FIGHTING THE SPOILS HUNTERS AND RASCALS 
47 
The cause of his leaving the Commission was a summons from his 
native city, which wanted him for President of its Board of Police 
Commissioners. This strongly appealed to him. It was bringing him 
back upon his old battlefield. It was a field which he knew inch by 
inch. And it was one in which there was strenuous work to be done. 
The rottenness of party politics had deeply invaded this department 
and it sadly needed an earthquake shaking up. He went into it with 
the earnest vim with which he was soon after to go into the Spanish 
War. 
“I thought the storm center was in New York,” he said, “and so 
I came there. It is a great piece of practical work. I like to take 
hold of work that has been done by a Tammany leader and do it as well, 
only by approaching it from the opposite direction. The thing that 
attracted me to it was that it was to be done in the hurly-burly, for I 
don't like cloister life.” 
A reform administration, that of Mayor Strong, was then in 
power, and soldiers of reform were needed to lead the ranks. The 
new Commissioner stirred up the town. The regulation reformers 
did not know whether to applaud or curse. Many declared that his 
rigid enforcement of the Excise law enabled Tammany to return to 
power by capturing the votes of liquor men who had temporarily joined 
the reformers. In reply Roosevelt said he had sworn to enforce all 
the laws and he would not compromise his conscience. Besides, he 
held that the best way to get a bad law repealed was to rigidly enforce 
it. The “Arabian Nights” features of Mr. Roosevelt’s police adminis¬ 
tration, his sudden appearance in unexpected places, his unheralded 
personal tours of inspection about the city after dark, catching many a 
policeman napping—all this and several volumes more are a part of 
history. Roosevelt made fame and friends during his police regime, 
and all classes admitted that he was an honest man. He said once, 
at the close of a meeting, that he believed a majority of policemen were 
good men. He believed in giving every applicant a chance to show 
what he could do and treating him honestly and fairly, regardless of 
his nationality, politics, religion or “pull.” 
“We have every country represented on the police force,” he said. 
“Hebrews working harmoniously with Irishmen; Germans making 
