CHAPTER 11 Hermann Hagedorn’s: The Boy’s Life of Theodore Roosevelt.

HE JUMPS INTO A TIGER'S DEN AND EMERGES, TO THE DISCOMFITURE   OF   THE   TIGER

ROOSEVELT resigned his position on the Civil * Service Commission in the spring of 1895, and returned to New York to take up a commissionership of a different sort. 

A wave of virtuous indignation had in the autumn of 1894 thrown Tammany Hall out of power in New York City and instated a non-partisan group of public-spirited citizens under Mayor Strong.  Roosevelt, who in his first political fight in the Republican organization of the Twenty-first Assembly District had been snowed under on a motion to commit the organization to a non-partisan system of street-cleaning, was offered the position of Street Cleaning Commissioner. 

I have been dreadfully harassed over this offer of Strong's [he wrote his sister "Bamie," in December, 1894].  Finally I refused, after much hesitation.  I should much have liked to help him, and to find myself again in close touch with my New York friends; but I was not willing to leave this work at this time, just when the ends are loose. 

In April of the following year the Mayor offered him the Police Commissionership.  His friends, notably Lodge, whose judgment he trusted, urged him to accept. 

I hated to leave Washington [he wrote], for I love the life; and I shall have, if I go, much hard work, and I will hardly be able to keep on with my literary matters.  Moreover, it is a position in which it is absolutely impossible to do what will be expected of me; the conditions will not admit it.  I must make up my mind to much criticism and disappointment.  But, on the other hand, I am nearly through what I can do here; and this is a good way of leaving a position which I greatly like but which I do not wish permanently to retain, and I think it a good thing to be definitely identified with my city once more.  I would like to do my share in governing the city after our great victory; and so far as may be, I would like once more to have my voice in political matters.  It was a rather close decision; but on the whole I felt I ought to go, though it is "taking chances. "

He began his new work early in May, 1895.  The Force had, through years of Tammany mis-government, become demoralized by favoritism and corruption.   There was a regular table of charges for appointments and promotions, so much for admission to the Force, so much for each step upward.   A man without money or political backing had no hope of advancement.    Graft was everywhere.    Criminals received immunity.    Policemen, on the other hand, were punished for making arrests against the wishes of the politicians.    The morale of the rank and file had consequently suffered.   While the few who were dishonest intrigued and "grafted" and grew powerful, the majority who were "square" lost heart in their work and pride in the Force.     The poison of corruption sapped their energy and purpose.  

"The Police Department was in a coma," said a lieutenant of police, many years later, "and Roosevelt woke it up. "

"He put new morale into the Force," said a captain of police.  "All payments for advancement stopped at once.  No political boss could appoint, promote, or injure you.  Promotions were strictly on the level.  No man was afraid to do his duty while Roosevelt was commissioner, because he knew that the commissioner was behind him.  The crooks were afraid of the cops and the cops were not afraid of the crooks.  All the decent, manly fellows on the Force loved this strenuous master who led them.  He was human.  You could talk to him.  He made even people with a shady past feel at home with him. "

"No matter how you felt when you were going to him," said the lieutenant of police, "when you were with him you felt you were as good as he was.  He gets acquainted with me as an East Side kid, and because I was a genuine East Side kid he stuck to me.  And he made me feel that he would sooner be seen in the company of me and my kind than in the company of ambassadors and kings. "

"It took some months," said the captain of police, "to give the Force their faith in Roosevelt.  They thought he might be just a flash in the pan.  But they found out soon there was no bunk in him.  He had an open door for any member of the Force.  Every man who really tried to do right or, having gone crooked, reformed and showed he was trying to do right, always received a fair chance.  He detested cowardice and shirking and the milk-and water men, but he always stuck to the man who proved he was doing or trying to do his job. "

"He was a great sticker," said the lieutenant of police. 

"The whole thing in a nutshell was this," said the captain of police.  '' The Force, kickers, gamblers, and all, knew in their hearts that if they gave good and faithful service this man Roosevelt would stick to them.  And if they incurred the enmity of the underworld or the political world, no unjust accusation would hurt them.  It would help them, if anything. "

"I've had my troubles on the Force since he left," said the lieutenant of police, "and there's been times when I've felt, just as any man would, like getting my revenge, when the chance came, on men who were trying to hurt me, or doing things that other men were doing, but that weren't just all right.  But I thought of him and I didn't do them.  I said to myself, People know that you're his friend and what you do reflects on him.  You have a right to dabble with your own reputation, but you haven't a right to dabble with his. "

"I guess," said the captain of police, "that nine-tenths of the men that's ever come in contact with Theodore Roosevelt are better and squarer men because of it. "

The lieutenant of police was an East Side Jew named Otto Raphael; the captain of police was an Irishman named Edward Bourke.  Both owed their careers to the new ideas which Roosevelt introduced at Headquarters on Mulberry Street.  Under the old system, Raphael would never have had a chance even to join the Force, for he had neither money nor influence; and Bourke would have been dishonorably discharged and sent "up the river," for he had dared to do the unpardonable thing and to arrest a lawbreaker who had a "pull" with Tammany Hall.  Roosevelt picked Raphael out of a crowd because he liked his face, and urged him to take the examinations; and by his unexpected appearance in a police court saved Bourke from the "frame-up" that was to send him to the penitentiary because he had obeyed orders and closed a saloon that no "copper" had ever had the nerve to close before.  His action in both cases was of a sort unheard of in Mulberry Street.  It marked the beginning of a new order. 

Roosevelt plunged into the work of reform with passionate enthusiasm.  He had enjoyed his Washington activity; he had enjoyed the fight of it.  But the activity had been comparatively tame and the fights, though hot, were never dangerous.  To put integrity and pride and spirit back into a corrupted and disrupted police force was a different matter, less akin to the desk work of a Washington office than to the wild adventures of the Dakota days.  In Mulberry Street his work lay among strong, fearless, and often defiant and desperate men.  It called into play every ounce of courage and manliness he possessed.  The agents of evil within the Force allied themselves against him with the agents of evil without.  Yellow newspapers blackened his character, the politicians even of his own party endeavored to intimidate him and, failing, to legislate him out of office. 

The trouble was that every move he made for honesty and justice in the Force and in the execution of the laws brought him into conflict with the whole elaborate system which corrupt police officers, corrupt politicians, corrupt business men, and the agents of the underworld had built up to make easy the way of the (influential) transgressor.  The first great clash came over the enforcement of the so-called excise law, demanding that all saloons in the state be closed on Sunday. 

The law was extreme and public sentiment was against it.  It was on the statutes, however, and Roosevelt decided that respect for law and order demanded that it be enforced.  He set about vigorously to enforce it. 

A howl arose from all sides.  The saloon-keepers, the brewers, the politicians, the yellow journals indignantly cried that the law was "dead," that it had never been enforced and never could be enforced. 

Roosevelt replied that if the law was dead the thing to do was to repeal it. 

He found out shortly, however, that it was not "dead" at all, and that the police had been enforcing it right and left with vigor.  But they had been enforcing it not against all saloon-keepers alike, but only against those who had no political influence.  The men who paid blackmail to Tammany Hall were safe.  The men who refused to pay were subjected to every form of petty tyranny and injustice.  Roosevelt found that, as formerly in the matter of appointments and promotions on the Force, there were fixed charges for police "protection" covering every variety of lawbreaking. 

He flung all his energy into the fight.  Once more he appealed to the people.  The scoffers cried that he was merely seeking the lime-light, but he himself knew that the only hope of real reform lay in the creation of a public sentiment against the evils of police corruption.  He told the citizens of New York what he was trying to do to make their city a safe and decent place to live in, and demanded their support.  "I would rather see this administration turned out because it enforced the laws," he cried, "than see it succeed by Violating them. "

A parade was arranged in protest against his enforcement of the excise law.  Twenty thousand men were in line.  Jeeringly, he was invited to review it. 

It was a defiant challenge, intended as a joke.  To the amazement and consternation of the men who made it, he accepted it. 

He reviewed the parade.  It was the case of the Marquis de Mores over again.  The Marquis had wanted to shoot him, the saloon-keepers wanted to kill him politically.  In both cases his quick and decisive action saved the day. 

The parade began with jeers and sneers for Roosevelt.  It ended in the wildest enthusiasm for the man against whose policy the parade was supposed to be a protest!

While the struggle on the saloon question continued, Roosevelt was diligently building up the morale and discipline of the Force.  His enormous energy, his courage, his knowledge of men and sympathy with human nature, his ability to defy and crush the evil-doers with an iron hand and yet keep his heart tender and warm for the saving grace of humanity in them these characteristic qualities of his had never shone to better advantage. 

The lawbreakers [wrote Jacob Riis] predicted scornfully that he would "knuckle down to politics the way they all did," and lived to respect him, though they swore at him as the one of them all who was stronger than pull. 

To the Force he was like a continuous electric current that galvanized to life what had been an inert lump.  The newspapers called him "Haroun-al-Roosevelt" because night after night he would prowl about the streets of the East Side between midnight and dawn, or ride on horseback through the wilds of the Bronx, with only Otto Raphael for company, to see for himself how the men were performing their duty. 

Twice [this week] I have spent the night in patrolling New York on my own account [he wrote his sister after he had been in office a month] to see exactly what the men were doing.  My experiences were interesting, and the trips did good, though each meant my going forty hours at a stretch without any sleep tramping the streets, finding out by personal inspection how the police were doing their duty.  A good many were not doing their duty; and I had a line of huge, frightened guardians of the peace down for reprimand or fine, as a sequel.  .  .  .  These midnight rambles are great fun.  My whole work brings me in contact with every class of people in New York, as no other work possibly could; and I get a glimpse of the real life of the swarming millions. 

He became the terror of the sluggard even as he was the idol of the man who did his duty. 

"For the first time," said Riis, "a moral purpose came into Mulberry Street.  In the light of it everything was transformed. "

To men like Riis who had fought for playgrounds and better tenement conditions, the coming of Roosevelt meant the fulfilment of the dreams of a lifetime.  No wonder Riis worshiped him as a sort of archangel come down from heaven to repair all the ills of mankind.  Riis had pleaded for years in vain for something more useful to the poor of Mulberry Bend than distant pity and tenement-house laws which were never enforced.  Roosevelt had come to him even before he was commissioner, saying, "I want to help. "   Riis took him at his word. 

"He wasn't satisfied with what the socialists handed him," said Otto Raphael.  "He went to it himself.  Nothing would stop him. " 

And nothing did.  Winter and summer, but most in hot midsummer nights, Roosevelt went with Riis through the tenements to see for himself how "the other half" lived.  Neither filth nor stench could hold him back.  The president of the Police Board was also a member of the Health Commission.  It was therefore very much the business of the Police Commissioner to find out why in one group of tenements off Mulberry Bend one-third of all the babies died.  Other commissioners had not bothered about it.  Roosevelt did. 

The tenements came down.  Other tenements came down.  Landlords protested and rushed to the courts.  But they got no satisfaction.  Parks and playgrounds were opened, the overcrowded old Tombs prison was demolished and a new one erected on its site, the police lodging-houses, which had degenerated into harbors for every species of tramp and vagrant and nurseries of every variety of crime, were closed. 

And always the "grafters" howled, and the yellow newspapers jeered, fanning the flame of class hatred and the timid, good people protested and, because they did not understand, lent their strength to the people who were neither timid nor good. 

In the New York political world just at present [he wrote his sister, after he had been eight months in office] every man's hand is against me; every politician and every editor; and I live in a welter of small intrigue.  . . .  I rather think that in one way or another I sllall be put out of office before many months go by.  But as I don't see what else I could have done,.  I take things with much philosophy and will abide the event unmoved.  I have made my blows felt, at any rate!

Day by day the struggle became more bitter. 

I work and fight!  from dawn until dusk, almost; and the difficulties, the opposition, the lukewarm support, I encounter, give me hours of profound depression; but at bottom I know the work has been well worth doing, and that I have done it as well as it could be done, and what I most care for is its intensely practical, workaday character; it is a grimy struggle, but a vital one. 
Two weeks later he was writing:

All day I strive to push matters along; to keep on good terms with the Mayor, while rejecting his advice and refusing to obey his orders; not to be drawn into a personal quarrel with Platt; not to let my colleagues split either among themselves or with me; to work with reformers like Dr.  Parkhurst, and yet not let them run away with the Department; to keep weeding out the bad men; to attend to the thousand complaints, well and ill founded, of citizens; to try to improve discipline, and to build up the detective bureau and develop leaders; and so on and so on.  By evening I am pretty well tired. 

Gradually it began to dawn on the minds of the people of the city that the Police Department was becoming more efficient than it had been at any previous time in its history and '' the screeching mendacity of the newspapers'' began gradually to '' wear through. " But the politicians of both parties continued to fight him, hammer and tongs. 

There is nothing of the purple in it [he wrote of his work in June, 1896].  It is as grimy as all work for municipal reform over here must be for some decades to come; and it is inconceivably arduous, disheartening, and irritating, beyond almost all other work of the kind.  . . .  I have to contend with the hostility of Tammany, and the almost equal hostility of the Republican machine; I have to contend with the folly of the reformers and the indifference of decent citizens; above all I have to contend with the singularly foolish law under which we administer the Department.  The work itself is hard, worrying, and often very disagreeable.  The police deal with vile crime and hideous vice; and it is not work to be done on a rose-water basis.  The actual fighting, with any of my varied foes, if do not much mind; I take it as part of the day's work; but there is much that is painful.  But fight after fight is won, and it’s very memory vanishes. 

Meanwhile, his efforts had been made even more difficult by constantly increasing friction with other members of the board.  His "queer, strong, able colleague," Parker, whom he had described a year before as "the most positive character with whom I have ever worked on a commission," had turned violently against him.  "If he and I get at odds," Roosevelt had prophesied, "we shall have a battle royal," and a battle royal it turned out to be. 

I have endless petty rows with Fitch and Parker; very irritating, because they are so petty; but very necessary; the battle for decent government must be won by just such interminable, grimy drudgery; painful months of marching and skirmishing, mostly indecisive; the "glorious days" of striking victory, are few and far between, and never take place at all unless there is plenty of this disagreeable, preliminary work. 

Parker blocked every move he endeavored to make toward better conditions on the Force and among the poor. 

"Lord!" Roosevelt exclaimed in one of his letters.  "It is hard work trying to really accomplish something in civic reform!"

The fight within the board was as bitter in its way as the fight against the lawbreakers, the "grafters," and the landlords who wanted their dollars and did not care though the blood of children dripped from them.  It hampered the work of reform and threatened to destroy the new spirit and discipline of the Force.  But Roosevelt knew that the things for which he fought were right, and raged at the short-sightedness which insisted on blocking the gears of progress and justice.  Respectable people were shocked because he lost his temper.  But he was human, and he saw better than they the enormous needs to be met and the powers of evil to be conquered. 

It was, as he described it, a "grimy" struggle, but the letters of this period reveal how little of the grime remained on the man who spent his days in the midst of it.  The children at Sagamore furnished, it seems, a kind of spiritual bath that amid every variety of crime and vice kept him clean and strong.  His letters are full of the amusing doings of "the bunnies. " In the very midst of one of his "chronic" fights he was writing from Sagamore Hill:

The children are in the seventh heaven; I wish you could see their costumes, especially Kermit's; he wears blue overalls like those of our hired man, with a cap like that of a second-rate French cook, a pair of shabby tennis shoes, and as his hands are poisonned a pair of exceedingly dirty kid gloves.  When, in this costume, turning somersaults on the manureheap he is indeed a joy forever.  Ted has suddenly begun greatly to enjoy riding pony Grant.  Archie is the sweetest thing you ever saw and perfectly friendly with cows, dogs, and horses.  I have been teaching Ted and Kermit to shoot with the Flobert rifle.  .  .  .  We went on a picnic to the marsh [he wrote a month later].  We were out sk or seven hours, Alice steering one boat, while Edith steered mine.  Ted enjoyed himself hugely, and on the way home slumbered peacefully in the bilgewater.  The autumn brought delights of its own:

Bob [Robert Ferguson] passed Thanksgiving day here, and was just a dear, and the same playmate as ever.  In the afternoon he and I and Ted took a ten-mile tramp, with axes, to clear out a bridle track which had become overgrown.  Ted really stood the walk wonderfully.  We came home after dark.  The faithful Susan [a pet of the children who had been named regardless of his sex] was with us, and at the foot of our hill he treed a 'possum.  So Bob ran for a gun, while Ted (who had reached the tree, and had seen the 'possum before either Bob or myself) and Susan and I stayed to keep ward over the 'possum.  Bob returned leading the delighted Kermit, who, as we returned in triumph with our quarry, explained "that it was the first time he had ever seen a fellow shot. " He felt as if it was much like any other homicide; but much approved of it. 

Ted [aged eight] chops hard with me; today he got down an oak at least sixty feet high. 
Christmas brought a magic all its own.  There was first the excitement of selecting the tree, packing into a carriage, old and young, and driving through the woods under the gray sky amid the joyous racket of the dogs.  The master of Sagamore himself always chopped down the tree.  Then on Christmas morning there were first the bulging stockings, then the rush of bare feet into the room of the father and mother where the larger presents were: then the drive to the little church and the short address of Oyster Bay's Leading Citizen; and then home again to roast pig and "hearts" before the roaring wood fire. 
Romping at Sagamore Hill, fighting in Mulberry Street, plowing ahead on the fourth volume of his Winning of the West when occasion offered, making speeches sometimes night after night, the object of endless abuse in New York and the lion of hour in Chicago when he made the Washington's Birthday address there under the auspices of the Union League Club, Theodore Roosevelt lived his crowded life.  He took part in the Presidential campaign of 1896, speaking here and there in behalf of McKinley. 

His candidate was victorious, and once more a Republican Administration was to have control of the government.  Roosevelt continued doggedly at his desk, cleansing the Augean stables of political corruption as effectively as opposition on his own board, in the newspapers of his own city, and among the leaders of his own political party in the state would permit. 

Meanwhile, a few people came to love him for the glorious fight that was in him, and the Force came to idolize him because they knew he was "square"; and here, there, and everywhere over the country, civic workers gained a deeper insight, a wider vision, and a surer courage from his experience and his personality. 

Roosevelt was no longer merely a "reformer. " He was becoming a national inspiration