Omens in New York

...Some political observers hold that Mr...

...While they talk of party principles and Hoover policies and declare that "the one real kind of Republican believes in Herbert Hoover," they subconsciously admit their impotence and, finding no more effective means of working, strive through a Republican majority in the Senate and Assembly to best a governor whose political acumen is of the first order...

...He has steered a middle course on the prohibition issue that makes him, up to this moment, acceptable to both wets and drys, and, meanwhile, he has so effectively soft-pedaled it within his own party that it has not affected the organization...

...It now has twenty-three representatives in Washington, as against nineteen Republicans and Fiorello H. LaGuardia, who is half a dozen of one and six of the other...

...Disorganization in the Republican party is wholly responsible for the political situation in New York state, and it is induced by three major factors of which the first is the policy of the Hoover administration during its first year, which has made for disillusionment on the part of many thousands of voters...

...From experience it has long been axiomatic that any Democrat who can carry New York state twice for governer is a potential presidential nominee...

...The almost complete collapse of the Republican county organizations in New York City was revealed in the elections last fall, when it fell to the enviable lot of Mayor James J. Walker, Tammany candidate for reelection, to lament that he just missed a 500,000 majority...

...Assistant Secretary of War F. Trubee Davison of Nassau County, who is understood not to be an active candidate...

...This confidence has not been shaken during the first year of Mr...

...He is a young man, and his friends hold that the best thing that could happen for him would be the naming of another Democratic candidate in 1932 to oppose Mr...

...W. Kingsland Macy, Republican leader of Suffolk County...

...All this would count big in the political career of Franklin Roosevelt, who by 1936, they argue, would have won new laurels and come upon times more propitious to the democracy...

...Heading the list of these issues are the dry laws...

...George W. Wickersham as chairman of the Law Enforcement Committee...

...The effects of all this, along with other party affairs, have reacted gravely on the Republican organization in New York state, already sorely divided over prohibition, for it is here that the wets have picked their chief battleground, whence spreads their propaganda through the several states of the union...

...Attorney-General Hamilton Ward, of Buffalo...

...Many of its best-known leaders are openly wet and are striving mightily to commit the party to a wet program...

...Some of these see him running away with the Democratic nomination two years before the nominating convention...

...The organization has not attempted to meet the issue...

...State Senator Seabury C. Mastick, of Westchester County...

...Such leaders and the lavish provision of funds enjoyed by the Association against the Prohibition Amendment for its purposes have brought the wets appreciable gains in the big cities up state, and it is no secret that thousands of the Wadsworth-Butler following will vote Democratic unless the party names a wet for governor...

...The conditions which are responsible for adding luminosity to the Roosevelt star are the very reverse of those which were envisaged two years ago, when only nine New York counties, with a vote of 2,089,-863, went Democratic in the presidential election and the Roosevelt plurality was a mere 25,562...

...In the following paper an attempt is made to chart contemporary political weather in New York...

...Further, his position on the prohibition issue is fortified by Republican fears-an apprehension that is characteristic of the Republican majority in their present uncertainty and disorganization which makes them comparable to the man who jumped at his own shadow...

...Not since the Fourteenth Amendment was debated in the South has any state been so stirred by an issue as is New York over the Eighteenth Amendment, and its aforementioned influence on public affairs throughout the country makes its attitude on great questions with which the nation now stands confronted of more than usual significance...

...Lawrence and the building of transmission lines, while the Republican majority stood committed as a unit to private development, ownership and operation...

...State Senator George R. Fearon, of Syracuse...

...John Lord O'Brian, of Buffalo, assistant to the Attorney-General, who is credited with being the real choice of the national Republicans...

...The governor's proposals had included the probable leasing of the state's transmission lines to private ownership, and somewhere back stage had come the prompter's voice that big business was not averse to a scheme that would save vast sums to private corporations in development work...

...Hoover's administration, but he has proved himself slower to act on questions of vital import than was expected, and there is a growing opinion that on such questions the President must exercise the prerogatives of his high office with reasonable promptitude, since to him the country looks for leadership...

...Lawrence River resources and social welfare legislation...

...Hoover, whose mistakes in the next three years would need to be far more signal than have characterized his first year to make it easy to defeat him...

...Then, with the suddenness of a pentecostal visitation, this avowedly intransigent Republican position was abandoned, for the moment at least, and the governor was invited to appoint his own commission to study and report on his scheme...

...Roosevelt would be returned to the executive mansion in Albany by a vote that would rival that Tammany landslide, for the party is united and its stand clearly defined on all the major issues, including prohibition, hydro-electric development and control of St...

...FROM the foundation of the government, politics in New York have had an important influence beyond the state's confines, and events are now shaping in a way that indicates an enhanced importance will attach to men and measures here during the next several months...

...and Edward B. Morgan as ambassador to Brazil...

...Roosevelt is in striking contrast with the "minds many" in the Republican fold, where, in search of a gubernatorial candidate who would travel down the middle of the road on the wet-dry issue, a score of trial balloons have been sent up...

...His seeming inaction has been, and is, most disquieting to those liberal Republican circles, which were in the main responsible for his nomination, and has added considerably to the vocal-ism of his political opponents, especially those in Congress, to whom the signs and portents are full of promise for the democracy...

...in the cities it is wet...

...We are reminded that one Democratic standard-bearer hailed from Albany and are led to wonder whether another will give the same address...

...Representative Hamilton Fish, of Putnam County...

...Indications are that it will contribute most effectively, with the aid of the insurgents, to changing the complexion of the House of Representatives in November and, forming a strong opposition in the legislative branch of the government, give the Hoover administration a taste of what the governor of New York and his predecessor have had served them...

...4. There is embodied in him the stirring traditions of the Roosevelt name with its gargantuan implications and audacity for the right...

...The careers of Tilden, Cleveland and Smith substantiated the axiom...

...Franklin Delano Roosevelt has carried the state once, and even his political opponents admit privately the likelihood of his carrying it again in November by a considerably larger plurality than he got in 1928...

...3. Religious prejudices can take no root in his past or present, and among his constituents are Roman Catholics, Protestants and Jews...

...As such he appeals strongly to hundreds of thousands of voters of all parties and to independents who view with growing alarm what they regard as the ever-increasing tendency toward Hamiltonian plutocracy and centralization of government...

...Chief of the several reasons for this are four which stand out most strikingly: 1. The Roosevelt position on highly controversial issues makes him acceptable to voters who are not bound by party in states whose electoral vote is indispensable to election...

...and the third, the absence of strong leadership in the Republican city, county and state organizations, with State Chairman William J. Maier's policy of "diplomacy, not dictatorship," seeming to be somewhat too subtle for the exigencies of the times...

...Roosevelt, as leader of the Democratic party in the state, had an unusual opportunity, which he did not shun, to display his political talents...

...Rather have its acts made more widespread the dissension evidenced in the Wickersham report...

...They see Mr...

...A further thing has served to plague the Republican organization, and that is the policy of the administration in the distribution of patronage...

...Harry F. Guggenheim as ambassador to Cuba...

...The unanimity within the state Democratic party for Mr...

...The Republican party in the state has been the chief political sufferer in the prohibition controversy, and nothing that the administration has done has helped the party here in this connection...

...At the same time, he holds that, "wisely or unwisely," the Eighteenth Amendment was written into the constitution and, as part of the organic law of the nation, must be enforced...

...Since then the political weathercock in New York has veered sharply from Republican toward Democratic party principles...

...Charles E. Hughes, jr., and, in New York City where the Tammany coup of the fall has somewhat marred potentialities, Federal Attorney Charles H. Tuttle, whose reputation as a dry appeals to upstate prohibitionists...

...Instead, it has straddled it...

...Roosevelt's political prestige is growing too fast for his own good...

...Although a personal dry, he has stood squarely on the state platform which took him into office in a Republican year...

...Proof of this was had in the bestowal of the most coveted of all these posts-that of the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court...

...It seems but yesterday that Herbert Hoover was elected President by a plurality that signified most unmistakably the nation's hopes and expectations and the big responsibility which this expression of confidence carried with it...

...Hoover going through the customary first-four-years' motions and are of the belief that after the election in 1932 he will frankly identify himself with that ultra-conservative, high-protectionist manufacturing and big-business group indigenous to the Republican party...

...Among these are James W. Wadsworth, jr., whose wetness enabled the New York Anti-saloon League and its following to retire him from the United States Senate, and Nicholas Murray Butler, who is regarded by some persons as of presidential timber and whose aspirations to go to the White House are well known...

...the second, prohibition, which has come to stand foremost in the public mind as a political issue...

...That the party within the state would respond to strong leadership was indicated unmistakably, however, in the water power contest, in which the Democratic executive declared for state development and ownership of the hydro-electric resources of the St...

...In up-state dry strongholds it is dry...

...What is left of Republican leadership knows this...

...Colonel William J. Donovan, of Buffalo...

...Underneath one finds a most interesting political situation, about which many people are talking and to which attention will be increasingly given...

...Today he looms big, not only for a seemingly certain reelection as governor of the empire state, but as the strongest potential presidential candidate the Democrats will be able to find in 1932...

...The article has, of course, no party tendency and aims merely to present facts and moods.-The Editors...

...Thus it happens that political observers from coast to coast are turning their gaze toward New York and directly to Albany, whence the Democratic party already has gone twice for a presidential candidate- in 1884 and 1928-and are speculatively shifting the political balances...

...2. Governor Roosevelt is a liberal of sincerely proletarian leanings, unequivocally espoused to the theories of state rights as set forth in Article X of the constitution...

...All of which augurs that nothing less than a miracle can bring Republican success in the November polls, and miracles do not happen in the world of practical politics, where the purely mathematical process of votes and the counting of them holds...

...Were the gubernatorial election tomorrow, there is little doubt that Mr...

...These incipient candidacies include Speaker Joseph A. McGinnies, of Chautauqua County, the choice of many of the extreme drys...

...The appointments to good jobs have fallen chiefly in the laps not of Hoover workers, who, having sown, felt they should reap, but in those of Union League Club Republicans...

...Thus has Mr...

...This following boasts many of the foremost names in the roster of the state's Old Guard and the most active young Republican leaders...

...And further proof is at hand in the appointment of Henry L. Stim-son as Secretary of State...