The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (100 page)

Clearly the message was getting through to the ranks. The only delinquent discovered on the whole East Side that night was Patrolman William E. Rath, who forsook his beat for an oyster saloon on upper Third Avenue. Here, according to the
Excise Herald
, the following dialogue took place:

At
3:00 A.M
. the night-walkers retired to Mike Lyon’s all-night restaurant on the Bowery for steaks, salad, and beer. Little notice was taken of them at first, until an alert reporter identified the two Commissioners, and word spread quickly from table to table. Even the chef came out to stare. Roosevelt was obliged to hold an impromptu press conference before he could proceed with his steak.
⁶⁷

Refreshed, he escorted his companions over to the West Side for a tour of the Fifteenth and Nineteenth precincts—the latter being the notorious Tenderloin district. Here things were much less satisfactory. No fewer than seven patrolmen were found to be off their posts, including three who had literally to be awakened to a sense of
their duties. Roosevelt jotted down their names and numbers in his pocketbook, and, much later in the day, handed the list to Chief Conlin, saying, “This time there will be no mercy.” At the disciplinary hearing he himself appeared as complainant.
⁶⁸

These and subsequent nocturnal jaunts delighted the citizens of New York, who for years had been starved of entertaining municipal news. No such eccentric behavior by a public official had ever been recorded. The somnambulant Commissioner was nicknamed Haroun-el-Roosevelt, after the caliph who liked to stalk unrecognized through Baghdad after dark. Cartoons were published of policemen trembling before drugstore displays of false teeth and spectacles.
⁶⁹
One enterprising peddler showed up on Mulberry Street with a sackload of celluloid dentures, each equipped with a toy whistle and wire tooth-grippers. “This is the way Roosey whistles!” the peddler cried, clipping on a set and hissing convincingly at passersby. The dentures sold as fast as he could fish them out of the bag, and Mulberry Street began to resound with shrilling noises.
⁷⁰
Whether “Roosey” heard the racket in his second-floor office is unknown, but a Captain Groo quickly emerged from headquarters and arrested the peddler for doing unlicensed business.
⁷¹

Roosevelt inspected the teeth later and allowed that they were “very pretty.”
⁷²
With his instinct for public relations, he must have known that the merchandising of one’s features, even those most regrettably prominent, is a sure sign of popular acceptance. He had won a wide reputation before, of course, but only in the sense that a few thousand editors, columnists, political observers, and sophisticated newspaper readers across the country knew who he was and what he stood for. But here, in his hand, was the first tactile proof that his “image” was working its way into the folk consciousness of America. These celluloid teeth grinned cheerful news, and he could not but delight in them.

The exact number of midnight patrols Roosevelt took in the summer of 1895 is a mystery. Certainly there were others. But for some reason, after the first two or three, he discouraged the press from publicizing them. Avery Andrews mentions one expedition which Lincoln Steffens was allowed to attend on condition that he did not write about it.
⁷³
Possibly Roosevelt wished to keep the tactical
advantage of surprise, knowing that a retinue of reporters would inevitably spread word of his coming and going around the precincts. In any case his daytime activities were by then so controversial as to preclude every inch of available column-space.

Although the nights of vigilance wearied him (each involved going without sleep for about forty hours), he took great pride in them and saw many things that broadened his social understanding.
⁷⁴
Tramping along what must have been hundreds of miles of silent avenues lit only by corner lamps and the occasional flickering torch of an oyster-cart, he could sense, if not feel, the ache of homelessness and poverty. In alleys and courtyards to left and right, he could gaze through open windows at the hot intimacies of tenement life, and listen to the bedlam of alien conversation. Italian changed to Chinese, German to Yiddish, Russian to Polish as he moved from block to block, until it was a relief to hear even a few words of broken English. Sometimes he cast about for pearls of street wisdom, as when he asked an Italian fruit vendor what possible “monish” could be made selling his wares on a deserted street at dead of night. The vendor cheerfully agreed it was no way to prosper. “W’at I maka on de peanut I losa on de dam’ banan’.”
⁷⁵

“These midnight rambles are great fun,” Roosevelt wrote. “My whole work brings me in contact with every class of people in New York … I get a glimpse of the real life of the swarming millions.”
⁷⁶

As always when he was learning something new, he visibly swelled with pleasure and satisfaction. The waiters and patrons at Mike Lyon’s Bowery restaurant got used to seeing him drop in at two or three in the morning, tired and hungry yet wreathed in smiles. “It was ‘Hello Teddy,’ ‘How are you Roosevelt?’ all over the room,” one regular recalled many years later. “Beaming, buoyant, blithe … really happy he was in those days.”
⁷⁷

R
OOSEVELT’S HAPPINESS
did not remain unalloyed for long. He very soon came up against “an ugly snag” in his efforts on behalf of municipal reform. This was the Sunday Excise Law, a thirty-eight-year-old statute which forbade the sale of intoxicating liquors by saloons on the Sabbath.
⁷⁸
The law had been reaffirmed in 1892 by a Democratic Legislature, as a gesture to New York State’s large but
mainly rural temperance vote.
⁷⁹
In the city it was always honored more in the breach than the observance. Some New York mayors, including William Strong, had threatened total enforcement,
⁸⁰
but gave up in alarm when they felt the passions any such action aroused. Resistance came from all classes. Slum-dwelling workers were not to be denied their weekend refreshments, after six days and fifty-seven hours of grimy labor. To the large, prosperous German community, a
stein
of lager after
Kirche
was more than a pleasure: it was a folk ritual, hallowed by centuries of tradition in the Old World. As for the “dudes” and “swells,” quaffing champagne in the privacy of Fifth Avenue clubs, they could only sympathize with tenement kids scampering through the streets with buckets of ale for the family.

Nevertheless the law existed; it was on the statute books, and Roosevelt, as New York City’s chief law enforcement official, sooner or later had to define his attitude toward it. He was not a prohibitionist—although he might well have been, given his own abstemious nature, and the frightful death of Elliott Roosevelt still fresh in his memory. As long ago as 1884, he had warned in the Assembly “that no more terrible curse could be inflicted on this community than the passage of a prohibitory law,” and by his deciding vote had killed just such a measure.
⁸¹
His objection was practical rather than moral. “It is idle to hope for the enforcement of a law where nineteen-twentieths of the people do not believe in the justice of its provisions.” The Sunday Excise Act was only partially prohibitory, but he still considered it “altogether too strict.”
⁸²

Yet suddenly, on 10 June 1895, the President of the Police Board called in his officers and instructed them to “rigidly enforce” the closing of all New York City’s saloons between midnight Saturday and midnight Sunday. “No matter if you think the law is a bad one; you must see that your men carry out your orders to the letter.”
⁸³

Announcing his policy to the press, Roosevelt brushed aside suggestions that it was bound to fail and bound to make him personally unpopular:

It was a declaration of war, harsh and uncompromising, expressed throughout in the first person singular—with the exception of one “we,” suggesting that at least a majority of Roosevelt’s Board backed him up. As a matter of fact, all four Commissioners believed that the law should be enforced. Roosevelt was particularly gratified by the public support of “my queer, strong able colleague Parker … far and away the most positive character with whom I have ever worked on a Commission.”
⁸⁵

Parker appeared to like him, and Roosevelt was by nature inclined to like everybody at first, so the two men got on excellently. They had many long discussions of the law at Headquarters, often continued over dinner in a nearby restaurant, and Roosevelt never doubted Parker’s sincere dedication to municipal reform. Yet something about the affable lawyer made him uneasy. “If he and I get at odds we shall have a battle royal.”
⁸⁶

A
LL HOPES THAT
Roosevelt might have been indulging in excise rhetoric evaporated on Sunday, 23 June, when astonished saloonkeepers throughout the city found their premises being invaded and warrants served on them when they refused to close. Even the notorious “King” Callahan, an ex-Assemblyman with powerful political connections, was ordered by a rookie to lock up his establishment on Chatham Square. Callahan liked to boast that he had thrown his
front door key into the East River the day he opened for business, and he assumed his visitor was joking. But the rookie, whose name was Bourke, decisively repeated the order; whereupon Callahan knocked him down. Patrons of the saloon joined in stomping the figure on the floor, but Bourke was a wiry youth, and rose to lay out all comers with his nightstick. The King was duly served with a summons to appear in Tombs Police Court.
⁸⁷

The seriousness of this gaffe—and Roosevelt’s real motive in ordering the saloons closed—became evident when Bourke arrived at the courthouse a couple of days later and found the chamber packed with professional politicians. A Congressman and State Senator stood ready to testify on Callahan’s behalf; senior police officials were conspicuously absent. Lincoln Steffens urgently sought out Roosevelt at Headquarters. “Pat Callahan is a sacred person in the underworld, a symbol,” he warned. Roosevelt must defend his rookie—even promote him, if the judge found Callahan guilty.
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