The New York Police Department needed a cleaning up. The force at that time was under a heavy cloud. There had been a Mayorality election. Tammany had made a hard fight but the Republican candidate, Strong, had been elected. The vote meant that the citizens thought the time had come for a New York police reform. Mayor Strong asked Roosevelt, then serving on the national Civil Service Commission, to be Police Commissioner.

Roosevelt’s friends thought that he was too big a man to take such a position. He saw a work that needed to be done.

Proctor, a friend and fellow worker, tried to persuade him not to undertake the job. Roosevelt had given the matter earnest thought. He believed himself capable of bringing about the necessary reforms. He knew that such a work would be of great benefit to his fellow citizens.

“Proctor,” he said, “it is my duty. I am going.”

“Go then!” said Proctor. “You must always have your own way. Yet I believe you are right. Clean up the city thoroughly!”

Roosevelt faced a bigger job than he knew. The metropolitan police system was in the hands of corrupt politicians. The Tammany ring exercised a tyranny over the policemen. Incompetency, immorality and dishonesty honeycombed the department. Many of the policemen, instead of being a protection to the people, were a menace.

Promotions went by favor and money. The man who wanted to become a policeman could get the job for from $200 to $300. A police lieutenant could buy his appointment for from $10,000 up. The men who secured positions in this way paid the money with the expectation of getting it back through graft. They had free rope so long as they delivered to the political leaders half of their spoils.

If a saloonkeeper wanted to obey the law and tried to get along without paying tribute to the policemen of his district, he found that a rival saloonkeeper was being accorded extraordinary privileges in order that he himself might be either ruined or forced to “come across.” Gambling dens, saloons and disorderly houses were free from punishment so long as they paid toll. Vice flaunted itself in the face of the law-abiding element of the city.

The very coming of Roosevelt to Mulberry Street was a challenge to the disorderly and corrupt elements of the metropolis. His friends warned him that other commissioners, with good intentions, had tried to do what he was about to attempt, but had found the police force so full of jealousy, favoritism and blackmail that little progress could be made.

“Tom” Byrnes, a detective of national fame, was the head of the New York police at that time. Roosevelt decided that reform should begin at the top. He dismissed Byrnes. The latter hurled at him this challenge:

“The system will break your opposition. You will give in, for you are only human, after all.”

Roosevelt kept on. No one was allowed anything to say concerning his appointments and promotions. Those who were physically and morally weak he banished from the service. Those who showed merit and faithfulness he promoted.

He started in at once to acquire an intimate knowledge of the men who worked under him. He accomplished this by making personal tours at night through the various police districts. Francis E. Leupp, whose previously-mentioned book, “The Man Roosevelt,” will always be a fruitful source to Roosevelt’s biographers, gives this description of such an expedition:

HAROUN-AL-RASCHID

“The friend (Leupp) found the Commissioner at the appointed place and hour, armed only with a little stick and a written list of the patrolmen’s posts in the district which was to be visited. They walked over each beat separately. In the first three beats they found only one man on post. One of the others had gone to assist the man on the third, but there was no trace of the third man’s whereabouts. They came upon a patrolman seated on a box with a woman.

“‘Patrolman,’ asked the Commissioner, ‘are you doing your duty on post 27?’

“The fellow jumped up in a hurry. This pedestrian, though unknown to him, was obviously familiar with police matters; so he stammered out, with every attempt to be obsequious: ‘Yes, sir; I am, sir.’

“‘Is it all right for you to sit down?’ inquired the mysterious stranger.

“‘Yes, sir—no, sir—well, sir, I wasn’t sitting down. I was just waiting for my partner, the patrolman on the next beat. Really, I wasn’t sitting down.’

“‘Very well,’ said the stranger, cutting him short and starting on. “The officer ran along, explaining again with much volubility that he had not been sitting down—he had just been leaning a little against something while he waited.

“‘That will do; you are following me off post. Go back to your beat now and present yourself before me at headquarters at half-past nine in the morning. I am Commissioner Roosevelt.’

“Another three blocks and the strollers came upon a patrolman chatting with a man and a woman. They passed the group, went a little way, and returned; the woman was gone, but the patrolman and the man were still there, and deep in conversation. The talk was interrupted to enable the officer to answer the Commissioner’s questions. The man seized the opportunity to slip off.

“‘They were drunk, sir, a little intoxicated, sir,’ was the patrolman’s excuse, as he caught an inkling of the situation. ‘I was just trying to quiet them down a bit. I’m sorry, sir, very sorry.’

“‘That’s enough. Come to Commissioner Roosevelt’s office at half-past nine.’

“In search of the roundsman the Commissioner started to call him to account for all this laxity in discipline. The roundsman was found gossiping with two patrolmen on another beat. “‘Which of you men belongs here?’ demanded the Commissioner, addressing the patrolmen.

“They and their companion met the inquiry defiantly. One of the trio retorted: ‘What business is that of yours?’

“The Commissioner made no response except to repeat his question in another form: ‘Which one of you is covering beat 31?’”

It was now plain that they were in trouble. By the light of a neighboring gas lamp the roundsman recognized the interrogator’s face. He cast a significant look at one of his companions, who answered meekly enough: “It’s me, sir.”

The other told where he belonged and left quickly for his post, while the roundsman made a poor fist of explaining that he was “just admonishing the patrolmen to move around and do their duty” when the commissioner came up.

“You may call on me at half-past nine and tell me all about it,” was the response. “I haven’t time now to listen.”

The culprits, when they appeared the next morning, had every conceivable excuse for their shortcomings. Many of them pleaded that this was their first offense.

“Take care that you do not do it a second time,” was Roosevelt’s response. “I am going to see with my own eyes how you men employ your time.”

On the other hand, where policemen had been found to have performed their duties well, they were also ordered to call at headquarters the next day, but instead of being reprimanded like the others, they were warmly praised. For the first time each man had a show for promotion on his merits. Neither politics nor religion counted. The man who did a brave deed was promoted. The man who was found corrupt was “broken.” That was all there was to it. It required no pull or money to become a member of the police force when Roosevelt had charge of it. This is illustrated by his selection of one of his policemen from the Bowery branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association. He tells the story that he had gone to the branch of the association one night and the secretary informed him that they had a young man who had just rescued a woman from a burning building, showing great coolness and courage.

The Commissioner was interested—brave men always attracted him. He asked to see the young man, who was a Russian and who had some years ago come to America during one of the waves of persecution in the realm of the Czar. He had been studying in the association classes for some time and wanted employment. Physically he was of the right type, and he passed his examination for the force.

He made one of the best policemen in the city, and in consequence of his pay he was able to provide for his mother and his old grandmother and to start his small brothers and sisters in life. Said Colonel Roosevelt, “He was already a good son and brother, so that it was not surprising that he made a good policeman.”

Roosevelt’s strenuous and novel methods soon began to count. Instead of being tools of blackmailers, the men became self-respecting and “straight.” It became a badge of honor to be known as a “Roosevelt cop.”

Mr. Enright, the present Chief of the New York Police Department and an old member of the force, testifies to the remarkable executive ability shown by Roosevelt. “He was the first Commissioner to inaugurate a strict civil service examination,” said Mr. Enright, “and he sent out a letter requesting 1,000 young men through the state to enter the examination and become members of the force. He tested them very severely, asking questions on history and geography. One of his questions was to name five states west of the Mississippi River and give the capitals. Another was to name five consecutive Presidents.

“He made drastic rules to enforce the excise law in those days, and on many Sundays used the whole Police Department in his work by placing a uniformed patrolman in front of the door of every saloon.”

Another warm admirer of Colonel Roosevelt is Captain Bourke, who received from Roosevelt his first promotion after he had arrested Mike Callahan, owner of a saloon at Mott Street and Chatham Square, who had been violating the excise law. Callahan was credited with being immune to arrest, due to his influence with politicians, and Bourke made the arrest after he had been only six weeks on the force. It was rumored that Bourke would be dismissed for his act, but when Callahan was arraigned and convicted Bourke was promoted.

Certain elements of the city rebelled against Roosevelt’s rigid enforcement of the excise laws and organized a parade in protest. A reviewing stand was built and, unknown to the promoters, Colonel Roosevelt slipped into the stand. At the head of a division was a stout German—a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War. Roosevelt’s endeavor to deprive him of his Sunday beer had aroused his wrath and as he passed the platform he shouted scornfully in German:

“Now, where is that Roosevelt?”

Mr. Roosevelt, leaning over the side of the stand, queried, also in German:

“Here I am. What will you, comrade?”

The astonished German when it dawned upon him that Roosevelt had heard him, raised his hat and shouted: “Hurrah for Roosevelt!” Roosevelt’s good humor caught the crowd. The cheer was repeated and the demonstration turned to one for the commissioner instead of against him.

On one occasion when Roosevelt was on a night tour of investigation, he walked around a certain beat three times without being able to find his man. Just as he was about to leave, a quarrel occurred in a cafe and the owner came out on the sidewalk and knocked with a stick as a signal that he needed police protection. Three times he rapped, but the policeman did not come. Roosevelt heard him say:

“Where in thunder is the scoundrel sleeping? He should have told me that he had given up sleeping in the barber shop so that I could have found him.” The next morning the policeman received a summons to headquarters to explain why he had changed his sleeping place.

It is also told of Roosevelt that an anti-Hebrew lecturer, intending to denounce Jews, asked for police protection at a lecture. The protection was promised and sent—thirty Hebrew policemen, whose presence so awed the speaker that his lecture became quite tame.

The attachment of members of the Jewish race for Roosevelt was illustrated at his funeral. The one man who was permitted to sit alone in the trophy room at Sagamore Hill, with the body of the Colonel, was Lieutenant Otto Raphael of the New York Police Force, a Hebrew of the East side. Mr. Roosevelt, in his biography, describes Raphael as “a powerful fellow with a good-humored face. He and I were both ‘straight New Yorkers,’ to use the vernacular. To show our community of feeling and our grasp of the facts of life, I may mention that we were almost the only men in the Police Department who picked Fitzsimmons as a winner over Corbett.”

Captain William B. Sullivan, now in command of the Gates Avenue Police Station, Brooklyn, who served as bodyguard to Roosevelt while he was Police Commissioner, attests that Roosevelt was a born policeman. “There wasn’t a man in the department,” said Sullivan, “that he didn’t know by name.”

While prosecuting his fight for the enforcement of the Sunday laws, Roosevelt made the police enforce a regulation which declared that ice must not be sold after 10 o’clock in the morning on Sundays. This proved to be a real hardship to the masses of the East side. A strong appeal was made to the commissioner to be less severe in the prosecution of this law, but he felt that he was in the right and kept to his course.

Then a reporter wrote a story of the death of a little girl in a tenement on the East Side. The narrative said that the mother had gone to buy ice for her after 10 o’clock on Sunday morning and that the iceman was arrested for selling it, and in the mother’s absence the child was said to have died.

This tale proved to be nothing more or less than a fable, written to show what could happen under the continued enforcement of this law. Roosevelt furiously denounced both the reporter and the editor of the newspaper which published this story, yet he soon withdrew his opposition to the selling of ice on Sunday. He said that he had received more than two hundred letters because of the story and that some of the women who wrote him declared that they would like to tear him to pieces.

In spite of the many bitter battles Roosevelt faced as Police Commissioner, he never lost his kindness of heart. He found one gray-haired veteran who had saved twenty-eight lives at the risk of his own. All of the recognition he had earned from the Police Board for this heroic deed was the privilege of buying a new uniform at his own expense, after he ruined his old one in the rescue of the lives.

The Police Board resolved, at Roosevelt’s request, that the clothes ruined in rescuing a life on duty should be paid for by the department.

Children found him always a warm, helpful friend. When things happened in their neighborhood that did violence to their youthful sense of justice, they came to him with their complaints and, if it were at all possible, he adjusted them.

His enemies tried many times to “get something on him.” One night they had him shadowed, thinking to catch him off his guard. News came to him of their attempt. He bridled with indignation. “They found me going home to my babies. Let them make the most of that,” he cried. While Police Commissioner, Roosevelt acted also as a member of the Department of Health. Here, working hand in hand with Jacob Riis, he did much to make conditions better for the poor. In those days it was the children that were the greatest sufferers from the lack of health laws.

While on his night visits Roosevelt went into dark courts and entered foul tenements to discover for himself the misery that lay within their walls. At his recommendation, the worst of these shacks were bought by the city and torn down. Fire-traps and disease-holes were abolished. Public playgrounds and parks in the crowded districts were laid out. Even in such good work Roosevelt met with opposition. He was sued by two landlords who had been forced to tear down their old buildings, but the court upheld his action.

Throughout his term of office he followed the rule he had inaugurated while Civil Service Commissioner of giving the widest publicity to everything that went on in his department. He gave full access to newspaper men so that the public could know exactly what was going on. Any one could visit him in his own office and he tried to help everybody who desired help.

Roosevelt’s attitude toward the commercialized social evil in the red-light districts was one of determined and unwavering opposition.

In his autobiography he states that he considered the social evil the saddest part of his police work. He made it a rule to treat the men caught in raids on houses of ill fame precisely as the women were treated. It was his belief that by treating men and women on an exact equality for the same act much could be done to minimize the evil. His judgment was that the same moral level for both sexes must be achieved by raising the standard for the man and not by lowering it for the woman.

As a remedy for these evils Roosevelt advocated higher wages for girls, early marriages and a co-operation of nation, state and municipality to crush commercialized vice.

The verdict of history was that Roosevelt was in advance of his time in his battle for righteousness within the police ranks of New York. He did a great work, but the job he had undertaken would have worn out a hundred Roosevelts.

He resigned from the department on April 17, 1897, to accept an appointment from the McKinley administration as Assistant Secretary of the Navy.