Midnight in the Metropolis

Many a citizen wondered what was happening to Jimmy Byrnes's midnight curfew. Thousands guessed that the 12 o'clock closing order, already sidetracked in New York by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, would soon be completely derailed. But the mayor's attempt to keep Manhattan bars and night clubs open until 1 a.m. had the opposite effect.

President Roosevelt quickly took a stand--he wanted the curfew observed everywhere. And though Jimmy Byrnes had all but admitted that the Government had no way of enforcing his order, the War Department put teeth in it by proclaiming a midnight curfew for soldiers.

Military police moved into Broadway bars, began hauling soldiers away from their drinks while delighted sailors raised glasses and jeered happily. The next day the Navy spoke too--obey the midnight curfew.

Then in an excess of zeal, the Army's Second Service Command ruled that enlisted men could not even eat in New York restaurant-bars after midnight. Hotelmen and bar and night club operators began shutting up at 12 again, shuddering at the idea of trying to separate service men from liquor or food an hour before civilians went home.

LaGuardia, still curfused, still certain that a 12 o'clock curfew disrupted Manhattan's subway and bus systems, and that it would cause speakeasies to flower, made a nationwide radio speech to explain himself. He said that an hour of "tolerance" would make the curfew more easily enforced. Then he went on to plead that the city does not license bars which offer no entertainment, thus has no control over them. But nobody seemed to be listening.

Mayors from all over the country righteously denounced the LaGuardia attitude. Across the country (where the curfew was being observed without much fuss), editorial writers and cartoonists wound up and chucked their bluntest barbs at New York City's mayor.

New York bars and night clubs went right on shutting up at the stroke of midnight. At week's end administration officials, far from being indignant at the Little Flower, had begun to regard him benignly. The U.S. public, which had considered the curfew an unnecessary imposition, had got so mad at the mayor of sinful New York that they had begun to like it.

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