Once Upon a Time in New York

by Herbert Mitgang

  Support for Jimmy Walker came from several quarters, expected and unexpected. In a signed editorial in the New York American, the publisher William Randolph Hearst urged the mayor to resign and run for reelection in the autumn. Hearst declared that Governor Roosevelt should “recognize the democratic rights of the citizens of New York City to conduct their own political affairs” and avoid exercising “dictatorial powers” by removing the mayor.

  Father Charles E. Coughlin, the anti-Semitic, fascist-minded firebrand from Detroit, who cloaked his raw ideas behind his priestly garb, had many admiring listeners. Coughlin wrote to Roosevelt that he should go the limit to give Mayor Walker his day in court. Because the so-called Radio Priest had a large following, Roosevelt responded cautiously: “I am, as you know, giving the defense every latitude and I am being scrupulously careful not to make up my mind in any way until their case is wholly in.”

  In his Washington column in The New York Times, Arthur Krock observed that the chastened mayor wisecracked while the governor conducted the difficult hearing with dignity and fairness. “Whatever the Governor’s verdict,” Krock wrote, “the political consequences will be enormous. If he removes the Mayor, he runs the risk of being knifed by the Democratic machine in New York City and faces resentment from Mr. Walker’s Democratic admirers in New England and Illinois. If he does not remove the Mayor, the Republican orators will ascribe his negative act to Presidential politics and picture Mr. Roosevelt as a trimmer and low type of politician. It is unfortunate that the Mayor’s judge is a candidate for the Presidency.”

  People west of the Hudson wanted a show of strength against New York corruption, and Roosevelt sensed that familiar anti-New York feeling. His mail ran overwhelmingly in favor of a tough but fair trial: “Your friends in Dutchess County and throughout the United States are proud of you.” “You may lose a few Tammany votes but gain many independent votes.” “Your cousin Theodore Roosevelt would do the courageous thing.”

  The Albany hearing went into evening sessions toward the end of August 1932. It was clear that the proceedings had exhausted all the parties; hostility hung in the air of the hot, overcrowded chamber. Roosevelt had a special reason to want to wind up the hearing; the November election was barely more than two months away. Rather than sitting in Albany or Hyde Park, he was determined to present himself to voters on a whistle-stop campaign all over the country.

  Meanwhile, Roosevelt sounded out one of the most respected legal minds in the country. Professor Felix Frankfurter of Harvard Law School, a future justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, remembered their private conversation in Hyde Park: “I worked out with Roosevelt the legal theory on which Jimmy Walker had to go, the theory being that when a public official has acquired money during the time that he was in public office, the presumption of wrongdoing lies there unless he can explain why he suddenly came into money that he couldn’t have got merely through his salary.” It was the same test that Roosevelt and Rosenman had applied in removing Sheriff Tom “Tin Box” Farley.

  Some of the old Tammany pros conferred with the mayor to see what could be done to save him. Afterward, they asked Jim Farley to plead Walker’s case with the governor—for political if not personal reasons.

  “I had known and liked Walker for a great many years,” Farley recalled, “and his friends assumed that the only thing necessary was for me to call up Albany, tell Governor Roosevelt to give Jimmy a clean bill of health, and the whole thing would be over.” Farley did speak to Roosevelt, but discovered that the Walker case was too hot and too far out in the open for any delay or tampering. The public—that is, voters in New York and around the country—would get the wrong message if Roosevelt seemed to cave in to Tammany pressure.

  Walker could see the handwriting on the wall.

  “I think Roosevelt is going to remove me,” Walker confided to a friend. “Papa made me eat my spinach.”

  He asked Al Smith, who still carried weight with the power brokers in New York and Catholic voters around the country, for advice.

  “Jim, you’re through,” Smith told him. “You must resign for the good of the party.”

  It was an ancient script, and Walker could see its merits as well as anyone: resign before you’re fired (or, in Walker’s case, be suspended temporarily). Never put yourself above your party. The Democrats had great power in New York—the only place where power mattered to Walker—and it would only be lessened if he were mortally wounded but still in office.

  On Sunday, August 28, 1932, Jimmy Walker’s brother George, who had been confined to a clinic, died of a tubercular condition at Saranac Lake, in upstate New York. This further depressed the mayor. Dr. Schroeder, Jimmy’s personal physician, said that he was suffering from “nervous exhaustion.” On Thursday morning, September 1, the mayor atttended a solemn requiem mass for his brother at St. Patrick’s Cathedral; afterward, the funeral cortege drove to Calvary Cemetery. Among the mourners was Jim Farley, F.D.R’s national campaign manager. Looking at the mayor’s drawn face at graveside, Farley turned to Dan McKetrick, an old friend of Walker’s, and whispered, “Jim looks terrible. In fact, he looks worse than George.”

  At the cemetery, Walker asked his sister, Nan Burke, to take a short stroll with him. They walked toward the nearby plot where Charles F. Murphy, the Tammany Sachem who had advanced Walker’s early career, was buried. Walker confided to her, “Nan, I’m going to resign.” She asked him when. He replied that he planned to do so that very day.

  Governor Roosevelt scheduled the next and perhaps final hearing for Friday, September 2, 1932, at 1:30 P.M. Nearly all the evidence was in; Judge Seabury, satisfied, declined an invitation to add to his conclusions.

  The night before the hearing, Roosevelt met with his closest political and judicial advisers in the Executive Mansion in Albany. He turned to Raymond Moley and, half to himself, said, “How would it be if I let the little Mayor off with a hell of a reprimand?” And Moley recalled that Roosevelt answered himself: “No, that would be weak.” Sitting around a table in Roosevelt’s study were several of the strategists who had helped him gain the Presidential nomination: Jim Farley, Basil O’Connor, Sam Rosenman, Frank Walker, and Arthur Mullen, a Democratic national committeeman from Nebraska. The professional politicians felt that Roosevelt should not remove Walker but, instead, end the case with a severe reprimand.

  As the discussion grew hot, O’Connor lit a cigarette, flicked the match at Roosevelt, and angrily said, “So you’d rather be right than President!”

  Roosevelt softly replied, “Well, there may be something in what you say.”

  At that moment, the professional politicians were wrong and Roosevelt’s instincts were right. The country was waiting for the governor to be firm, even tough. The national press had reported Jimmy Walker’s obviously slippery answers and had praised Roosevelt for his judicious conduct. The Republicans had blown Walker’s trial into an issue of Roosevelt and Tammanyism. In his political biography, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, James MacGregor Burns observed, “The Governor had walked the political tightrope expertly. He stripped the Republicans of a national issue without losing Tammany.”

  Roosevelt realized that to cave in with only a censure would have been an obvious retreat—and a losing move in the presidential campaign.

  Late in the evening of September 1, 1932, the phone suddenly rang in Roosevelt’s study. At 10:40 P.M., the mayor had sent an official message not to Roosevelt but to the Honorable Michael J. Cruise, City Clerk of the City of New York, Municipal Building, New York: It read:

  “I hereby resign as Mayor of New York, the said resignation to take effect immediately.”

  Roosevelt offered no immediate comment to the startling news. The reporters on the late shift in Room 9 at City Hall were thunderstruck. They rushed to the phones to make their late editions.

  Judge Seabury was in his townhouse on East Sixty-third Street, preparing material for the resumption of hearings in Albany the following day. After midnight, the p
hone rang with the news. Seabury then called George Trosk to come over. They sat up all night discussing what moves they should make next. Trosk later said, “We were about to delve further into Walker’s finances and the details would have completely destroyed him.” From his kitchen early that morning, Seabury told reporters:

  “The charges were fully proved and corroborated by documentary evidence. The Mayor’s resignation in the face of this record is equivalent to a confession of guilt.”

  Roosevelt’s triumph was clear, though he now had to worry about Tammany’s support in the November election. Tammany, for its part, had to pick up the pieces. Which course should it take? Threaten to refight the battle? Appeal to the courts? Let Walker twist in the wind? Or compromise to survive?

  On Friday, September 2,1932, at 1:30 P.M., Governor Roosevelt entered the hearing chamber for the last time. After thirteen sessions and two thousand pages of testimony, he issued a final statement:

  I desire to read into this record the following telegram received by me this morning:

  HON. FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT. IN VIEW OF THE RESIGNATION OF THE HON. JAMES J. WALKER, MAYOR, WE WILL NOT BE PRESENT IN THE EXECUTIVE CHAMBERS AT 1:30 P.M. FOR THE SCHEDULED HEARING.

  CURTIN & GLYNN, ATTORNEYS.

  No other comment was needed.

  TWELVE

  The Knave of Hearts

  WALKER RESIGNS, DENOUNCING THE GOVERNOR;

  SAYS HE WILL RUN FOR THE MAYORALTY AGAIN,

  APPEALING TO ‘FAIR JUDGMENT’ OF THE PEOPLE

  The page one banner headline that stretched across five columns of The New York Times on September 2, 1932, informed Americans that a surprising new battlefront was being opened in the city as well as in the presidential election.

  Jimmy Walker was out, but he was fighting mad, and it showed. In an unplanned maneuver, he now threatened to make a sham of his resignation. His “weapon” would be the electorate—the people who had chosen him twice before in overwhelming numbers.

  An hour after resigning, Walker cabled Betty Compton in Paris. She was delighted to hear from him; he promised to join her soon. They had not seen each other for eighteen months. Out in the cold once again was Allie Walker.

  Walker next issued a tough statement calling his trial a “travesty” and declaring that he planned to seek vindication by running for reelection. The tone was quite unlike the diplomatic and measured “Your Excellency” language that he had directed at the Democratic presidential candidate in Albany:

  “Instead of an impartial hearing, the proceeding before Governor Roosevelt developed into a mock trial, a proceeding in comparison to which even the practice of a drumhead court-martial seems liberal. The Governor denied me the right, to which I am entitled under the Constitution and the law, to confront accusing witnesses and cross-examine them, and by his treating accusations as self-proved, without supporting evidence.”

  Walker again argued that the accusations against him covered not only matters relating to his official conduct but also his “private affairs” and the private affairs of others having “no official relation” with the City of New York.

  “Even in England,” Walker said, “the King yielded to the courts in order that no one would suffer from an unjust or illegal act of the Executive or the Crown. I must submit to being outraged by the unlawful acts of the Governor. I did not believe that in this day and age any man in this country would assert the right to act above the law, to exercise arbitrary and unlawful power.”

  In charges that foreshadowed those leveled at special prosecutors in the latter part of the twentieth century, Walker complained, “The Governor has announced that he will persist in his illegal course. He has so announced at a time when I am informed that if the rights which he denies to me were granted, the alleged charges would have to be dismissed. But I am told that I am without remedy in the courts because the Governor asserts and stands on an immunity from the process of the courts. This has not been claimed even in England since the time of George III, whose assertions of arbitrary power provoked the American Revolutionary War.”

  It was the kind of extravagant claim that might have impressed Walker’s pals at Toots Shor’s saloon or the showbiz crowd at the Friars Club, but the comparison would not have held up in a court of law or even in the wised-up court of public opinion. With the counsel of Sam Rosenman and other legal experts, Roosevelt had sealed Walker’s fate. As for the public, the hearings were over, Walker had resigned, and now attention turned to the presidential election.

  Roosevelt was accused by Walker of being “studiously unfair” and of acting like “a prosecutor” instead of as “an impartial judge.” In an insulting crack about Roosevelt’s legal knowledge, Walker said that the governor required questions to be answered that “even a first-year law student would recognize were not permissible and without binding force upon me.” If he expected any redress, that was the wrong thing to say at the wrong time. Walker had already experienced F.D.R.’s hot temper.

  The angry ex-mayor wound up his furious protest with a rhetorical question: “Shall I permit myself to be lynched to satisfy prejudice or political ambition?” And he answered himself: “Why, then, continue before him [Governor Roosevelt] when there is another forum open to me? To that forum, the people of the City of New York, I leave my case in the spirit of true democracy, conscious of the rectitude of my official acts and with faith in the fair judgment of my fellow-citizens.”

  John Curtin followed up with a letter that attacked Roosevelt as well as Seabury. He stated that the governor lacked “cold neutrality.” As for Seabury, Curtin called his charges “a mountain of snow which quickly melts in the sunlight of analysis.” In his closing, Curtin described himself as only “a humble lawyer” protecting his client’s liberty under the Constitution. This fawning self-description brought winks and chuckles to his fellow members of the New York bar; one characteristic he definitely hadn’t shown at the hearing was humility.

  What was Roosevelt’s response to these personal attacks?

  The dignity and the strength of silence.

  “Why should he answer Mr. Walker’s virulent and hysterical attack upon him for the manner in which he has conducted the hearing in Albany? The thing speaks for itself,” The New York Times editorialized. “If Governor Roosevelt occasionally pressed a searching cross-examination, it was because he knew the case better than did the lawyer for the defense.”

  The editorial reaction elsewhere around the country to Walker’s resignation was almost unanimously hostile to the ex-mayor. The nation’s press deplored Walker’s attacks against Governor Roosevelt’s judicial mien. To be sure, some of this criticism represented old-fashioned heartland attitudes about wicked New York City.

  Walker’s letter was a big story at home and abroad:

  “Neither the belligerent tone of the statement accompanying Mayor Walker’s resignation nor his implied threat that he may seek vindication at the hands of the people can conceal the fact that his action was nothing more nor less than abject surrender.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “The Mayor’s dilatory tactics and feeble defense were a fitting prelude to his resignation. His statement seems the most ridiculous feature of all. The resignation did not astonish persons who had been reading his testimony.”—The Boston Herald

  “The resignation of Mayor Walker forestalls what was generally conceded to be certain removal from office. There will be universal approval of the stand of Governor Roosevelt, and his standing, not only in New York but the country over, will be strengthened.”—The Atlanta Constitution

  “All the clatter of Walker’s talk about unfairness and perversion of executive power, all the pettifogging resort to legal quibbles by his lawyer, cannot hide the fact that Walker has had full and free opportunity to explain the facts which discredit him. Governor Roosevelt has never shown to better advantage than in his clear-headed service to the cause of good government.”—The Chicago Tribune

  “The American people hav
e never been able to understand the admiration of the people of New York City for Mayor Walker. He has seemed to be a contemptible rather than an admirable figure, and his whining complaints of mistreatment by the Governor can cause no sympathy for him outside the metropolis.”—The St. Louis Globe-Democrat

  “Out of it all comes the one clear fact that Walker was the visible front, the symbol, of a corrupt and vicious machine government. Even if all his personal and official actions were shown to be blameless, that stigma would still lie upon his name.”—The New Orleans Times-Picayune

  “The resignation of Mayor Walker does not lend itself to wisecracking on the part of the spruce little Tammany favorite. Walker virtually confesses that a nimble and gamin-like turn of mind could not beat the rap. Flippancy has failed its most distinguished practitioner.”—The Portland Oregonian

  There was one reaction that pleased the business community. The day after Walker’s resignation, Wall Street traders reported that the prices of New York City bonds advanced sharply. Brokers believed that Acting Mayor Joseph V. McKee would introduce economies in government and bring a greater measure of stability to the marketplace.

  From Germany, which had welcomed Jimmy Walker twice during his mayoral junkets abroad, came a sympathetic response. The Vossische Zeitung of Berlin said that “Jimmy” had charm, elegance, ready humor, and optimism. Quite accurately, the newspaper said, “New York without him does not seem the same New York that so readily wins the hearts of all foreign visitors going there without any prejudices or blinkers.”

  But another view of the Walker-Roosevelt encounter came from England. Commenting on the ex-mayor’s charge that the hearing was an inquisition, an editorialist in The Manchester Guardian wrote: “A close reading of the transcript shows nothing that could be considered unfair in Governor Roosevelt’s questioning. Now the Mayor threatens to seek a verdict from the people by standing for election. He might embarrass Roosevelt considerably if he did, but he would embarrass his own allies in Tammany still more. Had he come through the hearing with flying colors, Tammany would have made a hero of him. Now he likely will be made a scapegoat.”