Manhattan Shift

For the first time since the War, Tammany Hall faces a long lean winter of political starvation, not of four months but of four years. Ridiculed by civic organizations, proved corrupt by a righteous investigator, beaten at the polls by a fiery little Italian-American Major, the Tammany sachems have been voting themselves pensions and appointments as fast as their Board of Estimate could say "Yea." At a single session fortnight ago they put through 471, including a pension for bumbling, prognathous Mayor John P. O'Brien. Out of dusty files they fished up and passed a pension for a onetime Market Commissioner who was removed from office last year. They created a special job for a Tammany fire chief. They extended the services of 361 Tammany employes who are over 70.

When civic organizations howled with rage, Mayor O'Brien replied that since city officials contributed part of their salaries to the pension fund it was not true that "all you had to do was shake the tree and the plums come tumbling down." Later it was discovered that of $144,000 earmarked to keep the O'Briens from starvation, the Mayor had contributed exactly $28,000, the city having put up the rest.

Thus Tammany took all it could and went out into the cold.

And last week fiery Mayor-elect Fiorello H. (for Enrico) LaGuardia announced the new face-fronts for his New Deal. They were young faces, very earnest, very mental.

To the office of Commissioner of Accounts, with a roving assignment to snoop into the finances of all city departments, he appointed a onetime Socialist-editor of The Nation, Paul Blanshard, who has lately distinguished himself as director of a civic committee. As helper he will have a 31-year-old lawyer, Irving Ben Cooper, who became one of Samuel Seabury's favorite aids because he unearthed the sleazy Tammany stool pigeon whose trick was to make honest women look like prostitutes.

A onetime boy-prodigy, Adolf Augustus Berle Jr., has been the cockiest and brainiest of the Roosevelt brain trust. He accepted, last week, the office of City Chamberlain on condition that the office eventually be abolished and that its salary meanwhile be curtailed. Mr. Berle has a teaching job at Columbia, a private law practice, is in demand as an author of newspaper articles and must be available for duty at the White House as well as at City Hall.

Mayor-elect LaGuardia's other appointments were:

To run the parks, Robert Moses, who shares with his intimate friend Alfred E. Smith, chief credit for countless miles of magnificent Long Island speedways and parkways.

To advise him on legal points, a Manhattan lawyer, who was decorated by the French Legion of Honor, and who served his city well on its unique Port Authority: Paul Windels.

To carry on civic welfare, a Harvard Law School graduate and for eight years director of the City Welfare Council: William Hodson.

To inspect the tenements and help launch a prospective Housing Authority, a progressive Harvard graduate and one-time Assemblyman: Langdon W. Post, son-in-law of Rollin Kirby whose slashing cartoons in the World-Telegram helped throw the Tammany Tiger into the ashcan.

To run the police department: Major General John F. O'Ryan.

So pleased was Public Works Administrator Harold L. Ickes with the prospects of Mayor-elect LaGuardia's New Deal that he last week allotted a loan & grant of $23.160.000 for New York subway construction.

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