Chapter 33

New York: Sketch of Megalopolis, with a Word on Wall Street

Submit to no models but your own O city!

—Walt Whitman

New York is all the cities.

—W. L. George

SO NOW we come to New York City, the incomparable, the brilliant star city of cities, the forty-ninth state, a law unto itself, the Cyclopean paradox, the inferno with no out-of-bounds, the supreme expression of both the miseries and the splendors of contemporary civilization, the Macedonia of the United States. It meets the most severe test that may be applied to definition of a metropolis—it stays up all night. But also it becomes a small town when it rains.

Paradox? New York is at once the climactic synthesis of America, and yet the negation of America in that it has so many characteristics called un-American. One friend of mine, indignant that it seems impossible for any American city to develop on the pattern of Paris or Vienna, always says that Manhattan is like Constantinople—not the Istanbul of old Stamboul but of the Pera or Levantine side. He meant not merely the trite fact that New York is polyglot, but that it is full of people, like the Levantines, who are interested basically in only two things, living well and making money. I would prefer a different analogy—that only Istanbul, of all cities in the world, has as enchanting and stimulating a profile.

Also I have heard New York characterized as nothing but “a cluster of small islets in the North Atlantic.” These at any rate fling their luster far. The most important single thing to say about Manhattan in relation to the rest of the United States is that it dominates what, for want of a better phrase, may be called American culture. New York is the publishing center of the nation; it is the art, theater, musical, ballet, operatic center; it is the opinion center; it is the radio center; it is the style center. Hollywood? But Hollywood is nothing more than a suburb of the Bronx, both financially and from the point of view of talent. Politically, socially, in the world of ideas and in the whole world of entertainment, which is a great American industry needless to say, New York sets the tone and pace of the entire nation. What books 140 million Americans will read is largely determined by New York reviewers. Most of the serious newspaper columns originate in or near New York; so do most of the gossip columns, which condition Americans from Mobile to Puget Sound to the same patterns of social behavior. In a broad variety of fields, from serious drama to what you will hear on a jukebox, it is what New York says that counts; New York opinion is the hallmark of both intellectual and material success; to be accepted in this nation, New York acceptance must come first. I do not assert that this is necessarily a good thing. I say merely that it is true. One reason for all this is that New York, with its richly cosmopolitan population, provides such an appreciative audience. It admires artistic quality. It has a fine inward gleam for talent. Also New York is a wonderfully opulent center for bogus culture. One of its chief industries might be said to be the manufacture of reputations, many of them fraudulent.

The field of culture or quasi culture aside, New York City’s tremendous importance has traditionally been based on four factors:

(1) It was by far the greatest point of entry for European immigrants. Karl Marx, writing in the New York Tribune a good many years ago, predicted not only that these would come, but that the great bulk of them, having arrived, would tend to remain in the New York area.

(2) It was by far the greatest American port for exports, primarily of wheat. New York was the city where people came in, and goods went out.

(3) It was the financial and credit capital of the United States.

(4) It was a great place for residents of other American cities to visit, shop in, and throw money at.

New York has to some extent lost ground in all these categories. First, immigration was largely cut off. Second, wheat and other exports turned to other ports (though New York is still the biggest ocean port in the country). Third, Washington replaced it as the financial capital, as we shall see. Fourth (though still the Number One American tourist attraction),¹ New York has lost something of its inevitableness as the place that all Americans want to see before they die.

This situation makes it clear incidentally why New York made such a fight to get the UN. The city is not exactly what you would call moribund, and actually the UN will serve to further its transformation from merely a national into a world metropolis. Nevertheless, most of New York was glad to have the UN safely tucked in between the East River and shabby old Turtle Bay.

“Little Old New York”

More than anywhere else in this book, the author must now steer tightly between Scylla and Charybdis, between saying too much and too little. How can we talk about the Statue of Liberty without seeming ridiculously supererogatory? But how can we omit Brooklyn Bridge and still give a fair, comprehensive picture? One must either take the space to mention something that everybody knows everything about, or else risk omission of things that everybody will think ought certainly to be included.

Park Avenue in summer near Grand Central, a thin quivering asphalt shelf, and the asphalt soft, a thin quivering layer of street separating the automobiles above from the trains below; avenues as homespun with small exquisite shops as Madison, and streets as magnificent as 57th; the fat black automobiles doubleparked on Fifth Avenue on sleety afternoons; kibitzers watching strenuously to see if the man running will really catch the bus; bridges soaring and slim as needles like the George Washington; the incomparable moment at dusk when the edges of tall buildings melt invisibly into the sky, so that nothing of them can be seen except the lighted windows; the way the pace of everything accelerates near Christmas; how the avenues will be cleared of snow and actually dry a day after a six-inch fall, while the side streets are still banked solid with sticky drifts; how the noon sun makes luminous spots on the rounded tops of automobiles, crowded together on the slope of Park Avenue so that they look like seashells; the shop that delivers chocolates by horse—all this is too familiar to bear mention.

That Manhattan was discovered by Henry Hudson in 1609, and bought from the Indians for $24 in 1626 I refuse to enlarge upon. Not so well known are such details as that the city’s flag still bears the Dutch royal colors (orange, white, and blue), and that, in 1811, it was decided that only three sides of the City Hall need be finished, since surely there would be no more movement of the city northward. Of course New York has been pushing outward like a swarm of bees ever since, and not merely to the north. It covers 365.4 square miles today; it has upwards of five thousand miles of streets.

As of 1940 the population of New York City within city limits was 7,454,995; as of early 1947, it is estimated at 7,768,000. Only two states, Pennsylvania, and California (aside from New York state itself) contain more people; of the seventy-five nations in the world, it has a greater population than forty-one. By 1970, according to census estimates, the population will have risen to 8,500,000; after 1980, along with that of the rest of the country, it is expected to decline. These figures refer to city limits only. As of 1940 the New York “metropolitan district” actually held 11,690,520 people and an estimate today is that 12,500,000 people live within a radius of thirty-five miles, making the area by all odds the greatest urban concentration the world has ever known. Newark and Jersey City are, to all intents and purposes except politically, subdivisions of Manhattan; I have heard a Pennsylvanian say that even Scranton was “part of New York”; speaking in the broadest way, “New York” includes the whole region from Bridgeport to Trenton and beyond.

Turn now to racial fusions. The best remark I know in this field is from Bryce, that New York “is a European city, but of no particular country.” He might of course have said, “but of many countries.” Details are well known. For instance two hundred newspapers not in English are published in New York. We have talked about enclaves like Hamtramck in Detroit. New York is full of Hamtramcks. More than two million New Yorkers are foreign born; more than two and a half million others are of foreign or mixed parentage. Of the foreign-born the largest group is Italian (more than 400,000), followed closely by Russian (395,-000), and with Germany (225,000), Eire (160,000) and Poland (195,000) next. Those of mixed parentage follow the same order. There are 26,884 foreign-born Czechs, 28,593 Greeks, and 12,000 Chinese. All told there are representatives of at least seventy nationalities in New York, from Bulgarians to Yemenites. Cutting across national categories are the Jews, of whom the city has about two million; New York is, as everybody knows, overwhelmingly the first Jewish city in the world.

A grave and estimable Bourbon of my acquaintance put it to me a few days ago, with internal frothings but probably with tongue in cheek as well, that the most powerful single influence in the United States today is that of Minsk, the provincial capital of Byelo-Russia. His train of thought went like this. Minsk is the birthplace of Max Lerner, the well-known editorial writer and political scientist. Lerner runs PM. PM runs the American Labor party. The American Labor party runs New York City. New York City runs New York state. And New York state of course runs the nation.²

Hamilton Fish Armstrong, writing in Foreign Affairs, once had some illuminating things to say about the New York potpourri. One is that, in spite of all that has been added, the basic Anglo-Dutch stock still gives marked coloration to the city. Another is that New York’s conglomerateness dates from the very beginning, and has given it a tolerance unmatched by any other American city except one much smaller, San Francisco. From the early Du Ponts to Otto Habsburg, from Leon Trotsky to Haya de la Torre, Manhattan has been traditionally generous to refugees. It has a cosmopolitanism of the mind as well as pocket. It may be built on islands, but it is not insular.

New York of course has religions in profusion too. It is a very strong Roman Catholic and Episcopalian as well as Jewish city. It is the headquarters of the Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch church, and it has a powerful upper sprinkling of Christian Scientists. The best indication of the importance of religion in New York is real estate. Stroll down Fifth Avenue. In block after patrician block are churches of various denominations occupying sites of the most prodigious value. Or—as an instance of the influence of religion in another secular field—consider Christmas shopping.

It is a proud boast of New York that, what with its enormous pools of foreign-born, any article or object known in the world may be found there. You can buy anything from Malabar spices to stamps from Mauritius to Shakespeare folios. A stall on Seventh Avenue sells about a hundred different varieties of razor blades. Also it is incomparably the greatest manufacturing town on earth; in an average year it produces goods valued at more than four billion dollars. It houses no fewer than 36,000 different industrial concerns, representing more than 312 different manufactures—even if, as noted in the chapter preceding, you can see deer in Westchester a few miles away. Also it is by far the first city in the nation in the service industries. Manhattan alone employs more wage earners than Detroit and Cleveland put together; Brooklyn more than Boston and Baltimore put together; Queens more than Washington and Pittsburgh put together.³ The two most important New York industries are printing and the garment trade. To attempt to describe Manhattan, without at least one mention of the Garment Center, is impossible. Everybody knows how, on the one hand, mammoth trucks choke the streets between 34th and 38th, and how, on the other, men on foot push through the crowds with their movable racks hung with clothes. The Garment Center means also that New York has two of the most powerful unions in the country, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers which was Sidney Hillman’s union, and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union run by as able a man as American labor knows, David Dubinsky. This union has elaborate extracurricular activities, like its famous summer camps. Once it produced a musical comedy, Pins and Needles, that became a great Broadway hit.⁴

In Inside Asia I had a small passage describing the variety of strange occupations in India, like grasshopper selling. I have just thumbed through the classified New York telephone directory, a volume 1,600 solid pages long. Among occupations in New York are cinders, chenille dotting, bullet-proof protective equipment, breast pumps, bungs, boiler baffles, glue room equipment, abattoirs, flow meters, eschatology, mildewproofing, pompons, potato chip machinery, rennet, spangles, solenoids, and spats. Also this book contains literally twenty-two columns of associations of one kind or another.

Items in Physiognomy

No king, no clown, to rule this town!

—William O. Bartlett

Well, little old Noisyville-on-the-Subway is good enough for me.

—O. Henry

As almost everybody knows, New York is divided into five counties called boroughs. The extraordinary tongue of MANHATTAN is only 12½ miles long and 2½ miles wide, but by 1947 estimates it contains 1,906,-000 people. It has twenty bridges, roughly 100,000 out-of-town visitors a day, 915 night-clubs, Columbia University, and Central Park, which many people think is the most satisfactory park in the world, with its 840 acres spread out like a carpet for the skyscrapers to tiptoe up to. It has subdivisions as divergent as Kips Bay, the Gas House District, Hell’s Kitchen and Greenwich Village. BROOKLYN (estimated population 2,798,000) is of course a world in itself, with local bosses like Peter J. McGuinness, a fierce local nationalism, the Dodgers, the Bush Terminal, Coney Island, and the Tablet, one of the most reactionary Catholic papers in the country. Geographically Brooklyn, which was once spelled Bruekelen, is the huge, bumpy, watery “head and shoulders” of Long Island. It covers 88.8 square miles; merely to list its street names takes 192 pages in a pocket guide. It delivers the biggest Democratic vote in the nation, and is a famous haunt of Christian Fronters; the viceroy of this formidable province, who died in 1946, was Frank V. Kelly. The BRONX, which borders on Westchester County and is the only borough on the mainland, covers 54.4 square miles and has 1,489,000 people. It is heavily Jewish like Brooklyn, and likewise a great community for baseball, having the Yankee Stadium; it contains sub-Bronxes like Throg’s Neck, Morrisania, Clason’s Point, and Mott Haven. It has its own flag, a well-known zoo, the Hall of Fame of New York University, and seven hundred miles of streets; for a proud interval it called itself the capital of the world, when the UN sat at Hunter College.

In the Bronx, one might say in parenthesis, live two notable New York politicians, Edward J. Flynn and Michael J. Quill. Mr. Flynn, its boss for many years, has craggy importance on the national level too; he is a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and FDR once named him ambassador to Australia. He was rejected by the Senate, however, because some Belgian paving blocks got found in the wrong place. Of all the great American municipal bosses, Flynn is the most superior, the most civilized and cultivated man. Mr. Quill is on the left-wing side of the political fence. He was born in County Kerry in 1905, and was a soldier in the Irish Republican Army; he came to New York, and got a job as a subway worker. Quill is two things today: head of the powerful Transport Workers Union, which threatened a serious strike in 1946, and a city councilman.

QUEENS, the biggest borough in area (126.6 square miles), has 1,456,000 people; it is the most diffuse of the boroughs, the least distinctive.⁵ It has La Guardia Field and Forest Hills, the tennis capital of America; it has 196 miles of waterfront, and relentlessly unending rows of ugly small houses; in Queens, as well as anywhere in the country, you may see how a great city frays at the periphery; no community has more untidy edges. Finally, RICHMOND (population 186,000) which is another world in itself, Staten Island. A curious community, half an hour away by boat, Richmond has only one vote out of sixteen in the Board of Estimate (the governing body of New York City); this it resents, and occasionally it threatens to secede.

One should, at this point, at least mention the other New York islands; they are untidily picturesque—Governor’s Island, North Brother Island, Randall’s Island, Riker’s Island—to say nothing of Ellis, Welfare, and South Brother. Then too there are the great and vital rivers, the Hudson, “like a state highway” as a writer in the Times⁶ said aptly, and the East, “synonymous with poverty and ugliness,” “churlish and oil-pocked,” “treated with no more reverence than … a subway excavation, and traditionally New York’s watery main street.”

Finally, the Port. Here, once more, we reach what Hollywood (or New York) would call the supercolossal. “This is at once the front door of the nation and its service entrance.”⁷ The Port of New York, run and run well by its unique authority, is the biggest natural harbor in the world; it comprises “seven bays, four river mouths, four estuaries”; it covers 431 square miles of water, has 307 miles of shore line, and 1,800 docks. Out of it, in a normal year, travel some 60 million tons of goods on 13,000 ships, to carry 41.7 per cent of the entire foreign trade of the United States.

New York, Neighborhoods & Spectacle

The city like a ragged purple dream, the wonderful, cruel, enchanting, bewildering, fatal, great city.

—O. Henry

Vulgar of manner, overfed,

Overdressed and underbred.

—Byron R. Newton

A point to make now is New York’s extreme brittleness, its vulnerability. As fascinating as any story in America is how it gets its water; the supply system represents an investment of two billion dollars, and some water comes from points at least a hundred miles away. What might a small bomb or two, at any of several strategic points, do to this enterprise? Also the city’s life depends on water in another direction, that is, on the bridges and tunnels by which water is traversed. New York learned grimly about its vulnerability in this respect during a tugboat strike early in 1946. A handful of 3,500 workers, manning three hundred tugboats, paralyzed the city from stem to stern; the entire Atlantean metropolis was forced to shut down for 16 hours. Most neutral observers thought that the operators had as grave, if not a graver, responsibility for this strike than the AF or L workers who struck; but this is beside the point. What counted (and could count again) is that the city, without these tugboats, cannot live. New York uses about 34,500,000 pounds of food a day, 98,000 tons of coal, and 4,000,000 gallons of oil, which help provide its gas, steam, and electricity. Seventy per cent of all this is moved by tugs and barges. Consider too elevator strikes; a brief one occurred in September, 1945. New York City has more than 43,000 elevators (about 20 per cent of all in the country), which carry about 17,500,000 passengers daily. Their shafts, put end to end, would stretch 1,600 miles; they go halfway to the moon, 125,000 miles, every day. When the elevators stop, New York stops too.⁸

At the Manhattan skyscrapers, every name in the book has been thrown. They have been called “the inconceivable spires of Manhattan, composed, repeating the upthrust torch of Liberty,” “gypsum crystals,” “a mass of stalagmites,” “a ship of living stone,” “an irregular tableland intersected by shadowy canyons,” “dividends in the sky,” “a giant cromlech,” and, best of all, “a pincushion.”⁹ A more utilitarian-minded description is one by H. G. Wells; the skyscrapers reminded him irresistibly of the commercial nature of our civilization, being like “piled-up packing cases outside a warehouse.”

Last Christmas I sent a lady a book. She lives in the Waldorf-Astoria Towers but the bookstore didn’t understand me on the telephone, and, remarkable as it may seem, the book was dispatched not across the street but a distance of some 2,500 miles, to Mrs. So-and-So, Waldorf-Astoria, Taos (New Mexico). When it was retrieved I could not but reflect that, after all, American history is little more than the record of progress from Taos to Towers. Progress? New Yorkers, cliff dwellers still, have simply moved into a new type of pueblo.

No city changes so quickly as New York; none has so short a memory or is so heartless to itself; it has an inhuman quality. Very few New Yorkers pay the slightest attention to the historical monuments that fill the city. Most know very little about its wonders. How many realize that, by a simple mathematical trick, anybody can calculate where house numbers on the avenues are? How many ever recall that Theodore Roosevelt was born at 26 East 20th Street,¹⁰ or that the oldest building in the city is on Peck Slip, or even that a three-million-dollar treasure ship is supposed to be lying in the East River near 53rd Street? My publisher lives in the east 30’s. I had been in his delightful house fifty times before I learned that James Monroe had once lived in it.

Glance at Baedeker’s United States of 1893. To what sights does this worthy guide give its severely rationed stars? What was the 1893 equivalent of Rockefeller Center? Let the reader go to the public library and find out. But as to other details the midtown hotels starred are the Everett House, the Westminster, and the Windsor. (“Fees to waiters and bellboys are unfortunately becoming more and more customary in New York hotels.”) The first uptown restaurant starred is the Café Brunswick; the chief “oyster saloon” is Dorlon’s; the first theater mentioned is Daly’s (“Shakespearean and modern comedy—Miss Ada Rehan”). As to shops, Baedeker says, “Many of the New York shops are very large and handsome, easily bearing comparison with those of Europe.” As to baths it mentions that “hot and cold baths may be obtained at all the hotels (25¢-75¢) and large barber shops.”¹¹

One extraordinary phenomenon all over New York is its unequal rate of growth. On one side of a courtyard in the east 6o’s is a glittering modern apartment house where, I doubt not, you could find a tolerable small place to live for a rental of $5,000 a year, if apartments were available at all. On the other side, not fifty feet away, is a dirty balcony hung with laundry, part of a frowsy tenement built over squalid shops.

I live in midtown Manhattan; I have just walked around the block to see concretely what illimitable variety this neighborhood affords. Within a hundred yards I can go to church, have my hair cut, admire flowers, visit two banks (both low Georgian buildings in red brick), and dine in one of the supreme restaurants of the world or at Hamburg Heaven. Within a slightly greater radius I can buy a Cézanne ($55,000), a chukar partridge ($7.50), a pound of Persian caviar ($38), or a copy of the Civil Service Leader (10¢). Within two hundred yards are three competing pharmacies comfortably busy, a shop for religious goods and missals, a delicatessen squeezed into a four-foot frontage, windows full of the most ornately superior English saddlery, a podiatrist, a good French bookstore, a Speed Hosiery repair shop, and, of course, the inevitable small stationery shop with its broad red band across the window advertising a variety of cigar.

New York is so volatile, so diffuse, that it has no more recognizable social frontiers; it is too big a community to be a community. As Fortune once observed, even the greater millionaires no longer live in houses for the most part, but in apartments; the Social Register contains upward of 30,000 names. Fifty years ago the “400” constituted a genuine enough inner nucleus. Today practically anybody who can buy a drink at “Twenty-One” or be seen in the Cub Room of the Stork Club is a member of society, because the criterion is no longer merely wealth or lineage. It is not Mrs. Vanderbilt who draws attention at the opera; it is a visiting movie star. Nor does it matter much nowadays where people live; anybody who has the money can buy a house in the east 70’s (if he can find the house). People shoot up; people shoot down. Ask any New Yorker to list the dozen leading citizens of the town. The variety of names you will get is astonishing.

Finally, what are the chief New York issues today, political, semipolitical, and otherwise? First, traffic. The violent snarled congestion in bursting streets costs the city at least a million dollars a day. Second, housing. Mayor O’Dwyer estimates that the city has an “absolute shortage” of 150,000 apartments, which means that about 500,000 people are living “under the crudest and most difficult conditions.” Another estmate is that 450,000 families, or roughly one-fifth of the total population, live in “subhuman” tenements or houses. Third, a complex internecine struggle over airport development and the future of the great airport now being built, Idlewild. Fourth, the subway fare. It costs the city about 70 million dollars a year to maintain this (“Biggest Ride in the World,” about twenty-five miles) at a nickel.

“Go East, Young Man”

New York City sucks in humanity from all over the world, as it sucks in New Orleans prawns and Idaho potatoes. This city, a parasite, would die without new blood. New Yorkers born in New York City are, as is notorious, rare. Consider some distinguished citizens in various fields and where they came from. John J. McCloy, presumptive president of the world bank, was born in Philadelphia, James A. Farley in Grassy Point (New York), Judge Sam Rosenman in San Antonio, Herbert Bayard Swope in St. Louis, and Gustav Metzman, president of the New York Central, in Baltimore. Henry R. Luce was born in China, Elsa Maxwell in Iowa, and Judge Learned Hand in Albany. Harold Ross, editor of the New Yorker, comes from Aspen, Colorado, and Lewis W. Douglas from Bisbee, Arizona. H. V. Kaltenborn was born in Wisconsin, George Jean Nathan in Indiana, Bruce Bliven of the New Republic in Iowa, and Winthrop W. Aldrich, probably the most important banker in the city, in Rhode Island. Among great churchmen John Haynes Holmes was born in Philadelphia and Harry Emerson Fosdick in Buffalo. The Van Doren literary family derives from Illinois, Mary Simkhovitch from Massachusetts, and Mrs. Ogden Reid of the Herald Tribune from Wisconsin. Walter S. Gifford, president of AT&T, was born in Massachusetts, former governor Charles Poletti in Vermont, Sherman Billingsley in Oklahoma, John W. Davis in West Virginia, and Arturo Toscanini in Parma, Italy. There are, of course, a few exceptions. Robert I. Gannon, president of Fordham University, was born on Staten Island, and former comptroller Joseph D. McGoldrick in Brooklyn. Born actually in Manhattan are Gilbert Miller, the theatrical producer, Arthur H. Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, and Charles G. Bolté, the brilliant young chairman of the American Veterans’ Committee.

Mayor Bill O’Dwyer and City Politics

Countless times in this book we have mentioned people with a great variety of experience, but I know none who quite matches O’Dwyer for abundance in this respect. He was born in 1890 in Bohola, County Mayo, Ireland, one of eleven children; both his parents were schoolteachers.¹² He ran off to Spain when a boy, and studied for two years with the Jesuits at the University of Salamanca; he planned to be a priest. But he changed his mind, took ship for New York, and arrived here in 1910, twenty years old, with $23.35 in his pocket. In the next few years he held every possible sort of job. First he became a handyman in a Bronx grocery at $9 a week; then he worked as a deckhand on a freighter in the South American trade, as a stoker, and later as a fireman on the river boats between New York and Albany. Meantime, he studied stenography at night school. He had a turn as a hod carrier and plasterer’s apprentice, working on a building near Maiden Lane; he can look out from the City Hall today and see where the scaffolding was, and he still holds his membership in the Plasterers Helpers Union, AF of L. Also—it pleases him to recall this now—he was a bartender for a brief elegant period in the Hotel Plaza.

Then came a great decision. O’Dwyer decided to become a cop. He had been granted United States citizenship in 1916, and he joined the New York police department a year later. Also he kept on studying at night, now at Fordham Law School; it was a long grind, but he was graduated in 1923. Finally, in 1925, after great ardors and sacrifices, he was admitted to the New York bar.

The fact that Mayor O’Dwyer, who has the nice numerical luck to be the one-hundredth elected mayor in New York City history, was a policeman has considerable importance. It means, first of all, that he knows cops. One can talk about issues and involvements like housing, subways, or what you will, but basically the mayor of any great American city stands or falls by his police department. Any time a police department, through horrible circumstance, chooses to embarrass a mayor by lying down on the job, the mayor is beaten. There are 19,000 policemen in New York City, and it is no easy thing to keep that many men, who may be continuously exposed to temptation, honest all the time. The average New York cop gets $3,420 a year. Twice a week, in the old days anyway, he may have had to turn down a hundred-dollar bill. The police have nice distinctions in graft. Gambling money, so the legend goes, is “clean”; vice money is, however, dirty. The terrific difficulty of dealing with gambling may be illustrated by one small point, that at Mr. La Guardia’s request the Stock and Curb exchanges for a brief time published no daily sales totals except in round numbers, so that the tens of thousands of people in the “policy” racket couldn’t use the last digits as the basis for their calculations.

But to resume. Mr. O’Dwyer knows cops and understands them and likes to deal with them. He was an honest cop himself and he has an honest police force now. He took over the commissioner appointed by Mr. La Guardia, Arthur W. Wallender, gave him a free hand to do a good job, and backed him up.

O’Dwyer’s political career may be outlined briefly. In 1932 he was appointed a city magistrate, which meant that he was politically “right.” Governor Lehman promoted him to the county court in 1938; later he won an election to a fourteen-year term on this bench. This was a well-paid job, and he could have looked forward to security and a pleasant routine existence for years and years. He dropped it the next year, however, to run for the district attorneyship of Kings County (Brooklyn), and won. His record in this post—though a subsequent investigation accused him of mild inefficiencies—made him famous. The job he did as a prosecutor is fully as remarkable as Dewey’s, though he never sensationalized it as Dewey did. Brooklyn had, in those years, a gang nicknamed Murder Incorporated, led by a notable killer named Louis Lepke and including some fancy folk like Abe “Kid Twist” Reles; that O’Dwyer got first-degree murder indictments against Lepke who was later duly electrocuted, and several of his lieutenants, is as unprecedented in its field as Dewey’s conviction of Jimmy Hines. Altogether, O’Dwyer’s friends say that he solved eighty-seven murders. His opponent in the 1945 mayoralty race, however, charged widely that his record was spurious in several important respects, that most of the real work was done by an assistant prosecutor, and that wily folk behind the scenes, who were the masters of the actual front-line killers, were never touched. However, the fact remains that Murder Incorporated was broken up.

In 1941, O’Dwyer ran for mayor; La Guardia beat him. Came the war. O’Dwyer volunteered for service the day after Pearl Harbor, and was presently commissioned as a major; the Army put him to work investigating contract frauds, and by 1944 he was a brigadier general. Then Roosevelt sent him as his personal representative to the Allied Control Commission in Italy, and later he was appointed executive director of the War Refugee Board. He ran for re-election as Kings County district attorney in absentia while still in the Army; Democratic, Republican and American Labor parties all endorsed him. Then came the mayoralty race of 1945. (New York, like most American cities, has its mayoralty election in off-years.) O’Dwyer won—there were some highly special circumstances connected with this election as we shall see—with an absolute majority of 285,000, and the biggest plurality in the history of the city.

His first year in office, at what is generally considered the third biggest and most difficult job in the United States, was certainly trying enough. He had the tugboat strike to deal with, and then the threat of a subway strike. His wife, who had been a telephone operator at the Hotel Vanderbilt when he met her in 1916, died after a long and exhausting illness. His appointments were excellent on the whole; he kept some of the best La Guardia men, like Bob Moses; he got William H. Davis, former head of the War Labor Board, to work with him on transportation. He fired two of his cabinet members, one following a scandal in professional football, the other after a tenement collapsed with the loss of thirty-seven lives. He worked hard to bring the UN to New York; it might not have come, however, had not John D. Rockefeller Jr. made possible the purchase of the site through an $8,500,000 gift. He did what he could on taxes, sought to bring a showdown on subway fare, and raised the pay of city employees to meet the advancing cost of living. In a city like New York, however, very little of this really matters. What does matter is the relation of a mayor to what is behind him. O’Dwyer is, after all, a Democrat. What everybody wanted to know was what he was going to do with Tammany. “A vast, corrupt organization, starved through twelve long years, is panting for its revenge,” wrote the New York Herald Tribune when he assumed office. During the La Guardia years, Tammany was of course frozen out. Was Mr. O’Dwyer going to let it in again, and if so in what form? The answer to this came in early 1947, after prolonged sub-surface struggles. The mayor pushed out the old Tammany leaders, shook the organization up from top to bottom, removed some of its more adhesive members, and became, in effect, Tammany chieftain himself with the slate washed clean.

I went down to the City Hall the other day and had an hour with O’Dwyer after not having seen him for several years. He is a shade grayer, a shade stockier, and still a grand man to talk to—easy-going, bluff, friendly, and informal. He wore a light brown sports jacket; he was as relaxed—working a fourteen-hour day—as a character in the Crock of Gold. O’Dwyer has heavy, very short, blunt fingers, a decisive nose, and expressive, eloquent blue eyes. He is full of Irish wit and bounce. Also he is very modest. Mostly we talked about things personal. But occasionally there were remarks like, “How the hell does democracy work, anyhow?” This was not, I hasten to add, said with any lack of faith. The mayor is a very gregarious man, and he loves people; especially he loves those who have fought their way out of a bad environment. What he hates most are stuffy people. (“I am sorry for the selfish ones; they only see one side.”) I asked him how he took the load off. “A thousand ways!” One is music and another books. Then suddenly Mr. O’Dwyer was reminiscing about his childhood. “It was all a series of breaks … you know how rebellious Irish kids are … and everybody yearning for a piece of poetry.” He wanted to be a doctor. Medicine, the mysterious agencies of disease, the world of pain, fascinated him, and he was bursting with humanity for the sick, though “healthy as a trout” himself. To contribute to that field, he thought, would be something. “What is it that makes people happy? To contribute!” He couldn’t afford the long years of schooling that medicine entailed; he chose the law as the next best thing. “When a guy gets along in his twenties he begins to get uneasy; people stare at themselves, and know that they’ll be sore as hell at life at sixty if they don’t do something to improve themselves.” He asked himself, while a cop on a beat, “Is life just a process of eating and destroying food?” The urge to get ahead stirred him, as he put it, “like a bug on an elephant’s tail.” And to do something for the little fellow. As a magistrate he had the power to be a tough guy, “to swing a hatchet.” When youngsters and old men came into his court he tried to “soothe ’em down.” Then suddenly O’Dwyer was talking about what is, as he knows and everybody knows, the dominant problem of our time, the relationship of government to the people. I asked him what he was proudest of in his record as mayor so far. He hesitated. “The guy who follows me will find a million things wrong, of course.” Again he paused. “One thing I kinda like—it might be a contribution.” This is a system he has worked out for dealing with potential labor troubles before they reach a climax; a body called the division of labor relations goes to work a month before the expiration date of any collective agreement so that, if there is the possibility of a strike, early discussions may avert it.

A word nbw on the 1945 mayoralty election that brought O’Dwyer in. Of all crazy elections in the history of New York City, this was certainly the craziest. He was the candidate of both the Democratic and American Labor parties, which was interpreted by anti-O’Dwyer folk as meaning that he was the candidate of (a) Tammany and (b) the Communists, unnatural as this coalition may seem. Of course O’Dwyer is about as Communistic as Saint Peter or Monsignor Sheen. In the old Brooklyn days the Christian Front boys vociferously sided with him for the most part. Nevertheless, he was bracketed with Vito Marcantonio, the industrious leader of the ALP. O’Dwyer, a good vote-getter with a good record, was obviously going to be a hard man to beat. After ponderous deliberations (in which Governor Dewey of course shared) the Republicans chose a judge of the general sessions court, Jonah J. Goldstein, to run against him.¹³ This was in part a device to catch the Jewish vote which is roughly 30 per cent of the total city vote as a rule. The only trouble with Judge Goldstein was that he was a Democrat! This fact may not be believed by the man from Mars, but it is true. Judge Goldstein, the Republican candidate to beat O’Dwyer, was a member of the Democratic party until the night before the nomination.¹⁴

Meantime, of course, much finagling had been going on in higher reaches of the Democratic party too—Roosevelt, Hannegan, Flynn, Kelly, all played a role. O’Dwyer would not consent to run until after a stiff fight with both Kelly and Flynn, who wanted to put people on the slate he wouldn’t have. Finally O’Dwyer (Democrat-ALP) and Goldstein (Republican but a Democrat) squared off against one another. Also behind Goldstein were the Fusion and the Liberal parties—which, however, were not at the time parties! All seemed simple. Then entered a new and disruptive factor—the Little Flower. Previously Mr. La Guardia had announced the names of a dozen people who he thought would make good mayors and whom he would support, among them Adolf A. Berle Jr., Lewis W. Douglas, Robert Moses, Gordon S. Rentschler, chairman of the board of the National City Bank, General Brehon Somervell, and Newbold Morris, then president of the City Council. Now Mr. Morris (an able and amiable man, about whom the crude witticism was spread that he had been born with a silver foot in his mouth) decided to enter the race himself. This made the struggle triangular. La Guardia vigorously supported Morris, who ran as a “No Deal’’ candidate. He knew of course that this would split the opposition, and help elect O’Dwyer; the only explanation is that (though in theory a Republican himself and a mortal foe of Tammany) La Guardia disliked the Dewey-Goldstein brand of Republicanism so much that he was willing to see a Tammany Democrat elected. O’Dwyer would have won anyway. Nevertheless, Morris’ candidacy did what Mr. La Guardia hoped it would do, and the New York Herald Tribune was soon writing, “The fundamental reason why William O’Dwyer is mayor today is that Mr. La Guardia willed it.”¹⁵

Tiger Tamed; Wigwam Sublet

They have such refined and delicate palates

That they can discover no one worthy of their ballots,

And then when someone terrible gets elected

They say, There, that’s just what I expected.

—Ogden Nash^*

A reformer is a guy who rides through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat.

—The late James J. Walker

Voters of the laboring class in the cities are very emotional … In the lower wards [of New York City] where there is a large vicious population, the condition of politics is often fairly appalling, and the local boss is generally a man of grossly immoral public and private character.

—Theodore Roosevelt in 1886

Of various puppets and ephemeral riffraff in New York City politics this book tells nothing. Nor have we the space to mention here how proportional representation makes a goulash of elections to the city council, how New York (just like a village) has big red signs near the polls telling people not to loiter, how Fusion is not something that you can call up on the telephone, how the Greater New York City Charter was first set up and how the city has a triple central government the interrelations of which can only be calculated by a slide rule, how the well-known entrepreneur of slot machines, Mr. Costello, lost $27,200 in a taxi and finally got about $150 back, and how the Liberal party broke off from the American Labor party (the father of which was Mr. La Guardia) after a vicious left-right split.

But about the institution known as Tammany and its camorra we must, if only for the record, have a brief line. Actually Tammany goes back into American history as far as the federal government itself. One of its founders was Aaron Burr, and it was a quite worthy organization in older days. Bob Wagner and Al Smith both came out of Tammany. It was the first classic example of the American political machine, and its role was the orthodox one of being a bridge between the newly arrived immigrant and citizenship. It taught him how to vote and for whom. Also it really rendered service. If Sally Snooks of West 98th Street got measles, the district leader saw to it that she was taken care of. Tammany purveyed help, if not justice. Whether or not the corner cop would let your youngster play under the water hydrant on a hot day depended on Tammany. It could do anything for a man from granting a bus franchise to a suspension of sentence for a serious crime; whether or not you could build a skyscraper—and how cheaply or expensively—or a chicken coop, depended on the Tiger. The Seabury investigation told much about the sale of judgeships. Then, after a long period of satiety and deliquescence, came the crushing blows of fifteen years ago. Judge Seabury demonstrated that it was extremely unwise for politicians to maintain safety deposit boxes with big amounts of cash in New York City. Jimmy Walker resigned rather than be forced out of office by Mr. Roosevelt, and the great days of Tammany were over.

Aside from scandals and witless leadership three major factors have contributed to the collapse of Tammany:

(1) The movement of people out of Manhattan itself into Brooklyn and the Bronx. Tammany is, of course, the Democratic machine in Manhattan only.

(2) Mr. La Guardia, who was beaten by Tammany in 1929, beat it in 1933, 1937, and 1941—which drove it into the wilderness.

(3) Above all, the New Deal. Tammany favors were small stuff compared to public works through the WPA. These latter, moreover, were administered honestly.

Wall Street, the Solar Plexus

I must atone for my wealth.

—Otto Kahn

There was a time, I am told on good authority, when John D. Rockefeller was getting one million dollars a day; and still, I have reason to believe, they buried him in a pair of pants.

—Milton Mayer

A bank is the thing that will always lend you money if you can prove you don’t need it.

—Joe E. Lewis

The main thing to say about Wall Street today is that it is not what it once was. Much of the brutal golden power, the sheen, is gone. Consider as typical of a whole great evolution what has happened to the “Corner,” i.e., the House of Morgan. J. P. Morgan himself, the Younger, died in 1943, and his will was made public in 1947. After deduction of tax, debts, and expenses, his net estate amounted to the bagatelle of $4,642,791. Nothing could more dramatically illustrate how times have irremediably changed.¹⁶

About American finance and business in general, monopoly, profits and the like, I hope to write in another place. Here is room only for the briefest highlights on Wall Street itself. The United States is the last stronghold of the capitalist system left in the world. We cannot but inspect its liver and solar plexus.

Wall Street is, strange as it may seem, so called because Peter Stuyvesant, in 1653, built a wall roughly where it lies today. It is a narrow, noisy, trenchlike little chasm, scarcely six hundred yards long. Here, or in the immediate neighborhood, are banks like Chase (“the most influential bank in the United States”),¹⁷ the National City, and the Guaranty. (Mr. Bell’s essay tells much about who owns these banks, for instance of the Giannini holdings in National City, and which are “Morgan banks” and which are not.) Here are potent underwriting houses like Halsey Stuart and Morgan Stanley; here is the Stock Exchange, on which are listed 200 billion dollars’ worth of securities and which transacted business worth 15 billion dollars in 1945. But another index of the way things have been going is that in 1929 the price of an Exchange seat was $625,000, and today is about $68,000. At the depth of the depression a seat cost $17,000. Details like these are as familiar to most Americans as the trademark of a brand of cigarettes, but let us point out once more that outlanders may not be so well informed.

In the vivid, fragrant days before 1929 Wall Street was, though disliked and distrusted by many people, an object of profound veneration to the business world. To become a Morgan partner, or even a Kuhn Loeb partner was for most rising young men of the East practically like becoming a cardinal, only more so. The path was well beaten for any really bright and ambitious youngster, and it was often a golden path—St. Paul’s or Lawrenceville, Yale or Princeton, and then the Street. Bankers were really looked up to in those days. Now of course they have to spend most of their time explaining themselves. Morgan and Kuhn Loeb had the juiciest parts of the investment business almost without competition, with Morgan concentrating on British and domestic industrial issues mostly, Kuhn Loeb on German and Scandinavian issues and some railroads. Another pregnant point is that in this era bankers played a very definite role in international political affairs. The House of Morgan was like the Board of Trade in England; to all intents and purposes it was a silently functioning agency of the American government itself. A Morgan partner could have much more influence than, say, an assistant secretary of state. Mr. Bell, if I may allude to his essay once more, makes mention of the way Wall Street kept in close touch with Washington, and told it, bluntly if necessary, what it was to do. Now as to the domestic side we must mention railroads in particular. The railway empires of the country were also more or less divided between Kuhn Loeb and Morgan, though other firms in time pushed their way in. The railroads could not promote their massive issues without money, and it was Wall Street which gave them money. Finally—and this is of course still true today—the bankers, through interlocking directorates and otherwise, had germinal influence on the affairs of almost all the great American manufacturing corporations.

Where do the bright youngsters turn today? A good many, if they hope to become millionaires some day by a conservative route, go into law. (Many, not exclusively interested in making money, more interested in making things or public policy, go into small businesses or government service, after a period at law.) The great law firms of Wall Street still pick the best brains in the nation. They have consummate power, ability, and intelligence. Their profits may still be enormous; since the SEC, a great deal more legal work attends financial issues than heretofore.¹⁸ One point to reflect on, though, is their inhospitality to Jews. Many big law firms—and to a certain extent banks—rigidly exclude Jews; even Jewish underlings and clerks are uncommon. In no American milieu is this more conspicuous. For a Jew to get into a good legal firm below Chambers Street is almost as difficult as to get into the Ku-Klux Klan. The upper reaches of the law in Wall Street are the last frigid citadel of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism.

To proceed. In 1930 James W. Gerard, formerly ambassador to Germany, made a national sensation—it will seem very tame now—by listing the sixty-four men who “ruled the United States.” He included only one politician (Mellon); he did not include the president, Mr. Hoover. These shoguns, he said, were the real powers behind the throne, too busy to run for office themselves but decisive in determining who did run, and in utter control of the nation’s purse strings. Perhaps the list has relevance today:

John D. Rockefeller Jr.

Andrew W. Mellon

J. P. Morgan

George F. Baker, banker

John D. Ryan, copper magnate

Walter C. Teagle, president of Standard Oil of New Jersey

Henry Ford

Frederick E. Weyerhaeuser, lumber

Myron C. Taylor

James A. Farrell, U.S. Steel

Arthur Curtiss James, large holder of railway securities

Charles Hayden, financier

Daniel O. Jackling, president of the Utah Copper Co.

Arthur V. Davis, president of Alcoa

P. M. Gossler, president of the Columbia Gas & Electric Corp.

R. C. Holmes, president of the Texas Corp.

John J. Raskob

Seven members of the Du Pont family

Edward J. Berwind, financier

Daniel Willard, Baltimore & Ohio

Sosthenes Behn, IT&T

Walter S. Gifford, AT&T

Owen D. Young, General Electric

Gerard Swope, General Electric

Thomas W. Lamont

Albert H. Wiggin, banker

Charles E. Mitchell, banker

Charles M. Schwab, Bethlehem Steel

Eugene G. Grace, Bethlehem Steel

Harry M. Warner, movies

Adolph Zukor, movies

William H. Crocker, San Francisco banker

O. P. and M. J. Van Sweringen, railway magnates

W. W. Atterbury, president of the Pennsylvania R.R.

Samuel Insull

The seven Fisher brothers

Daniel Guggenheim and William Loeb, mining magnates

George Washington Hill, American Tobacco Co.

Adolph S. Ochs

William Randolph Hearst

Robert R. McCormick

Joseph M. Patterson

Julius S. Rosenwald, merchant

Cyrus H. Curtis

Roy W. Howard

Sidney Z. Mitchell, chairman of the board, Electric Bond & Share

Walter Edwin Frew, Corn Exchange Bank

A. P. Giannini

William Green and Matthew Woll, labor¹⁹

What are the main reasons why Wall Street has declined so notably in prestige, authority, and influence? Following are a few. They are not listed chronologically or in order of importance:

(a) First, of course, the crash and the depression, which not only obliterated a great proportion of the national wealth, but drastically lowered confidence in bankers.

(b) Scandals. It was a severe blow to Wall Street that men like Richard Whitney, a former president of the Stock Exchange, and in a different category Charles E. Mitchell, the president of the National City Bank, no less, went on public trial. Something was wrong. When Whitney first got into trouble people said, “Oh, the Morgans will never let him go to jail.” But he went.

(c) Income tax. It is, after all, almost insuperably difficult nowadays to accumulate a fortune. It may not be impossible to make big money; to hold on to it is a different matter. What does it profit a man to spend thirty years trying to make money in large amounts, and have his major earnings go to taxes?

(d) More pertinent than any of these items so far, the transfer of much of the control of credit from Wall Street to the government. “Freedom to speculate” became severely limited. Moreover the government extended its direct financial power through such agencies as the RFC (created by Mr. Hoover). Many corporations didn’t have to go to Wall Street any more. They went to Washington.

(e) The growth of corporations themselves. Plenty of companies, especially new companies (like Kaiser) do of course still come to Wall Street for underwriting. But the colossi like AT&T are big enough to be their own bankers for the most part. In the old days a middle western railway could be as dependent on Morgan as a cripple on a crutch. Nowadays even small corporations do their banking locally. Financial power has become much more diffused. Also Ford (a special case of course) financed himself in an emergency through his own dealers.

(f) Various regulatory devices, initiated by the New Deal for the public interest. We accept these today, it has been said, almost as automatically as we accept—and welcome—the strictures of the Pure Food and Drug Act. But think back to 1929! A private bank did not even have to make public its condition. There was no federal regulation whatever of the issue of securities except of certain minor types.

(g) Among specific acts, the Banking Act of 1933, which enforced a separation of banks of deposit from investment banking (“and so took all the gravy out of Wall Street”) and the Securities Act of 1934 which set up the SEC. Today—something so obviously correct that it seems barbarous that it did not exist fifteen years ago—every underwriter is under strict legal compulsion to declare in the most minute detail every relevant fact about an impending issue. “It is the underwriters themselves,” notes Life, “not the corporation, that are legally liable for false or misleading statements in such a prospectus.” Every material fact bearing on an issue must be made known.

(h) One might also mention the Investment Trust Act and similar acts, regulating the operation of investment trusts and councilors, and forbidding the latter to act as brokers, and also, in another and wider field, the Johnson Act, which cut off loans to foreign nations in default on obligations to the United States.

(i) Competitive bidding. Except in isolated cases the railroads and utilities are no longer able to negotiate their financing with banking houses of their own choice. Instead they must offer their securities publicly to the highest bidder. This, as much as anything, has served to upset old banking ties, lower the morale of the Street, and cut profits to the bone.

(j) During the hearings of a subcommittee of the United States Senate investigating the banking business and the stock market, a lively press agent managed to put a midget on J. P. Morgan’s knee.

Perhaps this last item marked the turning point. With that midget, an impregnability was shattered, a myth was broken, an era ended. The Pecora hearings were the Great Divide, Wall Street has never been quite the same since.

Some testimony by Mr. Morgan and his associates during this astonishing investigation shows nicely what a Divine-Right-of-Kings world we lived in then:

Q.	Should not private banks be examined and forced to publish statements of their condition?
A.	Possibly.
Q.	What assurance has a depositor of the solvency of Morgan & Company?
A.	Faith.
Q.	Are not depositors entitled to statements of Morgan & Company’s condition?
A.	They can have them if they want them; no one has ever asked.
Q.	Has any public statement ever been made … since the Elder Morgan testified before the Pujo committee twenty years ago?
A.	No. That was the only public statement we have ever made about anything.

It was at this hearing, incidentally, that the country learned with a burning incredulous shock that neither Morgan nor any of his great partners, men like George Whitney and Thomas W. Lamont, had paid any income tax during the depression years 1931 and 1932, and that in 1930 their payments had totaled only $48,000. This was, of course, because the partnership had taken advantage of the capital gains and losses provision in income tax regulations. The late Senator Glass of Virginia snapped in icy disgust, “The fault is with the law.” (It should also be noted that few among those outraged by this nonpayment of taxes for two years paid much attention to the fact that from 1917 to 1927 members of the firm had paid taxes of more than 50 million dollars.)

Also in this investigation it became known that the Morgan partners followed the practice of offering certain stocks to a group of selected friends at prices considerably below market, before issuing them. The question was asked, “Was not the offer of such shares at wholesale prices a kind of bribe?” The answer was, “No. The shares were only offered to clients and friends who could afford to take a risk … regarded as too speculative for the general public.”²⁰ Among Morgan acquaintances—who got Standard Brands at bargain rates—were Calvin Coolidge (3,000 shares), John J. Raskob (2,000), General Pershing (500), Colonel Lindbergh (500), Bernard M. Baruch (4,000), Norman H. Davis (500), Cornelius S. Kelley of Anaconda (2,000), Charles E. Mitchell (10,000), Alfred P. Sloan (7,500), Clarence H. Mackay (2,000). Similar bargains in Allegheny Corporation stock went to Charles Francis Adams (1,000), Newton D. Baker (2,000), and Owen D. Young (5,000).²¹

Morgan partners in 1933 held 167 directorships in 89 corporations, it was revealed, with aggregate assets of about 20 billion dollars. Among the 89 were 15 banks and trust companies, 7 miscellaneous holding companies, 10 railroads, 5 public utility holding corporations, 8 public utility operating companies, 38 industrial companies and 6 insurance companies. Asked about this, Mr. Morgan himself said that he disliked having his partners serve as directors; they did so “only by the earnest request of companies which wanted them as financial advisers.” But, according to Time, “The Morgan-First National influence in 1935 was estimated by a National Resources Committee report as still reaching into $30,210,000 worth of U. S. railroads, utilities, industries, banks. Yet some of the proudest Morgan nurslings, like General Electric, had long since outgrown their Morgan link.”²²

Meantime the 1933 Banking Act was passed. “J. P. Morgan & Co.,” wrote the New York Times in its obituary of Mr. Morgan, “had to choose between its security underwriting business, the leading business of its kind in the world, and its private deposit banking.” It decided to remain a private commercial bank, and therefore had to drop its investment business. Morgan’s son Henry and two other partners resigned from the parent house to form a new investment firm, totally independent, Morgan Stanley & Company, Inc. Morgan’s other son, Junius, stayed on with the parent bank, which was still “the largest private bank in the world.”

In 1940 came another bruising and revolutionary step. The financial writers cried, “Götterdämmerung!” What happened was that the Morgan bank decided to incorporate itself. This was as if Carry Nation had done a midnight strip tease at Leon & Eddie’s. Morgan no longer a private bank! It applied to the authorities for a charter of incorporation and then moved into the sphere of “government supervision and growing accountability to the public.” The ancien régime was no more. This was Louis XVI’s head bouncing into the cart. “It was understood,” wrote the New York Times, that “the firm was incorporated because death and inheritance taxes raised difficulties of keeping the bank’s capital intact as partners died or withdrew. The firm had deposits of more than $600 million at the time of this change from a purely private bank to a state-chartered institution.” Some time after this—another shock to the old-fashioned—J. P. Morgan & Company, Inc., offered stock to the public for the first time, and in 1942 it was admitted to membership in the Federal Reserve system.

Now to conclude. No one should think from the above that Wall Street is powerless these days. By no means! It is still incontestably the most powerful financial center in the world. It still has an influence on America pervasive, tenacious, and articulate. All that has happened is that it can no longer play its game exclusively its own way. It must obey house rules.

As to the place in the national economy of some great corporations not so directly in the Wall Street arc, though most are based in or near New York, the most interesting presentation I have seen is that in a pamphlet prepared by Senator O’Mahoney’s Temporary National Economic Committee. Some of this material also appeared in the Congressional Record.²³ There were, as of that date, forty-one American corporations with total assets of a billion dollars or more. In the year preceding there had been thirty-eight; in 1941, thirty-two. There are, of course, other and perhaps better ways of measuring the size of a corporation than by its assets. But considered strictly from the point of view of assets, the biggest—and the largest enterprise in the United States—is the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, with almost six and a half billion dollars in assets; next comes Bell Telephone, with more than six billion; next comes the Prudential Insurance Company with more than five. A fingerful of banks are runners-up, with more than three and a half billion each; then come two more insurance companies, with more than three billion. The first railway on the list is the Pennsylvania, with assets of $2,800,000,000 plus. The first industrial corporation is Standard Oil of New Jersey, with $2,300,000,000 plus. General Motors is thirteenth on the list; U. S. Steel fourteenth; the New York Central fifteenth; the Santa Fe twenty-third; the Union Pacific twenty-fifth; Consolidated Edison twenty-seventh; Du Pont thirty-eighth; and Ford forty-first. Senate statisticians made much play with this list. They showed, for instance, that only six American states (New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, California, Michigan, Massachusetts) have a total assessed valuation of property greater than the assets of Metropolitan Life. Both AT&T and the Prudential Insurance Company have greater assets than all but thirteen states. Assets of Chase National run nip and tuck with those of Kentucky, and Standard Oil (New Jersey) is richer than Virginia. The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company of Milwaukee has assets almost equivalent to those of the state of Georgia; similarly the Chemical Bank & Trust Company of New York runs neck and neck with Florida; the Baltimore & Ohio Railway with Washington; and Commonwealth & Southern with Colorado. As of 1942 there were thirty-two American corporations with considerably greater wealth than eighteen states. Mr. Berle, the former American ambassador to Brazil and assistant secretary of state, said once that two hundred companies owned half the wealth of the United States. Probably he was not far wrong.²⁴

What happened to Wall Street and the nation during 1946 is hardly part of our story here. The long bull market finally collapsed. Pages might be written about the reasons for this. One striking fact is that the market did not climb, but actually sagged, after the Republican victory in 1946. What will happen next? This country has at hand at least some of the techniques that might prevent a new crash or a new depression. It remains to be seen, however, if it will use them. Plenty of people still hate the idea of government controls so much that they would rather ruin themselves—and everybody else to boot—than make use of them.

The Harlems

Harlem has a black belt where darkies dwell in a heaven and where white men seek a little hell.

—Alfred Kreymborg

There are several. One is Puerto Rican, one Haitian, and another, verging into what might be called the Marcantonio territory on the east side, Italian. I drove through this area before the 1946 election; loud speakers brought campaign speeches—in warm whole-toned Italian—out into the dreary, chilly streets. (It was in this neighborhood that a Republican election official, Joseph Scottoriggio, was killed in mysterious circumstances.) Also there are Russians in Harlem, Spaniards, Mexicans, a considerable salting of Chinese, some Japanese Nisei who do not want to return to California, and, of all things, the largest Finnish community in the United States. Take the Benjamin Franklin High School on the East River Drive. It may be doubted if any school in the country has such a bizarrely commingled student body.

Next to the Negroes, the biggest group in Harlem is that from Puerto Rico, which numbers about 100,000. Negroes and Puerto Ricans get on well together by and large. One Puerto Rican told me that this was natural because his people want to get Americanized as quickly as possible, and the Negroes represent Anglo-Saxon culture! Another item in this general field is probably apocryphal. Harlem had a small angry upsurge in 1943 which, but for instant sharp work by Mr. La Guardia and the police, might have become a serious riot. The Negro community seemed to feel so secure and confident of adequate protection, however, that a Chinese laundryman is supposed to have hung a sign on his shop, Me Colored Too! Still another point in Harlem mixedupness is the fact that a well-known small community exists of Negro Jews.

Though not necessarily the biggest, Harlem is by all odds the most important concentration of Negroes in America. Roughly from 110th Street to 115th on the east side, and from Madison Avenue to St. Nicholas, live some 310,000 Negroes. This is more than the population of whole cities like Atlanta, Dallas, or Portland, Oregon. Yet Harlem holds only about half the total number of Negroes (600,000) in New York City as a whole; there are approximately 150,000 in Brooklyn, about 30,000 in the Bronx, and about 30,000 in Queens. Years ago, New York Negroes lived in a few scattered and isolated enclaves: Minetta Lane in Greenwich Village, “San Juan Hill” on West 63rd Street near the river, and some areas in German Yorkville (especially on East 88th near Third). Now, as everybody knows, they have spread all over the city. Harlem itself is expanding all the time. It has no fixed frontiers.

Since “Harlem” has become a kind of abstraction (like “Hollywood”), it is extremely difficult to describe. The easiest thing to say is that it is a profoundly complex cross section of the whole of New York in black miniature. People are tempted to think of Harlem as exclusively a slum; it is also talked about as if it were a cave full of night clubs. Many Harlemites have of course never seen a night club. Some parts of it are indeed slums, and one block, near Lenox and 143rd Street, is commonly said to be the most crowded in the world. A recent commissioner of housing and building visited a sixty-four-year-old tenement in the neighborhood of Fifth and 117th not long ago, and found it “infested, scaly, shabby,” a menace to health, a disgrace otherwise, and a fire trap. Rats were so much in evidence that the remark was reported, “They not only come here to eat, but I think they cook their own food, too.”

But Harlem as a whole is by no means a slum. This is not the Bowery. A good many apartment blocks, built long before the district became Negro, are still in good shape; the trouble is that they are viciously overcrowded and badly maintained. For instance there will be only one superintendent for six buildings, jammed with sublet flats, and containing literally hundreds of families. Also Harlem has several handsome, modern, and well-maintained apartment buildings. One, at 409 Edgecombe, is in the area known locally as “Sugar Hill”; here lives, as I heard it put, “the glamor set of Black America.”²⁵ But this description makes Sugar Hill sound frivolous, which it is not. A great number of eminent Negroes live there—Walter White, the competent discerning secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Municipal Judge Charles E. Toney, Roy Wilkins the editor of Crisis, one of the best-known Negro lawyers in the country Thurgood Marshall, William T. Andrews who is one of the senior members of the state assembly, and W. E. B. Du Bois. The rents on Sugar Hill are perhaps $85.00 a month, for something very much like apartments on Park Avenue, and which on Park Avenue would cost $300.

I went up to Harlem with two Negro friends a few evenings ago, and tried to learn a little. It is a community constantly in motion. Like New Rochelle, it is a kind of bedroom for the rest of New York; people live here, and work downtown. It has several Negro newspapers, including the conservative Amsterdam News and the radical People’s Voice. There is no Negro department store; most of the shopkeepers on the main street (125th) are Jews. Almost all real estate is white absentee owned, though one Negro businessman, A. A. Austin, is a substantial owner; there is no Negro bank (but local branches of the great white banks employ Negro personnel); about seventy-five saloons and one movie house are Negro owned, but no more; the chief hotel is a remarkable establishment called the Theresa, almost exclusively Negro, but it is white owned, and several whites live in it. The chief Negro business in Harlem on a broad level is insurance (unless you want to count religion as a business), and on a narrower level hairdressing.

The whole community is, of course, strongly labor conscious. At least 50,000 Negroes in New York City are members of unions, including laundry workers, garment workers, hod carriers, longshoremen, painters, maritime workers, and members of the United Office and Professional Workers, CIO. Probably some single streets in Harlem have more Negro trade unionists than the entire state of Georgia. In New York as a whole there is probably less discrimination against Negroes, in employment and otherwise, than in any other city in America. In fact many familiar forms of anti-Negro discrimination are illegal in New York. Of course some discriminations, illegal or not, do continue to exist.

Harlem has no single political boss, any more than New York City itself has a single boss. You can find every shade of opinion on any question. Some Harlemites are “handkerchief-heads”; some frankly call themselves “antiwhite.” Once the community had a picturesque creature, Abdul Hamid Sufi, who was called the Black Hitler, and who, despite this name, operated a “Temple of Peace and Tranquillity.” There are extremely conservative Negroes, like Dr. Clilan B. Powell, editor of the Amsterdam News, a member of the State Boxing Commission, and assistant publicity director of the Republican National Committee, and there are equally some extreme radicals, as well as many who defy classification. The president of the New York City Civil Service Commission, Ferdinand Q. Morton, is a Negro, and so is a member of the state Committee Against Discrimination set up by the Ives Bill, Elmer Carter (who also lives on Sugar Hill incidentally). The only Communist on the New York City council is a competent and accomplished Negro, Benjamin J. Davis Jr. Also Davis, who played football at Williams and is a graduate of the Harvard Law School, is publisher of the Daily Worker. His father interestingly enough, an Atlanta publisher, is an important Republican politician. In a recent councilmanic election, under proportional representation, Davis’s vote was only topped by that of Stanley M. Isaacs, an able Republican who has been entrenched in New York politics for many years.

On a street corner near the Theresa we listened to a campaign speech by Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr.²⁶ Many Negroes dislike Powell, and call him a spellbinder. He has a blistering hot voice; he never pauses a second between sentences; he gestures like a piston. This evening, with his words reverberating up and down the street, he denied with ringing animosity that his wife, Hazel Scott, a well-known Negro pianist, was white (as some silly people had alleged); he excused some absences from Congress by saying that, after all, his constituents ought not mind that he had taken a brief honeymoon—how the crowd roared!—and, anyway, his mother was very ill. “Any Negro born of a Negro,” Powell cried out, “must be a Negro, must be a radical, must be a fighter, all the time!” Powell has fire and courage. By profession he is a preacher, as was his father before him. His Abyssinian Baptist church has, in fact, what is believed to be the largest Protestant congregation in the world, numbering at least ten thousand. Like almost all Negroes running for office in 1946, Powell was vulnerable on the score that the Democratic party was also the party of Mr. Bilbo, an embarrassing paradox indeed. But he squeezed through, and is now serving his second term in the House of Representatives. He was the first Negro councilman in New York City, and is one of two Negroes in the Congress.

To sum up: the chief characteristic of Harlem is that, by and large, its Negroes (and others in New York) have greater opportunities in more fields than in any comparable city; they have better chances in education, jobs, social evolution, and civil service; they are the nearest to full citizenship of any in the nation.

New York Olla Podrida

New York City has more trees (2,400,000) than houses, and it makes 18,200,000 telephone calls a day, of which about 125,000 are wrong numbers. Its rate of divorces is the lowest of any big American city, less than a tenth of that of Baltimore for instance, and even less than that in the surrounding countryside. One of its hotels, built largely over railway tracks, has an assessed valuation of $22,500,000 (there are 124 buildings valued at more than a million dollars in Manhattan alone), and it is probably the only city in the world that still maintains sheriff’s juries and has five district attorneys.

New York City has such admirable institutions as the New School for Social Research, the Council on Foreign Relations, Cooper Union, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Century Association. It has 17 billion dollars’ worth of real estate, and a black market in illegitimate babies. It has 492 playgrounds, more than 11,000 restaurants, 2,800 churches, and the largest store in the world, Macy’s, which wrote 40,328,836 sales checks in 1944, and serves more than 150,000 customers a day. It has the Great White Way, bad manners, 33,000 schoolteachers (average pay $3,803), and 500 boy gangs.

New York makes three-quarters of all the fur coats in the country, and its slang and mode of speech can change hour by hour. It has New York University, a wholly private institution which is the second largest university in the country, with 13,800 Jews in its student body, 12,000 Protestants, and 7,200 Catholics, and a great municipal institution, the City College of the College of the City of New York, one of four famous city colleges. In New York people drink 14 million gallons of hard liquor a year, and smoke about 20 billion cigarettes. It has 301,850 dogs, and one of its unsolved murders is the political assassination of Carlo Tresca.

New York has 9,371 taxis and more than 700 parks. Its budget runs to $175,000,000 for education alone, and it drinks 3,500,000 quarts of milk a day. The average New York family (in normal times) moves once every eighteen months, and more than 2,200,000 New Yorkers belong to the Associated Hospital Service. New York has a birth every five minutes, and a marriage every seven. It has “more Norwegian-born citizens than Tromsoe and Narvik put together,” and only one railroad, the New York Central, has the perpetual right to enter it by land. It has 22,000 soda fountains, and 112 tons of soot fall per square mile every month, which is why your face is dirty.

¹ “New York is a bigger summer resort than Atlantic City and a bigger winter resort than Miami.” Simeon Strunsky, No Mean City, p. 52.

² David Sarnoff, one of the most enlightened capitalists in the United States and president of the Radio Corporation of America, was also born in Minsk.

³ New York Herald Tribune, June 21, 1945, quoting A Survey of the New York Market published by the Consolidated Edison Company.

⁴ A New Yorker cartoon of the time presented two girls sweating at their sewing machines. One says to the other, “Now what’s my cue line after your song in Act II?” and spats. Also this book contains literally twenty-two columns of associations of one kind or another.

⁵ Four subdivisions of New York City are, it will be seen, greater in population than any American cities except Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Los Angeles.

⁶ Article by Murray Schumach, January 19, 1947.

⁷ New York City, in the American Guide Series, Random House, p. 410.

⁸ These figures and details are all from the New York Times, September 30, 1945, and February ro, 1946. A remarkable point is the safety record of the New York elevators. The ratio is one person killed to 196,000,000 carried.

⁹ These phrases are from a brilliant essay on New York by Vincent McHugh. It was originally published in the New York City volume of the WPA series, and was later reprinted by Clifton Fadiman in his anthology, Reading I’ve Liked.

¹⁰ Strunsky, op. cit.

¹¹ Another item is that the average Englishman will find offensive the American habit of spitting on the floor, but that the Americans are now keenly alive to this “weak point” and are “doing their best” to remove it.

¹² Two of his brothers, who also emigrated to America, met violent deaths; one, John, was killed by gunmen in a Brooklyn holdup some years ago; another, James, a Kew York City fireman, lost his life while answering a false alarm.

¹³ Not to be confused with Attorney Genera! Goldstein mentioned in the last chapter.

¹⁴ Time, September 24, 1945.

^* Copyright, 1933, by Ogden Nash.

¹⁵ A minor but illuminating item is the way the New York newspapers lined up during this campaign. The Times backed Morris; so did the Post. PM supported O’Dwyer until a day or two before the election, and then switched to Morris. The Brooklyn Eagle supported O’Dwyer and so did the Daily Worker. Supporting Goldstein were the Herald Tribune and the Sun. What line the News, Mirror, World-Telegram, and Journal-American took was difficult to figure out.

¹⁶ The best single thing on Wall Street in short space I have ever read is an essay by Elliot V. Bell in an anthology called We Saw It Happen. Mr. Bell was a financial reporter for the New York Times when he wrote it. He is now a leading member of Governor Dewey’s brain trust and the head of the New York State Banking Department.

¹⁷ See Life in a useful pictorial essay, January 7, 1946.

¹⁸ Life, op. cit., says that the charge for preparing a prospectus may be $100,000.

¹⁹ It is not uninteresting that while making out this list, Mr. Gerard was the guest of General Cornelius Vanderbilt at Newport, Rhode Island. One singular point is that none of the great insurance companies are represented.

²⁰ One of Morgan’s own statements about this was the following: “Our lists of private subscribers naturally were composed of men of affairs and position; but they were selected because of established business and personal relations and not because of any actual or potential political relations. We never had any occasion to ask favors from legislators or persons in public office, nor have we ever done so.” From the obituary of Mr. Morgan in the New York Times, March 4, 1943.

²¹ This list has been printed often. Here I am following Time, June 5, 1933.

²² February 26, 1940.

²³ February 12, 1945.

²³ As to concentration of ownership the New Republic states (September 2, 1946) that of the two hundred largest nonfinancial corporations in the country, 6 per cent of the common stock is owned by the upper 1 per cent of registered stockholders. Three family groups—Du Ponts, Mellons and Rockefellers—still control fifteen of these two hundred biggest corporations, with assets of eight billion dollars. In 1935 nearly a third of the directorships of the two hundred largest nonfinancial corporations and the fifty largest financial corporations were held by only four hundred men.

²⁵ For much detail on this and similar matters see Roi Ottley’s New World A-Coming.

²⁶ No relation to the Powell named above, I believe.