The Everything Theodore Roosevelt Book (18 page)

Those congressmen usually came around to agreeing with TR as he continued his reform efforts.

Spoiling the Spoils System

President Harrison was aware of TR’s dislike of political patronage and partisan influence. The new commissioner sank his teeth into the job immediately with his usual zeal for rooting out spoils wherever he saw them.

TR had experience in the civil service reform arena. He had served as a member of the New York Civil Service Reform Association in the early 1880s. As a New York state assemblyman, he worked to pass the first state civil service act in the nation, the New York State Civil Service Act of 1883. He worked just as hard on the national level to create a civil service system that would attract the best people into government.

As commissioner, TR espoused three major principles: the civil service system should create equal opportunities for all citizens, not just those who knew certain politicians; the only people who should be appointed to federal jobs were those who had the right experience; and public servants should not suffer for their political beliefs or gender. (One of his accomplishments in his six years in office was opening civil service positions to women.)

Theodore Roosevelt pulling an elephant’s tail in a political cartoon, 1889. The cartoon shows Benjamin Harrison on a Republican Party elephant labeled “Tannerism,” which is tearing down civil service rules, as TR, Thompson, and C. Lyman try to restrain the elephant by pulling on its tail. Caption reads “This is the ‘pull’ that civil service reform has with this administration.”

If those principles were met, fraud and political abuse in government would be wiped out, and corrupt government officials would be exposed. The system worked just fine.

TR’s reach was far and wide as he strove to implement fairness in the civil service system. He did not tolerate violations of his principles or of the code. Only one week into the job he recommended that examination board members in New York be fired for selling test questions to the public for $50.

TR acknowledged that he made enemies as Civil Service commissioner. He said, “I have made the Commission a living force, and in consequence the outcry among the spoilsmen has become furious. But I answered militantly that as long as I was responsible, the law should be enforced up to the handle everywhere, fearlessly and honestly.”

And, to show that he did not play favorites regardless of who appointed him, he ordered Baltimore police to arrest postal employees who were buying votes for the re-election of President Harrison. The practice did not help President Harrison. In a game of presidential ping-pong, he lost the 1892 election to Grover Cleveland, whom he had defeated in 1888. Even though Cleveland was a Democrat, he reappointed TR to the commissioner post.

A Troubling Second Term

There were a couple of incidents in TR’s second term as commissioner that made him step back and wonder if he could be doing more elsewhere to fight corruption. Even though there were tangible signs that he was effecting change, he wasn’t sure he was doing enough. As he saw it, labor was still driving the economy, and workers were still on the short end of the stick.

When two of the largest employers in the United States, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and the National Cordage Company, failed in 1893, it set off a nationwide depression. The stock market tumbled, banks and investment firms called in loans, companies fell into bankruptcy, and unemployment rates reached 25 percent. More than 15,000 companies closed their doors during the crisis.

The deep recession of 1893 affected TR adversely. So did the Pullman Palace Car Company strike of 1894. The ongoing depression of 1893 forced the company to reduce its workforce by 75 percent, rehire some workers, and then cut wages. Through all this, the company refused to lower the rent for workers who lived in company-built houses. Eventually the workers went on strike.

The Pullman strike was the first national strike in U.S. history. For the first time, people were exposed to unsatisfactory labor issues and a hint of socialism because of Eugene Debs’s union leadership. TR and other reformers saw an opportunity in the strike to balance the economic differences between labor and capitalism. But another problem surfaced: excessive force by the U.S. government to quell the strike.

Courts invoked the Sherman Act against labor unions, instead of against the company. President Cleveland dispatched federal troops to Chicago to suppress the strikers. Those actions forced TR to step back and analyze the need for balance.

A New Understanding

TR realized “that an even greater fight must be waged to improve economic conditions, and to secure social and industrial justice, justice as between individuals and justice as between classes.” And, he “began to see that political effort was largely valuable as it found expression and resulted in such social and industrial betterment.”

He wanted new venues to pursue that greater fight. On May 5, 1895, TR resigned from the Civil Service Commission to take a new position: police commissioner of New York City.

Joining the Police Force

TR’s next chance to fight graft and corruption came in New York City, with its population of 2 million people. Recently elected Republican Mayor William Strong offered him the opportunity to serve as the head of the street-cleaning department. TR passed that up. He did not feel that he had the experience. But there was an opening on the Board of Police Commissioners, which the mayor offered as an alternative.

One of TR’s oldest friends, Henry Cabot Lodge, pressed him to accept the position, which gave him the opportunity to return to his home base and root out corruption. On May 6, 1895, Mayor Strong appointed TR to the four-member board, at a salary of $5,000 per year. His appointment, which was for six years, lasted only two.

Strong appointed three other members: Frederick D. Grant, a Republican and oldest son of former President Ulysses S. Grant; Andrew D. Parker, a Democrat who would eventually become a thorn in TR’s side; and John Monks, another Democrat. His co-commissioners elected him as board president. TR left Washington, D.C., that same day to fight City Hall—literally.

TR should have gotten an inkling of the problems besetting the Board of Police Commissioners right away. Two outgoing members, both Republicans, were asked to resign, but they refused. Therefore, the new mayor, a Republican, ousted them under the Power of Removal Act. Both former commissioners protested their removals vigorously—especially since a member of their own party sent them packing.

The biggest obstacle he faced was the setup of the board. It was designed to make sure nothing could be done to influence the way the police department functioned. The board included two Democrats and two Republicans. That almost assured that the members would not agree on much.

TR promised to be nonpartisan as police commissioner. He wrote, “I was appointed with the distinct understanding that I was to administer the Police Department with entire disregard of partisan politics, and only from the standpoint of a good citizen interested in promoting the welfare of all good citizens.”

The commissioners appointed a police chief who they could not remove without a trial subject to review by a court. The chief and a single commissioner could stop anything proposed by the other three commissioners. That had the potential to create permanent deadlocks among the commissioners.

To compound matters, the mayor appointed the commissioners, but he could not remove them unless the governor of New York agreed. That was not likely in most cases due to the machinations of Tammany Hall, the political machine that ran the city and the state. Tammany Hall seemed to be exceeding its own levels of greed and graft where the department was concerned.

Finally, the commissioners could appoint police officers, but they could not fire them without a trial and a subsequent review by the courts. That was a political structure that almost guaranteed that any attempts at reforms would be difficult at best, if not outright impossible. Some men might have thrown up their hands in despair. TR did not.

TR Accepts the Challenge

Just as the Board of Commissioners was almost powerless to change the structure of the police department in the late 1800s, police officers in New York City were all but powerless to change the culture of the wide-open city. Gambling, drinking, prostitution, drugs, and other forms of vice were available to anyone who wanted to participate.

The police were in on the action in many cases. They were taking bribes—from the top down—to turn a blind eye or share in the profits. In turn, the police shared their bribes or payments with the Tammany Hall politicians. TR set out to begin his reforms at once.

TR was not content to work from behind a desk. He became a veritable field training officer who actually worked the streets with the cops on the beat. One person who accompanied him often on his patrols was Jacob Riis, a newspaperman and muckraker extraordinaire.

Jacob Riis was a photojournalist for the
New York Evening Sun
. He specialized in reporting on the plight of the poor people in New York City. Riis was one of the first reporters to use flash powder, which allowed him to take photos of the insides of tenements and show people how depressing the city’s slums really were.

In December 1889,
Scribner’s Magazine
published Riis’s photo essay of New York City slum life. The next year an expanded version came out in book form, titled
How the Other Half Lives
. TR read the book and took action once he became the police commissioner by ordering the police to close the lodging houses they ran—where Riis had often resided in his youth.

TR Takes the Riis Tour

Riis opened TR’s eyes to a side of the city that he knew about but did not often experience. Riis had grown up in the tenements of New York City. He knew how hard life was for the people who lived in them and how deep the police department’s influence ran.

Riis made sure that TR got to see the city at its worst, which made the commissioner anxious to make it into what it could be at its best. What he learned from his relationship with Riis played a big role in his political leadership as governor of New York state and president of the United States after he left the police department.