NEW YORK: Tigers Have Nine Lives

For three months the New York Post has published a pint-size box reporting: “LaGuardia Today . . . flew to Buffalo [or Washington or Boston or Chicago, etc.].” On a good day the Mayor sometimes flies to two cities in different directions (not counting New York City, where he often flies straight up in the air).

For such airy reasons Fiorello H. (for Enrico) LaGuardia was in deep trouble last week. Hard upon him was the quadrennial mayoralty election; hotter than ever on his neck was the breath of the unkillable Tammany Tiger. And Tammany had a new argument: “New York wants a full-time Mayor.”

Nobody could deny that the Little Flower was one of the world’s half-dozen busiest men, and far & away the world’s busiest busybody. Managing the earth’s most citified city would be a full-time job for Superman. LaGuardia tosses it off in a bare twelve hours a day. In his ample spare time he runs (without salary) the Office of Civilian Defense in Washington, participates in the Canadian-American Joint Defense Board, makes an average of 700 speeches a year, conducts an occasional orchestra, sits in on occasional Cabinet meetings, dashes to all the best fires, conducts a vast correspondence in the seven foreign languages he writes and cusses in, and fires one of his chief or petty assistants at least once daily.*

The Democrats had little or no platform for the mayoralty campaign, but they did have a shapely candidate, in spite of the fact that he looked like Tammany: 51-year-old, stocky William O’Dwyer, native of Ireland (County Mayo).

In the U.S., O’Dwyer became successively a coal passer, longshoreman, hod carrier, plasterer’s helper, policeman, attorney, magistrate, juvenile-delinquency expert, county judge, district attorney. Steadily the Democratic machine had brought him along. His culminating feat: smashing Brooklyn’s grubby ring of gutter killers, dubbed “Murder, Inc.”

O’Dwyer, personally no Tammanyite, opened his campaign, like a devout boxer who crosses himself before the bell rings, by formally disowning Tammany (see col. j). Unfortunately all his powerful friends looked like Tammany to many a New York City voter: Alfred E. Smith, Bosses Ed Flynn and Frank Kelly, Jim Farley, Christy Sullivan (the nominal Tammany leader). Certainly Tammany considered O’Dwyer its candidate. O’Dwyer tried to take the war issue out of the campaign by seconding the President’s foreign policy. But to his ranks flocked Coughlinites, Bundsters, Isolationists, America-Firsters, anti-Semites, Roosevelt-haters.

The Mayor was still offensive to all solemn and stuffy New Yorkers who value dignity more than good (though somewhat fantastic) government—and there are many such in the Republican Party. When LaGuardia took office in 1934, New York had unpaid bills of some $100,000,000, while its October 1941 bank balance was more than $218,000,000; the LaGuardia administration, while effecting enormous economies of management, had built 92 new school buildings, 14 health-center buildings, nine child-health stations, 25 hospital buildings, 325 playgrounds, 15 outdoor swimming pools, 845 wading pools, 252 tennis courts, 8,210 acres of new parks and playgrounds, six enclosed markets, 14 huge low-rent housing developments, one tunnel (and another under way), 77 track-miles of subways, 21 bridges and viaducts (five of the bridges enormous revenue-producers), 2,000 miles of curbing and re-curbing; 1,200 miles of sidewalks and paths. And it removed 160 miles of street car and railroad tracks, 30 miles of elevated railway.

Against these achievements are the undoubted facts that the Mayor is spending no less money than his Tammany predecessors, that he is head of the Mayors’ lobby which is expert in raiding the Federal Treasury, that he is a fat little bumptious character, clowning and screaming dictatorially, posing for pictures in chef’s hats, fireman’s hats, cowboy hats, gas masks, baseball caps, motorman’s caps, sandhog’s helmets, catcher’s masks, policeman’s hats, or hatless—domineering, demure, strident, spectacular, funny, embarrassing—but never dignified. He is a civic combination of Billy Sunday, “Schnozzle” Durante, “Chico” Marx and a fire siren.

In his opening campaign speech little Fiorello tossed away his prepared manuscript, grabbed off his horn-rimmed glasses and used them alternately as a cutlass, a rapier, a backscratcher, a wand, a scepter, a drumstick and a trowel. He touched his toes, imitated a football player’s kickoff, spat on an imaginary apple and polished it on his sleeve. He told the audience that his extra work came out of him and not out of the city. He ridiculed critics who complain of his Washington visits: “I saw the city needed this. . . . The bankers wanted to charge me 6%, but I could get the money in Washington for 3%. So, wham!” (He ducked his head, took a track runner’s on-your-mark position, dashed madly across the stage, pulled up puffing but triumphant.) “So, away to Washington I go again!” The bigwigs looked pained. The crowd loved it.

But the fact remained that LaGuardia faced a real fight for reelection. As a result of his manifold defense activities and many frank utterances, he is firmly labeled interventionist—a fact which of itself is not calculated to win him many votes among the older generation of New York’s 1,070,355 Italians, 600,084 Germans, and particularly its 535,034 Irish.

* Stenographers and secretaries who were unused to his ways often slunk miserably off to the pay window after a LaGuardia tantrum while he vainly pounded buzzers, wondering where everybody was. Now they just stay out of sight for a half hour, trot briskly back when he begins to scream for service. Firing gives him great relief; it is a kind of reflex, like Al Jolson’s dropping on one knee to sing a mammy song. As a gag, he fired his wife just before he proposed to her.