Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  At midnight, when the sixty police officers reached the Tenderloin precinct station house after their shift, Chapman without explanation ordered them to form a double-file line; about fifteen central office men joined the parade. Chapman then ordered them to march double-time one block to the Newmarket. The bluecoats surrounded the building.

  Chapman gave the signal; he and twenty other officers dashed through the front door and onto the crowded dance floor. The musicians abruptly stopped a “galloping waltz,” as one newspaper put it, the violins in mid-scrape, with a spontaneous synchronicity that would have delighted any conductor.

  Painted women shrieked in the sudden silence. Men, many with wives in far-off cities, scrambled toward the exits; Chapman ordered his officers to guard all doors and windows but quickly realized he needed reinforcements. The bushy-whiskered captain himself ran back to the station house and telephoned the West 20th Street precinct house for reserves.

  None of the clubgoers understood the raid. Was it now against the law to dance? Were cocktails at midnight taboo? Captain Chapman arrested the alleged owner, Edwin B. Corey, and then announced that he would be arresting everyone else as well. Was it two hundred people? Three hundred? Three hundred fifty? Some men tried to fight their way past the burly policemen but none succeeded.

  The police gathered everyone into the middle of the dance floor and formed a large ring around them. Patrolmen came and escorted a dozen or so at a time outside into a pair of horse-drawn police wagons waiting curbside. About a thousand-plus liquored‑up onlookers, who found the raid more entertaining than the nearby Oasis or any of the other clubs, rained down hoots and catcalls onto the police.

  The revelers, one by one, climbed into the wagon for the short ride to either the Tenderloin or West 20th Street precinct house. It took twenty-seven trips by two wagons to ferry all the prisoners. Three sergeants sat at the desk in the Tenderloin station house taking the “pedigree” of the 141 male and 60 female prisoners consigned to crowded holding cells.

  Arresting officers told newspapermen they had turned down gold rings and cash and promises of favors. The richer among the prisoners sent messengers with scribbled notes to friends and attorneys to rush over and make bail. Before dawn, at least twenty men and twenty-five women produced enough money and paperwork to leave the building.

  Court convened the following morning. Under the minaret-like orange tower of Jefferson Market Courthouse, each bedraggled prisoner, who had slept in evening clothes, was called to stand before Judge Cornell. The magistrate asked if Captain Chapman or his officers had witnessed this particular person commit a crime. Each time, Chapman said no. Each time, Magistrate Cornell released the prisoner. “Discharged.” “Discharged.” “Discharged.” An assembly line of the hung over and exonerated.

  The wait to appear dragged on so long that waiters from nearby restaurants delivered more than fifty breakfasts to the courthouse.

  The only hitch, according the New York World, was that many of the men had given fictitious names when first arrested, and now couldn’t remember them. Dozens of “John Smith”s failed to approach the bench. One fellow was impressively still drunk ten hours later and demanded an explanation as to why he had been arrested. Magistrate Cornell repeated that he was discharged and muttered, “Oh, go away.” The man then confronted Captain Chapman, who promptly arrested him for “drunk and disorderly” conduct and this charge stuck.

  Two hundred times Magistrate Cornell discharged prisoners for lack of evidence. Only owner Corey was held. Editorials of outrage against the reform police popped up.

  Just as Roosevelt’s Sunday saloon crackdown had alienated tens of thousands of German voters, so did this raid irritate another bloc of voters who would never want to see another merger of Republicans and reformers.

  On Sunday, March 7, the Republican power brokers decided to try to put the Police Board out of its misery.

  One by one, they arrived in the ornate lobby of the Fifth Avenue Hotel at 23rd Street for a session with Senator Platt. Attending were congressman Lemuel Quigg, insurance commissioner Louis F. Payn (a close friend of the governor), city czar “Smooth Ed” Lauterbach, ex-postmaster Van Cott, and “Wicked” Gibbs.

  The board’s days appeared limited, no matter what the coven here concocted. The Greater Consolidation Act, which would merge Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens, was expected to go into effect in nine months on January 1, 1898, and it was expected to replace the local police boards with a new Greater New York Police Board to be appointed by the new mayor, elected in November.

  But none of this was certain, and although Roosevelt was likely to lose his job in January (unless reappointed by the new mayor), several high-ranking New York City Republicans decided that they could not wait that long to be rid of him. Goaded by Lauterbach, they aimed to create a bill that would oust the current Police Board immediately and replace it with a new board appointed by the Republican governor Frank Black.

  They argued that a board changeover would ease the eventual transition to a Greater New York police force. Cynics argued it would allow the Republicans to control the police and election machinery in the runup to the hotly contested election for the first mayor of Greater New York in November. At stake was the largest city spoils system in the nation, and the Republicans knew they would need every trick to defeat Tammany Hall in the wake of Roosevelt.

  Newspapermen routinely camped out in the lobby when Senator “Easy Boss” Platt took the train up from Washington, and word of the meeting leaked out, unleashing a geyser of commentary, from premature obituaries for the board to tepid defense. Commissioner Grant volunteered that killing the board might be the only way to achieve harmony; Roosevelt preferred that the legislature grant the mayor the power to remove and replace commissioners, without trial and without the governor’s approval.

  The New York World pointed out that if Roosevelt was appointed assistant secretary of the navy, that too might bring harmony to the board.

  Senator Lodge, in the damp chill of March in D.C., called in every favor and tapped every shoulder. He incurred those implied debts that Roosevelt so scrupulously tried to avoid. Lodge updated TR in a very long optimistic letter (March 8, 1897) that read like a roll call of influential Republicans.

  You have been in my thoughts day and night and your name has been on my lips daily and yet I have not written you. The simple reason has been that in this town of crowds and rush, with a dying Congress and incoming President, with struggling ambitions and an air filled with contradictory rumors it has seemed to me that it would be a useless annoyance to tell you all the phases and fluctuations and all I was doing in the campaign I am making for you—the only thing I care about winning out.

  Lodge recounted a very favorable meeting with the new secretary of the navy, John D. Long; he noted that Senator Wolcott, Republican of Colorado, would ask McKinley for Roosevelt’s appointment as “his one personal favor”; Speaker Reed of Maine would write to McKinley and to Long. Judge William H. Taft, “one of the best fellows going,” convinced a friend of McKinley’s named Herrick to sing TR’s praises. Vice President Garret Hobart unexpectedly approached Lodge and offered to help; Hobart happened to be meeting with McKinley that afternoon.

  “You have, I think, a right to be proud of such support as that I have described and you have not raised a finger and it has all come voluntarily. All I have done is to mass and direct a little.”

  Roosevelt, under so much stress, reacted in a gush of gratitude. After Edith and TR read aloud Lodge’s letter about his efforts for TR, he wrote he felt “a little like bawling.” He searched for ways to articulate his appreciation.

  Roosevelt added that Parker and Grant had so hamstrung the police force that “I hail this bill to legislate us out as a relief.” He refused to count the navy job as a sure thing.

  “I have no idea what I should do next,” he very soon wrote to his sister, “but I should enjoy and should feel I deserved three or four months holiday at Sagamore; a
nd surely there is something I can turn my hand to.”

  On March 12, Captain Devery walked up the familiar steps of 300 Mulberry Street and took the elevator. It was a shorter commute to headquarters than to his precinct on 125th Street. He glad-handed the boys.

  Commissioner Andrews sat down at the desk in the hearing room and cleared some papers to one side. The day of reckoning for the Tammany brave, contemplated by the board for more than a year, was finally at hand. Just then a messenger arrived in the room and handed a document to Andrews. It was a “writ of prohibition” from New York Supreme Court justice Miles Beach.

  Late the previous afternoon, Devery’s lawyers, Colonel James and Abram Elkus, had argued before the judge that the bipartisan Police Board was not bipartisan and didn’t fulfill the law’s provisions: “No more than two members of the board can belong to the same political party or be of the same opinions on State and National issues.” James and Elkus argued that at least three board members agreed on national issues of “opposition to the free coinage of silver, the maintenance of silver and paper currency at a parity with gold, the Monroe Doctrine, pensions for soldiers, sympathy with Cuba, tariff for revenue, admission of territories.” At the state level, at least three agreed on the Consolidation of Greater New York, the liquor tax, and ballot reform.

  Commissioner Andrews read the document and reluctantly halted the trial and announced he would forward the legal papers to corporation counsel Scott.

  Speaking to reporters, Andrews said he wouldn’t comment “off-hand” but then proceeded to do so, admitting that “no more vicious system” than a bipartisan commission existed. He also conceded that three commissioners, including him, agreed on many of those national issues. The Tribune explained it succinctly: Commissioner Andrews voted for McKinley.

  Devery had slipped off the hook yet again. The supreme court judge chosen to review this temporary writ was onetime Tammany Hall sachem Judge Frederick Smyth.

  The legislation to oust the Police Board was stalling in Albany. Upstate church-belt Republicans wanted to horse-trade a tightening of loopholes in the Raines Liquor Law for their support of the Lauterbach police bill that would terminate Roosevelt. Raines himself wanted all the thousands of new “fake” Raines clubs to be taxed heavily or disbanded; he wanted new hotel rules about room size and wall thickness to close the “fake” Raines hotels. “If the Republican party makes these amendments,” sniped Republican Abe Gruber, “it couldn’t elect a mayor of the Greater New York if the Democrats went to Sing Sing for a candidate.”

  The Brooklyn Eagle published an incisive editorial on its neighbor city’s Police Board. Under the headline A DISORDERLY HOUSE, it wrote:

  The police board is not composed of two good men, Roosevelt and Andrews, one weak man, Grant, and one bad able man, Parker. It is composed of four men, full of faults, who, officially speaking, keep a disorderly house.

  Roosevelt is a good man in the most obnoxious sense of the word. He is about as unwise and whimsical as can be. Mr. Andrews sticks to Mr. Roosevelt with the tenacity and intelligence of a porous plaster [i.e., a Band-Aid]. Mr. Grant is a quiet methodical, ordinarily capable man. Parker is a shrewd, cool, keen character, with whom Grant prefers to act [instead of] following the vagaries of Roosevelt.

  The advantage which Parker has over the rest of the board is simply that which coolness, sanity and ability make for themselves over circumstances and men that disregard such qualities.

  On Tuesday night, March 16, 1897, Roosevelt, the invited speaker, inched his way through the standing-room-only crowd of about 400 men and women at the cramped Social Reform Club on East 4th Street. (Edith was visiting friends in Philadelphia for a few days, and TR always seemed wound a bit tighter when he couldn’t confide in her.)

  He would later describe the audience as “many socialists and anarchists, both of the parlor and practical kind.” That night, TR added a theme of social justice to his usual paean to reform board accomplishments. He spoke of how the police had almost banished local gang leaders who used to terrorize poor neighborhoods; he also spoke of the need to defeat clever, wealthy scoundrels who finessed the laws to steal whole railroads. But Roosevelt stressed that laws should not merely defend the poor and undermine the wealthy; laws should defend the honest and attack the criminal. The audience seemed to welcome the distinction.

  The commissioner—among other police highlights—then spoke of the great restraint the police showed during the massive election rallies. “I did not hear of a single instance of clubbing,” he said. “I beg your pardon,” someone shouted. “I was poked in the ribs.” Roosevelt, trying to control himself, said, “I saw 20,000 gentlemen who were not poked with a club. Of course you were poked in the ribs … and if you had not been kept back, you would not [be] here to raise objections.”

  Roosevelt received steady polite applause for his speech. The moderator then asked for any comments or questions from the audience. Up rose Moses Oppenheimer, a European Socialist who had emigrated after several arrests in Germany.

  Oppenheimer, a skilled rabble-rouser, ambushed Roosevelt. He had prepared a speech, and had already handed copies to the press. He now blindsided Roosevelt, who was forced to sit on the stage and listen. Oppenheimer began by recalling the days when the police commissioners “were in the habit of visiting churches and friendly political clubs and telling everybody how painstaking and good and virtuous they were.” The audience laughed loudly; TR sat facing them, unamused.

  “Like clergymen, Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Parker spoke from pulpits and would have no back talk. Tonight is the first opportunity for frank public criticism.” He said public officials should not be allowed to judge themselves and declare victories, but rather should be judged by others.

  We all know about the great anti-saloon crusade, the Haroun-Al-Raschid midnight rambles, the sensational handshakes; in those breezy and bustling days Mr. Roosevelt was in the habit of brushing aside every criticism with the accusation that the critics were criminals or the allies of criminals. Result—the Raines hotel, the speak-easy, and the people’s verdict in the election of 1895. Then there was a crusade against what is called the “social evil.” That is more rampant than ever.

  The packed house responded with shouts of “That’s right.” Roosevelt looked extremely annoyed.

  Oppenheimer continued that police officers were judged on the volume of arrests; witness Captain Chapman’s recent Tenderloin raid in which hundreds of citizens were falsely arrested. “To deprive a peaceable citizen of his liberty, to haul him to the police station and to court, to put him to the trouble and expense for insufficient reasons may seem but a trifle to a man who sits comfortably in his office at Mulberry Street, but to the innocent victim it is no trifling matter,” said Oppenheimer.

  The German native claimed it was very difficult to bring a complaint against a police officer, with policemen creating fear and the Police Board strewing red tape. “Let us fight against abuse of power and official terrorism which no free community should tolerate.” The hall erupted in cheers.

  Roosevelt leaped to his feet. He said Oppenheimer had no idea what he was talking about, that he was ignorant of the facts; the crowd responded with hisses and catcalls. TR offered to repeat the statement. He said Oppenheimer was trying to bring back the corrupt days of Tammany Hall and that knuckling under to Oppenheimer’s criticisms would transform New York City into such a cesspool of vice “as would make Babylon seem an Arcadia.”

  Roosevelt said no promotions were made for volume of arrests but all were made for “gallantry or merit.” This was not actually true because of civil service rules. As for illegal arrests of women, he said he had personally investigated “every single instance” and found not one single innocent woman had been arrested.

  TR said people were biased and couldn’t let go of their image of the police as corrupt but that the police had indeed changed. “I have striven as faithfully as mortal ever did to be a servant of every man in this city, no matt
er what his creed or politics,” he said, his voice quavering, almost breaking. “I have done all that in me lies to make the department honest.”

  The next day, Henry Cabot Lodge, who seemed to be finally swaying McKinley to select Roosevelt, opened his newspaper to see his friend portrayed as angrily debating a German Socialist.

  Lodge dashed off two unusually frank letters to TR, basically counseling him, in effect, to shut up, and to refuse all public speaking engagements until the new job was settled.

  “Edith got hold of the first [letter] immediately on her return from Philadelphia,” TR informed Lodge, “and insisted on reading it aloud to me, and endorsing all the views it set forth with fairly rabid emphasis.” TR informed him he had no more speaking commitments besides a Young Republican club in Brooklyn “where I cannot conceive of anything unpleasant happening.”

  He couldn’t resist defending himself for the Social Reform Club tirade. Roosevelt said that nine out of ten times he won converts on the East Side, and that the club boasted respected members such as Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell and Dr. Rainsford, but TR admitted: “I appreciate fully the discredit attaching to what looked like a joint debate with an abusive socialist blackguard.”

  Roosevelt said the club set him up and that most newspapermen “of the Free Silver Socialist stripe” were tipped off in advance to come watch him being bludgeoned. But Roosevelt claimed his best option in “a bad business was to fight it out” and that although Lodge might find it hard to believe, “They cheered me and cheered me again and again, and thronged around me so to shake hands, and to tell me that they had changed their opinion, that I was not able to get away for half an hour.”

  He conceded, though, that among newspapers only “the utterly unimportant Times” saw it that way.