encouragement, about half a million citizens did indeed leave town on Sunday, 21 July, to slake their thirsts in the country pubs of Long Island and New Jersey.113 They raised their tankards and drank many a bitter toast to Roosevelt’s downfall, while Presbyterian ministers and temperance societies sang hymns to his praise.

  Controversy builds political stature, and Roosevelt saw no reason to be alarmed by the extremes of hostility and admiration his name seemed to arouse. Even the Commercial Advertiser saw that “the most despised and at the same time the best-loved man in the country” was destined for higher office. “Will he succeed Col. Strong as Mayor; or Levi P. Morton as Governor; or Grover Cleveland as President?”114

  INSPIRED BY a midnight prowl on 23 July, which found every policeman on the Lower East Side patrolling with clockwork efficiency, Roosevelt announced that the following Sunday, the sixth of his campaign, would be “the dryest New York has ever known.”115 His prophecy proved correct: one newspaper compared the metropolis to the Sahara. A few side-doors were open for privileged customers, but the masses were obliged to go thirsty. Chewing-gum boys reported record sales; bums on the Bowery went into delirium tremens for lack of alcohol; one elderly lady was seen crossing over to Long Island City with an empty beer bucket. Fashionable neighborhoods were deserted as all who could afford to left town for the day. Some well-to-do youths chartered a pleasure-boat, recruited a band and a bevy of girls in white muslin, and cruised off to Idlewild Grove, towing two bargefuls of iced ale.116

  Roosevelt, relaxing with his family at Oyster Bay, could not be reached for comment, but Commissioner Grant was in the city, and expressed doubt that the poor were really suffering. “Everybody would get on beautifully in hot weather,” he suggested, “if they would drink warm weak tea.”117

  At midnight a downtown saloonkeeper named Levy, who had studied the statute-book and found that the hour from 12:00 P.M. Sunday to 1:00 A.M. Monday was not covered by any law, flagrantly opened his doors. Word traveled fast, and for the next hour saloons all over town were brilliant with lights and festivity.118 “MR. ROOSEVELT IS BEATEN,” claimed the Sun next morning, but it was plain he was not. The very scrupulousness with which Levy had observed the letter of the law testified to the efficiency of the Police Department in executing it.

  As dry Sunday followed dry Sunday through the heat of August, public resentment of Roosevelt smoldered. The English poet John Masefield, then working as a pot-boy in a New York saloon, “often heard men wondering how soon he would be shot.”119 On 5 August a clerk at the post office tore open a suspicious-looking package addressed to Roosevelt, and was startled b
y “a puff of flame and smoke.” Miraculously, all that had exploded was a match-fuse on the wrapper: inside lay a live cartridge embedded in gunpowder.

  Roosevelt dismissed the letter-bomb as “a cheap thing,” and refused to look at it.120 The campaign went on.

  ROOSEVELT’S ASTONISHING national prestige, so at odds with his unpopularity in New York, continued to grow. “The whole country, it seemed, was talking about Theodore Roosevelt,” wrote Avery Andrews. “It liked what he was doing.” Word of his exploits spread even to London, where the Times described him as a “police Rhadamanthus” ruling Mulberry Street “with undisputed sway.” His three colleagues, especially the excellent Parker, were supporting him to a man, and Acting Chief Conlin, although nominally in independent control of the force, was content to obey his orders. Crimes were down, arrests up, corruption clearly on the wane;121 Roosevelt had every reason to congratulate himself, and did not hesitate to do so.

  Familiar signs of self-satisfaction appeared in his behavior. He began to talk in private as if he were on a platform, pausing after every sentence to watch its effect on the listener.122 His youthful love of flamboyant dress was revived in a summer outfit, the like of which had never been seen at Police Headquarters. It consisted of a straw English boater, a pink shirt, and a black silk cummerbund whose tasseled ends dangled down to his knees.123 “Bustling, jocose, and rubicund,” he would burst into Board meetings and impulsively sweep up piles of documents awaiting action. “These relate to civil service matters. With the Board’s permission I will decide them all.”124 The word “I” invaded his speeches to such an extent that the Herald took to reproducing it in bold type: the effect on a column of gray newsprint was of buckshot at close range.125