Over the doorways of New York’s City Hall, loveliest in America, might well be written, “Through these portals have passed some of the worst mayors in the world.” Before Fiorello Henry La Guardia led his Fusion ticket to victory in the election of 1933, Tammany Mayor John P. O’Brien showed few signs of understanding his job, and before O’Brien, Jimmy Walker made no pretense whatever of performing it. Before Walker, the line led back to the frequently comic but sometimes catastrophic mayoralty of John F. (Red Mike) Hylan—so that at few times between 1917 and 1934 was New York governed in the true interests of its citizens. Throughout that period City Hall may have housed the body of the Mayor, but his soul was carefully preserved in an uptown apartment, in a district clubhouse, or in the trim brick building at Seventeenth Street and Union Square East labeled “The Society of Tammany or Columbian Order”—the real source of authority in city affairs. When La Guardia came in, the seat of government came back to City Hall with a thump. He even kept it there through a reëlection—the unprecedented reëlection of a reform Mayor that returned him to office in 1937.
The press of New York and of the U.S. has paid an extravagant amount of attention to Mayor La Guardia’s colorful personality: the Little Flower, the Roistering Rebel, the Wild Bull of Manhattan, the Fireball, the lover of opera and spaghetti. The Mayor is pretty sick of this, but he is undeniably picturesque. He can manipulate his personality in any one of a dozen ways: into a mood of fiery temper, a mood of expansive charm, a mood of pleading harassment. (He uses this last on tough numbers like Commissioner Bob Moses.) He is quite capable of turning these moods on and off like lights, and his associates have seen him switch from a fit of apparently ungovernable temper into mellow, reflective laughter when the object of the temper has slunk away. But this is not cold calculation. The Mayor is an actor. He succeeds best with himself and with others when he is dramatizing what he is doing. “You people know what I mean by ‘business,’” he once told a luncheonful of actors at the Hotel Astor. “What the hell—how else are you going to get people excited about a sewer?”
As a matter of fact, if La Guardia ever fulfills his ambition to become the President of the U.S., the White House will acquire a dramatist the full equal of today’s incumbent, or perhaps his superior. A few years ago the Mayor was playing host to the Military Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, hoping to persuade them to let him use Governors Island as an airport. He took them to the corner of Broad and Wall streets and waved his hand toward the statue of George Washington. “Gentlemen,” he said, “there is the Sub-Treasury. I’ll show you whether we need soldiers on Governors Island to protect it. It is now ten minutes past four. Watch!” He turned to his police aide, dramatically said, “Turn in a riot call.” Three minutes and thirty seconds later the first green radio police car came shrieking up Broad Street. In less than ten minutes, six emergency wagons, ten patrol wagons, thirty radio scout cars, seventy-five motorcycle cops, and fifty troopers were roaring around the bewildered Congressmen, and downtown traffic was in a celebrated snarl. His Honor beamed. “All right, Inspector,” he said to the ranking commander, “dismiss your men with the thanks of the Mayor.”
The Mayor has a capacity for intense and diversified action in the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt. If there is a collision on the el, the evening papers will have a picture of Mayor La Guardia churning up a ladder to inspect the accident and quiz the train crews. If there is a life-endangering fire anywhere in the Greater City, he will race to it in his telephone-and-radio-equipped automobile (Unit NYC of the Fire Department’s short-wave radio system). On Election Day, 1936, he began a tour of police stations before dawn, found some police captains still in bed, and sarcastically gave his Police Commissioner $1 alarm clocks for them. He once went kiting up to the Bronx with two police buglers who blew a fanfare and stood at attention while he read, at six-fifty of a winter morning, a proclamation banning the sale of artichokes in the public markets. To prove that a Park Avenue tunnel didn’t need a ventilating system, he walked through its eight-block length at the end of a parade of twenty-four garbage trucks, watering wagons, and rubbish haulers giving forth odors of decay, corruption, and exhaust gases. That one worried the Health Department, which had an ambulance ready—but the Mayor came out jauntily. “I’ve smelled worse smells than that,” said Fiorello La Guardia.
He swings sledge hammers to destroy confiscated slot machines, yanks furiously at crowbars when an old building is to be demolished, puts on a sand hog’s helmet and slicker to “inspect” new tunnels. When the baseball season opens, he doesn’t just toss out the first ball; he puts on a baseball cap, steps into the pitcher’s box, and lams one over. He has exercised the Mayor’s privilege as few, if any, Mayors have done before him of sitting as a committing magistrate. He is often elusive with the press; once he grabbed a reporter’s press card, stuck it in his hat, and began asking questions of his inquisitors. The son of an army bandmaster, he has led the bands of the Police, Fire, and Sanitation departments in surroundings as awesome as the Metropolitan Opera House, and he recently conducted the New York Philharmonic in The Star Spangled Banner at the World’s Fair. Once he led a hundred-piece band of high-school students in Sousa’s The Thunderer in Central Park. “They were about ten bars behind at one time,” he said, “and I thought for a minute that I was back in Congress.”
But little attention has been paid to a weightier aspect of the Mayor. He is a student. “When he was a member of Congress,” said a careful Washington reporter, “he gave the New York delegation the only example of industry and intelligence it had had in a generation.” When he upset Tammany in 1933 and took over the first administrative job he had ever held he proceeded with furious energy to carry out, all at once, every reformation that his years of study of New York—its politics, geography, people, government—had convinced him was necessary. The result was an administrative mess that the Mayor’s instinct for the dramatic did not minimize. He tried to follow every detail of government to its minutest end. He himself would make out the dinner menu for the Normandie‘s arrival on her maiden voyage. He would personally conduct a raid on an alleged house of ill repute in Brooklyn. He would spend the whole weekend at Sanitation Department headquarters giving orders during a heavy snowstorm. He was perpetually firing his Commissioners—”absolutely and permanently, God damn you!”—and then demanding to know where they were the next morning.
Today, things are quieter. The Mayor is mellower, and his scholarship in New York’s government has a correspondingly wider scope. As you see him at work, with his heavy horn-rimmed spectacles pushed up on his forehead, or furiously studying a document on which in a moment he will have something rapid and searching to say, he is apt to remind you of your favorite college professor—the one who not only knew his stuff, but knew it with humor and could do something about it. As the illustration on page 96 shows, he has a professorial love of charts and blackboards. He used charts last year to drive home his criticisms of the New York court system before the Bar Association. He rushed to Albany to use them in arguments for a bill that would enable New York to cut costs in the courts. He lugged a blackboard into the City Council to explain the emergency taxes he wanted for relief. No one watching him in this mood can doubt for a moment that he knows exactly what he is talking about, and that he is actuated, among other things, by a passionate desire to make New York a better place to live.
La Guardia’s frenzy to do it all himself has happily passed. He recently told a group in California that it was easy for him to get away now because he had a “bunch of $100,000-a-year Commissioners—getting only $10,000—running the city.” He is more inclined to let things ride now, and for the most part they ride smoothly. However, for the last two years (and only the last two) he has scheduled regular weekly meetings with individual Commissioners. “I have my feet on the pedals,” he says, “and my five fingers on the keys, and I can instantly detect a sour note.”
He prides himself on his ability to meet experts on their own grounds. Sometimes he out-experts them. When the engineers of the West Side Highway were stumped in getting the highway down through a snarl of existing tunnels and docks as far as Duane Street, La Guardia went out with them to look the problem over. “Why don’t you just build a bridge?” he asked. No one had thought of that solution—but the Canal Street Bridge of the West Side Highway is now the result. It was also the Mayor whose first suggestions were responsible for the city’s new garbage trucks. The old trucks stood high off the road, and garbage cans had to be swung by two men on the street to another, standing on mounds of slippery refuse. This was not only archaic and unsanitary, it resulted in the curious fact that the accident record for Sanitation Department employees was higher than for the Police or Fire Department. First, the Mayor demanded that the height of the trucks be cut down; the end result was a new fleet. The La Guardia-designed trucks are completely enclosed; they do not stink, attract flies, or contribute to the accident rate. The garbage is dumped into a cavernous mouth, low and at the back, and a chain conveyer inside distributes the load evenly. And the Mayor further contributed to the Sanitation Department’s pleasures and economies by designing a slow-speed, gasoline-driven, one-man tricycle for its street inspectors, to supersede two men in a department automobile.
La Guardia writes voluminous memorandums to aides and Commissioners on sheets that are pink or white or brown or blue or green. Each color represents a degree of urgency; if you get a pink memo immediate action is required of you, and a personal report to the Mayor. But when someone asked if he had introduced that system, he answered, offhandedly, “Oh, lots of companies have those.”
In that small episode there lies a large significance. The Mayor likes to regard himself less as a political official than as the chairman of a gigantic corporation. The difference between his problems and those of such other corporate chairmen as Alfred P. Sloan or Pierre S. du Pont is that the Mayor cannot vote proxies in endorsement of his policies but must so conduct his business as to be permitted to continue his policies as his brief terms expire. Moreover, although Mr. Sloan has a lot of trouble with Washington and the Mayor has none, the Mayor is hampered and hamstrung at every turn by the fact that New York City lives in a thralldom to New York state unlike any political servitude that has yet been visited on Mr. Sloan. For purely political reasons, the newly created New York City Council, which is the city’s legislative body, constantly votes the Mayor down by an eighteen-to-eight majority, and unlike Mr. Sloan the Mayor cannot silence, fire, placate, circumvent, or buy out his troublemakers. Mr. Sloan need not pay $10,000 and $15,000 salaries to people who do no useful work for him; the Mayor must. Only in the actions of his department heads can the Mayor, like Mr. Sloan, command and enforce the doing of his will.
Even this gives La Guardia less than it seems to promise. For New York City has extremely little power to “govern” as the word is ordinarily understood. Without enabling legislation from Albany, it has no authority to tackle such present-day municipal problems as housing, relief, transit unification, or extended water supply; the city government in theory is supposed only to keep the peace and to provide comparatively few basic services. The analogy is as if Mr. Sloan were permitted to build motorcars but forbidden to equip them with wheels except when he could bring political pressure to bear to have wheels declared permissible. The state of New York makes no legal distinction between New York City and Batavia or Dobbs Ferry—and since almost all the problems of New York City inhere in its size, its problems are sore indeed. It must maintain its own “legislative representative,” Reuben Lazarus, in Albany, on constant guard for its interests. It must find other means of political contact when, as happened last year, the State Senate abolished its committee on the affairs of New York City—purely for cloakroom reasons. “I have had to come to Albany not on my knees with my hat in my hand but crawling” says La Guardia. The fact is that New York is too big to be a city; it ought to be, in the words of Secretary Ickes, the forty-ninth state. Others have made the same comment. As things stand, New York is in the orbit of Washington, D.C., but in the constraint of Albany, N.Y.
To its great disadvantage and expense, New York has not one government but a set of three. There is first of all the central city government, consisting of the Mayor, the City Council of twenty-six members, the Board of Estimate (upon which sit the Mayor, the President of the City Council, the Comptroller, and representatives of every borough), and the City’s thirty-odd commissions, boards, and departments. This would seem to be enough, but to the job-spawning politicos of the past it was not. So there are also borough governments.
The boroughs are, in a sense, like five feudal domains. There is Brooklyn, with its population of 2,800,000; once a city in its own right, and full of pride and churches. There is gridironed Manhattan, whose population has dwindled to a mere 1,690,000 from 2,300,000 in 1916. There is the swiftly growing Bronx, whose population now stands at 1,500,000. There is the still more swiftly growing Queens (1,340,000), a borough which, like the Bronx before it, is a consolidation of what were previously no more than scattered towns. Bringing up the rear is the Borough of Richmond, which is geographically known as Staten Island, and which the New Yorker is apt to think of as a pastoral idyl of rocks and rills despite the fact that its population—176,000—is larger than that of Des Moines, Iowa, or Bridgeport, Connecticut. Each borough has its own president and its commissioner of borough works, and numerous aides—to a grand total of 7,000. Manhattan and the Bronx have their own asphalt plants, and Queens has a special topographical bureau. The Bronx even has its own flag with a slogan “Ne Cede Malis” (Yield Not to Evil) and so has Queens—with the crown of Queen Catherine, for whom it was named, in the upper left-hand corner.
Finally, and worse, there are the county governments. The counties are identical with the boroughs, except that the Borough of Manhattan is tailed New York County, and Kings County is the Borough of Brooklyn. But whereas the boroughs are subdivisions of the city, the counties are subdivisions of the state. County officers have been losing their power to municipal officers in recent years but there are still, excluding the county courts, some twenty-six officers in the city—sheriffs, county clerks, district attorneys, registers, public administrators, etc. These county officers, along with the courts, account for nearly all the patronage Tammany has left. La Guardia refers to the triple city-borough-county setup as “obsolete and archaic,” but in the five and a half years of his administration he has not yet been able to do much about it. County government still costs New York over $15,000,000 a year, and a considerable part of this—no one can say just how many millions—can, only be written down to waste. “It is a peculiar situation,” La Guardia says with heavy irony, “where instead of having five cities within one county you have five counties within one city.”
The accomplishments of La Guardia’s administration are, accordingly, all the more remarkable. The improvements in the governmental structure under which New York operates have been comparatively slight. The City Council, chosen by the system of Proportional Representation (which gives larger opportunities to minority groups), now replaces that beery and lethargic body, the Board of Aldermen. The result, although it represents an improvement in democratic theory, is a lessening, if anything, in the discipline that a good corporate executive would like to have. This and other improvements were contained in a new and simpler charter for the city adopted two years ago. It strengthened, although not enough to suit La Guardia, the central city government at the expense of borough government; it established a new City Planning Commission, a new central Department of Housing and Buildings; it separated the city’s tax-collecting and auditing functions, and in numerous oilier ways blocked avenues of previous corruption. But that is as if a corporation official were to feel a sense of accomplishment in saying, “At last we have found a means to keep our officials from stealing the assets of the company”—and nothing better illuminates the difference between the problems of honest men in business and honest men in politics than the realization that Fiorello La Guardia must constantly battle to enforce standards of practice that any businessman for years has been able to take for granted.
For all of this, La Guardia’s New York is a different New York from any that has preceded it. It is now an example of good city government. But most other good city governments in the U.S. are good because they have adopted more modern governmental concepts, such as the commission or the city-manager form. La Guardia has given New York good government under the most orthodox system there is—and the clumsiest example of it in the country.
Being the Mayor of New York City is often called the third most important political job in the nation, following only the presidency of the United States and the governorship of New York state. It is even more appropriately called the second. For one thing, no state can approach the number of New York City’s employees, and only the federal government has more. For another, the cost of operating the entire federal judicial system, from the U.S. Supreme Court down to courts in Hawaii and China, is less than the cost to New York City of courts operating in its area; La Guardia estimates that the city pays some $15,000,000 for the justice meted out here against total comparable federal costs of only $11,000,000. New York City accounts for more than half of the population of New York state, and no other state in the union, save Illinois and Pennsylvania, contains a greater population than is heaped together in the 323 square miles of La Guardia’s city. Last year’s budget of almost $590,000,000 represents not only more money than is handled by New York’s Governor but more money than is handled by the thirty smallest-budget states put together.
As the Mayor of New York, La Guardia rules more people than the Governor-General of Australia, the President of Chile, the King of Sweden, the dictator of Portugal. La Guardia is Commander-in-Chief of a police force of 19,000, a fire department of 11,000, and his city employees include 46,000 members of an educational system, 19,000 hospital employees from surgeons to diet cooks, and 14,000 members of the Department of Sanitation. All told. New York is governed with the aid of some 165,000 people, who need the help, from time to time, of another army of 50,000 temporary workers.
In these figures there is a hint, but only a hint, of the magnitude of La Guardia’s New York. There are other figures, to hint at the gravity of its problems. There are more than 600,000 jobless people in New York; to visualize them imagine a city the size of Buffalo in which no man or woman lifted a hand in productive enterprise. It would take the combined profits of American Tel. & Tel., du Pont, General Electric, American Tobacco, and Union Carbide to match the $278,900,000 that the city, with the help of the U.S. Treasury and the state of New York, spent on its unemployed last year.
New York has a net funded debt of some $2,000,000,000. The total assets of General Motors, plus Standard Oil of California, would be needed to liquidate it. The city is limited by the state constitution to a debt of no more than 10 per cent and an annual tax not to exceed 2 per cent of its real-estate assessment—and it is now within $37,000,000 of exhausting its unreserved debt margin. But for all the inefficiency of its political setup, for all its financial worries, for all its mastodonic size, New York does present the spectacle of a free people governing themselves with a certain wisdom and a certain logic. The La Guardia administration is today giving New York a better government than it has ever had before in modern times, and thus, so far, going a good distance toward disproving the despairing dictum of George Washington that “Mankind, when left to themselves, are unfit for their own government.”
Council and Board of Estimate
Someday, when New York’s citizens are even more awake to what an efficient government can mean, the new City Council will unquestionably mean something. At present it presents for the most part a record of noisy futility, and at the mention of it La Guardia holds his head in his hands and groans. The Proportional Representation plan by which its members are elected is an advance; it enables young, thirty-seven-year-old socialite-and-Republican Newbold Morris, who became its President, to say that it is “the most representative legislative body in the country.” But it is also, again in its president’s words, “the least dignified and most disorderly.” It set the precedent for itself, from its very beginning, of broadcasting its weekly sessions over the radio; this was, in the words of Heywood Broun, “a better show than the Planetarium.” Tammany played shrewder politics in the Council than did its Fusion opponents. At the outset the Council membership split clean down the middle, with both “Fusion” and “Tammany” claiming the majority control in a tricky parliamentary argument caused by the absence of one member. In the next few months it continued to wrangle, and the title “Majority Leader” was inscribed for a while on two doors at the same time—Tammany’s in traditional brass plate; Fusion’s on a slip of paper. Today “Tammany” is in clear control, and La Guardia can be sure only of the votes of the Council’s five American Labor party members and three “Fusionists.” “Tammany is a state of mind,” says Newbold Morris. The same goes for Fusion. The Council, in miniature, reflects the rapid disintegration of traditional party lines characteristic of New York’s politics in general. It reflects the decline of the Manhattan Democratic organization in the election of a Brooklynite as the Council’s vice chairman and the rift between Manhattan Democrats and those in outlying boroughs, who fought over the city clerkship all summer long while two clerks sat side by side in the Council meetings awaiting a court decision.
Since the Council initiates all municipal legislation and, under the constitution, must now join with the Mayor in asking for enabling legislation from Albany, its unruliness is a source of trouble. He seldom visits its deliberations, held weekly in a big room on City Hall’s second floor; there is no use. The most serious blow it dealt him was its refusal to pass his so-called county-reform bills, by which he had hoped to eliminate enough useless county expenses to save $1,000,000 a year. It defeated these bills after an all-night radio session (during which Morris smashed his gavel and a stenographer fainted) even though a three-to-one popular referendum in 1935 had authorized the reform of these county offices. At present, the best thing that can be said about the Council by those interested in political reality is that La Guardia’s administration is the first since Gaynor’s (1910-13) in which Tammany has not had an overwhelming majority of the city legislative body.
It is the Board of Estimate that is New York’s really remarkable body. Whereas the Council legislates, the Board of Estimate creates polity. It does so by holding the city purse. All eight members of the board sit upon it ex officio. They are Mayor La Guardia or his Deputy Mayor, Council President Newbold Morris, Comptroller Joseph D. McGoldrick, and the five borough presidents. Among these members sixteen votes are distributed: three each to the Mayor, the Council President, and the Comptroller: two each to President Isaacs of Manhattan and President Ingersoll of Brooklyn; one each to the Bronx’s Lyons, Queens’ Harvey, and Richmond’s Palma.
During his first administration La Guardia had plenty of trouble with the board. He began with a clear majority. Then his Comptroller, Arthur Cunningham, died. Later Bernard Deutsch, the Fusion President of the old Board of Aldermen died, too, and La Guardia lost control. Not until his 1937 re-election did he again achieve a majority, with only Jim Lyons of the Bronx consistently against him. La Guardia thus finds it unnecessary to attend the scheduled meetings. When the Mayor has something on his mind he usually summons the board members in a group to his office to thrash it out. The meetings go on weekly, just the same. In Tammany’s day when La Guardia sat upon the board as aldermanic President, the ceaseless uproar between him, Mayor Hylan, and Comptroller Craig provided the newspapers with the best comedy they have published in years. Today, with the warfare transferred to the City Council, the board meetings are quieter. The public still attends them in some measure—particularly the public from Queens, which is growing so fast that Queens citizens frequently arrive by busloads (at least five times as many, in a year, as from any other borough), to listen and be heard in arguments concerning bus franchises, sewer assessments, and highway improvements. This proliferating borough has over 300 different civic associations, all clamoring for attention, and is thus the scene of some of New York’s most embattled politics. Recently the Mayor moved in on the affairs of a Queens bus line that had been operating without a franchise but under protection of the courts, and smote it in characteristic fashion. “I feel like a Czech,” moaned Queens’ melodramatic Borough President Harvey, “Queens is becoming the Sudetenland of the City of New York.” This, presumably, did not bother the Mayor, who does not pause in his daily round to take notice of accusations of “dictatorship,” “communism,” “fascism,” or “a Napoleonic complex.”
The Board of Estimate meets in its west-wing second-floor chamber in City Hall. Its members sit in Roman splendor around a massive semicircular table, backed by wine-colored and betasseled draperies, and under a blazing chandelier. The Mayor’s chair, usually occupied by Council President Newbold Morris, is topped with an incorruptible brass eagle, and inside the rostrum there is a well in which reporters sit, looking up. Here they have the opportunity of watching an occasionally gaudy display of fireworks set off by the contact between Morris and Lyons of the Bronx, the only organization Democrat on the board. Lyons is dapper and wisecracking; the rest of the board is sedate in comparison. Most sedate of all is elderly and distinguished Raymond V. Ingersoll of Brooklyn, independent Democrat who was Park Commissioner years ago under reform Mayor Mitchell. A close second to him in probity is Manhattan’s Stanley J. Isaacs, Republican; a red-haired, middle-aged humanitarian, full of good works and slum-clearance legislation. Notably less sedate is George U. Harvey, the Queens Republican and professional patriot. Joseph Palma, of Richmond, is usually silent; he is newer to city politics than most, was formerly in the secret service and an aide to U.S. Presidents Wilson, Harding, and Coolidge.
Behind the board members may stand a dozen or more of their voteless assistants, examiners, and engineers. Facing the show are the ivory-and-mahogany-colored benches for the public—to which all meetings of the board are open, although public hearings are held only once a month. Here it may listen to its heart’s content to the board plodding its way through perhaps 200, perhaps 300, of the items that appear on its calendar every week. It may be talking about franchises, or pensions, or revocable permits or PWA projects, or highway or transit matters—but whatever the subject, the board is in a key position because what it talks about, it either backs with cash or lets starve for the lack of it.
Running the city
The board is in a key position in La Guardia’s New York for another reason, too. It is the link between the city’s most important elective officers and its appointive Commissioners—the men chosen by the Mayor to be the operating heads of the more than thirty departments, boards, and commissions that run the actual day-by-day affairs of New York, the corporation. In the language of business they would be the corporation’s vice-presidents-in-charge-of-. In the language of politics, they are the Mayor’s cabinet.
La Guardia’s appointments have been characterized by little bias of any kind except against the type of Tammany political hack who helped run the city into the decline in which La Guardia found it. He has gone to outside cities and fished in the nameless depths of the political seas for men of impressive attainments. He picked Dr. John L. Rice for his Health Commissioner because, as the article on city health (page 97) indicates, Dr. Rice had for ten years held the post of health officer in New Haven, Connecticut, and New Haven as a result had one of the best health records of any city of its size in the U.S. Commissioner Austin MacCormick of the Department of Correction came to New York’s city government from Chillicothe, Ohio, after a distinguished career in the federal prison service.
La Guardia has also promoted men up from the ranks; as Police Commissioner he picked a tough cop who had been kicked about the department for years because his unassailable honesty had made him a constant embarrassment to Tammany. Fire Commissioner John J. McElligott had spent twenty-six years fighting New York City’s fires. For his Commissioner of Parks La Guardia picked that autocratic but brilliant civil servant Robert Moses and got a bill of authorization through the state legislature to permit Moses to serve the city while he was also chairman of the state Council of Parks. In little more than five years the results of that appointment are world famous. (For Commissioner Moses and his works, see FORTUNE for June, 1938.) La Guardia’s appointment to Hospitals was Dr. S. S. Goldwater, former director of Mount Sinai Hospital and one of the outstanding hospital men in the country. All in all, the Commissioners and department heads with whom La Guardia has surrounded himself represent as distinguished a group as can be found anywhere in the world in the conduct of municipal affairs. You can see most of the more important ones lunching together every Wednesday in the office of big, extrovert, social Bill Carey, Commissioner of Sanitation. The only Commissioner who never attends is Moses, who always sends flowers instead. The Mayor doesn’t attend, either, preferring “kitchen cabinet” meetings of drinks and talk on occasional Saturday afternoons with his younger associates at his home.
But of all the city’s departments and commissions, there are three in particular that merit a closer glance—not because they are more “important” than the others but because, in the scheme of La Guardia’s New York, they are the most central in the governmental plan. They are the Department of Purchase, the Civil Service Commission, and the Budget Bureau.
Purchase. In Tammany days the Department of Purchase was a price-getting agency, and nothing more, if that much. Purchases were in reality made by the separate departments, and the waste of the city’s money had become so appalling that, even before La Guardia took office the state legislature passed a law centralizing the city’s purchases under a single control. Virtual author of that legislation was tall, scholarly Russell Forbes, professor of government at New York University, and it was to him that La Guardia turned in January, 1934, to be Commissioner when the new law went into effect. He is probably the country’s No. 1 authority in his field, and his book, Governmental Purchasing, is the standard work on its subject.
Notwithstanding his knowledge and authority he had hell’s own time building up his department. The old guard died hard, and sabotaged and plotted to the bitterest sort of end. It got a ruling interpreted to command Forbes to sign every official piece of paper leaving the department, and for days he did nothing but sit at his desk, endlessly scribbling his name. When he really began to be able to do some constructive work he found some fearful things. He inherited seventy-four city storehouses, all without central control. Slowly and painfully he reduced the number to thirty-seven, under his own authority. In one storehouse he found 50,000 spare parts for Model T Fords, and several tons of rain-soaked stationery, over which two city employees had stood guard for years. In another he found $15,000 worth of chandeliers bought for nobody knows what purpose in Mayor Gaynor’s day, but never undated. He discovered that the city, which buys 600,000 tons of coal a year, frequently bought bargeloads of dust, dirt, slag, and slate dressed with a thin coating of coal on top. At the beginning of his first year Forbes saved $50,000 by getting rid of collusion on bids for fuel oil. He saved $200,000 by getting genuine competition for city printing contracts. Last year he sold for $130,000 junk that Tammany had never disposed of for more than $25,000. The city now roasts its own coffee—1,000,000 pounds a year for city institutions—for the three-cent-a-pound difference that Forbes figures he saves. For the city’s pauper dead, he assembles coffins on Welfare Island, rather than buy the necessary 8,000 caskets a year outside. Last year the department spent $28,600,000 on the purchase of supplies. Only God knows how much those same purchases would have cost the city if a man with the Tammany stripe had made them.
Civil Service. When La Guardia appointed his civil-service and budgetary heads he told them that he would fire them if they did not succeed in becoming the worst-hated Commissioners in the city. They have done pretty well. Paul Kern, whose title is President of the Municipal Civil Service Commission, is a young (thirty-one years) Columbia Law School graduate who was once La Guardia’s secretary in Washington, later his law secretary in City Hall. It is he who is in effect in charge of the city’s huge personnel bureau, under whose jurisdiction come 120,000 jobs. That is all but 45,000—mostly in the city’s educational system.
La Guardia thinks that no achievement of his administration stands higher than the civil service. His blunt claim is that New York now has a lower number of politically appointed job holders than any other city or state government or than the federal government itself. “Public employment in New York City” says Paul Kern, “is 99 44/100 per cent pure.” By this he means that the number of “exempt,” high-paid appointive jobs under the commission’s jurisdiction has dropped from 899 in 1932 to 450 at present. This sounds unimpressive, but actually the jobs were all high up and were, as the commission puts it, “the main succor and support in the past for the political parasite specially fattened at public expense.” This kind of key position was important both to the government’s efficiency and to the power of the Tammany machine.
Only three industrial organizations in the U.S. employ more people than the city of New York. But not even these—A. T. & T., U.S. Steel, General Motors—have anything like the diversity of talents to seek and to cope with. For New York must examine, qualify, and hire not just steel workers or body builders, but directors of tuberculosis control, fan maintenance men for the city’s subway system, bridge builders, butchers, sewer cleaners, carriage painters, marble setters, pipe calkers, gardeners, livestock buyers, mortuary caretakers, first assistant tickler clerks, inspectors of tree complaints, deputy tax commissioners—and hundreds more. All in all, New York City has 2,000 different categories of employment. La Guardia believes that municipal government is a systematic and scientific affair. Accordingly the city now offers to selected firemen and sanitation-department employees college courses in engineering at its expense. It gives an examination to street cleaners who have ambitions to be foremen. La Guardia even tried to give examinations to city beach lifeguards, to see if they could swim, but this endeavor was blocked by the courts. This year La Guardia and his Commissioners are going to give courses in municipal government at New York University.* Grace note to civil service: a Negro, who is a graduate of Columbia University, buys all the city’s chemicals for Mr. Forbes’s Department of Purchase.
Budget. New York has three budgets. The first, the Expense Budget, to meet the running costs of the city and the debt service, comes close to $600,000,000 this year. Most of the revenue to meet it comes from taxes on real estate—the only taxes New York City can raise without the particular assent of the state. The second, the Capital Outlay Budget, is not really a budget at all, but rather a maximum program for specific capital improvements. The 1939 figure for that is $113,800,000. The third, the Relief Budget, describes itself. Since 1935 it has been entirely financed on a pay-as-you-go plan by special taxes—notably by the 2 per cent city sales tax. Last year the relief budget was $117,100,000. This is mostly for home relief, which the city and state of New York divide sixty-forty. It takes no account of the federal government’s huge work-relief contribution to New York’s unemployed—$161,800,000 in 1938.
Dismiss the last two budgets and focus on the Expense Budget of almost $600,000,000 a year. Responsibility for the justification of this huge sum rests upon the shoulders of solid, cigar smoking Kenneth Dayton, Director of the Budget Bureau, and his assistant, burly Lester Stone, once La Guardia’s secretary. Their jobs are tough. La Guardia makes them tougher. Budget-making time comes in the spring of the year, and for weeks before the submission of the budget to the Board of Estimate and the Council La Guardia is to be found not in his office but in the Budget offices on the twelfth floor of the Municipal Building, surrounded by a good many of the bureau’s sixty fiscal and engineering employees, and taking active and vociferous charge of budget preparation and rationale. But despite his best economy efforts, the budget for New York is not only huge, but growing huger.
Why must the budget be so vast? Why does it cost three times as much to run La Guardia’s New York as it took to run New York in 1915, if La Guardia’s New York is only one-half again as big? It is a hard question to answer. The first answer is an argument that a city’s functions have changed: that La Guardia’s New York demands, and should receive, social services in the form of more and better hospitals, health services, parks, and other boons than the New York of 1915 was ready for, or could desire—an argument that as history accelerates, the necessities of a city increase at a geometric more than an arithmetic rate. But there are a few fiscal answers, too. The first is the $160,000,000 annual debt service. How much of the city’s debt was in the past incurred without in any way benefiting the city no one can say, but considering the length of Tammany’s reign the amount must be gigantic. If to the debt service you add the number of other mandatory expenses which the Budget Bureau must pay but over which it has little control or none at all, you have already accounted for three-quarters of the budget total. Much of this huge figure is a matter of past history and of lobby pressures: in 1915 it was less than two-thirds. In preparing his 1939 budget, La Guardia cut $5,000,000 out of departmental appropriations to counterbalance mounting mandatory expenditures.
Of the total mandatory amount, an amount estimated between $250,000,000 and $300,000,000 is in salaries—salaries of schoolteachers, firemen, police, and so on, whose scales and increases are fixed by state law. This does not mean that a big percentage of these salaries could be saved if the state mandate were withdrawn. For the most part, says Budget Director Dayton, city employees are not overpaid. But there are the wasteful, duplicating, and largely political county salaries, which we have already mentioned. And there are many similar salaries in the courts: the Chief Clerk of the Surrogate’s Court in Kings County gets $15,000 a year against the $13,500 that retains the services of Park Commissioner Moses. There are 259 employees in the courts in New York City to whom the city pays $10,000 a year or over; as compared to only sixty-two in all the departments of the city government, excluding education. There are uneconomical, nonactuarial pension plans in the Police and Fire departments that La Guardia is working to change. And there are many more such.
As for the departmental appropriations, the two biggest authorities last year alone accounted for more than a third of the budget. Education takes $106,000,000; protection of life and property takes $98,000,000. These expenses and many others could be markedly reduced without loss of social service or operating efficiency—in Utopia. Or in a dictatorship such as the Mayor is often accused of running. Unquestionably, La Guardia’s New York could cost less money for what it gives—but for what it gives it already costs less than it used to and there is every reason to suppose that the Mayor will do better, so long as he does not reach a political nodal point at which the popularity of himself and his administration is endangered. Even clean politics is politics. Beyond that, the Mayor’s answer to city government costs is that if you want a great city, you must pay for it.
Is the credit of La Guardia’s New York good? The bankers of New York, who had to bail out Tammany’s New York in 1933 lest it sink with all souls on board, so consider it. The fact remains, however, that the city’s constitutional borrowing power, limited as we have seen to 10 per cent of its assessed valuation of taxable real estate, is within $37,000,000 of its limit. And that is a figure smaller than ever before in the modern city’s history. As a consequence, Comptroller McGoldrick is urging a moratorium on borrowing for capital projects—at which possibility La Guardia looks with an extremely wry face. In La Guardia’s New York, then, you find the symptom that meets you, in this decade, wherever you turn: the symptom of communities less and less able to sustain and nourish themselves of their own efforts, and more and more anxious to find succor in the bounty of the federal Treasury.
Mr. La Guardia’s trips to Washington, much more frequent than his trips to Albany, may thus grow more frequent still. In the last five years the federal government has spent and approved over $1,000,000,000 in New Deal funds for La Guardia’s New York. This is a lot of gravy: but the city has had a bill to pay too. It has pledged and spent for these programs (and for local unemployment relief) some $778,700,000. And Mr. La Guardia will need more millions still if his ambitious plans are to continue.
“May I point to one exhibit that I hope all visitors will note,” said La Guardia last April on the opening day of the World’s Fair, “and that is the city of New York itself.”
The city is, indeed, an exhibit—it has changed so much in the last few years that every visitor must realize it. He will realize it as he drives along the Henry Hudson Parkway, or across the new Triborough Bridge, which is really sixteen bridges in one, or the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge—fourth-longest suspension bridge in the U.S. Or up Sixth Avenue where the el has at last been torn down and the city is building a new $65,000,000 subway, or out past the new 550-acre municipal North Beach Airport, which will soon be taking business away from Newark and housing transoceanic seaplanes in its enormous hangars.
But these things are obvious and they are just the beginning. The city is an exhibit most of all because it has become so much better a place in which to live. And to the 7,500,000 people within its borders this means a lot of big tangible changes—and an aggregation of smaller, subtler things as well.*
It means that the city is a better place in which to play. Park acreage has increased 36 per cent. There are 850,000 newly planted trees and shrubs, eighty-seven new wading pools, two new golf courses, twelve swimming pools where before there were only two. Playground space has trebled—and in the first two years of Fusion 30 per cent fewer children were hurt in the city streets. There is a new Orchard Beach in Pelham Bay Park and a new Municipal Stadium at Randall’s Island.
It means that the city is a better place in which to be sick—if you must. It means a total of 7,000 more beds in the nurses’ homes and hospitals, and 4,000 more nurses, and a decentralized program with ten local health centers built and five more under way. It means the lowest infant death rate and the lowest death rate from tuberculosis in the city’s history.
It means to every citizen taxpayer and subway rider the genuine prospect—for the first time in seventeen years of negotiations—of unification of New York’s costly, complicated subway systems. It means that for the first time since the turn of the century a definite step has been taken toward lessening harbor pollution; the new Wards Island sewage plant, with the new Coney Island plant, handles one-fifth of the flow of the entire city. And it means that for the first time in twenty-five years a major expansion of the city’s water supply is under way—up at the Delaware watershed.
It means—to 8,000 people moving from the slums into three new low-cost housing developments—First Houses, Williamsburg, and Harlem River. To some 20,000 more it means the chance to move into Red Hook and Queensbridge as soon as they are finished.
It means, to school children. 97,000 new scats in the schools; for artistic high-school children, the new High School of Music and Art; and for older students the new college in Queens. It means, to the housewife, new enclosed municipal retail markets where peddlers and their wares are protected from city grime. And to 600,000 housewives it means daily radio reports on foods over WNYC. It means that the men who are housed in Rikers Island penitentiary get medical care and vocational training in a prison as up to date and humane as exists in the U.S.—replacing the scandalous hundred-year-old dungeon on Welfare Island.
It means that spectators can no longer loiter at Women’s Court, and children alone in the movie houses must sit in a special section with matrons in charge. It means the establishment in each borough of a small-claims court where the man in the street can get speedy justice without a lawyer. It means that the tax department is making the first systematic card-index system of real estate in the city’s history and the water department is making the first thoroughgoing survey of use and simply. It means that for the first time in the history of this noisy metropolis the milk-wagon horses are wearing rubber shoes. La Guardia’s New York may irk the taxpayer, but he can’t say that he has nothing to show for his money.
Exquisitely mounted in a jeweler’s case lined with green plush, La Guardia keeps a large well-polished piece of bone. When the occasion presents itself he bestows the bone with ironic ceremony on that one of his Commissioners who in his opinion has pulled a notable boner. A lot of people have had it—even careful Fire Commissioner McElligott, who made a speech about a Safe and Sane Fourth in 1934, and then went home and burned his hand lighting firecrackers—but no one has ever suggested that the Mayor himself should keep it for a year. Even La Guardia’s enemies give him credit for enormous sagacity as a political animal. There are even those who say that his ability to sense a political trend is superior to Franklin Roosevelt’s. His friends would like to see him in the White House; it is no secret that he would like to see himself there too. It has even been suggested that if Mr. Roosevelt had given the nation at large as much for its money as La Guardia has given New York, the nation’s present circumstances might be less ambiguous. One or the other political party might indeed fare further and fare worse than to pick La Guardia—but that is probably precisely what they will do. “You can’t be a good fellow and a good mayor.” says La Guardia—and he would probably carry that stubborn attitude, to his own disadvantage, into a campaign for a higher office. The country might like better another La Guardia saying: “To the victor belongs—the responsibility for good government.” But perhaps the strongest reason why La Guardia may not make the White House lies elsewhere. It lies in the slight foreignness of the little fifty-six-year-old man in the black hat who holds the No. 2 political job in the U.S. The Mayor of New York has not yet been entirely melted by the Melting Pot—and America is not so democratic as New York City.
