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at 689 Madison Avenue) that “I have never worked harder than in these last six days.” In subsequent letters he altered the clause to read, “the last two weeks,” and “the last four weeks.”47 Hard as it was to familiarize himself with every detail of police bureaucracy, there was the intense, additional frustration of finding himself without real administrative authority. “I have to deal with three colleagues, solve terribly difficult problems, and do my work under hampering laws,” he wrote, in one of his perennial cries for power. “… I have the most important and corrupt department in New York on my hands. I shall speedily assail some of the ablest, shrewdest men in this city, who will be fighting for their lives, and I know how hard the task ahead of me is. Yet, in spite of all the nervous strain and worry, I am glad I undertook it; for it is a man’s work.”48 Being congenitally unable to function unless he had some symbols of evil to attack, Roosevelt looked about him for an opponent. As usual he selected the biggest and nearest. “I think I shall move against Byrnes at once,” he told Lodge on 18 May. “I thoroughly distrust him, and cannot do any thorough work while he remains.49

The Chief of Police was not afraid of righteous persecution. He had survived threats against himself, and against “the business,” as policemen were wont to call their profession, many times before. “It will break you,” he warned Roosevelt. “You will yield. You are but human.”50

Yet, for a Colossus, he toppled with surprising ease. Nine days after Roosevelt’s declaration, Byrnes was out. The same law which had so recently elevated him to supreme command of the force, also permitted him to retire on full pension, along with any other officer who had served twenty-five years and wished to escape embarrassing questions from the reform Board. Threatened with public investigation, he handed in his resignation on 28 May, and strode heavily out of Police Headquarters. “Men stopped and stood to watch him go, silent, respectful, sad,” wrote Lincoln Steffens, “and the next day, the world went on as usual.”51

A second symbolic departure in the last week of May was that of Inspector “Clubber” Williams. This notoriously brutal officer had earned his nickname cracking skulls on the Lower East Side, while also earning a fortune which he solemnly ascribed to real-estate speculation in Japan. Williams was the pet peeve of Steffens, who told Roosevelt he would love to see him fired. “Well, you will” was the answer.52

A few days later [24 May] TR threw up his second-story window, leaned out, and yelled his famous cowboy call, “Hi yi yi.” He often summoned Riis and me thus. When we poked our heads out of my window across the street this time, he called me alone.

“Not you, Jake. Steffens, come up here.”

I hurried over to his office, and there in the hall stood Williams, who glared as usual at me with eyes that looked like clubs. I passed on in to TR, who bade me sit down on a certain chair in the back of the room. Then he summoned Williams and fired him; that is to say, he forced him to retire. It was done almost without words. Williams had been warned; the papers were all ready. He “signed there,” rose, turned and looked at me, and disappeared.53

According to Commissioner Andrews, the resignations of Byrnes and Williams “shook the force from top to bottom.” Men in the ranks felt puzzled and insecure in the power vacuum that followed. They hesitated to accept Roosevelt’s authority until Acting Chief Peter Conlin, a quiet, colorless ex-inspector, revealed whose side he was on. In the meantime there could be no doubt that the president of the Board had scored a double personal triumph.

Roosevelt boasted publicly that “the work of reforming the force was half done, because it was well begun.” The World agreed with him. “More than half the difficulty of police reform lay in the principle of corruption inherent in the old machine organization, and firmly established by years of toleration … the removal of [Byrnes and Williams] renders the further work of improvement