The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (99 page)
Read The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Online
Authors: Edmund Morris
The white glare of all this publicity inevitably focused much attention upon Roosevelt the man. A lead article in the
World
of 17 May shows with what clarity he stamped his image on the pages of the press. Although the article purported to describe a routine trial of police officers for infractions of discipline, it dwelt with fascinated relish upon the judge’s physical peculiarities, and survives as a documentary portrait of Theodore Roosevelt at thirty-six:
When he asks a question, Mr. Roosevelt shoots it at the poor trembling policeman as he would shoot a bullet at a coyote.… he shows a set of teeth calculated to unnerve the bravest of the Finest. His teeth are very white and almost as big as a colt’s teeth. They are broad teeth, they form a perfectly straight line. The lower teeth look like a row of dominoes. They do not lap over or under each other, as most teeth do, but come together evenly … They seem to say: “Tell the truth to your Commissioner, or he’ll bite your head off.”
Generally speaking, this interesting Commissioner’s face is red. He has lived a great deal out of doors, and that accounts for it. His hair is thick and short … Under his right ear he has a long scar. It is the opinion of all the policemen who have talked with him that he got that scar fighting an Indian out West. It is also their opinion that the Indian is dead.
But Mr. Roosevelt’s voice is the policeman’s hardest trial. It is an exasperating voice, a sharp voice, a rasping voice. It is a voice that comes from the tips of the teeth and seems to say in its tones, “What do you amount to, anyway?”
One thing our noble force may make up its mind to at once—it must do as Roosevelt says, for it is not likely that it will succeed in beating him.
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Jacob Riis, reporting another trial for the
Evening Sun
, noted how impossible it was for Roosevelt to yield conduct of the court to any of his colleagues. Within a quarter of an hour (although Andrews had the chair) he was putting all the questions and interrupting most of the answers. “Once or twice he turned to Commissioner Andrews and apologized … but by the time the third case ended there was no longer any apparent need to do that.”
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Andrews did not mind being upstaged, and Grant liked nothing so much as to sit and stare into space, but Parker, Roosevelt quickly sensed, needed careful handling. Fortunately the Democrat seemed to prefer working behind the scenes. Immaculate of trouser-leg, dark and glossy of beard, he would loll in his chair with fingers intertwined, smiling easily and often. He projected an air of fashionable languor, coming to work late, leaving early, not bothering to attend many board meetings; yet there was a certain “sinister efficiency”
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about the way he got things done that Roosevelt greatly admired. “Parker is my mainstay,” he wrote Lodge. “He is able and forceful, but a little inclined to be tricky. Andrews is good but timid, and ‘sticks in the bark.’ Grant is a good fellow, but dull and easily imposed on; he is our element of weakness.”
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Roosevelt found his new duties “absorbingly interesting,”
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and threw himself into them with animal vigor. His daily arrival at Mulberry Street became a ritual entertainment for the stoop-sitters of No. 303. About 8:30 he would come around the corner of Bleecker Street, walking with a springy tread, goggling his spectacles enthusiastically at everything around, about, and behind him. There was a rapid increase in pace as he drew near Police Headquarters, followed by a flying ascent of the front steps. Ahead of him in the lobby, a uniformed porter would step into the waiting elevator and reach for its controls; but by that time Roosevelt, feet blurring, was already halfway up the stairs. Arriving on the second floor with no perceptible rise or fall of his chest, he would scurry across the hallway into his office overlooking the street. Here, one morning, a reporter was on hand to note that “He swings the chair, sits down,
and takes off his glasses and his hat, all so quickly that he appears to be doing [everything] at once.”
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Replacing the glasses with pince-nez, Roosevelt would “fling his attention” at the first document in front of him. Read, digested, and acted upon, the item would be given to his “girl secretary”
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for filing, or, often as not, dispensed with in Rooseveltian fashion, i.e., crushed into a ball and hurled to the floor. By the end of the day the area around his desk was ankle-deep in paper jetsam.
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“I wonder he does not wear himself out,” sighed Commissioner Grant.
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On 13 May, Roosevelt admitted to Bamie (who was now on an extended stay in London, and had rented him her house at 689 Madison Avenue) that “I have never worked harder than in these last six days.” In subsequent letters he altered the clause to read, “the last two weeks,” and “the last four weeks.”
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Hard as it was to familiarize himself with every detail of police bureaucracy, there was the intense, additional frustration of finding himself without real administrative authority. “I have to deal with three colleagues, solve terribly difficult problems, and do my work under hampering laws,” he wrote, in one of his perennial cries for power. “… I have the most important and corrupt department in New York on my hands. I shall speedily assail some of the ablest, shrewdest men in this city, who will be fighting for their lives, and I know how hard the task ahead of me is. Yet, in spite of all the nervous strain and worry, I am glad I undertook it; for it is a man’s work.”
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Being congenitally unable to function unless he had some symbols of evil to attack, Roosevelt looked about him for an opponent. As usual he selected the biggest and nearest. “I think I shall move against Byrnes at once,” he told Lodge on 18 May. “I thoroughly distrust him, and cannot do any thorough work while he remains.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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S
HORTLY 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.
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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.
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Elsewhere Roosevelt discovered an officer
snoring on a butter-tub, and another “partly concealed,” as the
Tribune
discreetly put it, “by petticoats.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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He visited the station-house men’s room and emerged laughing: its graffiti included a sketch of himself prowling the streets.
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