THE REPORTER wondered what he was doing in church. W. E. Carson of the World had been urged to attend the Madison Square Presbyterian Church on Sunday morning, February 14, 1892. Half-suspecting that the tip might be a hoax, but hesitant to overlook a good story, Carson strolled into the Gothic brownstone church at Madison Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street. Sitting down in a pew, he peered past green granite columns and soon spotted a frail and aging man, who held his silk hat between his bony knees. The reporter recognized him as Thomas C. Platt, Republican boss of New York State, who recently had declared war on Richard Croker, leader of Tammany Hall and thus boss of New York City.
Now the minister stepped into the pulpit. He was the Reverend Charles H. Parkhurst, a fifty-year-old man with a slender figure, a long and narrow face, nearsighted eyes peering intensely through rimless glasses, a chin cloaked in a Vandyke, and curly hair worn long at the sides and the back of his head. Dr. Parkhurst looked like the scholar he was. A graduate of Amherst College, he had also studied in Germany, and he knew Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. That Sunday morning he wore a black clerical robe with a white starched bib at his throat.
He had spoken no longer than a minute when a gasp rose from the congregation, and the World reporter reached for a pencil inside his pocket. New York City, the pastor declared, was thoroughly rotten. He laid the blame squarely on Mayor Hugh J. Grant, District Attorney De Lancy Nicoll, and the police commissioners. “Every step that we take looking to the moral betterment of this city,” Dr. Parkhurst charged, “has to be taken directly in the teeth of the damnable pack of administrative bloodhounds that are fattening themselves on the ethical flesh and blood of our citizenship. . . .”
The Presbyterians sat in a state of shock. The reporter scribbled notes as fast as he could. Republican Boss Platt narrowed his eyes as he schemed how to use this sermon for his own political ends. But no man present that day could foresee the full consequences of the remarkable sermon.
It shook the town because the World played up Carson’s story. Mayor Grant angrily called on the minister to prove his allegations. Tammany politicians denounced Dr. Parkhurst as “un-Christian” and “vulgar.” Charles A. Dana, editor of the Sun, urged that the minister be driven from his pulpit. Other pastors felt that if Dr. Parkhurst wished to denounce evil, he should have stuck to Sodom and Gomorrah. And District Attorney Nicoll ordered him to appear before a grand jury.
Nine days after his sermon the preacher was haled before the jury and asked for legal evidence of his charges. He had none. His attack had been based on newspaper articles never denied by public officials. Nearly everyone realized that vice was rampant in the city, but Dr. Parkhurst had not documented the case. The grand jury, which was partial to Tammany, rebuked him and called his charges sweeping and groundless. The jury sent its report to the court of general sessions, whose presiding judge agreed. Dr. Parkhurst was depressed. “I had waked up a whole jungle of teeth-gnashing brutes,” he later said, “and it was a question of whether the hunter was going to bag the game or the game make prey of the hunter.”
After moping a few days, Dr. Parkhurst sought the advice of commission merchant David J. Whitney, a founder of the Society for the Prevention of Crime. This was a private organization of clergymen, merchants, and lawyers. Parkhurst had been its president for the past year. Humiliated by the grand jury, he wanted to pick up where he had left off but didn’t know how to proceed. Whitney urged him to make a personal tour of the underworld to collect evidence at firsthand. The merchant also put the minister in touch with a private detective, named Charles W. Gardner, who agreed to act as guide. This young man wasn’t an altogether savory character, but Parkhurst didn’t know it at the time. Gardner flaunted a huge mustache, which curled at the ends, and wore the hard hat popular with most private eyes of that era.
The detective and the pastor met in Parkhurst’s home at 133 East Thirty-fifth Street. For six dollars a night, plus expenses, the detective agreed to show the cleric the seamy side of New York life. He also promised to hire other private detectives to collect further data on their own. As the two men conversed, young John Langdon Erving entered the room. One of Parkhurst’s parishioners, Erving was tall and blond, a society dandy, and the scion of a rich family. It was decided that Erving would accompany his pastor and the detective on their outings. The three men agreed to meet on Saturday evening, March 5, in Gardner’s apartment at 207 West Eighteenth Street. Naturally, they would need disguises. Gardner later wrote a book, called The Doctor and the Devil, or Midnight Adventures of Dr. Parkhurst, in which he told how he changed the pastor’s appearance.
Their first night out on the town the three men stopped at Tom Summers’ Saloon, at 33 Cherry Street, where they drank whiskey that tasted like embalming fluid and watched little girls buy booze at ten cents a pint to take home to their fathers. When the detective praised the pastor’s ability to hold his liquor, Parkhurst closed his eyes and smiled. Next, they headed for a whorehouse at 342 Water Street, where painted women stood in the doorway soliciting trade. Two harlots grabbed Parkhurst, dragged him inside, and sat him down on a chair. He chatted easily with them, fended off their advances, and got away. The next stop was another red-light house, where a young prostitute asked Parkhurst to dance. To save the minister embarrassment, Erving danced with her, while Parkhurst sat and watched. Two old hags drifted up to him, begged him to buy them drinks, and he did. This so won the heart of a 200-pound crone that she leered at Parkhurst, asked him to call her Baby, and invited him upstairs. Again he managed to escape.
The night of March 9 the minister, detective, and socialite resumed their explorations. At Water Street and Catherine Slip they ducked into the bar of the East River Hotel, where they found two uniformed policemen enjoying drinks on the house. Parkhurst told Gardner to jot down their badge numbers. Then, acting like a roisterer, the minister ordered drinks for everyone in the bar. It cost Parkhurst only eighty cents to provide each of the sixteen customers with a whiskey. Next the trio visited a five-cent lodginghouse for men at 233 Park Row. Although this was a legal establishment, Parkhurst wanted to see it because Gardner had said that in places like this Tammany recruited voters to cast ballots frequently and fraudulently. In a room thirty feet wide and eighty feet long, dozens of foul-smelling bums slept on bare canvas cots; their stench drove Parkhurst out into the street.
On their next nocturnal trip the explorers headed for the Bowery and visited several brassy cabarets, known as concert gardens. Then they saw “tight houses,” where all women wore tights. Brothels were classified by the nationalities of their inmates, so on Forsyth Street the three men visited a “German house.” The madam said that the five scantily clad girls in the parlor were her daughters. Pushing on, the men got within a stone’s throw of Police Headquarters, at 300 Mulberry Street, when they were accosted by fifty tarts. One woman enticed them to a house on Elizabeth Street, which she described as “a boarding house for the most respectable policemen in the city.” By the time they left this place, Parkhurst had become ill from mixing his drinks, so the detective led him into a Third Avenue saloon for a glass of soda. As luck would have it, there sat a drunk who had gone to Amherst with the minister. When he greeted Parkhurst by name, the bartender looked up in surprise and fright, ordered the trio out of the place, and threw their money after them. Feeling better physically, Parkhurst demanded that Gardner “show me something worse.”
In Chinatown, northeast of what is now Foley Square, they watched a game of fan-tan and then padded into the murky room of a nearby building, where they found a Chinese man, his Caucasian wife, and their eight-year-old son smoking opium. Next came a visit to the Negro district around Sullivan and West Houston Streets, called Coontown. Then Frenchtown on the southern fringe of Washington Square in Greenwich Village. Entire blocks consisted of houses of prostitution—of all kinds. Worst of all, to the sensitive Parkhurst, was a four-story brick house on West Third Street, called the Golden Rule Pleasure Club. There they were greeted by “Scotch Ann,” who bade them enter the basement. This was partitioned into small dens, each containing a table and a couple of chairs.
As Gardner described it: “In each room sat a youth, whose face was painted, eyebrows blackened, and whose airs were those of a young girl. Each person talked in a high falsetto voice, and called the others by women’s names.” Puzzled, the minister turned to the detective and whispered a question. Gardner explained. For the first and only time Parkhurst was frightened. Running outdoors, he panted in horror, “Why, I wouldn’t stay in that house for all the money in the world!”
The evening of March 11, the last time he ventured into New York’s underworld, Parkhurst went with Gardner and Erving to a posh bawdyhouse at 31-33 East Twenty-seventh Street, just three blocks from Parkhurst’s own church. They were welcomed by the madam, Mrs. Hattie Adams, who called eight young women into the parlor. Having recovered from his revulsion of the previous night, the minister hoped to see the very worst. Gardner paid five of the girls three dollars apiece to put on a dance. A broken-down musician, called the Professor, sat at a piano in the parlor, but the girls refused to perform until he was blindfolded. This done, they shucked off the Mother Hubbard gowns they wore, leaving themselves completely naked, and romped around the room while the Professor banged out a lively jig. They frolicked through a cancan, they danced with Erving, and finally they played leapfrog, with Gardner acting as the frog. Throughout this revelry the minister sat in a corner sipping beer and watching with a blank face. Hattie became suspicious of him, but Gardner assured her that he was a “gay boy from the West.” The madam decided that maybe he was a pickpocket on vacation and tried pulling his whiskers, only to be rebuffed so sternly that she let it go at that.
Anti-Parkhurst newspapers later claimed that he had played the role of frog for the leapfrogging naked whores, but this was not the case. So celebrated did this episode become that delighted habitués of the Tenderloin district sang, “Dr. Parkhurst on the floor/Playing leapfrog with a whore/Ta-ra-ra-ra-boom-de-ay/Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!”
From Hattie Adams’ place the three men went to another brothel, on West Fourth Street, run by Marie Andrea. There they witnessed a “French circus.” Gardner later said that this sickened him, but the minister “sat in a corner with his feet curled under his chair and blandly smiled.” The detective also reported that “after their performance, the girls bowed like ballet dancers.” After the three men got out of the place, Gardner asked Parkhurst what he thought of the spectacle they had just seen. “Think of it?” the minister cried. “It was the most brutal, the most horrible exhibition that I ever saw in my life!”
Never again did Parkhurst enter a brothel, den, dive, saloon, or any other place of low repute. He now had all the evidence he sought. In addition to his eyewitness tours, 4 other detectives hired by Gardner had visited 254 saloons. All told, the Reverend Dr. Parkhurst spent about $500 in this campaign.
He let it be known that on Sunday, March 13, he would deliver another sermon about corruption in the city. An hour before he began to speak, his house of worship was jammed, some people even sitting on the steps leading to the pulpit. On the lectern the minister placed a Bible, a hymnbook, and a stack of documents prepared with the help of Gardner and Erving. Launching into his indictment, Parkhurst said that at first he had not considered it part of his ministerial duties “to go into the slums and help catch the rascals, especially as the police are paid nearly five million dollars a year for doing it themselves.” However, when he had realized that no one else would expose this vice, he had gone “down into the disgusting depths of this Tammany-debauched town.”
Parkhurst picked up the documents from the lectern. These were sworn affidavits of what he had seen, affidavits from the detectives hired by Gardner, and a list of thirty houses of prostitution within the Nineteenth Precinct, where his church was located. “For four weeks,” he cried, “you have been wincing under the sting of a general indictment and have been calling for particulars! This morning I have given you particulars—two hundred and eighty-four of them. Now, what are you going to do with them?”
His second sermon shocked the city even more than his first. Many citizens were horrified at the conditions he described. Others felt that the minister had been guilty of impropriety in crawling through the sewers of the underworld. He was accused of seeking personal publicity. Politicians pretended to worry that his findings might affect decent people. Some men of social and financial standing feared that reform would hurt business. The Sun declared that Dr. Parkhurst’s usefulness as a minister had come to an end since he had instigated and paid for obscene performances. And Anthony Comstock felt jealous. Comstock headed the Society for the Suppression of Vice, which competed with Parkhurst’s Society for the Prevention of Crime.
Parkhurst and his organization demanded that District Attorney Nicoll and the courts close the places he had visited. No action was taken. Since most police justices were creatures of Tammany Hall, they declined to issue warrants for the arrests Parkhurst wanted. Crime Society agents testified about disorderly housekeepers near the Essex Market court; but when they left the courtroom, they were attacked by a mob, and the police refused to protect them.
The next grand jury that convened was headed by an upright businessman, named Henry M. Taber. Under his influence the jurors summoned Parkhurst, gave him a friendly hearing, welcomed his affidavits, handed down indictments against two whorehouse madams, and questioned the city’s four police commissioners, as well as a few police inspectors and captains. Nearly 90 percent of all police appointments, transfers, and promotions had been recommended by leaders of Tammany Hall; this explains why the men appearing before the jury showed very poor memories.
The grand jury declared: “(The police) are either incompetent to do what is frequently done by private individuals with imperfect facilities for such work, or else there exist reasons and motives for such inaction which are illegal and corrupt. The general efficiency of the Department is so great that it is our belief that the latter suggestion is the explanation of the peculiar inactivity.”
Parkhurst hammered away, in sermon after sermon, about the unholy alliance between Tammany and the underworld. He received a flood of solid tips in letters from people afraid to sign their names. At last the Chamber of Commerce began to worry about the city’s reputation; early in 1894 it asked the state legislature to investigate the city’s police department. The legislature was controlled by Republican Boss Platt, who welcomed this opportunity to embarrass Democratic Boss Croker and the city’s Democratic machine.
Clarence Lexow, a Republican state senator, was named chairman of a committee to conduct the probe. Committee members began by coming to New York and visiting Dr. Parkhurst, the acknowledged leader of the anti-vice forces. Now worldly enough to recognize the partisan composition and purposes of the legislative committee, he declined to give his full cooperation. Because he had been the first to raise his voice in public, committee members had to placate him. They let him name their counsel, John W. Goff, a brilliant lawyer, who at this time was above political influence.
Thus, in 1894, began the famous Lexow investigation of crime and corruption in America’s greatest city. It became a national sensation. Never before had New York police been exposed so thoroughly. The committee’s findings ran to nearly 6,000 pages in 5 thick books. The World gave massive publicity to this probe, which deeply impressed twelve-year-old Fiorello LaGuardia. When LaGuardia was three years of age, his family moved to the West, and his father was now an army bandmaster near Prescott in Arizona Territory. Whenever young LaGuardia rode into Prescott, he bought copies of the New York World at a drugstore. Much later he wrote:
When I got home with the Sunday World, I would carefully read every word of the World’s fight against the corrupt Tammany machine in New York. That was the period of the lurid disclosures made by the Lexow investigation of corruption in the Police Department that extended throughout the political structure of the city. The papers then were filled with stories of startling crookedness on the part of the police and the politicians in New York. Unlike boys who grew up in the city and who heard from childhood about such things as graft and corruption, the amazing disclosures hit me like a shock. I could not understand how the people of the greatest city in the country could put up with the vice and crime that existed there. A resentment against Tammany was created in me at that time which I admit is to this day almost an obsession. . . .*
The Lexow committee consisted of 7 members—5 of them Republicans; 1 an independent Democrat; and 1 a Tammany Democrat. They held their first meeting on March 9, 1894, in a third-floor room of the Tweed-built County Courthouse at 52 Chambers Street. The city had a population of not quite 2,000,000. The 4,000-man police force was run by a 4-man board of police commissioners. When it became apparent that the committee’s counsel meant business, whorehouse keepers left town in droves, many heading for Chicago. A covert offer of $300,000 was made to counsel Goff to drop the probe, but he spurned this bribe. In 74 sessions the Lexow committee heard 678 witnesses and took 10,576 pages of testimony before its final meeting on December 29, 1894. Of these pages, 9,500 were about corruption in the police department.
In the middle of January, 1895, the Lexow committee issued a report. Although all worldly New Yorkers were generally aware of the situation, the report spelled it out in detail. Police bribery was so common that when a vaudeville actor wanted to impersonate a cop, he simply held one hand behind his back with the palm upturned. The report showed that woven into a web of corruption were policemen, judges, prostitutes, dope addicts, saloonkeepers, abortionists, robbers, gamblers, swindlers, bawdyhouse proprietors, politicians—and businessmen. In fact, M. R. Werner wrote that “the outstanding development of the Croker period in Tammany Hall was the beginning of an alliance between Tammany Hall and large corporate enterprise.” Boss Croker became so frightened that he temporarily resigned his Tammany leadership and left for Europe, announcing that he needed a complete rest because he was ill.
Corruption began at the bottom, worked its way to the top, and then descended to the bottom again. Any ambitious young man who wanted to become a policeman had to pay a $300 bribe just to be appointed to the force. Police Commissioner James J. Martin admitted under questioning that 85 percent of his appointments to the police ranks were made on the recommendations of Tammany leaders and that in 5 years he had promoted only 2 men on merit alone. It cost a patrolman $2,500 to be promoted to sergeant. A captaincy was worth $10,000 to $15,000 in bribe money, although a captain’s official salary was only $2,750 a year. To be elevated from captain to inspector cost from $12,000 to $20,000. The Lexow committee said that this promotion racket alone came to about $7,000,000 a year—a modest estimate, in its opinion.
Any policeman who paid for promotion expected to get his money back. A case in point was Alexander Williams, known as Clubber Williams because he said that there was more law at the end of a police club than in any courtroom. He was a sadistic brute who enjoyed beating up people. As a police captain, he was transferred from a not too lucrative downtown precinct to the Nineteenth Precinct, which embraced an area roughly bounded by Fourteenth to Forty-second streets and Fifth and Seventh avenues, now the city’s garment district. This section was so wide-open and vicious and depraved that some people called it Satan’s Circus. But Clubber Williams gave it another nickname. Upon taking over his new post, he drawled, “I’ve had nothing but chuck steaks for a long time, and now I’m going to get me a little of the tenderloin.” The area became the Tenderloin.
Imposing tribute on every kind of illegal activity, Williams grew wealthy on graft and ultimately was promoted to police inspector. Ordered to appear before the Lexow committee, he admitted that he had been charged with clubbing more people than any other man on the force, that he had several big bank accounts, and that besides his home in the city, he owned a mansion in Connecticut and kept a yacht.
Saloons were supposed to close at 1 A.M. on weekdays and to remain closed all day Sunday. However, thousands of saloonkeepers paid the police $20 a month to stay open after the deadline and all day Sunday. Uniformed cops openly accepted free drinks in these places. The many houses of prostitution in the city paid from $35 to $50 a month to the police for protection. Madams also bought tickets to Tammany parties and picnics. Charles Priem, who ran a brothel at 28 Bayard Street, told the committee that in 6 years he had given the police $4,300 in regular payments, an “initiation fee” of $500 every time a new captain took over the precinct, and an annual Christmas gift of $100 to whichever man happened to be captain at the holiday season. One madam said that she had paid the police $150 a month for 10 years.
Besides this direct graft, the police had a hand in subsidiary graft connected with prostitution—the sale to whorehouses of beer, liquor, cigars, cigarettes, food, medical service, and so forth. Some high police officials and Tammany politicians had direct financial interests in bawdyhouses, and the cop on the beat was told to protect the establishments especially favored by city officials, judges, and millionaires.
Steamship owners paid police to guard their vessels from the time they arrived in port until they were unloaded. Pushcart peddlers paid cops three dollars a week to stand in the streets beside their carts. Sailmakers on South Street paid police for permission to hang out canvas banners proclaiming their trade. Bootblacks had to give a free shine to any cop demanding service. Whenever Charles Delmonico of the famous Delmonico’s Restaurant staged a banquet, he asked his precinct house to assign a cop to duty at his entrance, and he paid the policemen five dollars an evening. Arthur Brisbane, then writing for the New York World, commented, “Another batch of the city’s businessmen proved that they were just about as worthy of freedom as a Kaffir at the Cape.”
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:
The poor, ignorant foreigner residing on the great east side of the city has been especially subjected to a brutal and infamous rule by the police, in conjunction with the administration of the local inferior courts, so that it is beyond a doubt that innocent people who have refused to yield to criminal extortion, have been clubbed and harassed and confined in jail, and the extremes of oppression have been applied to them in the separation of parent and child, the blasting of reputation and consignment of innocent persons to a convict’s cell. . . .
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.
Curiously, no arrests were made. In his autobiography Jacob Riis suggested an explanation for this omission. He said that Roosevelt’s enemies within the police department raided the Seeley party in the belief that they would catch him there. The plot failed because Roosevelt did not attend the affair.
The young president of the police board finally wearied of his thankless job. He negotiated for an appointment as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and in April, 1897, resigned his New York post to return to the nation’s capital. Although Roosevelt failed to rid die city of all corruption during his two years in office, he greatly improved the police department.
* From The Making of an Insurgent, An Autobiography: 1882-1919 by Fiorello H. LaGuardia. Copyright, 1948, by J. B. Lippincott Company. Published by J. B. Lippincott Company.