The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [258]
Although the nights of vigilance wearied him (each involved going without sleep for about forty hours), he took great pride in them and saw many things that broadened his social understanding.74 Tramping along what must have been hundreds of miles of silent avenues lit only by corner lamps and the occasional flickering torch of an oyster-cart, he could sense, if not feel, the ache of homelessness and poverty. In alleys and courtyards to left and right, he could gaze through open windows at the hot intimacies of tenement life, and listen to the bedlam of alien conversation. Italian changed to Chinese, German to Yiddish, Russian to Polish as he moved from block to block, until it was a relief to hear even a few words of broken English. Sometimes he cast about for pearls of street wisdom, as when he asked an Italian fruit vendor what possible “monish” could be made selling his wares on a deserted street at dead of night. The vendor cheerfully agreed it was no way to prosper. “W’at I maka on de peanut I losa on de dam’ banan’.”75
“These midnight rambles are great fun,” Roosevelt wrote. “My whole work brings me in contact with every class of people in New York … I get a glimpse of the real life of the swarming millions.”76
As always when he was learning something new, he visibly swelled with pleasure and satisfaction. The waiters and patrons at Mike Lyon’s Bowery restaurant got used to seeing him drop in at two or three in the morning, tired and hungry yet wreathed in smiles. “It was ‘Hello Teddy,’ ‘How are you Roosevelt?’ all over the room,” one regular recalled many years later. “Beaming, buoyant, blithe … really happy he was in those days.”77
ROOSEVELT’S HAPPINESS did not remain unalloyed for long. He very soon came up against “an ugly snag” in his efforts on behalf of municipal reform. This was the Sunday Excise Law, a thirty-eight-year-old statute which forbade the sale of intoxicating liquors by saloons on the Sabbath.78 The law had been reaffirmed in 1892 by a Democratic Legislature, as a gesture to New York State’s large but mainly rural temperance vote.79 In the city it was always honored more in the breach than the observance. Some New York mayors, including William Strong, had threatened total enforcement,80 but gave up in alarm when they felt the passions any such action aroused. Resistance came from all classes. Slum-dwelling workers were not to be denied their weekend refreshments, after six days and fifty-seven hours of grimy labor. To the large, prosperous German community, a stein of lager after Kirche was more than a pleasure: it was a folk ritual, hallowed by centuries of tradition in the Old World. As for the “dudes” and “swells,” quaffing champagne in the privacy of Fifth Avenue clubs, they could only sympathize with tenement kids scampering through the streets with buckets of ale for the family.
Nevertheless the law existed; it was on the statute books, and Roosevelt, as New York City’s chief law enforcement official, sooner or later had to define his attitude toward it. He was not a prohibitionist—although he might well have been, given his own abstemious nature, and the frightful death of Elliott Roosevelt still fresh in his memory. As long ago as 1884, he had warned in the Assembly “that no more terrible curse could be inflicted on this community than the passage of a prohibitory law,” and by his deciding vote had killed just such a measure.81 His objection was practical rather than moral. “It is idle to hope for the enforcement of a law where nineteen-twentieths of the people do not believe in the justice of its provisions.” The Sunday Excise Act was only