Stephen Crane and the Police Christopher P. Wilson (bio) Everyone who thinks is likely to know that the right of arrest is one of the most dangerous powers which organized society can give to the individual. . . . Theoretically the first result of government is to put control into the hands of honest men and nullify as far as may be the ambitions of criminals. When government places power in the hands of a criminal it of course violates this principle and becomes absurd. —Stephen Crane, unpublished fragment, 1896 In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the district in New York City most saturated by brothels, theaters, and (so often overlooked) many small industries, was the infamous Tenderloin. Situated between wealthy Gramercy Park and Murray Hill on the East and the working-class Hell’s Kitchen on the West, the Tenderloin was a border area juxtaposing splendor and want, extravagance and degradation, wealth and crime—and now, vice crime and police reform. As Timothy Gilfoyle recently reminds us, “The Tenderloin” was itself a police nickname, a name reputedly coined by a Tammany cop, Captain Alexander “Clubber” Williams. In police lore, this place name signified a juicy or “choice” cut of police duty, full of exposure to temptation and, concomitantly, opportunities to fatten one’s pay. And in the fall of 1896, journalist, novelist, and new literary celebrity Stephen Crane, still riding high from The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and the recent [End Page 273] reissuing of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1896), traveled to the Tenderloin to conduct what he called a “study of the life of a New York policeman”—a work that he apparently never even began to write. 1 In its place, we have only the so-called Dora Clark affair, an episode that has come both to represent Crane’s strained relations with New York’s finest and to explain why his work in Gotham would soon be cut short. As many scholars know, on September 15 and 16 of that autumn, the following events, as narrated in R. W. Stallman’s biography (1968), took place: From the Turkish Smoking Parlors [Crane] walked with [two young women] to the Broadway Garden, where another “chorus girl” introduced herself as Dora Clark and joined the group. Unknown to Crane, Dora Clark—also known as Ruby Young—was a streetwalker who had several times been arraigned for soliciting. Crane did not care who they were; it was enough that he had found their types. After he had interviewed them at the Broadway Garden, a resort of ill-repute, he escorted one of the women across the street to catch an uptown cable car, leaving the other and Dora Clark on the corner of Broadway and 31st Street. While they stood there conversing, two men walked swiftly by, as though in a hurry to get home, and neither they nor the two women took notice of each other. However, the women were just then spotted by [Police detective Charles Becker], not in uniform, from the vestibule of the Grand Hotel. It was 2 A.M. Walking back to [the two women] from the cable-car, Crane suddenly realized that they were being arrested [for soliciting the two men who had walked by] . . . and so Dora Clark spent the night in a prison cell, while Crane debated whether he dared afford to damage his reputation by defending a girl of the streets. (220) As Crane chronicled in his own account of the affair, “Adventures of a Novelist,” both local cops and fellow journalists warned him that Clark was a habitual offender. Theodore Roosevelt, recently appointed president of the city’s Police Board and a professed admirer of Crane’s writing, was noticeably silent in response to a protesting telegram from the author. Nevertheless, Crane went ahead and testified on Clark’s behalf on two occasions. Announcing that he must do his “duty as a man” as if “our wives and sisters” were “at the mercy of any ruffian who disgraces the uniform,” he appeared first at Clark’s criminal trial, which ended in dismissal. Then he testified at a Police Board hearing against Detective Becker that exonerated the policeman and...