Island of Vice
Page 36
Root interrupted: “Oh, stop. How is this relevant?”
“Why did you stop him before he reached Commissioner Roosevelt?” asked General Tracy sharply.
Root: “Was this all prearranged?”
Tracy: “I would have liked to hear about Roosevelt.”
TR could stand the comedy no longer. “I don’t care to get certificates of good character from my subordinates,” he snapped in a loud voice.
Conlin then left the stand without saying another word.
The rest of the morning’s testimony was anticlimactic. The elevator operator revealed that Parker had been at police headquarters on both Thanksgiving and Christmas, which might say something about his dedication or about his lack of a private life. (Parker was the only bachelor on the board.)
In the afternoon, one of the two main combatants finally got a chance to testify. Parker took the stand. General Tracy started slowly by letting Parker recount how he had worked his way up from being a stenographer in the corporation counsel’s office at age seventeen. Parker said he had belonged to no political party for the past ten years, except for a few months with a Democratic reform organization. He was an Independent.
How did he, such an outsider, land the job as police commissioner? Parker replied that he never sought the job but was called in out of the blue by the mayor. He was told that if Elihu Root approved of him, he would be appointed.
The newspapers reported that Mr. Root smiled at this moment.
Parker said Root approved of him and the mayor appointed him.
Parker described the early days of the board, how he and Roosevelt worked intimately together to handle the easing out of Chief Byrnes, and remained cordial and cooperative for nine months right through February 4, when Parker voted against Brooks and McCullagh and Tierney. Even after that, Parker went to dinner at Mr. Roosevelt’s home, and prior to the split, Roosevelt had repeatedly commended his work to large audiences.
As for his absences, Parker said he informed Roosevelt of them in advance and always revealed his views, and that he never missed a meeting requiring four votes. Parker added that Roosevelt even encouraged him to miss some board meetings to go to Albany and consult on the Greater Consolidation bill. Why? He wanted “inside tips” on the police supplemental legislation. Or, as General Tracy put it, “on whether Mr. Platt was going to turn you all out of office?” Parker replied, “Yes.” Many of the politically savvy in the audience laughed. Roosevelt scowled fiercely.
The mayor confided to friends that he was deeply disappointed by the prosecution’s case so far, and vowed aloud not to let this trial interfere with his annual monthlong summer nursing of his gout at Richfield Springs.
Compelled to return 215 miles to the city just for the trial, he advised the participants to finish in two marathon sessions, on July 7 and 8. Around now, Roosevelt somehow convinced Root to call him as a rebuttal witness; clearly Root had been trying to keep his ignitable young friend out of the verbal reach of General Tracy.
Roosevelt took the stand on the afternoon of July 7. Witnesses said he looked almost electrified.
“I have always been nervous before a contest,” Roosevelt told a family friend, “although I have not a particle of nervousness when once the fight is actually on, and indeed rather enjoy it. In the old days I was always nervous before a boxing match or polo game, or even a hard day with the hounds; after killing my first grizzly I recollect the hunter who was with me telling me that from the way I looked just before I went into the thing he would have believed if the bear had happened to get away that I had been afraid of it.”
Indeed, once Elihu Root began asking questions, Roosevelt answered without any nerves or hesitation. The New York Times compared his power and directness to a strong-armed archer firing arrows. The World added the observation that he appeared determined not to lose his temper.
Root was now perhaps the more nervous one because he kept Roosevelt on the stand for only about thirty minutes. The prevailing notion among Root, Edith, and Lodge was that TR could be a loose cannon. Root lobbed straightforward questions about Parker’s attendance and minimal input on hiring new recruits. TR said Parker did not attend meetings to abolish police lodging houses, the Broadway squad, or the steamboat squad, or to initiate pistol practice.
Root: “Was the business of the board postponed because of Mr. Parker’s absences?”
Roosevelt: “Yes, scores of times.”
He said Parker “habitually” reached the building in the late afternoon but refused to commit—when TR offered—to have board meetings at 4 p.m. instead of 10 a.m.
Roosevelt accused Parker of delaying the appointment of patrolmen whom Parker had originally recommended, a vague charge that implied corruption, of Parker’s waiting for another payoff. Mostly, he accused Parker of neglecting board work for the past six months. “It was a wonderment to us what he had been doing.”
Root abruptly turned to General Tracy. “You can have the witness.” The Tribune and the Herald judged Roosevelt “disappointed” at the sudden stop.
Tracy began aggressively; he tried to trace all of TR’s complaints as surfacing only after Parker refused to vote for Brooks and McCullagh, but Roosevelt denied it.
TR dated his first disagreement with Parker to months before that. He said a realization slowly welled in him that Parker might be “double-dealing and untrustworthy.” He found that Parker covertly criticized their decisions over promotions to the editor of the Evening Post, who relayed Parker’s words to him. All the while, Parker was pretending he had no problems with their approach.
Roosevelt said he found in early fall in the raucous runup to the election—when Republican machine men and Germans begged the police to lighten up on Sundays—that Parker had been secretly bad-mouthing the board’s excise crackdown. Roosevelt said he confronted Parker about it in front of the mayor.
General Tracy, without missing a beat, then asked: “Didn’t Parker then tell the mayor he endorsed strict excise enforcement? And didn’t you say to him, ‘You are a bully fellow to stand up for a colleague in that way. If only the other fellows were like you’?”
Roosevelt’s fuse was lit. It hadn’t taken long. “What?” he shouted. “Parker stand up for a colleague! No.” TR calmed himself down. The question was repeated. “I may have said the first part of the sentence,” TR conceded.
General Tracy walked Roosevelt through statement after statement of praise he had been quoted as giving Parker. Were his praises of Parker’s speeches “false and insincere”? General Tracy cited a Renwick Hall appearance on October 12, 1895, when Parker spoke first and received a long ovation, and then Roosevelt came to the podium and said: “He is just as good a commissioner as he is a speaker.”
Tracy cornered Roosevelt into admitting that he was deeply upset by Parker’s letter to Lauterbach, in which Parker claimed that Roosevelt championed more Democrats than Republicans. “I thought worse of Mr. Parker than I ever deemed it possible,” stated TR, looking directly at his fellow commissioner.
Then General Tracy tossed what appeared a softball question at Roosevelt. Why should Parker be removed? Roosevelt unspooled his pent‑up anger. Parker should be ousted for “mendacity, treachery and double dealing” and for “demoralizing the force.” TR said Parker refused to act with them on promotion, refused to make concessions regarding Cortwright, that he had held up Steinkampf, that he had forced the other commissioners to fix their merit marks and then submit them to him “so that I had to make concessions to him until I was perfectly ashamed that I yielded to him—I yielded to no other man like I did to him.”
GENERAL TRACY: That was the real secret, you had to yield.
ROOSEVELT: Gracious me! If he had only been right I would like to have yielded to him.
GENERAL TRACY: You enjoy yielding to a man?
ROOSEVELT: By George, I do. Now that is a fact.
The room erupted with laughter. Long laughter. Waves of it. TR looked deeply uncomfortable.
Their bellies full but their appetites for mischief apparently unslaked, Parker and Tracy decided to zero in on the promotion to sergeant of TR favorite Michael Tierney.
General Tracy’s cross-examination, extending from 8:30 to 11 p.m., picked at Roosevelt’s role in browbeating Chief Conlin to defy Parker and promote Roosevelt’s protégé on February 4.
Roosevelt praised Tierney as an “exceptionally able and trustworthy” corporal when he had served under him a decade ago, but Roosevelt admitted that he knew little about Tierney’s activities for the past four years.
General Tracy wanted to know whether Roosevelt realized when he waved the promotions notebook in Chief Conlin’s face and pointed to a memo of endorsement in Tierney’s folder signed by the chief himself that it was a mistake, a misfiled document?
“No,” answered Roosevelt.
TRACY: And that the chief had never written any such thing about Tierney?
ROOSEVELT: No.
TRACY: Have you heard of it?
ROOSEVELT: The chief told me so two or three days afterwards.
TR confirmed that he gave Tierney a merit rating of 60 out of a possible 65 even though the officer had a dozen police misconduct convictions, including a twenty-day suspension for attacking a civilian. Roosevelt reiterated that he had interviewed a police surgeon who had disagreed with the board’s judgment on the suspension.
Tracy probed more about Tierney. Roosevelt snapped, “Some of the best men we promoted had infinitely worse records.”
General Tracy immediately looked shocked. He solemnly asked the mayor to strike that line of testimony out of the record “to save a little reputation for these gentlemen.” As he said it, he gestured toward the half dozen police captains in the audience.
Since the trial focused on Parker’s delays, Tracy tried to spotlight Roosevelt’s reckless speed. He showed that Roosevelt had once returned to Parker a pile of half a dozen cases, totaling more than 300 pages of testimony, in less than half an hour. TR had simply accepted Parker’s verdicts. Tracy also brought out that Roosevelt could recall few details from the 1,500 cases he had judged.
On July 8, the final day of the trial, the mayor pronounced himself ready to go all night to finish up. The porch rocker and sulphur baths of the Spring House at Richfield Springs clearly beckoned.
General Tracy homed in on Roosevelt’s attendance; he came armed with every TR speaking trip or vacation. The travel log included: September 11, Roosevelt “law and order” speech in Buffalo; September 25 in New Haven to address Yale graduates; November 8, postelection recovery at Oyster Bay; December 30, Roosevelt in Philadelphia; February 22 in Chicago; April 22 to 27 in Michigan and Ohio. All these board meetings were rescheduled and Parker was cited for missing half of the new “special meetings.” Then asked Tracy: “You rescheduled to suit your own convenience then punished Parker for missing?”
Tracy wound down his cross-examination by focusing on promotions and how TR and his colleagues could fix the deck by giving a candidate a 40 or less for “merit.” Then, no matter how high the officer scored on the civil service exam (worth up to 35 points), he could not earn the 75 points needed to make the eligible list. Roosevelt conceded the narrow point, but strongly disagreed that this power would lead to promoting the wrong men.
Roosevelt left the stand.
The mayor called a dinner recess, and at this point, the perspiring sixty-six-year-old General Tracy pleaded fatigue and asked to be excused to catch a train to Bar Harbor, Maine. So Andrew D. Parker gave his own summation for the defense, a dense, detail-filled, two-hour-long speech, tackling point after point.
He was, as ever, tone deaf to everyone’s exasperation and exhaustion but maybe he calculatingly delivered the speech to list key points for a future judicial appeal.
Parker couldn’t leave the topic of Tierney’s drinking alone. He said he informed Roosevelt the man had a “still” on him and drank at headquarters, but one day later Roosevelt reported back to Parker that he had investigated and determined that Tierney never drank. “I laughed at that,” said Parker. In the hot stuffy room, lit by bare electric lightbulbs, Parker asked for the charges to be dropped.
The mayor whispered back and forth with the assistant corporation counsel and then stated that he was “reserving judgment.”
The next day, even the sympathetic New York Times stated: “It has by no means been made clear that Commissioner Parker was a negligent, inefficient or unfaithful commissioner.” The “reserving judgment” was a slap at TR.
Roosevelt, however, with his uncanny ability to wear blinders when needed, interpreted the events contrary to the newspapers in the city. In a letter to family friend Fanny Parsons, Roosevelt wrote: “In the trial before the Mayor I scored a complete victory over General Tracy in a very hard six hours cross-examination and had the satisfaction of stating under oath to Parker, who was not six feet distant, all that I thought worst in his moral character.”
He repeated almost the exact words writing to his sister Bamie, adding, though, that he had “forgiven” General Tracy for representing Parker since the lawyer had delivered to him the “satisfaction of telling, under oath, with Parker not six feet distant, just what I thought of [Parker’s] mendacity, treachery and duplicity.”
Wife Edith hoped her husband could now start to relax. “Thank goodness the Parker trial is over. I enclose part of Theodore’s examination. It has been a dreadful strain for him. He is physically well though sleepless and nervous.”
Around this time, Roosevelt began hinting heavily in letters to his friend and mentor Senator Henry Cabot Lodge that in “six or eight months,” he would have finished “all that I have to do” at police headquarters, which seemed to mean he would be ready for a new job. By sheer coincidence, that time frame would fall just as the newly elected president would be making appointments to his cabinet. If Republican William McKinley of Ohio won, might there not be some place in his administration for the law-and-order crusader from New York?
But first Roosevelt would have to convince the Midwestern governor that he had abandoned his longtime love affair with Reed of Maine and was now a loyal McKinley man.
The mayor spent weeks at Richfield Springs, refusing to deliver a ruling on the Parker trial or to pin down when he might decide. Roosevelt needed a quick guilty verdict and the governor’s swift signature, and the court system’s rejection of any appeals. He didn’t get any of it.
And every day for the foreseeable future Roosevelt and Parker would work side by side as commissioners, in this most dysfunctional Police Board family.
n mid-July the squabbling Police Board finally succeeded in promoting eight men to the exalted rank of captain. All were talented department veterans whom the board was convinced had not been tainted during the Byrnes years. Robert Young of the Elizabeth Street station spoke some Chinese; Daniel C. Moynihan had excelled during a horse-car strike. They each received a gold shield, and a pay raise to $2,750.
They reported to their new precincts at 8 a.m. on Thursday, July 16. That afternoon, Roosevelt summoned the new captains to headquarters for a lecture. (There was always a King-Arthur-addressing-his-knights feel to these chats.) He stressed courage and honesty; he implored the men to root out all bribery in their precincts, to be brave during riots (“cowardice … will no more be tolerated than it would be in the army”), and especially to crack down on vice. “Keep up a continual and unending warfare against crime, and especially that vicious sort which is carried on behind closed d
oors—pool-rooms, disorderly houses, and violations of the excise law. Keep that up to the handle.” He warned them if they failed to stay honest, “no influence on earth can save you.”
It’s fascinating and somewhat uncanny that despite one of the most concerted efforts in the history of New York City to crack down on whoring, gambling, and after-hours drinking that all three somehow thrived.
Although TR and Parker squabbled over promotions, they agreed completely on suppressing vice, as did Chief Conlin and the inspectors and several well-placed captains, including Chapman of the Tenderloin. Yet vice thrived. Suppressed in one place, it emerged elsewhere. Police hit at streetwalkers and known brothel locations, but the city was now embracing Raines Law hotels, and prostitutes were also taking apartments in tenement buildings. The police shuttered gambling palaces and the kingpins created private clubs with easy membership. Acting captain Groo had just raided a betting poolroom and offtrack betting parlor on Bleecker Street catering only to women. Comstock chased nudity on the stage but the new Olympia roof garden featured massive nude statues and risqué skits. Pushcart peddlers hand-sold penny cards of French nudes; bookseller Herman Stoll offered Bride’s Confession, Stolen Sweets, and Fanny Hill; and although “The Voice,” Russell Hunting, was temporarily in prison, others were standing up to the microphone to warble dirty songs and jokes.
The same night that TR gave his speech to the captains, yet another Tenderloin crowd tried to rescue yet another pretty woman whom a plainclothes officer accused of streetwalking. She claimed her only mistake was replying “Good evening” to the man’s “Hello” as she walked in front of the Metropolitan Opera House at 39th Street. “Bertie” ran to the cellar entrance of the Park & Tilford Grocery, yelling that a man was “insulting” her. As the crowd tightened around him, the man showed his badge. Revelers were unimpressed and called him “dirty sneak” and worse; someone ran to Soubrettes’ Row and twenty sporting women rushed to the scene to try to free their comrade. They circled Officer Saubel, cursed him, threatened him, enticed him, but he refused to let “Bertie” go. When the horses of the patrol wagon galloped off, the crowd followed shouting and the next day’s headline ran: BROADWAY TO HER RESCUE.