James John Walker, often known as Jimmy Walker and colloquially as Beau James, was mayor of New York City from 1926 to 1932.
Background
James John Walker was born of Irish Catholic parents in the Tammany-controlled ninth ward of New York's Greenwich Village. He was the second son and second of nine children (of whom only four survived infancy) of William Henry ("Billy") Walker and Ellen Ida (Roon) Walker. His father, a carpenter who had come to New York in 1857 from famine-stricken Kilkenny County, was a lumberyard owner and local Democratic politician; during Jimmy's boyhood he served as alderman of his ward and later as state assemblyman. Jimmy's mother had grown up in the large family of a prosperous Greenwich Village saloonkeeper.
Education
Billy Walker wanted his son to go into politics and to have educational advantages he himself had lacked. But Walker, an indifferent and undisciplined student who had endured the regime of local parochial schools through high school, dropped out of Saint Francis Xavier College after a year and business school after three months. To please his still-tenacious father, Walker enrolled at the New York Law School in 1902, and was graduated two years later, but almost a decade passed before he became a member of the New York bar.
Career
He spent the intervening time in Tin Pan Alley, grinding out lyrics for such popular ballads as "Good-bye, Eyes of Blue, " "Kiss All the Girls for Me, " and "There's Music in the Rustle of a Skirt. " In 1905 he scored a minor success with the lyrics for "Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?" Not until the age of thirty did Walker finally give in to his father's desire that he quit song writing for politics. However, his style and values remained those of a man who had started out in show business. The world he continued to like best and frequent most was the world of Broadway musicals, vaudeville, professional sports, gambling casinos, nightclubs, and (in the 1920s) speakeasies, a world populated by celebrities and characters of the type chronicled by Damon Runyon. That world, in turn, adored the radiant little playboy. Gay and witty, a free spender and a snappy dresser, Beau James had a genius for making people feel good. "Jimmy! Jimmy!" Toots Shor, the fabled restaurateur, once exclaimed. "When you walked into the room you brightened up the joint. " In 1909, after serving under his father as a Tammany district captain, Walker received the Democratic nomination for the safe state assembly seat from Greenwich Village. Thus began a sixteen-year stint in the Albany legislature that led ultimately to City Hall. Elevated to the state senate in 1914, and the leader of his party in that body from 1921 to 1925, Walker was an effective debater, a popular colleague, an engaging vote-getter, and a loyal organization man.
Tammany was then headed by Charles F. Murphy, who, beginning in the Progressive era, gave his support to a group of liberal young legislators that included Alfred E. Smith, Robert F. Wagner, and James A. Foley. Walker, joining the group, sponsored legislation for a uniform gas-rate law, a forty-eight-hour week for women and minors in industry, and an investigation of the New York Telephone Company. He needed no prodding to introduce bills legalizing Sunday baseball and professional boxing bouts of fifteen rounds. Opposed to the repressions that followed World War I, he spoke out against the Lusk antisedition bills of 1920, the Ku Klux Klan, prohibition, and censorship. Walker also supported Governor Smith in the passage of a bill to provide for an executive budget and in an unsuccessful attempt to extend the gubernatorial term from two to four years. In 1925 Al Smith and other party leaders decided against renominating Mayor John F. Hylan and picked Walker as an attractive contrast to the blundering incumbent. In a city of awesome Democratic registrations, Walker went on to win the election by a margin of more than 400, 000 votes over the Republican Frank D. Waterman, a fountain pen manufacturer. Four years later he won reelection by an even wider margin against Fiorello La Guardia, despite the latter's charges of corruption and mismanagement. Walker's being a Democrat in a Democratic city was not the sole reason for his popularity. Although he let others do most of his work for him, it was during his tenure that a Department of Sanitation was created; that the public hospitals were brought under a single head; that a comprehensive system of subways was developed; and that construction was begun on the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, the Triborough Bridge, Manhattan's West Side Highway, and a new subway. Mayor Walker also took credit for the work of the prestigious Committee on Plan and Survey, which he appointed to study the long-range needs of the city. But the major reason for Walker's popularity was that he embodied qualities that so many of his contemporaries admired during the Jazz Age. To a generation that admired the fictional heroes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Walker was Gotham's own Great Gatsby out on "the greatest, gaudiest spree in history. " Meanwhile, a brigade of Tammany spoilsmen took over, and not even after an official investigation began to uncover graft and incompetence in his administration did the mayor think it necessary to put his municipal house in order. Initial hearings in 1930 by the appellate division of the state supreme court into the affairs of the municipal court system found evidence of corruption, and in 1931 the legislature appointed a committee to investigate the city government in general. As counsel, the committee selected the tenacious referee of the earlier hearings, Judge Samuel Seabury. Walker, when summoned to testify, failed to give a satisfactory explanation of either the chaos of his administration or the unorthodoxy of his personal finances. He used the word "beneficences" to describe the almost $300, 000 he had received as stock profits from men who did business with the city, and he claimed ignorance of a safe-deposit box which had been taken out in both his own name and that of his financial agent and which at one time contained $750, 000 in cash. It is still a matter of speculation whether Walker had been taking bribes or was telling Seabury the truth. Nor is it clear whether Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt was planning to remove the mayor from office or merely to reprimand him. Walker settled that question by resigning on September 1, 1932. Walker returned to New York in 1935, and his appointment two years later as an assistant counsel of the New York State Transit Commission proved that he still had powerful friends. A better job, as impartial chairman of the National Cloak and Suit Industry, fell to him in 1940 through Mayor La Guardia. He died a half year later, of a blood clot on the brain, in Doctors Hospital, New York City. After services at St. Patrick's Cathedral he was buried in Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Westchester County.
Achievements
Religion
After his lovely but erratic second wife divorced him in April 1941 and died in 1944, he underwent a private transformation that led him back to his ancestral faith. In a communion breakfast speech to the Catholic Traffic Guild in 1946, Walker said: "The glamor of other days I have found to be worthless tinsel, and all the allure of the world just so much seduction and deception. I now have found in religion and repentance the happiness and joy that I sought elsewhere in vain. "
Interests
Neglecting the grueling chores of City Hall, he led parades, attended baseball games, played gracious and witty host to visiting dignitaries, took extended and exotic vacations abroad, and frequented New York's night spots.
Connections
On April 11, 1912, he married Janet Frances Allen, a musical comedy singer and vaudeville performer, who had left her native Chicago for the Great White Way. They had no children. Bored with his wife, he had a publicized love affair with a beautiful actress, Betty (Violet Halling) Compton, the English-born daughter of an American wool merchant, who was twenty-three years his junior. Divorced by his wife in early 1933, he married Betty Compton in a civil ceremony in Cannes, France, on April 18 and took up residence in England. The couple later adopted two children, Mary Ann and James John.