James John ("Jimmy") Walker, New York City's glib, pinchbeck little Mayor, had to appear in court last week. He was not on trial personally, just a witness. Yet he was on trial politically because the case was that of a city magistrate charged with buying his position from Tammany Hall, of which Mayor Walker is currently the chief official product. The scandal of George F. Ewald, judge of the Traffic Court, was another climax in a long series of Democratic scandals which mischance and political adversaries had been exposing all through Mayor Walker's administration. Leading up to the Ewald scandal, other items were as follows:
¶ The president of the borough of Queens, Maurice E. Connolly, had been jailed for fat sewer-contract graft (TIME, May 19).
¶ A judge of the General Sessions Court. Francis Xavier Mancuso, had been forced from the bench for lending his name, in which the Italian populace put great store, to shady City Trust Co., which crashed.
¶ The State Superintendent of Banks. Frank H. Warder, also had been cast out because of the City Trust failure.
¶ Another judge, Albert H. Vitale, had been discovered consorting with crooks & gamblers and was removed from office.
¶ The chief probation officer of the State General Sessions Court, Edwin J. Cooley, had been suspended from office and indicted for favoritism and misappropriation of funds and resigned in disfavor, although later whitewashed by a grand jury.
¶ A Kings County judge, W. Bernard ("Bernie") Vause had been sentenced to six years in jail for stock-swindling by mail with Columbia Finance Corp., a pseudo-bank into which many poor people put savings.
¶ The chairman of the Board of Standards & Appeals, William E. Walsh, was standing trial on a charge of accepting gratuities for building-permit arrangements and had been indicted for concealing these gratuities from Government income-tax collectors.
¶ The Public Administrator of Staten Island, James W. Hennessey, had been indicted for a $35,000 deficit in his accounts.
¶ Judge George F. Ewald of the Traffic Court, prior to being suspected of job-buying, was indicted for selling stock by mail in Cotter Butte Mines, Inc., a company whose real holdings are said by U. S. agents to be "nothing but a hole in the ground." He resigned from the bench last month.
Badminton. Before all these conditions had been revealed, Republican leaders in the State Legislature and Democratic Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt began playing political badminton with suggestions that New York City be investigated. While Governor Roosevelt temporized, Republican U. S. Attorney Charles H. Tuttle, aspirant for the gubernatorial nomination next autumn, was busy. He it was who brought the Vause, Walsh and Ewald cases to light, leaving the public to draw the political inference. He it was who startled Mayor Walker into starting an "investigation" of his own last month, supervised by his Commissioner of Accounts, James A. Higgins.
"A Trivial Thing." With an air of determined rectitude, the Mayor summoned his 38 department chiefs to the City Hall and spoke over their heads to the electorate via the municipal radio station (WNYC). He said in part: