The Only Honest Man

By Christopher Scanlan

(This essay appeared originally in the Spring 2001 issue of River Teeth, a Journal of Nonfiction Narrative and was selected as a "Notable Essay of 2002" in Best American Essays edited by Stephen Jay Gould and Robert Atwan. )


My grandfather introduced the Charleston to Paris.  Or the zipper. Or maybe it was both.

He paved the streets of Brooklyn and made a fortune mining for Alaskan gold.

He kissed the Blarney Stone and the pope's ring.

But what made him proudest was the encomium bestowed on him by Judge Samuel Seabury during the 1932 corruption hearings that led to the downfall of Jimmy Walker, the flamboyant Tammany Hall Mayor of New York City.  "You sir, are the only honest man to come before this tribunal." 

As a child, I remember my grandfather often harking, like a beloved melody, to that compliment. In a long and colorful life, the judge’s praise was a high point when his integrity was affirmed at a time when scandal claimed so many around him.

But that’s all I knew. Like most of his stories, told around theSunday dinner table or when I visited him in the furnished room at the YMCA where he spent his final days, this was ancient history. Then a few years back, one of my brothers sent me pages 288-299 from  “Gentleman Jimmy Walker: Mayor of the Jazz Age, a biography by George Walsh published in 1974.

“Thought these might interest you,” Jeff’s scribbled note said. “There’ll never be another Billy Scanlan!!!”

An image flashed before me. My silver-haired and mustachioed grandfather, at 85 still thevery picture of a diplomat in a dark blue double-breasted suit, Fedora cocked at a jaunty angle, waving his polished hickory cane in the air, announcing to anyone in earshot, “There’ll never be another Billy Scanlan!”.

We called him Baba, the mangled pronunciation of Grampa produced by his first grandchild, my brother, Jay. But to everyone else, he was Billy, and that signature phrase echoes in my head today, nearly 40 years after his death.

But those pages my brother mailed me told a different story about the only honest man to come before the Seabury commission.

They would lead me, years later, to the fragile, typewritten transcript of the commission hearings, buried in the library of the New York State Bar Association. There in a yellowing three-ring binder, I found the truth about his hour on the witness stand.

From there, the trail took me a few blocks away to the New York Public Library. For all his Irish cockiness, my grandfather wasn’t a famous man and so I was amazed to see, under the canopy of a microfilm reader, that for two days in the spring of 1932, Baba was front-page news on every one of the city’s newspapers, from the scrappy Daily News to the staid New York Times.

On a balmy spring afternoon, my grandfather, an obscure but well-connected salesman whose friendship with Jimmy Walker had paid off with lucrative commissions on the sale of city equipment, became a linchpin in the government’s case against the Tammany Hall political machine and the songwriting Irish-American playboy pol who epitomized the light and dark sides of the Roaring Twenties.

Four decades before Watergate, sixty years before the Starr investigation, these documents would help me recreate and rewrite a hidden chapter in my family’s past. They would provide a discovery that taught me just how bitterly the sins of our fathers are visited upon their sons and the sons yet to come, ultimately led me to consider my own personal history in a way I could never have imagined.

Wednesday May 18, 1932 was a beautiful day in New York City. The forecast called for fair and warmer temperatures and a light northerly breeze to carry the aromas of spring. By 3 p.m. when my grandfather took the stand at the County Courthouse on Foley Square, it was 67 degrees in Manhattan.

By all accounts, he didn’t come across well, displaying none of the braggadocio that was his trademark with his grandchildren.

“Scanlan is pompous and middle-aged, an old friend of the Walker family,” the Herald-Tribune’s man on the scene reported.“He used to share an office with Charles F. Murphy Jr., but in these days of depression, he carries his office in his hat and gets a good many of his telephone calls at Cortland 7-1000, the Mayor’s office number. But however at home he may feel at City Hall, he was the most miserable witness that has faced Mr. Seabury in a long time.”

Reading this description nearly 70 years after it saw print, I cringe. How must his 17-year-old son, my father, then a student at a pricey Catholic prep school in Connecticut, reacted to this portrait drawn by an anonymous reporter with an eye and ear for the telling detail and a flair for character assassination, justified or not.

In the summer of 1974 I spent an afternoon in a federal courtroom in Washington D.C., I was a young newspaper reporter on a busman’s holiday, observing a trial of one of the Watergate defendants.  What I remember about that day was the way the prosecutor cross-examined the witness on the stand.  I can't remember if he actually paced the courtroom as he spoke, but it seemed that with each question he came close and closer to the nervous man on the stand.  It was fascinating to watch, like a panther stalking his prey. 

That performance comes to mind as I sit at my desk, my grandfather’s testimony and the newspaper accounts that reported it in excruciating detail spread out around me.

Now Seabury zeroed in on a curious coincidence uncovered during the paper chase conducted by his investigators: Two days after my grandfather earned a $10,000 commission on the sale of dustless street cleaning machines to the city, a check for $6,000 drawn on his account landed in a special bank account controlled by the mayor’s personal accountant. Russell T. Sherwood wasn’t in court;Walker’s account, a man named Russell T. Sherwood, who’d responded tothecommission’s subpoenas by moving to Mexico.

My grandfather said he couldn’t help. He had recently burned his checkbook,he said, along with all of his other financial records after moving to a new home. That explanation didn’t set well with Seabury, a 57-year-old reformer whose great-great grandfather had been the first Episcopal bishop in the United States. Again, the view from the Herald-Tribune:

“Seabury rode Scanlan unmercifully in cross-examination, making fun of his story of the destroyed vouchers. The inquisitor’s voice was eloquent with sarcasm and Scanlan fidgeted nervously but stuck to his story.”

  “Well,” Seabury said, “where was this bonfire made?”

  “Out in my backyard,” Baba said.

  “Out in the backyard?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Anyone else present?”

  “I guess my wife and boys might have seen the conflagration.”

  “That is all? No special ceremony?”

  The courtroom erupted in laughter. The chairman gaveled order.

  “Oh no.”

  Assemblyman Cuvillier, a Walker partisan, objected but the chairman let Seabury continue.

  “You just touched a match to it?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Didn't take long before they were all consumed?”

  “I did it by degrees”

  “You had to touch more than one match to them?”

  “Several times.  Each package that I destroyed I naturally had to put a match to.”

  Again, Assembly Cuvillier protested. “He said it was destroyed by fire, and I don't see what difference it makes whether he used one match or a thousand matches.” 

  Ignoring him, Seabury pressed on. “How long did it take?” My grandfather looked on as Walker’s defender tried to halt the attack.  

  “He is perfectly frank and honest about the transaction,” Cuvillier said.

 Across the space of nearly 70 years, the prosecutor’s curt reply caught by the court reporter shook the foundations of every story Baba had ever told me, the tales of his prospecting days in Alaska, hisgolden days as a Gotham contractor withfriends in high places, his career in vaudeville, his roster of famous friends from  to the prizefighter Gene Tunney. “I submit,” Seabury told the commission,said, “there is no justification for that statement what ever, that this man has been perfectly honest and frank.”
 

  A week later, sitting in the same witness chair, Jimmy Walker couldn’t think of any reason why my grandfather should have deposited $6,000 of the ten grand commission he’d earned on the street sweeper sale to his bank account. He’d never given Scanlan “nor anyone else’ any help to get a city contract.

  But what must have hurt more was the way Gentlemen Jimmy characterized their relationship.

  "Do you know William J. Scanlan?" Seabury asked.

"Slightly," the mayor shrugged. "I very seldom saw him."
 

Three months later, on June 10, 1933, my father graduated from Canterbury Prep. Far from the weakest student – his final class ranking was 8th in a class of 17 – there seems little doubt, as I study my father’s high school report card that something had gone terribly wrong with. In English, Latin and French, his best subjects, his grades nosedived__from middle and high Bs in 1930, his freshman year __ to a dispiriting collection of low Ds,  just barely, Cs by his senior year. There may have been other reasons, but I can’t help but notice that his poor performance in school dovetailed with the period that legions of New York City newspapers were painting his own father as a Tammany Hall grafter.

 The following fall, while his classmates were enrolling at Harvard, Yale and Princeton, my father entered Georgetown University, then a respectable Catholic school but nothing near the Ivy League halls that Canterbury proudly prepared their students to occupy. It didn’t really matter. With the death of the Tammany Hall golden goose, my grandfather could no longer afford to pay tuition, and my father was forced to withdraw before completing his freshman year. He never went back.

 
"Anyone trying to reconstruct the Tammany Hall investigations of the 1930s is dependent on the work of Herbert Mitgang, the long-time New York Times journalist and biographer. I have relied extesively on his 1963 biography of Samuel Seabury, "The Man Who Rode the Tiger: The Life and Times of Judge Samuel Seabury," and his newest treatment, "Once Upon a Time in New York: Jimmy Walker, Franklin Roosevelt and the Last Great Battle of the Jazz Age," published in 2000."