DEAL, ENGLAND: On August 30 the Quaker leader William Penn set sail for America, the “True and Absolute Proprietor” of the province of Pennsylvania, an awesome tract of forty-five thousand square miles of unsurveyed and largely unexplored territory.

The proprietorship had been granted by King Charles II in payment of a debt owed to Penn’s father—and also, it is suspected, because the King found Quakers something of a strain on his tolerance and was glad to have some of them move to the far-distant New World. As for Penn, he had given up his search for acceptance in England, sadly concluding that “the deaf adder cannot be charmed.” He had planned his new colony as a “holy experiment” embodying his beliefs in religious freedom, trial by jury, and the right of petition.

The crossing aboard the bark Welcome was a particularly deadly one. The hundred Quakers who sailed with Penn, “Industrious Husbandmen” and people who have been “much clogg’d and oppress’d about a Livelyhood,” were struck down with smallpox during the crossing; thirty-one of them died. But the reception of the survivors in their new land was heartening. The Dutch, Swedish, and English settlers who lived along the shores of the Delaware welcomed the battered travelers pleasantly, and the local dignitaries of the town of New Castle presented Penn with symbols of his ownership—a bit of turf, a twig, and a bowl of river water.

The new arrivals saw few Indians, though Penn had previously sent word to the Delawares informing them of his coming and expressing the hope “that we may always live together as neighbors and friends.” Penn’s personal pleasure was also dampened by the fact that his wife, Gulielma, pregnant with her seventh child, had decided not to accompany him and was not there to share his joy.

Fearing—not unrealistically—that he might not live to return, he had left behind secretly written letters of farewell to his wife and children: “My love, that neither sea, nor land, nor death itself, can extinguish or lessen toward you,” he told Gulielma, “most endearedly visits you with eternal embraces, and will abide with you forever.”

His letter was long and fond, full of strictures and advice about raising their children: “I love sweetness, mixed with gravity, and cheerfulness tempered with sobriety. … Breed them up in a love one of another. …” Happily, however, his solicitude turned out to be unnecessary; he was back in England with his family in less than two years.

NEW YORK CITY: On September 2 headlines in The New York Times trumpeted the not wholly unexpected climax to a series of giddy events: “Walker resigns, denouncing the governor; says he will run for the mayoralty again, appealing to ‘fair judgement’ of the people.” The governor denounced was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had, three years earlier, authorized an investigation into the corruption of the city government of New York, flourishing in the dark shadows cast by Tammany Hall. Walker called the investigations “un-American” and hinted that his opponents were in league with the “Socialists.”

Walker’s notion of appealing to the “people” seemed to be a good idea. He was an enormously popular man who embodied the qualities many of his contemporaries admired in the Jazz Age. He dressed extravagantly, dined elegantly, went to ball games, and marched in parades. He had a show-biz mistress. He was a wit. He had been a songwriter—“Will you love me in December as you do in May?”—and had received the ultimate accolade from Toots Shor himself: “When you waHced into the room, you brightened up the joint. ”

It is an understatement to remark that while living this golden existence, Walker neglected business. He raised his own salary from twenty-five thousand to forty thousands dollars and took seven vacations (a total of 143 days) during his first two years as mayor. Walker took office in 1926. He shunned the duties he found onerous and left the field open to an army of Tammany spoilsmen who were, after all, his friends and supporters. The extent of corruption was mind-boggling. Relatives, of course, went on city payrolls, businessmen paid tribute for services due them under the law, cops took bribes, beat up prisoners, framed the innocent. Judgeships were bought and sold. Political hacks amassed huge fortunes.

It could not go on forever. The New York Bar asked Governor Roosevelt to look into the matter of the appointment of magistrates, and thus began a series of probes under the general supervision of Samuel Seabury, a righteous man and an anti-Tammany Democrat. These investigations, undeterred by Walker’s mutterings about “Soviet sympathizers,” led inevitably to a hard look at the mayor’s own financial dealings. These, though no criminal act had been proven, were bizarre. There were slush funds (Walker called this money “beneficences” from friends) and letters of credit of dubious provenance. On the witness stand Walker gave a series of evasive answers to Seabury’s questions, and the jig was pretty well up. The mayor turned to Al Smith for advice and got it: “Jim, you’re through. You must resign for the good of the party.” On September 1 Walker sent the city clerk this statement: “I hereby resign as Mayor of the City of New York, the same to take effect immediately.”