Once Upon a Time in New York

by Herbert Mitgang

  Gleefully, the anti-Tammany reformers summed up the situation in a ditty:

  Tammany Hall’s a patriotic outfit,

  Tammany Hall’s a great society,

  Fourth of July they always wave the flag, boys,

  But they never, never waive immunity!

  More tin boxes now came to light as Seabury’s lawyers and accountants reached beyond Manhattan to show how the boodle machine operated all over the city.

  The chief clerk of the Queens County Surrogate’s Court was John Theofel, the borough’s Democratic leader. During his six years in office, his net worth jumped from $28,650 to $201,300. Theofel couldn’t remember whether he kept his money in “a closet, in a shoe, in a sock or in a box.” Seabury enlightened him by producing bank slips showing deposits of large sums of cash.

  Seabury wondered what Theofel’s duties were as the court’s chief clerk. Scratching his head, the witness finally came up with an answer: “Walk through, keep around on the job.”

  By a strange coincidence, all the official cars purchased in Queens were Pierce-Arrows. When an assistant D.A. tried to buy a less expensive Packard for himself, Theofel told him that he had better buy a Pierce-Arrow from Wilson Bros., Inc., where all the other official cars came from. Dudley Wilson, it so happened, was Theofel’s son-in-law, and Theofel owned most of the stock in the auto dealership. With a straight face, the Tammany leader testified that the reason Queens officials were only allowed to own and drive Pierce-Arrows was to uphold the dignity of the borough.

  Not to be outshone, Brooklyn graft was demonstrated by three Tammany stalwarts: McCooey, McQuade, and McGuinness. “Uncle John” H. McCooey, the borough’s Democratic leader, held an official job as clerk of the Surrogate’s Court. From this sinecure, he was able to handpick judges for the state Supreme Court and approve dozens of courthouse jobs—with the usual kickback to the clubhouse.

  One of the new judges had a name that sounded familiar: John H. McCooey, Jr. Seabury asked McCooey how his inexperienced thirty-year-old son had received a $25,000-a-year Supreme Court job. “Oh,” said the elder McCooey, “nearly every leader in the party urged me very strongly to nominate Jack. I had no idea there was such a unanimity of opinion.” The notoriously corrupt Brooklyn Bar Association endorsed Junior’s nomination to become a Supreme Court justice because he had “poise and character.”

  The Honorable James A. McQuade held down the no-show job of county register in Brooklyn. And how, Judge Seabury inquired, did he succeed in accumulating $510,000 in six years on a salary of $12,000 a year? McQuade’s dissembling response invoked traditional family values:

  “It’s money that I borrowed. If you want me to get to the start of it, I will have to take and go over the family in its entirety, without feeling that I am humiliated in the least or am not humiliating the other thirty-four McQuades. If this committee can take the time, I will go over it from the start. I, unfortunately, went into politics. I say that cautiously.”

  Addressing him as “Mr. Register,” Seabury asked McQuade if the $510,000 he had deposited came only from the mysteriously borrowed money.

  In a laughable explanation—the newspapers called it the story of “the thirty-four starving McQuades”—he testified that a family business had failed after an unnamed person had stolen money from his company, causing McQuade Brothers to be liquidated.

  MCQUADE: The thirty-four McQuades were placed on my back, I being the only breadwinner, and after that it was necessary to keep life in their body, sustenance, to go out and borrow money. I felt it my duty, being that they were my flesh and blood, part and parcel of me, to help them. I am getting along in fairly good shape when my mother, Lord have mercy on her, dropped dead. I am going along nicely when my brother, Lord have mercy on him, dropped dead. But doing nicely, when I have two other brothers, and when my brother died, he willed me his family, which I am still taking care of, thank God. The extra money that you see in this year or any year from that year on has been money that I borrowed, and not ashamed of it.

  SEABURY [politely]: Well, now, Mr. Register, will you be good enough to indicate from whom you borrowed the money?

  MCQUADE: Oh, Judge, offhand I could not.

  Judge Seabury continued to press McQuade, getting the figures from his various bank accounts into the committee’s record. The indomitable Brooklyn register finally attempted to sound penurious and wealthy simultaneously.

  MCQUADE: I would, for instance, borrow a thousand dollars off John Brown. In two weeks time John wanted that thousand dollars, and I would borrow a thousand dollars off John Jones. Another, maybe two weeks he would want that. I would get it off John Smith, where in reality there would be possibly ten thousand dollars deposited for the thousand dollars that was actually working.

  SEABURY: Mr. Register, do you have any records of the sums you borrowed or paid off?

  MCQUADE: As the money was paid, it was off my mind, and I thanked God for it and destroyed anything that I might have.

  McQuade grew indignant when Seabury told him not to cry because he was getting the hearing he wanted to clear his good name.

  MCQUADE: You never heard me cry. With all my trouble, and I had plenty of that, I never cried. My name was McQuade. There are very few McQuades that do any crying.

  When McQuade finally left the stand, none the poorer, he grinned and asked the reporters, “How did my story go over?”

  In the opinion of his Brooklyn political colleagues, obviously well. Uncle John McCooey rewarded McQuade by nominating him for a job with a higher salary to take care of all those McQuades. In the fall election of 1931, the Democratic Brooklynites dutifully voted Register McQuade into office as Sheriff McQuade of Kings County.

  The investigation of the Honorable Peter J. McGuinness, assistant commissioner of public works, showed Seabury capable of low theater.

  At one point, Seabury asked, “Who suggested you to become assistant commissioner of public works?”

  McGuinness replied, “Well, as leader of the Greenpernt [so he pronounced Greenpoint] People’s Regular Organization of the Fifteenth Assembly District, I couldn’t pick a more better person to suggest for this job than myself. I drove nine gypsy bands out of Greenpernt, as well as three hundred Chinese coolies, and all the cats and dogs that used to run down the streets. I got Greenpernt three playgrounds, the subway, the one-and-a-half-million bridge on Greenpernt Avenue, and two million dollars’ worth of paving I done good. I thank you.”

  Judge Seabury reminded Commissioner McGuinness that gambling and bookmaking—two sources of the money he kept in his office safe—went on in his Greenpoint clubhouse.

  McGuinness replied that he couldn’t be held responsible for everything that went on there. In fact, he said, he had once watched his own club members gambling and warned them about a police raid. Seabury expressed surprise that McGuiness would do so.

  MCGUINNESS: Yes, I will spy on them, too. They were doing things there they shouldn’t do.

  SEABURY: Did you have any agreement with the raiding police?

  MCGUINNESS: Judge, in my public life, me and the police never agreed.

  SEABURY: But you said, “Here comes the police” or “Cheese it, the police”?

  MCGUINNESS: No, “Cheese it, here comes the cops.”

  SEABURY [bowing]: I stand corrected.

  It was now April 1932, two months before the Democratic national convention in Chicago. Governor Roosevelt’s political operatives put his name forward as the presidential nominee in all forty-eight states. Among the heavy hitters on his team were Jim Farley, Basil O’Connor, Sam Rosenman, Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, and Louis Howe—a mixture of brainy advisers, canny idealists, seasoned politicians, and, above all, loyalists.

  Actually, the campaign for the nomination was already under way. It had officially started in January when F.D.R. entered his first primary in North Dakota. By March a majority of the delegates in other states had been corralled but, by an old rule, it would take two-thirds to nom
inate, a proportion not yet attainable.

  Governor Roosevelt’s early bid for the nomination did not sit well with Al Smith. Roosevelt had developed a sense of independence in Albany; a coolness had developed between them. As the 1928 candidate, Smith still considered himself the head of the Democratic party—and the deserving contender for the nomination. What’s more, he was much closer to the still-powerful Tammany machine than Roosevelt. Behind the scenes, the Happy Warrior expressed his unhappiness with Roosevelt’s ambition, especially because President Hoover now seemed vulnerable.

  In his annual message to the state legislature in 1932, Roosevelt seemed to be talking to a national audience: “We know now from bitter experience that the theory that the nation could lift itself by its own bootstraps was not sound,” he said. “The mistakes of the past among men and among nations call for leadership broad enough to understand the problems not only of our nation but of their relationship to other nations, the problems not of New York alone but of all the other forty-seven states.”

  During the spring of 1932, Roosevelt’s campaign for the presidency was widely reported in the national press. At the same time, the newspapers were paying greater attention to the most colorful mayor in the country. Jimmy Walker still walked and talked with confidence; he was not abandoning his Tammany friends and appointees in the municipal departments. The clownish behavior of the sheriffs and other city officials questioned about their mysterious riches kept the country entertained; yet people were beginning to wonder about the efficacy of Mayor Walker’s administration.

  In the upcoming presidential nomination and election, delegates and voters from New York City and New York State would be of crucial importance. A duel between Governor Roosevelt and Mayor Walker appeared inevitable.

  NINE

  Little Boy Blue Blows His Horn

  “Let them come,” said Jimmy Walker defiantly.

  He spoke to a claque of friendly reporters while vacationing at the estate of Samuel Untermyer in Palm Springs, California. “I shall answer them in good time when I get back home.”

  That was the mayor’s only reaction on learning that Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt had airmailed copies of charges against him to his temporary refuge in the far west. Editorial writers at the newspapers and constitutional scholars in the law schools reminded the public that under the state constitution, the governor of New York had the power to remove public officials—including mayors—for good cause. Tammany Hall quaked at the news that the investigation had finally reached City Hall itself.

  On that spring day in 1932, Mayor Walker arrived at the New York County Courthouse in Foley Square, immaculately dressed in a blue shirt, blue tie, blue pocket handkerchief, blue socks. His haberdashery was carefully (if a bit ostentatiously) coordinated with his blue one-button, double-breasted suit. A close observer could notice that the ring on his pinky finger had a blue stone.

  Walker turned to his valet and, half in jest, said, “Little Boy Blue is about to blow his horn—or his top.”

  He carried with him a subpoena duces tecum calling for the production of all the records of his personal financial transactions from January 1,1926, to May 25,1932. It was a staggeringly far-reaching request.

  Still none of his intimates thought the worst could happen, not to Jimmy Walker, not to their Jimsie.

  The most notorious scandal in Gotham’s history wasn’t supposed to soil the elegant and popular mayor himself. Aware of Walker’s quick wit, his admirers reassured each other: Wait’ll he gets on the witness stand, he’ll make mincemeat out of that starched Seabury character.

  After all—as Jimmy Walker often reminded his doubters and accusers—the people had voted overwhelmingly to make him their mayor two times running. He had even defeated Congressman Fiorello H. La Guardia, who was no slouch as a campaigner and could outtalk him in a half-dozen languages.

  “Seabury doesn’t dare call Mayor Walker, because he knows he has no case against the greatest city in the world.” So declared Brooklyn’s Irwin Steingut, a Tammany operative who was minority leader of the New York State Assembly and a member of Republican senator Samuel Hofstadter’s joint legislative committee.

  As a prelude to the interrogation, Red-baiting of Seabury and his staff began immediately. Steingut and the other Tammany wheel-horses said that the investigators and reformers were only “an annex of the Socialist party—a bunch of agitators and Soviet sympathizers.”

  Even before mounting the witness stand, Walker publicly denied any responsibility for the graft taken by Tammany’s exposed tin-boxers. Instead, the mayor used the old technique of blaming the messenger (s): certain journalists on the broadsheet newspapers who were not his favorite drinking buddies.

  One writer who surely couldn’t be counted among Walker’s admirers was Heywood Broun:

  “I seem to see a willingness on Mayor Walker’s part to shift responsibility. He expressed grave concern over the failure of civic organizations and great newspapers.” (In a speech, Walker had said that any corruption should have been disclosed long ago—if only the press had been alert!) “In other words, the press has held out on James Joseph Walker. Apparently no reporter took the trouble to tell the Mayor the facts of life in a great city. Somebody should blurt out to him that there is no Santa Claus within the ranks of Tammany. At least, only for a very restricted set of good little boys and girls.”

  Before Walker’s first appearance began that morning, readers in New York and Washington carefully studied the lead editorial in The New York Times. Suddenly, the trial of Jimmy Walker, taking place only weeks before the Democratic presidential convention, had attained national meaning. Mayor Walker was a symbol of big-city machine politics; if nominated, Governor Roosevelt needed the machines for success at the 1932 convention and in the election.

  The unsigned Times editorial, titled “Not Even Standing Room,” said in part:

  “Much more than local concern is involved. The whole nation is watching the inquiry. At stake is the fate of more than one personality—even when it is such a flashing and brilliant personality as that of the Mayor of New York. The affair now branches out into national politics.

  “Everybody is wondering what Governor Roosevelt will do when a transcript of the evidence is laid before him by Judge Seabury. Even college undergraduates are eagerly debating the question whether Governor Roosevelt as an educated man of a favored social class will rise to the great opportunity to strike a powerful blow for honest government.

  “Today, in what may prove to be an exciting and dramatic clash between two strong characters, the public should not forget what is really to be decided. It is not whether the Mayor, under great stress, is able to maintain his reputation for mental alertness, ready wit and sharp sayings. What the city wants to know is whether Mr. Walker is able to meet and dispel the grave charges with the gravity and force of evidence and weight of character which befit the Chief Executive of this metropolis.

  “Our whole citizenship will be breathless spectators of the duel between Judge Seabury and Mayor Walker.”

  Walker was directed to produce not only his personal papers but also whatever data he had regarding business transactions with seven businessmen interested in bus franchises and taxicab ownership in the city.

  All seven had links to Jimmy Walker.

  Among them was State Senator John A. Hastings of Brooklyn, who was a silent partner in the Equitable Coach Company, an employee of the Terminal Taxicab Company, and a stockholder in a company seeking to sell tiles to contractors building city subways. It was the senator who had arranged and paid for Mayor Walker’s trips around the United States.

  Another was Russell T. Sherwood, whose business affairs with the mayor were so entangled that it was hard to tell where the interests of one left off and those of the other began. Sherwood, who was the mayor’s financial agent, fled New York when he received a subpoena. In spite of a $50,000 fine imposed upon him for contempt, he defied a Supreme Court order to return.


  Three backers of the Equitable Coach Company, whose political contact man was Senator Hastings, were also named in the subpoena. They were Frank R. Fageol, president of the Twin Coach Company of Ohio; William O’Neil, head of the General Tire and Rubber Company, and J. Allen Smith, who was brought back from Europe under court order to explain why he’d bought Mayor Walker a $10,000 letter of credit for use on his European trip in the summer of 1927.

  The two others named were J. A. Sisto, a taxicab financier whose great admiration for Walker moved him to make the mayor a gift of $26,500 worth of bonds, and John J. McKeon, who delivered the securities to the mayor in a sealed envelope one day when he rode uptown with him.

  Of the businessmen linked to Mayor Walker, only one, J. Allen Smith, was not called to be an early witness. It was Smith, in reporting to his superiors on the progress of negotiations for a city franchise, who referred to Jimmy Walker—in a secret telegram that was unearthed and decoded by Seabury’s staff—as THE BOY FRIEND and to Tammany Hall as THE WAR BOARD.

  Five thousand spectators were outside the courthouse and another seven hundred inside when Judge Seabury and eight of his associate and assistant counsel arrived, laden with briefcases and exhibits. They were greeted by scattered applause and a sibilant undertone of hisses. In a courtly gesture, Judge Seabury responded by tipping his soft gray hat to the crowd.

  When Mayor Walker arrived and slowly ascended the courthouse steps, the same crowd cheered and whistled. The man beneath the wide-brimmed fedora, rolled down on one side Broadway sharpie-style, was in no hurry to leave his admirers. He grinned and waved his arms overhead like a gladiator as they shouted, “Good luck, Jimmy!” “Atta boy, Jimmy!” “You tell ‘em, Jimmy!” As a reminder that Prohibition was still the law and should be repealed, several of his fans wore neckties that advocated “Beer for Prosperity.” Some had already imbibed that morning.