An Irish mayor for all New Yorkers
THE RISE AND FALL OF WILLIAM O'DWYER OF CO. MAYO
Voters in New York City are expected to elect Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani as the city’s 111th Mayor today. As I write this, the polls are opening. The polls that matter that is. All the other polls up to this point are part of the speculative science of politics as we know it. Often those polls are right. Occasionally they are wrong.
If they’re right this time, Mamdani will be the fourth Mayor of New York not born in America since World War Two ended. Abe Beame (104 in 1973) was born in London. Vincent Impelliteri (101 in 1951) was born in Sicily. And William O’Dwyer (100 in 1945) was born in Lismiraun, County Mayo in 1890. O’Dwyer is the last New York Mayor to have been born in Ireland.
He never let the voters forget where he came from. Beame and Impelliteri came to America as small children. Mamdani arrived when he was seven. O’Dwyer was 20 when he left Ireland and ended up in New York City after a year in a Jesuit seminary in Spain.
“Who could resist a political run by a poor kid who grew up in a big Mayo family, came to the U.S. at the age of 20, put himself through Fordham and later served honorably in the Army during World War II, rising to the rank of brigadier general?” Kevin Baker, author of The Big Crowd.
As soon as he became a naturalized Amrerican citizen in 1917, O'Dwyer joined the NYPD. While serving as a clerk for the Commissioner he attended Fordham Law school.
HIZZONER'S IRISHNESS
More than 1.1 million New York voters elected William O’Dwyer Mayor in November 1945. The War was over. Imagine what New York City was like. For one thing, it was full of voters who loved Ireland as much as they loved America and New York City. O’Dwyer never hesitated to proclaim what his foreign policy would be. During his 1945 campaign, he vowed to an adoring Ancient Order of Hibernians crowd that, as mayor, he would ask for the return of the six Northern Ireland counties to Ireland. At his inauguration they sang “It’s a great Day for the Irish.” Eamon DeValera lost his election for Taoiseach in February 1948, but O’Dwyer made sure there was a ticker tape parade down Broadway in his honor when he came to New York for Saint Patrick’s Day that year.
Dev came to America after his defeat to rally the Irish in opposition to the partition of the North of Ireland into the Six Counties that still exist separate from the Republic of Ireland.
With Dev sitting on the stage at Carnegie Hall, O’Dwyer told the crowd, “I look forward with a great deal of pleasure to one evening now and then when I can be relieved of the trouble of all the races that make up our city and spend a half hour with my own flesh and blood to talk about Ireland. It is a privilege for me to come here to talk about the injustice that keeps Six Counties of the little island that is the ccradle of our race under the subjection of our traditional enemy.”
When Irish Nobel Peace Prize recipient Sean McBride came to town, O’Dwyer proclaimed, “The Republic of Ireland was recognized by the nations of the world, but we know that the recognition of a Twenty-Six County Republic does not fulfill the aspirations of the Irish people. We know that there will not be complete freedom in Ireland until the British Army of occupation is withdrawn and until the six historic North-Eastern Counties are restored to the rest of the land.”
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO MAYOR O'DWYER?
How his story turned out is further proof that the Irish have cornered the market on unhappy endings. Didn’t the poet Seamus Heaney say, “Being Irish means knowing that the world will break your heart”?
Mayor O'Dwyer was elected to a second term in a landslide in 1949. But within two years President Harry Truman appointed him Ambassador to Mexico and he immediately left Gracie Mansion. Why? By that time the NYPD had been crushed by a corruption investigation. More than 500 officers took early retirement. Seventy-seven were indicted. The Police Commissioner and his Chief Deputy were canned. Hw could the mayor not have known what was going on?
“He proved to be quite comfortable in the role of glad-handing frontman for a network of corruption that gave the crime bosses and their political partners a stranglehold over the city’s economic life,” wrote David Samuels in Smithsonian Magazine six years ago.
“What (Brooklyn District Attorney Miles) McDonald’s investigation would reveal...was that Mayor O’Dwyer was the frontman for a system of citywide corruption... the public would find out that O’Dwyer and his aide James Moran had been meeting personally with the syndicate boss Frank Costello (model for Vito Corleone in The Godfather) as far back as 1941...the urban political operations that had helped elect Franklin Roosevelt to the presidency four times, and Truman once, were based on a system of unsavory alliances. Putting O’Dwyer on the stand would put the Democratic Party in New York—and elsewhere—on trial. One way to keep O’Dwyer safe from McDonald’s grand jury was to get him out of the country.”
William O’Dwyer, an exiled son of Erin who seemed to be headed to the summit of American politics, was never charged with a crime. In fact, New York City staged a ticker tape parade in his honor when he resigned. Prosecutors must have wondered whether a New York jury would ever convict such a man.
He returned to New York from Mexico in 1960 and died in 1964. The NY Times wrote, “The whole story has never come out and probably never will, but there seems little doubt that Mr. O'Dwyer was victimized by men he had trusted. The resurgent traditions of machine politics and his own excessively tolerant nature enabled grafters to reassert themselves in municipal affairs. His resignation as Mayor and appointment as Ambassador to Mexico by President Truman preceded one of the city's major police scandals.”
Former Mayor William O'Dwyer testified at US Senate hearings held in New York City two days after Saint Patrick's Day in 1951. Spearheaded by Senator Estes Kefauver, the Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce investigated the corruprion scanda in th NYPD during his term as the city's one hundfecth Mayor. A May 1951 report by the Kefauver Committee was damning. “During Mr. O’Dwyer’s term of office as district attorney of Kings County between 1940 and 1942, and his occupancy of the mayoralty from 1946 to 1950, neither he nor his appointees took any effective action against the top echelons of the gambling, narcotics, water-front, murder, or bookmaking rackets,”
LESSONS LEARNED?
Eric Adams, the 110th Mayor of New York, leaves office after one term as damaged goods. But for the corruption in his admnistration, he'd probably be the front runner in today's election. Last Septenber he was indicted by the Feds on bribery, wire fraud and illegal campaign contributions charges. Trump's Deprtment of Justice dismissed those charges.
FURTHER READING
For more on the Case of Mayor William O'Dwyer, check out the Smithsonain article.
If you're interested in O'Dwyer's career and his passion for cause independence for all 32 countis f Ireland check this out.