TLIAD: The Crapgames of New York

"Beau James" or "Smilin' Jim", or "Wet Jimmy" Walker, was the mayor New York City wanted in the 1920’s, but whether or not he was what they deserved was another matter. A liberal reformer, he centralized government services from the sewers and subways to the hospitals and saw the birth of the modern city’s welfare system. A Tammany man who had paid his dues voting the right way every time, every term in the State Assembly up in Albany, he also helped organize crime, helped make New York a city of scofflaws and handed out patronage jobs to all as he drank and played cards at the highly illegal and highly non-existent casino in Central Park, where he was also just as quick to order the NYPD to crack heads at Klan rallies.

A mayor who was always seen with a Broadway showgirl and nearly never his own wife, Walker was despised by Conservatives, political reformers, and dries. He was just as beloved --- or at least grudgingly supported --- by social reformers, Tammany and the machines that served under it in the other boroughs, the city’s poorer classes and depending on who you asked Organized Crime, and most certainly the Newspapers to whom he always was good copy.

Everything came to an end though in 1928. Proof has never been found that Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt coordinated an attack, but none the less, while she was touring the country trying to coordinate a Know-Nothing revival against New York Governor Al Smith, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Charles H. Tuttle suddenly found that Walker was corrupt. This startling revelation was constantly sent out across the nation, and as accusation turned to indictment was followed by trial, no one in the United States was allowed to forget that Walker was Al Smith’s right hand man.

As the Feds closed in, and the indignity of prison rapidly approached the Tammany man, Jimmy Walker emptied his bank accounts, thanked his supporters, left a resignation on his desk and skipped out of the country with his latest showgirl girlfriend, his administration coming to an abrupt end only months before he would have faced reelection. He would remain in Paris for the most part, until 1940. Al Smith would go onto lose the election handily in November, taking New York, Massachusetts, and only half of the Solid South. Charles H. Tuttle would go on to be elected Governor of New York. Mabel Walker Willebrandt would be rewarded for her anti-Catholic smear campaign by becoming the first female cabinet member when her nomination received Senate consent in 1929.
​

The quiet, somber, and illegal departure of Jimmy Walker from New York, accompanied as he was by his beautiful mistress, every donation or kickback he’d ever pocketed, all of his political allies, two thirds of the New York Press Corps, a full marching band, and a throng of common supporters who loved him for the good works he’d done and any onlooker who happened to be in that part of Manhattan that day, closed a chapter on New York State history.

Or perhaps the proper term is, began a brief interlude. While Walker entered a noble exile, and Al Smith was forced to look out the windows of his campaign train at burning crosses throughout the Nation, Tammany Hall counted themselves lucky to have been able to secure a series of proper resignations that saw City Corporation Counsel, Judge John P. O’Brien, become the new Acting Mayor.

O’Brien was a man of few words whose only advantage over the previous members of the City Counsel was that he was one of that breed of reform-minded Democrats who accepted things as they were. While he never got rich taking kickbacks, O’Brien was just as loyal to the Tammany Machine as he was a clean political operative.

And with Al Smith’s campaign on the line and a special election called to finish out the term, O’Brien only had to fix the problem of New York being seem to the rest of the nation as a corrupt, wet, den of papism and sin.

And that is what Judge John is remembered for. While the voters of New York continued to drink homemade wine, “accidentally” create beer from store goods, and of course visit their favorite drinking establishments from the Whites Only Cotton Club to their neighbor’s bathtub fuelled basement, the NYPD went on the crusading warpath. Tammany ward bosses tried to notify everyone they could but arrests were needed. Speakeasies across the city were busted every day, every night, every hour. Even a few mob arrests took place here and there, with even poor, suffering Arnold “The Brain” Rothstein having to endure the indignity of spending the week before and after the election on Riker’s Island.

Mind you O’Brien’s lasting legacy to the office was to reorganize the tax system in the city, and working to clean up, once and for all the finances of the city. None of it mattered though, Tammany had no interest in running him for his own term in the upcoming special election, and the people of New York were always going to remember him more for unleashing the NYPD. In the end O’Brien would leave the Mayor’s office as quickly as he entered it, reward would come in 1935 when the Democrats would return to power in Albany and secure him a Judgeship.
​

Opposition to Tammany Hall crossed party lines, the Republicans of New York had always presented themselves as the Anti-Corruption party, going back to their introduction to the city after a generation of Whiggish retreat as the party that would de-Irishify policing in the city. Having never been able to truly build themselves up in the city after the Draft Riots--- even Theodore Roosevelt would lose his attempt to be mayor, coming in third place --- they never had to abandon the anti-corruption line in the face of governing realities. The same was true for the “Reform” or “National” Democrats who in the era following either Bryan or Wilson depending on one’s views, had no time for Tammany’s use of what Plunkitt called “Honest Graft”. Inevitably in the face of constant defeats both factions eventually used the peculiarities of the New York political system to come together in election-year alliances.

As a result of the marriage of “clean” Democrats and Republicans, the GOP nomination process was dominated by the need to find the right man to maintain the pact. In 1928, that man was East Harlem Congressmen Fiorello H. LaGuardia. One time interpreter at Ellis Island, and WWI Bomber Pilot, LaGuardia was known at the time as a “Sawed off Mussolini” due to comments he had made in flights of romanticism about Il Duce while he’d been President of the Board of Alderman in the early 1920’s. In spite of this LaGuardia was a known liberal, and a wet, who was simultaneously tough on all crime.

LaGuardia’s first year in office was dominated by the need for him to prep for the regular election that was due to take place only 365 days after the first. With this in mind, the Little Flower dove in at once to the job, seeking to force every reform he’d ever dreamed of in place. All the while complaining to Hoover that the Volstead Act needed to be repealed.

New Yorkers adapted. Watching LaGuardia fight with Manhattan District Attorney Banton --- loyal to Tammany to his core --- was more than enough entertainment to deal with the fact that the cops were occasionally going to have to shut down your favorite club for a few weeks. And of Course, LaGuardia sought to force though civil service reform, which was popular even with the economy doing well.

Tammany called in the 1929 election for a return to “proven government” and for a free and diverse city in the face of the WASP-Republican actions of the previous year. LaGuardia, half-Catholic half-Jewish was able to shrug that off enough, and was blunt enough, and had enough of the common touch to beat off the still-popular, pre-Walker, Tammany Democrat, former Mayor John F. Hylan who was called out of retirement to retake New York for the machine as he had done in 1917.

The trouble started a few blocks away from City hall just before the election, when the bottom finally came out of the tub and the Stock Market collapsed. LaGuardia though was quick to launch an audit of the city, and declared that everything was well in the financial health of the city, his promises to not be dictated to by failed bankers was a boost a few weeks later in the 1929 municipal elections but as time wore on the trouble got much worse.

By 1930 unemployment in New York City was climbing at an alarming rate, while the Hoover administration veered between the President’s pressuring of Congress to launch investigations and seek reforms and Treasury Secretary Mellon’s faith that all would soon be well as long as nothing was poked, LaGuardia sought to take matters into his own hands.

But across 1930 and 1931 the money was not forthcoming. Work projects were started in miniature but city finances were limited and loans weren't coming from any corner. Nothing LaGuardia could due was enough to stem the tide. City jobs and work programs didn’t come close to cutting the unemployment rate and city soup kitchens, public and private and those controlled by the likes of Arnold Rothstein were pushed to their limits. Malnutrition became a crisis in the school system, the former site of the Central Park Casino, was now at the heart of the sprawling shanty collection in the heart of the city that was either referred to as Hooverville, Mellontown, or LaGuardia City.

LaGuardia was often in Albany, lobbying new Governor Tuttle to increase aid spending, in spite of the former Attorney’s view that financial security was the key for the state to make it through the storm. Nothing came from Washington. And then in the early months of 1931 the first bank collapse of the Depression finally occurred when the Bank of the United States was found to have been pilfered over the years by its owners whom had turned the Bronx based bank into a ponzi scheme, seeking to con the cities immigrants with the false sense that the bank was somehow connected to the Federal government. The result was a bank panic across the city, and soon the nation and the world. And in the midst of all of that came the news that the city of New York was an investor in the Bank of the United States too. And that Walker, O’Brien, and LaGuardia some $2.5 Million dollars had been saved up, and that it was all gone.

Corruption overnight was replaced by financial horror as the symbol of the city government, and while LaGuardia was able to force through a major investigation by the City, the State and the Justice Department into the actions of the BUS, even he knew it was over. 1931 would be a year of constant lobbying and fireside chats. LaGuardia’s declaration that Mellon’s message to the city was to “Drop Dead” led not only to a libel suit but to even worse relations between the Liberal mayor and the Conservatives and Old-Style Progressives of his party in Albany and Washington.

In 1932 relief finally started to arrive in New York, as the city was a prime target, with its twenty plus percent unemployment, for aid from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the Emergency Relief and Construction Act. But it still wasn’t enough. When the Democrats won the White House, Senate and House in 1932 there was a spot of hope, but even with a new President calling for major reforms it was far too late for LaGuardia. In the Republican Primary of 1933 he was unceremoniously dumped for Parks Commissioner Robert Moses. The Fusion Democrats having long since deserted him, LaGuardia was washed away, just as he was by his fellow party members whom he had so heartily opposed in a national wave of Reform Democrats in 1932/33.

Moses would lose the Mayoral Race and lose his various state and city posts.He would go on to become a United States Senator years later. Hoover would be unceremoniously dumped in 1932, only recovering a part of his reputation as a foreign policy adviser for presidents of both parties from 1941 onwards. LaGuardia would take his defeat and secure for himself then nomination of the New York Labor Party in 1936, winning back his own seat. He would sit as a third party Congressmen until his death.​

Joseph V. McKee (Democrat / Labor)
January 1st 1934 to December 31st 1941​

The only thing that was more entertaining to watch than the fight between former allies in the Republican Party in 1933 was the fight between factions of the Democratic Party. LaGuardia had failed, Tammany was more than ready to get right back into things, and the Reform Democrats were caught between sticking with Moses, whose credentials for reform came hand in hand with his close alliance with Tammany Sachem Smith and the Tammany pick, the moderate opponent of corrupt graft, Edward J. Flynn.

In the midst of the quandary though a third option presented himself, Joseph V. McKee, former High School teacher turned City Alderman. Announcing himself first to be a candidate of a “Reform Party” he quickling lept into things winning the support of first the American Labor Party and then rallying Democrats throughout the city into a primary victory against Flynn. While the night of the election a quiet peace would be made between McKee and Tammany, who were assured that while patronage was going to be rolled back, they were still going to have “a place at the table”.

McKee was the first United Democratic candidate in the city since before consolidation, and as such was virtually unbeatable. First things first, McKee would meet with his new counterpart in Albany, the recently elected Franklin D. Roosevelt, and began planning their pitch to Washington. They need not have waited, one year into his administration, President Hull’s programs already being called “The New Deal” were finally getting out of the Congress and out to the nation at large. The result was that not even New Yorker’s natural dissatisfaction with Vice President Curley could stop them from cheering as the old Bostonian arrived to announce that New York would be a testbed for the New Work’s Progress administration.

McKee became over the next eight years a popular, and ever present force in New York City along with Tammany man and WPA City Directory James Farley. McKee sought to create new parks, oversaw a major expansion of the subway system, and saw the expansion of Barren Island Airport as the city's first municipal airfield and the construction of the North Shore Seaplaneport. The construction of public housing in Brooklyn and the Bronx would serve to employ and protect the workers of New York. Children from New York would go off to serve in the NYA planting trees and building state parks in the Hudson Valley and co-ops were created which saw musicians, artists, and writers using the cultural capital of the city to record and create.

The McKee era is remembered for the mass art deco constructions which were build as city-subsidized projects in his era, with the Roosevelt Center and the Opdyke Theater joining the likes of the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings and Rockefeller Center.

Eventually, things would get better. And luckily for New York, eventually soon the world began to go to Shit. The first warning signs were the rise of the German-American Bund, and their constant rallies, including their infamous showing under the banner of Washington in Madison Square Garden and the active work of the Jewish American War Veterans to club all their heads in, which would eventually peak with the Battle of Southern Boulevard in October of 1939 when the JAWV, Communists, the ALP, and and huge numbers of local residents responded to a Bundist march with guns, clubs, and bats. The fight between the two rapidly started to turn into a massacre until McKee ordered the NYPD to drag out the surviving Bundists into the paddywagons until they were killed too.

The next would be in the spring of 1939 when the S.S. St. Louis arrived in the city with hundreds of Jewish refugees from Europe seeking to avoid the coming massacre of the Third Reich. McKee was a vigarous supporter of letting the refugees settle in the United States. Hull was unwilling to budge on the issue but in the end its viewed that McKee was an important player in having Hull convince Havana to grant them refugee status, which in turn would save a few thousand over the next year from the camps.

Soon though that era of escape came to an end, In August of 1939 the Nazi’s invaded Poland and the Second World War began. McKee would be, like many New Yorkers ready to see the Nazi’s get curbstomped as soon as possible. And even as the US was still neutral, to make money off of defeating the Nazi’s was so much the better.

In the era between 1939 and the Japanese attacks on Luzon and Hawaii on December 7/8th 1941 the City of New York found a level of prosperity it hadn’t seen in a decade. Shipping, manufacturing, shipbuilding and repair became massive boons on the city, as France sought to build itself on, and eventually Britain fought to survive alone. McKee’s support for the Pro-Allied Stance would play a key roll in shifting the New York delegation behind Paul V. McNutt, who in turn would pick Governor Franklin Roosevelt as his VP.

McKee would in turn also support New Yorkers going to Canada to join the fight, making him an arch enemy of the America First movement that rose across the nation in 1940/41. Under his administration New York again would become the “enemy” to many in America, no longer a Wet Papist hole but now the site of Bankers and Politicos who sought to drag the nation into another war.

In the end though, war came, and the city that McKee rebuilt would play a massive role in the fight that would follow. McKee would serve as McNutt’s US Ambassador to Ireland in 1943-1945, overseeing that Nation’s slow, overly delayed shift into entering the war in 1945 just before Western Allied and Soviet troops would meet in Czechoslovakia. James Farley would serve as Vice President Roosevelt’s Chief of Staff, and Tammany would return to prominence as a key player in the 1941 Democratic Primary.​

William O’Dwyer (Democrat (Tammany) / Labor)
January 1st 1942 to December 31st 1949​

Tammany Hall had waited, longer than they ever have waited before to come back. And in the final days of American peace, after more than a decade, they were able to secure the Democratic primary and then easily swept aside an attempt by reform Democrats reform the fusion alliance after convincing the Republicans to accept reform Democrat Wendell Willkie for their own nomination.

Bill O’Dwyer, Irish immigrant, former Cop turned lawyer turned Tammany’s Kings County DA turned into a wildly popular mayor initially. O’Dwyer would see a rapid transformation to full war footing, and helped make sure that the people, and Tammany Hall were capable of earning better lives from it. Factories transformed themselves from making juke boxes and radiators and hubcaps to grease guns, bazookas, and rifles.

Hundreds of Thousands of American boys departed for North Africa, Europe, and the Pacific from the docks of New York aboard the USS West Point (Former SS America), the USS Lafayette (Former SS Normandie, converted into a troop transport in the city) and the RMS Queen Elizabeth whom all once steamed into the city with the well dressed passengers of peacetime. They were joined by millions of tons of supplies, food, and combat systems which sailed from great convoys which in massive numbers either started, ended, assembled or at least passed through New York.

There were issues though, the depression and wartime rationing created by the end of 1942 a housing crisis unsurpassed in New York’s history to go along with wartime prosperity that hadn’t been seen since the Civil War. The New York City Police Department experienced a brain drain as officers of all ranks left to go serve from Normandy to Guadalcanal. Nevermind, there was the critical need to organize the rationing system, and prepare for civil defense.

The solution to all of this proved to be a simple one: Tammany Hall.

O’Dwyer a former cop himself was glad enough to see the return of the patronage cop, with variously ineligible for combat officers old and new were joined by young men from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Upstate New York who were given a quick traning regime, a badge and were sent out into a new and unfamiliar city, east coast counterparts for the “Okie LAPD” in the other great entrepot of the war.

Housing was another problem, but Tammany management of a New York City Housing Control Board would see subunits multiply and a Long Island attempt to prefabricate a basic house which had began in 1940 called Levittown was torn down and more or less rebuilt in Queens with material already purchased by the developer. Queens being better as a trolley car suburb area than a more distant point which would have required auto transport. This did little to solve the crisis though, but it certainly made good press, and both Levit and Sons and select others made handsomely off the move.

Rationing in term was organized on the Ward level. No one, or at least “No One” ever earned got more than their fair share but no one ever went without. Tammany Bosses, with Honest Graft being the watchword once more, with corruption never being allowed by the aging Al Smith to go beyond “The War Level”.

City Days of Prayer and Thanksgiving came with the fall of Bataan, the North African Landings, after Midway, the Invasion of Italy, and Normandy. Reelection came as American troops were driving back to Manila and into the Low Countries in late 1944. Telegrams delivered by cabbies and Western Union became the nightmare that wouldn’t go away. Then, in April of 1945 came a Day of Prayer when Ireland finally came in on the side of the angels. Another day of prayer when the word came that Hitler was dead and Europe was free. Then came the founding meeting of the UN, the funeral of Vice President Roosevelt, and at long last: Victory. Bill O’Dwyer’s most famous image would be the sight of him weeping outside St. Patrick’s on VJ Day. Soon some 900,000 New Yorkers would return home. Thousands of their peers, in the Army, Army Air Corps, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard and Merchant Marine lay at the bottom of the seas and in hallowed graves at places no New Yorker had ever heard of before but which they would never forget.

O’Dwyer’s second term would see a peacetime housing boom, and continued economic prosperity thanks to the work of Treasury Secretary Morganthau. The United States was the only great power in the world that’s industry hadn’t been ravaged, and despite U-Boats at the Narrows, New York was no different. From its ports would now steam food to a starving world, the Eisenhower Aid Program seeing Europe rebuild itself with the help of the United States and New York City specifically. Housing exploded, with trolley and railway expansion seeing the distant reaches of Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens rapidly turn into small collections of houses and apartments.

But as the peacetime boom went on, and with Al Smith in his grave, Tammany probably went too far. No one forgot the images of Ward Bosses and the Mayor eating well at the finest restaurants. No one forgot how some people just so happened to find themselves designated “war essential” to the Housing Boards. How redneck cops hadn’t taken too well to the idea of “Live and Let Live” in Harlem. With solutions to those problems slow to return in the post-war days, pressure against the mayor and for reform resumed in a City GOP empowered by new voters moved into the city and by new forces outside both of the main parties. And thus in the dying days of his administration Tammany would find itself on the defensive once more.

O’Dwyer’s attempt at a Third Term would end with more scandals than were probably likely, but in the years that would follow his sins of omission and participation began to fade, in their place was the image of the Mayor in his tin helmet working the air raid siren over city hall in a drill, the one who paid for free drinks for servicemen out of pockets in every bar he ever frequented, the man who shook hands of returning troops till his fingers bled --- an irony considering what followed. His quiet retirement would do him well, as he returned to his townhouse in Brooklyn to enjoy reading, writing newspaper columns and the normal perks of being a former Tammany mayor: the best tables and the best drinks in every house. Many years later O’Dwyer would be remembered more than anything for that wartime service, with a popular biography branding him for posterity as “The City’s General”.

O'Dwyer would die, rehabilitated and respected in 1964, with the current Mayor, a fellow Tammany Man eulogizing on his brave and selfless leadership. Wendell Wilkie would serve as the Special Ambassador in Charge of the Office for Coordination of Commercial and Cultural Relations between the American Republics. a wartime organization with an unwieldy name which worked simply to maintain alliances and friendly neutrality with Latin America in the second world war, he would die shortly after retiring at his home, in the start of 1946, rumors of his affair with Eva Peron are most definitively historical. The RMS Queen Elizibeth and USS West Point would survive their wartime, unescorted troop runs to return to civilian service, the USS Lafayette would be sunk by an Italian U-Boat in the Mediterranean in 1943 in the lead up to the Invasion of Sicily, in a disaster that would lead to the complete reorganization of armada defense for the invasion of Normandy a year later. The reinvention of Times Square as a collection of Bars, Peep Shows, Clubs and "Servicemen-targeted" Shops would remain intact for decades to come. Levit and Sons' attempt to recreate their Pre-war housing plan of the prefabricated town in New Jersey would end in bankruptcy, the image of the town spread across the nation as a "Rural Slum" would play a huge role in the founding of the Federal Department of Housing in 1949.​

Robert F. Wagner, Jr. (National Citizen’s / Liberal / Labor / Fusion / Republican)
January 1st 1950 to December 31st 1953​

World War II didn’t make New York City, but it did transform it.

The Great Migrations of African Americans and Puerto Ricans reached new heights as those communities joined hundreds of thousands of others who came to the city to work at the war factories, the docks, and the services that kept them going. Besides precipitating the largest housing crisis in the nation's history, they would transform New York, the political, cultural, culinary, social and economic landscape being remade as the most linguistically diverse city in the world added dozens more dialects, accents, and languages to its repertoire. And with that change in mind, these new New Yorkers did what every German, Irish, Italian, Polish or Jewish Russian to settle in the city having made it off the dock had done before them, they organized. In some instances, the old machine in Harlem for example, organizations joined the machine with ease. In other instances it was clear for new groups that the old machine mechanisms had no interest in working with the new, why learn Spanish when you can keep with the Irish?

And then there were the servicemen. A million or so New Yorkers had gone to war, doing inglorious work on Liberty Ships, carrying rifles into swamps and up mountains and across machine gun swept beaches, flying supplies over “The Hump” and Ordinance over Berlin, manning cannon and machine gun and depth charge in dark, windy, and rough seas. And when they came home saving the world for democracy, many were horrified by the lack of it in their own city. But there was no where to go, Rural and Suburban Queens and Staten Island, or Westchester, or Nassau Counties were at their limits too, and anyway, New York City was where the work was, what was on Long Island? Grumman? Those factories were handing out notices left and right. And so they stayed in New York. And slowly built their new homes, and slowly found the jobs they deserved, and found that their service and the comfort they had defered was hitting the wall of Machine politics. And there was just something wrong about having to go to the Ward Boss for a job after Okinawa or The Bulge.

The VFW and the American Legion were overnight turned into new organizations, the old WWI vets who had made their political deals decades ago and mostly met up to talk old glory stories were shoved aside by new leadership and new chapters. Branches for returned servicemen in the NYPD, branches for returned servicemen in the Electricians Union, returned servicemen of Washington Heights, Ozone Park, The Lower East Side, Crotona Park. The always politically active Jewish, Catholic, Black and Hispanic Veterans Organizations received shots of new vigor.
In 1946 none of it mattered, reform Democrats, or the Republicans, American Labor, or New York Liberal were all defeated in practically every competitive race against Tammany. In 1948 overwhelming victory of the Democratic Party which saw the Republicans thrown on the ropes nationally saw them virtually eliminated in New York City politics.

To the Servicemen organizations, and the new political clubs across the city there was no form of relief yet. In California there were the Democrats to turn to when you were a minority, in the South, whites who had come to work in the factories could and did rally to the Republican Party. In New York city a third alternative would be needed. Which was why in January of 1949 Servicemen from across the city met in Madison Square Garden and declared the foundation of the National Citizen’s Party. Their platform was simple: Non-Partisan Government, and the end of the Ward System in the City. Tammany was horrified, the old reform elements in the city were thrilled, and at once, Community Organizations from across the city were calling.

A sign of the non-partisan nature of the party would be how it was endorsed both by President Marshall and Senator Taft, not to mention diverse political voices from columnist and former Second Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to Former Governor Tuttle.

It is an Irony of history that the Non-Partisan Servicemen’s candidate was a born politician but Robert F. Wagner, Jr, son of the long term, ultra liberal, ultra-Tammany US senator from New York, but if Bob Wagner learned anything flying supplies into Free China, it was that Democracy was worth fighting for.

In the end Wagner won, and the New City defeated the Old. Within six months of taking office the Charter Amendment passed, creating a Proportional Representation system electing a City Council with regional limits only placed on the the Boroughs of the city, as well as creating a City Ombudsman in the office of the elected Public Advocate. A Tammany effort to force the amendment to be approved via referendum failed to stop it and by 1952 the new City Council system was a law. The press, the mainstream national parties, and the servicemen congratulated themselves on a job well done, and were assured that Tammany was a dead letter, which in a way it was.

Robert F. Wagner’s administration took a technocratic approach to things after that. The National Citizen’s Party ran some Congressional tickets, and met with mixed success. Attempts to spread the party beyond New York, City and State met with general failure. It was clear going into 1952’s Mayoral election that the party was done, its one goal having been achieved. Robert F. Wagner, Jr. made that point abundantly clear when he announced that he was going to run for Congress instead of another term declaring that “The Party had Secured its VT Day: Victory over Tammany”. A small fringe would keep going for several years, most notably being remembered as the hosts for a series of VFW vs Legion Boxing matches throughout the 1960’s.

Robert F. Wagner, Jr. would win that Congressional seat, and hold it for thirty years, becoming one of the most prominent members of the Democratic Caucus. Servicemen’s organizations would go their separate ways, aligning with the Democrats and the Republicans, the old ward system would be occasionally lamented, but for the first time in state history, local, ethnic voting blocs would find themselves seats at the table, and real voices in the governance of their city.​

Many Democrats were surprised when the best that Tammany Hall offered in 1952 was the shortest man to ever serve as mayor of New York. Abe Beame was a former Professor and Accountant, soft spoken but direct, he appealed to the anti-corruption wing of the Democratic Party with his talk of trimming expenses and the proper allocation of the city budget. After a few years of decent growth under Wagner, the Democratic pledge to create “A Beame Team” of technocratic leaders who would know what to do best for the city was one that proved massively popular.

An easy win in his pocket, Beame offended onlookers from outside the city by not only going to “Great Minds” like Former Commerce Secretary Averell Harriman, Bob Lehman, and the best and brightest from the RAND Corporation, but also city bosses like Carmine DiSapio, and Adam Powell. Old Tammany hands were rebranded as “experts” on their communities and of the man on the street. Critics would lament that the Ward Bosses were back, but the old hands of Tammany were gone, the new leaders, those smart enough to have done outreach with new communities in the city were as clean cut and well spoken as the Whiz Kids. And to the voter thats all that mattered.

Beame would oversee an era of popular growth. While the Port of New York began its slow decline due in part to the reorganization of American commerce towards points West and South, Wall Street boomed and the business and corporations of midtown assumed power as the leading engines of the city, as well as the constant construction that followed as Bauhaus defeated the International Style to become the dominant aesthetic in Post-War architecture.

Rapid construction saw miles of new city stretch out into the farms and rural fields of Queens and Staten Island, but Beame would also see the city mark Pennsylvania Station as “Protected City Landmark” a move that saved the station from destruction, and saw the birth of the Historical Preservation movement in the United States.

The darkest moment though of Beames administration would be its proudest, and for all the wrong reasons became the moment that New Yorker’s would remember him best for. In 1957, the New York Giants decided that high prices in New York would mean they should look elsewhere for a new stadium. California, with no professional baseball beckoned, and seeking another team to bring along, eventually convincing the New York Yankees to move to San Fransisco with them. Mass uproar followed.

When the dust settled and the teams were departing, a goodwill message was issued by the owners of both teams, thanking New York for all they had ever done for them over the previous decades. Beame spoke for all New Yorkers when he issued to the press a two word retort which he would go down in history for: “Drop Dead”. Historic Preservation would not even be mentioned by a city official when the time came to demolish Yankee Stadium.

Beame’s administration would see him working with real estate developer Nelson Rockefeller to begin revitalizing the downtown waterfronts which were entering decay, seeing everything from the Fulton Market Plaza to the Brooklyn Coastal Development District.

Beame’s Whiz Kids would scatter to the four winds in 1960 when the mayor chose not to seek a third term, they would go on to serve in cabinets, starting in 1957 with that of President Warren, in executive boards, and in think tanks for years to come, offering what one would call “Permanent Solutions to the problems of city Governance.” Harriman and Lehman would return to their respective corporate boards. Mayor Beame would take his mayoralty and turn it into a Department Chairmanship at Columbia, where he would teach accounting on and off for the rest of his life, a fondly remembered mayor. Nelson Rockefeller, with the real estate and artwork empires he had built in New York would become the expert on Urban development in the United States, becoming the First Secretary of Urban Affairs in 1958, and would serve in that post for 16 years, under three different presidents.

The San Francisco Yankees have not won a world series since 1988. The Los Angeles Giants lost in game seven to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 2011. At the time of this writing it has been a full three days since the last kid wearing a “Keep the Yankees in the Bronx” Shirt has been kicked in the shins in New York.​