But the most remarkable thing to me about Wooldridge is the work he
has done. Consider for a moment the record which heads this article.
Could anything shout forth the tremendous energy of the man in any
plainer terms? There are men in the same line of work with Wooldridge,
who have been in the service for the same length of time, who have not
made one arrest where he has made thousands.
Twenty thousand arrests in twenty years of service, a thousand arrests
every year, on an average. A thousand get-rich-quick concerns,
victimizing more than a million people, raided and put out of
business; thirteen thousand one hundred convictions; hundreds upon
hundreds of wine rooms, gambling houses, bucketshops, opium joints,
houses of ill fame, turf frauds, bogus charity swindles, policy
shops, matrimonial agencies, fraudulent guarantee companies, spurious
medicine concerns, thieving theater agencies and mushroom banks
brought to the bar of justice and made to expiate their crimes.
That is the record of the almost inconceivable work done by Clifton
R. Wooldridge on the Chicago police force. The figures are almost
appalling in their greatness. It is hard for the mind to comprehend
how any one man could have achieved all this vast amount of labor,
even if he worked twenty-four hours a day all the time. And yet it is
the bare record of the "big" work done by Wooldridge, aside from his
routine.