The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  “Nigger Heaven,” as Negroes themselves called Harlem, lay in the northeastern corner of Manhattan. Its approximate boundaries were Central Park and 110th Street on the south, the East River on the east, the Harlem River on the northeast, 168th Street on the north, and Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Park on the west Many were unable to find jobs, and there was no such thing as public relief. Hard pressed to find dwellings as well, the Negroes lived jammed together in this black ghetto. Some held rent parties, also called whist parties or dances, to raise money for rent. These affairs were publicized by cards such as the one saying: “We got yellow girls, we’ve got black and tan—Will you have a good time?—YEAH MAN!” A welcome was extended to anyone, Negro or white, who had cash to spend. Some white people considered the rent parties more amusing than nightclubs.

  It became commonplace for whites out on the town to say late in the evening, “Let’s go uptown for yardbird and strings.” Yard-bird was Harlem’s vernacular for fried chicken, and strings were spaghetti. This food—together with steaming chitterlings, good fried fish, and bad bootleg booze—could be enjoyed at low cost at the rent parties, and the impromptu singing and dancing often went on until dawn.

  White New Yorkers and visitors also flocked to Harlem’s famous nightclubs, such as the Cotton Club and Connie’s Inn. There they drank illicit whiskey, listened to the blues, and watched some of the greatest talent in the world. Harlem catered to the ofay, the secret Negro word for the white man—foe—in pig Latin. Anyone with enough money could find anything he wanted—girls, liquor, narcotics, perversion. As composer Duke Ellington later said, “That part of Harlem was degrading and humiliating to both Negroes and whites.” Considering the fact that many Negroes masked their hatred of white people behind smiles and that most Harlem hot spots fell into the hands of mobsters, there was amazingly little violence. Decorum was demanded in all of Harlem’s big nightclubs, but in small cellar joints and private apartments anything was likely to happen.

  Negroes knew that they were unwelcome in other parts of the city, most held menial jobs, and only the exceptional individual could claw his way out of this crippling environment. About 1925 Harlem’s literary renaissance began. A group of talented young writers depicted Negro life with such skill and honesty that they won the admiration of literary critics.

  In 1920 Harlem elected its first Negro alderman, an independent Republican, named George Harris, and ever since then Harlem has been represented on the board of aldermen. More than politicians, however, the one man who gave the Negro a sense of his own dignity was a pure black man, named Marcus Garvey.

  Born in Jamaica in 1887, intelligent but unschooled, a newspaper writer in Jamaica and Costa Rica, short chunky mustached Garvey came to Harlem in 1917. The next year he began publishing a weekly, called the Negro World, in which he urged Negro unity, nationalism, and the resettlement of Negroes in Africa. He appealed to racial pride at a time when Negroes felt that they had little cause to hold up their heads. A skilled orator, clever organizer, and shrewd psychologist, Garvey touched off the first real mass movement among American Negroes.

  He asked the League of Nations for permission to settle a colony in Africa and entered into discussions with Liberia. Unable to negotiate the return of American Negroes to Africa, Garvey organized the Universal African Legion, the Black Eagle Flying Corps, and the Universal Black Cross Nurses to force white people out of that continent. Establishing the African Orthodox Church and promising a Utopia under the African sun, Garvey became the uncrowned dictator of an imaginary black empire. Some Negroes hailed him as God.

  Between 1919 and 1921 Garvey collected $10,000,000. In 1923 he claimed 6,000,000 followers. This was an exaggeration, but even his critics admitted that 500,000 Negroes had pledged blind loyalty to him. Garvey set up two steamship companies and bought three seagoing ships in the name of his Universal Negro Improvement Association. He intended to man the vessels with Negro crews and sail from the United States to Africa and the West Indies. In 1923 he was found guilty of using the mails to defraud in raising money for his steamship lines and was sent to the federal penitentiary at Atlanta for five years. In 1927 President Calvin Coolidge pardoned him but had him deported as an undesirable alien. Marcus Garvey, who had touched both glory and shame, died in London in 1940.

  Chapter 43

  THE WALL STREET CRASH

  JAMES J. WALKER was born on June 19, 1881, in a flat at 110 Leroy Street in Greenwich Village. From boyhood he was steeped in Tammany politics; his Irish-born father had been a Tammany alderman, assemblyman, and leader of the old Ninth Ward. Jimmy Walker was reared in a nice house, went to a parochial school, never attended college, played professional baseball, acted in amateur theatricals, learned to play die piano, and yearned to compose popular songs.

  He went to work for a music publishing house in 1908 and wrote the lyrics for “Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?” which earned him more than $10,000 in the next 30 years. Then, bowing to his father’s wishes, Walker abandoned his career on Tin Pan Alley and entered politics. In 1912 he was elected to the New York state assembly. Later he was sent to the state senate, where he became Democratic floor leader.

  “I really was moving against my own desires most of the time, and the inner conflicts were great,” Walker told his friend Gene Fowler. The ambivalence left Jimmy Walker a neurotic, who feared crowds and cars, felt uneasy in elevators, shrank from slaps on the back, perspired at night, and had hands always cold to the touch and sometimes clammy. He camouflaged his tensions behind a façade of gaiety and charm. A skinny fellow who weighed only 125 pounds during periods of especial strain, Walker stood 5 feet 8½ inches tall, had a flat belly, had practically no hips, and tried to disguise his string-bean appearance by wearing suits that emphasized the breadth of his shoulders.

  Considering himself a fashion plate, but always dressed in ultra-Broadway style, Walker designed his own clothes and owned hundreds of custom-made ties. He was a close friend of actors, who taught him the theatrical trick of using his left hand to pick his handkerchief from the left-hand pocket of his jacket, instead of crossing his right hand over his chest. He lighted denicotinized cigarettes with a monogrammed gold lighter. His lean face, sharp nose, and flashing grin gave him a foxlike look. He parted his brown hair on the left. His flushed cheeks gave rise to remarks about his drinking habits, but although Jimmy Walker imbibed, his florid complexion was part of his heritage. He scorned Prohibition, declaring “this measure was born in hypocrisy and there it will die.”

  During his early Albany years he shared a hotel room with Al Smith, whom he admired. Smith, a devout Catholic and a man of moderate habits, worried about Walker’s playboy tendencies. But the quick-witted Walker, despite his frivolity, racked up a good record during his fourteen years in the state legislature. Typically, he married a pretty chorus girl, and typically, he was more than two hours late for his wedding.

  With the approach of the 1925 mayoralty election Mayor Hylan let it be known he was eager to serve a third term. However, most citizens had had their fill of the bumbling and bewildered Hylan. Tammany Hall opposed Hylan because it was tired of Hearst’s attempts to run the city from his California estate. Governor Al Smith, too, was disenchanted with Red Mike. A Walker for mayor boom was launched by some of Jimmy’s Broadway friends, and Smith somewhat reluctantly agreed to Walker’s candidacy. Hylan shouted that Walker intended to make New York an open city for gangsters, thieves, prostitutes, and dope peddlers, but Walker defeated Hylan in the Democratic primary. In the citywide election Walker easily beat his Republican rival, a fountain-pen manufacturer, named Frank D. Waterman.

  Jimmy Walker took office on January 1, 1926, as the city and nation basked in prosperity. Approaching the dais to be sworn in, he bowed to his wife and relatives and to the Tammany bigwigs, who were much in evidence. During the campaign Walker had said time and again that because Tammany Hall had created him he would never forget it. On the dais stood a radio microphon
e, and Jimmy Walker became the first mayor of New York whose inaugural ceremony was broadcast. While he was speaking, a woman fainted nearby. Walker rushed to her side and asked for a glass of water, which he put to her lips. People listening to the broadcast were puzzled by the sudden silence at City Hall, and within thirty seconds hundreds telephoned to ask if the new mayor had been assassinated. There was a sigh of relief when Walker returned to the microphone and finished his address.

  After the formalities were over, Mayor Walker strode jauntily into the mayor’s office in the west wing of City Hall. He gazed at the Colonial desk that had become his. He eyed the mellow furnishings. Catching sight of a portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette hanging over the mantelpiece, Walker arched his eyebrows and pretended to speak to it: “If I may borrow a phrase, I wish to announce, ‘Lafayette, we are here.’” The playboy had become the leader of a metropolis of nearly 6,000,000 citizens. He had never held any administrative position in the city government. He admitted that he knew nothing about many of the city’s problems. To City Hall reporters he confessed, “I’ve read not more than fifteen books from cover to cover.” When they asked how he had managed to amass so much information, he replied, “What little I know, I have learned by ear.”

  In those days City Hall was covered mainly by hack reporters. They adored Walker because he shot craps with them and always made good copy. They let him hobble them by insisting that most of his remarks be off the record. When serious matters were debated by the board of estimate, Walker won headlines with glittering wise-cracks while the issues of the day went largely unnoticed. Never arising before 10 A.M. and sometimes suffering hangovers, Walker’s charm often wore thin when he had to buckle down to city business. He would scold a citizen for taking one minute more than the allotted five minutes to discuss a proposed measure and then would keep sweating crowds waiting in board chambers while he dallied an hour and a half over lunch. Savage and coarse at times, Walker shouted down many an unfortunate person who aroused his ire. Once a man interrupted the mayor by shouting, “Liar!” Walker snapped, “Now that you have identified yourself, we shall proceed.”

  Jimmy’s churlish behavior, loyalty to Tammany, and willingness to appoint political hacks did not dim the affection most people felt for their debonair mayor. He didn’t mind being dubbed the late mayor because of his tardiness. He actually enjoyed being called the nightclub mayor. He was, as Gene Fowler said in Beau James, “a man of rainbow charm.” Douglas Gilbert wrote in the World-Telegram: “New York wore James J. Walker in its lapel, and he returned the compliment.” He had a twinkle in his eyes and a quip for every visiting celebrity—such as aviator Charles Lindbergh, channel-swimming Gertrude Ederle, and Queen Marie of Rumania—who reached City Hall after riding up Broadway amid the soft hail of ticker tape.

  Tammany tightened its grip on the city as Walker neglected the serious side of his job. Reviving frauds common during Boss Tweed days, politicians and criminals teamed up, favors were sold, and the municipal corporation inched toward bankruptcy. In this blithe era nobody worked very hard—least of all the city magistrates whose court sessions averaged only 3 hours and 11 minutes a day. During his first 2 years in office Walker took 7 vacations for a total of 143 days, visiting London, Paris, Berlin, Bermuda, Canada, Havana, Hollywood, San Francisco, Atlanta, Florida, Louisville, Houston, and Rome. Stopping in the Italian capital in 1927, Mayor Walker had a half-hour audience with Benito Mussolini as a movie crew recorded the scene.

  Walker gave pleasure, but he took freely as well. In 1929 his salary was boosted from $25,000 to $40,000—almost three times that of a member of the President’s Cabinet. When LaGuardia attacked Walker for this, Walker flashed his boyish smile and joked, “That’s cheap! Think what it would cost if I worked full time.” He lived ever more extravagantly and sank into debt. Once he said, “If I earn a million dollars this year, by the end of the year I’d have spent one million, ten thousand dollars.” To high-living free-spending New Yorkers, Jimmy Walker became a symbol of their way of life. They relected him mayor in 1929. One week before the election the stock market felt its first tremor. Soon were heard the first rumblings of a great judicial scandal. Walker had been riding high, wide, and handsome. Now he was riding for a fall.

  In the late 1920’s a segment of America had become one vast permanent floating crap game. Waiters and plumbers, motormen and grocers, seamstresses and chauffeurs, actors and writers—at least 1,000,000 Americans—gambled in the stock market. They bet on whether stock prices would rise or fall in a short period of time. They were more interested in the stock market pages than in the sports pages of newspapers. The little man had discovered that he could speculate in securities with borrowed money by buying on margin. The big man in the know seemed to encourage this speculation.

  In 1928 President Coolidge said, “No Congress of the United States ever assembled, on surveying the state of the Union, has met with a more pleasing prospect than that which appears at the present time.” Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover prophesied that “with the policies of the last eight years we shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.” Irving T. Bush, owner of the Bush Terminal in Brooklyn, declared that “we are only at the beginning of a period that will go down in history as a golden age.” Bernard Baruch said that “the economic condition of the world seems on the verge of a great forward movement.”

  New York City alone had more automobiles than all of Europe. Fifth Avenue’s opulence was rivaled only by Park Avenue, where apartment rentals of $40,000 were not uncommon. Between 1919 and 1929 land values here increased by 75 percent. Real estate taxes provided about four-fifths of the city’s revenue in 1928. National productivity increased; the output per wage earner grew 43 percent between 1919 and 1929. During the same period the use of telephones doubled, 1 out of every 3 American homes owned a radio, electrical goods sold as fast as they could be made, and there was an average of 1 auto for every 5½ Americans.

  The other side of the coin was less bright. Of the nation’s wealth 90 percent was held by 13 percent of its citizens. Installment buying had increased, and buy-now-pay-later had become an accepted way of life. Corporations and investment trusts lent carelessly to stock-brokers for speculative purposes. There was an overproduction of capital goods.

  People were convinced that prosperity was eternal. Wall Street branch houses increased. A New York actress converted her Park Avenue apartment into an office and played the stock market by telephone. A broker’s valet made nearly $250,000. Brokers’ offices were so crowded that it was difficult for a customer to find a spot to watch the posted quotations. Columnist Franklin P. Adams saw three famous artists in a restaurant and walked up, hoping to engage them in an intellectual discussion, and found the trio discussing the Federal Reserve Bank. Alexander Woollcott, the drama critic and author, got “hot tips on the market from big shots.” Comedian Groucho Marx took tips on investments from such diverse authorities as Bernard Baruch and a theatrical wardrobe woman.

  Then came Thursday, October 24, 1929, remembered as Black Thursday. The New York Stock Exchange opened at 10 A.M. with prices steady. United States Steel was quoted at 205½, a point or two above the previous closing. For a few minutes all prices remained firm. Then brokers began unloading margin accounts, which their customers no longer could cover. Selling started with the roaring confusion of a river breaking through a dam. Nearly everybody wanted to sell, and almost nobody wanted to buy. All seemed to be getting out. By 11 A.M. the market had degenerated into a mad scramble of sales, and by 11:30 A.M. panic had set in.

  Edward H. H. Simmons, president of the exchange, was on vacation. Responsibility fell upon the shoulders of the exchange’s vice-president, thirty-nine-year-old Richard Whitney. The son of a Boston banker, educated at Groton and Harvard, and married to the widow of a son of Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, Whitney was a power on Wall Street. He owned a 495-acre gentleman’s farm in New Jersey, a town house on Man
hattan’s East Side, 8 automobiles, 47 suits, 12 walking sticks, and 4 pink coats for fox hunting.

  The selling wave was so gigantic that ticker tapes ran far behind transactions. A time lag of up to thirty minutes ensued between prices quoted on the floor of the exchange and those on the ticker tape. As a result, all was confusion and uncertainty and worry. Among those watching this mad scene was Winston Churchill, Britain’s former Chancellor of the Exchequeur. He and the others heard a false rumor that eleven speculators had committed suicide. A crowd standing in Wall Street gazed apprehensively at a workman on the roof of a building, convinced that he was preparing to jump. There were untrue reports that the exchanges in Buffalo and Chicago had closed. Police Commissioner Grover Whalen sent a police detail to Wall Street to maintain order.

  At noon, five of the nation’s most influential bankers slipped into the House of Morgan. J. P. Morgan was in Europe, so they conferred with Thomas W. Lamont, senior partner of the firm. The vast wealth of the House of Morgan aside, these titans commanded more than $6,000,000,000 in banking reserves. Each chipped in millions of dollars to form a pool to buy stocks in order to create confidence in the market. Lamont later said that they did not try to hold prices at any given level but simply made enough purchases to restore order to the trading operation. Chosen to act for them was Richard Whitney, floor trader for the Morgans.

  At 12:30 P.M. the exchange closed its visitors’ gallery. At 1:30 P.M. Whitney walked onto the floor of the exchange and pushed his way past shouting men toward trading post No. 2, where U.S. Steel was handled. The vast hall hushed briefly as brokers watched him and then filled again with a buzz of excited voices. Whitney held a slip of paper in one hand. He called out: “Two hundred five for Steel!” He was offering to buy 10,000 shares of U.S. Steel at 205 when the current bids were several points lower. Only 200 shares were available at 193½, but Whitney’s gesture impressed brokers and customers and revived their courage. Then, moving with studied nonchalance, Whitney visited other trading posts, offering to buy from $20,000,000 to $30,000,000 worth of stock. His maneuver checked the selling wave, vanquished fear, and led many speculators to reinvest, lest they miss out on the new advance. It also gave some big and conservative operators time to unload. Prices boomed again.