STATES & CITIES: Joseph Nay & Yea

STATES & CITIES

Last year, as acting Mayor for 16 weeks after James John Walker’s flight, clean-cut, grinning little Joseph Vincent McKee was the idol, the White Hope of thousands of New Yorkers who mortally hate & fear the yoke of Tammany. He had striven for municipal economies. Although he prided himself on his Democratic regularity, in Board of Estimate meetings he did not seem afraid to swap punches with Tammany. When bumbling John Patrick O’Brien was propped up in the special Mayoral election last November by Tammany, many a citizen was puzzled at Mr. McKee’s unwillingness to run against him. Spurred chiefly by the militant World-Telegram, 262,000 voters wrote McKee’s name on their ballots literately; the votes of 73,000 more were not counted because of misspelling.

Last spring Mr. McKee made no effort to have his name entered in the Democratic primaries voted last fortnight (TIME, Oct. 2). He preferred to retire to a $50,000-a-year bank job. He was offered the top place on a Fusion ticket to oust Tammany from the City Hall in next month’s elections. Like Caesar, Joseph McKee for the third time waved away his honors. It therefore surprised many of his fellow citizens, disgusted many more,and dismayed both Fusion and Tammany when, last week, after a fortnight’s indecision culminating in a 48-hour period during which three appointments were made and broken with the Press, Joseph McKee declared himself the Independent Democratic candidate for Mayor.

“For nearly two weeks.” said his announcement, “by letter and by telegram, by resolution and personal appeal, I have been asked to be a candidate for Mayor. . . . One and all protested against a leadership that has shattered the city’s credit and made the people of this city bow their heads — an arrogant leadership of stupidity and corruption, unmatched since the days of Boss Tweed. . . . There is no real Fusion in this campaign. The so-called Fusion standard bearer is as objectionable to the solid element of our Republican citizenry as he is to the vast army of Democrats who are disgusted with machine politics. … As Mayor, I shall be absolutely free from political domination by any leader or any set of leaders.”

“A sorry business,” grumbled the Herald Tribune. “A Joseph Yea-and-Nay,” snapped the Times. “He has not acted as if he were his own man; scarcely as if he knew his own mind. . . . The fact remains that the best hope of a successful attack upon Tammany lies in the Fusion ticket.” The World-Telegram turned furiously on its former champion: “‘A plague on ALL bosses!’ becomes more than ever the slogan since the McKee decision.”

The national implications of the McKee candidacy were clear. James Aloysius Parley, the Democracy’s New York State as well as national chairman, had spent two days in the city prior to Mr. McKee’s fateful announcement. He had been closeted with Edward Joseph Flynn, New York’s Secretary of State, Democratic ruler of The Bronx, Mr. McKee’s next door neighbor and political mentor and the sole wedge by which the Farley-Roosevelt State machine might dislodge Tammany from control of the city. The night before Mr. McKee declared himself, reporters found little pucker-faced Louis McHenry Howe, the President’s Confidential secretary, in the President’s Manhattan home.

“I have neither seen nor communicated with anybody relative to the New York campaign since I’ve been here,” said Colonel Howe.

A maid entered the room.

“Mr. Howe,” she said, “Mr. Flynn is on the telephone again.”

“What a coincidence!” marveled Mr. Howe.

This scene considerably discounted the White House announcement of the week before that: “The President is giving no approval to any local candidate in any State.” The President’s good friend Vincent Astor was announced next day as one of McKee’s financial backers. A good Roosevelt-Flynn Democrat, U. S. Collector of Customs Harry M. Dunning, became Candidate McKee’s campaign manager. Observers believed that the President’s hand had been forced after prognathous Mayor O’Brien had made such an unimpressive showing in the primaries which nominated him to succeed himself a week before. Rather than take the risk of the Democracy’s losing the Nation’s No. 1 city to a Republican-led Fusion body, the President, through a Farley-Flynn-McKee finesse, was prepared to take the double hazard of lending his tacit support in a local political fight, thus jeopardizing his national prestige, and affronting the Republican Progressives who helped shove his recovery program through Congress last spring. McKee’s support would be drawn from the following of Fusion Candidate Fiorello La Guardia, scrappy little Progressive ex-Congressman, firm friend of Senators Norris, La Follette et al., as well as from disgruntled Democrats. In some quarters it was reported that the White House had been drawn into the New York Mayoral scrap because Postmaster General Jim Farley wants to become New York’s Governor.