Theodore Roosevelt Cracks Down on NYC Corruption | History

so in 1895 roosevelt accepts an appointment as commissioner of the new york city police department it's a challenge she wants to take it on and it's the right time in the right moment for his kind of leadership in 1895 the report of the lexile commission comes out and it is full of lurid details about kidnapping schemes where people are jailed with no cause until they sell their store and give the money to the police witnesses are brought in front of the investigating committee beaten half to death one of them with their eye hanging out of their socket remember roosevelt's image of public service is that one that's instilled in by his father that public service is noble and you only go into public service as a policeman or as a mayor of to do good to make the community better and here's you know an institution that is rotten to the core the patrolmen on the beat took a bribe to let the push carts stay in place more than 15 minutes he took a bribe to let the saloon owner stay open after one in the morning brothels were unbelievably lucrative it was 50 a month one district on the lower east side had 50 brothels 2500 back then was 75 000 in modern times 12 months you're looking at a million dollars and this was all shared among the captains the inspectors and the local politicians when theodore roosevelt steps into the police commission thomas burns is the utterly corrupt chief of police the tip of the pyramid of this giant organized crime syndicate so burns is almost untouchable he's powerful he's connected to tammany hall and yet roosevelt takes him on and says this guy has got to go it was an early indicator of a man who was willing to take on power and influence by using a kind of muscular position of public authority for the purposes of putting down the kind of illicit corruption of which the police department was central to but it's one thing for tr to believe that he can take on the boxing champion at harvard it's quite another to take on the most dangerous powerful man in new york burns is quite ruthless in dealing with his adversaries in terms of doing them in creating scandal around them or you know physically harming them and so roosevelt has all of these things to fear and so it's very much like the bully he confronts in the bar out west he had learned that even if he deep down inside was afraid of someone that if he acted like he wasn't afraid and sort of willed himself not to be afraid that he wouldn't be afraid to stand up to the bully to stand up to the corrupt person to stand up to the evil doer and triumph she burns commissioner [Music] it's an honor please drink i won't of course not finally reform-minded commissioner do you know that i'm going to reform him myself is that right we'll uh broke no corruption in my force send out the word no swearing at the citizenry oh so listening arrives already launched an investigation into one of our captains taking payouts nasty business it's quite a change of heart you've had well uh this job can break you mr commissioner we can work together how long you served this city chief burns 32 years i suppose after a career like that you might think about retiring the city needs me i'm not going anywhere neither am i so roosevelt threatened to prosecute burns over corruption and taking bribes from some of the wealthiest people in new york city roosevelt wanted to achieve the impossible here he wanted to clean up the dirtiest loudest roughest city in the united states and burns decides to resign when theodore roosevelt becomes the police commissioner he makes big changes he forces the police chief to resign from office and once he had changed the top leadership then he knew he had to change the entire culture because it really was a way of life in the police department and that meant understanding the policeman on the beat at night in new york so what he decides is that he's got to have his own first hand information he immediately contacts his friend jacob reese who has become nationally famous in recent years for writing an expose of the ills of urban life in tenement life called how the other half lives and roosevelt knows that rhys got a lot of his material by prowling the city after midnight jacob reese knew the back streets and tenements of new york city better than anybody else and he matched that with a new technology of flash photography so he could go into the darkest of the stale beer dives he could go into the underground flop houses he could go into the basement tenements and catch a literal snapshot of how the other half lives so he does these famous midnight rambles where he and rhys go out between midnight and five a.m he'll put a floppy hat on his head he'll have a long coat on he'll walk unbeknownst among the people so then he can see what's actually happening on the street and they find policemen that are sleeping at their posts they find policemen that are drinking in bars and carousing with prostitutes and are just outraged and he decides to do something about it officer brody yeah shouldn't you be at your post take a hike beat it right be careful who's this whoever he is about to knock some sense of him wait it's roosevelt it's not it is i swear i've seen him in the page now mr roosevelt i already stopped here thank you both for a most illuminating evening i shall see you in my office tomorrow policemen are fired people are reassigned and there's immediately a sense that roosevelt is is cleaning up the town like a like that kind of western sheriff that he so admired the good guys the white hats are in town and there's going to be a new way of doing business this is a mixture of the enforcement part of being police commissioner and playing the theatrics but the theatrics were not superficial he has this tremendous sense of right and wrong here's this five foot eight inch guy standing up to these massive irish cops and the public loved it all of a sudden there are cartoons and papers all across the country showing policemen cowering at the image of these big teeth and the mustache and the whiskers and again he becomes a romantic figure fighting corruption in new york just as he had become in the badlands being a cowboy so he's becoming as one of the newspaper reporters said at the time the most interesting man in america

Channel: HISTORY

Views: 60,528

Keywords: history, history channel, history channel shows, the history channel, documentary history channel, history documentary, documentary, history channel full episodes, documentaries, history channel documentaries, Rufus Jones, Theodore Roosevelt documentary, Theodore Roosevelt biography, Dr. H.W. Brands, Col. USMC Ret. Doug Douds, Dr. Kathleen Dalton, Dr. Douglas Brinkley, Dr. Megan Kate Nelson, Dr. Leroy G. Dorsey, Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Clay Jenkinson, Tweed Roosevelt, special

Id: lw4LahAdtds

Length: 9min 22sec (562 seconds)

Published: Tue May 31 2022