LaGuardia v. O'Brien v. McKee

STATES & CITIES

LaGuardia v. O'Brien v. McKee

To assure themselves a chance to vote in their most critical Mayoral election since 1913, New Yorkers swarmed to registration places all last week. When the Board of Registry closed its books, 2,322,382 citizens had entered their names--a turnout 6% greater than the city's vote in last autumn's bloodless national revolution. The number of candidates to be voted on Nov. 7 was proportionate to the num-ber of incipient voters. In the field were 28 parties. There were nine candidates for Comptroller, ten for Mayor, so many that it looked as though voting machines could not be used. But eliminating crackpots and perennial political protestants, the race for the nation's third most potent elective job was to be run by three men. Tammany's chances of victory had never been slimmer, for against it were arrayed not one reform candidate, but two. One was the most aggressive figure in the city's political life. The other enjoyed the patronage of the White House. Joseph Vincent McKee was the last of the major candidates to have his name entered on the ballots. Twelve men staggered into the Board of Elections carrying nine fat volumes in which 115,000 people had signed their names petitioning that he be placed in the running. Many a signer had written in McKee's name at last November's special Mayoral election, after McKee had served 16 weeks as Acting Mayor following James John ("Jimmy") Walker's flight from City Hall (TIME, Sept. 12, 1932). Now, having retired from politics, having refused the Fusion nomination which went to onetime Congressman Fiorello Henry LaGuardia, McKee entered the ring under an independent Democratic banner, as the "Recovery" candidate. There were two explanations offered for Joe McKee's decision to run for Mayor. The World-Telegram, Scripps-Howard crusader which had sponsored the write-in movement for him a year ago, turned bitterly against its former champion, denounced him for splitting the Reform ticket, declared that McKee's hankering for another taste of public life had been whetted last month when, as leader of a bankers' section of the NRA parade, he had failed to receive such cheers as rang in his ears when he was President of the Board of Aldermen and Acting Mayor. More credible was this straight political reasoning: Postmaster General James Aloysius Farley, national and State chairman of the Democracy, was out with his Bronx ally, New York's Secretary of State Edward Joseph Flynn, to crush Tammany and bring New York City into President Roosevelt's political dominion through Mr. Flynn's longtime protege McKee. Mr. McKee's hesitancy before he finally decided to run was attributed by his friends to his ill-health, a revelation which his age (44) and general appearance of pepticity made hard to believe. The McKee record is an extraordinary one, interpretable so ambiguously that even before he made his keynote address at Cooper Union last week it was both a boon and a handicap to him. Joseph McKee was born in Newark, raised in The Bronx. He worked his way through Fordham, taught there and at De Witt Clinton High School. He went to the State Assembly in 1918, became the youngest city Judge in 1924, youngest Aldermanic President in 1926. In that office he raised no violent anti-Tammany protests, but Samuel Seabury's municipal investigations spattered no mud on McKee's coat tails. His practice of having all Aldermanic meetings opened with prayer earned him the nickname "Holy Joe." As Acting Mayor, he announced before a patronage conference with Tammany Leader John Francis Curry: "I am an organization Democrat, always have been, always will be." But he dismissed a Tammany department chief for incompetence, disbanded the fleet of expensive city-owned motor cars, was on his way to effect $80,000,000 in municipal economies when the Tammany-controlled Board of Estimate took the budget out of his hands. As a result of his regularity, when his candidacy was announced organization Democrats defected from Tammany in wholesale lots. It was reported that 15 out of 24 Brooklyn district leaders had bolted to the Recovery ticket. The Tammany candidate for Borough President of Staten Island came out for McKee. In Queens County, Tammany was faced with further desertions. When Candidate McKee awakened to the fact that rats from Boss Curry's sinking ship endangered the buoyancy of his own, he announced that "only fine, decent people" would be tolerated in the Recovery Party, that far from welcoming bolters, in many cases he was in favor of abolishing the jobs they were running for.

"Holy Joe" McKee tried hard to renounce ALL party affiliations, including his connection with his next-door neighbor, Bronx Boss Flynn. He had previously told reporters that if they saw him on the 29th floor of the Lincoln Building, he would not be going to see Flynn but to rest in another friend's neighboring office. He promised to reduce the budget "by instituting real economies," abolish duplicating departments in the city government by having the charter revised, unify the subway system to provide an honest 5-c- fare. Explaining the formation of his independent party, he said: "I would not have served on the [Fusion] ticket because I would have had to accept the support and laid myself under obligation to Boss Koenig, whom the decent Republicans have just driven from power [TIME, Oct. 2]. ... I could not in conscience support the stupid, arrogant [Tammany] leadership that forces upon the city the well-intentioned but impotent figure of the present Mayor. ... As I stand before you, I owe allegiance to no political boss, nor am I hampered or fettered by any allegiance to leader or machine.

"During recent months we have seen the city sink lower under an increasing load of stupidity and incompetence and when an arrogant leadership asked the citizens of this city to put its stamp of approval on such a record, resentment became widespread and deepseated. . . . To whom could they turn? To the candidate named by the Fusion group? His record is the answer to that question. No one can have any confidence in him because his whole record has been a record of opportunism, instability and explosiveness unparalleled in politics."

Fiorello Henry LaGuardia has indeed had an explosive career. Born on Manhattan's Varick Street 51 years ago, he grew up at Army posts. His father, a bandmaster, died of embalmed beef at Tampa during the Spanish-American War. When he was 20, Fiorello got into the consular service, serving at Budapest, Trieste and Fiume. A row over immigrant inspection sent him back to Ellis Island, where he was interpreter until 1910, when he began to practice law. He went to Congress on the Republican ticket in 1917, took a leave of absence when the War broke out. He corralled a group of impatient student aviators in Paris, took them to Italy where they peppered the Austrians with bombs and propaganda for 18 months. Having a Congressman for Major was a great boon to his men, who recall him with deep affection.

Back in the U. S. after the War both Democrats and Republicans elected him to the 66th Congress. Then he began to kick up his heels in earnest. He adhered to no party, ran with Democrats, Republicans, Sons of the Wild Jackass, Farmer Laborites, at will. On "Calendar Wednesdays," when his colleagues left the clerk of the House to drone away hundreds of petty little bills to keep the folks back home happy, LaGuardia was usually pres-ent to object to the more flagrant bits of logrolling. He made Prohibitionist William David ("Earnest Willie") Upshaw's life a burden, advocated $150,000,000 enforcement appropriations to make the nation rebel against Prohibition. In 1919, on a Republican ticket with Socialist backing, he was elected President of New York's Board of Aldermen. He was returned to Congress in 1923. Back in New York politics in 1929, he ran on the Republican ticket against Jimmy Walker for Mayor, bringing charges of malfeasance against Walker which initiated the Seabury investigations. Last week his downtown Italian district went Democratic, failed to return him to Congress. He likes to mix salads, play the trombone and will fight at the drop of a hat. Making four speeches to McKee's one, he did not let his opponent's charges go long unnoticed. He, too, had pledged charter reforms and at the Harvard Club had impressed many of his conservative listeners, to whom his past radicalism was the cause of grave suspicion, with a plan to refinance the city's indebtedness at lower interest rates. He now stepped up to a microphone, radioed a paragraph-by-paragraph critique of the McKee address. Facts at his chubby fingertips, the tousle-headed little candidate barked: "Let us see how Mr. McKee 'instituted real economies.' " LaGuardia recalled that when he was President of the Board of Aldermen his salary was $7,500 and he ran the office with seven employes for $36,400 a year. McKee's salary (which he voted to up in 1929) was $25,000 and his office force of 17 cost the city $116,730. Candidate LaGuardia recalled that although Mr. McKee had written the Mayor in 1926 that he would attend no more secret conferences on the notorious Equitable Bus franchise deal, a flagrant piece of grafting which did more than anything else to oust Mayor Walker (TIME, June 6, 1932), McKee did later vote for the franchise to be granted. "Actions," taunted Candidate LaGuardia, "speak louder than words." At this point Samuel Seabury, patron saint of Fusion, chimed in: "They're mak-ing a primary out of an election. Fusion nominated a ticket so good and so strong that its mere nominations caused the Curry machine to crumble and broke Tammany's back. What happened then? They changed the name of the Tammany candidate from O'Brien to McKee." "Judge Seabury seems to think that he has the corner on virtue and probity in this city," snorted Candidate McKee. Inquisitor Seabury roared back and took verbal swipes at Recoverers Dudley Field Malone and Herbert Bayard Swope for being "servitors" of Jimmy Walker, and at Governor Lehman, President Roosevelt's good friend, for failing to act on Seabury recommendations for city reform. Thus attacked, these men swung back at Seabury and Fusion. "A base and reckless slander!" cried Joe McKee at Judge Seabury's attack on Governor Lehman, whose Jewish following is strong in McKee's Bronx. "I call on you," he wired LaGuardia, "to disavow it unequivocally and without reservation."

"Are you trying to draw a red herring across the cowardly, contemptible and unjust attack that you have made and published against a great race so gloriously represented by our governor?" reported Candidate LaGuardia. "Answer that, Mr. McKee. and think twice before you send me another telegram." An article McKee wrote for Catholic World in 1915 which slurred the character of the average Jewish student in New York's schools, was thus added as fuel to the leaping fires of altercation.

The Times, Herald Tribune, World-Telegram and Post joined battle for Fusion. The Daily News, Sun and Hearst-papers did yeoman service for Recovery. As the whooping & slamming grew noisier, old Mayor O'Brien felt more and more like a political wallflower. Nobody paid any attention at all to him.

John Patrick O'Brien's speech sonorously accepting Tammany's renomination was loyally cheered by several hundred city employes but, since no newspaper was interested in him, it made scant news. Accurately he observed: "Everyone knows that the 5-c- fare does not permit a sufficient return on the city's enormous rapid transit investment. But the people have chosen to pay the interest on this investment in another form; that is, by taxation." The earnest, bumbling Mayor took credit for having dismissed 8,000 city employes, for saving $15,000,000, even for Samuel Untermyer's four-year financial rehabilitation plan worked out with New York bankers. "I'm glad to be able to pass on to my children," he remarked a little forlornly, "the record of what I tried to do, putting in a full day's work and playing the game, playing a man's card, in bringing a ray of sunshine to those who fell in the battle of the Depression."

On Columbus Day, the pathetic 60-year-old politician stoically declared: "I will lead my party to victory. That's the heart and that's the courage that God blessed me with. Forward and onward, just like Columbus!"

Tammany Hall is by no means the totally wicked organization which out-of-towners and professional New York reformers believe it to be. Even so keen a muckraker as Lincoln Steffens lends support to the theory that only through such widespread political societies as Tammany does the greatest advantage come to the greatest number of citizens from their government. Many a shrewd, honest and successful Manhattanite maintains close Tammany connections. Unanimously, this Tammany type deplores the bad management which has brought the 128-year-old Hall into the shadow of its fifth reformation. This sorry plight, they claim, is due to the unfortunate personality and training of John Francis Curry. When Curry was a young ward heeler on the West Side he worked for a telegraph company instead of tending bar, as did most incipient Tammany officials. Lacking that broadening experience, he was suddenly shoved into the Leader's office in 1929 at the age of 56, too late in life for a district politician to learn to become a city, state, and political strategist, as a Tammany chief should be. As to John Curry's appalling choice of John O'Brien for Mayor last autumn, many a smart Tammanyite does not entirely blame Curry. When he was Corporation Counsel under Mayor Hylan, O'Brien showed considerable intelligence and ability. Then O'Brien disappeared for ten years in the Surrogate's Court. When, after he was nominated to the Mayoralty, John O'Brien began making the most absurd verbal blunders, putting his foot into his magniloquent mouth every time he opened it, his astonished acquaintances came to the conclusion that he had quietly entered his dotage. They attributed his condition to one of two things: worry over losing his and his wife's fortune (as has many another Irish family) in upper Broadway property; or, the strain which his celebrated 95,000-word decision on the Erlanger common-law marriage case put upon him (TIME, Dec. 28, 1931). In any case, informed Tammanyites believe, Boss Curry will pay for his stupidity in running O'Brien a second time. Only "Com-missioner" Murphy retained the Hall's leadership after a defeat at the polls. And Curry is no Murphy. Probable successor to Curry is Edward J. ("Eddie") Ahearn, 39, leader of a lower East Side district, inherited in 1921 from his father, whom Charles Evans Hughes as Governor removed from the Borough Presidency of Manhattan in 1907. Eddie Ahearn has two ambitions: to be Manhattan's Borough President, thus vindicating his father, and to be Tammany's Leader. Four years ago he missed nosing out Curry for Leadership by only if votes. Since then he has been visiting other district leaders, forming alliances. So far, Tammany has always come back after a municipal purging. Ahearn's youth and vitality may be sorely needed for the comeback. Kiss. Straw votes gathered by the Literary Digest, Daily News, Brooklyn Eagle and RKO theatres indicated last fortnight that LaGuardia was leading O'Brien by a wide margin. When McKee entered the race, the nucleus of his support was Democratic votes taken back from LaGuardia, plus defections from Tammany. Last week there were signs that he would get a lot of Republican votes too. The city's leading G. O. Partisans like Ruth Pratt and Ogden Mills were siding with Fusion against all "bossism," in accordance with the party's pledge. But many a silk-stocking Republican, to whom LaGuardia's radicalism is repugnant and who remembers how the gallant major bedeviled Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, would quietly cast his vote for handsome, upright young Joe McKee. Adding Republican momentum to its original Democratic impetus, McKee's cueball had already clicked off O'Brien's white-ball, was rolling toward LaGuardia's redball. It looked as though a Hooverite kiss would make a Rooseveltian billiard. Wall street was betting 2-to-1 it would.

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