The Police Commish

In the 1890s, New York City was unrepentantly wide open. Day or night, a man with a thirst or a letch or the urge to gamble could satisfy his cravings with ease. Long past midnight, small bands played in dozens of Manhattan concert saloons while prostitutes in floor-length dresses trawled the tables. Streetwalkers divvied up the various corners in the Tenderloin, and touts handed out cards for $1-a-date Bowery brothels. Bettors wanting action could wander into Frank Farrell's crystal-chandeliered casino on West 33rd Street. Tourists could smoke opium in no-frills dens in Chinatown.

And where were the cops? Quite a few were busy taking bribes. It was no secret that crooked officers shared their illegal profits with an equally corrupt Democratic political club, Tammany Hall. But on May 6, 1895, Republican mayor William Strong appointed to the city's four-man board of police commissioners the Manhattan native and former state legislator Theodore Roosevelt. Selected at once as board president, Roosevelt eagerly embraced the mayor's mandate for reform, calling it "a man's work." Quite simply, the author of The Winning of the West aimed to clean up Dodge, even if it had 2 million people. Although he never entirely succeeded--who could?--T.R.'s time on the police beat gave the Knickerbocker aristocrat a glimpse of life among the urban poor that shaped the Progressive he became.

Roosevelt set ambitious goals: to make merit replace bribery in the system of job assignments (sergeants sometimes paid $15,000 for lucrative captaincies) and, crazy as it sounds, to compel officers to actually enforce all the laws. He scored a few successes initially, weeding out corrupt veterans. To see whether patrolmen were walking their beats, he began making the same rounds late at night and incognito--though at times in the company of a newspaper reporter. Once, Roosevelt found three bluecoats loitering outside a saloon at 2:30 a.m. "What are you men doing here?" he asked abruptly. "What the %$*&# is that your business?" snapped one of them, in vintage New Yorkese. Roosevelt, spectacles glinting, then introduced himself and lectured them on performing their duty. "These midnight rambles are great fun," he later confided to his sister Anna. "I get a glimpse of the real life of the swarming millions." On some of those nights, Roosevelt's companion was the photographer and social critic Jacob Riis (How the Other Half Lives), who guided him through the circles of hell suffered by the city's struggling immigrants.