[Publius]

Look up "Beau" James Walker, the Tammany mayor of New York elected in 1929 but who left early to escape to Paris when Judge Samuel Seabury, Cardinal Dennis Patrick Hayes and Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt read him the riot act and threatened him with prison.

The next mayor was Fiorello La Guardia, who cleaned up the city and castrated Tammany Hall once and for all.

[xkaydet65]

And LaGuardia ushered in Progressive politics in NYC. Tammany was corrupt but it delivered service to the city. My grandfather was a protege of Tammany’s greatest most powerful boss Silent Charley Murphy. Murphy named him a deputy hospitals commissioner with a 9th grade education. Pure corruption ? Of course. But when he held the post every ambulance was staffed with an intern and Bellvue was the finest municipal hospital in the nation.