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.

Quote of the Day (Ogden Nash, on the Echoing ‘Footsteps’ of Fiorello La Guardia)

“When the valid votes are counted,
Will his future be feast or faminy?
Will he eat his lunch in a one-arm joint,
Or in a swell estaminet?
For Fiorello’s footsteps
Still echo in the corridor;
Reform is a horrid word enough,
But Fusion is even horrider.” —American light-verse poet Ogden Nash (1902-1971), “Don’t Bite the Hand That Puts the Foot in Your Mouth” in Everyone But Thee And Me (1962)

Seventy-five years ago today, Fiorello La Guardia—the “Little Flower” of New York City—died of pancreatic cancer. Having guided New York through the Great Depression and World War II, he had stepped down as mayor after three terms less than two years before, utterly exhausted—and, after so much time in the public eye and more than a little irascibility, the city had grown tired of him, too, according to public opinion polls.

By the time Ogden Nash recalled his legacy 15 years after his death, La Guardia had recovered his popularity. The musical Fiorello! won the Tony and Pulitzer Prizes in 1959, and the mayor was posthumously hailed for his attempts to root out corruption. And in 1961, Mayor Robert Wagner Jr. had turned decisively against the Tammany Hall political machine that had sustained his own rise—and that had been the object of La Guardia’s tireless (and noisy) anti-corruption efforts.

La Guardia had won his first campaign for mayor by campaigning on the “Fusion” ticket (primarily GOP-backed, with additional support by breakaway Democrats and independents). By the time Wagner ran for a third term, the “Reform” movement, which had sprung up among Manhattan insurgents three years before, was now spelling a threat to the power that Tammany Hall had enjoyed again after La Guardia’s departure.

Wagner’s defeat—and the fall from power of Tammany boss Carmine deSapio—proved in the end that Reform was, Nash’s contention to the contrary, “horrider” than Fusion to the old political machine.

This Day in Baseball History (Cobb Attacks Disabled Heckler)

May 15, 1912—Baseball’s first players’ strike was spurred not by desire to enhance earnings or protect privileges but on behalf of an outfielder admired for his skills on the diamond but despised for his temperament: the Detroit Tigers’ Ty Cobb.

The “Georgia Peach” possessed a quick bat, quick feet—and even quicker temper, demonstrated in an away game at the home of the New York Highlanders  (the future New York Yankees), when he left the field, jumped over the left-field fence, and pummeled a disabled fan who had heckled him.

Thirty years ago, when the Yankees slipped into divisional irrelevance midday through the George Steinbrenner era, a relative and I were watching at Yankee Stadium one of the principal owner’s recent brainstorms, John Mayberry, stride to the plate. The first baseman might have been a threat to the Bronx Bombers when he was with the Kansas City Royals a half-dozen years before, but by now he was on an irreversible downward slide—a situation fully recognized at year-end, when he completed his final season with a .209 batting average, derived in no small part to lack of conditioning.

“Hey Mayberry!” the relative and I heard a voice cry out near us in the stands. “You suck!”

We continued to watch the game. Similar insults, by virtue of repetition, were unexceptional.

“Hey, Mayberry!” the voice cried out again. “You couldn’t hit the side of a barn!”

It was getting a bit harder to concentrate on the at-bat, such was the heckler’s sense of aggrievement.

“Hey, Mayberry!” came the voice yet again, this time loud enough to be heard in every corner of the cathedral of sports. “If your average was as high as your weight, you’d be the biggest thing since Ty Cobb!”

My relative and I laughed, stunned at the audacity and acumen of this last insult. “I’ve got to find out who this guy is,” my relative said, and turned around to notice,  several rows up, the onetime sports editor of our high-school newspaper. We couldn’t believe that we had met again under these circumstances.

Cobb, had he been still alive, would have been pleased to know that his batting average (.367) was still instantly recognizable to the average stat-obsessed fan such as the guy we knew. On the other hand, if he had been razzed as Mayberry was, there’s no doubt that our friend would have been lucky to make it out of Yankee Stadium alive. Cobb's own experience proved it.

The headline in this post, as is common in such things, loses in nuance what it gains in concision. How would you have reacted if I had written instead, “Cobb Attacks Disabled Racist Fan”? Or, better yet: “Cobb Attacks Disabled, Racist Tammany Hack”?

Heckler Claude Lucker (also spelled Lueker or Leuker, depending on the paper) worked as a page in the office of “Big Tom” Foley, the saloon keeper and Tammany Hall boss for whom New York courthouse Foley Square is named. From the start of the game at Hilltop Park, home of the Highlanders, he had been taunting Cobb something royal. The Tigers star had repeatedly warned Lucker (with whom he had exchanged insults at prior games) to stop, to no avail.

In the fourth inning, Cobb struck back with an insult of his own. At this point, Lucker came up with what the outfielder must have felt to be a verbal spitball: the epithet “half-nigger.”

Cobb’s subsequent over-the-top reaction derived from the equivalent of a perfect storm: frustration over the 10-13 record his team brought to the stadium; his previous run-ins with Lucker; distaste for any association whatsoever with African-Americans, and even assaults on three different ones; an unstable temperament to begin with (no doubt worsened by shame over his father’s shooting by his wife’s lover); and, to top it all, teammate Sam Crawford’s question about what he would do about Lucker’s latest remark.

Cobb’s response was to scale the left-field fence, kick his tormenter till he fell down, then punch him mercilessly. None of the accounts I have read are clear about whether the star knew beforehand about Lucker’s significant handicaps (loss of one hand through a printing-press accident, as well as a couple of fingers on the other), but he certainly was aware by the time he was done flailing at him. An additional cry from a shocked onlooker (“that man has no hands!”) only seemed to heighten Cobb’s anger: “I don’t care if he has no feet!” he shot back.

While Cobb’s teammates allowed him to continue, a few nearby spectators tried to protect Lucker. It took a cop and an umpire to pull away Cobb, who was immediately ejected from the game.

American League President Ban Johnson, who happened to be observing the game, wasted no time in suspending the outfielder. Amazingly, Cobb’s teammates announced that they would support him by not playing until his ban was lifted immediately. “If the players cannot have protection, we must protect ourselves,” they wrote him.

From the perspective of a century, this support, from a group that generally loathed the talented but perpetually angry player, makes little sense, unless these factors are kept in mind:

*Cobb might have been an SOB, but at least he was their SOB. At 24 years of age, he had already developed into a world-class player. Their hopes for future success depended on him.

*Other players exhibited similar racist tendencies. Cobb’s extreme reaction, they felt—and a significant portion of the public and media, unfortunately, agreed with them—was fully justified by what was perceived as an insult.

*Johnson’s move struck many—especially Cobb, of course—as high-handed and dictatorial. The AL President, Cobb protested, had suspended him without even getting his side of the story first. That last charge might have resonated with players who could easily see themselves, for one reason or another, running afoul of league management in the future.

Rather than forfeit any games and have the team incur a $5,000 fine, the Tigers owner insisted that manager Hughie Jennings field. The result was, in the words of Cobb biographer Al Stump, “the most farcical lineup the majors ever had known,” including:

·          

*    * A 20-year-old Jesuit seminarian who, after recruiting the other eight, decided to pitch when he had he would earn more money;

·         * A 48-year-old Tigers coach, Deacon McGuire, catching;

·        * A 41-year-old first baseman; 

\

·         * Assorted semipro players;

·         * A boxer later implicated as a bagman in the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal.

This motley crew’s opponent was Connie Mack’s Philadelphia A’s, winners of the previous two World Series. Jennings took a look at its lineup—which included future Hall of Famers Eddie Collins, Frank Baker and Herb Pennock—and warned his young pitcher not to throw any fastballs because the resulting hit balls might get somebody killed. 

As it was, the A’s dumped the soft curves on every corner of the field. The final score was more like a football than a baseball game: 24-2.

Still, the Tigers refused to yield. By this time, they were asking members of other teams to join them in the protest by enlisting in a barnstorming tour. 

Johnson, angered as much by this attempt at baseball’s first labor agitation as by games that were making the national pastime a laughingstock, told the Tigers that they, too, would be banned and fined $50 for each game they missed.

Eventually, at Cobb’s urging, the Tigers took the field again, and their star re-joined them after serving out his suspension on May 26. He went 1-for-4 and the Tigers won. They finished the season, however, 69-84-1 (a September game against the Chicago White Sox was ruled a tie).

Lucker last appeared in print in accounts of Foley’s 1926 requiem mass. As for Cobb, only three old players, a representative from the Baseball Hall of Fame, and some family members showed up at his funeral. He had gained all the fame and money (an estimated $11 million in his will) he could want, but little in the way of human warmth to show for it in the end. It was just what you would expect from a player who once noted: "I had to fight all my life to survive. They were all against me... but I beat them and left them in the ditch."

This Day in Film History (NYC Mayor McClellan Revokes Theater Licenses)

December 24, 1908—Following a tempestuous public hearing, New York Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. revoked the license of all 550 movie theaters in the city—taking Progressivism in an unlikely new direction and prompting the motion-picture industry to make one of its early efforts to censor itself.

That name, McClellan—why does it sound so familiar? Yes, you’ve got it—he was the son of the “Young Napoleon” who was great at organizing but not so good at taking the measure of Robert E. Lee. McClellan Sr. ran against the President who had named him, then relieved him as commander of the Army of the Potomac, Abraham Lincoln. More than a decade after the Civil War, the former general found politics curiously congenial, serving as the governor of New Jersey.

McClellan Jr. inherited his father’s Democratic Party leanings—and, much, much more unfortunately, his high opinion of himself. What he really should have been all along was an academic, which would have allowed him to pontificate to his heart’s content while satisfying his vast interest in art and history. But he didn’t come to that until far later in his career, after he had found law a bore and politics not quite enough for someone of his talents. (But it seems as if no McClellan ever found a spot in life suitable for his estimation of his worth.)

After 14 years with Tammany Hall, young McClellan was tapped by the organization’s boss, Charlie Murphy, to run for mayor against Seth Low, the Republican incumbent, in 1903. (Low would be followed as Columbia University President by Nicholas Murray Butler, who would run for Vice-President, unsuccessfully, under William Howard Taft in the 1912 election. Hard as it might be to believe now, the GOP was not an endangered species on Morningside Heights in those years.)

After the 1905 election (when he campaigned against William Randolph Hearst, running as an independent), McClellan broke with Murphy—not unlike what a future governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, would do in a few years. McClellan’s luck was not as good as Wilson’s, however. By 1909, his break with Murphy had left him a spent force with no future in politics. He now fancied himself a reformer, and to that end he paid heed to something that he shouldn’t have even bothered with.

From high school, most of us remember some of the fruits of the Progressive movement—including conservation (under Theodore Roosevelt) and electoral measures such as direct election of senators, recall, referendums, and the like.

But, as Richard Hofstadter noted in his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Reform, it was also dominated in the cities by a native-born middle class that was revolted by the waves of immigrants coming to the U.S. and quickly becoming part of political machines such as Tammany. They saw Prohibition, for instance, as a means of restraining Catholic immigrants, who, they claimed, in an outrageous application of eugenics, had smaller brains because of drinking from an early age.

The ostensible cause for Progressive wrath about theaters, as film historian and cultural commentator Neal Gabler has noted, was public health—i.e., these dirty, cramped movie spaces could spread disease and fires. But more lay beneath the surface.

Among the most devoted habitués of theaters were the city’s Jews. On Christmas, to alleviate some of the profound alienation they felt in an overwhelmingly predominant Protestant society that allowed them into the nation under sufferance, they thronged the more than 40 nicklelodeons then extant in the city.

Christian ministers were none too pleased about this, and lobbied hard against it. “These men who run these shows have no moral scruples whatever," argued Canon William Chase, a New York Episcopalian clergyman. "They are simply in the business for the money there is in it."

McClellan went along with these ministers as he issued this revocation order to the police. Not that it mattered, for the move would be rescinded before long. But it sure scared the Motion Picture Patents Co. enough to ally with the People’s Institute, a New York-based Progressive group, to form the National Board of Censorship (which later ditched that name for the much more user-friendly name of the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures).

The National Board of Review in effect put the “good housekeeping” seal of approval on new films. If you watched movies from 1916 until the 1950s, you were likely to see “Passed by the National Board of Review” in a main title. It was an early industry effort to police itself—an effort that, in our time, has resulted in the much-disputed movie ratings system

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.