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"Corruption and dishonesty and crime are not administrative and partisan. They are personal and individual. . . . Be not disturbed by political propaganda. . . . The Republican party of this State has not an issue to go into the next campaign. . . . I know that a trivial thing, if dressed up . . . will gather a world of importance. . . . Go back to your jobs tomorrow morning and believe it is more important to keep your nose to the grindstone than your ear to the ground."
Much of the effect of this speech was spoiled when Commissioner Higgins announced that he would require no self-incriminating testimony from the officials subpenaed before him. Immediately the entire Press (including the arch-Democratic World and Everting World) cried out against the Walker regime. Flayed were the laissez faire methods of the administration, the "Tammany investigation of Tammany." Cartoonist Rollin Kirby of the World turned one phrase of the flashy-dressing, wisecracking Mayor into an exquisite pillory (see cut). In this crisis, the Mayor loudly reprimanded— for "inefficiency"—his Chiefs of the Department of Markets and Bureau of Weights & Measures, protectors of the city's food-buyers.
Ewald Trial. Meanwhile Attorney Tuttle had presented to both Federal and county grand juries evidence t'hat Judge Ewald (yet to be tried on the mail-fraud charge) had bought his seat on the bench for $10,000, which his pretty wife had paid to a Tammany district leader. Before the Federal jury, Mrs. Ewald and the Tammany leader refused to testify on the ground that it might incriminate them; before the county jury, however, they eagerly related that the $10,000 was a friendly loan ($5,000 in cash, $5,000 by a check drawn to a third party; no security) to help the Tammany man buy a country house. Mayor Walker, having appointed Ewald, was subpenaed to explain how and why he had done so.
Before the Mayor took the stand, the New York County District Attorney, Thomas C. T. Grain, good Tammany man, questioned him out of court. Republicans howled that this was a farcical "dress rehearsal." Next day, dressed his nattiest, talking his cockiest, Mayor Walker entered the courtroom with a grin. The jury applauded. He declared that Ewald had had such influence behind him that paying out money would have been unnecessary and ridiculous. "If he voluntarily contributed any money for that appointment," said the Mayor, "he might just as well have thrown it in a sewer, for all the good it did him." Pretty Mrs. Ewald also testified. The jury adjourned without indicting her husband.
Next Act. Public opinion, forcefully expressed by famed Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise, instantly demanded that Governor Roosevelt review the Ewald case. The Governor sent for the trial records the same day. The New York Bar Association also urged the Governor to action. Worried Prosecutor Grain said he might instruct the grand jury to indict Ewald after all. Observers suspected he was acting under instructions. The spotlight thus shifted from Manhattan to Albany and the next act in New York's "Scandals of 1930" promised to feature the two gubernatorial aspirants. Roosevelt and Tuttle, playing opposite each other in the skit entitled: "How bad are Mayor Walker & friends?"