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THEODORE ROOSEVELT
1919

CHAPTER 7

 POLICE COMMISSIONER OF NEW YORK

ONE of the spasms of reform in New York City politics which overturned Tammany Hall was the one in 1895, in which William L. Strong, a merchant, was elected Mayor on the issue of a business administration. As he was elected on a reform ticket he concluded he would bring a reformer into his administration, and hearing of a certain Theodore Roosevelt, who had been making such a racket at Washington as Civil Service Commissioner, concluded that he would offer him the head of the Street Cleaning Department. This proposition did not appeal to Mr. Roosevelt, and he declined it. He wanted a heavier job to tackle than cleaning streets. Hence Mayor Strong appointed him President of his Police Commission, never dreaming that he was getting such a buzz-saw on his hands as he did in the intense, irresistible, persistent, fearless fighter and real reformer, Theodore Roosevelt.

One of the first things the new Commissioner did was to stun the Mayor as much as the friends and enemies of law and decency by giving an order that on the next Sunday all saloons were to be closed, and that if the proprietors did not close them they would be arrested by the police and prosecuted for an infraction of the State law. As pastor of the Park Avenue Methodist Church, New York City, I preached a sermon on that Sunday morning, asking the people of our church and Methodists generally, and the ministers and members of all denominations, Protestant, Catholic and Hebrew, and the citizens who were members of no church but loved law and order, to stand behind Mr. Roosevelt in his effort to compel the law-defying and crime-breeding saloons to close on Sunday. Sure enough, some of the liquor dealers who had always been stronger than the law and authorities considered the threat a joke and kept open. And, of course, the Commissioner, strong in intellect and of determined will, was in dead earnest and not joking, and put six thousand policemen on the job of detecting and arresting these lawbreakers. He scared the brewers, distillers and saloon-keepers, till they fairly shivered and their teeth chattered.

On the Monday morning following I went down to the police headquarters to see Commissioner Roosevelt. I said to him, "Mr. Roosevelt, you do not know me; I never met you; I saw you once. It was at the National Republican Convention in Chicago which named James G. Elaine for the Presidency and John A. Logan for the vice-presidency. You were in the New York delegation, in the group with George William Curtis, who was working for the nomination of Senator Edmunds for the presidency. You had on a little straw hat and were not so fleshy as you are now. You were young and had not been long out of Harvard, but you were one of the notables of the convention and you were pointed out to me as such. I did not speak to you, nor have I seen you since that day. I have come down this morning to introduce myself to you, and to congratulate you on your courage in determining to close the Sunday saloons. The city has waited for twenty-five years for the coming of such a man. It ought not to be counted a heroic thing for a man to keep his oath solemnly made and to earn his salary by the discharge of his official duty, but the moral sense of the community is so low through the polluting influence of the liquor dealers, and their collusion with corrupt officials, that a man is counted a hero who dares keep his oath to enforce the law or earn his salary by so doing. I will stand by you till the last hour in the day; you are in a fight for the people and for God, and I belong in it and am proud to have such a leader. Our church will stand by you, too. In my sermon yesterday morning I asked all good people to sustain you in this crusade."

The Commissioner said: " I saw what you said in your pulpit in the report of this morning's papers, and thank you very much.''

"I am only one," I continued, "and an humble one at that, but you may count on me to stand with you on the front of the firing line. Whenever you shoot your big gun down here in Mulberry Street, just listen and you will hear its echo in the crack of a little fine-bored pistol on the corner of Park Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street, and that pistol will be in my hand and I will be shooting at the thing at which you aim.''

He said enthusiastically: "You're the stuff! I am looking for you as much as you are looking for me"; and, taking my hand warmly, he added, "I will stand with you in the fight till the end." Then he continued: "Do you know that you are the first man whose opinion I count of any value who has commended my action ? Do you see those letters and telegrams on that table ? There are perhaps fifty of them. Every single one criticizes me; some abuse me bitterly. These are some of the quotations from them: 'What an ass you are'; 'You are the biggest crank and fool in the world *;' You have wrecked the Republican party'; 'You have killed yourself politically, you will never be heard from again'; You are the deadest political duck that ever died in a pond.' "

"Commissioner Roosevelt," I answered, "I do not believe a word of them. For every enemy you make you will gain ten friends. In the long run, the most popular thing a man can do politically is to do the right thing morally. You are not dead, but have just begun to live politically."

He answered with considerable feeling: "I have entered this fight with no idea of making friends or fearing enemies; that has nothing to do with the question. It is simply a question of duty. That law is on the statute books and I have taken an oath to enforce it with the rest," and looking up, he continued, "With the help of God, I intend to do so. Whether my course will bring friends or foes, promotion or relegation to the rear, does not enter an instant into my calculation. It is mine only to do present duty which is plain to me."

On taking his hand to leave, I said, "In your vision of righteousness and moral courage in pursuing it you are the stuff of which I think a good President could be made. I should like to vote for you for that office some day." And I did.

There was a memorable scene at the beginning of the fight, when the frenzied brewers, distillers, saloonkeepers and their hired representatives appeared at a hearing they had called before Mayor Strong, and how bitterly they denounced Mr. Roosevelt, and how insolently they demanded a change in his policy or his removal. They said it was a cosmopolitan community, that the Sunday closing feature of the law had never been observed, and they insisted that the Mayor require the Commissioner instantly to stop his insane policy and give a "liberal" enforcement of the excise law.

When the liquor men had finished their say the Commissioner made his reply. He said: "Your Honor, these gentlemen have savagely attacked me and my policy of Sunday closing, and they have demanded of you that you require me to give a 'liberal' enforcement of the excise law." With vehemence and biting sarcasm, he continued: "These men want me to enforce the law a 'little bit,' to enforce it a little, tiny bit. Your Honor, I do not know how to do such a thing and I shall not begin to learn now. I did not take an oath to enforce the law a tiny bit. The great Empire State did not put that law on the statute books to be enforced a tiny bit, and so long as I am at the head of the Police Department of the city I shall do all in my power to enforce the law honestly and fearlessly." The terrible assault of the liquor dealers and others of great influence scared Mayor Strong almost out of his wits, and the Commissioner had to brace up the Mayor's backbone with one hand while he hammered the saloons with the other.

The bitter opposition to the closing of the saloons by Commissioner Roosevelt and the intense hatred of the liquor men engendered by it, reached its climax in the threats of assassination, which were many and serious. My barber said to me when he wiped the powder off my face and let me go from the chair, "I want to see you a moment if you can spare it, not out here where people can hear me, but in the back room where we can be to ourselves." I went with him and in a voice barely above a whisper and with a face such as one would wear at a funeral, he said, "I want to warn you of the danger you are in. You have been working with Mr. Roosevelt in closing the saloons on Sunday. It is the intention of the liquor people to kill him and to kill you. I hear the conversations that go on in my shop and I am told privately that this is not simply rumor, but that it is the settled determination to assassinate him and you." I replied, "I intend to stay in this fight with Roosevelt at any risk.''

The next time I saw the new Police Commissioner I told of the warning from the barber, and he said, "Doctor, I get stacks of those threats every day. They put an infernal machine in my office the other day wound up to kill me; the boys discovered it in time and saved me. But I am not afraid of one of them singly or all of them together. There are gunmen in this city that would kill me and kill you for $100, and there are many that would put up the money, but bad men are miserable cowards. I am not afraid of one of them, and I will go down on the East Side as often as I please and as late at night as I care to, and I will be hunting them while they are hunting me, and I tell you, my friend, if I succeed in this task, my life and your life and the lives of our citizens will be far more secure and New York will be a safer and better city." He continued, "Doctor, life is a tragedy; there is a risk at every step of the way, and duty too. I shall do duty and leave the risk to God. It is only the weakling and the coward that halts at danger; it is the true man who scorns it and does what is right. These threats are only a challenge to greater courage and a more strenuous fight."

It is a strange coincidence that the man that shot him while he was making a speech was an ex-saloonkeeper from New York City.

I noticed the singular politeness as well as dignity of a policeman at Fifth Avenue, at a shopping street. "Would you like to be promoted?" I said one day. He answered, '' There isn 't a ghost of a chance of my being promoted. I am a poor man and have no money to buy any promotion or any pull of any kind. I guess I will have to stick on this job." "I understand that under the Roosevelt administration money is not needed for promotion, and that the offer of it would be a reason for putting a man to the rear," I said to him. "I happen to be a friend of Commissioner Roosevelt, and if you would like to change your beat I will talk with the Commissioner about you. Mr. Roosevelt is a man who requires fitness for the task. You come up to our parsonage at any time you indicate and I will find out something about your individual history.'' He said,'' That is very kind of you and I will be up to see you to-morrow." He came, and after finding out some facts about his family and personal history, I asked him, "Did you ever do a brave thing? Did you ever take any risk? Did you ever make any dangerous arrest?" He said, "Yes, I have had several close shaves in my life. This one I think is the closest. I was going down the Bowery to the Police Headquarters one day and I saw a crook steal a watch from a man's pocket and run for the door of the car. The man cried: 'That man has got my watch,' but I had seen the fellow take it before the scream came and ran after him. We both got off the car in full speed and he got off a few feet ahead of me. I ran fully a square before I could gain on him and when I got just where I was ready to grab him, he turned about suddenly, whipped out a revolver and shot me in the abdomen. I felt I had gotten my death shot but intended to get my man anyhow. I caught him, slung him to the ground, took his revolver away from him, beat him almost into insensibility with the handle of it and then dragged him by force to Police Headquarters. I was sure the bullet would kill me, for I felt the blood running down my legs and a sense of exhaustion. When I gave my prisoner up, I said: '' He has killed me. Now lay me out on this lounge and send for a doctor. When they examined me they found that the bullet had struck a button of my underwear and deflected, and that what I thought was blood was only perspiration running down my limbs. I was the happiest man on earth when told that ball had not entered my body."

I did not write the Commissioner nor telephone him, but went down on purpose to see him about the case. As I told the story to him I got so excited over it in my own heart that he interrupted me, saying: "Good, good, splendid! that's the kind of stuff we want in this department. That's the kind of a man that shall have a chance." Then he touched a button and called the clerk and said: "Have Officer So-and-So report to me at 10 o 'clock to-morrow morning.'' The officer reported to him, and the next time I saw him he was riding a nice horse and with the roundsman's straps on his sleeve, and when I called on the late Li Hung Chang at the Waldorf Astoria, during his visit to America, the policeman who had charge of the reception was my handsome friend with his beautiful officer's uniform-, a lieutenant of the New York police.

    A policeman called at my parsonage one morning and said: "Commissioner Roosevelt wants to see you at once. It is on a matter of importance." "When I got there he took me into his private room and said: "I am just informed that there is a movement on hand to legislate me out of office. The united city papers have bombarded me, the leaders of both parties have conspired to suppress me. They have not succeeded in killing me, and they think their only plan to get rid of me will be to pass a law abolishing my office and, of course, me with it. I have sent for you hurriedly because I want to know what you think about the situation." I said to him: "Commissioner, I do not like the situation. I regard it as serious. In fact, I think that the knife is inconveniently close to your jugular." He said laughingly: "It looks that way to me." "You can do without the Commissionership," I said to him, "but the city cannot do without you. "We will not surrender, and will not run, Commissioner. They shall not touch a hair of your head. Our church people are splendidly organized in this fight and we will make it mighty uncomfortable for any leader or leaders to snuff you out in any such fashion." I immediately went to the Methodist Preachers' Meeting, to which I belonged, and which was enthusiastically in favor of the saloon-closing movements, and told them the sneaking plan of those who were leading the saloon forces for the Commissioner's removal and asked them in their individual charges to speak about it and institute an earnest protest against it. I then went to a number of other preachers' meetings and told them of the plot and asked them to unite vigorously in the fight against it, which they consented to do and did. I immediately opened communication with the Republican leaders at Albany and elsewhere, telling them what disastrous consequences politically would follow such a foolish and wicked course; that the good people of the State were with Roosevelt and would settle at the polls with any man or party who should attempt to punish him for doing his duty. The legislative plot to eliminate Roosevelt was thus nipped in the bud. I wrote a lengthy article for The North American Review appealing to the conscience and loyalty of all lovers of law and order to stand with Mr. Roosevelt in the fight and received from him a letter which is very precious to me now. It is as follows:
POLICE DEPARTMENT OF THE CITY OF NEW YOHK 
300 mulbebby STREET, new york, october 23, 1895.
my dear MR. iglehaet :
I have just been reading your admirable article in the North American Review on the saloons and the Sabbath. Permit me to say how deeply I appreciate the valiant and effective fight you have waged for decent government in this city.
Faithfully yours,
Theodore Roosevelt.

Commissioner Roosevelt was also a member of the Board of Health, and with his dear friend, Jacob Riis, secured tenement-house reforms whose healthful, physical and moral influence will be felt for generations to come. Roosevelt did more than enforce the Sunday law. He so organized the force and impressed himself on it, that it ceased to be the tool of the underworld and was ever after stronger.

The Theodore Roosevelt, the man as I knew him, and the world knew bam, stands out life-size in the following letter:

July 2nd .1895
 Rev. Ferdinand c. Iglehart, 106 I. 8th. 8t.,
New York
My dear Sir:-
I thank yon for the slip you tent no, and t thank you still more cordially for what you said in your sermon.
AS    I told you, it  is with me « simply question of observing my oath of office.    Nothing that either the saloon-Keepers or the politician* say, will alter in any degree ay position.
Sincerely yours.
Theodore Roosevelt

At the close of our two years' fight President McKinley appointed Mr. Roosevelt Assistant Secretary of the Navy.