One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (34 page)

“Harlem will be the scene of a long drawn out gang war waged on the one side by white racketeers who are determined to continue their domination of the rich takings of the game and on the other side by the Negro bankers who are working hard to exist and to win back for themselves the game which they once controlled,” the
Age
predicted.
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Sporadic violence broke out. Both sides appealed for support, St. Clair urging the public to spurn Schultz’s operation for the sake of black Harlem, and Schultz’s forces purporting to offer better-funded, better-protected gambling. St. Clair won the day. Public sentiment turned against Schultz at a time that was, for him, disastrous. Special Prosecutor Thomas Dewey was in relentless pursuit, and, with Prohibition ending at the close of 1933, illicit alcohol revenue was drying up. Schultz had staked his future on the numbers, only to see his take drop as black bettors wagered with black bankers. Starved for cash, he told the so-called controllers who collected bets that he was cutting their percentage of the wagering from 10 percent to 5 percent. In January 1935, the controllers went on strike.

“They were the only people I ever knew who had the nerve to stand up and fight the Dutchman,” Schultz’s lawyer Richard “Dixie” Davis later said.
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Within a week, Schultz backed down, hastening a decline that would lead to his gangland execution.

Far more profound, the numbers rebellion represented Harlem’s first mass action in pursuit of a tangible goal. Harlem had declared that Harlem’s money and Harlem’s self-determination were to stay in Harlem. This was a fight of pride and of the pocketbook—and a harbinger of struggles to come.

NO FOOL, HOLSTEIN
had receded from prominence in the numbers game by the time he and Battle put their minds to ensuring Battle’s promotion. Holstein recruited his old friend Oscar De Priest, now in his fifth year as the first African American elected to Congress in the twentieth century.

De Priest saw La Guardia’s mayoral election as a significant opportunity for New York’s African Americans. In February, about six weeks after the inauguration, he visited New York to urge Harlem leaders to form a committee that would present the community’s needs to the new mayor. When De Priest returned a month later, Holstein welcomed the celebrity congressman into his duplex apartment for an overnight stay. Battle joined the host and his guest, and then, on Saturday, March 17, 1934, the police sergeant and the politician traveled downtown to city hall.

Battle walked up the building’s broad steps and through tall doors. Inside, the rotunda where Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant had lain in state was quiet. On weekends, the building emptied of politicians, except for a mayor who was storming to the end of his first one hundred days in office.

A police officer escorted Battle and De Priest toward the high-windowed room designated for the city’s chief executive. La Guardia sprang from behind a desk piled with reports, correspondence, a pipe ashtray, and a magnifying glass. Battle looked down at a round, rumpled man with jet-black hair. La Guardia was five feet two yet moved with more confident authority than many larger men.

“Oscar,” the mayor said, gripping De Priest’s hand.

“Fiorello,” De Priest responded, his voice warm with affection for the former colleague who had welcomed a black representative to Congress.

Even now, the House enforced segregation. Recently, the Capitol dining room had barred entry to one of De Priest’s top aides, and the restaurant had ejected “an educated, refined colored woman who sat down to eat with white friends,” the
Age
reported.
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De Priest gestured toward Battle, saying by way of introduction: “Here’s a young Negro sergeant on the current list for promotion to lieutenant. I want you to make him a lieutenant, the first among Negroes. You’ll be making history for New York and for the country.”

A breed apart from all of his predecessors, La Guardia struck Battle as, quite possibly, the mayor to guarantee his promotion.

BORN IN GREENWICH VILLAGE
in 1882, La Guardia was the son of immigrants. His father was Achille La Guardia, an Italian of lapsed faith and prodigious musical talent. His mother was Irene Luzzatto-Coen, a woman of Austrian descent who was raised in the Italian culture of Trieste. She was Jewish. Achille La Guardia escaped the teeming lot of New York’s ethnic poor by enlisting in the US Army to serve as the chief musician of a regiment stationed in South Dakota. The family followed him there and then to a base near Prescott, Arizona, where Fiorello spent his boyhood in the waning days of the Wild West.

At the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898, Achille prepared to ship out for Cuba to entertain the troops. Sixteen-year-old Fiorello insisted on accompanying his father into the war zone, but tainted beef severely sickened Achille before they could sail. The illness forced Achille’s discharge into a civilian life of limited prospect. He returned with his family to Trieste and made a living as a hotel proprietor. Approaching the age of twenty-four, Fiorello sailed back to the United States, attended New York University Law School, and worked as an interpreter of Croatian, Italian, and German on Ellis Island. He also knew Yiddish.

After graduating from law school, La Guardia stood up for tenants against landlords, immigrants threatened with deportation, and workers who had been mistreated by bosses. He picketed on behalf of strikers and joined a political club—a Republican club because he loathed Tammany Hall’s corrupt bossism. Soon, social justice activism led to politics, and bare-knuckled politics led in 1916 to winning a seat in the House of Representatives. La Guardia was now New York’s unorthodox gentleman from East Harlem.

Wedged between the East River and a rim of Harlem, East Harlem was like its larger neighbor in name alone. An invisible dividing line separated dark skins from lighter ones and Southern-inflected speech from the rhythms of mixed European ancestries. Foreigners and the children of foreigners from two dozen backgrounds, Italians first, Jews second, packed into tenements that were less fit for habitation than Harlem’s once-upscale housing stock.

La Guardia carried the straits of his constituents to Washington. He dreamed of milk stations for children, public housing for families, and parks and playgrounds for all, none of which was on the agenda of a government that expected self-sufficiency of the poor. Regardless, he combined a flair for skewering comment and a capacity to outwork virtually anyone to stand in favor of benefits for the downtrodden and against succor for the powerful.

After President Wilson asked Congress for authorization to lead America into World War I, La Guardia enlisted as a lieutenant in the army’s nascent aviation unit to fly combat missions over Europe. He returned with the rank of major. Homecoming consigned La Guardia to life in a lonely minority in Congress. When the presidency of New York’s Board of Aldermen came open, he escaped an outsider’s frustrations in Washington with a campaign heavy on ethnic appeal and bruising statements. “I can outdemagogue the best of demagogues,” he told an aide.
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Typically, La Guardia made more of the post than anyone had before. As Thomas Kessner chronicled in his authoritative
Fiorello H. La Guardia and the Making of Modern New York
: “La Guardia refused to allow a small office to make an unimportant politician of him.” But calling for public housing, supporting labor unions, backing women’s rights, and urging progressive taxation was not to the liking of the Republican establishment. The party dumped the renegade at the next turn of the election cycle. Overcoming the additional and devastating blows of the deaths of his wife and infant daughter from tubercular infections, La Guardia engineered a return to Congress. There, he ridiculed Prohibition as unenforceable, railed against Washington’s refusal to adopt then-radical policies like unemployment insurance and relief for the poor, and unstintingly attacked Tammany Hall’s corruption.

Then came the Depression, and a change in attitudes about government’s obligations to citizens in need. Suddenly, the public showed a new willingness to consider for mayor a man who had right to crow, “I told you so.” On November 7, 1933, La Guardia secured 42 percent of the vote in a three-way contest, enough to be crowned winner.

New Yorkers soon discovered that everything about their ninety-ninth mayor was full-bodied and frenetic. His words, energy, humor, and temper were outsized. So, too, his optimistic, can-do spirit. Quickly, his whirlwind touched down in Washington and returned from Franklin Roosevelt’s newly opened spending bank with enough money to put two hundred thousand New Yorkers to work on public projects.

The Little Flower, yes, a shrinking violet, no—La Guardia capped Inauguration Day, January 1, 1934, by unceremoniously announcing to the Tammany-controlled Board of Aldermen, “In this administration, I’m the majority.” Immediately, he embarked on a fight to secure from the boss-dominated state legislature unprecedented powers to reorganize the government and cut costs. He dispatched hard-charging Robert Moses to speedily repair parks, playgrounds, and recreation areas with FDR’s funding. And, sporting a black sombrero that harkened to his formative years in Arizona, he dashed about New York inspecting city services. Woe be it to anyone whose work was found wanting.

Of paramount importance to Battle in the opening days of La Guardia’s administration was the question of what the volcanic new mayor intended for the police department. On Inauguration Day, La Guardia swore in as commissioner General John O’Ryan, a spit-and-polish World War I commander. Referring to a boundary that supposedly fenced off Lower Manhattan’s commercial district from criminals, he also gave marching orders to police commanders: “I have been told that Fulton Street is considered the deadline for crooks. That deadline is now removed. It is replaced by the Hudson River on the west, the Atlantic Ocean on the south, the Westchester County line on the north and the Nassau County line on the east.” Referring to organized crime’s political connections, La Guardia added: “We are removing that protection. Now see that that kind of crime is ably handled. If not—get out.”
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O’Ryan’s first directives included an edict that, come summer, police officers would continue to patrol in full-dress woolen jackets. “Every member of the department will have to stand up like he-men and take it, and like it,” O’Ryan declared. La Guardia soon countermanded the order and began to work his will on the force through Lewis Valentine, the scourge of Tammany Hall whose fortunes had risen and fallen even more violently than Battle’s had. Come August, La Guardia would dump O’Ryan to name Valentine commissioner.

Well before that, Battle watched La Guardia stamp the police department with his preferences. The organized crime syndicate had installed some twenty-five thousand slot machines in storefronts across the city, reaping an estimated $37 million in annual revenue. La Guardia hated the one-armed bandits for bilking people who could least afford to lose money. He ordered Valentine to be rid of the devices, led sensational raids, and personally took a sledgehammer to seized machines.

Battle admired the formidable little mayor’s grit, and La Guardia was broadly gracious, if noncommittal, at their meeting. Although he generally made sport of spurning special pleaders, La Guardia wished Battle well and encouraged De Priest’s plan for a Harlem citizens committee. Then, as quickly as it began, the session was over. La Guardia was not one for small talk and he had no time to spare.

The next night De Priest and La Guardia appeared at a dinner marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the NAACP’s founding. Addressing the celebrants, De Priest called La Guardia “the greatest asset to the NAACP that we have ever had in this city.” La Guardia told the gathering that his former House colleagues had an “obsession” with race that bordered on insanity.

Joking that “57 varieties of Negro leaders” had besieged him, La Guardia endorsed forming a committee to serve as his point of contact. Two weeks later, the Harlem Civic Union elected a mayor’s panel. The twelve members included A. Phillip Randolph, chief of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; Frederick Randolph Moore of the
Age
; Reverend William Lloyd Imes, the minister who had joined Battle’s John Brown pilgrimage; and Dr. E. P. Roberts, the physician who had delivered Jesse and Florence D’Angeles and who had signed Florence D’Angeles’s death certificate.
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What more could Battle need? He had the support of America’s leading black politician, who was a personal friend of the mayor, as well as the allegiance of the Harlem leaders who were promised the mayor’s ear. Likely unique again in the New York Police Department, Battle would have a place on Fiorello La Guardia’s agenda. He was sure of it.

THERE WAS A
wedding to plan, a church service, and a grand celebration befitting the marriage of Samuel Battle’s daughter. The date was set for Charline and Thornton Cherot to exchange vows. Florence took charge of deciding the niceties with Charline—her dress, the reception hall, the favors, the menu, the music. Battle would give Charline away in style.

But first there was a funeral to attend. Shortly before 6 p.m. on April 21, 1934, Battle’s dear friend Detective Jimmy Garvey called home to speak with his daughter Helen. For eighteen years he had borne the guilt of believing that he had afflicted her with polio during the 1916 epidemic. That evening Helen wasn’t feeling well. Garvey touched base to cheer her up, and they spoke for a good, long time.

“See you later,” Helen said before hanging up.

Garvey and his partner, Detective Francis Gleeson, left the stationhouse to patrol Broadway in plainclothes. Around 11 p.m., near the corner of West Seventy-First Street, they spotted two men who seemed excessively watchful.

“We decided to question them,” Gleeson would tell investigators. “We thought we could do a better job if we followed the men down a side street rather than stop and question them on Broadway, where a crowd might collect.”