The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [254]
Generally speaking, this interesting Commissioner’s face is red. He has lived a great deal out of doors, and that accounts for it. His hair is thick and short … Under his right ear he has a long scar. It is the opinion of all the policemen who have talked with him that he got that scar fighting an Indian out West. It is also their opinion that the Indian is dead.
But Mr. Roosevelt’s voice is the policeman’s hardest trial. It is an exasperating voice, a sharp voice, a rasping voice. It is a voice that comes from the tips of the teeth and seems to say in its tones, “What do you amount to, anyway?”
One thing our noble force may make up its mind to at once—it must do as Roosevelt says, for it is not likely that it will succeed in beating him.38
Jacob Riis, reporting another trial for the Evening Sun, noted how impossible it was for Roosevelt to yield conduct of the court to any of his colleagues. Within a quarter of an hour (although Andrews had the chair) he was putting all the questions and interrupting most of the answers. “Once or twice he turned to Commissioner Andrews and apologized … but by the time the third case ended there was no longer any apparent need to do that.”39
Andrews did not mind being upstaged, and Grant liked nothing so much as to sit and stare into space, but Parker, Roosevelt quickly sensed, needed careful handling. Fortunately the Democrat seemed to prefer working behind the scenes. Immaculate of trouser-leg, dark and glossy of beard, he would loll in his chair with fingers intertwined, smiling easily and often. He projected an air of fashionable languor, coming to work late, leaving early, not bothering to attend many board meetings; yet there was a certain “sinister efficiency”40 about the way he got things done that Roosevelt greatly admired. “Parker is my mainstay,” he wrote Lodge. “He is able and forceful, but a little inclined to be tricky. Andrews is good but timid, and ‘sticks in the bark.’ Grant is a good fellow, but dull and easily imposed on; he is our element of weakness.”41
Roosevelt found his new duties “absorbingly interesting,”42 and threw himself into them with animal vigor. His daily arrival at Mulberry Street became a ritual entertainment for the stoop-sitters of No. 303. About 8:30 he would come around the corner of Bleecker Street, walking with a springy tread, goggling his spectacles enthusiastically at everything around, about, and behind him. There was a rapid increase in pace as he drew near Police Headquarters, followed by a flying ascent of the front steps. Ahead of him in the lobby, a uniformed porter would step into the waiting elevator and reach for its controls; but by that time Roosevelt, feet blurring, was already halfway up the stairs. Arriving on the second floor with no perceptible rise or fall of his chest, he would scurry across the hallway into his office overlooking the street. Here, one morning, a reporter was on hand to note that “He swings the chair, sits down, and takes off his glasses and his hat, all so quickly that he appears to be doing [everything] at once.”43 Replacing the glasses with pince-nez, Roosevelt would “fling his attention” at the first document in front of him. Read, digested, and acted upon, the item would be given to his “girl secretary”44 for filing, or, often as not, dispensed with in Rooseveltian fashion, i.e., crushed into a ball and hurled to the floor. By the end of the day the area around his desk was ankle-deep in paper jetsam.45 “I wonder he does not wear himself out,” sighed Commissioner Grant.46
On 13 May, Roosevelt admitted to Bamie (who was now on an extended stay in London, and had rented him her house