The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [252]
The memoirs of Commissioners Andrews and Roosevelt differ as to the true extent of corruption in their department in May 1895. Andrews, who had a military fondness for men in uniform, believed that “the great majority of the rank and file were honest and efficient … Graft was largely confined to certain senior officers, and their ‘wardmen’, or graft collectors.”19 Roosevelt expressed himself rather more negatively. “From top to bottom,” he wrote, “the New York police force was utterly demoralized by the gangrene … venality and blackmail went hand-in-hand with the basest forms of low ward politics … the policeman, the ward politician, the liquor seller, and the criminal alternately preyed on one another and helped one another to prey on the general public.”20
Of course the truth lay somewhere between these two extremes. However both Commissioners, in referring to wardmen and ward politics, emphasized that the Police Department was not in business merely for itself. Its traditional function, indeed, was to finance the city’s political machines. Often the person collecting “contributions” around each precinct at the end of the week was not a policeman at all, but an employee of Tammany Hall.21 The vast sums thus accrued had kept the Democratic organization in power from 1886 (the year Abram Hewitt defeated Theodore Roosevelt for Mayor) until 1894, when mounting disgust over the Lexow hearings swept the reform ticket to victory.
As a result of this near-decade of corrupt domination of New York City politics, Tammany Hall had become so solidly entrenched that Mayor Strong’s election seemed but a temporary interruption of the status quo. “Our people could not stand the rotten police corruption,” Boss Richard Croker admitted. “They’ll be back at the next election; they can’t stand reform either.”22
Croker’s confidence was based on the fact that the Police Board also constituted the Board of Elections. This useful quirk in the law gave the four Commissioners power to appoint all election officers, prepare and count all ballots, and preserve order—or willful disorder—at the polls.23 Croker’s last tame Commissioner on Mulberry Street had boasted that “given control of the police, he cared not how the public voted.”24 Croker could have rigged the last election, as he had others in the past; but, being a political realist, he deemed it wiser not to play with the passions aroused by the Lexow investigation. Tammany Hall could afford to put up its shutters for a season or two. Its precinct organization was as perfect as ever, and its financial prospects were excellent. Corruption in the Police Department would continue, Roosevelt or no Roosevelt.25
“NOW, THEN, what’ll we do?” Roosevelt’s impetuous question sounded odd in the ears of the two reporters as they sat in his office on the first day of his Commissionership. “It was just as if we three were the Police Board,” marveled Lincoln Steffens, “TR, Riis, and I.” Willing as both men were to suggest what and whom Roosevelt might attack—for he was clearly in a fighting mood—they cautioned him to “go a bit slow” at first, and to discuss a program of reform with his colleagues.26 But Roosevelt knew he could achieve little in this job by proceeding deliberately; it was about as powerful, in constitutional terms, as his last. Once again he must exercise his genius for press relations. Instinct told him that these scribes would be of more use to him than the three Commissioners now waiting in the hallway.27
Jacob Riis, at forty-six, was the most influential reporter in the city. A big, rumpled, noisy, sweet-natured Dane, he had been obsessed with social reform ever since his youth as a penniless immigrant on the Lower East Side. (Deep within him he carried the memory of a policeman beating out the brains of his pet dog against the steps of Church Street Station.)28 In 1890 Riis’s documentary book How the Other Half Lives, illustrated with his own photographs, had shocked all thinking Americans into