Quote of the Day (Keith Richards, on How Records Represented ‘The Emancipation of Music’)

“I’ve learned everything I know off of records. Being able to replay something immediately without all that terrible stricture of written music, the prison of those bars, those five lines. Being able to hear recorded music freed up loads of musicians that couldn’t necessarily afford to learn to read or write music, like me. Before 1900, you’ve got Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, the cancan.  With recording, it was emancipation for the people. As long as you or somebody around you could afford a machine, suddenly you could hear music made by people, not set-up rigs and symphony orchestras. You could actually listen to what people were saying, almost off the cuff. Some of it can be a lot of rubbish, but some of it was really good. It was the emancipation of music. Otherwise you'd have had to go to a concert hall, and how many people could afford that?”—English rock ‘n’ roll guitarist and songwriter Keith Richards, Life (2010)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Woman of the Year,’ As a Sportswriter Introduces His Date to the Game of Baseball)

Tess Harding [A sophisticated foreign correspondent played by Katharine Hepburn]: [In the stands at a major-league ballpark, observing the large crowd in attendance] “Are all these people unemployed?”

Sam Craig [A sportswriter, played by Spencer Tracy]: “No, they're all attending their grandmother's funeral.”— Woman of the Year (1942), screenplay by Ring Lardner Jr., Michael Kanin, and John Lee Mahin, directed by George Stevens

A lovely hat that Miss Harding is wearing, isn’t it? Except that it blocks the view of the large, angry-looking fellow behind her.

Oh, well—with the help of Sam, she’ll learn about not just the balls and strikes that affect the players, but appropriate attire for spectators like herself! 

This Day in New York History (Bill O’Dwyer Withers Under Questioning at Kefauver Crime Hearings)

Mar. 19, 1951—The Kefauver Committee hearings on organized crime, in the middle of a 14-city media road show, had already reached a crescendo upon arriving at New York's Federal Courthouse within the prior week, particularly with testimony by reputed mobster Frank Costello.

But now, in the first of two successive days, the nation would be transfixed by more testimony unfolding through the emerging medium of television: William O’Dwyer, the current US Ambassador to Mexico and the former mayor of New York City, crumbling under hostile committee questioning, was experiencing the effective end of his public career.

Costello, nicknamed the “Prime Minister of the Underworld,” would be sentenced to 18 months in prison for contempt of Congress when he broke off his testimony. O’Dwyer, more cooperative, saw his reputation shrivel, a judgment formalized in the committee’s final report that took him to task for allowing organized crime to fester under his watch while he was Brooklyn District Attorney and New York’s Mayor.

But the hearings' importance lay beyond destroying O’Dwyer or the intrigue surrounding the appearance of Costello, who worked out an agreement with the five-man committee to allow only his hands to be seen by TV viewers.

Indeed, the Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, which held hearings in 14 cities, demonstrated the corrosive effects of organized crime at the city and state levels, marked a cultural watershed, positioned chairman Estes Kefauver for presidential and vice presidential bids, and set the stage for deeper investigations into mob influence.

What follows in this past is based on research for a biography of O’Dwyer’s faithful younger brother Paul that I wrote with Rob Polner, An Irish Passion for Justice.

Accusations had already appeared in the New York press related to what O’Dwyer’s interim replacement as DA, a Republican, called his “laxity” and “maladministration” of his district attorney’s office. The mushroom cloud of these questions led to his hurried 1950 resignation from City Hall and appointment by President Harry Truman as ambassador to Mexico.

Then Truman gave his blessings to Kefauver—a colorful Tennessee politician who had made a coonskin cap his trademark in his successful 1948 Senate race—to examine mob infiltration of city and state governments and summon their leaders, many of them fellow Democrats, by request or subpoena.

Understanding the environment surrounding the hearings can bewilder contemporary readers unless they keep in mind these factors:

*Television: An estimated 30 million Americans tuned in to watch the live proceedings in March 1951. By the time the committee, its staff, and attendant cameras rolled into New York, the hearings had become a sensation. Suddenly, “Kefauver block parties” became the rage, and Broadway attendance took a nosedive as viewers found the real-life drama on their small screens at home even more fascinating and entertaining than what they would normally see on the Great White Way.

*Cold War pressures: Just as communists sought to erode the international appeal of democracy following World War II, so the mob world’s money was subverting democracy from within, the new zeitgeist went.  For that reason, Bill would be regarded not simply as someone who may have pulled punches on behalf of shadowy figures believed to have underworld connections, but rather as a supporter of an “alien” conspiracy fomented by Italian American criminals who were destabilizing the American experiment from within.

*A focus on gambling: Though the committee’s understanding of “organized crime” encompassed “protection,” prostitution, murder, blackmail, and gambling, according to the committee’s mission statement, it was the last that consumed the lion’s share of its attention. Gambling was, Kefauver claimed, "the life blood of organized crime," so the committee went to the areas where the activity was most likely to flourish: cities, which were often controlled, as in New York, by Democratic political machines.

Paul O’Dwyer, an attorney normally with a heightened awareness of his clients’ rights and interests, long afterward regretted having strongly urged his brother to testify, even though Bill’s doctor had cautioned about the physical strain created by the hearings:

“I felt his [Bill’s] appearance was imperative because he should not let his detractors say they had frightened him from coming to a town over which he had presided with such distinction for five years. It was immature reasoning, and in retrospect, I believe I would not have given that advice to a client not related to me but otherwise under the same circumstance.”

Bill’s testimony, frequently non-specific, struck many as evasive. Moreover, the normally self-confident pol who had been twice elected Gotham’s mayor had been replaced by am energy-drained witness who, battling the flu and mopping his perspiring brow, reacted with annoyance to his inquisitors rather than his customary charm. He did little to hide, for instance, his scorn of Republican Charles Tobey of New Hampshire as a hypocrite:

Tobey: “Why did [O’Dwyer aide James] Moran go to the apartment [of Frank Costello, in 1942] with you, to carry a bag or what? Was he an errand boy, a companion, an advisor?”

O’Dwyer: “Senator, if the answer is intended to be anything other than sarcastic, I will answer it.”

Tobey: “When you were there, were you conscious that he was a gangster?”

O’Dwyer: “I was conscious that he had a reputation as a very big book-maker.”

Tobey: “It seems to me you should have said about Costello, ‘Unclean, unclean!’ And that you should have left him alone, as if he were a leper. But instead you trotted up to his place—”

O’Dwyer: “I had business with him. They say there is a lot of it in your home state of New Hampshire—30 million dollars a year… I wonder who the bookmakers in Breton Woods support for public office in New Hampshire?”

Tobey: “I hate a four-flusher!”…

When Bill was back at his hotel room after concluding his testimony, family and friends quickly sensed that he had lost his old elan, as described later in an oral history interview by Brooklyn Eagle reporter Clifford Evans:

“Suddenly he looked old. Suddenly this very proud man . . . who had gone from bartender here in N.Y. all the way up to being the No. 1 citizen as Mayor, and then during the war, had become a General and had been given the rank in our State Department of minister—a man who, single handedly, on assignment from Roosevelt, had negotiated with dollars and in secrecy for the saving of thousands of Jews from Hitler’s Germany—a man who had done so much to make us feel good, and suddenly, everything just crashed. The grayness about him and the open window there— it was kind of a difficult moment.”

Now in his early 60s, Bill finished out his term as ambassador a year and a half later. Any possibility of a further diplomatic, or even political, career, let alone influence at any local or national level, was over. Though he was never charged as a result of the multiple investigations into his time as prosecutor and mayor, he also was never able to dispel the miasma of doubt about his conduct until his death in 1964.

City Hall reporters recalled that, only a generation before, a prior New York Democrat, the dapper “Beau James” Walker, had also departed Gracie Mansion in haste as a corruption scandal erupted. More than seven decades would pass before another mayor would see his time in office end prematurely.

The rise and fall of Eric Adams eerily echoed O’Dwyer’s. As ex-cops from Brooklyn, they ascended the political ladder largely based on their crime-fighting reputations. The Irish emigrant and African-American tapped into the fierce pride of marginalized groups that, by the time the politicians reached middle age, had become crucial cogs of the city’s Democratic coalition.

In the end, they could not maintain their political base. Party leaders prevailed upon Truman to appoint O’Dwyer as ambassador. Adams, despite the Trump Administration’s decision to drop federal charges of bribery, fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations, was forced to withdraw his independent bid for reelection as mayor in the fall of 2025.

The Kefauver hearings demonstrated the power of televised congressional hearings to lift or lower individual politicians’ reputations. Ironically today, bipartisan investigations of important national issues—a hallmark of Congress at least since the Teapot Dome scandal— are in abeyance. They’ve all but disappeared from contemporary politics since the election of Donald Trump to a second term.

That is a striking if rarely commented-on development, especially considering that Capitol Hill panels have shed light on government waste and misconduct through the eras of Jim Crow, Joe McCarthy, the Vietnam war, Watergate, rampant FBI and CIA abuses, 9/11, and Wall Street recklessness. The nationally televised hearings focused on the January 6 US Capitol attack were the last of any magnitude.

New rounds of televised hearings are painfully overdue—inquiries unrelated to the dangers once posed by organized crime, but to organized money and its similarly pernicious effect on the functioning of democratic government.

As the line between private and public interests has gone from blurred to all-but erased, the survival of a balanced two-party system hinges, at least in part, on the willingness of Congress to examine enormous conflicts of interest and alleged corruption in Washington. 

Quote of the Day (Alexander Karn, on ‘Willingness to Confront Our History’)

“The road to a ‘more perfect Union,’ which is enshrined in the Constitution, runs through the past, and it depends on our willingness to confront our history in an honest and thoroughgoing way.”— Colgate University historian Alexander Karn quoted by Dan Friedman and Amanda Moore, “Trump’s War on History,” Mother Jones, March-April 2026

(The image accompanying this post shows a detail from an anti-slavery almanac of the 1840s.)

Quote of the Day (Erin Kendall Braun, on How Memory Operates)

“Most people think that their memory operates like a video recorder, replaying events as they originally happened. But memories aren’t static and objective like a recording. Instead, they’re associative: our brains link together the relevant details of experiences to store and later recall.”— American cognitive neuroscientist and memory expert Erin Kendall Braun, quoted by Julia Joy, “Ask an Alum: Why You Can’t Always Trust Your Memory,” Columbia, Winter 2025-26

Quote of the Day (Winston Churchill, on How Ireland Affected ‘The Vital Strings of British Life and Politics’)

“Great Empires have been overturned. The whole map of Europe has been changed. The position of countries has been violently altered. The modes of thought of men, the whole outlook on affairs, the grouping of parties, all have encountered violent and tremendous changes in the deluge of the world, but as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world. That says a lot for the persistency with which Irish men on the one side or the other are able to pursue their controversies. It says a great deal for the power which Ireland has, both Nationalist and Orange, to lay their hands upon the vital strings of British life and politics, and to hold, dominate, and convulse, year after year, generation after generation, the politics of this powerful country.” —Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965), then Britain’s Secretary of State for the Colonies, “House of Commons Speech on the Ireland Situation,” Feb. 16, 1922

For those of us of Irish descent, St. Patrick’s Day should be not only for celebration but for remembrance of trauma, struggle, and resilience.  

With all due respect to the poet W.H. Auden when writing his great tribute to William Butler Yeats, it wasn’t simply the case that “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” It was Great Britain that had made Ireland mad in the first place. Among others who forgot this was Winston Churchill.

As long as freedom exists, he will be remembered for rallying Britain against the Nazi menace. His skill as a wordsmith is evident even in this short passage above.

But his not inconsiderable blind spot was arch-imperialism, and it shows here by what he doesn’t mention. British politics and government had been affected through much of his lifetime not so much by quarreling Nationalist and Orange factions in Ireland, as he suggests, but by that government’s fatal decision in the 16^th and 17^th centuries to sponsor plantations on the island, through land confiscated from Catholics and given to Protestant settlers from Scotland.

The most enduring of those plantations was in Ulster, the center of “Orange” opposition not just of independence but of home rule.

Moreover, for all the future Prime Minister’s worship of his father, it was Lord Randolph Churchill who had encouraged longstanding tensions between Protestant and Catholic in Ireland for blatantly political reasons.

When Prime Minister William Gladstone came out in the 1880s for Home Rule, Lord Churchill told a friend that long before he had decided if that came to pass, “the Orange card would be the one to play.” The prospect of armed Orange agreement to any grant of self-determination bothered him little as well: “Ulster will fight, Ulster will be right.”

Arguing for the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, Churchill may have felt he was removing the Irish question from British politics once and for all.

It turned out to be anything but, because of issues related to gerrymandering and systematic discrimination of the Catholic minority in Ulster that neither the Liberal nor Conservative governments in which Churchill served as minister moved to alleviate them. 

Those issues lay at the heart of the civil-rights movement launched by Catholics in the late 1960s, sparking a predictable reaction from the descendants of Orange opponents of the prior centuries—and now (with the toxic presence of British troops added to the mix) the nearly three-decades “Troubles” were launched.

Photo of the Day: Horace Greeley Monument, City Hall Park, NYC

I’m not sure what I expected as I walked briskly through City Hall Park one afternoon last week, but it wasn’t this monument to an influential businessman and media magnate who never served in the Big Apple’s government.

With that said, though not be as well remembered today as he might have wished, Horace Greeley was a person of consequence in 19^th century America, and it wouldn’t hurt anyone passing through this area of Lower Manhattan to learn at least a bit more about him. This outdoor sculpture is as good a place as any to start.

In the New York area, the only press lords besides Greeley with designs on the Presidency were William Randolph Hearst (who never made it higher than Congress) and Michael Bloomberg (whose 2020 Democratic primary campaign failed dismally, despite $60 million of his own fortune).

Greeley, at least, filled an expiring Congressional term before being nominated in 1872 by both the Democratic and Liberal Republican parties. He lost that fall to Ulysses Grant—then, only a few weeks later, died, worn out in body and mind by the race, the recent death of his wife, and a bruising, losing struggle to keep his paper, the New York Tribune, out of the hands of a business rival.

Well before that, Greeley had made his mark as a tireless editorial voice for westward expansionism, free homesteading, the rights of labor, agricultural improvement, high tariffs, the beneficial impact of immigration, and most important, abolitionism.

His influence was so considerable that in 1862, after his open public letter to Abraham Lincoln advocating the confiscation of slaves held by Confederates, the President felt compelled to make one of his most famous explanations about the connection between freeing the slaves and preserving the Union.

For all his high-mindedness, Greeley earned a parallel reputation as an eccentric. His public advocacy for causes such as vegetarianism, spiritualism, and utopian socialism were considered especially fringe for his time.

Moreover, what people encountered when meeting him in person—his oversized, floppy hat covering unkempt white hair, a threadbare white coat, and a high-pitched voice that could erupt irritably—led cartoonist Thomas Nast to caricature him, repeatedly and unforgettably. (See this May 2008 blog post from the National Portrait Gallery on how Greeley was depicted.)

You’ll see little of that in the far more respectful monument in City Hall Park, created by John Quincy Adams Ward, one of the foremost sculptors of the day. The artist, Greeley’s daughter Gabrielle recalled, “spent hours studying my father as he worked in his office [and] after his death took a mask of his face." 

The statue shows Greeley sitting in a Victorian easy chair, with a copy of the Tribune spread out loosely over his knee—not just scrutinizing it for appearance or content, but perhaps contemplating how he could keep it from descending into the sensationalist abyss occupied by competitor James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald.

When the monument was unveiled in 1890, it stood in front of The Tribune’s building. By 1915, with the paper leasing corner, ground floor space in its building to a drugstore, the monument was moved to where it was originally intended: across the street, in City Hall Park.