The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (97 page)
Read The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Online
Authors: Edmund Morris
TO LEMUEL ELY QUIGG
WASHINGTON, APRIL 3, 1895
LODGE WILL SEE YOU AND TELL YOU. I WILL ACCEPT SUBJECT TO HONORABLE CONDITIONS. KEEP THIS STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL
.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
94
T
HE APPOINTMENT WAS CONFIRMED
on 17 April, by which time Roosevelt was quite reconciled to leaving Washington. “I think it a good thing to be identified with my native city again.”
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Mayor Strong asked him to be ready to take office about the first of May. Roosevelt promptly sent his resignation to President Cleveland.
I have now been in office almost exactly six years, a little over two years of the time under yourself; and I leave with the greatest reluctance … During my term of office I have seen the classified service grow to more than double the size that it was six years ago … Year by year the law has been better executed, taking the service as a whole, and in spite of occasional exceptions in certain offices and bureaus. Since you yourself took office this time nearly six thousand positions have been put into the classified service … it has been a pleasure to serve on the Commission under you.
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“There goes the best politician in Washington,” Cleveland said, after bidding him farewell.
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All the abrasiveness of recent months melted away as Roosevelt joyfully contemplated his achievements in Washington and the challenge awaiting him in New York. He hated to leave the capital at a time when the trees were dense with blossom, and the slow Southern
girls—so different from their quick-stepping Northern sisters!—were strolling through the streets in their light summer dresses, to the sound of banjos down by the river. He was sorry to say good-bye to nice, peevish old Henry Adams, to “Spwing-Wice of the Bwitish Legation,”
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and Lodge and Reed and Hay and all “the pleasant gang” who breakfasted at 1603 H Street. He would miss the Smithsonian, to which he affectionately donated his pair of Minnesota skis, along with several specimens from the long-defunct Roosevelt Museum of Natural History.
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Most of all, perhaps, he would miss the Cosmos Club, the little old house on Madison Place where leaders of Washington’s scientific community liked to gather for polysyllabic discussions. Ever since Roosevelt’s first days as Civil Service Commissioner, when he astonished twenty Cosmos members by effortlessly sorting a pile of fossil-bones into skeletons, with running commentaries on the life habits of each animal, he had been a star attraction at the club.
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In later life Rudyard Kipling, looking back on these “spacious and friendly days” in Washington, would remember Roosevelt dropping by the Cosmos and pouring out “projects, discussions of men and politics, and criticisms of books” in a torrential stream, punctuated by bursts of humor. “I curled up in the seat opposite, and listened and wondered, until the universe seemed to be going round, and Theodore was the spinner.”
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The Biggest Man in New York
Bitter as home-brewed ale were his foaming passions
.
N
EW
Y
ORK’S
Police Headquarters at 300 Mulberry Street was a squat, square building with a marble facade long since yellowed by the fumes of Little Italy.
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Many a
stiletto
victim had been carried bleeding up its steep front steps, and countless
padrones
awaiting indictment had glared through its barred basement windows at a little group of reporters lounging on the stoop of No. 303, across the way.
The reporters, in turn, enjoyed one of the more entertaining vistas in Manhattan. Before them stretched a cobbled street, framed on both sides by tenement buildings, and looped around with strings of brilliant laundry. It was an arena always alive with drama, or at least the promise of drama. A sudden singing of the telegraph wires, which untidily connected Police Headquarters with every precinct in the city, might signify riots in Hell’s Kitchen, or a brothel-bust in the Tenderloin; sooner or later the latest victims of the law would be delivered in shiny patrol-wagons, and the press would dash across to meet them, pencils and pads at the ready.
Even when Mulberry Street was sunk in Monday-morning calm, as around ten o’clock on 6 May 1895,
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the stoop-sitters were loath
to quit their airy perch for the “newspaper offices” upstairs—actually just stifling cells of the kind that, elsewhere in the neighborhood, sheltered whole families. As long as the breeze did not blow uptown from the reeking slums of Mulberry Bend, a man could enjoy his cigar, play poker, and shout humorous insults at the cop on duty opposite. If the sun grew uncomfortably hot, he could send around the corner for iced oysters at a penny each, or stop a passing
aguajolo
for fresh lemonade.
“Many a
stiletto
victim had been carried bleeding up its steep front steps.”
Police Headquarters, Mulberry Street, New York City
. (
Illustration 19.1
)
Lincoln Steffens, the talented young correspondent of the
Evening Post
, was on the stoop that day when Jacob Riis of the
Evening Sun
came out into the street shouting a telephone message. Theodore Roosevelt had just been sworn in as Police Commissioner at City Hall, eighteen blocks south: he and his three colleagues were already on their way to headquarters to relieve the outgoing Commissioners.
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The news came as no surprise to Steffens. Riis was an old and worshipful friend of Roosevelt’s, and had been gloating over his appointment for weeks. It was the will of God that such a reformer should be chosen to purge the notoriously corrupt New York police. Neither did Riis doubt that his man would become president of the new Police Board. “I don’t care who the other Commissioners are. TR is enough.”
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About half-past ten an interestingly varied quartet walked around the corner. Leading the way was the bull-necked, bull-chested figure of Theodore Roosevelt. Behind him came a dumpy, middle-aged man bearing an uncanny resemblance to Ulysses S. Grant, and a military-looking youth, very tall and very pale, with a nervous vein beating in his temple. The fourth man seemed to walk somehow apart from the other Commissioners, although he was obviously their coequal—a handsome, lounging, bearded dandy of about thirty-five. Steffens identified them in turn as Frederick D. Grant (R), an upstate politician and eldest son of the great general; Avery D. Andrews (D), a graduate of West Point and a rather undistinguished lawyer; and Andrew D. Parker (D), also a lawyer, but one of the cleverest in the city, and a rumored agent of the County Democratic organization.
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Roosevelt broke into a run when he caught sight of Riis waiting outside No. 303. As Steffens remembered it,
He came on ahead down the street; he yelled, “Hello, Jake,” to Riis, and running up the stairs to the front door of Police Headquarters, he waved us reporters to follow. We did. With the police officials standing around watching, the new Board went up to the second story … TR seized Riis, who introduced me, and still running, he asked questions: “Where are our offices? Where is the Board Room? What do we do first?” Out of the half-heard answers he gathered the way to the Board Room, where the three old Commissioners waited, like three of the new Commissioners, stiff, formal and dignified. Not TR. He introduced himself, his colleagues, with handshakes, and called a meeting of the new Board … had himself elected President—this had been prearranged—and then adjourned to pull Riis and me with him into his office.
“Now, then, what’ll we do?”
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Avery Andrews, writing more than sixty years later, confirmed the accuracy of this account, with the small qualification that Roosevelt’s election had
not
been prearranged. “As the senior Commissioner in length of service, I called the meeting to order and nominated Roosevelt as President of the Board; after which I was elected Treasurer.”
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Thus some semblance of bipartisanship was preserved at the outset by distributing control of the Police Department between the two political parties.
“The public,” Roosevelt announced in his first presidential statement, “may rest assured that so far as I am concerned, there will be no politics in the department, and I know that I voice the sentiment of my colleagues in that respect. We are all activated by the desire to so regulate this department that it will earn the respect and confidence of the community.… All appointments and promotions will be made for merit only, and without regard to political or religious considerations.”
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A
LTHOUGH
R
OOSEVELT WAS
doubtless pleased to have been given pride of place among his colleagues, he found, within two days of taking office, that the honor was merely titular. On 8 May 1895, Mayor Strong approved an Albany bill which substantially
altered the power structure of the New York police.
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Far from elevating the president of the Board above the other Commissioners (as a certain Assemblyman named Roosevelt had suggested in 1884), the Bi-Partisan Police Act depressed him to virtually the same level. Since two Board members were necessarily Republicans, and the other two Democrats, agenda tending to divide the parties would inevitably cause deadlock. Roosevelt knew that these could be resolved only by deal-making or by wrangling. Neither solution appealed to him. The new law, he wrote sarcastically, “modeled the government of the police force somewhat on the lines of the Polish Parliament.”
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It virtually guaranteed that, contrary to what he had just announced, there was going to be plenty of politics-as-usual in the Police Department, from the Board on down. One of the Act’s provisions, frustrating to him as a former campaigner against partisan patronage, was to transfer authority over police examinations from the municipal civil-service commission to a special panel of police officers—each of whom, presumably, would be easily bought. The Act insisted, further, on equal two-party representation while extending the Police Board’s control of city elections. This in effect gave the Republican party—a perennial minority in New York municipal affairs—disproportionate clout in “supervising” voter behavior. At the same time, crazily, it seemed designed to thwart any majority decision by the Commissioners. “Lest we should get such a majority, it gave each member power to veto the actions of his colleagues in certain very important matters; and, lest we should do too much when we were unanimous, it provided that the Chief [of Police], our nominal subordinate, should have entirely independent action … and should be practically irremovable.”
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