Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
duty honestly and fearlessly, and never cause you to feel that you were
mistaken in me, so that you will be justly proud of my record." The
Senator, though politically opposed to me, always kept a feeling of
friendship for me after this incident. He served in Congress while I was
President.
The police can be used to help all kinds of good purposes. When I was
Police Commissioner much difficulty had been encountered in locating
illegal and fraudulent practitioners of medicine. Dr. Maurice Lewi
called on me, with a letter from James Russell Parsons, the Secretary of
the Board of Regents at Albany, and asked me if I could not help.
After questioning him I found that the local authorities were eager to
prosecute these men, but could not locate them; and I made up my mind
I would try my hand at it. Accordingly, a sealed order was sent to the
commanding officer of each police precinct in New York, not to be opened
until just before the morning roll call, previous to the police squad
going on duty. This order required that, immediately upon reaching post,
each patrolman should go over his beat and enter upon a sheet of paper,
provided for that purpose, the full name and address of every doctor
sign there appearing. Immediately upon securing this information, the
patrolman was instructed to return the sheet to the officer in charge of
the precinct. The latter in turn was instructed to collect and place
in one large envelope and to return to Police Headquarters all the
data thus received. As a result of this procedure, within two hours the
prosecuting officials of the city of New York were in possession of the
name and address of every person in New York who announced himself as
a physician; and scores of pretended physicians were brought to book or
driven from the city.
One of the perennially serious and difficult problems, and one of the
chief reasons for police blackmail and corruption, is to be found in the
excise situation in New York. When I was Police Commissioner, New York
was a city with twelve or fifteen thousand saloons, with a State law
which said they should be closed on Sundays, and with a local sentiment
which put a premium on violating the law by making Sunday the most
profitable day in the week to the saloon-keeper who was willing to take
chances. It was this willingness to take chances that furnished to the
corrupt politician and the corrupt police officer their opportunities.
There was in New York City a strong sentiment in favor of honesty in
politics; there was also a strong sentiment in favor of opening the
saloons on Sundays; and, finally, there was a strong sentiment in favor
of keeping the saloons closed on Sunday. Unfortunately, many of the men
who favored honest government nevertheless preferred keeping the saloons
open to having honest government; and many others among the men who
favored honest government put it second to keeping the saloons closed.
Moreover, among the people who wished the law obeyed and the saloons
closed there were plenty who objected strongly to every step necessary
to accomplish the result, although they also insisted that the result
should be accomplished.
Meanwhile the politicians found an incredible profit in using the law as
a club to keep the saloons in line; all except the biggest, the owners
of which, or the owners of the breweries back of which, sat in the inner
councils of Tammany, or controlled Tammany's allies in the Republican
organization. The police used the partial and spasmodic enforcement
of the law as a means of collecting blackmail. The result was that the
officers of the law, the politicians, and the saloon-keepers became
inextricably tangled in a network of crime and connivance at crime. The
most powerful saloon-keepers controlled the politicians and the police,
while the latter in turn terrorized and blackmailed all the other
saloon-keepers. It was not a case of non-enforcement of the law. The
law was very actively enforced, but it was enforced with corrupt
discrimination.
It is difficult for men who have not been brought into contact with that
side of political life which deals with the underworld to understand the
brazen openness with which this blackmailing of lawbreakers was carried
out. A further very dark fact was that many of the men responsible for
putting the law on the statute-books in order to please one element of
their constituents, also connived at or even profited by the corrupt
and partial non-enforcement of the law in order to please another set of
their constituents, or to secure profit for themselves. The organ of the
liquor-sellers at that time was the Wine and Spirit Gazette. The editor
of this paper believed in selling liquor on Sunday, and felt that it was
an outrage to forbid it. But he also felt that corruption and blackmail
made too big a price to pay for the partial non-enforcement of the law.
He made in his paper a statement, the correctness of which was never
questioned, which offers a startling commentary on New York politics of
that period. In this statement he recited the fact that the system of
blackmail had been brought to such a state of perfection, and had become
so oppressive to the liquor dealers themselves, that they communicated
at length on the subject with Governor Hill (the State Democratic boss)
and then with Mr. Croker (the city Democratic boss). Finally the matter
was formally taken up by a committee of the Central Association of
Liquor Dealers in an interview they held with Mr. Martin, my Tammany
predecessor as President of the police force. In matter-of-course way
the editor's statement continues: "An agreement was made between the
leaders of Tammany Hall and the liquor dealers according to which the
monthly blackmail paid to the force should be discontinued in return for
political support." Not only did the big bosses, State and local, treat
this agreement, and the corruption to which it was due, as normal and
proper, but they never even took the trouble to deny what had been done
when it was made public. Tammany and the police, however, did not fully
live up to the agreement; and much discrimination of a very corrupt
kind, and of a very exasperating kind to liquor-sellers who wished to be
honest, continued in connection with the enforcing of the law.
In short, the agreement was kept only with those who had "pull." These
men with "pull" were benefited when their rivals were bullied and
blackmailed by the police. The police, meanwhile, who had bought
appointment or promotion, and the politicians back of them, extended the
blackmailing to include about everything from the pushcart peddler and
the big or small merchant who wished to use the sidewalk illegally for
his goods, up to the keepers of the brothel, the gambling-house, and the
policy-shop. The total blackmail ran into millions of dollars. New York
was a wide-open town. The big bosses rolled in wealth, and the corrupt
policemen who ran the force lost all sense of decency and justice.
Nevertheless, I wish to insist on the fact that the honest men on the
patrol posts, "the men with the night-sticks," remained desirous to see
honesty obtain, although they were losing courage and hope.
This was the situation that confronted me when I came to Mulberry
Street. The saloon was the chief source of mischief. It was with the
saloon that I had to deal, and there was only one way to deal with
it. That was to enforce the law. The howl that rose was deafening. The
professional politicians raved. The yellow press surpassed themselves
in clamor and mendacity. A favorite assertion was that I was enforcing
a "blue" law, an obsolete law that had never before been enforced. As
a matter of fact, I was only enforcing honestly a law that had hitherto
been enforced dishonestly. There was very little increase in the number
of arrests made for violating the Sunday law. Indeed, there were weeks
when the number of arrests went down. The only difference was that
there was no protected class. Everybody was arrested alike, and I took
especial pains to see that there was no discrimination, and that the
big men and the men with political influence were treated like every one
else. The immediate effect was wholly good. I had been told that it
was not possible to close the saloons on Sunday and that I could
not succeed. However, I did succeed. The warden of Bellevue Hospital
reported, two or three weeks after we had begun, that for the first time
in its existence there had not been a case due to a drunken brawl in the
hospital all Monday. The police courts gave the same testimony, while
savings banks recorded increased deposits and pawnshops hard times.
The most touching of all things was the fact that we received letters,
literally by the hundred, from mothers in tenement-houses who had never
been allowed to take their children to the country in the wide-open
days, and who now found their husbands willing to take them and their
families for an outing on Sunday. Jake Riis and I spent one Sunday from
morning till night in the tenement districts, seeing for ourselves what
had happened.
During the two years that we were in office things never slipped back
to anything like what they had been before. But we did not succeed
in keeping them quite as highly keyed as during these first weeks. As
regards the Sunday-closing law, this was partly because public sentiment
was not really with us. The people who had demanded honesty, but who
did not like to pay for it by the loss of illegal pleasure, joined the
openly dishonest in attacking us. Moreover, all kinds of ways of evading
the law were tried, and some of them were successful. The statute, for
instance, permitted any man to take liquor with meals. After two
or three months a magistrate was found who decided judicially that
seventeen beers and one pretzel made a meal--after which decision joy
again became unconfined in at least some of the saloons, and the yellow
press gleefully announced that my "tyranny" had been curbed. But my
prime object, that of stopping blackmail, was largely attained.
All kinds of incidents occurred in connection with this crusade. One of
them introduced me to a friend who remains a friend yet. His name was
Edward J. Bourke. He was one of the men who entered the police force
through our examinations shortly after I took office. I had summoned
twenty or thirty of the successful applicants to let me look over them;
and as I walked into the hall, one of them, a well-set-up man, called
out sharply to the others, "Gangway," making them move to one side.
I found he had served in the United States navy. The incident was
sufficient to make me keep him in mind. A month later I was notified by
a police reporter, a very good fellow, that Bourke was in difficulties,
and that he thought I had better look into the matter myself, as Bourke
was being accused by certain very influential men of grave misconduct in
an arrest he had made the night before. Accordingly, I took the matter
up personally. I found that on the new patrolman's beat the preceding
night--a new beat--there was a big saloon run by a man of great
influence in political circles known as "King" Calahan. After midnight
the saloon was still running in full blast, and Bourke, stepping inside,
told Calahan to close up. It was at the time filled with "friends of
personal liberty," as Governor Hill used at that time, in moments of
pathos, to term everybody who regarded as tyranny any restriction on the
sale of liquor. Calahan's saloon had never before in its history been
closed, and to have a green cop tell him to close it seemed to him so
incredible that he regarded it merely as a bad jest. On his next round
Bourke stepped in and repeated the order. Calahan felt that the jest