The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [250]
Roosevelt broke into a run when he caught sight of Riis waiting outside No. 303. As Steffens remembered it,
He came on ahead down the street; he yelled, “Hello, Jake,” to Riis, and running up the stairs to the front door of Police Headquarters, he waved us reporters to follow. We did. With the police officials standing around watching, the new Board went up to the second story … TR seized Riis, who introduced me, and still running, he asked questions: “Where are our offices? Where is the Board Room? What do we do first?” Out of the half-heard answers he gathered the way to the Board Room, where the three old Commissioners waited, like three of the new Commissioners, stiff, formal and dignified. Not TR. He introduced himself, his colleagues, with handshakes, and called a meeting of the new Board … had himself elected President—this had been prearranged—and then adjourned to pull Riis and me with him into his office.
“Now, then, what’ll we do?”6
Avery Andrews, writing more than sixty years later, confirmed the accuracy of this account, with the small qualification that Roosevelt’s election had not been prearranged. “As the senior Commissioner in length of service, I called the meeting to order and nominated Roosevelt as President of the Board; after which I was elected Treasurer.”7 Thus some semblance of bipartisanship was preserved at the outset by distributing control of the Police Department between the two political parties.
“The public,” Roosevelt announced in his first presidential statement, “may rest assured that so far as I am concerned, there will be no politics in the department, and I know that I voice the sentiment of my colleagues in that respect. We are all activated by the desire to so regulate this department that it will earn the respect and confidence of the community.… All appointments and promotions will be made for merit only, and without regard to political or religious considerations.”8
ALTHOUGH ROOSEVELT WAS doubtless pleased to have been given pride of place among his colleagues, he found, within two days of taking office, that the honor was merely titular. On 8 May 1895, Mayor Strong approved an Albany bill which substantially altered the power structure of the New York police.9 Far from elevating the president of the Board above the other Commissioners (as a certain Assemblyman named Roosevelt had suggested in 1884), the Bi-Partisan Police Act depressed him to virtually the same level. Since two Board members were necessarily Republicans, and the other two Democrats, agenda tending to divide the parties would inevitably cause deadlock. Roosevelt knew that these could be resolved only by deal-making or by wrangling. Neither solution appealed to him. The new law, he wrote sarcastically, “modeled the government of the police force somewhat on the lines of the Polish Parliament.”10
It virtually guaranteed that, contrary to what he had just announced, there was going to be plenty of politics-as-usual in the Police Department, from the Board on down. One of the Act’s provisions, frustrating to him as a former campaigner against partisan patronage, was to transfer authority over police examinations from the municipal civil-service commission to a special panel of police officers—each of whom, presumably, would be easily bought. The Act insisted, further, on equal two-party representation while extending the Police Board’s control of city elections. This in effect gave the Republican party—a perennial minority in New York municipal affairs—disproportionate clout in “supervising” voter behavior. At the same time, crazily, it seemed designed to thwart any majority decision by the Commissioners. “Lest we should get such a majority, it gave each member power to veto the actions of his colleagues in certain very important matters; and, lest we should do too much when we were unanimous, it provided that the Chief [of Police], our nominal subordinate, should