The Rotten Apple
The greed that defined New York
The Mayor was corrupt.
He didn’t really hide that part. The late nights at the hottest clubs in town, the immaculately tailored suits, the girlfriends all across the city, the interest in almost all things but his job. These facts—and his constant presence in the gossip pages—didn’t amount to a campaign of corruption on their own accord, but they created an image of flash and arrogance that became the story instead of the Mayor’s accomplishments, which were exceedingly thin. The worst part perhaps wasn’t even the corruption itself, but how plain it was to everyone. Even the casual observer could have noticed, and of course, they did. The Deputies who seemed to do nothing besides collect a paycheck, the works projects that started and never seemed to finish, and the slow grind of a bureaucracy that screeched louder than the failing Subway system.
New York City—America’s greatest city, arguably the capital of Planet Earth—was a shell of its former self. Here, skyscrapers hung suspended in the air unfinished. Men roamed the streets with holes in their shoes, eviction notices came as regularly as the mail, children went to school listless and hungry, and men stood in long lines outside bars that allowed proprietors to sleep on the floor if they bought a single drink. This was New York in 1932, a city wrought by the Great Depression of the American economy and the greed of its municipal government.
In prior years, 10,000 of New York’s 29,000 manufacturing plants had closed. Nearly one in three employable adults were out of work and an estimated 1,600,000 received public relief. Those who still had jobs only worked a few days a week or worked full time for half the salary. Staples like eggs and meat were now luxuries. Even milk was so expensive that many parents let their children drink a much cheaper option: coffee. In this sense, the Depression didn’t just apply to America’s economy but to its people. And in the search for solutions, there were few that were apparent. President Herbert Hoover—who was orphaned as a young child in rural Iowa—didn’t think the federal government should directly involve itself in the economy or the lives of its citizens. So, it didn’t, and life went on without relief or rest for millions.
But in New York City, the government was growing. Between 1918 and 1932, the number of city employees had doubled. The salaries for those employees had tripled. As a result, the city’s budget rose 250 percent to $631,366,298. In those same years, the city’s debt increased by $100,000 per day and by 1932 it had reached $1,897,481,478—an amount that nearly equaled the debt of all 48 states combined. And on top of it all, the city was losing revenue, and as the Depression wore on, losing it more quickly than ever. Increasingly the city’s cash cow—real estate taxes—stopped flowing in. Fewer properties were taxable and what’s more, fewer could pay what they owed.
At the center of it all was Tammany Hall and its handpicked mayor, Jimmy Walker.
Since the 1850s, the Tammany Hall political machine had run New York City. Political leaders made inroads into the growing immigrant community—especially among the Irish—and transformed the promise of city jobs into Democratic votes. Often, as the machine grew, city contracts would be awarded to Tammany friendly firms. The hand of power feeding itself. For a long time, things worked out fine and Tammany’s grasp even reached Albany, where one of its native sons—Al Smith—became Governor of New York and the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee in 1928. Smith, however, did not embrace corruption himself but reform, inspiring his hand-picked successor as governor—Franklin D. Roosevelt—to go even further.
But while Smith chose wisely in the Governor’s Mansion, in Gracie Mansion, he chose poorly when he handpicked Jimmy Walker to become Mayor. Walker had personally asked Smith to endorse him as the Democratic nominee, which in Democratic New York meant a sure victory. But Smith balked at first, worried about Walker’s drinking and his infidelity. But Walker assured him that he had given up the bottle and had renewed his commitment to his wife. Walker had gotten by in Albany in the New York State Senate by listening. That is, listening to Smith and Smith’s top advisor, a young man named Robert Moses. But upon taking office as Mayor on New Year’s Day 1926, Walker listened no longer. He started drinking again and sent his wife off to Miami, and starting spending most of his time at a social club in Central Park.
Soon, as the city threatened to default, the stench from Tammany began to rise. Mayor Walker often worked only a few hours a day, and just a few days a week. He drove around in a chauffeured black limousine and fought to raise his yearly salary from $25,000 to $40,000. Not that the extra $15k mattered much—he also personally accepted more than a million dollars in bribes from businesses whom he awarded city contracts. As the Depression worsened, Governor Roosevelt saw a target in Tammany Hall, and for him, a steppingstone on his way to his next goal: the presidency.
Roosevelt tasked Judge Samuel Seabury to investigate the rumors of corruption. What the Judge found was shocking. There were more officials involved in Tammany schemes than weren’t. Seabury’s investigation also found countless reports of a New York Police Department run amok. When business was slow, cops would go into Black neighborhoods like Harlem and make arrests at random. And according to one witness named Vivian Gordon, cops had been arresting housewives and working women and framing them as prostitutes to get them to pay bail. To make it all worse, a week after Gordon’s testimony, she was found strangled to death in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx.
One alleged Tammany associate—State Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Carter—even disappeared, vanishing into thin air as the investigations began. One night, Justice Carter got into a cab on 45th Street and was never seen again. Walker saw the writing on the wall. As Roosevelt’s campaign for president heated up, and in his official capacity as Governor, it became clear that FDR might remove Walker from office. Walker decided to spare Roosevelt and resigned as Mayor on September 1, 1932. He set sail for Europe with his girlfriend, the actress Betty Compton, a few days later. The two would be married in Cannes, France in 1933. The next Mayor elected would be John P. O’Brien, the last of the Tammany Hall mayors. Shortly after O’Brien was elected, reporters asked him who he planned to name as his Police Commissioner. O’Brien replied, “I don’t know. They haven’t told me yet.”
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Sources:
Robert Caro. The Power Broker. 1974.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/28/nyregion/nyc-mayor-adams-corruption-history.html
https://avenuemagazine.com/jimmy-walker-prohibition-era-new-york-mayor-notorious-new-yorker/