Joseph Berger is a metropolitan reporter for The Times.
Before there was Rudy Giuliani, there was Teddy Roosevelt.
In the 1990s, Giuliani was New York’s dogged crime fighter in chief, but just about 100 years earlier, Roosevelt had donned that mantle as a police commissioner and president of what was then the city’s four-man, bipartisan Police Board. His campaign to wipe out everyday vice and corruption gained him a national reputation, one that, in contrast to Giuliani’s, actually led to the White House.
Roosevelt needed no broken-windows theory to drive his crusade, just an outraged silk-stocking moralism, and fin de siècle New York City gave him plenty to be outraged about. The number of brothels in Manhattan was legion, dotting not just the notorious Tenderloin district, and the number of prostitutes was estimated at more than 30,000. Casinos and opium dens were commonplace, and saloons stayed open on Sundays in brazen disregard of state laws. The police not only tolerated pleasure domes but skimmed the earnings, with payoffs to the beat cop filtering up to the precinct captains and the police chief....
