The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  When Walker entered the hearing room, he was greeted again with cheers and applause. Senator Hofstadter banged a gavel and warned spectators that they would be ousted if they interrupted the proceedings. At 11 A.M. die senator turned to Judge Samuel Seabury, who wore a gray suit, white starched shirt, and conservative dark tie. “Judge Seabury,” said the senator, “the committee is ready, if you are.” Seabury turned to Walker and asked courteously, “Mr. Mayor, will you be good enough to take the stand?” Walker stepped briskly into the witness chair and sat with one hand dangling gracefully over the oaken rail.

  One of Seabury’s associates, warning the judge about Walker’s legendary charm, had advised, “Don’t look him straight in the eye when he’s on the stand. He has an uncanny ability to stare you down.” Seabury took this advice. During his examination of the mayor he stood to one side and faced him as little as necessary. Their exchanges were like a duel between a jack-in-the-box and an adding machine.

  Seabury stuck to facts—grim and revealing facts. Walker fought back with wisecracks and tart answers, stalled for time to reflect by asking for more details, interrupted Seabury’s questions, made speeches, feigned indignation, shed crocodile tears, insisted that questions were so complex that he couldn’t trust his memory, announced that the answers were in the record anyway, and asked the judge to repeat his questions. Refusing to be hoodwinked, Seabury turned his back on the witness and told the stenographer to read back the questions. The committee’s minority Democratic members tried to protect the mayor by objecting repeatedly to questions and by heckling Seabury. Chairman Hofstadter practically wore out his right arm banging the gavel to restore order. Seabury was relentless. Using the evidence amassed by his assistants over the previous seven months, he tripped up Walker time after time and forced him to make damaging admissions. The judge got into the record a series of confessions, whose import was lost on Walker’s admirers. After the second and final day of the mayor’s appearance, roses were strewed in his path as he strode out of the State Office Building.

  But a few days later at Yankee Stadium the mayor was booed. New Yorkers began to understand that their erstwhile pet was an ersatz mayor, able to play the role of Beau Brummell only because he was subsidized by rich and conniving men seeking favors at the expense of taxpayers.

  On June 8, 1932, Seabury sent Governor Roosevelt fifteen charges against Walker, the first one declaring that Walker had “failed properly to execute the duties which, as Mayor of the City of New York, it was incumbent upon him to discharge.” Seabury urged the Democratic governor to dismiss a Democratic mayor backed by Tammany Hall at a time when the Democratic national convention was only a few weeks away. Roosevelt wanted the Democratic presidential nomination and felt that he needed Tammany support to get it. He was very much on the spot. In his Hyde Park home the governor turned to Raymond Moley and mused aloud, “How would it be if I let the little mayor off with a hell of a reprimand?” Before Moley could reply, Roosevelt jerked up his great chin and snapped, “No! That would be weak!”

  Now the scene shifted to Albany. In twelve sessions held in the State Capitol Building Roosevelt sat as judge in a hearing to determine if Walker should be deposed. Like Seabury, the governor quickly learned how difficult it was to get a straight answer from the playboy mayor. Before the Albany hearings began, Roosevelt conferred with Felix Frankfurter, then a Harvard law professor. Frankfurter later said, “I worked out with Roosevelt the legal theory on which Jimmy Walker had to go—the theory being that when a public official has acquired money during the time that he was in public office, the presumption of wrongdoing lies there unless he can explain why he suddenly came into money that he couldn’t have got merely through his salary.”

  There was a break in the Albany hearings so that Walker could return to New York to attend his brother’s funeral. The mayor met in the Hotel Plaza with a dozen or more Tammany leaders, including Al Smith. When Walker asked Smith for his opinion, Smith said, “Jim, you’re through. You must resign for the good of the party.” The evening of September 1, 1932, Walker sent the city clerk this statement: “I hereby resign as Mayor of the City of New York, the same to take effect immediately.”

  Walker then issued an angry statement calling Roosevelt “unfair” and his hearings “un-American,” and in the late afternoon of September 2 he sailed for Europe. The Jimmy Walker era was over. The bubble had burst.

  Chapter 46

  FIORELLO LAGUARDIA BECOMES MAYOR

  JIMMY WALKER’S duties as mayor were taken over temporarily by the president of the board of aldermen, Joseph V. McKee. Then a special election was held in November, 1932, to select a man to serve the rest of Walker’s unexpired term. Boss Curry picked John P. O’Brien as the Tammany candidate, and O’Brien won. A former surrogate of New York County, O’Brien was so gauche that his enemies called him the wild bull of the china shop. He once referred to Einstein as “Albert Weinstein.” When a reporter asked the Tammany-controlled mayor the name of his new police commissioner, he replied, “I don’t know. I haven’t got the word yet.”

  In the regular election of 1933 three candidates vied for mayor. The Democrats were split, O’Brien running as the Tammany candidate and McKee running as an independent Democrat. Fiorello H. LaGuardia, a Republican in name only, was the choice of the Republican and City Fusion parties. It was a vicious campaign besmirched with violence. LaGuardia charged that McKee was anti-Semitic, and McKee declared that LaGuardia was “a Communist at heart.” LaGuardia promised to destroy the Tammany system of bosses and machine politics and replace them with nonpartisan government by experts. New Yorkers were weary of Tammany domination, shocked by the Walker scandals, and sobered by the depression. Between them O’Brien and McKee won more votes than LaGuardia, but he was elected.

  The evening of December 31, 1933, LaGuardia and leaders of his reform coalition gathered in the second-floor library of Judge Samuel Seabury’s town house. The host and most male guests were in tuxedos, but LaGuardia wore a business suit. At midnight a black-robed state supreme court justice swore him into office, thus ending sixteen years of Tammany rule. LaGuardia then turned to his wife and kissed her while Seabury cried, “Now we have a mayor of New York!” A minute later LaGuardia picked up a telephone and ordered the arrest of Charles “Lucky” Luciano, the most notorious gangster in town.

  Now the “Little Flower” held the office he had sought three times. With cyclonic energy he threw himself into the job, dictating to relays of secretaries up to twelve hours a day and dashing here and there in the city to see conditions firsthand. Only about five feet tall, the new mayor was sensitive about his height. He had a chunky body, a round face, black hair, dark and burning eyes, a swarthy complexion, and eyebrows that met over the bridge of his nose. His full lower lip pushed out petulantly whenever he was crossed. He bounced about on short legs and walked with a choppy gait. Indifferent to clothes, he wore rumpled suits and never quite got his tie firmly tucked into the V of his collar. He was an exuberant Latin, who spoke in a high-pitched voice and waved his hands as he talked. He knew all about gutter politics, yet genuinely cared about the welfare of the people. Trigger-fast at repartee, a master of the crushing retort, he pounded lecterns and often shouted until his voice broke. No intellectual, he saw life in blacks and whites. A liberal, he distrusted big business and pronounced the word “rich” as though it nauseated him. He was irascible, stubborn, autocratic, impatient, belligerent, opinionated, and overbearing. He was charming, warmhearted, generous, and loving. He adored children, enjoyed parties, smoked a cigar or corncob pipe, was a talented mimic, played chess, and blew the cornet.

  Although this was LaGuardia’s first administrative job, he knew city government inside and out. It pained him to delegate power, but he nonetheless surrounded himself with as distinguished a group of city officials as could be found in the world. These departmental heads developed an infectious esprit de corps, despite the polished bone the mayor kept in a jeweler’s box. Whenev
er a commissioner pulled a boner, LaGuardia presented this symbol to him with ceremonious irony.

  When LaGuardia took office, city finances were chaotic, crime was rampant, housing was a mess, and soon the city’s unemployed equaled the entire population of upstate Buffalo. The new mayor preferred welfare to economy, although he restored the city’s credit rating. He was friendly with the new President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, obtained vast sums of New Deal money for city relief and used them well. LaGuardia built more public projects than any other mayor in the city’s history.

  Municipal parks had been deteriorating for a decade, and the mayor chose an exceedingly able man, Robert Moses, to renovate and beautify them. Park Commissioner Moses said, “We aim to rebuild New York, saving what is durable, what is salvageable, and what is genuinely historical, and substituting progress for obsolescence.” In the Central Park Zoo the lions’ cages were so flimsy that animal keepers carried shotguns to protect children if the beasts escaped. The park itself teemed with rats, and in a single week Moses’s exterminators killed more than 200,000 of them. In 2 years Moses increased recreational facilities by about 35 percent. With parks and playgrounds multiplying at incredible speed, Moses snapped at the sanitation commissioner for piling garbage cans along a certain park. The commissioner asked plaintively, How were his men to know when they set down garbage cans that there would be a new park beside them the next day?

  At the beginning of the depression poor people were dependent on private charity and local government, but neither could cope with the worsening situation. New York was hit harder than any other American city because of its size. In 1931, when Walker was mayor, the city had launched its own relief program, issuing bonds to pay the cost. Mayor O’Brien had met relief needs mainly by borrowing. LaGuardia, who wanted to put relief on a pay-as-you-go basis, received authority from the state to finance relief from current revenues. This meant that he had to find new taxes.

  Although LaGuardia had opposed sales taxes while he was a member of Congress, as mayor he imposed a 2 percent sales tax, a 3 percent utility tax, and a gross business tax of 0.1 percent to meet the city’s share of relief costs. The state and federal governments contributed 75 percent of the city’s relief burden. Between 1933 and 1939 the United States spent more than $1,000,000,000 for relief in New York City. The peak came in March, 1936, when 1,550,000 men, women, and children in the city, or nearly 20 percent of the total population, got some form of public assistance.

  The phrase “work relief” was avoided at first; relief projects were called emergency work. Officials couldn’t decide whether it was work being performed or relief being dispensed. At last they faced up to the grim fact that relief was intended to keep people from starving and to boost their morale with jobs that made them feel useful. Nonetheless, there was much sneering about leafraking and loafing on the job. The efficiency-minded Moses once snapped, “The official who promises one hundred percent efficiency is taking the public for a ride!” But Moses was softhearted. After a fishing trip with friends off Long Island, he cleaned 500 flounders and gave them to the poor.

  In those dark days little girls played a game called Going on Relief. One youngster would take the part of a relief worker. She would question her friends about their families; whereupon the other little girls displayed their dolls and told sad stories about how many children they had to support. Small boys, for their part, took up another game, which they called Picketing. Carrying crude signs, marching back and forth, and hooting at “scabs,” they reenacted labor clashes they had seen or heard about from their fathers.

  A building boom had begun before the stock market crash, and now many of these projects continued, providing jobs for workers who had not been hired for public construction. Some new structures were finished before LaGuardia took office. The 102-story Empire State Building, the world’s tallest skyscraper, opened on May 1, 1931, on the site of the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Will Durant, the historian, once wrote that “the Empire State Building is as sublime as Chartres Cathedral.” On October 1, 1931, a new Waldorf-Astoria opened on the block bounded by Park and Lexington Avenues and Forty-ninth and Fiftieth streets. Then came the city’s most important single architectural project—Rockefeller Center. This city within a city was erected by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., on the west side of Fifth Avenue between West Forty-eighth and West Fifty-first streets. He employed 75,000 men for 10 years. The tallest peak in this sierra of skyscrapers was the 70-story Radio Corporation of America Building, completed in May, 1933. The New York City Guide, written by talented relief workers, declared, “In its architecture Rockefeller Center stands as distinctly for New York as the Louvre stands for Paris.”

  The construction industry and labor unions, like many other businesses and institutions, had become infested with racketeers. When Prohibition ended, bootleggers and gangsters tried to find a new way to make a dishonest dollar, so they muscled their way into control of a wide range of enterprises, such as restaurants, theaters, bakeries, the garment trade, loan sharking, prostitution, and all forms of gambling. They forced honest businessmen and labor leaders to pay them so-called protection money under fear of reprisals. After the racketeers had taken over a firm or entire industry, they fixed prices, as is done by cartels. Protection money and price boosts were passed along to consumers, already hard pressed to make ends meet.

  LaGuardia, who had promised to rid the city of crooks, improved the police department, tried to make honest men of cops, cracked down on gamblers, and smashed slot machines and pinball machines. His crime-busting record was exceeded, however, by that of Thomas E. Dewey. Born in Michigan, Dewey had received a law degree from Columbia University, entered a Manhattan law firm, and had become Chief Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. In 1935 Governor Herbert H. Lehman appointed Dewey a special prosecutor and told him to run racketeers out of town.

  Various gangs throughout the country had put aside their differences and organized themselves into a national syndicate. The eastern division, headquartered in New York, was known as the Big Six. Francesco Castiglia, better known as Frank Costello, was in charge of the division’s gambling. Lucky Luciano headed the prostitution and narcotics rackets. Arthur Flegenheimer, called Dutch Schultz, controlled the restaurants and the Harlem policy banks. Joseph Doto, whose alias was Joey Adonis, ruled the bail bond racket and Brooklyn waterfront. Louis “Lepke” Buchalter and Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro dominated the industrial and labor extortions. Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and Meyer Lansky were strong-arm enforcers.

  When Dewey probed the restaurant racket, Dutch Schultz began worrying. When Dewey looked into the policy racket, Schultz banged a table with his fist and screamed, “Dewey’s gotta go! He has gotta be hit in the head!” But with criminals now organized in a cartel, Schultz couldn’t act alone. Ranking East Coast gangsters held a summit meeting in New York to discuss Dewey’s assassination. Most were against the overt act; one mobster argued that if they killed Dewey, federal agents might take up where he left off and chase the syndicate out of the country. Syndicate directors voted to let Dewey live. However, they soon heard that the furious Dutchman was going to take Dewey by himself. To protect their interests, they had Dutch Schultz murdered.

  Dewey’s investigators found damaging evidence about James J. “Jimmy” Hines, a Tammany leader who acted as the principal link between the underworld and Tammany Hall. Hines had protected Schultz’s policy racket and guarded the interests of a host of other criminals. Dewey got an indictment from a grand jury, and Hines was sent to Sing Sing. Dewey also masterminded the arrest and conviction of Lucky Luciano on a charge of compulsory prostitution. During his two years as special prosecutor, Dewey obtained seventy-two convictions out of seventy-three indictments.

  A girl living in Jackson Heights read in her history book that George Washington had been sworn in as the first President of the United States in 1789. The year 1939 would mark the 150th anniversary of the historic event, and the y
oungster thought that the city should celebrate by staging a world’s fair. The city fathers and civic leaders agreed. Various sections of each borough wanted the fair, but the arguments ended when Park Commissioner Moses refused to cooperate unless Flushing Meadow was selected. The meadow had served as a city dump the last quarter century, and Moses hoped to use a temporary fair to create a permanent park. Groundbreaking ceremonies were held in 1936, and the two-year fair opened in 1939.

  It was the greatest world’s fair ever held up to that time, attracting a total of nearly 45,000,000 visitors and costing $157,000,000, but it was a financial failure. New York had not had a world’s fair since 1853, when the city’s population had stood at 581,018. In 1939 New York was a metropolis of 7,434,346 persons. This was more than the combined populations of Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Idaho, Maine, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, and Wyoming—plus all the foreign-born white males of Oklahoma. More people lived in New York City than in Australia or Bulgaria or Peru or Greece or Sweden or Morocco.

  The day the fair opened, Mayor LaGuardia said, “May I point to one exhibit that I hope all visitors will note, and that is the city of New York itself.” He had cause to be proud of the city and of himself as well. He was completely honest. He was the best mayor New York ever had. He served longer than any mayor since Richard Varick, who held office from 1789 to 1801. Not since Mayor Mitchel’s time had any city administration been so vigorous. He instituted more reforms than any mayor of any city at any time in the nation’s history. He improved and expanded municipal services, secured the adoption of a new city charter, reformed the civil service, attacked the slum problem, bettered housing conditions, resumed the construction of schools, unified the subway systems, stimulated cultural affairs, made the city an aviation center, and opened the nation’s first free port. He cleaned up the magistrates’ courts. He abolished the Tammany-controlled board of aldermen and established a city council elected by proportional representation. Grateful New Yorkers reelected him in 1937 and again in 1941.