"Great-Heart": The Life Story of Theodore RooseveltHenderson, Daniel
General
"Great-Heart": The Life Story of Theodore Roosevelt
Henderson, Daniel
Presidents -- United States -- Biography; Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919
It is also told of Roosevelt that an anti-Hebrew lecturer, intending to
denounce Jews, asked for police protection at a lecture. The protection
was promised and sent--thirty Hebrew policemen, whose presence so awed
the speaker that his lecture became quite tame.
The attachment of members of the Jewish race for Roosevelt was
illustrated at his funeral. The one man who was permitted to sit alone
in the trophy room at Sagamore Hill, with the body of the Colonel, was
Lieutenant Otto Raphael of the New York Police Force, a Hebrew of the
East side. Mr. Roosevelt, in his biography, describes Raphael as “a
powerful fellow with a good-humored face. He and I were both ‘straight
New Yorkers,’ to use the vernacular. To show our community of feeling
and our grasp of the facts of life, I may mention that we were almost
the only men in the Police Department who picked Fitzsimmons as a
winner over Corbett.”
[Illustration: COPYRIGHT, UNDERWOOD & UNDERWOOD
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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