Once Upon a Time in New York

by Herbert Mitgang

  (Laughter—Gavel)

  Judge Seabury produced an accountant’s statistical analysis of the bank and brokerage accounts of Walker and his fugitive agent, Russell T. Sherwood. Sherwood, a $10,000-a-year accountant, had drawn $263,838.36 from a secret safe-deposit account in 1927, the day before Mayor Walker sailed for Europe. The application for the box had been cosigned by Walker.

  Seabury entered into evidence a detailed analysis of Sherwood’s deposits and withdrawals. Tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of checks were made out either to Mrs. Walker or to “Cash” or “Bearer.” One check read: “For expenses of yacht ‘Mary W’ in service of Mrs. James J. Walker—$6,034.”

  As Seabury unfolded the facts about the Sherwood-Walker secret account, the mayor retorted: “I hope he proves it is mine. I will try to collect it.” Walker kept insisting that Sherwood was not his “agent,” while the hard evidence of the checks bearing his or his wife’s name proved otherwise.

  “I want the privilege of adding one word,” Walker said, after a long wrangle. “I showed that I was willing to cooperate, but there is no doubt in my mind but this is nothing but an examination before trial, else the papers are further from the truth than they ever were. This is preliminary to preferring charges to the Governor, and no one is fooled by this fact”

  After his second and final day before the joint legislative committee, Jimmy Walker had his say for the benefit of the press—and of the politicos in New York City and Albany who, his instincts correctly told him, would eventually determine his fate:

  “I hope with the close of the two national conventions in Chicago, we will be through with some of the politics.”

  This was a reference not only to Governor Roosevelt’s expected nomination for president but also to the possibility that Judge Seabury would run for high office—perhaps for governor of New York.

  Then, with a crack against Seabury as someone “who didn’t know the difference between uptown and downtown,” Walker left the courthouse to more cheering crowds.

  He was greeted by a shower of roses. A dozen young women had stationed themselves on either side of the main doorway and threw flowers at him as he emerged. Before descending the steps, he greeted each woman. Jimmy Walker still had the people with him; their approval had always been his greatest tonic.

  No roses greeted Judge Seabury and his staff as they left the courthouse. One of his boys dryly noted, “Well, at least there are fewer boos and hisses now than on the first day.” They read the ten daily papers to see which way the public wind was blowing. The news was not encouraging; a headline in The New York Times read:

  MANY PLEASED BY WALKER SHOWING

  Friends Hold He Came Off Better

  Than Even Against Seabury in

  His Two Days on Stand

  A few days later, Walker lashed back before an audience of 18,000 men and women at Madison Square Garden. The Times’s headline read:

  OVATION FOR WALKER AT GARDEN

  Wave of Applause Rolls after

  Him as He Reviews Class–

  Called ‘Loved by All’

  The news article went on to say that while reviewing the graduation exercises of the Police College’s class of May 1932, Walker proudly maintained: “I am still Mayor of New York.” He said bitter things about “criticism predicated on individual ambition; criticism arising out of political jealousy; criticism sometimes emanating from vindictiveness.”

  He was introduced by Police Commissioner Mulrooney as “the man loved by all the people of the city, His Honor the Mayor of New York.” When he finished his inspiring talk to the new police officers, their families and foreign dignitaries, “[the] Garden shook with applause.”

  When he was told about the mayor’s tumultuous reception, Seabury wryly declared, “They gave one to Tweed, too.”

  Of all the press coverage, the most amusing portrait of Jimmy Walker turned up in The Nation, the venerable political weekly. It was written by none other than George S. Kaufman, former New York Times drama editor turned playwright of such satirical hits as Once in a Lifetime. A week after Walker’s testimony, he wrote Jimmy the Well-dressed Man, which he described as a “vaudeville act with music.” The two-character playlet featured Walker and Seabury; their loosely rhymed exchange differed from the official transcript, and lightened the town’s mood. It went:

  MR. SEABURY

  Your Honor, this committee

  Has some questions it would hand

  To the Mayor of New York City

  Who is sitting on the stand.

  MR. WALKER

  I promise not to halt or pause

  I’m famous for my wit

  I’m sitting on the stand because

  I can’t stand on the sit.

  [He dances]

  MR. SEABURY

  Now, to you it’s old and hoary

  But it’s very new to us

  So we’d like to hear the story

  Of the Equitable bus.

  MR. WALKER

  I remember! Why, the driver

  Sees a woman grab her knee

  And he says, “Not worth a fiver!

  Legs they ain’t no treat to me!”

  [He cuts a caper. He offers half of it to Mr. Seabury, who refuses because he has just had his lunch]

  MR. SEABURY

  Now, to open matters wider

  (I guess this is where we clash)

  Did Samuel Ungerleider

  Ever slip you any cash?

  MR. WALKER

  Say, here’s the greatest yarn on earth

  The one about the dame

  That got into the Pullman berth

  But I’ll never tell her name.

  [He throws his hat into the air. It comes down with $263,000 in it]

  After Mr. Seabury asks several more questions about the sources of Mr. Walker’s magical income, the mayor concludes:

  MR. WALKER

  Fee, fi, fo, fum!

  Whoops-a-daisy, and ho hum!

  The whole committee is on the bum—

  Where do you get your questions from?

  Hey, diddle, doodle!

  The cash and the boodle—

  It’s ten to one they’ll win again!

  So what do I care

  If you give me the air—

  They’ll only vote me in again!

  In again!

  In again!

  They’ll only vote me in—a-gain!

  [He dances. The rest of the committee comes down off

  the bench and joins in the dance. At this point the piper

  comes on the scene. The public pays him]

  CURTAIN

  A far more serious comment came from Arthur Krock, the most influential columnist in the nation. As the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, he was a confidant of presidents and aspiring presidents. Like Walter Lippmann of the New York Herald Tribume, he offered free advice to key officials in the power centers of the federal government; in return, he was given inside information. One of Krock’s sources was Joseph P. Kennedy, a businessman and strong financial backer of Governor Roosevelt and the Democratic party. (Roosevelt later named Kennedy head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, then made him ambassador to the Court of St. James. The latter was a disastrous appointment; the ambassador was removed because of his Anglophobia. Joe Kennedy would later use his influence and money to help elect his son John Fitzgerald Kennedy president of the United States.)

  In his turgid writing style, the estimable Krock made sure to underscore for his national readership that what had happened in a New York courtroom would affect the 1932 presidential election because, in effect, the legislative committee was acting like a grand jury:

  “Regardless of what Judge Seabury does about the testimony, the Governor of New York, especially because he is a candidate for Presidential nomination next month, faces a perplexing problem in Jimmy Walker. If Judge Seabury files the charges, Mr. Roosevelt, unless he dismisses the Mayor or rejects the charges at
once, an unlikely proceeding, must give Mr. Walker time to make a defense or he must appoint the Attorney General to conduct a hearing of the charges. This would carry a decision far beyond the adjournment date of the national conventions. If such be his course, the Governor, as a Presidential candidate, will be both helped and hurt by it.

  “Helped, because Tammany will hesitate in the convention to make the Governor an enemy. Hurt, because there will be demands that he express indignation at the careless conduct of the Mayor of the country’s greatest city. And there is the further complication that, if the Mayor is removed, and runs for ‘vindication’ in November, he will entirely muss up the Presidential contest. But, in spite of these imponderables, the life of a Presidential candidate must go on.”

  By contrast to what his colleagues on the newspaper considered to be Krock’s patented boredom, the normally humorless New York Times decided that the mayor had been evasive and deserved a subtle lashing. An unnamed editorial writer, sounding as if he were trying to be E. B. White of The New Yorker (but not quite succeeding), wrote a pair of parodies of Jimmy Walker’s answers to Judge Seabury’s questions:

  I.

  Q: Your name, please?

  A: George Washington.

  Q: Business?

  A: Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army.

  Q: I show you a document in which it is stated that on the night of December 25,1776, you crossed the Delaware River. Is that correct?

  A: Did I say that?

  Q: Yes. Isn’t it true?

  A: Well, Judge, I really don’t know. I’m a bit hazy about it.

  Q: You admit that on Christmas Eve you were encamped on the Pennsylvania side of the river?

  A: Yes.

  Q: And that on December 26 you fought the Battle of Trenton on the Jersey side?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Then isn’t it a fact that some time between those dates you crossed the river?

  A: How do I know I crossed the river. I might have gone around it.

  II.

  Q: Please give the clerk your name.

  A: Adam, your Honor.

  Q: Business?

  A: Horticulturist.

  Q: In the Spring of the year 4000 B.C. where were you employed, and in what official capacity?

  A: Head gardener in the Garden of Eden.

  Q: Did you ever get in a jam in the Garden?

  A: Oh, yes, your Honor! All those apple trees—that’s what got Eve and me into so much trouble.

  Q: What kind of trouble?

  A: Well, the trees needed spraying every year, and I was contact man for the Eden Exterminator Company, makers of the Paradise Sprayer, and when we started in to draw up the specifications—

  Q: Well, you needn’t go into that now. All I want to get on the record is that as a result of yielding to this natural temptation to make a little money on the side you lost your job and had to leave the Garden on foot in the midst of the Depression—

  A: Oh, no, your Honor, not on foot. Eve and I left the Garden in a covered wagon bought and paid for by a number of devoted friends.

  The Democratic presidential convention was now only a few weeks away. Roosevelt already had 666 votes lined up; it would take 770 votes to gain the nomination. The other main players were far behind. They included Alfred E. Smith of New York, with some 201 votes, John Nance Garner of Texas, with 90, and George White of Ohio, with 52. Samuel Seabury, the dreamer, had no votes.

  For reasons of his own, Seabury sat back and let the case against Walker simmer for several days after the hearings ended. He thought Governor Roosevelt should make the first move; Roosevelt thought Seabury, as counsel to the legislative committee, should do so. Neither wanted to take a step that might appear to be politically motivated. By this time, in fact, any extrajudicial statement by any of the parties was considered political. Tammany’s Sachems waited in the wings, paralyzed into silence. The man in the middle, Jimmy Walker, turned up a little more often at his unfamiliar City Hall desk, not wishing to be perceived in his usual role as the Night Mayor of New York.

  During the first week in June, Seabury gave no hint of his intentions. He went to Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, where he received an honorary doctor of laws degree. In the view of the Good Government forces in the city, he was riding high—talked about as a man on a white horse. Letters and telegrams poured into Albany and New York, praising Judge Seabury as an old-fashioned, hard-hitting counsel and demanding Mayor Walker’s removal.

  In a lead editorial, The New York Times summed up Governor Roosevelt’s dilemma in the Walker matter, but without biting the bullet itself:

  “To act on his own initiative now, the Governor’s advisers have told him, would be to run the risk of being accused of political opportunism. The political effect of Mayor Walker’s case on Governor Roosevelt’s chances of winning his party’s nomination for President cannot be minimized. Failure to act decisively if charges are filed with him might be interpreted as bowing to Tammany Hall, while precipitate action would alienate the local organization and cast doubt on Mr. Roosevelt’s ability to carry his own state.”

  Pressed for a comment, if not for action, Governor Roosevelt issued a blunt statement from the Executive Mansion in Albany through Guernsey T. Cross, his personal secretary. It indicated that he was clearing the decks for action, if necessary; at the same time, he was taking a swipe at Judge Seabury:

  “The only information before the Governor is in the form of very incomplete newspaper stories. It is not even clear from Judge Seabury’s statement to Chairman Hofstadter whether he has fully completed his investigation. I act in each case definitely, positively and with due promptness. Get the law straight. It is the duty of the legislative committee and its counsel, if they believe they have sufficient cause, to present evidence to the proper authorities without waiting to make a formal report to next year’s legislature. You cannot get away from that obvious public duty.

  “In the case of Sheriff Farley, Judge Seabury asked the legislative committee to present the evidence to the Governor. The committee refused. Judge Seabury sent it himself. I acted. If the evidence in any case now before the legislative committee, in their judgment or that of their counsel, warrants, it is time for the legislative committee and their counsel to stop talking and do something. It is not the time for political sniping or buck passing.”

  In fact, the transcripts of the hearings had been sent to Governor Roosevelt right from the beginning. He did not have to rely on what he called “incomplete” news accounts for damaging information about Walker’s shady sources of income. But he still needed an official recommendation to stay upright on his tightrope.

  There was another way in which Roosevelt’s bluntness was meant to be a subliminal message to Judge Seabury. Roosevelt’s closest political aide, Louis Howe, had discovered a startling piece of news. He told Roosevelt that Seabury was making moves behind the scenes to capture the Democratic nomination for himself. Howe said that Seabury’s friends had approached people on Capitol Hill to sound them out about his own candidacy in case the convention was deadlocked. Roosevelt and his operatives knew that despite Seabury’s newborn fame, he had no delegates and didn’t stand a chance of obtaining the nomination.

  Yet Seabury began to believe his press clippings; they encouraged him to hope that lightning would strike in Chicago. One Connecticut newspaper said: “Seabury’s probe of Tammany Makes National Sensation.” A Michigan paper: “Tammany Foe to Be Candidate for Presidency.” An Indiana paper: “Judge Seabury, Controlling Genius Behind New York Investigations, Does Not Deny Aspirations.” Seabury’s secretary, Dorothy Brenner, pasted all such clippings in a scrapbook labeled, rather prematurely, “President.”

  In a private letter to Colonel Edward House, one of his political advisers, Roosevelt wrote, “This fellow Seabury is merely trying to perpetrate another political play to embarrass me. His conduct has been a deep disappointment to people who honestly seek better government in New Yor
k City by stressing the fundamentals and eliminating political innuendoes.”

  Finally, with the convention a scant week away, Seabury sent Governor Roosevelt a copy of the transcript of the Walker testimony, together with his analysis. He filed the report in his own name because a majority of the members of the joint legislative committee refused to back him up.

  “This record is presented to you by me in my individual capacity as a citizen of the State of New York,” he wrote Roosevelt, “not as the counsel to the joint legislative committee. I submit the record to you not as formal charges but for your information so that you may determine what shall be done.”

  Judge Seabury’s analysis of the evidence summarized the series of “beneficences” received by Mayor Walker from people doing business with the city, or hoping to. These moneys included Russell T. Sherwood’s deposits of close to a million dollars in banking and brokerage accounts. Seabury concluded that Walker was guilty of malfeasance and nonfeasance, making him unfit to continue in office.

  “I have no request or petition to make,” Seabury concluded, although his intentions were obvious. “My only desire is that the matter may be dealt with solely upon its merits. In my judgment, the evidence presents matters of the gravest moment to the people of the City of New York. I therefore present it to Your Excellency, who alone, under the Constitution and the laws, is empowered to act.”

  Now the ball was finally in the governor’s court. He and his legal advisers undertook a study of the transcript and an analysis of the evidence. Then Roosevelt forwarded the material to the mayor without comment, requesting that he answer Seabury’s charges. It was now one week before the convention.

  Jimmy Walker stalled, saying that he would reply after the convention.

  Walker entertained the faint but not absurd hope that his mentor, Al Smith, might still be a contender. Even if Smith didn’t get the nomination, Walker believed that, somehow, Smith would still be more influential than F.D.R. in New York State and more sympathetic to his plight. It was accepted wisdom that with the Depression on and unemployment high, almost any Democrat, even a Roman Catholic, could be elected in a contest against President Hoover.