Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  Roosevelt squirmed in his seat, very impatient to reply in front of this esteemed assemblage, but he was forced to wait more than a quarter hour until Mayor Strong finished, and then Mayor Curtis of Boston delivered some brief remarks.

  The commissioner rose; he might have been aiming for banter but his tight lips and chopping hand gestures belied him.

  He informed these titans of reform that in addition to being a “Dutchman” he was also part Irish and that in any case, he was pleased the Puritans had come to these shores because they possessed two wonderful traits. “They were essentially moral and essentially manly.” His remark drew applause, not laughter from the chastened crowd.

  Roosevelt said the mayor was too busy to investigate every tale but that the story about the police cracking down on a poor ice seller on a Sunday was false. The “Czar’s Minions”—as he sarcastically referred to his own policemen—had arrested a man selling policy (illegal lottery) tickets and that fellow, trying to avoid jail, had pretended to be an iceman. The press had mixed up the two stories.

  He also stated with a distinct edge in his voice that he had no sympathy for law-breaking liquor dealers and would continue to shut them down.

  Then, not satisfied with debunking only genial Mayor Strong, Roosevelt attacked the New York World for its “Mecca of Outlaws” article.

  “The World printed a list of criminals, who, it said, were at large,” he enunciated. “Many of them are dead and some of the others are in prison.” He paused. “There was about two or three per cent of truth in the story, which is an unusually large percentage for the New York World.” The audience—many with a drink in one hand and a cigar in the other—laughed very hard.

  Roosevelt didn’t realize just how right he was about the lack of truthfulness in “Mecca of Outlaws.” Pulitzer’s reporters had apparently thumbed through a copy of the decade-old Professional Criminals of America (1886) written by former police chief Thomas Byrnes and had borrowed eighteen of its first nineteen profiles. The theft bordered on plagiarism at times, such as this item for Edward Dinkelman, alias Eddie Miller, pickpocket/hotel thief: “Dark hair, dark eyes, dark complexion, round face, nervously quick in his movements” (New York World); “Dark hair, dark eyes, round face, dark complexion; dresses well and is very quick in his movements” (Professional Criminals of America).

  The next day’s wave of peacemaking by the mayor and commissioner didn’t sway too many. “The mayor is just sick of Teddy,” said one veteran Republican, “and hits him over the head with a bungstarter [the mallet to loosen corks from barrels] and tries to apologize now by saying he was jesting … these reformers make me tired.”

  Roosevelt planned on spending the Christmas holidays out at Oyster Bay with his large, boisterous family, children to the right, to the left, and underfoot. He delegated five straight days for enjoying the snow, the sleigh riding, the winter vistas. However, too much time not working sometimes led him to unpleasant introspection. On day two, he wrote a letter to Henry Cabot Lodge and noted “rather gloomily” that this would mark the first Christmas dinner not eaten at the Lodges’ home after five consecutive years together.

  Roosevelt complained about being tantalized but ultimately denied the chance to go to the Republican presidential convention by the local party leaders. He groused that even the stalwartly Republican New York Tribune now ran only anti-TR pieces since he had denied them their boodle in political advertising during the last campaign. He expected the mayor to criticize him in his upcoming annual address, and had heard that the Platt machine was luring Governor Morton to agree to sign a bill ousting the Police Board by telling him that TR planned on backing Congressman Thomas Reed of Maine for president instead of him.

  Henry Cabot Lodge—troubled by TR’s dour letters—rushed two upbeat missives in reply, stressing Roosevelt’s national accomplishments. Roosevelt, already back at work by December 27, admitted he was grateful for the boost. “Don’t imagine that I really get very blue. Every now and then I feel sullen for an hour or two when everybody seems to join against me here but I would not for anything give up my experience of the last eight months. I prize them more than any eight months in my official career.”

  Roosevelt’s downhill slide sped up.

  On Friday, December 27, thieves stole the Burden family diamonds and other jewels worth $60,000 (approximately $1.5 million in 2012 dollars). As word of the robbery spread on Saturday, Roosevelt was in Philadelphia giving a speech on the revitalization of the New York City police.

  The townhouse of Isaac Burden—the very wealthy iron-ore millionaire—overlooked Madison Square Park. From his front steps, he could see Delmonico’s; every morning, the tower of Madison Square Garden threw his yard into shade. It marked a prestigious address, fit for an elite family, one of the city’s famed Four Hundred.

  On Friday night, the husband and wife attended Romeo and Juliet sitting in their usual box at the Metropolitan Opera, bringing along two female servants and their coachman and footman, and leaving eight servants in the house.

  Mrs. Burden arrived home from the opera just before midnight and went to place a necklace in the safe in her bedroom. She screamed when she discovered the safe door open and jewels missing, including a magnificent five-strand diamond necklace, with a center diamond the “size of a hazelnut.” She yelled to a servant to press the “message alarm” and two boys raced over from American District Telegraph, nearby at Broadway and 26th Street; she sent them running to the 30th Street police station to alert Captain Pickett, who rushed over with several officers.

  Detectives searched the three-story townhouse and the basement, yard, and stables. Mrs. Burden staunchly defended her servants from suspicion even though acting captain O’Brien suspected an inside job. At one point, a detective, ransacking the kitchen, removed a large ham from the icebox; several servants teased him, asking if he was very hungry and wondering if there was anything he wasn’t going to search. The detective put the ham back. (Four months later, it would be revealed that the thieves, with the help of a maid, had stashed the jewels inside that ham.)

  The sensational robbery seemed to confirm the World’s and other newspapers’ charges that crime was once again rampant in New York. With Roosevelt in Philadelphia, Commissioner Parker took a rare lead in speaking to the press: he promised a crisp investigation and he adamantly denied that the reform police had gone soft on criminals.

  The police department assigned massive manpower to searching the house, combing the neighborhood, and grilling second-story men and other burglars. The detectives cabled Scotland Yard; they sent “hundreds of postal cards to the police of other cities giving a description of the lost property.”

  However, in the days following, even the pro-reform New York Times joined the general bashing of the police: “The Burden robbery … means that the police system has permitted the existence, in point of comfort and security from arrest, of dangerous thieves who have been free to watch, plan and succeed in a center of this civilization.”

  The Washington Post took special delight: “Ted Roosevelt is going about the country lecturing on the efficiency of the New York police force, while that town is overrun with thieves and crooks and big diamond robberies are becoming a daily occurrence.”

  On Sunday, Roosevelt returned by train from resounding waves of applause at that municipal reform dinner in Philadelphia and headed straight to Oyster Bay. He unburdened himself to his sister.

  We are having a good deal of anxiety with our detective bureau. Under the old system certain classes of criminals were protected, partly for blackmail, partly on condition that they should betray and spy on certain other classes. Now we have stopped blackmail and protect no criminal, and in consequence, the war we wage is very hard indeed.

  Roosevelt had always found the “stool pigeon” system morally repugnant—for the police to pay some lawbreakers in cash or in indulgence of their crimes for information leading to the arrest of other thieves for other crimes. He lobbied
hard and convinced Parker to join him in eradicating it entirely.

  Abe Hummel, a defense lawyer with several decades’ experience, observed in a book on New York City crime:

  Ninety-nine out of a hundred cases are worked through the squeal of some thief, or ex-thief, who keeps posted on the doings of others of his class in the city. He knows some officer intimately; goes to him and tells him that the night before One-Thumbed Charley turned a trick on Church street, and the stuff is “planted” at such and such a place. Acting on this information, the officers visit the place indicated, and just sit around and wait till their man shows up. Lots of ability about that, isn’t there? Some people have an idea, you know, that after a burglary the detectives visit the house where it occurred, and, after examining certain marks on the window where the man got in, immediately say: “This is the work of Slippery Sam; he is the only fellow who does this sort of work in this particular style.” Nothing of the kind.

  The World, which never tired of twitting Teddy, interviewed some convicts at Sing Sing. One of the nation’s highest-profile bank robbers, John Watson, serving nine years for his latest caper, said that without stool pigeons the police have no way of learning details about crimes. “They are just as much in the dark as any other citizen of New York.”

  On New Year’s Eve in nineteenth-century fin de siècle New York, boisterous crowds massed not in Times Square, which didn’t yet exist, but around Trinity Church on Lower Broadway, overflowing into half a dozen nearby streets, eventually toppling police lines and shutting down the streetcars. The people, ushering out 1895, waited for the famed church bells to peal in the New Year with a dozen-tune hourlong medley starting at 11:30 p.m. and climaxing with “Happy New Year” at midnight.

  The church steeple was flanked by a full moon that night; gusts of wind racing off the water whistled through the canyons of buildings, chilling the tens of thousands who stared at the steeple and waited for the bells of Trinity to signal the New Year. Peddlers sold five-cent tin trumpets as long as a man’s arm, and penny kazoos and Dutch watch rattles and slide whistles and drums and shrill horns called “laughing hyenas.” With temperatures dipping to freezing and crowds crushing in on each other, people tooted and shouted and banged so much that no one could hear the long-awaited church bells. “The sweet-tongued orchestra in the belfry was drowned out, smothered, silenced in the din of 50,000 instruments of torture,” reported the World.

  Gangs of teenage hoodlums pulled little pranks, such as tipping over drunks. And Good Samaritans rescued mothers foolish enough to bring their babies into the throng, shepherding them into doorways. Liquor bottles were passed since no law prevented public consumption.

  At the stroke of midnight, the world-famous chimes-man played “Happy New Year to Thee” and then later added “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Home, Sweet Home.”

  The holiday season did nothing to calm Roosevelt’s jangled nerves and left him even more convinced that he might lose his job soon. “I don’t see what else I could have done,” he wrote to his sister. “I take things with much philosophy and will abide the event unmoved. I have made my blows felt at any rate.”

  oosevelt had heard the rumblings and rumors long enough.

  Sometime during the first two weeks of the New Year, he tried to arrange a meeting with Boss Platt, the Republican backroom titan. Platt’s corrupt manipulations of voter registries during the recent primaries had guaranteed his dominance over New York’s congressional nominations and the delegates heading to the national presidential nominating convention in late spring.

  Roosevelt failed in his first few attempts to wangle an interview. So he reached out to one of his first mentors, the tough East Side Irish Catholic Joe Murray, who had seen potential in the loud twenty-three-year-old Harvard grad back in 1881 and had boosted him for assemblyman in the Twenty-first District.

  Murray, a rough man, a classic machine Republican, who fondly participated in election brawls and rewarded loyalty, was now an excise commissioner at $5,000 per year. He agreed to set up a meeting with Platt.

  On Sunday, January 19, 1896, big Joe Murray walked Roosevelt over to the Fifth Avenue Hotel and guided him in to see the sixty-two-year-old Platt, the wizened low-key orchestrator. Presidents such as Grant, Harrison, and Hayes had walked that same carpeted hallway to sound out Platt.

  The two men were a caricaturist’s daydream. Roosevelt, though stressed, was still all sturdy vitality with his steady gaze and quick smile; Platt was a world-weary, almost disappearing presence, with an immaculate fine suit hung on a skeletal frame. Roosevelt opened with the ostensible reason for his visit, to ask Platt his plans regarding the upcoming presidential election.

  Platt was trying to be a kingmaker, throwing his support to the governor of New York, the machine Republican Levi P. Morton, but what if Morton faded early at the nominating convention—what would Platt do?

  Since Roosevelt preferred Reed of Maine over Governor McKinley of Ohio or Morton of New York, he hoped to find out something that he could report directly to Senator Lodge and to Reed, both of whom he would be seeing the following week in D.C. Authentic information about the nation’s most populous state was political gold; Reed would be grateful. Platt was quite shifty in his response but TR did learn enough to decide that backing any breakaway movement by reform Republicans in New York State would at this time be a waste.

  Roosevelt then asked if he could pose another question and Platt nodded his assent. Conventional wisdom now had it that the New York City Police Board would be abolished by a massive rezoning of the city plotted by the upstate Republicans. The Greater Consolidation of New York would meld the various counties such as Kings (Brooklyn), Queens, and Richmond (Staten Island) into one massive city—with combined police, fire, and sanitation departments—joining the current New York of Manhattan and parts of the Bronx. The bill’s passage was a foregone conclusion if the Republicans stayed in power because consolidation would dilute Tammany’s Democratic stranglehold. The creation of America’s greatest metropolis would happen—to a large extent—because of gerrymandering and petty politics.

  Pundits pegged consolidation as at least two years away (i.e., January of 1898), but now fresh rumors swirled that the Republican powers, exasperated by Roosevelt’s policies, were planning a supplemental police bill that would allow the governor to fire the New York police commissioners immediately.

  “I asked him if we’d be legislated out of office,” Roosevelt later recounted of their succinct exchange. “He said: ‘Yes.’ I said: ‘I’d fight.’ And he said. ‘Oh, certainly, that’s alright.’ ” Platt spoke in an earnest voice barely above a whisper.

  The state boss quietly predicted that the Police Board would be out of work within sixty days. As TR rose to leave, Platt asked Roosevelt a question: Did he agree that Commissioner Parker was a “very able man”? TR praised Parker and said he was working well with him. Platt then asked if Roosevelt was interested in being reappointed to a new Police Board along with Parker. Roosevelt declined the offer.

  In a letter to Lodge that night TR characterized his meeting with Platt as “entirely pleasant and cold-blooded.” He also promised his mentor that he wouldn’t break with the Republican Party because “the presidential contest is too important.” (Roosevelt didn’t specify whether it was “too important” only for the country, or also for his future job prospects; he had shown himself elastic in presidential politics, resigning himself to Republican Party choices, such as Blaine in 1884.)

  Roosevelt also wrote that Sunday to his sister of his “likely” ouster. He expressed no regrets, calling the year “perhaps the best spent of my life.” He also vowed: “I wish to leave the force with our work practically done so as to make it as difficult to undo as possible.”

  He clearly intended to make his “blows felt.”

  The next day Roosevelt tried to eviscerate his enemies. He delivered a speech full of belligerent broadsides to a convention of Methodist ministers. He painted, more em
phatically than ever, the image of a corrupt greed-driven world conspiring against the pure crusader and he depicted any legislature—even a Republican one—as being openly corrupt if it legislated out the pure crusader.

  He identified almost all the major players in the political life of the great city and one by one accused them of backing criminals and lawlessness.

  The next day, the World, in its coverage, devoted almost one-third of its front page to a massive cartoon. Flanked by the giant words “I AM,” a pint-sized Roosevelt stood, with his back arched, his oversized head spewing saliva and words. And the caption read:

  Judge Cowing is wrong in talking of the carnival of crime in New York—Magistrate Flammer is wrong in opposing my child spies—Public is wrong in saying crimes of violence are increasing—Newspapers all wrong—Old Police Board was wrong—Judges of General Sessions are wrong in imposing such light sentences—Legislature is wrong—And he obviously meant his hearers to understand “I alone am Right!”

  And for once the World, so relentlessly criticized by Roosevelt, had delivered a news report, even a cartoon one, that was absolutely accurate … that is exactly what TR meant.

  This was Roosevelt’s greatest strength, and his most lampoonable trait: his utter righteousness, his zealot’s self-confidence. It would lead him over a lifetime to notching world-changing victories but also to humbling, almost incomprehensible defeats.

  In this speech to the annual meeting of Methodist Ministers at 150 Fifth Avenue, Roosevelt lumped together newspapers, politicians, bankers, merchants, crooks, gamblers, saloon keepers, proprietors of disorderly houses, and small shopkeepers, all “knitted” together to the corrupt old system, which had “thrived and fattened through dishonesty and favoritism.”