The Police Commish

By Richard Zacks

In the 1890s, New York City was unrepentantly wide open. Day or night, a man with a thirst or a letch or the urge to gamble could satisfy his cravings with ease. Long past midnight, small bands played in dozens of Manhattan concert saloons while prostitutes in floor-length dresses trawled the tables. Streetwalkers divvied up the various corners in the Tenderloin, and touts handed out cards for $1-a-date Bowery brothels. Bettors wanting action could wander into Frank Farrell's crystal-chandeliered casino on West 33rd Street. Tourists could smoke opium in no-frills dens in Chinatown.

And where were the cops? Quite a few were busy taking bribes. It was no secret that crooked officers shared their illegal profits with an equally corrupt Democratic political club, Tammany Hall. But on May 6, 1895, Republican mayor William Strong appointed to the city's four-man board of police commissioners the Manhattan native and former state legislator Theodore Roosevelt. Selected at once as board president, Roosevelt eagerly embraced the mayor's mandate for reform, calling it "a man's work." Quite simply, the author of The Winning of the West aimed to clean up Dodge, even if it had 2 million people. Although he never entirely succeeded--who could?--T.R.'s time on the police beat gave the Knickerbocker aristocrat a glimpse of life among the urban poor that shaped the Progressive he became.

Roosevelt set ambitious goals: to make merit replace bribery in the system of job assignments (sergeants sometimes paid $15,000 for lucrative captaincies) and, crazy as it sounds, to compel officers to actually enforce all the laws. He scored a few successes initially, weeding out corrupt veterans. To see whether patrolmen were walking their beats, he began making the same rounds late at night and incognito--though at times in the company of a newspaper reporter. Once, Roosevelt found three bluecoats loitering outside a saloon at 2:30 a.m. "What are you men doing here?" he asked abruptly. "What the %$*&# is that your business?" snapped one of them, in vintage New Yorkese. Roosevelt, spectacles glinting, then introduced himself and lectured them on performing their duty. "These midnight rambles are great fun," he later confided to his sister Anna. "I get a glimpse of the real life of the swarming millions." On some of those nights, Roosevelt's companion was the photographer and social critic Jacob Riis (How the Other Half Lives), who guided him through the circles of hell suffered by the city's struggling immigrants.

Roosevelt was settling in at 300 Mulberry Street, the police headquarters, when he embarked on what would be the costliest struggle of his tenure. He decided to enforce the moribund blue law against Sunday drinking. In a New York minute, he went from lauded to loathed. Fearlessly, he vowed not to back down. "Dry Sundays" led Manhattanites to flee to Coney Island for a beer; 540,000 mugs were sold one Sunday. German Americans, missing their beer gardens, held an anti-Roosevelt parade. Two mail bombs arrived and were defused. "I would rather see this administration turned out for enforcing laws than see it succeed for violating them," Roosevelt proclaimed. Privately, though, he agonized. "I have now run up against an ugly snag, the Sunday Excise Law," he wrote to Anna. "It is altogether too strict, but I have no honorable alternative save to enforce it and I am enforcing it, to the furious rage of the saloon keepers, and of many good people too; for which I am sorry."

The situation turned even bleaker for Commissioner Roosevelt when his fellow Republicans passed an ill-conceived law to crack down on what little legal Sunday drinking remained, mainly at hotels. The Raines Law decreed that only hotels with 10 or more rooms could serve alcohol with a meal on Sundays. Within weeks, almost every saloon, beer dive and dance hall in the city transformed itself into a "Raines Law hotel." Tavern owners thumbed their nose at Teddy. "Ten beers and one hard-boiled egg scarcely constitute a meal," groused Roosevelt, but wink-wink Tammany judges disagreed, one even stating that 17 beers and a pretzel were sufficiently nourishing to qualify.

Even more infuriating to Roosevelt, prostitutes and unmarried couples began renting--by the hour--those 10 hastily constructed rooms over the bar. Meanwhile, Roosevelt fell into an ongoing feud with a scheming fellow commissioner, Andrew Parker, which stalemated the board. "I cannot shoot him or engage in a rough-and-tumble with him," Roosevelt lamented. The would-be reformer was bogging down, spending his time giving out awards for stopping runaway carriages.

By August 1896, a scant 15 months into the job, Roosevelt was seeking to escape. As William McKinley's presidential campaign began gearing up, he mentioned to an influential McKinley backer, Maria Storer, that his dream job was Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Roosevelt began passionately campaigning for McKinley, electrifying crowds from Massachusetts to North Dakota.

McKinley was elected, but Roosevelt was dour on his own prospects."This is the last office I shall ever hold," he told a friend. "I have offended so many powerful interests and so many powerful politicians." The President-elect was indeed wary. "I am told your friend Theodore is always getting into rows with everybody," he informed Mrs. Storer. "I am afraid he is too pugnacious." But at the last moment, McKinley relented.

His legacy as police commissioner? He helped introduce a bicycle squad and pistol-shooting practice. Vice triumphed, but Roosevelt survived with his honor intact and with an enlarged sympathy for the struggles of the poor. "He is a fighter, a man of indomitable pluck and energy," wrote the Washington Post. "A field of immeasurable usefulness awaits him. Will he find it?"

Zacks, author of The Pirate Hunter, is at work on a book about police commissioner Roosevelt