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.

This Day in Football History (Death of Tim Mara, A Giant Among Owners)

Feb. 16, 1959—Tim Mara, a bookmaker who parlayed a $500 investment into multigenerational family ownership of the pro New York Giants football team, died in his native New York at age 71.

Himself a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame (posthumously elected in the Class of 1963), “Big Tim” (a reference to his 6-ft., solid 205-pound frame) was the father of another Canton inductee, son Wellington. He was a cornerstone of the National Football League, as his payment for the Giants franchise gave the fledgling league a showcase in the nation’s largest city.

Over the years, Mara and the league had to endure several stiff challenges, including bearing the brunt of the fight against rival AFL in 1926; helping to keep the team and league together at all during the Great Depression (when he transferred ownership to sons Jack, 22, and Wellington, 14) and WWII (when some teams, with players off fighting, could not continue in their current form); and enduring another upstart league, the AAFC, from 1946 to 1949.

But Mara built Giants into a perennial powerhouse with three NFL championships and eight divisional titles, And only a few months before his death, the NFL’s first “sudden death” playoff game—between the Giants and the Baltimore Colts—became known as “the greatest game ever played,” finally establishing the league’s popularity.

In a number of ways, Mara’s story resembles that of fellow NFL owner and good friend Art Rooney. Both were devout Irish-Catholics who earned the wherewithal to buy their teams through their bookmaking; both created great franchises (in Rooney’s case, the Pittsburgh Steelers) that have won multiple championships; and both passed on their stake in the teams to their descendants, now in the third generation of ownership.

 

For all the money that Mara amassed by the end of his life, his beginnings were distinctly humble. Growing up in Greenwich Village, he quit school when his policeman father died in order to help his mother and brother survive, according to his friend, Pulitzer Prize-winning sportswriter Arthur Daley.

Mara began running bets when he was a 12-year-old newsboy, since his route—along Broadway, from Wanamakers to Union Square—was filled with bookmaking joints. Fortunately for him, many customers were lower- and middle-echelon Tammany Hall figures who, as they rose, remembered him fondly, including Governor Alfred E. Smith (who incorrectly predicted that pro football would never compete with college football) and Jimmy Walker, the dapper “Night Mayor” in the Roaring Twenties.

Before long, Mara began booking bets himself, becoming a “wagering commissioner” when this was still legal, up to the ‘30s. Never gambling himself, he eventually branched out, with side ventures in bookbinding, coal, liquor, scotch, and boxing promotions.

Success with his NFL venture was hardly assured for a long time. Mara experienced stiff financial losses until Red Grange’s debut in the Polo Grounds for the Chicago Bears on Dec. 6,1925, turned the tide, converting a $40,000 deficit into an $18,000 gain.

By this time, Mara’s childhood associates had drawn him into Tammany Hall’s “Tiger Room” at 23rd Street and Fourth Avenue, where they could relax and help each other out. His loyalty (a trait that evidently still runs in the family) led him to help out these associates, even when it brought unwanted attention.

One was Walker, who in 1930, when the Great Depression was taking hold, got Mara to promote a game benefiting the city’s unemployed. The contest; against the Knute Rockne-led Notre Dame, ended up netting $116,000. (Mara was such a good friend of the mayor’s that, at the latter’s funeral in 1946, he led the entire Giant team en masse into St. Patrick’s Cathedral only moments before the service was to begin, according to Donald I. Miller’s Supreme City.)

While Mara remained friends with Walker to the end, he was not so lucky with Smith. Their falling out stemmed from the 1928 Presidential race. Late in the campaign, the governor’s campaign manager, John J. Raskob, sought to keep his Presidential campaign through loans meant to evade campaign-finance laws. Friends such as Mara were assured they would not be responsible for the loan, but after the election that proved not to be the case. In 1934, he and another member of the Tammany group, Patrick Kenny, became involved in litigation for recovery of the loan.

Overwhelmingly, however, in other areas of his life, Mara managed to avoid such difficulties, in part because of his winning personality. This excerpt from a 1937 profile of him in Turf and Sport Digest conveys quite well the impact of can-do optimism:

“Atop that high stool he is the very picture of beaming good humor. His big, rosy, happy face is topped by a crop of wavy reddish hair. Contrasting with the nervous secretive taciturnity of most of the clubhouse bookmakers Mara’s joyful mien and robust voice, calling out hearty greetings and poking weak fun at all comers, is refreshing. You like the fellow. He looks as though he’d give you a break.”

Quote of the Day (Alfred E. Smith, on Intolerance)

"The best way to kill anything un-American is to drag it out into the open, because anything un-American cannot live in the sunlight."—New York Gov. and Democratic Presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith, campaign address in Oklahoma City, OK, September 20, 1928

As I mentioned in my post last month on Smith's acceptance speech as Democratic candidate, the vituperation, exaggerations and just plain bigotry he was forced to endure in his campaign are not unlike—at least in degree—what Barack Obama is facing this year. How Smith responded said much about his strengths as a man. The same, hopefully, will turn out to be the case for Obama.

Smith's nomination brought anti-Catholic bigots out from everywhere, like ants running out from under a rock just turned over. Even Midwestern editor William Allen White, revered as a symbol of Progressivism, fell victim to this malady, claiming that "The whole Puritan civilization which has built a sturdy, orderly nation is threatened by Smith."

Hmm…I think that "sturdy, orderly nation" was about to be threatened more by the 1929 stock-market crash than by Smith's religion, his ethnicity, his "wet" (i.e., anti-Prohibition) views, or even by his connection to the Tammany Hall political machine.

Those who ascend what Winston Churchill called "the greasy pole" of politics have problematic or troubling elements in their background. This year, Obama --with his connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and to former Weatherman William Ayres, and the unusual real estate deal that allowed him to purchase his home—is no different in this respect from Smith. And, I might add, from Senators McCain and Biden and Governor Palin.

Preposterous rumors about Smith's drunkenness—most often revolving around two aides who had to, invariably, help him up—wildly exaggerated his drinking habits. Though people made more than they should have of his connection to Tammany Hall, they ignored his close and growing friendship with moneyman John J. Raskob, whom he had named head of the Democratic National Committee—and who, after the election, employed him to head up the building of the Empire State Building and steered his political views rightward.

But, as Smith noted in his 1929 autobiography, Up to Now, when he stepped off his campaign train in Oklahoma City, "it was quite apparent to me that the foremost issue so far as that part of the country was concerned was religion." And well he might think so: the infamous large burning cross of the Ku Klux Klan was there to greet him upon his arrival, and an urban legend created by the KKK had sprung up to the effect that the New York governor was building the Holland Tunnel all the way to the Vatican!

His campaign entourage realized they had a problem on their hands, but they split over how to confront it. Some were in favor of ignoring it, but Smith felt that the forces of hatred needed to be confronted. And so he did.

One of the best extemporaneous speakers, Smith left no definitive written record of one of his best addresses. All we have left are subsequent newspaper accounts. But it’s clear that he charged the Republicans with introducing religion as a factor into the race; castigated the Ku Klux Klan; and denounced voting for or against him solely on the basis of his religious beliefs rather than his qualifications for the job.

At one point, Smith poured scorn on the attempt to “ inject bigotry, hatred, intolerance and un-American sectarian division into a campaign.” “There is no greater mockery in the world today,” he continued, “than the burning of the Cross by these people who are spreading this propaganda . . . while the Christ that they are supposed to adore, love and venerate . . . taught the holy, sacred writ of brotherly love.”

Barack Obama’s record in public life and his ideology are fair game for discussion—as are John McCain’s. What is not are Internet-spread fictions about Obama being a crypto-Muslim; about moving back his birthdate to when Hawaii had become a state so he could qualify as a U.S. citizen; about actually being born in Kenya; and about not reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Al Smith’s point—made in the midst of a frustrating, losing election—bears repeating and elaboration: there must be no place for religious or racial intolerance in American elections. We’ve been through that. That way lies peril to our system. Let’s drag the perpetrators of the lies into the spotlight, Smith-style, and expose them for the un-American frauds they are.)

Quote of the Day (Alfred E. Smith)

“Upon the steps of this Capitol, where twenty-five years ago I first came into the service of the State, I receive my party's summons to lead it in the nation. Within this building, I learned the principles, the purposes and the functions of government and to know that the greatest privilege that can come to any man is to give himself to a nation which has reared him and raised him from obscurity to be a contender for the highest office in the gift of its people.”—New York Governor Alfred E. Smith, speech accepting the Democratic Party nomination for President, at the State Capitol, Albany, N.Y., August 22, 1928

(In popular memory, Al Smith is remembered nowadays as the first Catholic ever to win a major party nomination for President; as a failed candidate swamped by Herbert Hoover in an electoral landslide; and as the New York governor superseded by his friend-turned-rival, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Nothing sums that up better than a scene in the otherwise very fine cable TV biopic of FDR’s struggle with polio, Warm Springs, showing Smith—puffing away on a cigar, every inch a pol in a smoke-filled room—dismissing any future threat from FDR with the suggestion that by the next election, he’d probably be dead anyway.

But “The Happy Warrior” deserves far better, as one of the most innovative politicians in American history—indeed, as the one who pointed the way toward the New Deal, starting with his work in the New York State Assembly ensuring workplace safety following the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, then during his own terms as governor.

The best short account I know of Smith is contained in a long chapter in Robert A. Caro’s epic biography of Smith’s parks commissioner, Robert Moses, The Power Broker.

But if you’d like a visceral idea of his charm—of why people warmed to him—then I’d recommend that you watch the “Up From City Streets” episode in the TV documentary The Irish in America: The Long Journey Home. Though in certain ways that four-part series could only do the most superficial justice to a complex history, this episode concentrates in fascinating detail on Smith, recreating his career with the help of rarely seen newsreels—including one of the politician singing what became his 1928 campaign theme, “The Sidewalks of New York.”

Next month, I’ll have more to say—MUCH more—on one particular aspect of Smith’s failed campaign: his courageous confrontation in Oklahoma with the vitriolic anti-Catholic smears launched against him. Despite the differences between his time and ours, it parallels, in unmistakable ways, the current rancid Internet campaign against Barack Obama as a “Marxist Moslem.” Think about that last phrase for a half hour and, at that end of that time, please tell me if you’ve ever heard of another such person. I’ll bet you haven’t. That’s because it’s a contradiction in terms.

But for now, I’m going to confine myself to one particular aspect of Smith’s campaign: radio. Smith’s 1929 autobiography, Up to Now, takes note of the impact of radio on his Presidential campaign—and, indeed, this was the first convention acceptance speech ever broadcast in this still relatively new medium, as well as the first TV news event, though THAT technology was so new that the candidate probably didn’t even understand how to discuss it.

Let’s see how Smith viewed the wireless telegraph and its effect on politics: “Radio replaces the antiquated method of attempting to circularize the electorate by the mailing of speeches of acceptance and of debates. A large part of these documents was always wasted. Nothing makes such an impression on a person as the spoken word. Oratory and the power of speech will always be effective.”

Spoken like a Tammany Hall tactician. Certainly correct in its way, but still…Limiting.

For Smith and FDR, radio was like paint—but while the former viewed it in a utilitarian light, the latter used it like an artist. Smith knew the value of radio, but with traces of his Lower East Side background as proudly displayed as his brown derby, the candidate only knew what radio could do. Roosevelt understood how to use it. Smith was like a house painter who knew a nice color would make a building more attractive to buyers; Roosevelt was a Michelangelo who could inspire awe by dipping into the full spectrum of tone colors in his voice.

There were undoubtedly times in the 1930s when Smith deeply resented how this mastery enabled the man who nominated him for President in 1924 beat him to the Oval Office in 1932. But by the beginning of the 1940s, as Hitler mobilized Germany for war with mesmerizing radio oratory, the bitter former candidate might have understood that FDR’s mastery of the same medium enabled him to rally the free world against the Nazi terror. The two former New York governors had reconciled by the time of Smith’s death in 1944. Smith's 1928 convention speech not only pointed toward a new means of communication in politics, but a new understanding of the role of government--one that, after 20 years of experimentation with unregulated markets, we are learning all over again.)

This Day in Southern History (Congressman Shoots Black Man)

March 27, 1908—Confronted by a black man on a Washington, D.C., streetcar, swigging out of a bottle, Democratic Congressman and diehard Prohibitionist James Thomas Heflin of Alabama chose the calm, rational response: shooting the fellow. Amazingly, this politician would not only escape punishment, but continue in his old post and even win higher office, where he would become a historic embarrassment.

This year, as an African-American, for the first time in history, stands an excellent chance of winning a major-party nomination for President, it’s useful to look back a century to discover the state of race relations then. This relatively little-known episode is as good a place to start as any. The fact that it is almost forgotten says much about how casually racism of the most vicious kind was once woven into the fabric of political life.

I first came across this curious incident in, of all things, a baseball book: Cait Murphy’s Crazy ’08, or what she calls “The Greatest Year in Baseball History.” In addition to its account of that landmark year (for Cubs fans, who saw their team win its last World Series, it’s been only downhill since then), the book includes a number of interesting asides on the wider cultural climate in the country, including this one sentence that made me sit up and take notice: “In March, a congressman from Alabama, James Heflin, shoots a black passenger on a Washington streetcar for insulting him.”

What!!??? I asked myself upon reading this. I knew I had to write about this for the blog.

Nearly 75 years later, the name “Heflin” would have been immediately associated with Howell Heflin, a genial sort who, like his uncle, served as U.S. Senator from Alabama. Unlike his forebear, Howell quickly recognized which way the political wind was blowing and reaped much good will and many votes from blacks who exerted their right to vote in the wake of the civil rights movement.

If Howell Heflin was an example of the “New South,” then “Cotton Tom”—so nicknamed for his advocacy of the cause of farmers—was practically an archetype of the unregenerate bigot. Even George Wallace and Jesse Helms weren’t so nakedly anti-civil-rights or racist. No less an authority than Southern historian Diane McWhorter has labeled him—as you’ll see, not without justification—“the biggest boob in the history of Congress.”

Yet this exotic political creature existed in enough quantity on Capitol Hill at one time that, when the creators of the 1947 musical Finian’s Rainbow satirized a loudmouthed politico as “Senator Billboard Rawkins,” they knew that audiences would associate him with Senator Theodore Bilbo or, if their memories extended just a bit further, to “Cotton Tom” Heflin.

Before the shooting incident, Rep. Heflin made noise less with firearms than with his mouth. After President Theodore Roosevelt invited Tuskegee Institute President Booker T. Washington to the White House for dinner, the Alabama congressman announced that if an anarchist happened to explode a bomb under the table where the two men dined, then “no harm would have been done.” (Two years later, Heflin was shocked to enter a sleeping car only to find that he had to share it with Washington, who was occupying the lower berth.)

A mere month before the shooting, Heflin tried to insert a clause into a bill that would segregate D.C.’s streetcars. That ploy didn’t work, but it wasn’t the last time he’d provide what Daniel Patrick Moynihan later called, in a much different context, “boob bait for the bubbas.”

Shootings are not to be taken lightly, particularly when the assailant leaves someone seriously wounded, as in this case. But Heflin not only got the case dismissed, but began to proclaim it one of the high points of his career to date.

Most people would say that arrived six years later, when he successfully co-sponsored a bill creating Mother’s Day, but even that was not unmixed with calculation: Heflin believed—correctly, as it turned out—that the bill would take the edge off voters who loathed his opposition to women’s suffrage.

In 1920, Congressman Heflin moved up to the U.S. Senate, where he propounded more idiotic (oh, I’m sorry, we have to be objective here—controversial) positions against federal child-labor legislation and Roman Catholicism, and for Prohibition.

It was the latter two stances—not, unfortunately, his racism—that brought Heflin’s political career to an end. Al Smith’s Catholicism and opposition to Prohibition led Heflin to support Smith’s Republican opponent, Herbert Hoover, in the 1928 election.

Then as now, just as it’ll probably be 20 centuries from now, parties don’t like turncoats. Even though many Southern Democratic officeholders had their issues with Al Smith, few went to the point of endorsing his opponent or to calling their party’s nominee “the hireling of the Pope.” Alabama’s Democratic Party voters weren’t amused, and they responded by denying Heflin renomination in 1930.

Still, Helfin didn’t give up. By a one-vote majority, his former colleagues decided to let him speak about the $100,000 (this in the midst of the Depression), 15-month voter-fraud probe they had authorized the election won by his opponent, John Bankhead (yes, that’s the uncle of the salty actress Tallulah).

Given two hours, Heflin took five, replete with the African-American dialect and red-faced ranting that had fueled his career to date. But the clubby Senate doesn’t like anyone who makes it look like a laughingstock (even when it really is), as Joseph McCarthy would learn to his horror more than 20 years later in his censure vote. Two days after the kind of performance that led Time Magazine to label the senator “Tom-Tom” Heflin, his former colleagues tossed out his claim and with it, his last chance for a political resurrection.

In Finian’s Rainbow, Senator Rawkins is magically transformed, by the wish of a leprechaun, into a black man, and suffers enough for his pains that he becomes a civil-rights advocate. Al Smith, had he been alive, might have chuckled at the transformation, as would “Cotton Tom’s” 1908 shooting victim.

This Day in Labor History (Triangle Factory Fire)

March 25, 1911—In the worst workplace disaster in New York City history before 9/11, a half-hour-long fire broke out near closing time at the Triangle Waist Company in Greenwich Village, leaving 146 dead. The outrage provoked by the incident led to action on long-unheeded calls for better fire-protection measures while launching a wave of social-welfare legislation and leaders who paved the way for the New Deal.

One of my memories of 9/11 is the photograph of the “Falling Man” hurtling toward death below to avoid being consumed by the fire raging inside the Twin Towers. Just such a sight—much less novel then—greeted many New Yorkers 97 years ago as they beheld one young woman after another jumping to her death out of the Asch Building near Washington Square.

All through elementary and secondary school, I heard nothing about this crucial event in American history. In fact, the first time I came across it was in the superlative chapter on Alfred E. Smith in Robert A. Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker.

I would hope that modern texts remedy this problem, but I doubt it—kids nowadays are lucky they can figure out in which century the Civil War occurred. In certain ways, however, I believe that March 25, 1911 should be committed to memory as surely as July 4, 1776.

Both dates, in their ways, marked a movement away from heavy-handed control by an elite and toward greater freedom—in one case, for white American males of property; in the later one, for the economically oppressed laborer, frequently female and foreign-born.

So, if I were to design a syllabus to teach this event, what would I choose?

Well, I’d start with So Others Might Live, a fine account of New York’s Bravest by journalist-historian Terry Golway. The section on the Triangle fire is short—only a half-dozen pages—but they give an excellent précis for the conditions that led to the blaze and the Fire Department’s helpless anger in combating it.

It also discusses an Irish-American Cassandra, department head Edward Croker, a chief as blunt as he was fearless, who, for his repeated warnings about high-rise office and factory buildings, had to endure constant smearing by business interests for being the nephew of past Tammany Hall boss Richard Croker—until events proved him right.

After Golway’s history, I’d assign David Von Drehle’s Triangle: The Fire That Changed America, for a deeper understanding of the background, events and people involved in that day. Though the extent of the tragedy was unusual, the labor conditions that made it inevitable were anything but. Harassment for petty rule violations had sparked a massive waist-union strike only the year before, and at the time of the fire, a hundred accidents occurred in American workplaces every day.

But the Triangle sweatshop, Gotham’s largest blouse-making operation, requires a Dickens to evoke. Its 500 or more workers, mostly young Jewish and Italian women, crouched over their machines. Only the walls and floors met the owners’ claim that the building was fireproof; the fabric and other materials on the factory floor represented potential kindling.

Worse, the operations on the upper floors lay just beyond the reach of fire department ladders and doors were locked because of fears of employee theft. When the rickety fire escape collapsed, then, it meant certain death for the fire’s victims, 123 of whom were women.

The New York Times won the Pulitzer Prize for its “Portraits in Grief” after 9/11. On a somewhat smaller scale, facing heavier odds because of the distance of the years, Von Drehle was about to compile his own version of this for the Triangle victims, by combing through countless news articles and a long-lost transcript of the trial involving the factory owners (whose acquittal on manslaughter charges brought howls of execration on their heads).

Von Drehle’s account makes clear why the disaster was a landmark event in American immigrant and labor history, but it was also a watershed in American political and urban history. In particular, in the fallout from the tragedy, Tammany Hall—the same political machine that, only a decade before, successfully ran a mayoral candidate with the proud slogan, “To Hell With Reform”—at least partly redeemed its corrupt, largely inglorious history.

For this third phase of the event, Von Drehle should be read in combination with Caro. The indispensable man at the center of this phase was one of the great sphinxes of New York history, Tammany’s chieftain, Charles Murphy. Film buffs know Murphy in fictionalized form, as “Jim Gettys” in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, but in real life Murphy kept his own counsel as he shrewdly navigated the political shoals.

Now Murphy acted, giving the go-ahead to his Tammany lieutenants in the Albany state legislature, Al Smith and Robert F. Wagner, to investigate the blaze and what led up to it. Their work led to 25 workplace safety bills in 1912.

More important, that work helped stave off a socialist insurgency in the city (perhaps partly answering Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous question about why there was no socialism in the United States) and launched the careers of several illustrious figures: Smith, the governor whose tenure became a kind of laboratory for later New Deal legislation; Wagner, later a U.S. senator and proud patriarch of a line of politicians who figured in city history for nearly three-quarters of a century; and Frances Perkins, who later, as FDR’s Secretary of Labor, became the first female to serve in the Cabinet.