TR cleans up New York
I've just finished reading Richard Zacks' 2012 book "Island of Vice," a chronicle of the two years (1895-1896) that the great American comic character Theodore Roosevelt served as New York City Police Commissioner. This guy really believed his own shit. He was a reformer on that job in the sense that he consolidated police power into a single commissioner and declared war on Sunday alcohol consumption. Not consumption by all New Yorkers, however, as you might assume. Just because working men could expect arrest for drinking a beer or a whiskey at a tavern on their only day off during the week, Roosevelt's fellow society swells could still spend their Sabbath swilling champagne at Delmonico's, the Union League, the Harvard Club, or the Knickerbocker.As the most powerful man in the New York Police Department for those two years, the Great Progressive did little to change the city. Tammany Hall-style corruption returned-- and thanks to Roosevelt, the power of the police baton had been institutionalized. He had the peculiar vision to see that saloon keepers, street peddlers, gamblers, and brothel madams were a greater threat to democracy than were the gilded robber barons living in the mansions along Fifth Avenue. An inflexible prude, Roosevelt was always a man of his class for his class, who accused every proponent of the silver standard over the gold standard in those days of being alternately ignorant or criminal. He said they violated the Commandment "Thou Shalt Not Steal," and he called farmers "the basest set in the land." His crusade against the "social evils" in New York City disproved the principles of Prohibition a generation before they began getting disproved at the nation level. He was unapologetic. For his stewardship, he was awarded the governorship of New York, the vice presidency, and later, after an assassin's bullet felled William McKinley, the presidency. From there, it was a full-scale imperial assault by the U.S. military upon the rest of the globe.
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Ouch. More bad news from California.
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The St. Louis County Police Chief admits that many of the county's municipalities issue fines and fabricate crimes to raise money. Chief Jon Belmar says he doesn't even know the names of some of the police chiefs in these small towns in his district.
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Here's another Dennis Hastert scandal for you. He enters Congress in 1987 with a net worth of $270,000. He leaves twenty years later with an estimated net worth of $17 million. Now that's what I call public service!
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How cool is Kolten Wong?
posted by CM @ 10:46 AM
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