The writer of this article has enjoyed intimate personal association with the great detective, both in the capacity of a newspaper reporter, magazine writer and anti-graft worker. The ins and outs of the nature of the greatest secret service worker in Chicago, Clifton R. Wooldridge, have been to me an open book. And when I call him Wooldridge, the incorruptible, I know whereof I speak.
I have seen him when all the "influences" (and they are the same "influences" which have been denounced all over the country of late) were brought to bear upon him, when even his own chiefs were inclined to be frightened, but no "influence" from any source, howsoever high, has ever availed to swerve him one inch from the path of duty.
Cannot Be Bribed.
He has been offered bribes innumerable; but in each and every instance the would-be briber has learned a very unpleasant lesson. For this man, who might be worth almost anything he wished, is by no means affluent. But he has kept his name untarnished and his spirit high through good fortune and through bad, through evil repute and good.
Wooldridge does not know the meaning of a lie. A lie is something so foreign to his nature that he has trouble in comprehending how others can see profit in falsifying. It has been his cardinal principle through life that liars always come to a bad end finally. And he has seen his healthy estimate of life vindicated, both in the high circles of frenzied finance and in the low levels of sneak-thievery.
Tremendous Amount of Work Done.
But the most remarkable thing to me about Wooldridge is the work he has done. Consider for a moment the record which heads this article. Could anything shout forth the tremendous energy of the man in any plainer terms? There are men in the same line of work with Wooldridge, who have been in the service for the same length of time, who have not made one arrest where he has made thousands.
Twenty thousand arrests in twenty years of service, a thousand arrests every year, on an average. A thousand get-rich-quick concerns, victimizing more than a million people, raided and put out of business; thirteen thousand one hundred convictions; hundreds upon hundreds of wine rooms, gambling houses, bucketshops, opium joints, houses of ill fame, turf frauds, bogus charity swindles, policy shops, matrimonial agencies, fraudulent guarantee companies, spurious medicine concerns, thieving theater agencies and mushroom banks brought to the bar of justice and made to expiate their crimes.
That is the record of the almost inconceivable work done by Clifton R. Wooldridge on the Chicago police force. The figures are almost appalling in their greatness. It is hard for the mind to comprehend how any one man could have achieved all this vast amount of labor, even if he worked twenty-four hours a day all the time. And yet it is the bare record of the "big" work done by Wooldridge, aside from his routine.