The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [256]
Roosevelt now turned his attention to questions of efficiency and discipline in the force. With shrewd flair for melodrama, he chose to begin his investigations at night.55
SHORTLY AFTER 2:00 A.M. on 7 June 1895, a stocky, bespectacled figure emerged from the Union League Club and stood on the steps overlooking Fifth Avenue. Although the night was warm, he turned the collar of his evening coat up and pulled a soft hat low over his eyes. Presently a shaggy man in dark green glasses joined him, and the pair began walking eastward along Forty-second Street. Some suspicious club attendants, accompanied by a night watchman, followed them until satisfied that whatever mischief they planned was going to take place somewhere else.
Turning down Third Avenue, Roosevelt and his companion, who was none other than Jacob Riis, walked south as far as Twenty-seventh Street without seeing a single policeman. Second Avenue was better patrolled, in that at least one officer was on the beat. But as the hours wore on, and the searchers continued to prowl around the East Side, it became apparent that New York’s Finest were also among its rarest. Roosevelt and Riis were standing outside an all-night restaurant when the owner came out, rapped the sidewalk with a stick, and gazed angrily up and down the deserted street. “Where in thunder does that copper sleep?” he asked, unaware that he was addressing the president of the Police Board.56
Later Roosevelt swooped incognito upon a roundsman and two patrolmen conversing outside a corner liquor store. “Why don’t you two men patrol your posts?” The loiterers seemed inclined to respond violently until he introduced himself, whereupon they marched off in a hurry.57 Elsewhere Roosevelt discovered an officer snoring on a butter-tub, and another “partly concealed,” as the Tribune discreetly put it, “by petticoats.”58
The result of this expedition was that the Commissioner had six names and numbers entered in his pocketbook by 7:15 A.M., when he returned to Mulberry Street to begin the next day’s work. A reporter noted that he looked “tired and worn” as he strode up the steps of Headquarters. Yet he was obviously in a good humor—so much so he could not bring himself to punish the offenders when they were brought before him at 9:30. However he announced afterward that “I certainly shall … deal severely with the next roundsman or patrolman I find guilty of any similar shortcomings.”59
Newspaper coverage that afternoon and the following morning was everything he could have desired. “ROOSEVELT AS ROUNDSMAN” one headline declaimed. “Policemen Didn’t Dream the President of the Board Was Catching Them Napping,” read another. “He Makes the Night Hideous for Sleepy Patrolmen,” reported a third. Even more gratifying were fulsome editorials of praise, in other cities as well as New York. It was generally agreed that “a new epoch” had begun in the Police Department, and that Roosevelt, not Peter Conlin, was its real Chief.60 The Brooklyn Times rejoiced that wanton clubbing of New Yorkers would now decline; no cop would wish his nightstick “to collide with the head of the ubiquitous Theodore.” The Washington Star suggested that all members of the force should memorize Roosevelt’s features, so as to be prepared for trouble whenever teeth and spectacles came out of the darkness.61
On his next “night patrol,” which took place in the small hours of 14 June, Roosevelt was accompanied by Commissioner Andrews and Richard Harding Davis, the roving correspondent of Harper’s Monthly.62 The three young men entered the Thirteenth precinct, on the Lower East Side, soon after midnight, and began a systematic search of its clammy caverns. This was distinctly ghetto territory: ill-lit, badly sanitized, the air around Union Market heavy with the smells of schmaltz and blood-soaked kosher salt. Roosevelt, who as president of the Police Board was also a member of the Board of Health, made a note to hasten the closing of the long-condemned slaughterhouse.63
What policemen could be seen wandering through pale