Mayor Hylan Records Acceptance Speech

One hundred years ago today … the newspapers were critiquing Mayor Hylan’s speech accepting the renomination of the NY Democratic party. The October 5th speech was recorded, the first time a NYC Mayor’s speech was put on wax. You can listen to part of it here.

The record was put out by Okeh records, whom we have featured before for putting out the first ever blues records (by Mamie Smith).

After making his speech, Hylan had made his way to the Polo Grounds to watch the first game of the World Series in the company of Commissioner Kenesaw Landis. 

As we have reported on Hylan’s movements occasionally on this site,  we have actually seen him at baseball games before.

In his speech, Hylan outlined a plan for the city takeover of the private subway lines, and to scrap trolleys and elevated trains in favor of buses.

Our recommendation is that the private operators turn the city owned subways back to the city for municipal operation at a five cent fare. These lines carry more than two-thirds of all the passengers In the city. The remainder can be better accommodated by the operation of modern automobile buses. Surface lines that have become obsolete and should be taken off the streets of our city. The city will not buy them. It could not afford to accept them as a gift. Most of them should long since have been junked.

“HYLAN WOULD JUNK SURFACE CAR LINES.” The New York Herald, 6 October 1921, p. 6.

The Herald reported that Hylan’s proposal was at odds with the city’s Transit Commission: 

In contrast to Mayor Hylan's scheme, which, it was declared, could not but result in further disintegration and disintegration of transit service, it was learned yesterday that the Transit Commission's study of present operating methods has convinced it that it can increase the serviceability of the present lines, without the addition of a single foot of new trackage, sufficiently to accommodate 500,000,000 more passengers a year. 

The Evening World’s political cartoonist John Cassell lampooned the idea in an illustration called “Trackless,” showing Hylan on roller skates.

The World’s editorial staff did not treat the mayor any better:

If less were at stake one could afford to be a little sorry for Mayor Hylan. With such a formidable fleet of facts closing in on him, it is pathetic to see him with no resource but smoke-screens of words. Replying yesterday to the formal notification of his renomination, the Mayor blew the same old whorls–defiance of the "selfish interests," denunciation of the newspapers.

“Hylan.” The Evening World, 6 October 1921, p. 30.

In another moment of his speech, one not attacked the way the transit section was, Hylan expressed his unhappiness with the idea of raising the pay for City College faculty. 
And he probably found favor with his anti-prohibition stance, popular in the city at the time.

– Jonathan Goldman, Oct 6, 2021

TAGS: politicians, speech, recordings, transit, transportation, education, baseball, politics, elections, Democrats, cartoons