"Who Could Say 'No'?"

"No" is a word that comes hard to New York's Mayor James John Walker. One day last week he was quite incapable of uttering it when a Non-Partisan Committee of 682 New York citizens waited upon him at the City Hall, asked him to stand for reelection.

For months Mayor Walker had been keeping city voters in a state of theoretical suspense as to his candidacy.* He had let it be known that he was considering a return to private life to get rich, that he had many an offer to capitalize his personality. Last week he put all his offers aside, accepted the "call of public duty."

Nicely pre-arranged was the ceremony of acceptance. Heading the committee was August Heckscher, octogenarian philanthropist, whose slum elimination project on the city's lower East Side Mayor Walker has helped. A change in the city administration might disturb Mr. Heck-scher's chief philanthropic hobby.

Mayor Walker was 25 minutes late for the City Hall ceremony. When he arrived, telegrams were stacked before him congratulating him on the acceptance he had not yet given. Mr. Heckscher, wearing a large bow tie, arose, adjusted his spectacles, placed himself before the nest of microphones to read his speech. So faint was his voice that .Mayor Walker had to cup his ears and lean forward. Nominator Heckscher gave "40 indictments" (reasons) why Mayor Walker should be renominated. He praised his administration as "brilliant." recalled the "goodwill" the Mayor had spread by junketing through Europe in 1927.

Mayor Walker responded extemporaneously. For 40 minutes he talked of his boyhood in the New York slums, of city improvements he had started and hoped to finish, of necessary increases in the city budget to give the People better living conditions. To the committee's request he concluded: "This is the answer: Who could say No?"

Proud was he of that "snapper" on the end of his acceptance speech. He said afterward: "I suppose I've gone Cal one better with that 'Who could say no?' I'll pay for that. Some wag will follow me to my grave."

A few hours after the "persuasion" of Mayor Walker, upon the scene arrived Manhattan's short, swart, bustling Congressman Fiorella H. LaGuardia, to start his campaign for the Republican nomination to run against Mayor Walker. Said he: "The situation is by no means hopeless. . . . The big task is to find candidates with fighting hearts. . . ."

Simultaneously John Francis ("Red Mike") Hylan, Mayor Walker's voluble predecessor, now an independent candidate for reelection, put in wide circulation an envelope inscribed: "Voter--Who killed Rothstein and Marlow?" A card inside replied: "Send Hylan back to City Hall. Send Enright back to Police Headquarters. They may find the man."

* Fortnight ago Director William H. Allen of the New York Institute of Public Service petitioned New York's Governor Roosevelt to remove Mayor Walker from office on the ground of incompetency. Playfully temporized the Governor: "I have received so many letters in the last few days asking for the removal of every public official from the President of the U. S. down to, dog, catcher that it will take me a few days to read them all."