COMBINATION PHOTOGRAPH SHOWING ROOSEVELT IN MANY CHARACTERISTIC POSES
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.