The questions put to Lawler were perhaps no more absurd than many
a one framed by civil-service examiners. In any event the written
examination is apt to do as much harm as good, and for policemen and
firemen we came to the conclusion that it was almost wholly worthless,
once it had been determined that an applicant could write well enough
to turn in an intelligible report. The initial qualification on which
we came to rely and to regard as most important was the physical
qualification. There is no way to tell by asking a man questions
whether he will be a good policeman or not; the only way to find
that out is to try him for a year. But his physical condition can be
determined, and on this basis we began to build the police force, under
the direction of Dr. Peter Donnelly, one of the ablest surgeons in the
country, whose tragic early death was seemingly but a part of that
fate which took from us in a few short years so many of the best and
brightest of the young men in our movement. The death of Peter Donnelly
left us desolate because he had a genius for friendship equal to that
genius as a surgeon which enabled him to render a great social service.
He was perfectly rigid in the examinations to which he subjected
applicants for positions in the department, and wholly inaccessible to
any sort of influence in favor of the unfit. In the old days, which
by many were regretted as the good old days, the only qualification
an applicant needed was a friend on the police board, and as a result
the force was encumbered with the lame, the halt, and the blind; there
were drinkers if not drunkards among them, and the paunches which some
bore before them were so great that when they took their belts off
and hung them up in those resorts where they accepted the hospitality
of a midnight meal, the belts seemed to be as large as the hoops of
the Heidelberg tun. We rid the force of these as quickly as it could
be done, and the recruits who replaced them were, because of Dr.
Donnelly’s care and service, superb young fellows, lithe and clean, who
bore themselves with self respect and an ardent pride in that _esprit
de corps_ we were enabled to develop.
But before that spirit could exist there were defects other than
physical that must be removed; there were old jealousies and
animosities, some of a religious, or rather a theological nature--relic
of an old warfare between the sects that once devastated the town with
its unreasoning and remorseless and ignorant hatred; a St. Patrick’s
day had once been celebrated by dismissing a score or more of Irishmen
from the police department. There were other differences of race
origin, and in doing away with all these, so far as it could be done,
Mr. Mooney, the Director of Public Safety, had to his assistance the
ability and the tact of two crusted old characters on the force, one
of them the Chief of Police, Perry D. Knapp, and the other Inspector
John Carew, whose hair had so whitened in the days he served the city
as a detective that he was called Silver Jack. He was one of the ablest
detectives anywhere, though prejudice and jealousy had kept him down
for a long time. I had known him in my youth, and later in the courts,
and now that I had the chance I put him at the head of the detective
department, and when I was tired of the troubles which harassed him
and me during the day, I tried sometimes to forget them at night by
writing stories in which he figured as the clever detective he was.
And as for Perry Knapp, I suppose there was not another chief of
police like him anywhere. Over his desk was a picture of Walt Whitman,
and in his heart was the love for humanity that Whitman had, and in
his library were well read copies of Emerson and a collection of
Lincolniana I have often envied him. He had served in close association
with Jones, who had made his position difficult by promoting him over
the heads of others in the department who ranked him, and he was
the heir of all the old distrust of Jones’s attitude toward life.
Nevertheless, he found a way to apply Jones’s theories to the policing
of a city without any of that ostentation which in some cases has
brought such methods into disfavor. I cannot, of course, describe his
whole method, but he was always trying to help people and not to hurt
them. He established a system by which drunken men were no longer
arrested, but, when they could not be taken home as were those club
members with whom he tried in that respect at least to put them on a
parity, they were cared for at police headquarters until morning, and
then with a bath and a breakfast, allowed to go without leaving behind
to dog their footsteps that most dreadful of all fates, a “police
record.” No one will ever know how many poor girls picked up in police
raids he saved from the life to which they had been tempted or driven,
by sending them back to their homes when they had homes, or in some
manner finding for them a way out of their troubles. And I shall always
remember with a pleasure that there is such good in humanity after all,
when I recall that boy in the workhouse whom a father in a far-off
city was seeking. The boy was working with other prisoners on a bit
of public work in one of the parks that winter morning, and after he
had secured a parole, the Chief drove out to the park, and got the
boy, clothed him with garments he had bought himself, bought a railway
ticket and sent the boy away to Chicago and his home. If he had waited
until the lad was brought in at night, he explained, the old man would
have lost a whole day of his son’s companionship!
That is what I mean when I say that a government should be made human,
or part of what I mean; such incidents are specifically noticeable
because they stand out in such contrast against the hard surface of
that inhuman institutionalism the reformers with their everlasting
repressions and denials and negatives are trying to make so much
harder. Charley Stevens, the old circus man whom I appointed as
Superintendent of the Workhouse, very successfully applied the some
principle to the management of that institution, which he conducted
with his humor and quaint philosophy more than by any code of rules.
He usually referred to his prison as the Temple of Thought, and he
abolished from it all the marks of a prison, such as stripes and
close cropped polls, and all that sort of thing. He was criticized,
of course, since the conventional notion is that prisoners should be
made to appear as hideous as possible; I am pretty sure that reformer
disapproved who one Sunday afternoon went down there and asked the
superintendent if he would permit him to preach to the inmates and was
told by Stevens that he would like to accommodate him, but that he
could not just then break up the pedro game. There were those who said
that he was making it too easy for the prisoners, and yet every now
and then some of them would escape, and when they were brought back,
as they usually were, they were met only with reproaches and asked why
they could not leave their addresses when they went away so that their
mail could be forwarded. There were, however, two escaping prisoners
who never were returned. They got away just in time to make a sensation
for the noon editions of the newspapers, and as I was on my way to
luncheon I met Stevens, standing on the street corner, very calmly,
while the newsboys were crying in our ears the awful calamity that had
befallen society. When I asked what he was doing, he said that he was
hunting the escaped prisoners. “I’ve been to the Secor and the Boody
House,” he said, naming two leading hotels, “and they’re not there. I’m
going over to the Toledo Club now, and if they’re not there, I don’t
know where to look for them.”
It may be that in these little incidents I give the impression that he
was a trifler, but that is not the case. He knew, of course, that so
far as doing any good whatever in the world is concerned, our whole
penal system is a farce at which one might laugh if it did not cause
so many tears to be shed in the world. But he did try to be kind to
the inmates, and by the operation of the parole system succeeded to
an extent commensurate with that attained by Dr. Cooley of Cleveland.
Of course it was all done under the supervision of Mr. Mooney, the
Director of Public Safety, who rightly characterized our whole penal
system when he said:
“Whenever you send one to prison you send four or five; you send a
man’s wife and his mother, and his sister and his children, who are all
innocent, and you never do him any good.”
But the workhouse, though under Mr. Mooney’s direction, was not
connected with the police department, except in the archaic minds of
those who thought if we were only harsh and hard enough in our use of
both, we could drive evil, or at least the appearance of evil, out
of the city, and leave it, standing like a rock of morality, in the
weltering waste of immorality all about us.