Pace Rick Brookhiser, but Richard “Boss” Croker was never Mayor of New York. He was Tammany Hall boss.
Nor was he a Protestant: at his death in Ireland he was given a Catholic funeral, complete with Requiem Mass. His second wife was a Cherokee Indian, whom he married at St. Agnes Church at Lexington and 43rd, shortly after the death of his first wife. He returned to Ireland and left an estate of nearly five millions dollars.
What’s interesting about LaGuardia was that his father was a lapsed Catholic, his mother was Jewish, he grew up in Arizona, and he became an Episcopalian who spoke Hebrew, German, Yiddish, Hungarian, Italian and Croatian.
Is this a great country or what?