Return of the Native

POLITICAL NOTES

In the harbor of Manhattan, two bargees stirred sleepily last week. It was only about eleven o'clock in the morning and the bargees, who had gone to bed at ten the night before, were drowsing until it became time to eat their supper. One of them mumbled a curse and sat up angry and bewildered. Soon his companion did likewise; the two stared at each other with alarm and annoyance, for the air was full of strange noises. Whistles, sirens, funnels, horns, bells, squealers, filled the morning with a troublesome cacophony. Suddenly one bargee shook his fist: "It's that lazy bum Walker," the bargee said, "now he's back!" "Yes, the loafer," said the other bargee. Then both bargees moved into a shady place on the deck, for it was a hot September forenoon, and returned to somnolence.

What was to the bargees merely an unwarranted disturbance of early morning comfort, was, to newspapers, material for front pages desecrated by a lack of transoceanic flights and prizefights. The man so scornfully described by the lazy fellows, was in reality James J. Walker, Mayor of New York, who had been abroad for two months. Surely the adjectives applied by the bargees were out of order; they had read, no doubt, in spare moments, accounts of the Mayor's whiskey-tippling in England, his beer-drinking in Germany, his liquid luncheons in Italy, his wine-bibbing in France and his miscellaneous guzzlings in bars and on trains elsewhere. But they had not read the Mayor's most recent wireless message from on board the Ile de France: "It was to get a broader and more comprehensive view of city problems and their correction that I have traveled many miles through Europe and worked hard in my search for a rest."

To reporters, Mayor Walker said, as he drew near to New York, "I studied housing, hospitals, water-supply and transit. . . . I never had time to ride on the subways. I always wanted to, but there was always something else going on. . . . The funniest thing that happened to me abroad was the most pathetic. For two weeks I've been refusing good drinks." "How often?" asked incredulous newsgatherers. "Continuously." "Why?" "Hell," said the Mayor of New York, "you spoil it by asking why. I was sick!" Later the Mayor of New York said: "The greatest thrill of my life was when I knelt at the feet of the temporal head of the church in Rome."

As soon as his feet touched the sidewalks of New York, the Mayor put them resolutely into his limousine and started for home. There was no parade--although the Acting Mayor, Joseph Vincent McKee, and the Welcoming Committee Head, Grover Whalen, would gladly have provided one. On the evening of his return, the Mayor arrived half an hour late at the theatre in which Manhattan Mary (see p. 25 for a review) was playing. Attired in a very dark blue dinner coat, he smiled while the chief comedian played leapfrog among the members of his party, sitting in the first row. At the end of the first act, he made one of his "London was fine, Berlin was swell, Rome was superb, Paris was beyond words, but this is the best yet" speeches; then at the end of the third act, wherein a stage mayor was treating the musical comedy heroine to a stage welcome, the Mayor himself bounced up on the boards and stole the part. "Where," he said to the chief comedian, "did you get the name 'Crickets'?" "Well, I got it from watching these . . . these little insects you know. Remarkable little creatures, they are, the way they make music with their hind legs . . . wonderful . . . remarkable. . . ." Mayor Walker, scornfully: "And will you tell me what is remarkable about a cricket making a noise with his hind legs?" Comedian, giggling: "Well . . . huhhuhhuh . . . Paul Whiteman can't do it." The orchestra played the finale, the audience, with frantic enthusiasm for a chief magistrate who is as much at home on the stage as he is in the Vatican at Rome or the City Hall, cheered and clapped, the Mayor bowed and smiled.

The next morning the Mayor was at his office before the two surly bargees had even fairly entered their beauty sleep. The problems that faced him were many: a railroad had run its tracks along a parkway adjacent to a playground; one Edward A. Miller had used the Edward A. Miller had used the Mayor's name wrongfully for his "Mayorality Ball to his honor James J. Walker" to be given on Dec. 1; the Mayor deferred the selection of a site for a Manhattan airport; he listened to women politicians begging for more sewers.

At a luncheon given to him by the Advertising Club, he said: "No man can have fellow citizens such as I see before me and tolerate anybody abroad apologizing for you. . . . I love New York. I love it with all the love I am capable of. . . . And don't please confuse that predisposition or that anxiety to smile or to laugh, to be light. Please sometimes think that behind that 'smile or even perhaps as you see that laugh, or that wisecrack as they call it, there may be something deeper down that is worry. There may be an anxiety that I would not betray and rather than betray it I would rather reach out for a laugh. . . ."

In the afternoon he inspected a hospital.

In the evening he again went to the theatre, where, a merry, capricious, versatile, capable man-of-affairs-about-town he again saw himself impersonated upon the stage, again made a speech which, if not actually witty, was graceful and gay, again in his deep voice, thanked New Yorkers for such enraptured applause as has never before been given to the Chief Magistrate of the largest U. S. city.