National Affairs: Scandals of New York

James John (“Jimmy”) Walker, New York City’s glib, pinchbeck little Mayor, had to appear in court last week. He was not on trial personally, just a witness. Yet he was on trial politically because the case was that of a city magistrate charged with buying his position from Tammany Hall, of which Mayor Walker is currently the chief official product. The scandal of George F. Ewald, judge of the Traffic Court, was another climax in a long series of Democratic scandals which mischance and political adversaries had been exposing all through Mayor Walker’s administration. Leading up to the Ewald scandal, other items were as follows:

¶ The president of the borough of Queens, Maurice E. Connolly, had been jailed for fat sewer-contract graft (TIME, May 19).

¶ A judge of the General Sessions Court. Francis Xavier Mancuso, had been forced from the bench for lending his name, in which the Italian populace put great store, to shady City Trust Co., which crashed.

¶ The State Superintendent of Banks. Frank H. Warder, also had been cast out because of the City Trust failure.

¶ Another judge, Albert H. Vitale, had been discovered consorting with crooks & gamblers and was removed from office.

¶ The chief probation officer of the State General Sessions Court, Edwin J. Cooley, had been suspended from office and indicted for favoritism and misappropriation of funds and resigned in disfavor, although later whitewashed by a grand jury.

¶ A Kings County judge, W. Bernard (“Bernie”) Vause had been sentenced to six years in jail for stock-swindling by mail with Columbia Finance Corp., a pseudo-bank into which many poor people put savings.

¶ The chairman of the Board of Standards & Appeals, William E. Walsh, was standing trial on a charge of accepting gratuities for building-permit arrangements and had been indicted for concealing these gratuities from Government income-tax collectors.

¶ The Public Administrator of Staten Island, James W. Hennessey, had been indicted for a $35,000 deficit in his accounts.

¶ Judge George F. Ewald of the Traffic Court, prior to being suspected of job-buying, was indicted for selling stock by mail in Cotter Butte Mines, Inc., a company whose real holdings are said by U. S. agents to be “nothing but a hole in the ground.” He resigned from the bench last month.

Badminton. Before all these conditions had been revealed, Republican leaders in the State Legislature and Democratic Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt began playing political badminton with suggestions that New York City be investigated. While Governor Roosevelt temporized, Republican U. S. Attorney Charles H. Tuttle, aspirant for the gubernatorial nomination next autumn, was busy. He it was who brought the Vause, Walsh and Ewald cases to light, leaving the public to draw the political inference. He it was who startled Mayor Walker into starting an “investigation” of his own last month, supervised by his Commissioner of Accounts, James A. Higgins.

“A Trivial Thing.” With an air of determined rectitude, the Mayor summoned his 38 department chiefs to the City Hall and spoke over their heads to the electorate via the municipal radio station (WNYC). He said in part:

“Corruption and dishonesty and crime are not administrative and partisan. They are personal and individual. . . . Be not disturbed by political propaganda. . . . The Republican party of this State has not an issue to go into the next campaign. . . . I know that a trivial thing, if dressed up . . . will gather a world of importance. . . . Go back to your jobs tomorrow morning and believe it is more important to keep your nose to the grindstone than your ear to the ground.”

Much of the effect of this speech was spoiled when Commissioner Higgins announced that he would require no self-incriminating testimony from the officials subpenaed before him. Immediately the entire Press (including the arch-Democratic World and Everting World) cried out against the Walker regime. Flayed were the laissez faire methods of the administration, the “Tammany investigation of Tammany.” Cartoonist Rollin Kirby of the World turned one phrase of the flashy-dressing, wisecracking Mayor into an exquisite pillory (see cut). In this crisis, the Mayor loudly reprimanded— for “inefficiency”—his Chiefs of the Department of Markets and Bureau of Weights & Measures, protectors of the city’s food-buyers.

Ewald Trial. Meanwhile Attorney Tuttle had presented to both Federal and county grand juries evidence t’hat Judge Ewald (yet to be tried on the mail-fraud charge) had bought his seat on the bench for $10,000, which his pretty wife had paid to a Tammany district leader. Before the Federal jury, Mrs. Ewald and the Tammany leader refused to testify on the ground that it might incriminate them; before the county jury, however, they eagerly related that the $10,000 was a friendly loan ($5,000 in cash, $5,000 by a check drawn to a third party; no security) to help the Tammany man buy a country house. Mayor Walker, having appointed Ewald, was subpenaed to explain how and why he had done so.

Before the Mayor took the stand, the New York County District Attorney, Thomas C. T. Grain, good Tammany man, questioned him out of court. Republicans howled that this was a farcical “dress rehearsal.” Next day, dressed his nattiest, talking his cockiest, Mayor Walker entered the courtroom with a grin. The jury applauded. He declared that Ewald had had such influence behind him that paying out money would have been unnecessary and ridiculous. “If he voluntarily contributed any money for that appointment,” said the Mayor, “he might just as well have thrown it in a sewer, for all the good it did him.” Pretty Mrs. Ewald also testified. The jury adjourned without indicting her husband.

Next Act. Public opinion, forcefully expressed by famed Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise, instantly demanded that Governor Roosevelt review the Ewald case. The Governor sent for the trial records the same day. The New York Bar Association also urged the Governor to action. Worried Prosecutor Grain said he might instruct the grand jury to indict Ewald after all. Observers suspected he was acting under instructions. The spotlight thus shifted from Manhattan to Albany and the next act in New York’s “Scandals of 1930” promised to feature the two gubernatorial aspirants. Roosevelt and Tuttle, playing opposite each other in the skit entitled: “How bad are Mayor Walker & friends?”