This Day in New York City History (‘Beau James’ Walker Inaugurated Mayor)

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.