The World City in Boom, Bust and War

7/30/2019 The World City in Boom, Bust and War

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New York in the Jazz Age

In the 1920s NYC was the most famous city in the world the symbol of the jazzage

It was famous for its skyscrapers, subways, the Great White Way (Times Square)

and Harlem.

Vast wealth pored into the Citys economy as 1/3 of the nations exports and of its

exports arrived or left from New York harbor.

New Yorks financial district was the center of the greatest stock market boom years

in American history, with seats on the NY Stock Exchange selling for $625,000 each.


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A Day in the Life of the Night Mayor

Walker was a dandy, who changed his

clothes six times a day.

Here is his daily work routine:

Up at 10, reads papers, breakfast inbed, phone calls from bed.

At noon, up from bed, selects first suit.

So famous for his lazy habits that he isdubbed the late mayor of New York.

Late for every meeting, including onewith the President of the U.S., CalvinCoolidge.

Walkers day really begins at night.

Every night he attends night clubs andprize fights, accompanied by hismistress, the England born actressBetty Compton.


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The Great Depression Ends the Party

Jimmy Walker would soon have cause to regret hiseasy, re-election defeat of Fiorello LaGuardia in the1929 election.

The Roaring Twenties segued into the GreatDepression of the 1930s.

The stock market crash in October, 1929 wiped outthe savings of millions of people and led to massivelayoffs and high unemployment.

The song Brother Can You Spare a Dime

captured the desperation of many New Yorkers.

In an International Unemployment Day march onMarch 6, 1930, 35,000 demonstrators at UnionSquare were attacked by the police.

On a single day in January, 1931, 85,000 peoplegot meals at City soup kitchens.

The municipal lodging houses provided 400,000beds to over one million homeless people.

By 1933, of New York workers were unemployedand 1/5 were receiving public welfare payments.


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Jimmy Walker Departs

Amidst spreading rumors ofcorruption, Governor FranklinDelano Roosevelt appointed aCommission headed by judgeSamuel Seabury to investigatepolice and city officials.

The trail led straight to the mayor,who was accused of taking bribesfor the awarding of City contracts.

He never stood trial, but resignedin September 1932 and sailed toEurope, where he divorced his

wife and married his mistress. He later returned to the City and

lived on East End Avenue till hisdeath in 1946.


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FDR to the Rescue!

Under President Herbert Hoover, the federal government hada laissez faire attitude. Forcing states and cities to takeresponsibility for the needs of the poor.

Under Governor Roosevelt (1929-1932), New York Statebecame the laboratory for the social policies that wouldbecome the New Deal under FDRs presidency.(1933-1945)

While private charities once provided of relief to the poor,under FDR, the government provided 90% of the total aid tofamilies.

Henry Hopkins, who had worked at a settlement house, was

the head of the NYS Emergency Relief Association. Later, he headed the federal Civil Works Agency, which

pumped $150 million to 400 construction projects in NYC.

In 1933, the Public Works Administration sponsored 49housing projects in New York City.

The first built was the Williamsburg houses in Brooklyn.

In 1937, the U.S. Housing Authority began to pay 90% of thecost of public housing for families earning less than $1,150 ayear.

Projects were built in 142 cities.

One third of the apartments went to African American families;47,500 out of the total of 161,162.

This was the most successful non-discriminatory effort of anyfederal agency during the New Deal.


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Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia

LaGuardia (1882-1947) was electedfor three terms as Mayor (1934-1945).

He was elected on a fusion party

ticket backed by reform Democrats,Socialists and goo-goos (Republicangood government types).

LaGuardia was nicknamed the Little

Flower due to his last name and his

diminutive size (5 tall).

His father, an Italian immigrant, servedas a U.S. Army bandmaster, andLaGuardia, although born in

Greenwich Village, spent hischildhood on army bases in Arizonaand Montana.

His mother was from an old ItalianJewish family.


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LaGuardias Political Career

After attending NYU Law School at night,LaGuardia worked as a lawyer for theILGWU.

His day job while at school was as aninterpreter at Ellis Island in Italian, Yiddish,Serbo-Croatian and German.

In 1917 he was elected to Congress fromEast Harlem, and his lieutenant andsuccessor was a Socialist, Vito Marcantonio.

As mayor, he had a flair for publicityrushing to fires, smashing illegal slotmachines and speakeasy liquor bottles, andreading the comics to kids on the radioduring a newspaper strike.

He was so furious that he had to fly toWashington from New Jersey, that he wasinstrumental in getting an airport built inQueens.


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Harry Lloyd Hopkins Although Hopkins (1890-1946) was born in Iowa, he

did more than any public official to help NewYorkers get through the Depression.

He and LaGuardia worked with FDR to create theCivil Works Administration, and he was appointedits head in 1933.

He was quite a character, a mixture of socialcrusader and playboy.

He was a social worker who lived in a Settlement

House as a young man and was committed tohelping the poor.

He also loved race horses and pretty women.

He was rude and tactless to the rich and powerfuland kind and tender to the distressed.

As New York was suffering through the terriblewinter of 1932-3, the CWA poured $50 million intothe City to fund construction of schools,playgrounds, swimming pools and roads.

Hopkins also engineered the successor to theCWA, the Works Progress Administration (WPA),which employed 8.5 million people in its seven yearhistory.

NYC received 1/7th of WPA project funds.


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Enter the Master Builder

In 1933, LaGuardia appointed Robert Mosesto direct the WPA projects in NYC.

Although Moses never held elected office,he dominated city planning under fivedifferent mayors.

He did more than any other official tochange the face of NYC and its suburbs.

The brilliant son of wealthy German Jews,Moses was a Yale graduate with a doctoratefrom Oxford.

At one point he held twelve city and statepositions simultaneously.

In the 1930s alone he supervised the

planning and building of hundreds of parksand beaches, 235 playgrounds (only one inHarlem), three major bridges (Triborough,Whitestone and Henry Hudson), the QueensMidtown tunnel and LaGuardia airport.

By 1940, there were more miles of non-intersecting highways in NYC than in thenext five largest cities combined.


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Boss Tweed without the Greed

To his biographer, Robert Caro, Robert Moses was the Power Broker, combining imaginationiron

willandarrogance.

Moses was never accused of corruption; what he wanted was POWER.

He believed that:

Cars were more important than mass transit

Office buildings should replace factories

Slum clearance (urban renewal) should outweigh community preservation.

Caro estimates that Moses displaced a quarter million people for his highways and a half million for his urbanrenewal projects, earning him the nickname the Great Remover.

Urban Renewal often meant Black Removal but his projects also devastated white, working class communities.


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The Worlds Fair 1939

A major achievement of the LaGuardiaadministration was a reform of the civil servicesystem aimed at limiting corruption in city hiring andcurbing the power of Tammany Hall.

By 1939, more than 74% of city employees had totake competitive examinations to obtain city jobs.

The international fame of NYC was recognizedwhen it hosted the Worlds Fair of 1939-1940 in

Flushing Meadows, Queens.

Completion of the Triborough Bridge, the QueensMidtown Tunnel and connecting highways made thefair accessible to millions of visitors.

Within two years, a 90 foot mountain of ash wastransformed into an elegant fair site covering 1.216acres.

Adam Clayton Powell Jr., later to be the first African

American City Councilman and Congressman fromNYC, led a demonstration at World Fairheadquarters at the Empire State Building thatresulted in 600 Worlds Fair jobs for blacks.


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The City in World War II

Although mayor LaGuardia supported President Roosevelts

executive order banning discrimination in hiring in defenseindustries, persistent inequality fanned resentment in the blackcommunity.

The Navy used Walton H.S. and Hunter College to train an allwhite womens unit.

In 1943 Robert Moses engineered an agreement with theMetropolitan Insurance Company to build a segregated,semipublic housing development called Stuyvesant Town.

The residents of Harlem were not appeased when Met Lifepromised to build another segregated development in Harlem.(Riverton Houses).

During the spring of 1943 there were race riots in Alabama,New Jersey, California and Texas, culminating in a three dayriot in Detroit in June.

On August 1, 1943, a riot started in Harlem, fueled by highrents, wartime job discrimination and economic deprivation.

The spark was wounding of a black soldier, who was trying tohelp a woman being arrested, by a white policeman.

The riot spread over thirty blocks of Harlem. By the time it ended, six blacks were killed, 185 wounded, over

500 arrested and there was property damage to1,450 stores.

Largely in response to the riot, LaGuardia backed the nations

first anti-discrimination in housing law that passed the CityCouncil in 1944.


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The Future Looked Bright

When the war ended in 1945, the City of New Yorkhad every reason to be confident of its futureprosperity.

The 1950 U.S. Census counted a population of7,891,957, larger than 45 of the then 48 states.

As you prosperity.

The 1950 U.S. Census counted a population of7,891,957, larger than 45 of the then 48 states.

As you learned from Joshua Freemans chapter, themanufacturing vitality of the City was unsurpassedanywhere in the nation.

Forty percent of the nations freight passed throughthe City, and its transit system carried theequivalent of the worlds population, billions ofpassengers each year.

However, the prosperity of the postwar era broughta problem that the City has wrestled with eversincethe battle with the automobile.

As Detroit went back into full production, increasingcommuter traffic made traffic control a nightmare.

It was estimated that if all the trucks and carsentering NYC each day were put end to end, theywould span the nation from the Atlantic to thePacific.

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The World City in Boom, Bust and War