Shortly before 11 a.m. on January 1, 1910, William J. Gaynor, a slender, elegantly dressed man with a Van Dyke beard, left his brownstone at 20 Eighth Avenue, near Prospect Park in Brooklyn. About an hour later, having walked all the way, he strode up the front steps of City Hall, in which he had not before set foot. Within miinutes, Gaynor would become the 94th mayor of New York.
At noon precisely, Gaynor took the oath. He delivered one of the shortest inaugural addresses on record: “I enter upon this office with the intention of doing the very best I can for the City of New York. That will have to suffice; I can do no more.”
Gaynor was born in Whitesboro, New York, on February 2, 1848. He spent four years in the Christian Brothers as Brother Adrian Denys. The experience left him with a taste for the Stoics, particularly Epictetus; Don Quixote, which he ranked second only to The Bible; and the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and Benvenuto Cellini. He read law for about two years and was admitted to the New York bar in 1871. Then he worked briefly as a reporter for the Brooklyn Argus before hanging out his shingle in Flatbush.
He married in 1874 and was divorced seven years later on the only grounds then available in New York: adultery. In 1886, he married Augusta C. Mayer, a beautiful woman, gracious, domestic and fond of society. The marriage endured despite Gaynor’s temper, although Philip Kohler, one of Gaynor’s secretaries, insisted there was a slug in the woodwork of the Gaynors’ front hall that she had fired at the judge in a moment of anger and missed. He represented such men as Shifty Hughie McCarthy who, as Lately Thomas wrote in The Mayor Who Mastered New York, was “always in trouble, suspected of everything, and usually guilty.” He also represented saloonkeepers accused of violating the Sunday opening laws. He became a superb trial lawyer, cutting quickly to the heart of a lawsuit through thorough preparation, cold logic, and terse, colloquial presentation.
Gaynor first came to public notice after investigating election frauds in Coney Island, when he jailed John Y. McKane, the local Democratic boss who had once elected himself Gravesend town supervisor, land commissioner, chairman of the water, tax and excise boards, and chief of police—all at the same time. Elected to the New York Supreme Court in 1893 and reelected in 1907, Gaynor proved an extreme libertarian; he was, as the New York Globe later wrote, “…a primitive American and really believed in the Bill of Rights…These things did not represent sentimental nonsense to him nor did he regard them as impractical abstractions.”
To Gaynor, government should not interfere with those who lived as they wanted without disturbing their neighbors. People should spend their Sundays as they wished, and he usually released boys and young men arrested for playing ball on the Christian Sabbath. He was tolerant of backsliding from the stricter moral codes. He sensed men would not be transformed into angels, at least in his time, and lacked patience for those who insisted on its immediate possibility.
Among working men and women he was at ease, and he chatted easily with the uneducated about farming or work or politics. Among his intellectual equals, he was a genial and fascinating conversationalist. If a reporter caught him on a good day, as did a reporter from the World who met him at his summer home on Long Island, he would murmur, “Well, if you have to interview me, let’s step inside and go to work on it like mechanics.” Once they were in his office, he took out two tumblers and uncorked the “Old Senator.”
He loved dining with friends over a bottle of champagne, talking about history, politics, literature, the law, and whatever came to mind. His capacity for spirits was bottomless and seemed only to sharpen his tongue. Ira Bamberger, a lawyer and friend, spent such an evening with the judge. Their conversation went on for quite some time and “more than one cork was popped.” Bamberger had a case on Gaynor’s calendar the next morning. Bamberger missed the first call. He staggered late into court, evidencing the kind of hangover in which the growth of one’s hair is an agony. Judge Gaynor called Bamberger up to the bench and delivered a deadpan rebuke the the lawyer’s lateness, concluding, “From your appearance, you would seem to have fallen among bad companions.”
Yet all Gaynor’s philosophy could not bridle his bad temper. Years later, reporters who had covered City Hall during the administrations of Gaynor and La Guardia agreed hands-down that Gaynor’s capacity for sustained, epic, imaginative profanity, rich with allusion, imagery and metaphor, made the Little Flower’s tantrums look a little silly.
In 1909, Tammany boss Charles F. Murphy began figuring how the party might keep City Hall at that year’s elections. He chose Gaynor, somehow believing he could be controlled. This was a mistake. The Republicans nominated Otto Bannard, a wealthy, colorless banker, and a strong ticket with him. Then publisher William Randolph Hearst, who had unsuccessfully run for president in 1904, mayor in 1905 and governor in 1906, announced his independent candidacy.
Gaynor found his 30 years’ public service meant nothing. Only the World and the New York Press endorsed him. The Times deemed his nomination “a scandal.” Gaynor’s opponents called him “a symbol for everything that is indecent and disgusting,” “a poor, I will go further and say a bad judge,” “a hypocrite,” “a learned fraud,” “mentally cross-eyed,” “incapable of telling the truth.” Gaynor replied in kind, saying of one opponent, “Hearst’s face almost makes me want to puke.” The press said that no campaign had ever been fought on such low terms. (Then, as now, political reporters had no memory or sense of history).
On Election Day, Gaynor polled forty-three percent of the vote, Bannard thirty percent, and Hearst twenty-seven.
Gaynor’s marriage with Tammany was short-lived: he made the mistake of appointing qualified officials regardless of party ties. By contrast, for Tammany, party ties were often the highest qualification. Besides, its men kicked back part of their salaries to the organization’s coffers. Without patronage, Tammany was on a starvation diet.
“What do we have for Charlie Murphy?” a colleague once asked.
“A few kind words,” the Mayor replied.
During lulls in his office routine, Gaynor buzzed for a stenographer, took a basket of letters and began dictating. Most correspondents received such letters as:
Dear Sir: I thank you very much for your kind and encouraging letter of March 31.Very truly yours, W.J. Gaynor, Mayor
Others received more individual replies: “Dear Sir: I care nothing for common rumor, and I guess you made up the rumor in this case yourself. Very truly yours, W.J. Gaynor, Mayor.”
“Dear Sir: Your letter is at hand and I have read enough of it to see that you are a mere scamp. Nonetheless, I sometimes derive profit from the sayings and doings of scamps. Very truly yours, W.J. Gaynor, Mayor.”
“Dear Madam: I regret to say that I do not know anyone I can recommend to you as a husband. You can doubtless make a better selection than I can, as you know the kind of man you want. Of course, it may be very hard to find him, but no harder for you than for me. Very truly yours, W.J. Gaynor, Mayor.”
“Dear Sir: I am very glad to receive your letter and your poem. The poem is very fine but your advice is very bad. Very truly yours, W.J. Gaynor, Mayor.”
“Dear Sir: No, I do not want a bear. Very truly yours, W.J. Gaynor, Mayor.”
His most famous photograph was taken in August 1910 by a photographer for the New York World who had shown up late. The Mayor was leaving for a European vacation. He had boarded the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse and was chatting on the deck when an unkempt man, James Gallagher, rushed up behind him, shouting, “You have taken away my bread and butter.” Gallagher, who had been fired from the city’s Docks Department some three weeks before, put put a pistol to Gaynor’s neck and fired. The photographer just kept snapping pictures. Andy Logan, in Against the Evidence, notes that Charles Chapin, the Evening World’s renowned and sadistic editor, later rejoiced at the photographs: “Blood all over him, and an exclusive, too!”
The bullet lodged in the vault of Gaynor’s larynx. On doctors’ advice, it was not removed. One result was frequent fits of exhausting coughing. His temper became still shorter, his tongue sharper.
The city’s better element had long since decided vice and its companion, police corruption, were New York’s great problems. To professional reformers like the Rev. Charles Parkhurst, this meant eradicating prostitution and gambling. Somehow, it also meant rigidly enforcing Sunday closing laws, which meant denying most working people any entertainments on their one day off. To Gaynor, Parkhurst and his ilk were self-righteous busybodies. Once, when Gaynor was introduced to William Sheafe Chase, a Sunday law enforcement fanatic who affected the ecclesiastical title of Canon, Gaynor refused his extended hand, saying, “You’re no canon. You’re only a popgun.”
Gaynor’s view of the police was molded by his passion for personal liberty and the rule of law. He stopped warrantless raids. He disciplined officers for casual brutality, such as using clubs on children and innocent passersby to clear the streets. Nonetheless, graft and corruption permeated the Department and led to repeated scandals.
Gaynor’s police commissioner, Rhinelander Waldo, was a gentleman descended from the earliest Dutch settlers, a wealthy 34-year-old West Pointer who had fought bravely in the Philippines. He was honest, energetic and enthusiastic. He had beautiful manners. And, unlike the character based on him in E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, he was clueless. His three senior deputies were grafters. His chief of staff, Winfield Sheehan, was one of the three men controlling illegal gambling in the city. The lieutenant commanding the vice squad, Charles Becker, was a brutal, corrupt thug, a slugger and grafter throughout his career, who would die in the electric chair.
But by the time Becker took the hot squat in 1915, Gaynor’s career was long over. Understandably, Tammany Hall did not renominate him in 1913. The Republicans and reformers nominated John Purroy Mitchel, a dashingly handsome social climber barely 30 years old. Rejected by all parties, Gaynor ran as an independent. In a massive demonstration and parade at City Hall, he picked up a shovel and said he would “shovel all these grafters into the ground.”
But it would not happen. Shortly after the rally, an exhausted Gaynor left for a brief vacation in Europe. On September 12, 1913, as RMS Baltic approached Ireland, Gaynor’s son walked up to his father’s deck chair. He bent down, touched the huddled old man, and realized death had preceded him.
Eight days later, Gaynor’s body lay in state on a bier in the City Hall rotunda, where Lincoln’s body had lain nearly 50 years before. At 8 a.m., the doors were opened. Five hundred were waiting to pay their respects. By 9 a.m., 15,000 men and women were standing in a line two miles long to honor the mayor who, whether right or wrong, had always been on their side. Throughout the day, the people filed past him. At midnight, when the doors were closed, 20,000 were still in line. The next morning, more than 100,000 people lined Broadway as a horse-drawn caisson bore the coffin down Broadway to Trinity Church.
His official portrait in City Hall is hidden behind the door to Room 9, the Press Room.
New York Press, December 26, 2000