Okey Dope
The Elegant Oakey. By Crosswell Bowen. (O.U.P., 30s.)
ft• probably shows something or other, but the only two Mayors of London whose names I can automatically recall are Dick Whittington and John Wilkes. But Mayors of New York from Fiorello La Guardia, the greatest of the lot (so like and so unlike Mr. Herbert Morrison and/or Lord Passfield); such eggheads as Abram Hewitt and Seth Low; such comic and pathetic figures as John 'Faithful' Hylan; reformers like John Purroy Mitchell; great men manques like Gaynor; such sad characters as William O'Dwyer, who left Salamanca to his own though, possibly, not the Church's loss; the list is full of interest. And there are the playboys Oakey Hall and James J. Walker, both Damon Runyon characters from the floating crap game that was New York politics in the days of Boss Tweed and the 'era of beautiful nonsense' presided over by Cal Coolidge.
Oakey Hall is a comic and ludicrous figure, out of his depth in the turbid waters of Tammany, Mozart, Apollo and the other halls that fought for the spoils of New York in the shadow of Jay Gould and Jim Fisk. He was a snappy dresser and orator. He passed for a scholar (although the Latin quoted here is not of the best); he was a great deal of a fool and something of a knave. He had a full private life (in the limited American sense of private), was a member of good clubs, though he found Harvard slow and left Cambridge (Mass.) without a degree. No one could make him an important figure but, like. Jimmy Walker, he had his representational interest, His biographer has missed nearly all the opportunities his subject offers him. Quoting lavishly from contemporary court records and from Oakey Hall's own oratory, he can't be dull all of the time, but his own contribution to the oft-told story is slight. We do get the inside dope on the libel action against Bryce for the famous suppressed chapter in the first edition of The American Commonwealth, and that is about all.
Mr. Bowen tells us that this book grew out of a projected profile for The New Yorker. He conspicuously fails to meet the standards • we expect from that learned journal (and from the Oxford Press). Here we have the Fenian, Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, promoted to the rank of bishop; Poulteney Bigelow, the Kaiser's old pal, made Minister to the Court of St. James's; the first Lord Russell of Killowen confused with the second Earl Russell; and a hitherto obscure Mr. Clarence A. Seward made 'former Secretary of State for the United States.' It is an indica- tion of the competence of this recounter of the chroniques seandaleuses of New York that he apparently thinks that the first James Gordon Bennett was a Catholic convert like Hall himself. Bennett was a former student of Blairs College, Aberdeen, a 'spoiled priest' as they say in Ire- land. Reconciling him to the church of his birth was, for Cardinal McCloskey, a ticklish job like that which fell to the Abbe Dupanloup in re- conciling Talleyrand, but it was not a matter of an 'eleventh-hour reception.' Unlucky in life, Oakey Hall hasn't been lucky in death. But there is a good story buried in this incoherent and inaccurate narrative.
D. W. BROGAN
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