Heir to the Empire City

ALTHOUGH ROOSEVELT MISSED his chance to become mayor of New York City in 1894, he still aimed to return to his hometown prior to the national election of 1896. In the meantime, he was still trying to influence events in New York. So he arranged a meeting between the reform-minded Republican mayor-elect, William Strong, and his friend Jacob Riis. In 1890, Riis had published How the Other Half Lives, a book chronicling the terrible living conditions of the city’s working poor, complete with haunting pictures. “It is very important to the city to have a businessman’s mayor,” Roosevelt wrote Riis as he tried to set up the meeting. “But it is more important to have a workingman’s mayor.” This is a remarkable passage. Here was brown-stone-born, Harvard-educated Theodore Roosevelt expressing his belief in New York’s need for “a workingman’s mayor.” To Riis, Roosevelt wrote about the needs of the working poor living in tenements. These were the neighborhoods Roosevelt had visited briefly with Samuel Gompers in the early 1880s. True, Roosevelt was not advocating work programs for the unemployed, or even tenement reform, but only a better chance for respectability and usefulness. Roosevelt was more than a touch condescending. Still, voicing the need for something to be done for New York’s poor was a radical notion in 1894. Here was Roosevelt displaying an understanding of urban social problems, and his belief in government’s responsibility for addressing them. Henry George or William Jennings Bryan could not have said it any better.

In his letter to Riis, Roosevelt also indicated his high hopes for Strong’s term in office. Might it not be a good thing to be associated with a reform Republican administration back in New York? In fact, Strong did offer Roosevelt a place in his administration—as head of the Street Cleaning Commission. On the one hand, this was the very matter that had brought Roosevelt into politics nearly fifteen years before. On the other hand, had he accepted, the ambitious Roosevelt would have been responsible for hauling away the city’s garbage. When Roosevelt declined the offer, he worried that he was shutting an avenue of opportunity. He wrote Riis that he would have liked to have been Strong’s street cleaning commissioner, but that he was simply not familiar with the mechanics of hauling garbage and sweeping streets. Declining the position was a smart move, and in the end his decision was also good for New York. Strong next asked Colonel George Waring to fill the post, and Waring accepted. He brought to the job an unprecedented level of efficiency and professionalism.

Roosevelt was still uncertain when Strong then asked him to serve on the four-man police commission. Far from being chief of New York’s Finest, a police commissioner sat on an oversight committee meant to ensure that hiring and firing, promotion and discipline were all based on merit rather than political connections. In other words, it was a sort of civil service commission for New York’s police. Roosevelt had spent six years on the federal Civil Service Commission, so he worried that such a job would be a step backward for him. Could he turn down a second offer from Strong? If Roosevelt did not accept this job, what position could he possibly attain back in New York before 1896? Roosevelt was completely at a loss. He wrote to Lodge, “It is very puzzling!” Always the savvy politician, Lodge told his friend to accept the offer. Roosevelt became head of the commission, with the title “president.” After accepting, excitement overshadowed his previous hesitation. “I think it is a good thing to be definitely identified with my city once more,” Roosevelt wrote his sister Anna. “I would like to do my share in governing the city after our great victory; and so far as may be I would like once more to have my voice in political matters.” Here exactly were the twin reasons for taking the position of police commissioner: it allowed Roosevelt to return to New York—“my city”—and it allowed him to take an active role in city government and politics.

Such a move was key on the eve of the 1896 elections. If the midterm elections just past were an indication, 1896 was shaping up to be a Republican year. In the House, Republicans had gained 117 seats, while the Democrats had lost 113. It was the largest transfer of power between parties in American history. In twenty-four states in 1894, no Democrats were elected to national office. Added to this were the economic downturn, the split within the Democratic Party over bimetallism, and the fact that after his two terms, Cleveland would not be running again for president. The eventual Republican nominee would not have to face a Democratic incumbent and could assail a divided Democratic Party on the economy. As was often the case, a strong electoral showing for the Republican presidential ticket would trickle down to affect state and local elections. Roosevelt might just be the beneficiary of this in 1896.

As ever, Lodge understood the situation better than this friend did. He warned Roosevelt that, while doing his job as police commissioner, he should not lose sight of national party politics. Lodge had warned Roosevelt of essentially the same thing when the New Yorker was civil service commissioner, as Roosevelt’s reforming righteousness often tested the patience of Republican leaders. In attacking police corruption, Lodge warned, Roosevelt should be practical and avoid burning his bridges before 1896. “You need not have the slightest fear about my losing interest in National Politics,” Roosevelt reassured Lodge. “In a couple years or less I shall have finished the work here for which I am specially fitted, and in which I take a special interest.” He added, “I shall then be quite ready to take up a new job.” Roosevelt seemed to understand what Lodge undoubtedly knew perfectly: that preparing for the next step up the political ladder required a modicum of restraint and prudence on Roosevelt’s part. Events would quickly show that such qualities were beyond Roosevelt’s ability.

ROOSEVELT OWED HIS JOB in part to the efforts of Dr. Charles Parkhurst, president of the Society for the Prevention of Crime. Under Parkhurst, the society had aggressively targeted all manner of vice in New York City. The society hired private detectives who raided brothels and gambling dens, collecting evidence of police corruption. Under pressure from the press and public opinion, the New York State Senate had appointed a special committee to investigate the notoriously corrupt police department. Named after its chairman, Clarence Lexow, the Lexow Committee met in the Tweed Courthouse, itself the greatest symbol of Tammany corruption. The committee collected more than 10,000 pages of testimony that chronicled the alliance between the police and Tammany Hall in controlling elections and collecting protection money from illicit operations. In its January 1895 report, issued only months before Roosevelt took office as commissioner, the committee described the “brutal treatment of Republican voters” by police on Election Day, portraying cops as essentially “agents of Tammany Hall.” In shocking detail, the committee had heard endless stories of police brutality, especially against, as it recounted, “the poor, ignorant foreigner residing on the great east side of the city.” One story involved a Mrs. Urchittel, “a humble Russian Jewess, ignorant of our tongue, an honest and impoverished widow with three small children whom she was striving to support.” A precinct detective had falsely accused her of keeping a brothel in the back room of her store where her children slept. The detective demanded money, and when the woman could not pay, he secured false testimony from witnesses under his control—his “miserable tools,” the report said—and had her convicted. Her children were taken from her, and she had to sell her store to pay the resulting fine. When she was released from jail, she fell seriously ill. “When she recovered,” the report recounted, “her home was gone, her children were gone, and she was penniless.”

The record of police abuse and corruption seemed endless. Police purchased their appointments for the standard rate of $300, and one Captain Creedon confessed to paying $15,000 to secure his promotion. The police organized widespread protection rackets that netted tens of thousands of dollars. To open a new brothel, the brothel operator had to pay the police $500, while protection for existing brothels ran from $25 to $50 per month. The system had been perfected over the years. Police charged the proprietors of the brothels according to certain formulas, such as by the number of women working in them, or the number of rooms occupied. Individual prostitutes paid the local patrolmen a fee for permission to ply their trade along city highways. Operators of the approximately six hundred “policy shops” that controlled New York gambling each paid the police a fixed sum of $15 a month, and police made sure to protect the territory of each “policy king.” Not only criminals paid the police. “It has been abundantly proven,” concluded the committee,

that bootblacks, push-cart and fruit venders, as well as keepers of soda water stands, corner grocerymen, sailmakers, . . . boxmakers, provision dealers, wholesale drygoods merchants and builders . . . steamboat and steamship companies, who require police service on their docks, those who give public exhibitions, and in fact all persons, and all classes of persons whose business is subject to the observation of the police, or who may be reported as violating ordinances, or who may require the aid of police, all have to contribute in substantial sums to the vast amounts which flow into the station-houses.

In other words, at one time or another, just about every citizen of New York was subject to, or the victim of, police extortion. As many businesses listed payoffs to police as part of their cost of doing business, all New Yorkers paid a price for police corruption.

Police brutality was also common, yet only one dismissal in three years had been ordered “for the clubbing of a private citizen.” Even during the committee’s proceedings, witnesses were brought into the hall bruised and bloody from recent police beatings. “The eye of one man,” read the committee’s report, “punched out by a patrolman’s club, hung on his cheek.” The police themselves had become a special criminal class in New York, “a separate and highly privileged class, armed with the authority and the machinery for oppression and punishment, but practically free themselves from the operation of the criminal law.”

The chief of police had little executive power over his own department. Instead, the police commissioners, appointed by the party in power, were vested with vast authority, including “power of appointment, of promotion, of assignment, and of discipline, with respect to a force of 4,000 men.” Moreover, commissioners oversaw police equipment, station houses, and disbursement of $5 million of appropriations plus $600,000 in pensions annually. Commissioners also sat in judgment over police officers, with the number of police trials averaging 5,000 per year. Finally, police commissioners were charged with overseeing the inspection of elections—from certifying candidates for office to taking custody of the actual election returns. If commissioners so chose, they could “exert a potent influence” in favor of a particular candidate or political party. With Tammany usually in firm control of New York’s mayoralty, the Lexow Committee’s report was a damning indictment of the Democratic machine’s criminal alliance with the police. The committee recommended a separate civil service exam for police officers. It also recommended making the Board of Police Commissioners bipartisan. With the two parties equally represented, it was thought, politics would cease to control police commissioners’ actions. On this last point, Roosevelt was about to find out how wrong the Lexow Committee was.

UPON TAKING OFFICE in May 1895, Roosevelt began to clean house. He was able to force the chief of police and other corrupt officers to resign. With his friend Jacob Riis, a former police reporter, he began his famed midnight inspection tours, making sure police officers were on duty when and where they were supposed to be, rather than asleep, or spending time in brothels or saloons. Arguably, in tackling corruption among New York City’s 4,000 policemen and their countless allies in the criminal and political classes, Roosevelt faced a task more vast and complex than overseeing America’s federal civil service.

At the center of much of the corruption lay the weekly violation of the Sunday excise law, which prohibited alcohol sales on Sundays. This state law had been backed by the rural, upstate temperance vote and imposed on the city, where it was routinely ignored. Worse, it was selectively enforced. Payoffs to the police allowed a saloon to remain open on Sunday, yet police could choose to enforce closure of, say, a saloon that competed with one owned by a local political figure. Many saloonkeepers were also Tammany bosses, and their saloons often doubled as unofficial Tammany headquarters. Like his Assembly investigating committee of 1884, Roosevelt’s enforcement of the Sunday excise law not only served to attack vice and corruption, but also appeared to serve the interests of the Republican Party. Republican leaders would soon have reason to dispute this.

When Roosevelt took office in early 1895, between 12,000 and 15,000 saloons were operating in New York City. Within a few months, Roosevelt had been successful in closing 97 percent of them on Sundays, stopping the flow of some 3 million glasses of beer. As a result, by the summer of 1895, Roosevelt had become the most unpopular man in New York City. Inevitably, he was attacked by opposition politicians in the Democratic Party. But Roosevelt was also attacked by German Americans, who usually voted Republican. In the 1895 elections for state assembly, German Americans switched their votes to the Democrats, and Republican leaders blamed Roosevelt for their disastrous showing at the polls that year. Someone even sent Roosevelt a letter bomb that a postal clerk opened to find loaded only with sawdust. When a US senator from New York, Democrat David Hill, attacked Roosevelt for wasting police resources on this crusade rather than fighting crime, Roosevelt chose to reply to Hill by giving a speech to a German American audience. The Sunday excise law, Roosevelt said, was never meant to be honestly enforced. “It was meant to be used to blackmail and browbeat the saloon keepers who were not the slaves of Tammany Hall,” he declared to a hostile audience, “while the big Tammany Hall bosses who owned saloons were allowed to violate the law with impunity and to corrupt the police force at will.” Here was the clearest explanation for Roosevelt’s crusade against the saloons. It was not a temperance crusade against the evil of drink, nor an attempt to save drunken immigrants from themselves. Instead, by simply enforcing a statute already on the books, Roosevelt sought to break the powerful and corrupt alliance between Tammany Hall and New York’s police.

Always aware of the power of the press and public opinion, Roosevelt made a great effort to explain his actions and motivations to reporters. When at the beginning of his Sunday excise crusade the New York Sun had questioned why Roosevelt would act against public sentiment, Roosevelt had replied, “I do not deal with public sentiment. I deal with the law.” Roosevelt also pointed out that lax enforcement resulted in a system in which saloonkeepers bribed policemen or hid behind political influence. For Roosevelt, the problem was having a law “which is not strictly enforced, which certain people are allowed to violate with impunity for corrupt reasons, while other offenders who lack their political influence are mercilessly harassed.” He made a promise: “All our resources will be strained to prevent any such discrimination and to secure the equal punishment of all offenders.” Equal enforcement of the law, and equal treatment of all citizens by the government, were hallmarks of Roosevelt’s thought. They underlay many of his beliefs about good government, the evils of the spoils system, the benefits of basing civil service solely on merit, and, in New York, the need for police promotions based on meritorious service rather than political influence.

The year 1896 found a new addition to the anti-saloon crusade in the form of the Raines law, which made it illegal to serve free lunches as a way of drawing in midday drinkers, who usually ended up being the working poor. Hence the saying, “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” The law also allowed Sunday liquor-selling in hotels only. This provision resulted in every saloonkeeper renting out the upstairs rooms in the tenement or building that his saloon occupied. By the summer of 1896, such new “Raines Law Hotels” were springing up daily, and they were widely seen as seedy and unwelcome. Renting out the rooms above saloons struck many as a throwback to the days when prostitutes plied their trade only a stairway’s climb from the saloon floor. Others saw the rooms as encouraging gambling and other liquor-related vices. In an August 6 editorial, the New York Times complained that in one precinct where there had been only two hotels before passage of the Raines law, there now existed fifty-one “hotels” that sold liquor on Sundays, “and [at] all hours of the night with impunity and with a noticeable increase of drunkenness and disorder.” The New York Evening Post complained of the “Raines law humbug.”

The political backlash to his saloon-closing crusade and the Raines law were blows to Roosevelt. With the best of intentions, he had enforced an incredibly unpopular law. As a result, he had been attacked by both Republican and Democratic politicians, by German Americans, and by the press. In a recent development, tailors on the Lower East Side had gone on strike, and this had resulted in frequent, violent clashes between them and the contractors who were trying to keep their shops open with scab labor. Some in New York now blamed Roosevelt for this violence, saying that all the police were tied up in the anti-liquor crusade rather than maintaining law and order. In the end, the Sunday saloon-closing effort was largely a failure and meant the end of any future career in New York City politics for Roosevelt.

In this defeat, however, were sown the seeds of future political victory and his role as a Progressive Era reformer. After the 1895 Republican losses of city Assembly seats—losses that party leaders had blamed on him—Roosevelt had written to Lodge saying that party leaders were distancing themselves from him. They had not even allowed him to campaign and make speeches for Republican candidates. In his reply, Lodge advised Roosevelt: “You are making a great place and reputation for yourself which will lead surely to even better things. Remember too that apart from the great principle of enforcing all laws there is a very large and powerful body of Republicans in the State who will stand by you and behind you because you are enforcing that particular law.” In other words, Roosevelt might be losing support in the city, but he was gaining support statewide, perhaps for the next political office. Lodge even talked about Roosevelt’s path soon leading to a seat next to his in the United States Senate. Lodge was close to being correct. Within only two years of his anti-saloon crusade, Roosevelt would indeed be elected to statewide office, not as senator, as Lodge had speculated, but as governor of New York.

But at the moment, upper-class, brownstone-born Roosevelt was clearly oblivious to the role saloons played in New York City working-class culture. Saloons were not just places to get a beer, but also alternative communal spaces for men, often organized around ethnicity or occupation. Saloons provided the workingman many free things, not just a free lunch. They also provided newspapers, check-cashing services, and job information. At a time when laborers worked six days a week, enforcing the Sunday excise law deprived workers of the community and comfort provided by saloons. If Irish and German immigrants could not partake of a beer on Sunday, what other day could they head down to their local saloon? This was the irony of Roosevelt’s battle to close saloons on Sunday: while it was meant to help the “humbler class” throw off Tammany’s yoke, it also punished the very people Roosevelt thought he was aiding. These working-class immigrants, crowded into Lower East Side tenements, were exactly the same people he would seek to help once more during one of the worst natural disasters in New York history.

THE KILLER HEAT WAVE of 1896 began on August 4, with an official high temperature in the city of 87 degrees and 90 percent humidity. The combination was deadly. Before it was over, the heat wave would claim 1,300 lives, mostly immigrant laborers living in tenements. New Yorkers literally worked themselves to death. Across the river in Brooklyn, Mayor Seth Low opened that city’s parks to citizens at night so they could sleep outdoors. Such a simple move allowed thousands in Brooklyn to catch at least a breath of fresh air and some rest before returning to work the next day. In New York City, with the ban on sleeping in the parks still in effect, people slept on rooftops, on fire escapes, at the piers, and even on the streets. A place on top of a garbage bin was highly prized, as it allowed the sleeper to rise above the searing, stinking asphalt. Rooftop sleeping just added to the tragedy, as some people fell to their deaths. Others fell asleep on piers, rolled into the river, and drowned.

Death certificates from the ten-day heat wave chronicled the unfolding tragedy. The first victim may have been fifteen-month-old Hyman Goldman, newly arrived in the city with his family. For three weeks a doctor had been seeing little Hyman for “cholera infantium”—a common diarrhea suffered by children during summer months that led to dehydration, and frequently death. By the time the heat wave settled over the Goldman family’s tenement at 55 Broome Street, the toddler had already been severely weakened. His doctor wrote a one-word cause of death: “Exhaustion.” The heat wave took a terrible toll on the city’s very young, as indicated by the batch of death certificates filed by doctors at the New York Foundling Hospital. The hospital had been established to care for abandoned babies and to address the nineteenth-century practice of infanticide of unwanted children. The heat wave felled the little babies one after another. But in addition to the very young, the elderly were at great risk during the heat wave. Katherine Brennan was a sixty-six-year-old widow originally from Ireland who lived in a tenement. Her death certificate said she died of “Weakness of old age” exacerbated by “hot weather.” Sometimes, the heat caused death indirectly. One baby died after his mother went into labor prematurely. Often a doctor would measure the victim’s body temperature at the time of death. Readings of 111 degrees were common.

During the heat wave, horses died by the hundreds, and their carcasses were left to fester on the city’s streets. Often, days would go by before a dead horse could be removed, and, all the while, it baked in the sun and began to emit a horrible smell, causing great discomfort for those nearby. “The heated term was the worst and most fatal we have ever known,” Roosevelt wrote his sister Anna. “The death-rate trebled until it approached the ratio of a cholera epidemic; the horses died by the hundred, so that it was impossible to remove their carcasses, and they added a genuine flavor of pestilence.” A New York Herald reporter noted a dead horse on every city block, and many businesses had to close because the stench kept away customers. The managers of the Anchor Steam Brewing Company sent Mayor Strong a letter of complaint about the dead horses, asserting that “in no small town or City . . . would a dead animal be allowed to decompose for four days as occurred under our office window last week, notwithstanding the fact that it was three times reported to the ‘Board of Health.’”

Roosevelt’s position as president of the Board of Police Commissioners also gave him a place on the Board of Health. He recalled one storekeeper who wrote continually to the board, asking for a dead horse in front of his store to be removed. The smell was deterring customers. The board finally sent a cart to remove the horse, but it was a large wagon already stacked with the carcasses of eleven other dead horses. When the cart stopped in front of the man’s store, it broke down. Now the storekeeper wrote back to the Board of Health, asking it, as Roosevelt remembered, to “remove either the horses, or his shop, he didn’t care which.”

It was probably complaints like that one from Anchor Steam Brewing that prompted Mayor Strong on August 13 to call an emergency meeting of department heads. Up until then, the city had made no concerted effort to relieve the plight of New Yorkers during the heat wave. If he had been mayor, would Roosevelt have done anything differently? With his comment to Jacob Riis that New York needed “a workingman’s mayor,” and his decision to target saloons as a way to lift Tammany’s yoke from the neck of the workingman, it seems likely he would have. At the very least, Mayor Roosevelt might have begun to coordinate the efforts to remove dead horses much earlier. He might have cooled down the streets by having them “flushed” with hoses; kept the “floating baths,” constructed with pontoons in the rivers, open longer; and changed the work hours for city employees. All of these remedies had been undertaken individually by department heads without orders from the mayor’s office. Roosevelt might have also ordered the city parks to be thrown open at night. As police commissioner, he had already ordered that police wagons be pressed into service as ambulances to carry the prostrated to hospitals. One order Roosevelt did not issue, however, was any modification to the police dress code of heavy blue wool. As first responders during the heat wave, many policemen suffered heat exhaustion; hundreds were hospitalized, and six died. Roosevelt did press his police department into service to aid the stricken poor in the tenement districts, where the heat wave hit hardest. The police commissioner suggested a scheme for the city to distribute free ice through the police station houses.

Before electric refrigeration, people used “ice boxes”: wooden boxes lined by tin or zinc, and requiring the purchase of a large block of ice. In every major American city, ice vendors were some of the largest businesses. In New York, an ice magnate named Charles Morse controlled most of the ice distribution. The resulting trust—a group of firms that combined to reduce competition and raise prices—kept prices high and ice out of reach of the city’s poor. In a heat wave like that of August 1896, this practice had deadly consequences. Private charities responded by raising money for ice giveaways, but never before in the city’s history had the government distributed free ice to the poor. On August 13, Roosevelt instructed his policemen to inform local residents of the ice giveaway scheduled for later that evening. Everyone was shocked at the massive turnout. Hours before the ice even arrived in precinct houses, hundreds of men, women, and children crowded around the police stations clamoring for free ice. “It was to them better than bread to the starving,” the New York Journal reported. “Mothers with sickly babes in their arms jostled with weary men, while children begged for a piece of ice to take home to the sick room.” The Times estimated that 20,000 people were served ice that first night, yet that was only a tiny fraction of the residents of one of the most densely packed tenement districts. Roosevelt recommended the giveaway be doubled the following evening. Seeing that some better-off residents received free ice at the expense of some of the poorest, Roosevelt devised a system whereby police gave tickets to the poorest families along their beats. Moreover, he personally explored the darkest back alleys of the tenement districts to see how families used the ice. He observed firsthand fathers chipping off pieces of ice for children to suck, and a mother wrapping ice in a handkerchief to tie around the forehead of an ailing infant in her arms. Few New Yorkers of Roosevelt’s class had ever had such intimate contact with the city’s poorest residents. Almost twenty years later in his memoirs, Roosevelt still remembered the “strange and pathetic scenes” from the heat wave.

ROOSEVELT GAINED NO political advantage from helping the immigrant poor of the Lower East Side. Such New Yorkers voted Democrat. Because of the crusade to enforce the Sunday excise law, Roosevelt’s city career was at an end. As Republicans readied in 1896 to battle William Jennings Bryan as the “Popocrat” candidate—nominated by both the Populists and Democrats—Roosevelt made sure to visit Republican headquarters in New York and offer his services to William McKinley’s campaign manager, Mark Hanna. In the event of a Republican win that fall, Roosevelt and Lodge hoped that Roosevelt’s efforts on behalf of McKinley would be rewarded with a post in Washington. Still, the heat wave and Roosevelt’s contact with the urban poor helped shape his ideas about government responsibility for workers and immigrants. Roosevelt had been one of the few city department heads to take concrete steps to aid the residents of the tenements. He had advocated and carried out a scheme to give away a commodity that had been priced out of reach for many New Yorkers because of the existence of a trust. Roosevelt’s actions helped “bust” the trust, which would become a hallmark of Roosevelt’s presidency. He had expressed not only great sympathy for the poor, but also government’s responsibility to take action to alleviate their suffering. From his words to Jacob Riis calling for a “workingman’s mayor” to his actions during the heat wave, Roosevelt displayed an amazing sensitivity to the plight of even the humblest of New Yorkers.

Roosevelt’s understanding of the problems facing urban America went far beyond mere sympathy, however. His time as police commissioner allowed him to acquire a broad view of the entire city. Tackling police corruption and closing saloons on Sundays were not isolated phenomena, but part of a vast, interconnected web of evils plaguing New York. Although he was head of only one city department during his two years as president of the Board of Police Commissioners, Roosevelt understood that battling police corruption touched on just about every other problem in the city: the exploitation of immigrants; the exploitation of women; the problems facing labor; the blackmail of small business owners; corruption among city officials; high taxes; ineffective, if not brutal, police; rigged elections; vice, including gambling and prostitution; failure to enforce, or selective enforcement of, the law; the inadequacy of the courts; the dangers of tenement dwelling; and the filth, dirt, and disease that plagued the city and its denizens. Roosevelt’s advocacy of good government and his implementation and expansion of civil service might appear as a tiny sliver of the immense total reform agenda being advocated at the dawn of the Progressive Era. But Roosevelt understood that having clear government oversight, enforcing the law equitably, and increasing executive power—whether of a mayor or police chief—led to more livable cities and the alleviation of the plight of the poor, especially the working-class immigrants living in tenements. Being police commissioner gave Roosevelt an almost holistic understanding of the American city, both the problems it faced and the solutions available.

By the late nineteenth century, city problems were quickly becoming national problems. On the streets of New York, Roosevelt received an education that would serve him well as he rose to become chief executive, first of the nation’s largest state, then of the nation itself.