Once Upon a Time in New York Page 5

  Once caught in farcical style were James J. Walker and Betty Compton, according to the The East Hampton Star, Long Island’s trusted local newspaper, which normally devoted itself to gardening advice from the Ladies Village Improvement Society, the fortunes of the high school football team, and high-tide news for the commercial fishermen operating beyond the Montauk Point lighthouse. In 1929, a headline in the paper read:

  WALKER’S TOUCH OF COMEDY

  ENDS MONTAUK RAID TALK

  The article went on to say that Mayor Walker had been cornered in a gambling raid at the Montauk Island Club but had claimed he was only having dinner in the club’s restaurant. The Suffolk Country district attorney—a gentleman with the unlikely name of Wednesday Blue—declined to press charges against the mayor of New York City.

  “As long as the Mayor admits he was around when the raid occurred,” said Mr. Blue, “that satisfies me. I’m willing to let it go at that.”

  What The Star failed to mention was that Betty Compton had been playing hazard for high stakes in the club’s casino—with Jimmy Walker standing at her elbow—when the sheriff’s deputies arrived. Walker deserted his ladylove and, borrowing a waiter’s apron, tried to disguise himself as a member of the dining room staff. Nobody believed him, of course, yet everybody concerned winked as Jimmy and Betty sailed into the sunset on a yacht that belonged to one of his rich pals and was anchored in Montauk Harbor.

  An Association Against the Prohibition Amendment was formed by wealthy industrialists a few years after the law went into effect. They believed that the Eighteenth Amendment increased their taxes and gave too much power to the federal government. A majority of sympathetic Congressmen challenged the Eighteenth Amendment in the early 1930s; it was repealed soon after President Roosevelt took office.

  For repeal, the traditional long-term process of ratification by the state legislatures was avoided by an extraordinary method. For the first time since the Constitution itself had been ratified, Congress called for separate ratifying conventions in each state, whose delegates would be elected for the specific purpose of saying yes or no to the Twenty-first Amendment. The nationwide total was almost 73 percent. After this vote, the states were again in control of liquor laws. Several states held steadfast to Prohibition even after federal repeal, but New York became a wet state.

  Prohibition played a role in the 1928 presidential election between Alfred E. Smith and Herbert Hoover. In the compaign, Hoover called the federal law “a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose.” Smith, following the Democratic party line, wanted regulation left to the states. Hoover’s defense of the Eighteenth Amendment did not help him when he ran against Governor Roosevelt in 1932.

  Perhaps Jimmy Walker’s greatest moment of glory would come on a fine spring day in 1932 when, dressed in striped trousers, with a flower in his lapel, he led a demonstration up Fifth Avenue during the “beer parade” that marked the end of Prohibition. It was his last hurrah; the worst was yet to come.

  The boozy years were drawing to a close.

  By now, one-third of the nation was (in F.D.R.’s phrase) “ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-fed.” During his first presidential campaign, in words that ignited the dreams of the public—as no other president has in the twentieth century—Roosevelt declared:

  “Throughout the Nation, men and women, forgotten in the political philosophy of the Government of the last years, look to us here for guidance and for more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth. On the farms, in the large metropolitan areas, in the smaller cities and in the villages, millions of our citizens cherish the hope that their old standards of living and of thought have not gone forever. Those millions cannot and shall not hope in vain. I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a New Deal for the American people.”

  Even as major felonies occurred in the streets, and corruption was rampant in the business of the city, people recognized the need for a National Recovery Act to revive their personal lives by creating jobs. “N.R.A.—We Do Our Part” became a New Deal slogan that appeared on billboards and in the windows of nearly every home and business. The end of Prohibition meshed with the beginning of the New Deal. By breaking the bonds of criminality that accompanied Prohibition, legitimate businessmen, engaged in the manufacture and transportation of wines, beer, and liquor, could flourish openly without payoffs to gangster elements.

  It was not simply Jimmy Walker’s open flouting of the liquor laws during his nighttime peregrinations that would bring him down. Governor Roosevelt, in fact, was also a voice against Prohibition: “The methods adopted since the World War with the purpose of achieving a greater temperance by the forcing of Prohibition have been accompanied by complete and tragic failure,” Roosevelt said. “It has led to the general encouragement of lawlessness, corruption, hypocrisy, crime and disorder.”

  A more devastating factor than booze was at work in the Empire City. It was the inability of Walker’s district attorneys and police officials to crack other kinds of cases—political ones involving the Tammany hacks and felons in his City for Sale—that fundamentally diveded Walker and Roosevelt. Simultaneously, citizen reformers and newspaper editorials clamored for action against the bigtime gangsters and well-known corrupters.

  THREE

  The Gang’s All Here

  During Franklin Roosevelt’s and Jimmy Walker’s early careers in the Democratic party, before World War I, it was recognized that Tammany Hall stood at the center of political power in New York City and sometimes could influence legislation in Albany. Almost every well-paid position in a city department was cleared through the borough leaders—and many jobs could be bought. Doing business with the municipal government also carried a price tag. The corrupted were in cahoots with the corrupters. A quick license, a fake billing, a rakeoff, a moneyed handshake, a wink . . . and the fix would be in.

  The big town’s agencies and services were for sale. So were the civil and criminal courts. Nominees for the bench were selected by the Tammany chieftains, not by the bar associations or judicial reform groups. Payoffs flowed upward to the Hall from the clubhouses. Everybody understood that this was the way the system worked, the way to get things done.

  A permit to make a cut in the sidewalk for a gas station? $50. A variance to add another floor to a skyscraper without a legal setback to let a little sunshine in? That’ll be $3,000 for the building inspector, plus another $5,000 lagniappe for “the organization” at Tammany’s impressive new headquarters, built on Seventeenth Street and Union Square in 1929. What’s the under-the-table payment for a pier on the Hudson River to dock your transatlantic liner? Well, how does $50,000 in unmarked, untaxed bills sound?

  Even if you got a $5 traffic ticket for speeding in your Packard (or Studebaker or Nash or Jordan, any of those elegant, romantic roadsters with rumble seats and running boards), you took it around to your local Democratic clubhouse. There young lawyers on the make volunteered their time and fixed your ticket. Favors brought obligations, greasing the way for ambitious loyalists who hoped to earn a place on the ballot themselves someday.

  In gratitude to the district leader, your whole family voted the straight Democratic line in the next election. It didn’t matter that some of the old folks couldn’t pronounce the names of the candidates or scrawl much more than their signatures; all they had to know was that you marked an “X” next to every five-pointed Democratic star on the ballot.

  The Republicans? Tammany’s leaders liked to say that the Grand Old Party represented the wealthy and those who pretended to be—the uptown swells who lived on the right side of the New York Central tracks, the straw bosses in starched Arrow Collars whose forebears had arrived long before the turn of the century—not the people in the neighborhoods where most of the working families lived; not “our kind.”

  After all, the Democrats sneered, look at the Republican presidents running the country in the 1920s: Harding, Coolidge, Hoover. The very mention
of their names caused disdain among the Democratic faithful in New York State.

  Then, of course, there were progressive-minded politicians like the Roosevelts.

  To be sure, there were Roosevelts and Roosevelts—Republican Theodore from Oyster Bay, on the north shore of Long Island, and Democratic Franklin from Hyde Park, on the Hudson Highlands. The two men were distant kinsmen. Franklin’s bride, Eleanor Roosevelt, was his cousin as well as Theodore Roosevelt’s niece. At Franklin and Eleanor’s wedding in 1905, Theodore Roosevelt gave the bride away.

  Teddy Roosevelt had emerged as the leader of reform Republicans in the New York State Assembly in the early 1880s. Then he mounted his steed as colonel of a volunteer cavalry unit, the “Rough Riders,” in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, and heroically rode off to the governorship in 1899. Elected vice president in 1900, he succeeded the assassinated William McKinley in September 1901.

  Franklin Roosevelt turned to the Democratic party from another direction, as part of the reform movement of the Progressive Era. F.D.R/s father, James, was a registered Democrat and had been a lifelong supporter of New York governor, and then president, Grover Cleveland in the 1880s and 1890s. As governor, Cleveland had distanced himself from Tammany Hall. The Cleveland Democrats still carried weight in New York State politics. Personally and politically, it was only natural that Franklin Roosevelt be nominated by Dutchess County’s Democrats for state senator in 1910.

  F.D.R. was not Tammany’s man, then or later, but in Albany he saw the need to get along with all factions of the Democratic party. The Tammany Democracy in Albany included Alfred E. Smith, a future governor, and Robert F. Wagner, a future U.S. senator. Early on, Smith dismissed the new senator from Dutchess County as a brash young man, more interested in civil service reform than social legislation. But Roosevelt was a quick study and soon found himself in agreement with Smith and Wagner, the cities’ leading spokesmen in Albany. Indeed, it can be said that Roosevelt first learned about political compromise and the need for social reform from both of them.

  From the beginning of his political journey, Roosevelt knew something that Tammany and some of the newspaper columnists who considered him only a dilettante didn’t know: Almost from the time he was elected president of the Harvard Crimson in 1903 and entered Columbia University’s law school the following year, F.D.R. had envisioned himself as a future president of the United States. With or without Tammany’s support, he would work relentlessly to achieve that dream.

  “Politics is business; that’s what’s the matter with it The corruption that shocks us in public affairs we practice ourselves in our private concerns.”

  So wrote Lincoln Steffens, one of the pioneering muckrakers against municipal corruption, in The Shame of the Cities. But Steffens was only a journalist, a member of a lowly profession that perforce stands on the outside looking in. To know Tammany from the inside demanded a “philosopher” in the tradition of the legendary George Washington Plunkitt, a Democratic ward boss on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1880s. The gregarious and loquacious Plunkitt transacted all his business from what he called his office: the bootblack stand in front of the New York County Courthouse.

  Plunkitt lives in history for coining the phrase “honest graft.” He received four salaries—simultaneously—for serving as a magistrate, alderman, county supervisor and state senator. With a straight face, he defined the difference between business and larceny:

  “The politician who steals is worse than a thief. He is a fool. With the grand opportunities all around for the man with a political pull there’s no excuse for stealing a cent. It makes me tired to hear old codgers boasting that they retired from politics without a dollar except what they earned in their profession or private business. If they lived today they would be just the same as the rest of us. There ain’t any more honest people in the world just now than the convicts in Sing Sing. Not one of them steals anything. Because they can’t, my boy, because they can’t.

  “As for me, I see my opportunities and I take them. Honest graft.”

  Jimmy Walker came out of a long tradition of acceptable bribery and official looting—and, somewhat surprisingly, patriotism. As a proper Tammany man by inheritance and preference, Walker sometimes wrapped himself in the flag during his speeches. New Yorkers lapped up his patriotic platitudes in behalf of God, country, and the greatest city in the world.

  In Walker’s time, Tammany was still considered a benevolent political organization. The sachems served as the motor running the Democratic party in New York City, and party traditions mattered. The organization was established more than two centuries ago as the Society of St. Tammany, or Columbian Order, by William Mooney, a Continental Army veteran. The name derived from Tamanend, a legendary Indian chief who had a reputation for wisdom and love of liberty. The society’s original purpose was pure: to help the cause of American independence.

  In the post-Revolutionary War period, Tammany men affected Indian names and titles. Originally, there were thirteen trustees, after the original thirteen states. The president, or leader, was the Grand Sachem. The title of Great Grand Sachem was conferred upon the president of the United States; Andrew Jackson was the last president so honored. Unlike the politicos who influenced elections in other states by the force of local personalities, Tammany was a long-lived New York institution.

  Below the Sachems came the Sagamore (master of ceremonies), the Scribe (secretary), and the Wiskinskie (doorkeeper). The Indian dress gradually became purely ceremonial, but the titles of Grand Sachem, Sachem, and Wiskinskie continued. Eventually, top hats replaced feathered headgear, but they served the same purpose: to signify beribboned Authority. Another carryover from the founding days was the use of the term “Wigwam” for the organization’s meeting hall.

  The democratization of the ballot box was one of Tammany’s original goals; the society helped to bring about the removal of the property qualification for voting. The broadened franchise brought Tammany a greater following in New York City. Almost at the same time, Tammany members in the city government began to use their powers in corrupt ways. One of the first Grand Sachems to be convicted was Matthew L. Davis, who defrauded banks and insurance companies of several million dollars in the 1820s. When some of the Sachems were caught in swindles, the society learned how to use its influence to bring about light prison terms.

  The pattern of election, dictation, and corruption in Tammany Hall began to flourish in the middle of the nineteenth century. One of Tammany’s most notorious leaders was Fernando Wood, who had served in Congress and been involved in commercial and political fraud—perfect training for accumulating Tammany boodle. As the Democratic mayor of New York, Wood ruled in an era of gangs that performed as bullyboys for the machine during elections.

  When he was denied renomination—not for wrongdoing but because of his eccentric, obsessive behavior—Wood organized a faction of Tammany named Mozart Hall, after its meeting place. Though they professed loyalty to the Union cause, elements in both Tammany and Mozart Hall were Southern sympathizers. During the Civil War, the Lincoln administration considered Fernando Wood and his “Peace Democrats” troublemakers if not actually treasonous.

  The post–Civil War era introduced Tammany’s most inventive scoundrel, William Marcy Tweed. He was perhaps the greatest spoilsman in American municipal history as well as a master of subterranean politics. Tweed was the first to have bestowed on him the title “Boss” that preceded the names of future leaders.

  After being elected to the Board of Supervisors in New York, he formed what became known as the Tweed Ring. Its purpose was to lobby in support of bills for unnecessary supplies—again and again and again. As soon as he became head of Tammany Hall, Tweed increased the “tax” on contractors supplying materials to the city from a “normal” 10 percent to 35 percent. He created fictitious public institutions, put in his friends as officers, then billed the city for millions of dollars to run the nonexistent agencies.

 
Nearly every city job from janitor to judge could be bought. The Tweed Ring nomination to such a lucrative office as county clerk, for example, cost $40,000. It was well worth the bribe to the lucky incumbent.

  In its proudest hour, The New York Times published evidence that blew the Tweed Ring wide open in 1871 and thereafter. It fired off a long editorial salvo, “The Democratic Millennium,” which began: “We should like to have a treatise from Mr. Tweed on the art of growing rich in as many years as can be counted on the fingers of one hand. You might begin with nothing and in five or six years you can boast of your ten millions. How was it done? We wish Mr. Tweed to tell us.”

  The independent newspaper kept up the drumbeat while other papers, generally partisan in those days, including The World and The Sun, scolded The Times’s crusade, saying its anti-Tweed editorials harmed New York City’s credit in Wall Street and the banking and business community. The only help The Times received came from Thomas Nast, the editorial cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly, the political and literary journal; Nast’s biting pen etched memorable images of the Ring of corruption. Nast created the Tammany tiger (the idea stemmed from the tiger’s head that decorated Tweed’s volunteer fire engine company), the Republican elephant, and the Democratic donkey—symbols employed by cartoonists to this day.

  The main cover for Tammany’s phony appropriations at the time was a new county courthouse, built near the then new City Hall. A half-dozen courthouses could have been built for the money spent on its faked costs. One phantom firm alone received $6 million in two years “for supplying furniture and carpets.” (The infamous building remains in City Hall Park today. Justice is no longer meted out there, but passersby with a sense of history still refer to it as the Tweed Courthouse.) The Times attacked the building costs vociferously.