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 (Red Smith, on Entertainer-Mayor Jimmy Walker)

“The crowd was in the Long Island Bowl for the second Sharkey-Stribling fight and the preliminaries were stumbling to a close and there came the rising whine of sirens from outside. A stir and a babble ran through the crowd and heads turned away from the ring and it seemed everyone was standing and craning. Down an aisle swept Jimmy (Walker) with his retinue, with a hand uplifted in jaunty response to the shouts that greeted him. And that entrance was more exciting than any of the fifteen rounds of brawling that followed.”—Red Smith, “As He Seemed to a Hick,” in The New York Herald Tribune, 1946, reprinted in To Absent Friends From Red Smith (1982)

This quote shows, as if you needed a reason, why Red Smith was more than just a great sportswriter, but also a Pulitzer Prize-winning one, with prose as elegant as his subject here, James J. Walker. The magical qualities it ascribes to New York’s mayor in the Roaring Twenties struck me full force as I wrote my prior post on the present occupant of Gracie Mansion, Mike Bloomberg.

Over the last couple of generations, a vogue has emerged for running government as a business. So many people have subscribed to this notion that it has helped elect charm-challenged functionaries like Bloomberg, Jon Corzine and Mitt Romney.

But when you’re talking about business in this context, which company head do you have in mind, a builder or a destroyer—Steve Jobs or “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap? It’s an important question, because the businessman-politician depends crucially for his authority on prosperity, and once that’s gone, so is nearly every shred of the electorate’s interest in his well-being.

But people make an awful lot of allowances for charm, don’t they? You can hardly find a more classic example than Walker, described flatly by Smith as “the most charming man you ever met.”

You can understand what Smith was talking about by checking out the accompanying photo. It’s easy to imagine Walker being born fully formed, with a boutonniere in his lapel, a melody in his heart and a quip on his lips.

The 20th century provided unparalleled opportunities for entertainers to enter politics: Texas radio entertainer-entrepreneur Pappy O’Daniel, Sonny Bono, “The Love Boat’s” Fred Grandy, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and, also in California, George Murphy (as Senator) and Ronald Reagan (as governor). (After the latter’s midnight swearing-in, he turned to Murphy, an old film song-and-dance-man, and cracked: “Well, George, here we are on the late show again!”)

If “Gentleman Jimmy” Walker wasn’t the first of the entertainer-turned-politicians, he was awfully close. The son of an Irish-born alderman, he made his living for a while as a young man on Tin Pan Alley, cranking out such tunes as this one, with a title he would certainly take to heart in years to come: “There’s Beauty in the Rustle of a Skirt.”

To be sure, President Kennedy’s grandfather, John “Honey Fitzgerald” Fitzgerald, didn’t require much coaxing to break into “Sweet Adeline,” and if you want to understand how Alfred E. Smith bonded with voters, then look for the short clip of him belting out his campaign theme song, “The Sidewalks of New York,” that was included several years ago in the TV documentary series The Irish in America: The Long Journey Home.

Maybe it was that shared love of song that led Smith to notice the young Walker and help propel him up the ranks of Tammany Hall, where he would eventually successfully challenge John Hylan for Mayor.

It was Walker’s great good fortune to become Hizzoner when Gotham assumed its status as the leading financial, media, and industrial city of the world. It was his misfortune still to be around when the music ceased after Black Tuesday in 1929.

It’s somehow appropriate that “Beau James,” as he came to be called, was mayor during the Jazz Age. In fact, if you could have equipped him with a Southern accent, he could just as easily have fit in down in jazz capital New Orleans, where “Let the Good Times Roll” could have served as a campaign slogan.

It was under Walker that New York staked its claim as the nerve center of what might later be viewed as the blue state sensibility. At the height of a censorship debate in Albany he cracked, “I have never yet heard of a girl being ruined by a book” (shortened, not long thereafter, to “No girl was ever ruined by a book”).

If anyone knew anything about girls, it was he. Cocktail waitresses added spice to the illegal speakeasies he frequented, and seven decades before Donna Hanover Giuliani announced on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral that “America’s Mayor” had broken their marriage irretrievably, New Yorkers reacted with much greater equanimity when the Catholic Walker left his wife for showgirl Betty Compton.

Residents didn’t seem to mind that, nor a penchant for traveling outside the continental U.S. that exceeded Mayor Bloomberg’s. But after the stock market crashed, Tammany corruption became harder to ignore and Walker was enmeshed in a corruption probe.

Still, it was risky for Franklin Roosevelt to involve himself in the Seabury investigation into these matters, not least of all with the Irish-Americans who were part of Walker’s (and his own) base. Years ago, my godfather, my Uncle Johnny, could still flash with anger in asking how FDR could destroy a mayor who made sure that my uncle’s down-on-their-luck family had a turkey delivered to their apartment on Thanksgiving.

In September 1932, Walker abruptly resigned, then sailed off to Europe soon thereafter. He endured several years of lonely exile (Smith indelibly describes the former mayor calling up reporters while abroad just to shoot the breeze) before returning home. For awhile, it seemed that the answer to a tune he penned in his younger days--"Will You Love Me in December As You Do in May?"--was going to be a firm "no."

Whatever his faults—and they were many—Walker at least did not spend his time out of power in endless bitterness, and perhaps for that reason even a number of his former opponents found it difficult to carry a grudge against him. 

In fact, Fiorello LaGuardia—the anti-corruption candidate who Walker beat for reelection in 1929—even appointed his old rival to be municipal arbiter to the garment industry, eight years after Walker’s fall from power.

Walker’s last years were spent doing what his background eminently fitted him for: head of a record label. He died in 1946 and was buried in Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Westchester County. (My uncle would, I strongly suspect, be tickled pink at the prospect that the mayor he loved is buried on the same grounds that he is.)

The entertainment world was not through with New York’s “Night Mayor.” In 1957, Bob Hope starred, uncharacteristically, in a film based on Gene Fowler’s affectionate biography, Beau James.

Over a decade later, Frank Gorshin—just a couple of years removed from his turn as The Riddler on TV’s Batman—headlined a Broadway musical about Hizzoner, Jimmy, with Anita Gillette as Betty Compton. 

Unlike another musical about a New York mayor, Fiorello, this musical lasted only 84 performances. Undoubtedly, “Beau James” would have shrugged the whole thing off with a wisecrack, then have a few laughs at the nearest bar when it was all over.