A. L. P.

Perhaps more a one-man political party than the leader of any potential third party, Fiorello LaGuardia, re-elected Mayor of New York City last week (see col. 1), got 672,823 votes as the Republican candidate, 159,895 votes as the Fusion candidate, and 28,839 as a Progressive. But 482,459 of the votes that gave him his 454,425 plurality came from an organization that has never before appeared on a New York mayoralty ballot, the American Labor Party, which polled more votes than any independent political organization has received in a U. S. municipal election since the War.

The American Labor Party was organized in July 1936 by New York leaders of John L. Lewis' and Major George Berry's nationwide Non-Partisan League who thought that Labor in the State was politically ripe for a full-fledged party of its own. In its first appearance on the ballot, it justified that expectation by polling 300,000 votes for Roosevelt and Democratic Governor Herbert Lehman. In its second appearance last week, it not only held the balance of power in New York's municipal election but helped elect Democrat Thomas F. Holling as mayor of Buffalo, cut a wider swath by supporting 13 successful candidates for the State Assembly (including sober young Robert F. Wagner Jr.), besides a good share of delegates to New York's forthcoming constitutional convention.

Although Labor's Non-Partisan League is today generally considered the political arm of C. I. O., the American Labor Party has managed to keep a foot in both of Labor's camps. Of the 250 unions affiliated with it, about 40% are A. F. of L. Executive Secretary of the A. L. P., whose campaign headquarters were a suite of rooms in the West Side's smallish Claridge Hotel, is pince-nezzed, 39-year-old Alex Rose, vice-president and secretary of the United Hatters, Cap & Millinery Workers, an A. F. of L. union whose president, Max Zaritzky, is personally friendly to C. L O. State Chairman is Vice President Luigi Antonini of the C. I. O. International Ladies' Garment Workers Union, a voluble Italian who wears a Buster Brown tie and is also president of I. L. G. W. U.'s Manhattan dressmakers' Local 89, the largest (42,000 members) union local in the world. Treasurer is Andrew Armstrong, vice president of the A. F. of L.'s well-intrenched Printing Pressmen's Union. Treasurer Armstrong's money raising devices are a 10-c- annual levy per member on the affiliated unions, a 50-c- annual levy per member on district organizations. An-other $70,000 was raised for A. L. P. by a Citizen's Finance Committee headed by liberal Lawyer Morris Ernst.

A. L. P. differs from current labor forays into politics such as that of the C. I. O. in Detroit (see p. 17), by being less headlong, throwing its weight strategically behind candidates already in the field in preference to putting up its own. Last week this policy was emphasized by A. L. P. bigwigs convening at the Claridge to lay plans for the future. This year A. L. P.'s new assemblymen will be expected to plump for a fairly well defined platform including: 1) ratification of the child labor amendment, 2) a "little" Wagner-Steagall housing bill for New York, 3) reducing the old age pension limit to 60, 4) municipal power plants as a yardstick for rates, 5) regulation of private detective agencies.

Last week A. L. P.'s were the only party headquarters to receive a post-election visit from Mayor LaGuardia. Posing with Leaders Rose and Antonini with a copy of Lawyer Ernst's Supreme Court book, The Ultimate Power, clasped in his chubby hand, His Honor was the very picture of a modern labor-loving mayor. That he was A. L. P.'s mayor any more than he was Fusion's or the Republicans', however, Fiorello LaGuardia denied in one of his explosive bursts of advice: "Your party is clean now and has lofty principles, but it is hard to maintain these things. Every political party ought to be disbanded after 20 years."

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