The Good Old Bad Days

The tabloid New York Daily News flatters the common man by cheering for commonness; consequently it has the largest newspaper audience in the U.S. The News scorns reformers, and flaunts the details of Manhattan's juiciest scandals with a self-righteousness that does not conceal a smirk. Its general attitude toward manners & morals is the tough kid's jeer: if they're good they're probably phoney and certainly ridiculous.

Last week the News wore its favorite, city-kid's air. Tired of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia's civic scoldings, the News plunged into the tawdry past, and came up with a Manhattan mayoralty candidate it could really be enthusiastic about: Jimmy Walker.

Said a News editorial: "Jimmy was Mayor 1926-1932; and those were years when New York was a pleasant place to live in. It was a wide-open town, in defiance of the prohibitionists. There may have been some graft changing hands-- 'honest graft,' as it was called--but not many people cared. What did matter . . . was that it was fun to be in New York in Jimmy Walker's time. For the last few years, it has been no more fun to be in New York than anywhere else. The war has been partly to blame for that; but [so has] LaGuardia. . . . Jimmy Walker . . . would win in a walk, on the nostalgic vote."

Poll & Payroll. Then, fairly sniffing the stale air of speakeasies and Minsky burlesque shows, and cocking an ear for the tugboat whistles that used to herald a civic reception for a Channel swimmer or a Uruguayan pingpong champ, the News set out to bring Jimmy back. It hired teams of canvassers (at $10 a day apiece) to poll the city, promising its readers that the poll "will be conducted scientifically and impartially." Actually, no Ja vote in Hitler's Reich ever packed a more loaded question than the one the News launched its poll with: "If not Walker, who?" The citizenry of Manhattan, scientifically questioned by the News's pollsters, were decidedly for Walker.

One thing the News forgot to tell its readers: how Jimmy Walker felt about it. That skinny, glib, ingratiating Irishman, who at 63 still looks like an aging musi-comedy juvenile, has rung up many a useful dollar since he left the mayor's office in a hurry in 1932, just as graft investigations by Judge Samuel Seabury and Governor Franklin Roosevelt were getting uncomfortably close to him. Next week Jimmy's $20,000-a-year contract as "impartial Czar" of the cloak-&-suit industry runs out, but he already has another job, the presidency of a new phonograph-record firm. Said he last week to 1,300 fellow cloak-&-suiters dining at the Waldorf-Astoria: "I am not a candidate for mayor. I am on a good payroll now. Please leave me alone."

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