For the kind of Independence Day in which fireworks explode in the air and not in the hands, New Yorkers can thank the late William Jay Gaynor, whose single term as mayor ended in 1913. A little man with a Vandyke beard, volcanic temper, and cold blue eyes, Gaynor was a pioneer in the cause of a “safe and sane” Fourth of July.

It was almost the least of his causes. This particular mayor of New York was an apostle of liberty. He believed in individual freedom and in the rule of law, and he said so at every opportunity. “A personal liberty disciple,” one clergyman called him, intending to discredit both him and his offensive libertarian ideas.

Hard-drinking, blunt-spoken, unsmiling, and cantankerous, Gaynor was a born non-politician. “Th’ human hunk iv gloom,” one satirist styled him. It is impossible to imagine him in City Hall in 2005. Then, again, not many could believe it when he was chosen to run in 1909. “There is not, I fancy, a man who he has not offended,” said Edward M. Shepard, the progressive Democratic leader who put Gaynor’s name into nomination. “Of this I speak, for I am one of those who has been offended – again and again.” And when the ungracious candidate won, they still couldn’t believe it. “Judge Gaynor,” The New York Sun editorialized, “certainly the most unfit candidate ever offered for the Mayoralty in the history of the community, has been elected by an impressive plurality. The fact is full of sinister significance.”

The Sun could hardly have objected to the mayor elect’s judicial record – it had, in fact, commended it. Nor to his brief career in journalism – Gaynor had had a stint in the Sun’s Brooklyn bureau. Maybe what rankled the editors was the fact that Tammany Hall had thrown its weight behind his candidacy. But, if so, the staunchly Republican Sun worried in vain. When asked what he intended to do to express his gratitude to Charles F. Murphy, the Tammany chieftain who had guaranteed his victory, Gaynor laconically replied, “Suppose that we give him a few kind words.” And they were pretty much all that Murphy got.

What Gaynor tried to give the people of New York was a government that knew its place. For the most part, he succeeded. And though he did not specifically set out to improve the quality of City Hall journalism with his funny and calculatedly scurrilous wit, he succeeded at that as well. “Now that the election is over,” he remarked on one occasion, “nobody has any immediate reason for lying.”

Not that every New Yorker enjoyed the mayor’s style of truth telling. Gaynor hated the apostles of moral uplift as much as they hated sin. In 1910, they demanded that he ban the exhibition of newsreels of the Jack Johnson-Jim Jeffries heavyweight title fight in Reno, Nev. Gaynor himself was no fight fan. But to one of these do-gooders, a Brooklyn pastor, he exploded, “If it lay in my power to say whether the pictures should be exhibited it would not take long to decide it. I do not see how it can do anyone any good to look at them. But will you be so good as to remember that ours is a government of laws and not of men?”

No prize fight dealt as much death and destruction as an average July 4 in New York City. It was counted a step in the right direction that only seven persons were killed in Independence Day celebrations in 1909. Eleven had perished in 1908 and 22 in 1907. Hundreds were annually maimed. But in 1910, the first Fourth in Gaynor’s term, no fatalities were immediately reported in the paper of record. The day was “bombless, fire crackerless, and revolverless, but not joyless.”

It was, of course, not politician-less. Gaynor reviewed the annual parade and listened to the reading of the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. He heard the musical selections performed by the People’s Choral Union of Brooklyn. And he turned to face the crowd that had gathered in City Hall Park.

“You elect men from among yourselves,” he told them, sounding his favorite theme, “not to do as they like, not to trample on you, not to club you, not to wrong you, not to put a hand on you, not to touch your property, not to touch your person, except in so far as you have allowed it, and only in the way you have allowed it in these laws which you have made. That, my friends, is the distinction between a government of laws and a government of men; and our Government is a government of laws.”

A month later, Gaynor was shot by an employee of the city Dock Department after boarding the liner Kaiser Wilhelm for his annual vacation in England (a news photographer snapped the immediate aftermath, the mayor’s neck and collar blackened with blood). Though the shooting contributed to his death in 1913, at the age of 65, Gaynor recovered enough strength to return to his desk. In response to a letter of condolence by an inmate at Clinton Prison, he replied, “I am well aware that many of you are not really bad men, but unfortunate men, and that God so sees you. There are many of us who would be the same as you are if we had the same trouble and obstacles in our lives. So do not be discouraged. I shall not speak of my trouble in view of the greater trouble of all of you. Let us all be patient and content.”

When Gaynor, weakened by the unextracted bullet, died in September 1913, tens of thousands of people turned out to watch his funeral cortege proceed from Trinity Church, Wall Street, to Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Not a bad showing for a non-politician.

Mr. Grant, the editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, intends to cast a write-in vote for William Jay Gaynor in the 2005 New York City mayoral election.