BLOW TO TAMMANY

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 34, 4 November 1937, Page 11

BLOW TO TAMMANY

La Guardia Again Mayor Of New York BITTER ELECTION Thomas E. Dewey District Attorney By Telegraph.—Press Assn.—Copyright. (Received November 3, 9.5 p.m.) New York, November 2. Mr. F. 11. La Guardia has been re-elected -Mayor of New York witli a plurality indicated to be .300,000. Mr. Thomas E. Dewey, who won an international reputation by his successful prosecution of racketeering methods, lias been elected New York County District-Attorney with a plurality of probably 100,000. It was one of the most bitter city elections in recent history, marking the most serious defeat of Tammany since the inception of the so-called Fusion Party, led by Mr. La Guardia, which was victorious in all the important municipal offices. Observers believe Tammany’s power is either permanently destroyed, or will survive only as a minor organisation, controlling only small offices in the borough of Manhattan. NATIONAL ASPECT OF ELECTION La Guardia The Key Figure A national importance has been attached to the New York City mayoralty election next month —not because New York City is the largest government mechanism outside Washington, D.C., nor because its budget is second only to the Federal Government and is larger than a handful of States combined, nor because its chief official receives the highest government salary outside the President — but because out of it may emerge the leader of a national party, wrote Leon Siler in the October number of “Current History.” Fiorello Henry Lt Guardia ran off front Congress in 1917 to join the army but was rejected at first because of his height—or lack of it. To-day, New York’s five-foot-two Italian mayor has become a political giant. Regardless of the outcome of his fight to succeed himself on election day—and political observers will tell you that all the signs are in his favour—he is being prominently mentioned as the standard bearer of a number of parties. William Allen White confides all the way from his editorial office in Kansas that he would like to see Mr. La Guardia as the “modern Lincoln” of the Republican Party. Others have selected him as one of the Crown Princes of the New Deal Royal Family. But there is no certainty that La Guardia will consent to march in or at the bead of the political parades of either Republicans or New Dealers. There is reason to prophesy that if he does any marching at all, it will be as the number one man of the American Labour Party, an organisation which has thrown itself into the fight for his re-election and which has promised to deliver the labour vote of the nation’s largest labour city. There are other national implications. In addition to the backing of the American Labour Party, La Guardia has the support of a great number of Republicans, independent Democrats and fusionists, and the official blessings of the Communist Party. Yet a victory for La Guardia will be interpreted as victory for the New Deal. For the underlying philosophy governing municipal government in New York City the last four years lias been progressive with a distinct New Deal tinge.

The New Deal figured largely as an election issue in the pre-primary days of the campaign. Senator Royal S. Copeland, seeking both Democratic and Republican designation and flying under the colours of Tammany Hall, conducted his campaign for nomination as if it were a continuation of the Presidential fight of 1936. New Deal legislation and philosophy were all brought into the issue. Tammany dissenters and New Deal Democrats came into the open with a candidate of their own to vie with Copeland for the Democratic nomination. He was Jeremiah T. Mahoney, former Justice of the New York State Supreme Court, who, as head of the Amateur Athletic Union, led the fight against participation in the German Olympics. The selection of Justice Mahoney, believed to have been inspired or approved by the White House, is hardly a repudiation of the La Guardia administration. Above everything else, it was conceived in the hope of giving James A. Farley the juciest political patronage plum outside the Federal Government itself. Opposition to the antiNew Deal Copeland was only a minor consideration, as was the apparent paradox of pitting a candidate against a man who had already shown strong sympathy for the New Deal, and whose re-election would be interpreted as an endorsement by the voters of that very same New Deal. This even though his opponent might have official New Deal backing.

It is all very confusing to the voters. They will have been confused beyond advance prediction if the Democratic and Republican primaries of September have come and gone and all three candidates—La Guardia, Copeland, Mahoney—still are out pleading for votes. The possibilities of confusion were manifold in late August. Mahoney and Copeland were rivals in the Democratic primary ; Copeland and La Guarwere entered in the Republican primary; it was certain that regardless of the Republican primary outcome, La Guardia would be on the general election ballot as the candidate of various minority groups under a Fusion banner. The reader is at liberty to concoct his own political jigsaw puzzle out of these ingredients. A Clean Administration. Going concern value was high on the La Guardia side. Its elements were diverse, and about few of them did the mayor’s opponents offer any arugment. Against neither La Guardia nor any of his department heads had complaints involving personal integrity been raised in a four-year regime. Pages are reserved regularly in the records of New York City administrations for major and minor scandals, but in the case of tiie La Guardia era the pages have remained virtually blank-. A new charter, modernising the city government’s structure and procedures in many respects, had been drafted by

a La Guardia-appointed commission, adopted by the city’s voters with an effective date of next January 1, and upheld by the courts in the face of bitter Democratic attack. To those who gave the charter a resounding majority when its adoption was voted the La Guardia supporters could say: “Keep the new charter’s friends in office as it goes into effect; don’t turn it over to its enemies.”

Most of the city department heads responsible to the mayor had functioned with unquestioned efficiency. Complaints of police graft, whether whispered or shouted, had ceased. Quality of the city’s health and hospital services. vital needs in such a teeming population centre, had been, visibly improved. Methods and facilities for distribution of the 25,000 tons of food entering the city daily had been improved, and food racketeers suppressed. Tenement house evils had been attacked, and new low-rent housing projects launched. The corporation counsel had rooted out evils in condemnation procedure which cost the city uncounted millions under less scrupulous control. The merit system of appointment and promotion of subordinate city employees had progressed.

Public improvements had multiplied at an unprecedented rate—in a city where tlie clamour for more and more municipal equipment for the comfort, protection and convenience of citizens will never be fully satisfied this side the millennium. Construction programmes, federally aided or otherwise, had provided new park and playground facilities, rapid transit extensions, bridges, boulevards, schools, hospitals, health stations, beaches, docks, markets on a scale never achieved before.

Thomas E. Dewey, the phenomenally successful rackets prosecutor, had allied himself with La Guardia on a Fusion nomination for district attorney of New York county, which is the borough of Manhattan. If the mayor’s drive for “honest, efficient, non-politi-cal” city government needed a fresh punch to give it fresh vote-gathering quality, underwriting of the Fusion cause by Dewey potentially provided it. When Dewey, in accepting his nomination, endorsed La Guardia and struck at “an alliance of long standing betw’een crime and certain elements of Tammany Hall,” it appeared certain the young prosecutor would be an ace of the campaign. Youth was on Fusion's side. La Guardia turned fifty-five this year; Thomas E. Dewey is thirty-five, Mahoney is sixty-two, Copeland sixtyeight. It was a far less effervescent La Guardia who sought a second term as mayor than the one who served New York’s Harlem in Congress for many years. The flamboyance, the furious strictures and dramatics of his Washington crusading gave way to businesslike industriousness and to calm logic when he entered the mayor’s office and put into operation his formula for nonpolitical city control. Ilis anti-llitler outburst of a few months ago, when he suggested that a wax figure of Hitler be placed in a “chamber of horrors” exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, was one of his few departures, as mayor, from moderation of demeanour and speech. Whether his custodianship of the mayoralty has in fact been non-politi-cal, whether the city is better off as a result, whether the opposition to the “little man” is just venality and corruption knocking once more at the City Hall's venerable doors, are questions on which the New York City voters soon will have their say.