MOST OF THE BOSSES OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY, and some of FDR’s own aides, did not think he should actively campaign around the country in the fall. They argued that going to California would be a political mistake.* FDR knew what they were really thinking—that he didn’t have the strength for it. He told them, “There is one reason in favor of my going which has not been brought to your attention and that reason is—I want to!”
But first FDR would have to bring Al Smith back into the Democratic fold. When he ran into Smith a week after the convention at a function, a wire service reporter did the Roosevelt campaign a big favor by inventing a colorful greeting from Smith—“Hello, you old potato!”—which, though untrue, was taken as a sign of rapprochement.
By this point, Al Smith was the least of Roosevelt’s problems inside New York. As governor, FDR had to contend with the Jimmy Walker case, which threatened to derail his campaign. Much ink was spilled claiming that the case would lead to Hoover’s reelection. Instead, it showed the canny judiciousness of the man who would succeed him. FDR proved he could dodge a political land mine.
Jimmy Walker had been elected mayor of New York City in 1925, a charming ribbon-cutter who enjoyed warm relations everywhere, including with a showgirl mistress whom he squired around town without embarrassment. Mayor Walker was a part-time Tin Pan Alley songwriter and full-time dandy whose all-night carousing embodied the speakeasy glamour of the 1920s in New York. He changed outfits four times a day and was impeccably dressed each time, on a budget for clothes alone that exceeded what he made double-dipping as mayor and a state senator. For a man who wore as much cologne as Walker, he still stunk of corruption. The challenge was to prove it.
In 1930, after public reports of scandal, Governor Roosevelt had commissioned an investigation not just of Walker but of the entire municipal government and Tammany Hall. Now the results of the probe were complete and the papers were full of stories about corruption. The charter of the city of New York gave the governor the power to chair a trial-like proceeding to examine the evidence and remove the mayor, at least temporarily, for cause.
Tammany had seen governors and U.S. presidents come and go without hurting its power. The real question was not what Roosevelt could do to Tammany, but the reverse. Would the cold Tammany bosses sit on their hands and let Hoover take New York? This was a genuine risk if FDR removed Walker. At the same time, if he went too easy on the mayor, the rest of the country might think him timid: his equivocating on Walker and Tammany before the Chicago convention was what helped engender that impression of FDR’s weakness in the first place.
The “trial” of Jimmy Walker, the honorable Franklin D. Roosevelt presiding, opened in Albany on August 11, 1932. It was a classic showdown that spurred interest across the nation: governor versus mayor; country versus city; reform versus machine; patrician Protestant versus up-from-the-streets Catholic. Most of all, it pitted a presidential nominee with little reputation outside New York against a wise-cracking politician with a rogue’s charm and a better-than-even bet to make his inquisitor look foolish.
During the three-week trial, the governor showed reporters a side they had not seen. He was tough on Walker’s lawyer for his “dilatory” tactics and showed a command of legal procedure that would have surprised his old law school classmates. Of course the quasi-legal nature of the rare proceeding gave Roosevelt the liberty to make up the rules as he went along, and he did so in a commanding fashion. The New York Times editorialized that he had won “nothing but admiration” for his “firm but impartial” handling of the matter.
As the trial wrapped up, Roosevelt was faced with the question of what to do about Walker. “How would it be if I let the mayor off with a hell of a reprimand?” he asked the Brain Trust. Most thought that would be the smartest move. Then Roosevelt answered his own question: “No, that would be weak.” The governor was vacillating. According to Ed Flynn, who talked with him frequently about Walker, FDR felt the evidence would have to be overwhelming to remove him as mayor, and it wasn’t overwhelming yet.
But the mayor got spooked. “I think Roosevelt is going to remove me,” Walker told a friend. “Papa [FDR] made me eat my spinach.” No one knows exactly what motivated Jimmy Walker on the last weekend of August 1932. It may have been news of the death of his brother from tuberculosis. Or perhaps Al Smith’s dismissive advice—“You’re through”—had sunk in. In any event, he telegraphed his resignation as mayor of New York.
Even this did not set FDR free of the case. As soon as he quit, Walker launched a verbal assault on his interlocutor, comparing him to King George III for his “assertions of arbitrary power” in the “mock trial.” He immediately announced that he would take the matter to the voters by becoming a candidate for reelection in a special mayoral contest scheduled for November. James Hagerty of The New York Times (later President Eisenhower’s press secretary) wrote that a Walker candidacy meant that FDR “may lose the Presidency entirely on the Walker issue.” It was an example of how something that today is widely assumed to be a foregone conclusion—an FDR victory over Hoover—was not seen that way at the time. Polling was new, which made political prognosticating mostly guesswork.
At the end of the summer, Walker sailed for Europe to be with his mistress, intending to return for the state party convention. But while he was gone, the Catholic hierarchy of New York City, scandalized by his flagrant adultery, decided that it could not countenance another Walker candidacy. Like many other politicians, Walker’s fate was sealed by sex more than money.
Because Walker had quit, FDR would not look strong for slaying “the Tammany Tiger.” But he would not look weak, either. New York State would be solidly behind him in November. Herbert Hoover was finished, even if he didn’t know it yet.
*The 1916 GOP candidate, Charles Evans Hughes, had famously lost by a whisker to Woodrow Wilson after he campaigned in California without including Progressive Republican governor Hiram Johnson in his entourage. By 1932, Johnson was still in politics, representing California in the Senate, but he posed no threat to FDR.