On the Way to Becoming Mayor

An Odd Moment on the Way to LaGuardia’s Becoming Mayor of New York

   While I’m well into Robert Caro’s book on Robert Moses, it’s “only” to page 360—there being 1162 of text. The complex narrative is immensely interesting (that Pulitzer was certainly deserved) and of course about much more than the book’s ambiguous hero. Needless to say, you won’t get a review on this blog; that much work I leave to others. But I will probably report about some passages that strike me of particular interest, starting with the following.

   A Fusion Party had been formed with the aim of beating the Tammany candidate for New York City mayor whose term would begin in January 1934. The clean government elders serially approached a large bunch of distinguished New Yorkers and were turned down. Then they came to one who refused the nomination on quite unusual grounds.

   That would-be candidate was Nathan Straus who was both delighted and flattered by the proposal and asked for a couple of days before giving his response. When they met again Straus told the Fusion elders that he had decided to decline. “The ill-fated star of Adolf Hitler was rising. . . . Jews were accused by Hitler of endeavoring encompass the control and government of the whole world . . . Straus refused to accept a nomination for Mayor at a time when Herbert Lehman [a Jew] was Governor because it might give credence in some quarters to Mr. Hitler’s charges. . . .” (p.353)

   This refusal led to the nomination of Fiorello LaGuardia who was then elected Mayor of the City of New York. It is not known whether The Little Flower knew of Hitler’s role in the prologue to his nomination.

   P.S. LaGuardia was mayor from the time we arrived in New York in March 1939 until 1945. I was in high school for most of those years and listened always to LaGuardia’s Sunday broadcasts on WNYC. He ended each of these talks with a resounding “Patience and Fortitude.”