Jimmy Walker

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  James John Walker was remembered as Jimmy Walker and nicknamed Beau James. He once said a reformer is a guy who rides through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat. The line captures a man who led New York City for six years with wit, charm, and an open tolerance for other people's vices. He eventually resigned amid a corruption scandal. How did a man with little patience for policy rise through New York's most powerful political machine to lead the nation's largest city? And what turned the very qualities that made him beloved into the evidence that ended his career?

• 2. From Lyrics To Lawmaking

  ›

  William H. Walker, an Irish-born carpenter and lumberyard owner, was Jimmy's father and a Democratic assemblyman and alderman from Greenwich Village. His political standing contradicts stories that Walker grew up poor. Walker struggled as a student and left college without graduating, later completing a law degree at New York Law School in 1904. Though his father wanted him to become a lawyer and politician, Walker preferred writing songs and working in the music business. In 1906 he wrote the lyrics for a hit called Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May, with composer Ernest Ball.

  Walker entered politics in 1909, three years after that songwriting success, and did not pass the bar exam until 1912. He served in the New York State Assembly for New York County's 5th district in 1910, 1911, 1912, 1913, and 1914. From 1915 to 1925 he sat in the New York State Senate, holding seats across eleven consecutive legislatures, the 138th through the 148th. He was the chamber's Minority Leader from 1920 to 1922. He then served as Temporary President of the State Senate from 1923 to 1924, followed by another term as Minority Leader in 1925. Throughout his Senate years, Walker was a vocal opponent of Prohibition, a position he would carry into City Hall.

• 3. Allies And Enemies

  ›

  Robert Moses, later a renowned urban planner but then a reformist activist and ally of Governor Al Smith, stood beside Walker on the Senate floor. Moses held no official position in the chamber, so he had to kneel beside Walker's desk instead of sitting in a chair. He fed Walker arguments and facts to use against Republican opponents. On issues like these, author Robert Caro wrote, 'Walker had no patience to master.' Moses also carried messages to Walker on Governor Smith's behalf.

  Ellwood Rabenold, a reformist Democrat elected to the State Senate, tested Walker's tolerance in 1923 by threatening the party's one-vote majority. Rabenold refused to support a bill Democrats viewed as essential and then attacked Walker's character. Walker responded by vowing to 'ruin' Rabenold and spent the rest of the term working to force him out of politics. He succeeded, and showed no remorse for ending Rabenold's career. Walker's willingness to use raw power against a fellow Democrat did not go unnoticed by the party bosses who would soon decide his political future.

• 4. The Road To City Hall

  ›

  By 1925, Walker was ready to challenge Mayor John Francis Hylan for the Democratic nomination in that year's race for Mayor of New York. Walker's reputation as a flamboyant man-about-town, seen at legitimate theaters and illegal speakeasies alike, made him a hero to many working-class voters. His valet would later pack 43 suits for a single Europe trip in August 1927, a token of that same taste for excess. That reputation for tolerating corruption, though, made him suspect to middle-class and moralistic voters.

  Governor Alfred E. Smith became Walker's mentor and a staunch supporter. Smith backed him because Walker supported social welfare legislation, the legalization of boxing, and repeal of Sunday blue laws against baseball. Walker had also condemned the Ku Klux Klan publicly. Their shared opposition to Prohibition strengthened the alliance further.

  Smith understood that beating Hylan required guiding nearly every move Walker made, and he used Tammany Hall's machine to help secure the win. Walker also had to provide at least a cover for his personal indiscretions. He chose that route rather than reform, moving his visits with chorus girls into a penthouse funded by Tammany Hall. Walker defeated Hylan in the Democratic primary, then beat Republican candidate Frank D. Waterman in the general election to become mayor. The machine that elected him would expect plenty back once he held the office.

• 5. Mayor Of The Jazz Age

  ›

  In his first year in office, Walker created the Department of Sanitation and unified New York's public hospitals. He improved parks and playgrounds across the city. He also guided the Board of Transportation into a contract for an expanded subway system, the Independent Subway System, known as the IND. New highways and a dock built for superliners followed under his administration. Despite a threatened strike by transit workers, Walker kept the subway fare at five cents.

  As mayor, Walker challenged the Eighteenth Amendment by replacing the police commissioner with an inexperienced former state banking commissioner. The new commissioner immediately dissolved the Special Service Squad. Since Walker did not consider drinking a crime, he discouraged police from actively enforcing Prohibition. He made exceptions only for excessive violations or cases likely to draw press attention. Speakeasies multiplied across the city throughout his term.

  His affairs with chorus girls were widely known, and he eventually left his wife, Janet, for the showgirl Betty Compton. In 1928, Anna Anderson, the best known impostor claiming to be Anastasia Romanov, arrived in New York City for the first time. She was publicly denied by the exiled Romanov family and returned to Germany in 1931, both events falling within Walker's mayoralty. Walker would soon face voters again, just as the country's economy was about to turn against him.

• 6. Downfall

  ›

  Walker won re-election in 1929 by an overwhelming margin, defeating Republican Fiorello H. La Guardia and Socialist Norman Thomas. The stock market crash of 1929 quickly turned his fortunes downward. Patrick Joseph Hayes, the Cardinal Archbishop of New York, denounced Walker. He suggested that Walker's personal and political tolerance for 'girlie magazines' and casinos had helped cause the downturn. That denunciation was among the reasons Tammany Hall eventually withdrew its support. Even so, Walker endorsed Al Smith for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1932.

  Judge Samuel Seabury led the investigative committee, known as the Seabury Commission or the Hofstadter Committee, that eventually forced Walker to testify. Rising social unrest had triggered the inquiry into corruption inside his administration. Walker brought about his own downfall by accepting large sums of money from businessmen seeking municipal contracts.

  One surprise witness in the Seabury investigation was Vivian Gordon. She testified that women were falsely arrested and accused of prostitution by the New York City Police Department. She also said police officers received extra money in their paychecks. After she testified, Gordon was found strangled in a park in the Bronx. The killing showed New Yorkers that corruption could carry deadly consequences, and it raised suspicion that Walker might bear some responsibility for her death.

  Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt faced his own dilemma as New York City became a national symbol of corruption under Walker. The state constitution allowed Roosevelt to remove an elected mayor, but doing so risked losing Tammany Hall's support for his presidential nomination. Letting Walker off, though, risked making Roosevelt look weak to the national press.

  Facing that pressure, Walker dodged questions about his personal bank accounts, describing the money he had received as 'beneficences' rather than bribes. He delayed appearing in person until after Roosevelt secured the Democratic nomination. Once that nomination was locked in, Roosevelt moved to remove Walker from office. Walker resigned on the 1st of September 1932, only months before the national election. Betty Compton, the woman he had left his marriage for, would join him in the fallout that followed.

• 7. Life After The Mayoralty

  ›

  Betty Compton, his Ziegfeld girl, accompanied Walker on a grand tour of Europe after his resignation. On the 12th of November 1932, aboard the SS Conte Grande, Walker announced he had 'no desire or intention of ever holding public office again.' He remained abroad until the danger of criminal prosecution seemed to fade, marrying Compton in Cannes, France, during that time.

  After returning to the United States, Walker became head of Majestic Records, a label whose roster included performers such as Louis Prima and Bud Freeman. He and Compton adopted two children, Mary Ann Walker and James J. Walker. In 1940, Walker hosted his own radio program on WHN, Jimmy Walker's Opportunity Hour, with Henry Gladstone as announcer. That same year, Compton filed for divorce, which became final on the 15th of March 1941.

  Walker died on the 18th of November 1946, at age 65, of a brain hemorrhage. He was interred in Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York. Years earlier, as a state senator, he had sponsored the 'Walker Law' legalizing boxing in New York. The boxing community later honored him, inducting him into the International Boxing Hall of Fame and awarding him the Edward J. Neil Trophy in 1945. He also spent many summers at Atlantic Beach, New York, both during and after his mayoralty, through his friendship with the town's founder, William Austin.

  A 1985 survey ranked Walker as the fourth-worst American big-city mayor in office since 1820. Historians, political scientists, and urban experts took part, led by Melvin G. Holli of the University of Illinois at Chicago. A follow-up edition of the same survey in 1993 ranked him third-worst. That reputation for failure did little to stop songwriters, filmmakers, and playwrights from turning his story into entertainment.

• 8. Beau James On Stage And Screen

  ›

  Bob Hope starred as Walker in the 1957 film Beau James, a romanticized account of his mayoral tenure. The film offered a fairly accurate picture of a man who, during his years as mayor, embodied the jazz age's romantic spirit. It was based on a biography also titled Beau James, written by Gene Fowler. Dean Martin recorded a song with the same title, presenting an even more idealized, romantic take on Walker's time in office. That same book also inspired Jimmy, a stage musical about Walker. It ran briefly on Broadway from October 1969 to January 1970, starring Frank Gorshin as Walker and Anita Gillette as Betty Compton. Walker's legacy surfaces once more in Fiorello, another Broadway musical, in a song titled 'Gentleman Jimmy.' Decades after his resignation, that song keeps the nickname Gentleman Jimmy alive on stages far from City Hall.