I Never Did Like Politics by Terry Golway

Author:Terry Golway
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

2

Now We Have a Mayor

It took a split in New York’s dominant Democratic Party and no small bit of mendacity on the part of Franklin Roosevelt to ensure Fiorello La Guardia’s election as mayor in 1933. And even then the man who would go on to become the city’s greatest chief executive and one of the country’s best-known politicians barely managed to scrape together 40 percent of the vote. Suffice it to say, most New York voters didn’t immediately recognize the former congressman as the right man at the right time for the right job. Basically, the Little Flower got lucky.

La Guardia had taken one for the Republican team in 1929 when he ran a doomed campaign against the charismatic incumbent Jimmy Walker, who won 60 percent of the vote. Unlike his first attempt at the city’s top job in 1921, La Guardia didn’t lose anything by losing—he remained a member of Congress and so retained his powerful and passionate platform as the city and the nation plunged into the Great Depression. When the 1933 mayoral election came around, a year after Walker resigned in disgrace and with New York’s finances in shambles, the city seemed ready for radical change. La Guardia’s name was on many lips as reformers, anti-Tammany activists, and the city’s outnumbered Republicans searched for a credible nominee to oppose Walker’s successor. But his nomination was hardly a foregone conclusion, and La Guardia risked being labeled a three-time loser if he decided to make a run for it.

The incumbent mayor was a Tammany man named John P. O’Brien, who had won a special election held three months after Walker resigned on September 1, 1932. By law, the president of the board of aldermen served as acting mayor when there was a vacancy, so until voters went to the polls in November to select a new mayor, a Democrat named Joseph V. McKee had taken charge of the city for a few months. McKee was no ward heeler. A Fordham Law graduate who taught Latin and Greek before entering politics, he was widely praised as a thoughtful and efficient public servant. He was close to the legendary Democratic leader of the Bronx, Edward Flynn, who served as governor Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of state and would later chair the Democratic National Committee.

McKee had inherited a municipal government drowning in debt and bloated with personnel—the city’s workforce had doubled in just a dozen years. Revenue shriveled up after the stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent Depression, but the Walker administration was not up to the challenge. Walker himself seemed blissfully unaware that the high times of the Jazz Age had come to a crashing end: In the summer of 1931, as breadlines snaked around city blocks, Walker embarked on a grand European tour, including a stop in pre-Hitler Berlin, where he was welcomed by the city’s seven-foot-two mayor, Heinrich Sahm. Walker acknowledged the hard economic times but noted cheerfully that in his travels he had found no “depression of hospitality.

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