National Affairs: Fun for Young & Old

New York City, which enjoys a good show, was having a pleasantly lively time in the mayoralty campaign. Neither greying, genial Democratic Mayor Bill O’Dwyer, nor his Republican-Liberal-Fusion challenger, Newbold Morris, could find any real excuse to call each other hard names. The Communist Party’s favorite Congressman, shrill little Vito Marcantonio, had no real chance. There was no real issue. But the candidates were cartwheeling through a sort of political acrobatic contest, which provided wholesome free entertainment for young & old.

Morris started the fireworks. He is a wealthy, 47-year-old Yale man who was one of Fiorello La Guardia’s most active proteges and is backed by Labor’s David Dubinsky. Holding the mantle of the Little Flower like a bullfighter’s cape, he leaped into the arena, flapped it at the mayor—and then set hurriedly off after that well-scuffed political kigmy, Gambler Frank Costello. He implied heatedly that Costello ruled Tammany and that Tammany ruled O’Dwyer. He did not document the allegation, but for all that, it had a fine, wild ring to it, and it made lovely headlines.

Love Walks In. Bill O’Dwyer paid no attention. Instead he introduced Love into the campaign, by admitting that he was sweet on a handsome brunette style consultant named Sloan Simpson. When asked if they were to be married, he beamed and whistled the opening bars of Some Enchanted Evening. The results were spectacular. The newspapers bloomed with pictures of the smiling couple, and ran columns of saccharine speculation on the great romance.

Morris immediately lit on the record of the mayor’s administration, and started pecking like a woodpecker on a hollow tree. It was a difficult feat since O’Dwyer had run the Big City in competent, if unspectacular fashion and had managed to avoid scandal. Morris cried that O’Dwyer should have done more. Also, he had discovered that New York had bookies.

O’Dwyer held to his attitude of grand disdain. He admitted that a few wire rooms were running, but he had 300 cops chasing bookies and could not in good conscience spare more for the job. The taxpayers’ children, he intoned, had to be helped across dangerous streets. As for the slums—the Republican, Morris, had only recently discovered them. “I,” said the ex-Cop O’Dwyer, “lived in them.”

Beefsteak & Cantaloupes. Then, turning on his opponent, he portentously berated him for not discussing national issues, spoke as though the fate of the nation hinged on the mayoralty race. When the Republican New York Sun reported happily that a big bookie ‘named Frank Erickson had attended a beefsteak dinner given in honor of the mayor and Democratic Senatorial Candidate Herbert Lehman, O’Dwyer had a strange & wonderful answer. “Lehman,” he said indignantly, “has been framed.”

Meanwhile Vito Marcantonio had been hopping about on the fringes of the fray, on one occasion with his good friend, Henry Wallace. He cried that the assessed valuation of rich men’s buildings was being reduced, that recipients of city welfare were about to be starved, that vested interests would release torrents of nameless horrors if he were not elected. He also complained that someone had thrown old cantaloupes at him from a building top.

With the election less than a week away, New York resounded to the sound of street-corner meetings, band music (O’Dwyer was welcomed to the strains of I’m in Love with a Wonderful Guy) and outraged cries. Best bet on the outcome: 1) O’Dwyer, 2) Morris, 3) Marcantonio.