Definition
William O'Dwyer was an Irish-born Brooklyn district attorney who served as mayor of New York City from 1946 to 1950, the first postwar mayor and the man under whom Robert Moses's authority empire matured. He resigned mid-term under the shadow of a police-corruption scandal, accepting a diplomatic posting to Mexico.
O'Dwyer represents the postwar restoration of the Democratic machine after the LaGuardia interlude — and the kind of mayor for whom Moses's combination of federal money, public-relations dominance, and authority charters was an irresistible governing convenience.
Why it matters
How it works
A postwar mayor of a machine city had to balance three constituencies at once: the borough Democratic leaders who put him in office, the federal agencies whose money he needed, and the public-authority commissioners — pre-eminently Moses — who alone could move that money into asphalt and concrete on schedule. O'Dwyer's path of least resistance was to ratify whatever Moses brought to him, in exchange for ribbon-cuttings and an uninterrupted flow of construction headlines.
The arrangement worked until the scandals it concealed broke open. Mayors who outsource execution to a more powerful subordinate eventually inherit the political cost of what was built in their name.