The Unruly Reformer
JANEWAY, MICHAEL
The Unruly Reformer LA GUARDIA COMES TO POWER: 1933 By Arthur Mann Lippincott. $3.95. 199 pp. Reviewed by MICHAEL JANEWAY ADOLPH BERLE, one of those responsible for Fiorello La Guardia's...
...SEABURY: How about when bleak winter winds blow...
...Questioning John Theofel, boss of Queens County, Judge Seabury asked about the leader's duties as chief clerk of a court: THEOFEL: I can't just recall offhand, Judge, the different departments, but I walk around the office and keep them on the job...
...SEABURY: And do you also have a vacation...
...There was reason to believe, Flynn was persuaded (with Roosevelt the persuader), that he and the White House could ride the anti-Tammany wave with their own man...
...Volume I, La Guardia: A Fighter Against His Times, 1882-1933, concerned itself with the difficult study of La Guardia's personality, of his early struggles both for success and for progressive measures...
...The balance of La Guardia at City Hall, Flynn in the Bronx and Herbert Lehman in Albany later suited the President comfortably...
...This is a good time, of course, to produce a book about the 1933 New York mayoralty race...
...Is there no more revealing evidence, to suggest one possible source, in the Roosevelt papers at Hyde Park...
...The La Guardia who could snarl about the bankers' plea for government aid after 1929, "The bastards broke the People's back with their usury...
...The team of Seabury and La Guardia was called "the Little Flower and the Mayflower...
...But for whatever reason Mann has let this slim volume follow his substantial, complete first one (his prefatory remarks stress the importance of 1933 as the "turning point" in La Guardia's career), it comes to us with a few gaps in the narrative...
...For the reformers not to apply the lessons of their previous defeats by coalescing would have meant, Mann suggests, continued frustration for both of them...
...McKee was a product of the Bronx Democratic organization of the only pro-Roosevelt, anti-Tammany New York county leader of the day, Ed Flynn...
...Then he goes on to argue with the proposition...
...THEOFEL: Some...
...The formula does not include a description of the candidate...
...La Guardia successfully pinned an anti-Semitic charge on McKee in the last weeks of the campaign, and it has been argued that La Guardia owed his election to a Jewish swing...
...Reviewed by MICHAEL JANEWAY ADOLPH BERLE, one of those responsible for Fiorello La Guardia's success in the New York City mayoralty race of 1933, wrote the author of this book last spring that La Guardia "could be and was a gut-fighter in New York politics," but "he knew the difference between gut-fighting and the society he hoped to create...
...Before 1933, as Mann notes in his new book, these struggles took place "on the edges of power," when La Guardia "fought the establishment...
...Was he really, like Berle, for La Guardia, and had he entered McKee not to take anti-Tammany votes from La Guardia but to create chaos on the Democratic side...
...La Guardia was a New Dealer, but he did not win as one until his second race, in 1937...
...The year 1933 was the one they had worked for and waited for, Seabury with his labors against Tammany, La Guardia as the proto-New Dealer of the 1920s...
...Independent Democrat, investigator and nemesis of Tammany Hall, pillar of "good government" fusion, mugwump and brahmin, Seabury was character witness in 1933 for the "roughneck" La Guardia, the "crazy little wop" as he was often called in GOP circles...
...There has been argument, for example, about how La Guardia, running on the Republican and City Fusion tickets, won his 40 per cent of the vote, leaving his two Democratic adversaries, Tammany's boobish Mayor John O'Brien and the popular antiTammany Democrat Joseph McKee with 27 and 28 per cent, respectively...
...Maybe later...
...How important that factor is will be demonstrated on November 2...
...the parallels between the politics of then and now are being widely discussed...
...Two weeks...
...Burns wrote: "He intervened so adroitly and indirectly in the New York City mayoralty election of 1933 that politicians were arguing years later as to which Democratic faction he had aided, or whether he was intent mainly on electing La Guardia...
...Mann does not list the FDR Library as one of the sources he inspected personally for this book...
...But most of all, Mann concluded in his first volume, La Guardia was a builder, anticipating the New Deal in his sponsorship of liberal legislation in Congress, as well as the stormy wrecker who fought the Coolidge "business of America is business" dictum, and the dictum's hold over Hoover...
...the People will survive," needed Seabury, and the "good government" Fusionists needed the "rabble-rouser...
...Mann wrote: "He was an attorney who despised the men of his profession, a Republican who sniped at his own party, a labor lawyer who wasn't a Socialist, a reformer who played the cunning game of ward politics...
...Thus Mann concluded in A Fighter Against His Times, " a vision accompanied the anger...
...after 1933 he was a force in "the liberal political establishment of the 1930s and 1940s...
...After some negotia tion (in which, in fact, Berle first sold La Guardia to Seabury), Seabury sold La Guardia to the establishment wing of independent reform, the patrician arbiters of Fusion...
...Roosevelt did prefer his split baronies and contrived juxtapositions to having "his own man"this or that McKee...
...THEOFEL: I took the month of July...
...Seabury and La Guardia had both been losers before...
...Excerpts from Seabury's investigation of Tammany, the prelude to 1933, speak volumes about the Hall's complacency, and its investigator's laconically devastating style...
...SEABURY: Are your duties arduous...
...in 1933 he won with the help of a solid Republican core that had voted for Hoover the year before...
...THEOFEL: About nine o'clock to about two o'clock...
...La Guardia had no serious Fusion backing when he ran his disastrous race against Tammany's still high-flying Jimmy Walker in 1929...
...There are several in-triguing questions about La Guardia's 1933 mayoralty campaign that have been waiting around for some years now...
...It was an anti-Tammany election, Mann concludes, but not an anti-Democratic one...
...Mann explodes this theory, suggests McKee never had a Jewish following, and shows that the Jewish vote split on class lines, middle and upper classes voting for La Guardia, the ghetto slums, like all ghetto slums except the fanatically pro-La Guardia Italian ones, holding steady for Tammany...
...FDR ordered the third candidate, McKee, entered in the race...
...The proposition, however, is at least a misreading of James MacGregor Burns' Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, (cited in Mann's notes...
...THEOFEL: I had a vacation in February...
...Many of the questions invite statistical analysis, and here Mann has not skimped...
...Volume I attempted to define a personality that defied categories...
...However minor in the larger context these questions of the roles of FDR and of the gangsters are, Mann's lack of effort in pursuing them stands out precisely because he has limited himself in this book to the year in which they were so very important...
...Thus Adolph Berle, La Guardia's direct link with the White House, ultimately proved more authoritative than Flynn as he told group after group that FDR was not for the conservative McKee...
...One can only wonder whether that calculation explains why six years after his exhaustive initial effort, Mann has produced only 122 pages of fresh material, not all of it new, sandwiched and padded between 77 pages of capsuled Volume I, notes, charts, maps, and a sloppy index writ large (Volume I's excellent one was writ small...
...The mechanics of [La Guardia's1 coalition are relevant to any Republican who hopes to duplicate Fiorello's feat in New York City," writes Mann in his conclusion to La Guardia Comes to Power...
...The third volume is to inquire how La Guardia used power after he attained it as Mayor...
...Now Tammany was dead at Seabury's hands, and La Guardia close to the New Deal councils in Washington...
...But though a flock of New Dealers endorsed McKee, and though his entry seemed to demoralize the La Guardia camp for a while, Roosevelt, watching the pot boil, sensed La Guardia's continued lead and reneged on promises to publicly support McKee (whose candidacy remained chalked up to Flynn...
...Some Mann has answered, some he has not...
...SEABURY: Some...
...A fascinating relationship, it has been explored before (in Charles Garrett's 1961 The La Guardia Years, not a biography but a scholarly study of New York politics), though perhaps not as well or as fully as here...
...The present one assumes, from Volume I, that he always had the capacity...
...This is the second volume of what will now be a three-part biography of La Guardia by Professor Arthur Mann of Smith College, and it attempts to explain how in 1933 this gut-fighter finally gained the power he sought...
...They were "a firm base in his own party, an endorsement from a third party, defections from all other parties, and a divided Democratic party...
...I went to Hot Springs...
...But other than misreading Burns (with whom, in the end, he really agrees) and repeating other published accounts, Mann has little to tell us about FDR's original motives...
...Let them die...
...La Guardia, however alienated, never succumbed to the nihilism of a Mencken...
...Discussing this issue, Mann writes, "it has been said, most recently by one of [Roosevelt's] biographers, that he intervened with the purpose of assuring La Guardia's victory by splitting the Democratic vote...
...It was the only government they knew...
...Finally, he offers no elaboration on the often repeated stories about La Guardia's support from gangsters in 1933, except for two casual comments from La Guardia confidantes downgrading the significance of the support, and alleging that La Guardia had no knowledge of it...
...How much of your time do they take...
...Mann's narrative is at its best in describing how much the unruly reformer and the impeccable reformer needed each other...
...same publisher...
...Other questions are not statistical, and here Mann proves inadequate...
...He was also a New Yorker who grew up in Arizona and became intimately associated in Congress with the Western and Midwestern Progressives and Populists, a halfJewish Italian who spoke seven languages...
...The dominant theme of La Guardia Comes to Power: 1933 is the relationship of La Guardia and Judge Samuel Seabury...
Vol. 48 • October 1965 • No. 21
