Schwab, Frank X. b.Augustl4, 1874; Buffalo, New York d.April 23, 1946; Buffalo, New York
Controversial German American mayor of Buffalo from 1922 to 1929. Schwab acquired national publicity in the 1920s for his open hostility to both Prohibition and the Ku Klux Klan.
Schwab was elected mayor in 1921 while still under indictment for violations of the Volstead law, a law that defined the ban on intoxicating liquors in the Eighteenth Amendment. The former brewer proceeded to dismantle the city’s effort to police the flow of illicit liquor. He also waged a ruthless campaign against the Klan in western New York. Hated by some for his supposed Anglophobia and wisecracking, Schwab lost the mayoralty in 1929 to a former friend, Charles Roesch. He continued to run for the mayoralty unsuccessfully in many bids thereafter, and became the most outspoken German American opponent to the city’s Nazi element.Schwab was the son of a workingclass Austrian father and a Bavarian mother. After graduating from St. Anna’s German Catholic parochial school, Schwab began work as a cabinetmaker. He later recalled that a priest was about to pay for his high school education, but that his father had complained that just when children got big enough to help their parents, they left them. Schwab thereupon refused to go to high school and worked long hours to supplement the family income. Schwab’s rise through a blue-collar world came from a series of practical inventions he made to improve the safety of the shops where he worked, his German Catholic connections, a notable sense of humor, and a superior singing voice—which he used to good effect at the age of twenty at a Milwaukee Saengerfest. His break from manual labor came after a Buffalo brewer, Conrad Hammer, heard his Milwaukee performance. Hammer appointed Schwab as a solicitor for his brewery, starting at $15 dollars a week.
Schwab’s success in getting saloon owners to adopt Hammer beer increased his income to $4,500 dollars a year and facilitated his marriage to a St.
Anna girl, whose father was a storeowner. His wife, Theresa, of Prussian ancestry, served as his personal accountant for life and did most of the work to raise the couple’s six children. Schwab’s success with Hammer beer also helped make him a well-known personality throughout the working-class neighborhoods of the city.In 1915 Schwab opened his own liquor store, and shortly thereafter, a brewery. He delved into politics in 1917, supporting the Socialist antiwar position, and became an outspoken opponent to Prohibition. In 1920 twenty local policemen working with federal authorities raided Schwab’s Buffalo Brewing Company. They found that the alcoholic content of his “near-beer” was over.5 percent, and falsely labeled. Schwab reorganized his firm and appealed for clemency. City and federal authorities appeared unmoved, but the local citizenry rallied to his defense. When a columnist, Jack Kelly, of the Buffalo Times playfully proposed Schwab as a candidate for mayor, the joke itself became a force. The brewery industry rallied behind him, and Schwab defeated the incumbent, superpatriotic mayor, George Buck, in the fall election of 1921.
As mayor, Schwab supported increases in taxation to fund new schools and a series of programs to help the poor. But the public debate about the mayor focused on his personality and his stand against Prohibition. Performing for working-class Catholics and east-side Germans, Schwab wore his bow tie submarined under his collar, and used a beer starter for a gavel. He declared that the waves of Lake Erie were sad because they were only water (and not beer). Dismissed by a council member for making the city a “laughingstock,” Schwab waged a life and death struggle against his most vociferous critics, the local Klan. As vigilante Klansmen threatened saloonkeepers, the mayor remade the city’s police force into an antiKlan agency. He even employed covert agents and encouraged the organization of anti-Klan societies.
For this, Klansmen called the mayor, “Frank Xsema Slob,” and murdered one of his informants in the summer of 1924. But the mayor’s supporters fought back with bombings, death threats, and at least one attempt to poison a leading Klansman at a local restaurant. For a time in the summer of 1924 a clandestine war was being waged in Buffalo. Schwab claimed afterward that the Klan almost assassinated him twice, and it is probable that he became in effect a local Henry II, who encouraged the police and the Mafia to wreak vengeance but did not directly order skirmishes or executions. At last, Schwab obtained a list of Klan members, which he used to intimidate and destroy the group. Elected again in 1925, Schwab continued to humor some and rankle others. He spoke against daylight saving time, automobiles, jazz, short dresses, and the hip flask. While mayor hecalled America’s recent ally, Great Britain, the traditional enemy of the United States, and claimed that both Abraham Lincoln and George Washington had been saloonkeepers.
Schwab was a Republican, but he lacked strong ties to the parties, and their opposition by 1929 helped to explain his defeat. For the rest of his life, Schwab aspired to reclaim the mayoralty, especially after Mayor Joseph Kelly during World War II removed his bust from City Hall. During this time of continued politicking, Schwab again became an active member of German Vereine, and opened a restaurant named Old Vienna. He used his reputation as a former Klan antagonist and mayor to attack Nazi penetration in the German clubs. To Schwab, the Nazis constituted a Klan of German aliens who mocked the Constitution, and did not deserve its rights. Schwab, however, lacked the social influence to keep the Nazis out of German Day festivities and the political influence to repeat the performance of exposing a hate group. In his last election in 1945, he won a respectable, though inauspicious 36,000 votes, and worsened an already unstable heart condition.
Andrew Yox
See also Buffalo; German-American Bund
References and Further Reading
Holli, Melvin G., and Peter Jones, eds.
Biographical Dictionary of American Mayors 1820—1980. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981, p. 321.
Lay, Shawn. Hooded Knights on the Niagara: The Ku Klux Klan in Buffalo, New York. New York: New York University, 1995.
Yox, Andrew P. “Decline of the German- American Community in Buffalo, 1855—1925.” PhD dissertation. University of Chicago, 1983, pp. 348-350.