Grim Fall, Yes, But No Tragedy
Spitzer No Jimmy Walker

By JIM CALLAGHAN

James J. Walker, Mayor of New York from 1926 until his abrupt resignation in 1932, was fond of singing a tune titled, "It Ain't What You Do; It's The Way You Do It." Part of the song said, "I thought I was smart, but I soon found out/ I didn't know what life was all about/ But then I learnt, I must confess/ that life is all like a game of chess."

Mr. Callaghan, a staff writer for the New York Teacher, has been writing about city politics since 1978. The views expressed are his own, not his union's. He can be reached at mcalla24@aol.com.

It's a song that former Governor Eliot Spitzer, called the world's smartest man by Congressman Charles Rangel ("Just ask him," Rangel added), might be humming on his way to visit his lawyer's offices this week.

Shocked, Shocked ...

As an epidemic of prayer broke out in Albany, Washington and New York, and hypocritical voters expressed shock there was sex going on in Casablanca on the Hudson, pundits would do well to look at how previous politicians dealt with corruption and sex outside their marriages.

Former Governor Nelson Rockefeller was spared the fate of explaining to his wife what he was doing in his office late one night having sex with an aide. He suffered a heart attack and died while he was being pleasured.

Let's also put things into perspective. There was no "tragedy" that befell the State of New York. 9/11 was a tragedy. If politicians of every stripe want to suddenly get religious on us and urge us to pray for Mr. Spitzer, they at least can tell us what we are praying for, other than the fact that he doesn't change his mind and decide to run for Governor in 2010. The State of New York functioned exactly as it should have last week: the State Constitution took care of everything and we now have a new Governor who doesn't seem to get enjoyment from beating up his opponents in public.

STEPPED OUT WITH A SMILE: The late Mayor James J. Walker, like Eliot Spitzer, strayed outside the marital bed, but never opted 'to hold any weepy press conferences and humiliate his wife a second time.'

Sailed Under Cloudy Skies

Spitzer's tawdry press conference, during which he apologized for his "private" behavior, was not what Walker did when he left office under a cloud just before New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt had to decide whether to remove him from office. Walker did not hold any weepy press conferences and humiliate his wife a second time. He didn't try to cut a deal to mitigate criminal charges. He promptly boarded an ocean liner and sailed to Paris with his mistress, Betty Compton. Unlike now, there was no weeping and gnashing of teeth and pontificating from the media, mainly because everyone in town knew that Walker, while very much married, preferred the company of younger showgirls while his wife waited for him in their elegant brownstone on St. Luke's Place in Greenwich Village.

A Charming Rogue

Walker was a jaunty, witty, handsome man who could charm just about anyone - and did. He served in the State Senate and was a protégé of Al Smith. He also liked to write songs, one of which became famous and could have been asked of his constituents years later when they found out about his penchant for taking millions of dollars of bribes from those doing business with the city. It was called "Will You Love Me in December As You Do in May?"

Walker's major achievement in Albany was passing a law legalizing Sunday baseball. (Some thought he was a secret owner of the New York baseball Giants). With the support of publisher William Randolph Hearst, he defeated the incumbent Mayor John Hylan and became the city's "Night Mayor," an encomium that fit because he seldom got to work before noon, if at all.

Walker was out on the town practically every night, breaking the Prohibition laws as he visited speakeasies in every borough. He smoked and he drank and he was addicted to sex just like Spitzer, but there is no record that he ever paid for his liaisons (with cash) or ever - unlike later mayors - placed his goomattas on the city payroll. He did, however, use city funds to build the Central Park casino for Betty Compton.

Cut-Rate Corruption

Walker's corruption, by comparison to what is happening today in this city, was minor stuff: you got a city contract, and you kicked back to the Mayor and his friends. You built the IND subway, you hired the Mayor's friend to install the tiles (Take a look at them nearly 80 years later; pretty nice work). If you wanted a medical case fixed, you hired the Mayor's brother, who was a doctor and amassed more than $400,000 while splitting fees with doctors who treated city workers. Today, you hire a lawyer or consultant or you fix a billion-dollar contract so there is only one bidder, while the media becomes obsessed with the Governor's hooker pal.

Done in By Do-Gooders

Walker was tripped up by a cheap politician named Samuel Seabury, who once was appointed by Tammany Hall as a judge and ran for Governor in 1916. His great grandfather was a blueblood who opposed the boycott of British goods in 1775. As part of a plan to install Fiorello LaGuardia for Mayor, the good-government types lobbied for an investigation into the city's Magistrates Court, then rife with corruption, a probe that later led to Walker's financial tricks. Walker and his associates were grilled for days by Seabury, and the Mayor usually had no logical answer as to how he wound up with million-dollar letters of credit deposited into his bank account from City Hall favor-seekers, including one fellow who bid on a bus franchise even though his firm owned no buses and had no garages.

Unlike Spitzer, LaGuardia and Rudy Giuliani, Walker was not a public scold, and this got him a pass for his shenanigans, at least from 1926 until the stock market crashed in 1929, when the mood of the city turned sour. His motto could have been lifted from the sign that hung over a Ninth Ave. meat market owned by the father of Bella Stavitsky (you might remember her as Bella Abzug), which was "Live and Let Live."

When Walker was asked if he wanted to be mayor of any other city in America, he asked: "Where else is there?" He asked a reporter if he thought Diogenes was on the level. Taunting cops who were demanding raises, he said, "Show me a cop who can't make extra money in his precinct and I will show you a dumb cop," giving a mayoral wink and a nod to payoffs. Told that a political opponent was being appointed to the Children's Court, he quipped, "Great, now he can be among his peers." When Silent Charlie Murphy left the good earth, Walker said "The brains of Tammany Hall lie buried in Calvary Cemetery."

But he built 40 public schools and firehouses and courthouses and would never think of using a billion dollars of city money to tear down perfectly useful baseball stadiums and build new ones. He was a bon vivant in the Jazz Age, a time when ticker-tape parades were reserved for people like Lucky Lindbergh, who flew solo across the Atlantic in 1927, rather than football players. He was lucky enough to get re-elected (against LaGuardia) in 1929, a few weeks after the market crashed.

Magic Money Box

But his luck ran out when the daily newspapers offered up stories about "Tin Box" Farley, the Sheriff of New York County, who told Seabury that he amassed over a half-million dollars in 10 years on a salary of only $6,000 a year. Foley said he would put the money in his tin box and it would grow. A "magical" box, he described it to a not-very-amused Seabury. When another Walker crony was asked why he placed a $6,000 check in the Mayor's bank account just a few weeks after winning a city contract, the Tammany goodfella said he could not recall because he had burned all his records when he moved into a new house.

Grateful that Walker didn't force him to make a choice between firing Tammany's Mayor or allowing the perception in the national media that he was tolerating corruption, just weeks before the 1932 Democratic convention, FDR convinced LaGuardia to give Walker a $20,000 sinecure as an impartial arbitrator in the garment industry.

There is hope for Spitzer yet. In 1945, the Daily News ran a poll that gave Walker 38 percent of the vote to 30 percent for William O'Dwyer and 25 percent for LaGuardia. Perhaps it was a post-war nostalgia vote for the good old days or a sympathy vote for the man who had made New Yorkers laugh, which the morose LaGuardia was incapable of doing.

Nonetheless, Walker, in frail health, didn't run.

He spent his last years living in a bachelor pad on East End Avenue with the second husband, and the dog, of his former mistress, Betty Compton.

The lesson for "reformers" like Spitzer is clear: if you want to have a mistress, do it in public and don't pay for sex. New York City residents have already decided, much like the voters did with Walker, that the wives of at least one recent Mayor, a former Governor and a former President of the United States, will just learn how to live with the public humiliation. Meanwhile, we can all pray that the hypocrisy of deciding that a sex scandal is more devastating than immigrants being killed by shoddy construction work every other month because of municipal corruption will absolve us of our sins of indifference.