Revisiting NYPD Past with Theodore Roosevelt

Last week I did a book review at the Albany Public Library. I’ve spoken there a half-dozen times, mostly about my own books and on one other occasion reviewing a biography of Clarence Darrow. Both times, I have to thank the Friends of the Albany Public Library (average age about sixty-five, I estimate) for prompting me to finally read a book I already owned that languished unread on the shelf among all the other Unreads. For the same reason they asked me to do Clarence Darrow (one criminal mouthpiece to another), they tapped me for Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt’s Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York by Richard Zachs. Roosevelt was appointed on May 6, 1895 as President of the four-member Police Commission that ran the New York City Police Department. Tasked by Republican reformers to put the New York cops back on the straight-and-narrow, after thirty years of Tammany Mayors memories must have been vague as to when that last was.

In 1895, New York City was largely the island of Manhattan and “some parts of the Bronx”—which parts weren’t specified, but here’s a lament from a Bronx patrolman: “The next time I get that post I’ll demand an axe to hew a path through the forest, with a locomotive headlight to illumine the way, and a dozen red sky rockets to send up for assistance in case I fall into some gully or get tangled up in the jungles north of 180th Street.” (That’s how cops spoke of Staten Island in the 1970s.) The boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island did not merge into one New York City until 1898.

When Roosevelt (“TR”) took office, the City had 3,800 policemen in 38 Precincts, watching over two million people crammed into a dozen square miles, connected by a 5-cent cable car ride and four massive elevated train lines running north-south on Second, Third, Sixth and Ninth Avenues. Physically, the City was recognizable but different. Madison Square Garden was a yellow-and-white edifice on East 26th Street, atop which perched on her tiptoes, a 13-foot gilded copper statue of Diana, Goddess of the Hunt, lit up at night by 50 Edison Lamps, spun naked on perfectly balanced ball bearings, telling City dwellers which way the wind blew. At Fifth Avenue and 41st Street, the Croton Distributing Reservoir occupied the site of the future New York Public Library. No automobiles. Instead, “Tens of thousands of horses, carriages, wagons, public horse and cable cars, but not a single traffic light or stop sign and vehicles could ride in any direction on any street, no faster than 5-miles-per-hour.” No traffic cops. Horse thieves abounded in NYC; outlaw stables where horses’ coats were quick-dyed, tails clipped and wagons repainted, presaged the coming of the chop-shops of the 1970s.

More than 30,000 prostitutes worked daily from the upscale Tenderloin district (a 2-block-wide swath along Broadway from 23rd to 42nd Streets) to impoverished Russian Jewish girls charging 50-cents down on Eldridge St. In the tiny 9-square-block 11th Precinct on the Lower East Side, 250,000 mostly Polish and Russian Jews, lived and labored. Their pushcarts filled Hester, Allen, Chrystie, Forsyth, Delancey, Grand and Houston Streets, far as the eye could see seven days a week. Pushcart men paid a few dollars for the privilege of remaining stationary, to not have to move on every ten minutes as local law mandated; Italian bootblacks paid for prized corners and shined police shoes free. You could get a drink, and more, in the 250 saloons and 50 brothels in the 11th Precinct, even on Sunday. Especially on Sunday, the workingman’s only day-off.

Big Bill Devery, Captain of the 11th Precinct, plainly stated his view of such enterprises in his domain: “Take a payoff, let the people enjoy themselves.” Devery charged each brothel a $500 initiation fee and $50 a month; method of payment was “the police handshake,” a $50 bill palmed and passed. Saloons, gambling halls, pool rooms paid to stay open. It was this business as usual in every Precinct. Into this Sea of Iniquity, strode Theodore Roosevelt, on the arm of the Rev. Charles Parkhurst of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church on East 24th Street, a hop, skip, and a jump from TR’s ancestral mansion on East 20th. Rev. Parkhurst, the Prophet Jeremiah of the Republican Reform Movement, and TR who said, “Nothing must stand in the was of enforcement of the law.” Two peas in a pod on a Holy Crusade.

During the sweltering summer of 1895, TR succeeded in closing down practically all the City’s 8,000 saloons on Sundays, for the only time in residents’ memory. During the first fourteen months of his term, TR succeeded principally in that, although the NYPD followed his lead less slavishly in shuttering brothels and gambling parlors, as witnessed by the Department trials and firings of scores of policemen. (None of whom went to jail, however.) By the following summer of 1896, the Republican-controlled Legislature in Albany had had enough, as did a thirsty City. New York State’s Sabbath Law (an Excise Tax Law), on the books since 1857, forbade attending baseball games, horse races and theatre on Sunday, as well as the buying of most anything, especially alcohol. The newly-passed Raines Law, ostensibly even harsher on its face, primarily raised fees and taxes on premises licensed to sell alcohol, while providing an unanticipated boon to the City’s saloon keepers. Private clubs (like TR’s Union League) and ”hotels with 10 rooms or more” could sell alcohol to guests with a meal seven days a week. A construction boom was thereby launched that added 10 rooms to every saloon in the City that had ready access to hammer, saw and nails. A Tammany Hall Judge helpfully ruled that “a meal” could consist of a single sandwich, thus giving birth to the “Raines Law sandwich,” described by playwright Eugene O’Neill as “an old desiccated ruin of dust-laden bread and mummified ham or cheese.” Never consumed, only one was legally required to be kept on the premises.

In April 1897, Roosevelt decamped with relief from the NYPD to his new job as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in President William McKinley’s Administration. TR had tirelessly importuned his friend and Harvard classmate, U.S. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, to rescue him from his pickle. In May, 1898, the new Police Board chose Captain Big Bill Devery, TR’s bête noire, as Chief of Police. As author Richard Zachs observes: “…despite one of the most concerted efforts in the history of New York City to crack down on whoring, gambling and after-hours drinking, all three somehow thrived.” As epitaph, Abe Hummel, an infamous criminal lawyer of the day, said it best: ”Roosevelt’s tombstone should read: ‘Here lies all the civic virtue there ever was.’”

Robert Knightly

Everybody's Corrupt

You may not know that Theodore Roosevelt once served as police commissioner for the City of New York. As a student of muckraker Lincoln Steffens and a life-long fan of T.R. I knew a little about it. I knew he had trouble with the police culture of New York, the corrupt Democratic machine, and the way things were generally done in the city. But I didn't know the details, or how badly things went for him, until I read Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt's Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York, by Richard Zacks.

It was the Protestant preachers, in particular the Reverend Charles H. Parkhurst, who first cast the light of general scrutiny on the sin that New York loved: prostitution, drink, and gambling. Parkhurst went out one night with a flash fellow of his acquaintance and took a tour of the low places of the city in order to denounce them from the pulpit. He was so horrified that he went out again the next night, and the night after. He soon roused the respectable people of the city, which is to say, the Republicans, to demand that the city be cleansed of sin. No illegal activity could take place without the complicity of the police. The Lexow commission hearings revealed them to be on the take, a great public scandal.

The aroused citizens voted out the Tammany mayor. The new mayor appointed the high-minded Theodore Roosevelt to the Police Commission to clean up the town. He started by creeping through the bad neighborhoods at night in disguise, getting the dirt on all the negligent cops he saw there. They began to shape up and look sharp. He forced them to raid all the brothels. No one was safe. He decreed that snitches were no longer to be paid for information, since they were criminals themselves and didn't deserve it. No undeserving person was to have a break. Homeless? Get a job. No longer would the homeless be allowed to sleep in the basements of police stations, on bare planks. They must report to the homeless shelter run by Protestant clergymen, where they would be forced to chop wood for three hours for their night's lodging.

Roosevelt closed all the bars on Sundays, because that was the law, handed down by the Republican legislators in Albany. Now in those days Sunday was the working man's only day off, his only solace a drink of beer. New Yorkers began to yearn for the return of Tammany. But Theodore Roosevelt was stiff-necked. Political expediency was never a part of his vocabulary. Right was right, and the law was the law. In vain did thirsty newspaper writers point out that the rich folks could drink at home on Sundays, or in their pricey hotels.

Then the wife of a prominent and powerful citizen was robbed of her jewels.

Without a stable of underworld informers to ferret out the thief, the police were helpless. Now it became apparent that virtue didn't work, not in New York City, perhaps not anywhere. Everyone, high and low, benefitted from the slimy network of corruption and bribery that the city ran on in ordinary times, and they wanted it back again. The rest is history. Roosevelt went on to become President of the United States, but that's a story for another day.

Kate Gallison