The Epic of New York City (73 page)

George Appo, the son of a white mother and a Chinese father, told the Lexow committee that the city had 10,000 opium dens. One was located on West Forty-Second Street near Seventh Avenue. High police officials divided New York into districts so that they could be sure of getting their take from the city's 1,000 policy slip establishments; each paid from $15 to $35 a month to operate. Bailing out prostitutes was a valuable Tammany concession, and the police often shared in the proceeds of robberies committed by whores.

Perhaps the most damning evidence turned up by the Lexow committee was the fact that police did not consider themselves servants of the people, but their masters. Insolent, arrogant, and vicious, they produced a reign of terror as cruel as that of Cossacks during Old World pogroms. A man who had been robbed was beaten up by the policemen to whom he turned for help. A clergyman was thrown out of a precinct house where he had protested about streetwalkers. Some cops threatened to arrest any woman they found alone on the streets at night unless she gave them money. One patrolman clubbed sixteen people, including a fifteen-year-old girl, whom he bashed in the mouth with his fist while she was strolling on Broadway with her father. The Lexow committee said:

As the probe continued, the police department was deluged with cops applying for retirement. Croker wasn't the only one who pleaded illness; a long line of politicians and high police officials also took to
“sickbeds.” After Police Commissioner John McClave had been asked why his appointments and promotions had been followed by big deposits in his bank account, his spirits wilted, he resigned, and his lawyer thought that he might go insane. For the first time in the history of New York a police captain was sent to jail; he admitted accepting a basketful of peaches and another of pears from a commission merchant during a jury trial. And Police Superintendent Thomas F. Byrnes, seated in the witness chair, needed nearly 4 hours to account for the $350,000 he had amassed in real estate and securities.

As a result of the Lexow investigation, about seventy indictments were lodged against police officers, among them two former commissioners, three inspectors, one former inspector, twenty captains, and two former captains. Some were convicted, but higher courts reversed many of these verdicts. Several men were restored to duty on the force. Although this disappointed reformers, they hailed the Reverend Dr. Charles Parkhurst for starting the exposé. It was suggested that an arch be erected in his honor in Madison Square Park, that his birthday be made a national holiday, and that New York be renamed Parkhurst.

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 old-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.