Tammany Hall, located in New York City, is a building and was a political pressure group organization. From 1789 to approximately 1945 Tammany Hall mostly aligned with the Democratic Party, controlling New York City politics, business, and the criminal element throughout the city for over 100 years. Its height was during the reign of William “Boss” Tweed, who died in the Ludlow Street Jail in 1878. Tammany politics, however, did not die with Tweed, nor did the building itself, located at 44 Union Square at Park Avenue and 17th Street. This location was the third headquarters of the political group, constructed in 1929 in a moment of hubris. The building was sold to the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union in 1943, eventually becoming a theater (The 39 Steps was a long-running comedy there), as well as the New York Film Academy, and now in its most recent renovation and landmark status– a Petco store and event space.
Politics is like that sometimes.
New York City has an upcoming mayoral election in 2025, and as such, this is a good time to look back eighty years to the campaign of Judge Jonah Jamison Goldstein— “JJ” to his friends. Goldstein attempted to win the NYC mayoral race of 1945 under the Liberal-Republican-Fusion ticket. His primary opponents were William O’Dwyer, on the Democratic Party ticket, and the No Deal Party candidate, Newbold Morris.
Judge Goldstein had been a fixture in New York City humanitarian circles as a leader in the Lower East Side’s Grand Street Boys Association, the Educational Alliance, the East Side Neighborhood Association, and the Jewish Big Brother Movement. In 1931, Goldstein was appointed a judge in the New York City Magistrates’ Court, primarily working on domestic and juvenile delinquency cases and was elected in 1939 to the New York County Court of General Sessions. In 1941, he presided over the Morris U. Schappes case. Schappes was one of several educators fired by the Rapp-Coudert Committee, which attempted to remove members of the Communist Party from the educational system of New York state.
THE GOOD GOVERNMENT TICKET OF 1945 ON THE REPUBLICAN / LIBERAL / CITY FUSION PARTY LINE
According to AJHS Academic Council member Daniel Soyer in his article, “The Liberal Party of New York and Independent Labor Politics,” the Liberal Party was established in New York State in May 1944, though its antecedents date to the 19th century. In 1944, Liberal Party leaders had been members of the American Labor Party (ALP) who left the ALP when that organization was under fire with accusations of communist infiltration. The Liberal Party is usually aligned (for better or worse) with the Democratic Party and/or liberal Republicans such as New York City Mayor John Lindsay and Senator Jacob Javits. The Liberal Party helped President Franklin D. Roosevelt win re-election in 1944 though he died in 1945. The last Liberal Party candidate for Governor in New York State was Andrew Cuomo in 2002.
In the 1945 New York City mayoral race, Judge Goldstein, a Democrat, partnered with City Comptroller Joseph D. McGoldrick (1938-1945), a Republican, and Judge Nicholas M. Pette, a non-partisan candidate running for President of the City Council. The three ran under a “City Fusion Party,” established in NYC by Republican Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who used the City Fusion Party to defeat the Democrats of Tammany Hall in the 1933 mayoral election. La Guardia served as Mayor from 1934-1946 and died in 1947. The Fusion Party was aligned with President Roosevelt as part of a New Deal Coalition. Contemporary Fusion Party examples from today include the Working Families Party (aligned with Democrats) and the Conservative Party, an offshoot of the New York State Republican Party.
Judge Goldstein’s primary opponents that year were the Democratic Party candidate, William O’Dwyer—the Tammany candidate elected mayor in 1946—and (Augustus) Newbold Morris’s run on the No Deal Party, an offshoot of the New York State Democratic Party. Morris had been a member of the New York City Planning Commission and President of the New York City Council from 1938-1945. He was also a Republican who refused to run under that party and would not endorse Goldstein, whom he called a “discarded Tammany candidate,” even though Goldstein was not connected to Tammany Hall. The No Deal Party ran only once, created specifically by La Guardia when he recruited Morris to run to drain off GOP voters. The party was disbanded after the election. Other candidates that year represented the Socialist, Trotskyist Anti-War, Socialist Labor, and Workers Parties.
THE RESULT: O’DWYER WINS AGAIN IN 1949… AND LEAVES IN 1950.
When the election was over, William O’Dwyer was elected Mayor for the first time (the city’s 100th mayor), beating second-place Goldstein by 21% of the vote. O’Dwyer would be re-elected again in 1949. Allegations of corruption, including close mob ties, would lead to him leaving the mayor’s job when he was implicated—but never charged with—corruption and racketeering.
However, additional corruption cases would soon be tied to O’Dwyer. By early 1950, the Roosevelt-appointed U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Miles McDonald, had investigated bookie Harry Gross, uncovering citywide payoffs of over $1 million a year. According to David Samuels’ article, “The Mayor and the Mob,” Gross employed “400 bookies, runners and accountants in 35 betting parlors across the city, Long Island, and northern New Jersey…” which led McDonald to “other protection rackets, spanning city departments. Most of these roads led back to James Moran.” James Moran had been William O’Dwyer’s clerk when O’Dwyer was a presiding judge and powerful political fixer. Indeed, O’Dwyer had named Moran the first deputy of the Fire Department in 1946, and by 1951 was exposed as the man behind “the fuel oil racket, in which building owners had to pay bribes to receive oil, and [Moran] received large, regular bribes from the head of the fireman’s union.” According to Samuels, Miles McDonald’s investigation into Gross and Moran made him the target of severe harassment from corrupt police officers who sided with O’Dwyer and the protection he provided.
President Harry Truman even found himself vulnerable to O’Dwyer’s scandal. In August 1951 it was revealed that O’Dwyer and Moran “had been meeting personally with the syndicate boss Frank Costello as far back as 1941.” Truman knew if O’Dwyer was forced to testify by McDonald, the entire Democratic Party and Tammany machine would face backlash due to unsavory alliances and political bribery. Truman upended O’Dwyer’s potential testimony by naming him Ambassador to Mexico, thereby skirting a potential subpoena. On August 31, 1950, Vincent Impellitteri (who O’Dwyer had handpicked to be the President of the New York City Council) became the Acting Mayor and New York City’s 101st Mayor. With O’Dwyer’s departure, Tammany Hall was as dead as Boss Tweed and would never reach its former political heights again.
AFTERMATH
After Goldstein’s defeat, he would continue to work as a Judge of the General Sessions until his retirement in 1956 as well as continuing his affiliation and work as a lay rabbi with the Grand Street Boys, the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, the Boy Scouts, and the Governor Al Smith Memorial Fund. He was the first of New York’s law offices to hire Black lawyers—Aiken A. Pope and Francis E. Rivers—quitting the American Bar Association when it would not admit Rivers to the Bar.
“I have been a member of the American Bar Association for twenty-nine years and desire to continue my membership if I can do so without stultifying myself. To be a member of a professional organization which bars Negroes from its membership would in essence be contributing to the perpetuation of bigotry. This I refuse to do. Unless I receive concrete evidence that the association is not pursuing this discriminatory and un-American practice, you may regard this letter as my resignation from the membership of the American Bar Association.” –Judge Jonah Goldstein, 1943
He married Harriet B. Lowenstein in 1920, and she was the first woman in New York State to become a lawyer as well as a certified public accountant. Lowenstein was the philanthropic adviser to Felix M. Warburg and controller of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies.
After Goldstein’s retirement, he vocally advocated in print and on television for the end of criminal drug possession, urging the U.S. to rethink its anti-drug policy. In an address to NBC on March 25, 1956, Judge Goldstein remarked that “The only way to curb this crime wave, which is the inevitable handmaiden of addiction, is to take the profit out of illicit drug traffic by administering shots, at cost, to the poor addict in publicly operated clinics.” He went on to argue that “The poverty of criminal addicts and their need for large sums of cash has led directly to the wave of muggings, robberies, burglaries and larcenies that have marked our post war world.” ending with “We will not be on the way toward a solution of this curse until it is recognized and treated as a medical problem, and not a penal offense.” In the Saturday Evening Post, July 30th, 1966 issue Judge Goldstein’s op-ed titled, “Give drugs to addicts so we can be safe” he once again argued in favor of decriminalizing drug use as a means of controlling other forms of crime.
Goldstein died at the age of 81 in 1967 in Bethlehem, NH.
William O’Dwyer continued as U.S. ambassador to Mexico until 1952. He helped organize the first Israel Day Parade and died on November 24, 1964, in New York City. He was never held to account for Tammany Hall.
James Moran was sentenced to 12 to 25 years for extortion, perjury, and tax evasion. He served ten and half years in prison and was released to his family home located at 545 Eighth Street in Brooklyn in 1962. He died of a heart attack on an IND train in 1968.
VOTER TURNOUT IN NYC THEN AND NOW
NYC’s population between 1940 and 1950 ranged from 7,454,995 to 7,891,957 with 1,982,361 New Yorkers voting in the 1945 mayoral race. To put that in context, in 2023 NYC’s population was an estimated 8,252,035 and only 1,118,245 people voted in the mayoral election of 2021. So, if you live in NYC, make sure you’re registered to cast your vote like it’s 1945!
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Sources
“Crime: O’Dwyer’s Good Friend.” Time Magazine. May 21, 1951. https://time.com/archive/6796619/crime-odwyers-good-friend/. Accessed March 5, 2025.
Hamm, Theodore. “When an NYPD Corruption Scandal Sent NYC’s Mayor Fleeing to Mexico.” Indypendent.org. https://indypendent.org/2023/05/when-an-nypd-corruption-scandal-sent-nycs-mayor-fleeing-to-mexico/ Accessed March 5, 2025.
Judge Jonah J. Goldstein Papers. P-61. American Jewish Historical Society.
“Brief History and Platform of the Liberal Party.” LiberalParty.org https://www.liberalparty.org/LPofNY/policies-and-platform/brief-history-and-platform-of-the-liberal-party/ Accessed March 4, 2025.
Judge Jonah Goldstein Quits Bar Association Because It Bars Negro from Membership. Jewish Telegraphic Agency. April 11, 1943.
https://www.jta.org/archive/judge-jonah-goldstein-quits-bar-association-because-it-bars-negro-from-membership Accessed February 27 Accessed February 27, 2025.
“Moran Appointed Chief Fire Deputy.” New York Times, February 16, 1946. https://www.nytimes.com/1946/02/16/archives/moran-appointed-chief-fire-deputy-man-who-was-chief-clerk-to-odwyer.html. Accessed March 5, 2025.
“Moran Released from U.S. Prison; O’Dwyer Aide at Home in Brooklyn Denies Guilt.” New York Times, June 26, 1962. https://www.nytimes.com/1962/06/26/archives/moran-released-from-us-prison-exodwyer-aide-at-home-in-brooklyn.html. Accessed March 5, 2025.
“Nicholas M. Pette.” Historical Society of the New York Courts. https://history.nycourts.gov/biography/nicholas-m-pette/ Accessed March 4, 2025.
“New York City Mayor 1945.” Our Campaigns. https://www.ourcampaigns.com/RaceDetail.html?RaceID=79409. Accessed March 4, 2025.
Samuels, David. “The Mayor and the Mob.” Smithsonian Magazine. October 2019. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/mayor-william-odwyer-new-york-city-mob-180973078/ Accessed March 4, 2025.
“Son of Jim Moran Asks Court to Forget Father’s Extra Raps.” New York Daily News, May 4, 1961. https://www.newspapers.com/article/daily-news-1961-james-moran-sons-seeks-p/33422242/. Accessed March 5, 2025.
Soyer, Daniel. “The Liberal Party of New York and Independent Labor Politics.” Organization of American Historians. https://www.oah.org/process/soyer-the-liberal-party-of-new-york/. Accessed March 4, 2025.
Walsh, Robert. “O’Dwyer’s Moran Dies on IND Train.” New York Daily News, January 6. 1968. https://www.newspapers.com/article/daily-news-1968-james-moran-obit-dies-on/33422420/?locale=en-US. Accessed March 6, 2025.
