Theodore Roosevelt: An AutobiographyRoosevelt, Theodore
History
Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
Roosevelt, Theodore
Presidents -- United States -- Biography; Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919
The many-sided ethnic character of the force now and then gives rise to,
or affords opportunity for, queer happenings. Occasionally it enables
one to meet emergencies in the best possible fashion. While I was Police
Commissioner an anti-Semitic preacher from Berlin, Rector Ahlwardt, came
over to New York to preach a crusade against the Jews. Many of the New
York Jews were much excited and asked me to prevent him from speaking
and not to give him police protection. This, I told them, was
impossible; and if possible would have been undesirable because it
would have made him a martyr. The proper thing to do was to make him
ridiculous. Accordingly I detailed for his protection a Jew sergeant and
a score or two of Jew policemen. He made his harangue against the Jews
under the active protection of some forty policemen, every one of them a
Jew! It was the most effective possible answer; and incidentally it was
an object-lesson to our people, whose greatest need it is to learn that
there must be no division by class hatred, whether this hatred be that
of creed against creed, nationality against nationality, section against
section, or men of one social or industrial condition against men
of another social and industrial condition. We must ever judge each
individual on his own conduct and merits, and not on his membership
in any class, whether that class be based on theological, social, or
industrial considerations.
Among my political opponents when I was Police Commissioner was the
head of a very influential local Democratic organization. He was a
State Senator usually known as Big Tim Sullivan. Big Tim represented
the morals of another era; that is, his principles and actions were very
much those of a Norman noble in the years immediately succeeding the
Battle of Hastings. (This will seem flattery only to those who are not
acquainted with the real histories and antecedents of the Norman nobles
of the epoch in question.) His application of these eleventh-century
theories to our nineteenth-century municipal democratic conditions
brought him into sharp contact with me, and with one of my right-hand
men in the Department, Inspector John McCullough. Under the old
dispensation this would have meant that his friends and kinsfolk were
under the ban.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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