Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  Roosevelt rushed in at the last minute and absentmindedly occupied the vacant seat next to Parker. He quickly switched places with Grant.

  TR got settled, looked up, and was stunned to see who was representing Commissioner Parker: Roosevelt’s longtime friend and sometime family lawyer, high-ranking Republican general Benjamin F. Tracy. White-bearded Tracy, a decorated Civil War hero, was Republican royalty; he had recently served as secretary of the navy under President Benjamin Harrison.

  “Rather to my surprise, General Tracy turned up as [Parker’s] counsel and my assailant, though he knows Parker’s shortcomings well and has heard from me all of our troubles,” Roosevelt later wrote. “It strikes me as a not very honorable course but it is just the kind of thing that [Joseph H.] Choate does and that most lawyers seem to regard as in accord with their peculiar code of professional ethics.”

  The mayor chose Elihu Root, another powerhouse Republican lawyer, to handle the prosecution. Fourteen years older than TR, Root often found himself trying to tamp down Roosevelt’s impulsiveness. (He remained enough of an intimate to tease Roosevelt; years later, he sent the then president of the United States a birthday telegram: “I congratulate you on attaining the respectable age of 46. You have made a good start in life and your friends have great hopes for you when you grow up.”)

  Waggle-eared, with a push-broom mustache over a weak chin, fifty-one-year-old Root knew sixty-six-year-old Tracy well; they shared the dais at many a Republican banquet and sat at nearby clubroom tables at the Union League; they were rainmakers. Both were known as extremely intelligent, with a genial wit that could turn caustic.

  Root opened the proceedings by numbingly walking the Police Board’s dour bald-headed chief clerk, Colonel Kipp, through the facts of the charges about Parker’s attendance, pension duties, and responses to citizens’ complaints.

  From the outset, Roosevelt, though merely a spectator, was, by his own admission to his wife, extremely nervous. Throughout, he scratched frantic notes in pencil onto a tablet and had trouble sitting still.

  General Tracy, on cross-examination, tried to lighten the tone. Alluding to the citizens’ complaints, which Parker had supposedly ignored throughout November, General Tracy elicited from Clerk Kipp the information that Parker had actually forwarded them all to Police Chief Conlin, who had in turn handed them to the appropriate captains, who had answered them. So, Parker’s “grave omission,” stated Tracy, ladling on the sarcasm, was that he “failed to give the complainants a notice which they had already received from the police captains?” “Yes,” replied the earnest clerk Kipp.

  The room erupted in laughter. Roosevelt, not smiling, scribbled more furiously. He and Andrews sat near the corporation counsel and repeatedly whispered suggestions.

  As for the attendance at board meetings, Kipp revealed that most board decisions—except promotions and retirements—required only three commissioners and that agendas were often informally discussed beforehand.

  On the issue of Parker’s delaying police misconduct verdicts, Kipp stated that Parker had affected only nineteen verdicts out of more than 3,000 cases that had crossed his desk.

  By any yardstick, this first day had not gone swimmingly for Roosevelt. He had difficulty sleeping that night and on successive nights, Edith later confided to her sister-in-law.

  On Friday, day two, the hearing room was less packed; ex-chief Byrnes had bailed; the corporation counsel assigned an assistant. Root was clearly avoiding fireworks. Parker appeared confident and well rested.

  Root recalled Kipp and plodded through placing on the record many of the citizen complaints not personally answered by Parker, also many of the pension cases not personally handled by Parker. General Tracy interjected at one point when the mayor’s eyes kept involuntarily closing from boredom: “That kind of evidence is laughable.” Shot back Root: “Then you may spend your time laughing.”

  Commissioner Grant made a request to testify immediately since he would be leaving that evening to go to St. Louis for a week as a delegate to the Republican National Convention … the fact that Grant would miss the board’s next two meetings did not bolster TR’s case against Parker on attendance.

  Root called Grant for the prosecution but the affable man, his combed-over locks plastered to his dome, did not seem to relish taking sides. He answered questions simply and tersely.

  Root focused on the pension cases—Parker and Grant comprised the entire Pension Committee, with Parker as chairman. Grant claimed no pensions were paid later than normal. General Tracy on cross-examination asked Grant if he could cite a single instance when Parker’s absence stopped the board from acting on an important matter; Colonel Grant scrunched up his face and tried to conjure up the hazy memory of perhaps one retirement vote a year ago.

  Then General Tracy asked Grant about the other commissioners’ absences and summer vacations. “Did Roosevelt leave on Thursdays and come back on Tuesdays?”

  Elihu Root objected to the question. “I have no doubt you prefer to try Roosevelt,” snapped Root. “My friend has just betrayed the secret of this trial,” replied General Tracy, affably. Amid the laughter, the mayor sustained the objection.

  Roosevelt was not enjoying the show. “President Roosevelt displayed considerable nervousness as the trial went on,” stated the New York Tribune, the paper of the mainstream Republican Party. “He established a [patrolman’s] beat back of the counsel table, and walked it uneasily during much of the session, occasionally stopping to drop some comment into the ear of his colleague Commissioner Andrews.”

  Testimony continued. Grant confirmed that he knew that many of Parker’s absences were due to work Parker was doing for the committee on the Greater Consolidation of New York. General Tracy kept trying to hammer away about Roosevelt’s attendance but the questions were not allowed. The World estimated that the mayor sided with the prosecution nine out of ten times.

  Around 6:15 p.m., Grant asked how much longer the cross-examination would take. He had to catch a train, specifically the “Special Train” of the McKinley League of New York State. When told “four hours,” he asked to be excused. The mayor abruptly adjourned the trial.

  Roosevelt rushed out on Friday night to Oyster Bay only to find out that Edith, in a mixup, had already headed into the city. He spent the night alone. She and the children then boarded an early Saturday morning train and reached Sagamore Hill in the swirling rain. “Today we are having a terrific storm and I am glad, for Theodore is fit for nothing but to sit quietly with a book,” she wrote to her sister-in-law, Bamie. “This trial has been a terrific strain.”

  Roosevelt also did what he usually did in times of Police Board strain; he focused in his letters on international and national politics. He knew that the convention that week would crown taciturn McKinley as the candidate, and not his original choice, Thomas B. Reed of Maine.

  “While I greatly regret the defeat of Reed, who was in every way McKinley’s superior …” he wrote to his sister, “McKinley himself is an upright and honorable man, of very considerable ability & good record as a soldier and in congress.”

  Roosevelt wished he could be at the Republican convention in St. Louis but instead he returned to Manhattan, to City Hall, to find himself once again in a brutal conflict, with the whole town watching. The Herald called the mayor the “stage manager” and opposing counsels, Root and Tracy, “two rival stars of comedy.”

  Roosevelt showed up at Friday’s Parker hearing wearing an oversized McKinley-Hobart button, with clear color portraits of the candidates, bigger than a silver dollar. Newspapermen and politicians clustered around to view it, and TR remarked that it was the first of its kind to reach New York City. By design or not, Roosevelt briefly shifted the spotlight away from the stumbling prosecution.

  Everyone expected Root to call Roosevelt to testify but instead he recalled Colonel Kipp for a run-through of yet more of the mind-numbing citizen complaints.

  Even these did not go well on cross-ex
amination.

  General Tracy spotlighted the notes of Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell, wealthy founder of Charity Organization Society of New York. She had complained in November about a Sunday saloon illegally thriving in her neighborhood. Parker’s assistant had forwarded her complaint to Chief Conlin, who had assigned Captain Martens, who found the complaint groundless. Mrs. Shaw Lowell considered Martens’s reply inadequate, so she complained again, but not to the Police Board per se. Tracy cleared his throat, then slowly began reading the opening of her letter aloud: “My Dear Mr. Roosevelt.” The lawyer turned theatrically to the mayor and said, “Your honor, we cannot admit Mr. Roosevelt’s private correspondence as testimony into this official investigation.” He paused. “This letter, as I read it, refers to a ‘pointless communication received from Mr. Roosevelt’s Department.’ We are not responsible for Mr. Roosevelt’s ‘pointless communications.’ ”

  The mayor laughed and the letter was not admitted.

  TR could do little but scribble furious notes and remain mute.

  Matters were not faring any better in his attempts to right the mounting Raines Law fiasco. That week, Magistrate Cornell dismissed a hefty stack of “Raines Law hotel” Sunday violations brought by the police; he stated the New York Supreme Court had ruled that a sandwich, no matter how small, did indeed constitute a “meal.” The Roosevelt police—after months of Sunday victories—were now striking out in sobering up the city on the Sabbath.

  However, over on the vice front, the police, with help from crusader Anthony Comstock, scored a significant victory, the culmination of a two-year Comstock manhunt for “The Voice.” Within months of the invention of a workable camera in the 1840s, someone had experimented with photographing nudes. Now, with Edison’s invention of the phonograph, someone was recording wax cylinders with smutty stories and jokes, to be played through ear tubes for a nickel a listen in saloons and arcades.

  Comstock and his agents had confiscated some particularly offensive cylinders but had never found the producer. One featured a stage actor mocking Shakespeare: “To pee or not to pee, that is the question, whether it is better in the flesh to suffer the stings and smarts of this outrageous clap or to …”

  The “Voice” also told profane jokes: “What did Adam do when he discovered the difference between himself and Eve?” Answer: “He split the difference, raised Cain and did it again when he got Abel.”

  But many of these recordings were neither tame nor highbrow; on one, a couple mimicked the frenzied escalating heavy breathing of intercourse. Another featured a labor union meeting of New York “whores” hosted by “Ophelia Openhole, President” and “Sarah Broadass, Secretary” in which the pair tried to establish minimum rates.

  - “Common old fashioned fuck” [man on top]: $1

  - “Rear fashion”: $1.50

  - “Back scuttle fashion” [anal]: $1.75

  - “Pudding jerking” [a hand job: French boudin or blood pudding is a kind of fat squishy sausage]: $2

  - “Tasting French” [oral]: $2.50

  - “French fashion with use of patent balls” [elaborate oral]: $3.50

  - “All night, with use of towel and rose water”: $5

  On June 24, Comstock’s agent, George Oram, acting on a tip, found thirty-one-year-old actor Russell Hunting at 45 Clinton Place on the East Side and bought wax cylinders from him for $1.50 each; Hunting bragged he had just sold fifty in Coney Island. Armed with a warrant, Roosevelt’s police later seized three phonographs, fifty-three cylinders, and stacks of promotional literature. Magistrate Kudlich of Jefferson Market Courthouse soon sentenced audio porn purveyor Hunting to three months in jail.

  Over the weeks in June, Parker attended board meetings regularly and, surprisingly, was now working efficiently with the rest of the board toward delivering another round of promotions of captains and sergeants. Written tests had been scheduled and graded, eligible lists fine-tuned. The topic of promoting inspectors was avoided.

  The rumor mill had it that the mayor was considering dropping the Parker charges to prevent Parker and General Tracy from humiliating Roosevelt and Andrews on the stand. The rumor mill was wrong.

  The trial resumed on Monday, June 29. General Tracy called Grant back to testify. Grant freely admitted many meetings were rescheduled to accommodate his travel plans or those of TR or Andrews. “You have got enough evidence out of me to convict me already, I guess,” said Colonel Grant, chuckling. (Roosevelt, in a letter to Cabot Lodge, speculated whether a “fool” such as Grant or a “knave” such as Parker could cause more damage to a good cause.) Elihu Root completed his redirect questioning of Grant, then he shocked almost everyone in the room: he rested the prosecution’s case, without calling Roosevelt.

  General Tracy then asked the mayor to dismiss the charges. Tracy promised that if the mayor convicted Parker, he would appeal to the courts even before the governor made a decision on whether to sign. He pointed out how odd it was that the prosecution never called Commissioners Andrews or Roosevelt, and that Grant had essentially played out as a defense witness.

  The general scoffed at the main charges, especially the pension issues. “I say all these [pension] cases were properly attended to.” Mr. Roosevelt shook his head vigorously as though dissenting. General Tracy stared at Roosevelt, then remarked: “I see my friend shakes his head, but there is nothing in it.”

  Moments later, when the mayor refused to dismiss charges, Roosevelt exulted. “He jumped around like a tin monkey on a stick,” sniped the reporter for the World, “grinning with delight and nodding his head first to one friend and then to another.” Parker and Tracy reacted as though they had expected just such a ruling, and were now quite prepared to bring on a very vigorous defense.

  On Wednesday, July 1, dozens of police officers crowded into the mayor’s office. The defense planned to call as many as forty men who currently worked in the police department, from Chief Conlin and Inspector Moses Cortwright down to elevator operators and doormen. Common sense dictated that anyone saying anything excessively positive about Parker risked earning the wrath of board president Roosevelt. Career men with families, men hoping for promotions, would have to make hard choices.

  Inspector Moses Cortwright—a respected veteran with twenty-nine years on the force—took the stand and said he consulted Commissioner Parker more than the other commissioners, especially on legal matters. He added that Parker could easily be found at headquarters, since he was usually the last commissioner to leave the building, after 7 p.m.

  Captain Stephen O’Brien—the outspoken forty-five-year-old head of detectives, originally trained by Byrnes—testified that Parker single-handedly reorganized the detective bureau, spending a solid month investigating the records and traits of 500 officers to find 100 detectives. “He found out things I never knew,” said the police department’s current spymaster. O’Brien asserted that Parker made himself available on nights and weekends, and frequently pleaded the department’s needs with district attorneys and judges.

  The highest-ranking witness, Chief Peter Conlin—resplendent in gold epaulettes and sleeve bars—took the stand. After establishing the chief’s credentials, Tracy asked several questions about working with the Police Board. “I was most frequently in consultation with Mr. Parker, because the other members of the board seemed to refer everything legal to him,” stated Conlin. “They deferred to him so much that I concluded he was the master spirit of the board.”

  Roosevelt had been scratching out a note. He dropped his pencil.

  “I consulted with Mr. Roosevelt once or twice but he referred me to Mr. Parker.”

  The utterance seemed to hover in the air. The usually voluble Tracy spoke not a syllable for almost a full minute.

  He tried to follow up by asking Chief Conlin to compare the various commissioners but the mayor ruled the questions inadmissible. But back on the topic of Parker alone, Conlin responded that he spoke to Parker almost every day “and made no important changes without consulting
him.” If he couldn’t find him, Parker encouraged Conlin to come to his house, even as late as eleven at night.

  General Tracy slipped in: “Did you consult the other commissioners as much?”

  “No sir!” came the ringing reply before Root could raise an objection.

  Why? “Because I understood Mr. Parker was more in charge than the others; because he knew more about it, could give better suggestions, better advice, better criticisms than the others.”

  The mayor—who seemed to slouch lower in his high-backed rocking chair as the day progressed—announced that he wanted to finish up the trial so he could head to his country home at Richfield Springs for the Fourth of July. He seemed to want desperately to leave.

  Testimony resumed on the morning of Thursday, July 2—the sea of blue still filled the room and Chief Conlin climbed back into the witness chair. Conlin’s frankness, along with these slaps at Roosevelt, brought renewed crowds, overflowing the room. The muggy summer weather made the mayor’s office, despite its many windows, “as stuffy as a lower east side hall bedroom when the breeze is cut off,” according to the New York Times. Men in starched collars sweated.

  The defense tried to bring out that Conlin was no puppet and refused to accept some of Parker’s suggestions for captain. Eventually, Conlin’s testimony wound down and General Tracy said, “Thank you, that is all, Chief.”

  Conlin, however, remained in the chair. “I want to say right here that before this little trouble the board was all a unit, working together for the good of the force. They worked hard and well, and did all they could do to uphold my hands, for which I am grateful. I think the people of New York ought to be grateful to them too. Colonel Grant is an energetic untiring worker. Mr. Andrews too has his heart in the work and I think his inauguration of pistol practice was an excellent thing. As for Mr.——”