The Unmaking of a Mayor. William F. Buckley Jr.
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most prominent members of the Fusion Conference Committee, which was charged with finding a suitable candidate, were, as a matter of fact, political conservatives. Before they formally settled on La Guardia, they had rated as qualified candidates prominent men whose social and political views ranged right across the political spectrum. Judge Seabury, the patrician reformer, was offered the designation, and turned it down on the grounds that to profiteer from the findings of his own committee might have the effect of discrediting his motives. Nathan Strauss, Jr., scion of the famous merchandising family, unidentified with any political ideology, also declined—on the grounds that Herbert Lehman was Governor and to propose another Jew as Mayor might bring on an anti-Semitic backlash. Robert Moses, an independent Republican, was turned down only because Judge Seabury violently opposed him.33 A ticket including Al Smith and Norman Thomas was seriously considered—Al Smith, who had already begun to question what he deemed the left excesses of Franklin Roosevelt, and had thus emerged as a conservative; and Norman Thomas, the firebrand socialist. Smith said no, as did a half-dozen others. Fusion’s very favorite candidate was Joseph McKee, a Democrat of impeccable reputation who had actually served for a couple of months as Acting Mayor after Jimmy Walker quit. But McKee resigned from politics and went into business, whence he was resurrected a few months later by FDR and persuaded to run against La Guardia and the Tammany incumbent, Mayor O’Brien, whose daze during the entire period was symbolized by his speech to the Greek-American society in which he confessed his lifelong devotion to “that great Greek poet, Horace.”
Because Moses was opposed to proportional representation (against which Seabury, in his final years, finally turned); and because Moses was an Al Smith man. Seabury always resented Smith because, he believed, Smith had edged him out of the Presidency. (Seabury was convinced he could have beaten Hoover in 1928.)
The Seabury disclosures that brought Fusion to the fore are not to be confused with the routine malversations of public officials. Tammany Hall had been insouciantly bleeding New York, and the place stank. “The gang that had misgoverned the city,” Professor Arthur Mann has written,44 “had made bribery, wirepulling, and influence-peddling into a way of life, from fixing lowly traffic tickets all the way up to buying a judgeship. By 1943, the city’s credit was so badly impaired that municipal securities were selling twenty-six points under par.”
La Guardia Comes to Power, 1933 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1965).
The job at hand, moreover, was not merely to oust the rascals, but to cause the people to desire that this should be done; to persuade a sufficient number of voters that the whole notion of good government was in jeopardy, that fiduciary standards of public service were actually in danger of deinstitutionalization. Though Seabury was the final hero of the investigations, he had by no means been the crowd-pleaser: the people seemed greatly amused by, and certainly were infinitely tolerant of high rascality. The boss of Tammany during another investigation had been Richard Croker, who, when asked what was his opinion of free silver, replied blandly, “I’m in favor of all kinds of money—the more the better.”55 When the dashing Jimmy Walker was asked by Seabury to justify elevating one of his hack predecessors as judge of the Children’s Court of Queens, the Mayor said, “The appointment of Judge Hylan means the children can now be tried by their peer.” But the conscience of the city consolidated, even as the Victorian conscience of London finally reacted against the breezy degeneracy of Oscar Wilde: and the search was on for a truly invincible Goo-goo.
Ibid., p. 40.
Judge Seabury was primarily responsible for the choice of La Guardia, to whom he had been introduced by Adolf Berle, Jr., who in turn had come to know him through the enthusiastic intercession of the young and influential reformer Newbold Morris. Having got the Fusion nomination, La Guardia was promptly endorsed by the Republican Party. At the outset of his campaign, La Guardia stuck single-mindedly to his mandate. He was running against Tammany Hall, period. He was asked by an association of newspaper editors for his social and economic views and replied that they were immaterial: “The only question is honest and efficient administration of our municipal government.” “There is only one issue,” La Guardia repeated to his fellow Fusion candidates halfway through the campaign, “and that issue is the Tammany Hall of John F. Curry.”
To the Fusionists’ astonishment and dismay, Franklin Roosevelt, sensing that Tammany Democracy was at least temporarily out but desiring his very own man in New York, persuaded McKee to run on the “Recovery” ballot, pledging to reform the Democratic Party from within. The popularity of Roosevelt and his New Deal was enormous, with the result that La Guardia faced the awful possibility that he might well lose to McKee, who went busily to work identifying himself with the New Deal. La Guardia feared that McKee would have a special appeal for the city’s poor, who were more numerous, even, than the city’s Italians, the ethnic base of La Guardia’s own strength. As Professor Mann put it, “the task before La Guardia was as clear as it was urgent: to build a bridge between the aspirations of the Goo Goos and the needs of the Disinherited.”
Goo-gooism, in other words, would not be enough. So La Guardia went on from his call for administrative purification to welfarist proposals embodied in his famous phrase, “What is needed is government with a heart.” He spoke “feelingly” about social justice, said La Guardia, “because I feel so strongly about it”—which was certainly the very best of reasons for speaking feelingly about it. And indeed, although La Guardia could be accused of any number of hypocrisies and polemical venalities (he prided himself that he could “out-demagogue the demagogues”); and although it is altogether possible that he finally took the election away from McKee only by imputing anti-Semitism to him (which caused FDR, in fright, to withhold the tacit endorsement he had planned), it cannot be contended that La Guardia’s unscheduled turn to an emphasis on social welfarism was out of character. He had been known for years as America’s most liberal Congressman. He was to go on, his biographer concludes, to “join the liberal political establishment of the 1930’s and 1940’s.” Yet at his inauguration, what he stressed was his original mandate for good government in the technical sense of an honest, just administration. “Our theory of municipal government is an experiment,” he said, “to try to show that a nonpartisan, nonpolitical local government is possible.” Whereupon he recited the famous Oath of the Young Men of Athens, whose appropriateness is both a tribute to its universality, and confirmation of the essentially non-programmatic character of La Guardia’s mandate . . . “We will fight for our ideals and sacred things of the city, both alone and with many. We will revere and obey the city’s law and do our best to incite a like respect in those above us who are prone to annul them and set them at nought. We will strike unceasingly to quicken the public sense of civic duty. Thus in all these ways we will transmit this city not only not less, but far greater and more beautiful, than it was transmitted to us . . .”
It is hard to understand the applicability of the Fusion idea to John Lindsay’s candidacy. A little oil in the machinery is almost always in order after a long stretch in office by a single administration. But that is Goo-gooism of a completely different order from what was needed in New York after the Seabury investigations. Mayor Wagner’s administration was not corrupt, except in the sense that fatigue can be a form of corruption. A close study of the public indictments of Mr. Wagner by Mr. Lindsay confirms that his administrative delinquencies were, by the standards of 1933, utterly trivial. And as if to reinforce the implicit contention that Mr. Lindsay had no deep quarrel with Mr. Wagner, he picked as his running-mates one Liberal—the State Chairman of the Party that had endorsed Wagner’s re-election—and one Democrat who was intimately implicated in Wagner’s administration. It is as though La Guardia had picked as running-mates two men intimately associated with Jimmy Walker. If the objective in 1965 wasn’t merely the routine objective of bringing in another administration—and we were told the objective was something far more hallowed, calling for the august concept of Fusion—then didn’t Lindsay face the difficulties that the reformer McKee faced in 1933? At that time Walter Lippmann, declaring for La Guardia, had written, “Can the machine be sufficiently reformed by men who, until a month ago, were part of it? [La Guardia’s Fusion had answered with a resounding “No!” Lindsay’s Fusion embraced one of Wagner’s highest lieutenants and ran him