Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  The New York Times called the Lexow revelations heard over the last eight months “the sensation of the country.” Thanks to telegraph and telephone, newspapers delivered sleaze from Manhattan to their readers. And editorial writers from Maine to California called for reform of the police in the nation’s largest city.

  The Lexow revelations had already led to thirteen criminal indictments of high-ranking officers; in addition, Lexow witnesses had leveled serious charges of corruption or incompetence against fifty-three men, including two current police commissioners, two former commissioners, three inspectors, fourteen current captains, two ex-captains, three sergeants, six detectives, eight former precinct detectives, and nine patrolmen.

  The Lexow report would conclude: “It seemed as though every interest, every occupation, almost every citizen was dominated by an all-controlling and overshadowing dread of the police department.”

  New York’s Finest—they already had the nickname—were accused of being New York’s Filthiest. They ruled New York’s street corners as an “established caste … with powers and privileges away above and beyond the people.”

  Mayor William L. Strong took office on January 1, with an overwhelming mandate to reform the city. He offered Theodore Roosevelt the job of … sanitation commissioner. Roosevelt agonized, declared himself eager to bust up the corrupt contractors, but ultimately found the post beneath his dignity.

  Four months later, in April 1895, the mayor offered Roosevelt the post of police commissioner.

  he dawn of the reform era in the police department began on May 6, 1895, when sixty-eight-year-old mayor William L. Strong, a former bank president, in a brief 10 a.m. ceremony at City Hall, swore Theodore Roosevelt in as police commissioner. His salary would be $5,000 a year for five years. The mayor also gave the oath to Colonel Frederick D. Grant, forty-four-year-old son of the late Republican president, and Andrew D. Parker, a thirty-six-year-old Democratic lawyer. The three new men would be joining the sole remaining Democratic commissioner, thirty-one-year-old Avery D. Andrews.

  Roosevelt—despite his reputation as headstrong and energetic—could not rule the show. By a recently passed law, the four-man board had to be bipartisan, that is, have two Democrats and two Republicans, but Mayor Strong implored them that morning not to be bipartisan, but to be nonpartisan, to banish politics and make decisions for the good of the city. In that era of bruising elections when Tammany Hall Democrats dominated New York City and upstate Republicans carried the rest of the state, Strong’s request sounded quintessentially high-minded, and perhaps daft.

  Three of these four men had never met before that day, and Roosevelt had but a passing acquaintance with Grant from various Republican dinners. Coming together on this “blind date” in governance were a reform Republican (Roosevelt), a loyal party Republican (Grant), an anti-Tammany Democrat (Parker), and a never-cared-for-politics Democrat (Andrews). Yet many key decisions of the board, such as promotions, would call for a unanimous vote; that meant one board member could scuttle the rest. By the middle of his tenure, Roosevelt would compare a bipartisan commission to a “Polish Parliament” where deadlocks are often ended “by killing the man who objected.”

  But that morning, they were all smiles and bonhomie and promises of cooperation to clean up the police department.

  The four men, all well dressed for the occasion, strolled together uptown the mile from City Hall at Park Place to police headquarters at 300 Mulberry Street. They made a stately foursome: Andrews, the youngest, tall and lean, a devoted cyclist; Parker, also tall, with a precisely manicured beard; Roosevelt, mustachioed, strong but a bit stocky, just starting to add pounds to his thirty-six-inch waistline; Grant, the oldest, who, despite his comb-over, resembled his famous father. All four had blue eyes.

  The walk was scenic in a classic New York sense. “The tenements stank,” wrote a journalist of the blocks near police headquarters. “The alleys puffed forth the stenches of the night. Slatternly women hung out of windows to breathe or to gossip or quarrel across the courts; idle men hung half-dressed over the old iron fences or sat … on the stoops of the houses which had been the fine homes of the old families moved uptown.” (The wealthy Roosevelt clan, for one, had moved from Maiden Lane to Union Square to 20th Street to 57th Street.)

  As the four men approached 300 Mulberry Street, Roosevelt started to race-walk, more like a boy headed to the ball fields than a man in a suit heading to a job. The others struggled to catch up. Newspapermen, looking out from their basement digs across the street, abandoned their midmorning poker game to meet the new commissioners. Jacob Riis, veteran crime reporter for the New York Evening Sun, rushed outside; he had been there since 7 a.m., and he towed along his assistant Max Fischel, who had been there since 3 a.m. gathering the blotter report from the precincts. “Hello, Jake,” Roosevelt called out to Riis, whom he had met briefly soon after the publication in 1890 of Riis’s landmark book on poverty, How the Other Half Lives. With a wave of his hand, Roosevelt—who had never entered the building before—led the pack up the steps of police headquarters, past “Pat,” the Irish doorman.

  Roosevelt, all nervous energy, blurted out questions to Riis: “Where are our offices? Where is the boardroom? What do we do first?” He seemed to be moving fast enough to race right by the powerful ghosts of 300 Mulberry Street. He breezed past the office of the world-famous detective Thomas Byrnes; he didn’t slow at the Rogues’ Gallery of photos or the museum of crime paraphernalia.

  This wide drab four-story building, with dirty awnings and a basement jail—located just north of Houston Street (pronounced “How-stin” by genuine New Yorkers)—represented the command center of the nation’s largest police force, with almost 4,000 officers. A newly installed telephone service connected it to most of the thirty-eight precinct station houses and accepted calls from the rare private Manhattan caller wealthy enough to have a phone. The telegraph office still took the bulk of the incoming information, and hummed with complaints of dead dogs and loud saloons.

  The four men gathered and chatted in Commissioner Andrews’s office at 10:45 a.m. and waited for the departing commissioners to arrive to turn over their offices to the new men.

  Roosevelt quickly grew restless waiting so Andrews took the men on a brief tour of the building. The new commissioners had no idea that they had inadvertently inspired a new dress code. “Every police attendant about Police Headquarters who possessed diamonds hid them carefully in his waistcoat pockets,” observed the New York Herald. “It is not regarded as politic at the old building on Mulberry street to attract the attention of a reform Commissioner by the display of too much prosperity.”

  On their tour, Roosevelt greeted every workingman in the halls of the building, right down to the janitor in the sub-basement who spent his days shoveling coal into the steam boiler that ran the furnace. Roosevelt pointedly did not seek out Byrnes, the head of the police department for the past three years.

  Each of the three men dropped his card off in the commissioner’s office he would inherit, with Roosevelt and Grant on the third floor near the boardroom, and Parker and Andrews on the second floor.

  The new board held its first meeting at 11:30 a.m. They sat around a large rectangular table with windows looking out on Mulberry Street. As prearranged, Andrews nominated Roosevelt for president and the three, with Roosevelt recusing himself, voted yea. He was now the highest-ranking police official in New York City—at least in title. His $5,000-a-year salary and single vote were equal to the others.

  The board elected Major Avery Andrews treasurer to oversee the $5 million budget, and Andrew Parker would chair two committees: “Elections” and “Pensions.” Grant was given “Repairs and Supplies” and “Rules and Discipline.” Roosevelt, as president, was an ex-officio member of all the committees. The commissioners would hold three board meetings a week, and take turns presiding over once-a-week police misconduct trials.

  Soon after, Roosevelt slipped away and met with his pal
Riis, who had in tow twenty-nine-year-old Lincoln Steffens, a novice police reporter for the liberal New York Evening Post who would become famous for muckraking. “It was all breathless and sudden,” wrote Steffens thirty years later in his autobiography, “but Riis and I were soon describing the situation to him, telling which higher officers to consult, which to ignore and punish; what forms were, the customs, rules, methods. It was just as if we three were the Police Board, T.R., Riis and I, and as we got T.R. calmed down we made him promise to go a bit slow, to consult with his colleagues also.” (A careful reading of Roosevelt’s letters shows that Steffens aggrandized his role a bit; Roosevelt referred to Riis as “my main prop and comfort,” the “closest to me” during those years.)

  Roosevelt readily admitted he “knew nothing of police management,” but would try to frame that lack of preconceptions as a positive. He would describe the upcoming week as the hardest stretch he had ever worked in his life and report that he found the department completely “demoralized.” That word, circa 1890, still packed more of the meaning of lacking any moral compass than depressed. Half the precincts lacked captains, because of suspensions and retirements.

  The rest of the afternoon was spent in informal meetings; Andrews, whose office was connected to Roosevelt’s by a wrought-iron spiral staircase, hovered close to TR. Before the mayor appointed him, this West Point graduate had described himself as a lawyer “with a minimum of clients and a maximum of free time.” Even the most famous man in the building, Chief Byrnes, dropped in for a chat. To Roosevelt, Byrnes represented the old guard; to many others, he represented the greatest strengths of the department: modern crime-fighting skills.

  Roosevelt in his sheltered life had had very few interactions with the New York police. On Wednesday, day three, Roosevelt and the other two new commissioners sat at the shoulder of Commissioner Andrews as he conducted the trials of nearly 100 policemen accused of misconduct by citizens or by supervisors called roundsmen. The four commissioners would rotate this once-a-week duty, and each could exonerate or levy small fines; heftier sentences such as dismissal required a majority vote.

  Thus began Roosevelt’s education in the day-to-day aspects of policing and of the rules: one patrolman was caught bringing a “can of coffee” to a fellow officer and claimed he went just “five feet off post”; others failed to report an unlit streetlamp, a dead dog, sunken street pavement. The more serious offenses involved letting a prisoner escape, assaulting a citizen, turning up in a saloon.

  Andrews presided with curt righteous irritability. A patrolman named Dick Mullin claimed he went in uniform into a saloon to use the toilet and that he had told two young ladies on the street to alert the roundsman—if he should wander by—of that fact. Andrews: “Are there not hundreds … of people on Grand Street that hour of the evening?” The officer nodded and before Andrews could ask another question Roosevelt jumped in: “How is it that you should select two young ladies in whom to confide your business?” Andrews warned: “The officer who goes into a saloon takes his commission into his own hands.” He promised to render a verdict later.

  When street cops and court officers blamed each other for the escape of some prisoners from Jefferson Market Courthouse, Roosevelt and Parker asked a flurry of extremely pointed questions.

  And so it went. The tone had changed. The old Tammany commissioners had joked with the men, and docked half a day’s pay. Not these reformers.

  That night Roosevelt attended the annual meeting of the New York Civil Service Reform Association at the City Club on Fifth Avenue and gave a rousing speech. A century-plus later it’s hard to fathom the passion and contentiousness of something as bland sounding as civil service reform, but men such as Roosevelt considered it the bedrock for purifying politics and saving democracy. Until the 1880s, elected officials routinely handed out plum public-sector jobs to party faithful as rewards. Reformers envisioned a day when men would be hired based on merit alone (and not kickbacks or bribes).

  Gradually Congress and presidents, governors and legislatures moved more and more jobs under civil service hiring rules. By 1895, about one-quarter of the 175,000 federal jobs were civil service, and about 13,600 of the 19,340 New York City public posts.

  Roosevelt had fought for six years in D.C., irritating both Republican and Democrat alike, to locate and honor every single civil service job.

  The party bosses, not surprisingly, detested civil service. “How are you goin’ to interest our young men in their country if you have no offices to give them when they work for their party,” asked George Washington Plunkitt, a New York state senator and member of Tammany Hall. “Isn’t it enough to make a man sour on his country when he wants to serve it and won’t be allowed unless he answers a lot of fool questions about the number of cubic inches of water in the Atlantic and the quality of sand in the Sahara.”

  The exam especially infuriated those who professed to have more common sense than book education. A Brooklyn cop—fresh from his exam—shared what he said were some of the questions with fellow officers. “What is the distance between Tokyo and Canarsie by ferry boat?” “Elucidate the forty-seventh problem of Euclid.” “Is it better to have a clue without a case or a case without a clue?” “If a hen and a half lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take three detective sergeants to catch three horse thieves?”

  Carl Schurz, a longtime reformer and a leader in the German American community, introduced Theodore Roosevelt to the cheering audience. TR traced recent developments in Washington regarding postal, railroad, and customs workers, then he turned to his current job. He vowed “open competitive examinations for all positions” based on new physical, mental, and moral standards “without any regard to politics.” He said that there would be only four exempt positions: a confidential secretary for each of the commissioners. And he noted that, as president, he was entitled to a stenographer too, but he would make sure his secretary could take dictation as well, thereby saving the department money and cutting one more potential patronage job. More polite applause from this audience full of some of the wealthiest, most influential reform men in the city, such as Richard Watson Gilder, Century Magazine editor, and E. L. Godkin, editor of the Evening Post.

  On day four of his stint, Roosevelt hired a woman. Again, more than a century later, it is hard to appreciate the shock of that decision. Women were starting to make inroads as “typewriters” and stenographers in commercial offices but not at the New York City Police Department, which employed a few dozen matrons for the precinct jails and some housekeepers, usually police widows, to sweep the floors and make the beds. “Of Corset Will Be Necessary to Alter the Uniform” ran one mocking headline in 1887 at the hiring of the first matrons. “Their night stick will be of papier mache of a color to match their gloves and will contain a vial of smelling salts in the handle.”

  Headquarters was still a bastion of masculinity, full of beefy armed men dragging prisoners along. “[The hiring] took the breath out of the old stagers at Mulberry Street barracks,” observed the New York World. Roosevelt added to the gender insult by hiring her at $1,700 a year to replace two men employed by the previous commissioner for $2,900 a year combined. Roosevelt was saving the department $1,200.

  Minnie G. Kelly was “young, small and comely, with raven black hair.” In her debut, she wore a wasp-waisted black dress and school-marmish spectacles and pulled her hair primly into a loose bun. Her job would not be easy: capturing the torrents of Roosevelt’s words … he would write or dictate more than 150,000 letters in his lifetime.

  (Years later, Roosevelt would declare himself pleased with her overall job performance but concede she made her share of mistakes. He recalled dictating a letter about an overly aggressive officer. “I was obliged to restrain the virtuous ardor of Sergeant Murphy, who, in his efforts to bring about a state of quiet on the street, would frequently commit some assaults himself.”

  That’s what he said aloud; when Miss Kelly handed him the
sheet, he read on the page: “I was obliged to restrain the virtuous ardor of Sergeant Murphy, who, in his efforts to bring about a state of quiet on the street, would frequently commit somersaults himself.” TR later wrote his sister that he couldn’t stop laughing long enough to reprimand her as he couldn’t banish the mental image of the rotund sergeant rolling down the street.)

  Even in the smallest ways in those first days, Roosevelt wanted to shake up the department and assert the reform agenda. Previous commissioners had voted themselves diamond-studded gold badges costing $400. Roosevelt and the new board voted to create a simple $15 round silver badge, with the city’s coat of arms surrounded by blue enamel lettering: POLICE COMMISSIONER OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK. And even these inexpensive badges must be returned upon leaving office. “Personally, I should be content with a copper cent stamped P.C.,” he told Riis. Frugality, incorruptibility.

  After the board meeting on Friday, the commissioners shared a hack carriage to City Hall to lobby the mayor on a pending police reform bill. The police department then had no vehicles designated for the use of captains, chiefs, or commissioners; the officials either boarded a streetcar or elevated train or hailed a horse cab. The four men bounced along the cobblestone streets, then glided on the newly installed asphalt avenues.

  While Roosevelt was pleased that hiring was now safely under the jurisdiction of the new Police Civil Service Board and promotions controlled by his board, he was appalled that the Republican-dominated legislature had recently passed a bill that would grant the chief of police full control over the weekly misconduct trials. Roosevelt had, of course, by now figured out that reorganizing the force centered on three basic management principles: hiring good new men, firing corrupt current officers, and disciplining to keep everyone in line.

  Roosevelt rushed into the crowded, fadedly elegant room at 2 p.m., his colleagues trailing behind, and he approached the mayor, who suffered from gout and was sitting in a rocking chair. Roosevelt launched into a passionate diatribe, his hands sawing the air as he tried to convince the mayor to withhold his signature. “This bill is thoroughly bad and vicious,” he said. “If it was drawn for the purpose of continuing the abuses in the department, it could not be better framed.”