At his first press conference, Roosevelt announced that henceforth appointments and promotions would be made on merit alone: “No political influence could save a man who deserved punishment and none could win an unworthy promotion.” The police force had heard such rhetoric before, but they soon began to realize the unique weight of Roosevelt’s pledge. Within three weeks of his swearing-in, he summoned Superintendent Byrnes and Inspector Williams to his office and forced them to resign. These stunning departures broadcast clearly that the reform police board “would spare no man” in its campaign to root out corruption.
Genuine reform, however, hinged upon the patrolmen on the beat. Riis suggested that Roosevelt accompany him on a series of unannounced inspections between midnight and sunrise to determine whether the officers on the beat were faithfully safeguarding their designated posts. Concealing his evening clothes beneath a long coat and donning a floppy hat to obscure his face, Roosevelt set out with Riis at 2 a.m. from the steps of the Union League Club. Over the next three to four hours, they would follow a route mapped out in advance by the veteran reporter to encompass a dozen police patrol areas. If he found an officer dutifully patrolling his beat, Roosevelt patted him on the back; but those whom he discovered sleeping or enjoying a meal at an all-night restaurant were summoned to appear before him as soon as the department opened that morning. One startled policeman was chatting with a prostitute when Roosevelt confronted him and asked him to account for himself. Not recognizing the commissioner of the New York City Police, the officer belligerently replied: “What’s that to you? Shall I fan him, Mame?” The woman nodded in agreement. “Sure, fan him to death.”
The police reporters all attended the morning roundup when the delinquent men appeared before the commissioner. “A sorrier-looking set of men never came to police headquarters,” Steffens reported in the Evening Post. The New York Sun provided details of the new commissioner’s midnight forays with the dramatic headline: “Roosevelt on Patrol: He Makes Night Hideous for Sleepy Policemen.” Under Bishop’s guidance, the editorial page praised the “patrolman hunt” as “the beginning of a new epoch.” Roosevelt continued his surprise inspections on subsequent nights with different companions, including Steffens, the celebrated reporter Richard Harding Davis, and the novelist Hamlin Garland.
These predawn missions attracted press attention across the country. “Police Commissioner Roosevelt finds that he can secure more information in one night,” observed the San Antonio Daily Light, “than he would in a year in broad daylight.” As tales of his unorthodox maneuvers spread, Roosevelt became an alluring subject for cartoonists, spawning caricatures of startled policemen cowering at the sight of an enormous set of teeth and round, metal-rimmed eyeglasses. “A pair of gold-mounted spectacles is a mark of authority more to be feared in police circles,” one reporter quipped, “than the biggest badge that ever glittered on a uniformed coat.” Roosevelt relished seeing his caricature. “Few men,” he remarked, “live to see their own hieroglyph.”
“These midnight rambles are great fun,” Roosevelt admitted to Bamie, “though each meant my going forty hours at a stretch without any sleep.” Riis and Steffens guided him through sections of the city he had never explored. “It is one thing to listen in perfunctory fashion to tales of overcrowded tenements,” Roosevelt conceded, “and it is quite another actually to see what that overcrowding means, some hot summer night, by even a single inspection during the hours of darkness.” Progress was slow, but with the attention Roosevelt helped focus on conditions in the most abject neighborhoods, the city eventually “tore down unfit tenements, forced the opening of parks and playgrounds.”
Conversations with Riis and Steffens convinced Roosevelt that the only way to pry out what Riis described as “the tap-root” of corruption in the police force was through strict enforcement of the law requiring that saloons be closed on Sundays. Passed by the state legislature nearly four decades earlier to satisfy rural constituents, the Sunday law had warped into a massive vehicle of police and political blackmail. In more than 10,000 saloons operating in the city, owners and managers understood that so long as they continued to make monthly payments to the police and politicians, they were free to flout the statute on the Lord’s Day, often the most lucrative day of the week. If they refused or fell out of favor with Tammany, they were promptly shut down and arrested for violating the law.
Roosevelt fully anticipated the political fallout of rigorously enforcing a law both unpopular and immensely lucrative. “The corrupt would never forgive him,” remarked Steffens, “and the great mass of the people would not understand.” For the workingmen of the city, the saloon was a place to drink with friends, play cards, and shoot pool on their only day off. Roosevelt sympathized with the statute’s critics, allowing that it “is altogether too strict.” Until the legislature changed the law, however, he was responsible for enforcing it fairly and squarely. Still, he deliberated long and hard before taking action. “Is there any other way,” he implored Steffens and Riis, “to do the work I was sent here to do?” Assured that no alternative existed, he resolutely targeted June 23, 1895, to commence a new policy of regulation that would harbor “no protected class.”
Each Sunday proved dryer than the one before. By the third Sunday in August, Roosevelt and Riis combed the city and discovered more than 95 percent of the saloons shut down. Those that took the risk of remaining open operated “to a most limited extent,” with no money changing hands for the privilege. “The tap-root” of corruption had been extracted. “The police force became an army of heroes,” Riis noted, at least “for a season.”
As expected, Roosevelt’s uncompromising enforcement policy drew forth violent resentment. “I have never been engaged in a more savage fight,” Roosevelt told Lodge. Vitriolic telegrams flooded his office: “You are the biggest fool that ever lived”; “What an ass you have made of yourself”; “You have wrecked the Republican Party.” Reports surfaced that a box containing dynamite had been sent to the commissioner’s office. Though it proved a hoax, “the next bomb,” warned the World, “will be deposited in the ballot-box in November and be loaded with popular indignation at his uncalled-for, unjust, discriminating, oppressive and superlatively foolish execution of the Sunday excise law.” Rumors circulated that both the Republican bosses and Mayor Strong were dissatisfied with the new commissioner. “Roosevelt is like a boy with his first pair of skates,” one prominent Republican boss lamented, “and the Republican Party is sure to be held responsible for what he does.”
“This was a fight after Roosevelt’s own heart,” remarked Joseph Bishop. When he received a mocking invitation to what promised to be a massive parade protesting his policy, the commissioner astounded the organizers by accepting. Along the parade route more than 150,000 cheering people were gathered, standing “in windows, on steps and poles and wagons, and even lampposts. . . . There were gilded floats, decorated and peopled in a manner most pleasing to the eye,” reported the World, “and long lines of men in shining uniforms and all the glitter and splendor of mounted paraders.” As more than 30,000 marchers paraded along Lexington Avenue, there was Roosevelt, the signal object of derision, smiling and waving for hours from the reviewing stand.
The commissioner “laughed louder than any one else” as the scathing banners and placards came into view: “Send the Police Czar to Russia”; “Rooseveltism is a farce and a humbug.” Sighting one banner emblazoned with the words: “Roosevelt’s Razzle Dazzle Reform Racket,” he asked the bearer if he could keep the banner as a souvenir. “Certainly,” replied the man. “That is the best yet,” Roosevelt chuckled, pointing to a wagon entitled “The Millionaire’s Club.” The float sported three gentlemen in frock coats and tall hats, with one bearing “a striking resemblance to Theodore Roosevelt.” The trio sipped champagne at a “private club,” while at the rear of the wagon a mock arrest of a beer-drinking laborer was staged. “That is really a good stroke,” Roosevelt burst forth with admiration.
Even the New York World, which had been “shrieking with rage” against Roosevelt, conceded that the crowd was delighted by his appearance: “It looked almost as if the whole affair were in his honor, and the long lines to whom he bowed, took off their hats in salute.” All along the way, marchers shouted, “Bully for Teddy!” and “Teddy, you’re a man!” His ability to turn the tables, to relish his protracted self-mockery in public, was compressed into the headline of a Chicago newspaper: “Cheered by Those Who Came to Jeer.”
Good feelings soon faded, however, when Roosevelt announced that, despite his thorough enjoyment of the festivities, “a hundred parades . . . would not make me change the position I have taken.” As the November 1895 elections approached, Roosevelt feared that his unpopular stance on the Sunday closing law might usher in a revival of Tammany. The Republican bosses “are on the verge of open war with me,” Roosevelt told Lodge, adding that Mayor Strong “has actually been endeavoring to make me let up on the saloon, and impliedly threatened to try to turn me out if I refused! It is needless to say that I told him I would not let up one particle; and would not resign either.” The city elections confirmed Roosevelt’s worst misgivings. The Tammany slate routed the Republican slate, and the Republican bosses placed the blame squarely on Roosevelt’s uncompromising policy. Rumblings from the state legislature in Albany suggested machinations afoot to sweep him out of his job.
Open dissension in the bipartisan police board multiplied Roosevelt’s woes. “Thinks he’s the whole board,” grumbled Democrat Andrew Parker. “He talks, talks, talks, all the time,” Parker complained to the Evening Post’s Joseph Bishop: “Scarcely a day passes that there is not something from him in the papers about what he is doing . . . and the public is getting tired of it. It injures our work.” In defense of his friend, Bishop replied, “Stop Roosevelt talking? Why you would kill him. He has to talk. The peculiarity about him is that he has what is essentially a boy’s mind. . . . I don’t know as he will ever outgrow it. But with it he has great qualities . . . inflexible honesty, absolute fearlessness and devotion to good government.” Parker “said nothing further,” Bishop recalled, “and we parted rather coldly.” Parker’s hostility toward Roosevelt eventually congealed into hatred, and the structure of the bipartisan board allowed him to paralyze Roosevelt’s further ambitions for reform. Not surprisingly, the newspapers delighted in the running feud, likening the battle between Roosevelt and Parker to “armed combat.”
During these trying days, Roosevelt’s growing family provided indispensable respite. “His wife and children gave him,” one friend observed, “a kind of spiritual bath that sent him back to the city refreshed and ready for what might come.” Roosevelt spent two or three nights in town at Bamie’s pied-à-terre on Madison Avenue, but during the rest of the week he commuted by bicycle and train from the loving home Edith had created at Sagamore Hill. Their five children, now ranging in age from eleven to two, inhabited a world far removed from the intrigue and animosity of his public career. “Their gay doings, their odd sayings,” one family friend, Hermann Hagedorn, remarked, “cleansed him of the smoke and the grime of the battle.”
When forty-year-old Bamie stunned the family by announcing her engagement and marriage to naval officer William S. Cowles, Theodore and Edith rented her Madison Avenue apartment for the winter months. While Edith preferred the domestic seclusion of Sagamore Hill, city life allowed her to provide the children with wider social and cultural opportunities, including lessons at Mr. Dodsworth’s, the dance school she had adored as a young girl.
Despite the restorative presence of his family, Roosevelt seemed “over-strained & over-wrought” to Lodge, who confided in Bamie that Theodore’s “wonderful spring and interest in all sorts of things is much lowered. He is not depressed but he is fearfully overworked & insists on writing history & doing all sorts of things he has no need to do. He has that morbid idée fixe that he cannot leave his work for a moment else the world should stop.”
The 1896 presidential contest between McKinley and Bryan provided a welcome outlet, allowing Roosevelt to leave behind his multitude of problems in the city, traveling through the state and country to stump for the Republican nominee. While he had passionately hoped that his friend Speaker Tom Reed would be the candidate, he campaigned vigorously for the Republican ticket. He retained serious reservations about McKinley, whom he considered to have “a chocolate éclair backbone,” but convinced himself that the Republican fight against the Democrats was crucial for the soul of America. If victory came to Bryan and the mob of populists and socialists “who want to strike down the well-to-do, and who have been inflamed against the rich,” the United States would face “years of social misery, not markedly different from that of any South American Republic.”
Beyond his overwrought dread of a Democratic triumph, Roosevelt also determined that lending his energetic voice to McKinley’s campaign represented his best hope for regaining the confidence of the Republican bosses. He spoke before huge audiences everywhere he went. “The halls were jammed,” he reported to Bamie, “people standing in masses in the aisles.” His adventures in New York, captured in stories, headlines, and cartoons across the nation, had made him a compelling, national figure. Roosevelt capitalized on this interest and his efforts did not go unrecognized. “He gave all of his time, all of his energy, and all of his towering ability to the work of the campaign,” recalled Republican National Committee member Albert B. Cummins.
McKinley’s victory resulted in Roosevelt’s appointment as assistant secretary of the Navy, providing a graceful exit from his mounting troubles as police commissioner. His departure left both Riis and Steffens downcast. Indeed, Jacob Riis considered the two years he spent with Roosevelt on Mulberry Street “the happiest by far” of his entire career. “Then was life really worth living,” he recalled, confessing that once Roosevelt departed, he “had no heart in it.” Beyond his personal despondency, Steffens for his part feared that “reform was beaten.” And in short order, “Tammany did come back.”
Still, the impact of Roosevelt’s vigorous tenure would not be forgotten. “The end of the reign of Mr. Roosevelt is not the end of Rooseveltism,” Steffens wrote in the Evening Post, predicting that his impress would exert “an active influence in the force for a generation at least, till the youngest ‘reform cop’ is retired.” Even after Roosevelt became a national hero during the Spanish-American War and was elected governor of New York, Steffens deemed his controversial reign as police commissioner “the proudest single achievement of his life,” insisting that no other challenge “called for so much courage, energy, labor or brain and will power.” Steffens would also leave Mulberry Street in short order to serve as editor of New York’s oldest newspaper, the Commercial Advertiser, yet the relationship established with Roosevelt would flourish in the years ahead.
Just as Roosevelt’s three years in the New York Assembly had taught him to work with colleagues far removed from his cloistered patrician background, so his two years as police commissioner in New York City had deepened and broadened his outlook on social and economic issues. Jacob Riis had introduced him to the realities of immigrant life in the slums, though Roosevelt found it hard to relinquish his conception of the poor as people who had “failed in life.” He had walked through ill-ventilated, dilapidated tenements where wealthy landlords used every legal device to evade regulation and responsibility. Observing this widespread failure to rectify conditions, Roosevelt recalled, “I became more set than ever in my distrust of those men, whether business men or lawyers, judges, legislators, or executive officers, who seek to make of the Constitution a fetish for the prevention of the work of social reform.”
The mentoring of Riis and Steffens and the intimate exposure to the hardships confronting the city’s poor had begun to work a marked change in Roosevelt, loosening the “steel chain” of conservative opposition to government intervention in the economic and social processes that had been his birthright.
Life on the circuit ideally suited a man of Taft’s gregarious temperament. Traveling to Cleveland, Toledo, Memphis, Nashville, Detroit, and Louisville, he quickly made friends in every city that comprised the Sixth District. Though he missed Nellie and the children when he was away from Cincinnati, he delighted in the camaraderie of the circuit. His daily letters home describe a continuous round of banquets and receptions hosted by leading members of the bar, as well as invitations to private clubs. “I have been in court every day from nine until five o’clock and I have been out every night to dine and have not tumbled into bed any night before twelve o’clock,” he wrote to Nellie from the Russell House in Detroit, concluding, “I have had no trouble with sleeping except for want of time.” In Memphis, he described a ball at the Tennessee Club, a meeting of the Shakespearean circle, and a banquet he attended. “The Bar here is said to be the finest in the circuit,” he told Nellie. “Certainly it is a most delightful body of men.” He was equally enchanted by three evenings at the palatial Lake Shore home of the Cleveland industrialist Mark Hanna. “They have eight bedrooms besides those required for his family,” he explained to his wife, “and he gives house parties lasting a week when he has twenty or twenty five guests at a time.”
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism Page 31