Jan. 1,
1926—In a pattern that held true for his attendance at major public meetings
for the next seven years, Jimmy Walker was late—by 90 minutes—for his
own inauguration as New York mayor.
This time,
he had a valid excuse: he and wife Allie were helplessly mired in the traffic
that had come to clog the streets of Gotham with the rise of the automobile—a
problem he intended to alleviate once he took the oath of office.
As he becomes
the focus of the same ceremony, Zohran Mamdani maintains a relationship with
the electorate significantly different from Walker’s, going beyond the fact
that the former is an insurgent with democratic socialist sympathies while the
latter was a product of the Tammany Hall political machine.
No, those
who cast their ballots for Walker (and even many of those who didn’t) couldn’t
help liking him; Mandami’s voters believe in him. If that trust is ever
broken, God help him.
Sharing a
hotel room with Walker on a trip to Albany, Gov. Alfred E. Smith, remarking on
his protégé’s slender form in multicolored pajamas, compared him to a candy
cane. In time, the wisecrack assumed a double meaning. Like that confection,
Walker was fun to take in but not as substantive as might be wished.
By the conclusion
of his time in office—induced by a
wide-ranging corruption probe by Judge Samuel Seabury—Walker earned several
nicknames, including “Gentleman Jimmy,” “The Night Mayor,” “The Jazz Mayor,”
and, inevitably, given an incurable tendency to tardiness that even delayed him from
meeting with President Calvin Coolidge for 40 minutes, “The Late Mayor.”
But I
prefer the one I heard nearly half a century ago, the title of a 1957 biopic
starring Bob Hope: “Beau James,” a moniker that underscored his reputation as a
dandy.
If you
want a more complete idea of Walker’s colorful personality, then I urge you to
read my blog post from nearly 16 years ago that took as its point of departure
Red Smith’s dazzling reminiscences.
But the
post you’re reading now focuses on several of the flamboyant politician’s
policies—and the extent to which his managerial strengths and weaknesses, along
with the contemporary environment, affected his ability to implement them.
In the attached blog post from nearly five years ago, longtime NYC archivist Kenneth Cobb paid
Walker the compliment of taking his work seriously—something that the mayor all
too often did not.
Similar to Bill O’Dwyer at City Hall 20 years later, Walker
was a glad-handing pol with great ability to maneuver others toward a desired
outcome, but often beset by stress and ill health and disposed towards
delegating matters to energetic but hard-pressed staffers.
In contrast
to O’Dwyer, Walker’s ailments were more severe and self-induced. His epic nocturnal
partying required him to sleep it all off, exacerbated his allergy towards handling
difficult problems early in the morning, and drove him towards frequent
vacations, including to Europe and Palm Springs—a total of 143 days in his
first two years alone.
The result: for seven years, New York not only
had a “night mayor,” but a part-time one.
The place
to start in assessing Walker is his inaugural address, where he outlined
several key areas of concern: health, business conditions, housing,
transportation, education, parks and recreation, child welfare, and police and
fire protection.
This is
the kind of speech almost any New York mayor would give. In fact, its
surprising aspects, considering Walker’s prior reputation as a witty party
leader in the State Senate and his subsequent bantering with the press, are its
lack of memorable lines and overall seriousness.
It turned
out that Walker did achieve some of his goals, including:
*establishing
the Department of Sanitation—implementing “the first major improvement in the
city’s sewage problem in its history,” according to Donald Miller’s history of Jazz
Age Manhattan, Supreme City;
*creating
a City Committee on Plan and Survey that ended up watered down by Democratic
borough sachems and eventually eliminated through budget cuts in the
Depression, but not before advancing the ideal of an objective master plan for
the city;
*expanding
parks and playgrounds by purchasing thousands of acres;
*enhancing
public health by consolidating 26 municipal hospitals under a single
commissioner, authorizing massive hospital construction and modernizing
Bellevue’s psychopathic division;
*supporting
civic aviation by initiating construction of Floyd Bennett Field, the city’s
first municipal airport;
*maintaining
the five-cent subway fare;
*presided
over the opening of the first section of the Independent (IND) subway system;
and,
*spearheaded
construction of the West Side Highway.
Ironically,
the beginning of the end for Walker began within only a few days of his
greatest political triumph: a reelection victory in November 1929, as he took 60%
of the vote compared with 25% for Republican Fiorello LaGuardia and 12% for
Socialist Norman Thomas.
But the
stock-market crash that occurred on “Black Tuesday” at the end of October meant
that the mayor could no longer count on a vigorous private sector to fund his
ambitious new programs—and that there would be less patience for stunts like signing
into law a pay raise for himself as the first order of business in his second
term.
Franklin Roosevelt,
now in charge in Albany and with his eye on the White House, instigated the Seabury inquiry that turned up the heat on Walker through the spring and summer of 1932.
But in
the end it was Walker’s mentor Al Smith—no longer in office but out of patience
with the "candy cane's" blatant philandering and laziness—who delivered the coup de grace,
bluntly telling him, “You’re through.” That night, at the beginning of
September, Walker wrote his letter of resignation, effective immediately.
Charm and
generosity have enabled many politicians to survive all kinds of disasters, and
Walker demonstrated those attributes to an unusual degree.
You will
find no argument from me that he was fiscally fraudulent. (Herbert Mitgang’s
history of the Seabury investigation, Once Upon a Time in New York, leaves no doubt on that score.)
But his corruption pales next to the
current Presidential administration, and unlike the present Oval Office
incumbent he spurned attempts at naming after himself initiatives he had
championed. “The mayor of New York still believes himself to be a public
servant and not a potentate,” he said.
Moreover,
for everyone who rightly recalls the bribes and what Walker termed “beneficences”
that came his way for those courting favors, you will discover someone else
with ancestors who survived in difficult times through charity arranged or
personally distributed by him.
