Opinion: It’s long been slippery at the top in NYC government

Unless you happen to be wealthy enough to finance your own campaign, to win an election as mayor may require climbing a greasy pole. If you’re lucky, or unlucky, enough to reach the top, you are likely to become a popular target, with voters holding you responsible for subway crime, high rents and even rats.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams, guilty or not of the federal indictment alleging campaign finance fraud and quid-pro-quo arrangements, knows that better than most. Having no previous managerial experience other than low-powered service as Brooklyn borough president, he must now navigate dangerous shallows without the help of a Democratic “rabbi” or party leader who, so far, appears willing or able to come to his rescue in the fractious party. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was among the first to call for his resignation. It is conservatives – exemplified by The Wall Street Journal and New York Post editorial pages, and Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform – who have been sympathetic.

Lacking the substantial personal bank account of at least one of his predecessors – Michael Bloomberg, who briefly convinced the City Council to abolish mayoral term limits – Adams is drawing comparisons most often with two New York mayors from the past: stylish Jimmy Walker of the Roaring Twenties and the mid-20th-century’s William O’Dwyer, both of whom resigned from office with a cloud of scandal over their heads.

As City Hall-ologists take odds on whether Adams will sink under the weight of the federal investigation, a key difference between then and now is worth considering: In the old days, Democrats like “Beau James” and “Bill-O” served at the pleasure of the city’s powerful county leaders and were protected so long as they benefited the interests, whether nefarious or legitimate, of the hierarchical Tammany Hall machine.

More than the approval of the party bosses, what matters most in our modern political era is raising enough money for political advertising, by hook or perhaps crookedness. This gives candidates who aren’t backed by the political machine a shot at winning an election that didn’t exist for them in the long Tammany era.

Walker served the usually corrupt urban bosses of his era. Before becoming mayor during what F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed the “Jazz Age,” he was a state Senate leader who championed a bill allowing baseball games to be played on Sundays, the traditional worker’s holiday. His 1925 mayoral bid was backed by the popular governor, Al Smith, who supported his protegé for mayor.

Though an icon for fellow Irish Americans, Walker was the “Night Mayor,” as the “boys” in the press called him. Holding little fealty to the so-called Protestant work ethic, he’d change into different bespoke suits multiple times a day. Though married, he painted the town red with a Broadway chorus-girl mistress and furnished a handsome casino-club in Central Park to businessmen and cronies seeking government favors.

Although Walker was known for having written the lyrics to a good old-fashioned ditty, “Will You Love Me in December As You Do in May?”, by the time of the Great Depression, the answer within Tammany Hall was a resounding “No,” and his quick humor, fine neckties and mesmerizing charisma lost their luster. Judge Samuel Seabury, a sober-sided reformer, probed his administration and magistrate’s courts, exposing gangster influence and insider graft that was extraordinarily brazen and pervasive.

Having ignored Smith’s advice not to seek a second term, Walker landed in front of an administrative tribunal, with then-Gov. Franklin Roosevelt, a presidential candidate soon to be elected, presiding.

Bringing stacks of bank books, letters of credit and other documents to the hearings, Seabury demonstrated that a joint stock account into which Walker had personally invested not even a penny of his own money had paid him $246,692. The estimated take overall was $1 million in 1932 dollars.

A Tammany loyalist since he was first elected to the state legislature in 1909, Walker no longer had the man he called “the brains of Tammany Hall,” Charlie Murphy, to intervene for him with Roosevelt, as Murphy died in 1924. Instead, a fumbling and inscrutable organization man, John Curry, sat at the party’s helm when Walker found himself in some very hot water.

Although no criminal wrongdoing was established through the tribunal, Seabury submitted a removal charge to Roosevelt on the grounds that Walker was simply unfit for office. Visibly shaken, “Beau James” pressed an injunction against Roosevelt, only to give in, removing himself to Europe. FDR proceeded with his drive for the White House, with Tammany’s important backing.

A similar fate – resignation – would come to befall O’Dwyer, New York’s 100th mayor, after he assailed a mushrooming investigation by Brooklyn District Attorney Miles McDonald into police corruption, which uncovered $1 million a year in cash bribes from a major-league bookie to hundreds of beat cops and high-ranking supervisors.

But O’Dwyer, elected in 1945 and reelected in 1949, was no Walker. A former Brooklyn DA who busted “Murder Incorporated” – a low-rent killing-for-hire operation for the “Combination,” or mob – he showed public resolve in presiding over a wartime-depleted metropolis. Sponsored by a weakened Tammany Hall, he initiated an inoculation of all city residents after a case of smallpox showed up at the Port Authority. He built temporary homes for thousands of returning veterans and their families and sponsored an unpopular doubling of the nickel subway fare in order to give subway and bus workers a raise.

But questions about O’Dwyer’s probity had loomed ever since his time as district attorney. In 1941, his star witness against the mob, Abe Reles, was found dead on a roof extension of Coney Island’s Half Moon Hotel while under the prosecutor’s protective custody, with the cause of death never established, then or in subsequent investigations.

On the eve of his overwhelming election to City Hall four years later, a grand jury convened by O’Dwyer’s interim replacement as DA, a Republican, accused the mayor of “laxity” and “maladministration” of his district attorney’s office. It was the first of many city, state and federal probes of O’Dwyer’s conduct, none resulting in a finding of criminality with regard to him, yet all adding up to a body blow to his political prospects.

When Bronx leader Edward Flynn, a confidant of President Harry Truman, decided in 1950 that O’Dwyer had to resign, the mayor complied, becoming U.S. ambassador to Mexico in an apparent trade-off. A ticker-tape parade, and a great deal of public surprise and confusion, saw him off.

As different as each man was from the other, Walker and O’Dwyer shared the same unhappy outcomes – exile and ostracization – once they lost the irreplaceable support of major Democratic Party players.

Adams, who denies the charges arrayed against him, may eventually face a similar fate.