Reluctant Warriors of 1936: William Bleakley & Herbert Lehman

On a warm, clear afternoon in June 1926, 600 Westchester County Republican delegates gathered in the art deco casino at Playland Amusement Park on Long Island Sound to endorse their neighbor, state Supreme Court Justice William F. Bleakley (1883–1969), for New York Governor.

Republicans thought they had a shot at the governor’s mansion following seven straight election defeats. Just a month earlier, popular Democratic incumbent Herbert H. Lehman (1878-1963) made it known that he wouldn’t seek a third two-year term.

Bleakley, born in the northern Westchester hamlet of Verplanck to an engineer and a schoolteacher, was a force at the local level, having served nearly 20 years on city, county, and state courts. But Bleakley shared a similar pretense of reluctance with Lehman.

At the casino convention, Chair Charles H. Griffiths placed Bleakley’s name in nomination near the end of the session. “Chairman Griffiths’ action surprised the delegates,” the New York Times reported, “as it had been announced previously no endorsement would be made in view of Justice Bleakley’s insistence that his name not be mentioned.”

But the stakes were especially high that year, a presidential election year: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lehman’s predecessor as governor, was seeking a second term in the White House in the depths of the Great Depression.

And FDR would need New York’s most-in-the-nation 47 electoral votes in the fall election. So the governor’s race in FDR’s home state could, in theory, play a pivotal role.

The recently nominated GOP presidential slate consisted of the millionaire oil industry executive Kansas Governor Alf Landon (1887-1987) and Chicago Daily News publisher Frank Knox (1874-1944).

(Both men, along with former President Herbert Hoover, are the only supporters of Theodore Roosevelt‘s progressive “Bull Moose Party” in 1912 to later appear on a Republican ticket.)

“It is important that we have a man at the head of the State ticket who not only will be carried in, but will help the national ticket,” Griffiths told Westchester delegates. “If the party can carry this seat with a big majority we would not have to worry about (our candidates) Landon and Knox getting to Washington.”

Bleakley, 52, built support for the statewide nomination over the summer, including from neighboring Rockland, Dutchess, and Putnam counties, as he spoke out publicly against FDR, Lehman, and the New Deal. A continuing deadlock between two rival Onondaga County politicians – George Fearon, a state senator, and Mayor of Syracuse Rolland Marvin – almost certainly helped.

At the state convention in late September, Bleakley won on the first ballot, nearly doubling Fearon’s delegate count 680 to 348. Rochester publisher Frank Gannett (1876-1957, founder of Gannett) came in third with 92 delegates; Fearon then moved that the vote be made unanimous.

Meanwhile, the Democrats experienced unexpected drama. Al Smith (1873-1944), FDR’s predecessor as governor, and “the Happy Warrior” whose name FDR had placed in nomination for president at the 1928 Democratic National Convention, broke with Roosevelt, ostensibly over concerns about the scope of the New Deal, but almost certainly also fueled by their rivalry. Smith publicly backed Landon.

FDR, not wanting to take any chances with the New York governor’s race, pressed Lehman, 58, not to step aside – to in effect help cement Roosevelt’s backyard.

In a June 29 letter to “Dear Herbert,” Roosevelt implored Lehman to reconsider.

“May I repeat to you what I have already told you—that I was deeply disappointed when you stated that you would not again be a candidate for Governor,” he wrote, noting that the two men had been side by side in Albany – Lehman as FDR’s lieutenant governor – in making New York a laboratory for the social legislation now being put in place at the national level.

He cited “fair wage laws, unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, care of the destitute, but I should include the equally wide range of legislation affecting public utilities and conservation and, in general, the lives of the average citizen.”

“Our State was and still is among the pioneers,” he added, “and today the Federal Government is making it possible for all the States to join in this great work. The next two years, I think, will be very critical ones, and what takes place in New York will have an outstanding effect all over the Nation.”

A Republican governor, FDR feared, could mortally weaken such programs at the state level, and “the Nation would be hurt thereby, for that kind of example is imitated and spreads. I hope, therefore, that not only for the State but for the national good, you will be willing to reconsider your statement that you would not run again.”

Lehman eventually acceded, and the two somewhat reluctant warriors, Bleakley and Lehman, squared off. They were both from Westchester, but Bleakley’s modest Yonkers base was worlds distant from the Lehman Brothers heir’s 75-acre spread in Purchase.

The formal campaign lasted less than a month. Lehman kicked things off with an October 6th speech at the National Democratic Club in New York City, charging Bleakley with advocating a “counsel of weakness and executive futility”; which would “retard progressive legislation in this State for many decades.”

He declared that the state Democratic Party stood for everything “progressive and humane” while the Republican leadership was “reactionary, stand-pat and heartless.”

The people, said Governor Lehman, demanded courage and determined effort to enact progressive laws, as they had of his storied predecessors, notwithstanding legislators’ resistance.

“Let us consider what would have been sacrificed in this State,” he said, “if Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Evans Hughes, Alfred E. Smith and Franklin D. Roosevelt had been willing to follow my opponent’s policy of supineness and inactivity.”

Bleakley, speaking the next day in Dansville, Livingston County, about 50 miles south of Rochester, described Lehman’s remarks as a tacit admission of the assumption of dictatorial power, adding that “the pupil in Albany has well learned the lesson from his master in Washington.”

In the rural heart of the state he charged that the Democrats had abandoned New York’s farmers: “While you are left in the wilderness of depression, your taxes pave the way to the green pastures for the farmers of other states.”

He decried “an increasing tendency in this country to centralize power in the Executive” in acting over the heads of legislative bodies – akin, he said, to “a virtual dictatorship.”

And so it went, back and forth, with Lehman advocating progressive initiatives and a continuation of the programs of the past eight Democratic-led eight years, and Bleakley seeking to tie Lehman ever more closely to Roosevelt and the New Deal.

On November 3rd, Roosevelt buried Landon in what was then the biggest landslide in US history, taking 46 of 48 states – including his home state by more than a million votes.

Bleakley exceeded Landon’s New York vote total by more than 300,000, but still lost by more than half a million votes. In a typical upstate-downstate breakdown, FDR won New York City by more than 1.3 million votes and lost the rest of the state by more than 200,000 votes. Bleakley under-performed FDR in the city, but outperformed him in the rest of the state.

Bleakley sent a telegram to Lehman at 1:15 am on November 4th, conceding defeat and congratulating the governor on his re-election. “The people have spoken,” he wrote. “You fought a clean fight and a good one. I wish you a very successful administration and continued good health.”

Lehman would go on to be re-elected once more, in 1938, this time defeating Manhattan District Attorney and gang-buster Thomas E. Dewey (1902-1971) – this time by only 65,000 votes in a non-presidential election year.

The 1938 election was for the first four-year gubernatorial term, and by 1942, Lehman, 64, really meant it when he stepped aside. Dewey that year would finally break Democrats’ 24-year hold on the statehouse.

But Lehman wasn’t done with public service, resigning the governorship less than a month before the end of his term to accept appointment as director of the Office of Foreign Relief for the State Department.

He held a similar United Nations role from 1943 to 1946, and served as a US Senator from 1949 to 1957, when he finally retired at age 78. He died in 1963 at age 85.

Judge Bleakley’s power in Westchester was undiminished by his 1936 defeat – if anything, it was enhanced by his better-than-expected showing and his election sweep of his home county’s 18 towns and four cities, outperforming Landon by 20,000 votes.

In 1937, he founded a law firm that still exists today as Bleakley Platt & Schmidt. In 1938, he placed Dewey’s name in nomination at the state GOP convention in Saratoga Springs; that November, Bleakley was elected as the first county executive of Westchester, serving 2½ years until resigning in August 1941 to accept appointment as counsel to a State Joint Legislative Committee on Reapportionment.

A year later, his former adversary, Governor Lehman, appointed him as commissioner under the state’s 1907 Moreland Act to investigate Workmen’s Compensation Law violations.

The Westchester County Republican machine remained strong for more than a generation, with Republicans holding the county executive’s seat until 1973, and helping send Dewey and county resident Nelson Rockefeller (1908-1979) to Albany seven times.

Bleakley died in 1969; his obituary in the Bronxville Review Press-Reporter noted that he had never been GOP chairman at city, county, or state level but “was recognized as a power-wielding influence in party deliberations and decisions… Often referred to as ‘Mr. Republican’ he was called titular head of Westchester and was recognized by state political leaders as Republican ‘head man in Westchester.’”

Read more about New York’s Political History or it’s role in the Progressive Era

Illustrations, from above: FDR with Herbert Lehman (center) and Al Smith, ca. 1928; the art deco facade of Playland Casino (Westchester Archives Playland Photography Collection); then NY Governor FDR and Lieutenant Governor Lehman at the Democratic Party campaign headquarters, ca. 1928; 1936 Bleakley for New York State Governor campaign pins; Herbert Lehman (l) and William Bleakley; and 1936 election results reported in the New York Times, Nov. 4, 1936.