Once Upon a Time in New York

by Herbert Mitgang

  His skills at urging compromises helped him in his new role as a mediator; so did his humor: “If a man makes good suits, he’ll go broke. If he makes bad ones, he’ll go to jail.” He joked about the disputed parties he dealt with: “They are always buttonholing me.”

  In 1940, Betty showed signs of restlessness and unhappiness. She complained that her individuality was being lost and began to see a psychoanalyst. In 1941, she obtained a Florida divorce on vague but legally required grounds of “extreme cruelty.” They shared in the custody of their adopted children and remained close friends, even attending the theater together. A marriage, her fourth, followed in 1942 to Theodore Knappen, a consulting engineer, whom she met on a cruise ship to South America. She had always wanted a biological child, and she gave birth to a son in 1944. Six months later, mourned by her husband and Jimmy Walker, the beautiful former Betty Compton died of cancer at the age of forty.

  For the next two years, Jimmy Walker continued to play the role of the good New Yorker, salving his loneliness by speaking at rallies to help the war effort and participating in hundreds of charitable and social events all over the city. After resigning as impartial chairman of the garment industry in 1945, he became president of Majestic Records, a subsidiary of a radio and television company. He explained that his job was to plug the company’s music. “I used to press suits,” he said. “Now I’m pressing records.”

  In one of the last talks he gave, at a communion breakfast, he said, “The glamour of other days I have found to be worthless tinsel, and all the allure of the world just so much seduction and deception. I now have found in religion and repentance the happiness and joy that I sought elsewhere in vain.”

  Toward the end of 1946, Walker often complained of dizziness, headaches, and breathing difficulties. Doctors were called in. It was found that he had a blood clot on the brain. In a coma, he was taken to Doctors Hospital—the same hospital where Betty had died. Now it was his time. The nurses drew the blinds in his darkened room.

  On November 18,1946, at the age of sixty-five, James J. Walker died, unaware that the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church had been administered to him. Thousands of people visited Campbell’s Funeral Home and attended the high requiem mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He would have been thrilled by the big turnout and tipped his gray derby and waved his malacca cane to his beloved crowds.

  In the words of the popular song that he had written early in his career as an aspiring lyricist, they still loved him in December as they did in May.

  After drinking through the night, Arthur “Bugs” Baer, the humorist, and Toots Shor, the saloonkeeper, went to Campbell’s at four o’clock in the morning to get a last look at him. The sentimental Shor stood at the casket and, through his tears, cried out, “Jimmy! Jimmy! When you walked into the room you brightened up the joint!”

  So recalled Gene Fowler, the romanticizing Hearst newspaperman and Walker companion. Palship overflowed the funeral parlor; politics was forgotten.

  Two of his old friends spoke through mist-filled eyes: “I think there’s a special place for Jim in Heaven.” “If there isn’t, then I don’t want to go there.”

  William O’Dwyer, then mayor of New York, said, “He was more of a philosopher than the public could ever believe or know.”

  Among the city’s rabid sports fans, he was remembered as the father of the law that legalized boxing in New York State and sponsored legislation allowing Sunday baseball. He was also a favorite of the tabloid newspapers; no mayor had ever provided reporters with livelier copy. If nothing else, they could always write about his bespoke duds.

  That Machiavellian master builder, Robert Moses, contrasted Beau James and the Little Flower: “La Guardia could speak real Yiddish where Jimmy Walker’s vocabulary was limited to gefilte fish and bagels and lox. Fiorello reveled in Italian of the street variety where Jimmy knew only arrivederci and pasta. Walker had to make a quick exit to get a big hand. La Guardia had persistence and knowledge and could afford to stick around and make a real impression. One was an entertaining, enormously likable mountebank, the other an accomplished showman.”

  Louis Nizer, a prominent attorney who also liked to occupy center stage, said, “James J. Walker met success like a gentleman and failure like a man.”

  About his own life and career, Jimmy Walker wistfully yet candidly observed:

  “I have lived and I have loved. The only difference is that I was a little more public about it than most people. After all, maybe it isn’t a mistake to be one’s self and take chances. With all my misgivings, my countless mistakes, with all my multiplicity of shortcomings, I have a single regret. I have reached the peak of the hill and must start the journey downward. I have carried youth right up to the fifty-yard mark.” And then he added:

  “I had mine and made the most of it.”

  Epilogue

  A New Political Era

  The subway and bus and trolley riders from the ethnic neighborhoods of New York City remembered Beau James as a bon vivant who was as much at home in the cafés of Montmartre as in the speakeasies of Manhattan, a Broadway boulevardier in spats who symbolized the good times and street smarts of a boozy era. Baghdad-on-the-F.D.R.-Drive was no City Upon a Hill, but it was a helluva lot of fun while it lasted—except, of course, for the unemployed, the victims of racial and religious discrimination, and the idle poor who pressed their noses against the closed windows of opportunity.

  Death was not the time to talk about Jimmy Walker’s trial by fire before Governor Roosevelt, or to describe the steadfastness of the Seabury investigation, or to mention that he resigned the mayoralty and fled to Europe rather than face legal problems because of his conduct, or to recall the parade of Follies girls who floated through his life, or to reminisce about Betty Compton, his gorgeous mistress.

  In the general public’s memory, Jimmy Walker is enshrined not for his larceny but for his lighthearted personality—for being a fun mayor who reflected a gay era in the life of the city and country. He did that, true, but it would conceal his record not to add that he was also a corrupt mayor who was for sale and who kept and used illegally obtained funds—laughingly known as beneficences—in hidden bank and brokerage accounts. In this respect, he failed the trusting people of his beloved New York.

  None of that—not even the fact that he was a loyal Tammany man who honored the Tweed-like system of boodle—detracted for a moment from Walker’s undeniable charm and appeal to the electorate during the Roaring Twenties and the early years of the Depression. Eventually, both Roosevelt and La Guardia extended the hand of friendship to Walker the man, not Walker the Mayor.

  Jimmy Walker’s early mentor, Al Smith, rose from the sidewalks of New York and became a strong advocate of social legislation. But he wound up an unhappy warrior, the victim of religious prejudice in the 1920s. The Ku Klux Klan burned crosses against his candidacy—and against the supposed “evils” of New York. Hate literature prophesied that “bootleggers and harlots would dance on the White House lawn” if he was elected.

  In the more open-minded American society of the 1960s, after the biggest war in history, the lessons learned from Smith’s presidential race helped to elect John F. Kennedy as the first Catholic president. Smith did not live to see it happen. Toward the end of his life, Smith’s liberal reputation was harmed by his volte-face in favor of big business and his denunciation of the New Deal. As a champion of the conservative Liberty League, he attacked the “socialistic heresies” of the Roosevelt administration.

  In the second half of the twentieth century, Tammany Hall no longer owned City Hall. The bosses lost their absolute power to name and elect mayors, judges, and commissioners. The resignation of Mayor Walker, Tammany Sachem and symbol of rule by bossdom, was a body blow from which the organization never fully recovered. F.D.R. kept getting reelected, with or without Tammany’s support. Mayor La Guardia consistently denounced the Hall, and also kept getting reelected. The popular Little Flower was able to bre
ak the Democrats’ long-held habit of voting only for every star on the ballot.

  Something new was happening in Gotham. You could no longer buy a family’s loyalty and votes with a free turkey at Christmastime. During the 1930s, the federal government was providing what the state and city could not: employment opportunities, through such make-work agencies as the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration, and unemployment insurance and disability payments funded directly with federal money or with federal money funneled through the states. Although these payments were often low, a dollar went a long way during the Depression. A full dinner at a good restaurant cost $1.50; for the well-fixed, a room at the elegant Plaza Hotel was $8 a night.

  In the wonderful lyrics of Betty Comden and Adolph Green in On the Town, the Bronx was still up and the Battery down, but the neighborhoods and ethnic backgrounds of their residents were changing. People in Manhattan and the other boroughs were better educated and more independent; votes were no longer dominated by malleable immigrants. You didn’t have to be named O’Brien, Sullivan, Murphy, McCooey, McQuade, Hylan, Foley, or Flynn to become a district leader or a mayor, a commissioner or a sheriff. In addition to officials of Irish ancestry, there were now borough presidents who were Italians, Hispanics, Jews, and blacks. (Soon enough, they dispensed their own patronage.)

  A sign of its diminution of power was that Tammany Hall’s impressive stone and brick building on Seventeenth Street and Union Square, which served as headquarters from 1929 to 1943, had to be abandoned for lack of funds. After several moves, the organization wound up in rented rooms in an office building at 62 East Forty-second Street. Leaving the Wigwam was a psychological blow to the New York County Democratic Committee, the formal name for what was once informally called Tammany. The Hall’s last boss was Carmine DeSapio, who successfully supported Robert F. Wagner, Jr., for mayor in 1953. When Wagner decided to run for a third term in 1961, he ran on an anti-Tammany platform. That ended DeSapio’s leadership.

  The rise of the Democratic reform clubs in the 1950s and 1960s introduced a strong new force in New York that marked finis for Tammany. Simultaneously, Governor Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois, an eloquent voice for progressive government in the New Deal tradition, was nominated twice to run for president Among the reformers who supported Stevenson and played leading party roles, nationally and locally, were two highly respected old New Yorkers who represented the best in Democratic politics: former Governor Herbert Lehman and Eleanor Roosevelt.

  During the La Guardia years in City Hall, the Republican-Fusion mayor was a powerful ally of Roosevelt’s New Deal. He often went directly to the White House to plead for his city and its people. It helped, of course, that the President and the mayor were on the same wavelength.

  Neither F.D.R. nor the Little Flower won their elections by the current means of electoral politics—market surveyors and pollsters who solicit the opinions of a supposed cross-section of voters and then tell the candidates what’s in the air and how to shift with the wind. In the White House and City Hall, Roosevelt and La Guardia were surrounded by intelligent advisers from academe, but they thought for themselves and followed their own gut instincts. To be sure, they courted the press, but they didn’t depend on the punditocracy to approve their programs.

  La Guardia’s accomplishments have been overshadowed by his flamboyant personality, so well satirized in the musical Fiorello! He’s best remembered for reading Dick Tracy and the other comic strips over WNYC, the city’s radio station, during a newspaper shutdown, for showing up at fires, for smashing slot machines, and for declaring war on gamblers, burlesque houses, and kiosks that carried “smutty” magazines. Though civil libertarians complained about his high-handedness and censorship, the public at large cheered him on.

  But La Guardia’s more important achievements are still visible in New York. As president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors for nearly ten years, he fought for more federal assistance to the cities. Under the La Guardia administration, there was an upsurge of public housing for the poor, including blacks in Harlem. He and his commissioners built more parks, sewer systems, hospitals, health centers, bridges, and airports than any of his Tammany predecessors. There is no Tweed Courthouse to tarnish La Guardia’s record.

  F.D.R. changed the direction of the government and the country between 1933 and 1945. No matter what it’s called, he created the underpinnings of a welfare state that didn’t destroy but—with all its flaws and opportunities—actually preserved the American free enterprise system. In his third inaugural address, on January 20,1941, Roosevelt declared: “The hopes of the Republic cannot forever tolerate either undeserved poverty or self-serving wealth.” In similar forms, that contest still continues today.

  To read Roosevelt’s words now is to become newly aware that his successors, both Democratic and Republican, have lacked his vision and failed to equal his achievements in the White House. It’s a largely forgotten event, but his courage was first displayed in full flower when, against the legal odds, he served as judge and jury in the Albany hearings that brought down Jimmy Walker and Tammany Hall. Thereafter, F.D.R. went on to become the commanding president of the twentieth century.

  A Note on Sources

  In the course of reporting and writing about American history, politics, and the judiciary over the years, I interviewed or corresponded with a number of individuals who provided background material for some of the facts and conclusions in this and related books. These materials can be found in the Herbert Mitgang Papers in the Manuscripts and Archives Section, New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, New York City. There are no restrictions on these papers; they are open to scholars and authors who apply for permission to the Special Collections Office at the Library.

  New material will be added to the papers within a year after publication of this book.

  The bulk of the material about the Seabury investigations, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt’s role, and the trials of Mayor James J. Walker and members of his administration, including the district attorney and other officials, can be found in scattered official city and state reports and judicial documents. No one institution contains all the reports mentioned below.

  Major sources include the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, New York; the mayoral papers of the different administrations in the Municipal Archives and Records Center, New York City; the library of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York; the Columbia University School of Law library; the Collection of Tammaniana and the Oral History transcripts of various personalities at the Columbia University library.

  An invaluable source of information is the Newspaper Division of the New York Public Library, which contains editions of The New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, New York Sun, New York World-Telegram, New York Journal-American, Daily News, and other publications about events covered by this book. The New York Times especially proved itself the newspaper of record by printing transcripts from the hearings before the state legislative committee in Manhattan and Governor Roosevelt in Albany.

  These are the official records used for the book:

  Magistrates’ Courts public hearings, transcript of testimony, 299 witnesses, 1930–1931.

  In the Matter of the Investigation, under commission issued by Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of the State of New York, of charges made against Honorable Thomas C. T. Crain, District Attorney of New York County, 1931.

  In the Matter of the Investigation of the Magistrates’ Courts, First Judicial Department, Supreme Court, Appellate Division, final report, 1932.

  Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate the Departments of the City of New York, transcript of testimony, 320 witnesses, 16 volumes, 1931–1932.

  In the Matter of the Investigation of the Departments of the Government of the City of New York, pursuant to joint resolutions adopted by the New York State Legislature, intermediate report, 1932.

  In the Matter of the Investigation of the Depar
tments of the City of New York, pursuant to joint resolutions adopted by the New York State Legislature, second intermediate report, 1932.

  In the Matter of the Investigations of the Departments of the City of New York, pursuant to joint resolutions adopted by the New York State Legislature, final report, 1932.

  Hearings before Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, Albany, in the Matter of the Charges against Mayor James J. Walker, brought by Samuel Seabury, William J. Schieffelin, as chairman, on behalf of the Committee of One Thousand, James E. Finegan, and others. Transcript of testimony, 34 witnesses, led by Mayor Walker, 5 volumes, 1932.

  Individuals I interviewed or corresponded with in the past, both while writing about the Seabury investigation and in researching New York Times articles and editorials on the judiciary and municipal affairs, include:

  Adolf A. Berle, Jr., Chamberlain of New York City, counsel to the Board of Estimate on transit, occasional Roosevelt Brain Truster; William M. Chadbourne, Fusion party leader and Bull Mooser; Edward Corsi, La Guardia associate, U.S. commissioner of immigration; Thomas E. Dewey, district attorney, governor of New York, Republican presidential candidate; Edward R. Finch, presiding justice, Appellate Division, Supreme Court, First Department; Felix Frankfurter, associate justice, U.S. Supreme Court; Judge Learned Hand, U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit; Roy W. Howard, publisher, Scripps-Howard newspapers; Mrs. Fiorello H. La Guardia; Reuben A. Lazarus, consultant on municipal affairs, New York State Assembly, member of Mayor Walker’s legal staff.

  Also, Walter Lippmann, New York Herald Tribune columnist; David C. Mearns, chief, manuscript division, library of Congress; Raymond Moley, professor of public law, Columbia University, and Roosevelt Brain Truster; Robert Moses, New York City parks commissioner, construction coordinator, member of the City Planning Commission; Allan Nevins, Columbia University history professor, founder, Society of American Historians; Joseph M. Proskauer, lawyer, state Supreme Court justice; Eleanor Roosevelt, for her views of Governor Roosevelt’s stand on the Walker hearings; Samuel I. Rosenman, counsel to Governor Roosevelt, speechwriter, state Supreme Court justice.