The Reformer

At 57, New York's Judge Samuel Seabury seemed almost an anachronism in the gay, irreverent 1920s. The son, grandson and great-grandson of clergymen, he saw part of life through the stained-glass windows of the Protestant Episcopal Church. He saw another part with the solemn, pince-nezed gaze of a reform-minded lawyer and jurist. The worst of what he saw was symbolized by James John Walker, New York City's twice-elected (1925, 1929) mayor. Jimmy Walker, top hat perched jauntily askew, wisecracked his way through the '20s like a handsome Bacchus, and it was perhaps inevitable that he would one day clash with stern, silver-haired Samuel Seabury.

The collision came in 1931 after Seabury, in retirement after serving on the New York Supreme Court and the New York Court of Appeals, was summoned by the Appellate Division to investigate the city's lower courts. Earnestly, painstakingly, he raked the muck of city corruption among lawyers, bondsmen, cops, judges and pimps on the city payroll.

"Take the Stand." One by one, Investigator Seabury helped toss the rascals out --to Jimmy Walker's dismay. "This fellow," cried the mayor, "would convict the Twelve Apostles if he could." But Seabury, authorized by a state legislative committee to pursue his investigations, was now ready to tackle James J. Walker himself. And the day finally came in the dusty old courtroom in the New York County Courthouse when Samuel Seabury said quietly: "Mr. Mayor, would you be good enough to take the stand?"

Seabury, combing through Jimmy's financial records, had come up with a lot that needed explaining; e.g., Walker received $26,000 in securities from brokers interested in local taxicab legislation that was subsequently enacted; he held $10,000 in bonds of a steel corporation that later received a city contract; he received a $10,000 letter of credit from promoters of a bus company that won a city franchise; he accepted "beneficences" of $240,000 from Newspaper Publisher Paul Block. Recalling that an earlier Seabury target had admitted getting thousands in cash from "a wonderful tin box," Jimmy protested: "I took it home and put it in a safe--not a vault, not a tin box, a safe in my own house . . . available for Mrs. Walker and myself."

The Muffled Roar. Two days of dogged Seabury questioning wore off Jimmy's gloss. Little by little his theatrics turned hollow, his cockiness wilted. Samuel Seabury sent his report to New York's Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, who called Democrat Walker on the carpet for personal questioning. But before Roosevelt had a chance to remove Walker from office, the mayor resigned and fled to Europe. Three years later he returned, played desperately at being a man about town, became a familiar and still-jaunty figure in nightclubs, theaters and bars before his death in 1946.

Aloof, and thin-lipped, Judge Samuel Seabury moved out of the news and was scarcely heard from again. Last week, at 85, the man who had helped muffle the roar of the '20s died in a Long Island nursing home.

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