Great Names From the Thirties
MURRAY KEMPTON writes from New York:
The election of a mayor of New York is the only political event of consequence facing Ameri- cans next fall.
The Republicans have the candidate and the Democrats have the votes. United States Representative John Lindsay is a vastly charm- ing young Manhattan Congressman who refused to endorse Senator ,Goldwater last fall, was re- elected by 97,000 votes—twice his normal plurality—and at once won the claim to pro- motion which belongs to the troopers who hew safely through to become the lone survivors of ambushes. He runs for Mayor of New York on George Mallory's principle. It is all that is there. It has also not been climbed by a Republican of in orthodoxy even as minimal as Lindsay's; Fiorello La Guardia, who was elected as a Republican in 1937, was really our fast success- ' ul Social. Democrat. The Democrats have a three-to-one majority among New Yorkers assert- ing a party affiliation. A Lindsay victory then is certain to be interpreted as a sign that the Republican moderates have risen again after being crushed by Goldwater last summer. Presi- dent Johnson is reported disturbed enough by the Prospect to seek to repair the habitual disorders of New York's Democratic party.
If he is, it Will be an attempt promising results hardly happier than those so far produced by activism in the Dominican Republic. New York City politics is more Caribbean than mainland, more African in fact than Western at all. The city is a collection of dissatisfied tribes qtiarrelling through a one-party system. Its actual govern- ment is semi-colonial; the state governor and the state legislature control its budget and its tax system; the state legislature has been as habitually Republican as the mayor has been democratic.
It has been the tradition of New York state party politics for the Republicans to elect the governor by pointing to the horror the Demo- crats have made of the city as a portent of what they would do to the state if given the chance. The tradition of New York municipal politics has been for the Democrats to elect the mayor by blaming the city's troubles on the penury of the Republicans in the state. legislature. The resident government is the fusion of hereditary Democratic families with the mapagers of the city's 219,000 civil servants, who play the part
the military plays in other undeveloped societies.
Over the last twelve years, the Mayor has been Robert F. Wagner, son of a United States Senator who was one of President Roosevelt's stalwarts. Wagner was cherished for his father's name and his own gentle nature; nonetheless, he could not escape punishment for the city's slow decay with- out heroic and entertaining sleights. Four years ago he managed to win re-election by loudly denouncing the record of his prior eight years in office and summoning the voters to drive the rascals from control of the city.
It had been assumed that Wagner would run again; and, to a peculiarly parochial city, the one great interest in the sudden Republican challenge seemed to be what extraordinary affront to com- mon sense the Mayor would invent to withstand it. Then, quite suddenly last week, Mayor Wag- ner, exhausted, announced that he would not run again and departed, leaving the Democrats bereft behind him.
For the moment, Mr. Johnson could-appear to think of no substitute except Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr. He was following the habit of New York Democrats, which is to offer the electorate a great name from the 'thirties, either untested or already found wanting. Mr. Roosevelt is a peach well past its bloom; after the war, he served a casual eight years in Congress, tried for the Demo- cratic nomination for governor and was debarred by a coalition of his own enemies and his father's, disappeared to sell European cars, was disinterred by President Kennedy for light house- keeping as Assistant Secretary of Commerce, and is now once more at liberty. After two days of trial, Mr. Johnson was already casting about for a new candidate.
He could not, without massive intervention, hope to head off a civil war. The Democratic nomination will almost certainly be the subject of a primary election between at least two of its four factions: the civil servants the ordinary politicians who have been Wagnerians, the other ordinary politicians who had hoped to drive Wag- ner from control of the state party and replace him with Senator Robert Kennedy; and the 're- formers,' a special breed who became Democratic activists under the inspiration of Adlai Steven- son and have had little use for their energies since his departure from politics.
The civil servants appeared to have moved quickest to fill the vacuum, as the army always does in these situations. Paul R. Screvane, presi- dent of the city council, a sort of vice-mayoral office, announced himself as a candidate for the Democratic nomination. Most American candi- dates are men who early acquired the habit of running for office; and a few arc men first noticed by their achievements in private life; but very few indeed started in government and then turned t politics. Screvane started as a truck driver for the city, rose to be Commissioner of Sanitation, and then was appointed Deputy Mayor, froth which place he ran for elective office the first time in 1961.
In him the servant asserts himself against the master. He represents the chance that, as the public employee comes to represent the largest work-force in the society, he may also become its strongest political force quite displacing the politician of tradition.
The civil service merit system was designed to protect the public employee against the politician. But now, in the figure of Screvane, if he suc- ceeds the civil servants will control the Demo- cratic party. By every ponderable measure, that means control of the city's politics. The Demo- cratic majority is so immense that no Republican, even John Lindsay, could at the moment be accorded an even chance to overturn it. Wash- ington talks about the New York election in terms of Republicans and Democrats; its real im- portance may be as the first seizure of a municipal government by its servants.
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