Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
had gone too far, and by way of protest knocked Bourke down. This was
an error of judgment on his part, for when Bourke arose he knocked down
Calahan. The two then grappled and fell on the floor, while the "friends
of personal liberty" danced around the fight and endeavored to stamp on
everything they thought wasn't Calahan. However, Bourke, though pretty
roughly handled, got his man and shut the saloon. When he appeared
against the lawbreaker in court next day, he found the court-room
crowded with influential Tammany Hall politicians, backed by one or
two Republican leaders of the same type; for Calahan was a baron of
the underworld, and both his feudal superiors and his feudal inferiors
gathered to the rescue. His backers in court included a Congressman and
a State Senator, and so deep-rooted was the police belief in "pull"
that his own superiors had turned against Bourke and were preparing to
sacrifice him. Just at this time I acted on the information given me by
my newspaper friend by starting in person for the court. The knowledge
that I knew what was going on, that I meant what I said, and that I
intended to make the affair personal, was all that was necessary. Before
I reached the court all effort to defend Calahan had promptly ceased,
and Bourke had come forth triumphant. I immediately promoted him to
roundsman. He is a captain now. He has been on the force ever since,
save that when the Spanish War came he obtained a holiday without pay
for six months and reentered the navy, serving as gun captain in one of
the gunboats, and doing his work, as was to be expected, in first-rate
fashion, especially when under fire.
Let me again say that when men tell me that the police are irredeemably
bad I remember scores and hundreds of cases like this of Bourke, like
the case I have already mentioned of Raphael, like the other cases I
have given above.
It is useless to tell me that these men are bad. They are naturally
first-rate men. There are no better men anywhere than the men of the
New York police force; and when they go bad it is because the system
is wrong, and because they are not given the chance to do the good work
they can do and would rather do. I never coddled these men. I punished
them severely whenever I thought their conduct required it. All I did
was to try to be just; to reward them when they did well; in short, to
act squarely by them. I believe that, as a whole, they liked me. When,
in 1912, I ran for President on the Progressive ticket, I received a
number of unsigned letters inclosing sums of money for the campaign. One
of these inclosed twenty dollars. The writer, who did not give his
name, said that he was a policeman, that I had once had him before me on
charges, and had fined him twenty dollars; that, as a matter of fact,
he had not committed the offense for which I fined him, but that the
evidence was such that he did not wonder that I had been misled, and
never blamed me for it, because I had acted squarely and had given
honest and decent men a chance in the Police Department; and that now he
inclosed a twenty-dollar bill, the amount of the fine inflicted on him
so many years before. I have always wished I knew who the man was.
The disciplinary courts were very interesting. But it was
extraordinarily difficult to get at the facts in the more complicated
cases--as must always be true under similar circumstances; for
ordinarily it is necessary to back up the superior officer who makes
the charge, and yet it is always possible that this superior officer is
consciously or unconsciously biased against his subordinate.
In the courts the charges were sometimes brought by police officers and
sometimes by private citizens. In the latter case we would get queer
insights into twilight phases of New York life. It was necessary to be
always on our guard. Often an accusation would be brought against the
policeman because he had been guilty of misconduct. Much more often the
accusation merely meant that the officer had incurred animosity by doing
his duty. I remember one amusing case where the officer was wholly to
blame but had acted in entire good faith.
One of the favorite and most demoralizing forms of gambling in New York
was policy-playing. The policy slips consisted of papers with three rows
of figures written on them. The officer in question was a huge pithecoid
lout of a creature, with a wooden face and a receding forehead, and his
accuser whom he had arrested the preceding evening was a little grig
of a red-headed man, obviously respectable, and almost incoherent with
rage. The anger of the little red-headed man was but natural, for he had
just come out from a night in the station-house. He had been arrested
late in the evening on suspicion that he was a policy-player, because of
the rows of figures on a piece of paper which he had held in his hand,
and because at the time of his arrest he had just stepped into the
entrance of the hall of a tenement-house in order to read by lamplight.
The paper was produced in evidence. There were the three rows of figures
all right, but, as the accused explained, hopping up and down with rage
and excitement, they were all of them the numbers of hymns. He was the
superintendent of a small Sunday-school. He had written down the hymns
for several future services, one under the other, and on the way home
was stopping to look at them, under convenient lamp-posts, and finally
by the light of the lamp in a tenement-house hallway; and it was this
conduct which struck the sagacious man in uniform as "suspicious."
One of the saddest features of police work is dealing with the social
evil, with prostitutes and houses of ill fame. In so far as the law gave
me power, I always treated the men taken in any raid on these houses
precisely as the women were treated. My experience brought me to the
very strong conviction that there ought not to be any toleration by law
of the vice. I do not know of any method which will put a complete
stop to the evil, but I do know certain things that ought to be done to
minimize it. One of these is treating men and women on an exact equality
for the same act. Another is the establishment of night courts and of
special commissions to deal with this special class of cases. Another
is that suggested by the Rev. Charles Stelzle, of the Labor Temple--to
publish conspicuously the name of the owner of any property used for
immoral purposes, after said owner had been notified of the use and has
failed to prevent it. Another is to prosecute the keepers and backers of
brothels, men and women, as relentlessly and punish them as severely as
pickpockets and common thieves. They should never be fined; they should
be imprisoned. As for the girls, the very young ones and first
offenders should be put in the charge of probation officers or sent to
reformatories, and the large percentage of feeble-minded girls and of
incorrigible girls and women should be sent to institutions created for
them. We would thus remove from this hideous commerce the articles
of commerce. Moreover, the Federal Government must in ever-increasing
measure proceed against the degraded promoters of this commercialism,
for their activities are inter-State and the Nation can often deal with
them more effectively than the States; although, as public sentiment
becomes aroused, Nation, State, and municipality will all cooperate
towards the same end of rooting out the traffic. But the prime need is
to raise the level of individual morality; and, moreover, to encourage
early marriages, the single standard of sex-morality, and a strict sense
of reciprocal conjugal obligation. The women who preach late marriages
are by just so much making it difficult to better the standard of
chastity.
As regards the white slave traffic, the men engaged in it, and the women
too, are far worse criminals than any ordinary murderers can be. For
them there is need of such a law as that recently adopted in England
through the efforts of Arthur Lee, M.P., a law which includes whipping
for the male offenders. There are brutes so low, so infamous, so
degraded and bestial in their cruelty and brutality, that the only way
to get at them is through their skins. Sentimentality on behalf of such
men is really almost as unhealthy and wicked as the criminality of the
men themselves. My experience is that there should be no toleration of
any "tenderloin" or "red light" district, and that, above all, there
should be the most relentless war on commercialized vice. The men who
profit and make their living by the depravity and the awful misery
of other human beings stand far below any ordinary criminals, and no
measures taken against them can be too severe.
As for the wretched girls who follow the dreadful trade in question, a
good deal can be done by a change in economic conditions. This ought
to be done. When girls are paid wages inadequate to keep them from
starvation, or to permit them to live decently, a certain proportion are
forced by their economic misery into lives of vice. The employers and
all others responsible for these conditions stand on a moral level not
far above the white slavers themselves. But it is a mistake to suppose
that either the correction of these economic conditions or the abolition
of the white slave trade will wholly correct the evil or will even reach
the major part of it. The economic factor is very far from being the
chief factor in inducing girls to go into this dreadful life. As with so
many other problems, while there must be governmental action, there must
also be strengthening of the average individual character in order to
achieve the desired end. Even where economic conditions are bad, girls
who are both strong and pure will remain unaffected by temptations to
which girls of weak character or lax standards readily yield. Any man
who knows the wide variation in the proportions of the different races
and nationalities engaged in prostitution must come to the conclusion
that it is out of the question to treat economic conditions as the sole
conditions or even as the chief conditions that determine this question.
There are certain races--the Irish are honorably conspicuous among
them--which, no matter what the economic pressure, furnish relatively
few inmates of houses of ill fame. I do not believe that the differences
are due to permanent race characteristics; this is shown by the
fact that the best settlement houses find that practically all their
"long-term graduates," so to speak, all the girls that come for a long
period under their influence, no matter what their race or national
origin, remain pure. In every race there are some naturally vicious
individuals and some weak individuals who readily succumb under economic
pressure. A girl who is lazy and hates hard work, a girl whose mind is
rather feeble, and who is of "subnormal intelligence," as the phrase now
goes, or a girl who craves cheap finery and vapid pleasure, is always
in danger. A high ideal of personal purity is essential. Where the same
pressure under the same economic conditions has tenfold the effect
on one set of people that it has on another, it is evident that the
question of moral standards is even more important than the question
of economic standards, very important though this question is. It is
important for us to remember that the girl ought to have the chance, not
only for the necessaries of life, but for innocent pleasure; and that
even more than the man she must not be broken by overwork, by excessive
toil. Moreover, public opinion and the law should combine to hunt
down the "flagrant man swine" who himself hunts down poor or silly or
unprotected girls. But we must not, in foolish sentimentality, excuse
the girl from her duty to keep herself pure. Our duty to achieve the