The endless game

A game of chess is being played on the “[Depar]tment of Police” board, between a hand labeled “Political Pull” showing a cufflink labeled “Brass Check” and a hand labeled “Reform.” Some of the squares are labeled “Race Track, Suburbs, White Lights, Gambling District, Goatville, Financial District, Tenderloin, Red Light District, Lonely Beat, [and] Hell’s Kitchen.” The chess pieces are police officers, some in plainclothes, labeled “Crooked Captain, Inspector, Sleuth, ‘Fixed’ Captain, Honest Captain, Grafting Captain, Honest Inspector, Plainclothes Man, [and] Sergeant.”

comments and context

Comments and Context

A dozen years before this cartoon — when Theodore Roosevelt had assumed his position as president of the Board of Police Commissioners in New York City, and continuing through his tenure — corruption among the police ranks was rife. Startling revelations mostly were instigated by the municipal reformer Reverend C. H. Parkhurst, followed by a 10,000 page report by the Lexow Committee (chaired by state senator Clarence Lexow) exposing countless abuses by the Lexow Committee.

These scandals fueled the voters’ revolt that led to the election of the reform mayor William Lafeyette Strong; and his reformist administration in turn was fueled by prosecution of abuses. These reforms, and many others, were the assignment of the new commissioner, Roosevelt. He and his recalcitrant fellow board members (two of the four commissioners continually resisted his measures) addressed police bribery and protection schemes, merit promotions, and such.

Roosevelt biographer Edmund Morris has maintained that “Strong was not strong” as mayor, and indeed he was turned out by voters. However, his reforms were many, and largely successful. He hired George Waring to reform the city’s sanitation services, and “Colonel Waring’s White Wings” cleaned the streets and raised consciousness. The Police Department was another area. The press had fun with Roosevelt’s enforcement of Sunday-prohibition statutes (poor immigrants who worked six days a week enjoyed their beer), but Roosevelt merely enforced the laws, and asked legislators to change unpopular laws if they so wished.

It is interesting to speculate about how Roosevelt’s career — and that of New York City itself — would have proceeded if he, and not Strong, had been mayor. Roosevelt had many entreaties to run for mayor (as he had, and lost, in 1886), and in the reform wave of 1894 he likely would have won. It was Theodore’s wife Edith who strenuously opposed his candidacy, and only later did she learn that he had sincerely sought the office, quietly sacrificing his ambition on her behalf and then, ironically, becoming police commissioner.

Cartoonist S. D. Ehrhart’s drawing, a dozen years subsequent to that reform spasm, indicates — in the context of the Strong era — the frustrating aspect of municipal reform in urban America at the time.

For Lexow’s 10,000 pages of documentation, and Roosevelt’s very real reforms — merit promotions, safeguards against “purchases” of tests and appointments, the bright light of exposure to public and press, bicycle squads, 1700 new policemen, many recruits from native-born areas outside the city — in 1906, corruption in New York City’s police force still was rife.

In fact, even when Roosevelt left the commissioner’s job to become Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the McKinley administration, not a single miscreant in the police force was fired; those under suspension were reinstated, with back pay. Headlines and some structural reforms were achieved, but corruption was endemic.

That systemic rot is what Ehrhart pictures in his cartoon. The hands of the politician and the reformer are of equal size. The police, uniformed and plain-clothed, are shuffled back and forth (and, presumably, back again) from one corrupt square to another. Note that all the police are corpulent, suggesting successful graft activities. And the only possible redeeming cops, the Honest Captain and Honest Inspector, are chess-pieces firmly under the crooked politician’s hand.

Major revelations of police corruption, and spectacular trials, and noisy reforms, continued into New York City’s future, especially in 1912 and the 1950s. It might still continue into future years.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1906-11-21

Creator(s)

Ehrhart, S. D. (Samuel D.), approximately 1862-1937

Period

U.S. President – 2nd Term (March 1905-February 1909)

Repository

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Page Count

1

Record Type

Image

Resource Type

Cartoon

Rights

These images are presented through a cooperative effort between the Library of Congress and Dickinson State University. No known restrictions on publication.

Citation