American ideals, and other essays, social and political

by Theodore Roosevelt

In New York the saloonkeepers have always stood high among professional politicians. Nearly two thirds of the political leaders of Tammany Hall have, at one time or another, been in the liquor business. The saloon is the natural club and meeting place for the ward heelers and leaders, and the bar-room politician is one of the most common and best recognized factors, in local political government. The saloonkeepers are always hand in glove with the professional politicians, and occupy toward them a position such as is not held by any other class of men. The influence they wield in local politics has always been very great, and until our board took office no man ever dared seriously to threaten them for their flagrant violations of the law. The powerful and influential saloonkeeper was glad to see his neighbors closed, for it gave him business. On the other hand, a corrupt police captain, or the corrupt politician who controlled him, could always extort money from a saloonkeeper by threatening to close him and let his neighbor remain open. Gradually the greed of corrupt police officials and of corrupt politicians, grew by what it fed on, until they began to blackmail all but the very most influential liquor sellers; and as liquor sellers were very numerous, and the profits of the liquor business great, the amount collected was enormous.

The reputable saloonkeepers themselves found this condition of blackmail and political favoritism almost intolerable. The law which we found on the statute books had been put on by a Tammany Legislature three years before we took office. A couple of months after we took office, Mr. J. P. Smith, the editor of the liquor-dealers’ organ, The Wine and Spirit Gazette, gave out the following interview, which is of such an extraordinary character that I insert it almost in full:

“Governor Flower, as well as the Legislature of 1892, was elected upon distinct pledges that relief would be given by the Democratic party to the liquor dealers, especially of the cities of the State. In accordance with this promise a Sunday-opening clause was inserted in the excise bill of 1892. Governor Flower then said that he could not approve the Sunday-opening clause; whereupon the Liquor Dealers’ Association, which had charge of the bill, struck the Sunday-opening clause out. After Governor Hill had been elected for the second term I had several interviews with him on that very subject. He told me, ‘You know I am the friend of the liquor dealers and will go to almost any length to help them and give them relief; but do not ask me to recommend to the Legislature the passage of the law opening the saloons on Sunday. I cannot do it, for it will ruin the Democratic party in the State.’ He gave the same interview to various members of the State Liquor Dealers’ Association, who waited upon him for the purpose of getting relief from the blackmail of the police, stating that the lack of having the Sunday question properly regulated was at the bottom of the trouble. Blackmail had been brought to such a state of perfection, and had become so oppressive to the liquor dealers themselves, that they communicated first with Governor Hill and then with Mr. Croker. The Wine and Spirit Gazette had taken up the subject because of gross discrimination made by the police in the enforcement of the Sunday-closing law. The paper again and again called upon the police commissioners to either uniformly enforce the law or uniformly disregard it. A committee of the Central Association of Liquor Dealers of this city then took up the matter and called upon Police Commissioner Martin.[15] An agreement was then made between the leaders of Tammany Hall and the liquor dealers, according to which the monthly blackmail paid to the police should be discontinued in return for political support.[16] In other words, the retail dealers should bind themselves to solidly support the Tammany ticket in consideration of the discontinuance of the monthly blackmail by the police. This agreement was carried out. Now what was the consequence? If the liquor dealer, after the monthly blackmail ceased, showed any signs of independence, the Tammany Hall district leader would give the tip to the police captain, and that man would be pulled and arrested on the following Sunday.”

Continuing, Mr. Smith inveighed against the law, but said:

“The (present) police commissioners are honestly endeavoring to have the law impartially carried out. They are no respectors of persons. And our information from all classes of liquor-dealers is that the rich and the poor, the influential and the uninfluential, are required equally to obey the law.”

There is really some difficulty in commenting upon the statements of this interview, statements which were never denied.

The law was not in the least a dead-letter; it was enforced, but it was corruptly and partially enforced. It was a prominent factor in the Tammany scheme of government. It afforded a most effective means for blackmailing a large portion of the liquor sellers and for the wholesale corruption of the police department. The high Tammany officials and police captains and patrolmen blackmailed and bullied the small liquor sellers without a pull, and turned them into abject slaves of Tammany Hall. On the other hand, the wealthy and politically influential liquor sellers controlled the police, and made or marred captains, sergeants, and patrolmen at their pleasure. In some of the precincts most of the saloons were closed; in others almost all were open. The rich and powerful liquor seller violated the law at will, unless he had fallen under the ban of the police or the ward boss, when he was not allowed to violate it at all.

Under these circumstances the new police board had one of two courses to follow. We could either instruct the police to allow all the saloonkeepers to become law-breakers, or else we could instruct them to allow none to be law-breakers. We followed the latter course, because we had some regard for our oaths of office. For two or three months we had a regular fight, and on Sundays had to employ half the force to enforce the liquor law; for the Tammany legislators had drawn the law so as to make it easy of enforcement for purposes of blackmail, but not easy of enforcement generally, certain provisions being deliberately inserted with the intention to make it difficult of universal execution. However, when once the liquor sellers and their allies understood that we had not the slightest intention of being bullied, threatened or cajoled out of following the course which we had laid down, resistance practically ceased. During the year after we took office the number of arrests for violation of the Sunday liquor law sank to about one half of what they had been during the last year of the Tammany rule; and yet the saloons were practically closed, whereas under Tammany most of them had been open. We adopted no new methods, save in so far as honesty could be called a new method. We did not enforce the law with unusual severity; we merely enforced it against the man with a pull, just as much as against the man without a pull. We refused to discriminate in favor of influential law-breakers. The professional politicians of low type, the liquor sellers, the editors of some German newspapers, and the sensational press generally, attacked us with a ferocity which really verged on insanity.

We went our way without regarding this opposition, and gave a very wholesome lesson to the effect that a law should not be put on the statute books if it was not meant to be enforced, and that even an excise law could be honestly enforced in New York if the public officials so desired. The rich brewers and liquor sellers, who had made money hand over fist by violating the excise law with the corrupt connivance of the police, raved with anger, and every corrupt politician and newspaper in the city gave them clamorous assistance; but the poor man, and notably the poor man’s wife and children, benefited very greatly by what we did. The hospital surgeons found that their Monday labors were lessened by nearly one half, owing to the startling diminution in cases of injury due to drunken brawls; the work of the magistrates who sat in the city courts on Monday for the trial of the offenders of the preceding twenty-four hours was correspondingly decreased; while many a tenement-house family spent Sunday in the country because for the first time the head of the family could not use up his money in getting drunk. The one all-important element in good citizenship in our country is obedience to law, and nothing is more needed than the resolute enforcement of law. This we gave.

There was no species of mendacity to which our opponents did not resort in the effort to break us down in our purpose. For weeks they eagerly repeated the tale that the saloons were as wide open as ever; but they finally abandoned this when the counsel for the Liquor Dealers’ Association admitted in open court, at the time when we secured the conviction of thirty of his clients and thereby brought the fight to an end, that over nine tenths of the liquor dealers had been rendered bankrupt because we had stopped that illegal trade which gave them the best portion of their revenue. They then took the line that by devoting our attention to enforcing the liquor law we permitted crime to increase. This, of course, offered a very congenial field for newspapers like the World, which exploited it to the utmost; all the more readily since the mere reiteration of the falsehood tended to encourage criminals, and so to make it not a falsehood. For a time the cry was not without influence, even with decent people, especially if they belonged to the class of the timid rich; but it simply wasn’t true, and so this bubble went down stream with the others. For six or eight months the cry grew, first louder, then lower; and then it died away. A commentary upon its accuracy was furnished toward the end of our administration; for in February 1897, the Judge who addressed the grand jury of the month was able to congratulate them upon the fact that there was at that time less crime in New York relatively to the population than ever before; and this held true for our two years’ service.