Elephant Ride in Harlem

The big news out of a small Manhattan Congressional election last week was that the Negro seems to be turning against the New Deal. The news was enough to make GOPsters hail a local, narrow Democratic victory as a national Republican triumph.

The facts: New York's 21st Congressional District starts at the Hudson River, where "white folks live on the hill," then dips into Harlem. Negroes constitute a third of the district's voters; the 21st has not elected a Republican in 22 years; in the shiniest days of the New Deal, the Democratic majority shot as high as 80,000 votes. Last week a Tammany perennial won by a squeaky 1,571 votes.

Actually, Republican William S. Bennet, 73, a Wall Street lawyer who served three terms in the House before World War I, polled more votes than Tammany's candidate, James H. Torrens, 69, received on the Democratic ballot. The 3.226 votes that Torrens got on the leftist American Labor Party's ticket were the margin of his victory. Even more important, Republican Bennet won the only two sections that lie wholly in Harlem.

Democrats and ALPsters, instead of glowing over victory, rushed into print with as many "explanations" as if they had lost. Election Day was wet, snowy, and nasty; balloting was only one-fourth of normal. They alibied on & on: loyal Negro Democrats weren't interested; Franklin Roosevelt himself was not on the ballot; New York's fiery Fiorello LaGuardia, telling his supporters after the election what he was careful not to say before, blamed his Party's weak choice. He described Bennet as "cultured, educated and experienced" and Torrens as a "Tammany wardheeler."

Republicans, working Harlem with success for the first time in years, heard better explanations. What had the hamstrung Fair Employment Practices Commission really done for the Negro worker? How fair a break were Negroes getting in the Armed Services? Republicans heard of many a Negro serviceman returning in anger to Harlem, there to spread dissatisfaction. Often the returned Negro soldier was angry at segregation in Army camps, at the Navy's unabashed racial snobbishness, at the Negro's "token" representation on the fighting fronts. The Negroes who helped elect a Republican Governor last November in Kentucky, and now had voted Republican in Harlem, had taken their protests to the polls.

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