Topic 9
WHY TWO POLITICIANS FAILED

TO those resident away from New York, as well as to many resident within, the defeat of Mayor John Purroy Mitchel for reelection and the failure of Governor Charles S.  Whitman to make a better showing than he did, are mysteries.

There are those who cite both failures as proof that New York City, at least, does not want good government, for Whitman, like Mitchel, was beaten by New York City votes.

Colonel Roosevelt held no such opinion.  To him Mitchel failed because he got out of touch with the public, while Whitman, he declared, might well have been President had he attended strictly to the business of being Governor of the State of New York.  Whitman was no prime favorite of his, but he believed Whitman might easily have duplicated Cleveland's feat in jumping from the Executive Mansion in Albany to the White House had he not been badly stung by the presidential bee early in his term of office.

"If," said the Colonel, as I was leaving Oyster Bay for the Chicago Convention of 1916, "Whitman had had the sense just to have been Governor of New York these two years, it would n't be a question of Hughes or Roosevelt in Chicago.  It would have been Whitman.

"Just think of the chance he had! Elected Governor of the State of New York on a highly moral issue by an enormous majority, with a legislature friendly and the people sympathetic; all he had to do was be Governor of New York, a real Governor, and make his administration stick out just as Arthur Woods has stood out as a Police Commissioner, and the nomination would have been his without the asking.  He had every chance, and more, that Cleveland had.

"But it was not in him to think of these things.  He had his eyes on the Presidency from the moment he was elected; he has not made the record he could have made by attending strictly to the job in hand, and he has lost the Presidency.  It is too bad."

Colonel Roosevelt went into the Mitchel campaign with no delusions as to the probable result.  There was, however, a chance that Tammany might lose, and he felt that no hope of beating Tammany was too forlorn to be abandoned.  To him duty spelled a drive at Tammany whenever the opportunity offered.

Mayor Mitchel's failure, the Colonel believed, was due entirely to his getting out of step with the electorate.

"There is," he went on to say, "no doubt that Mitchel has on the whole given New York the best administration the city has ever had.  There is every reason why his administration should be continued.  Another four years and Tammany will be starved to death.  If Tammany gets back now, it means another lease of life for it.

"Furthermore, the weaknesses of Mitchel as Mayor are temperamental rather than otherwise.  He has been a good Mayor and the work now begun should be carried on.  To elect Hylan or any other man with the Tammany tag on him is to give the cause of good government in America a decided setback."

"Yet," said I, "he has made his election impossible by his arrogance and, what you have noted, his being out of touch with the man in the street.  Almost anything may develop in the campaign.  Personally I feel sure it will develop into quite the dirtiest mud slinging affair we have known in years.  For that reason, and the additional fact that I do not like to see you identified with a loser, I am sorry you are in it.  You cannot hope to win."

"Being with a loser, so long as what the loser stands for is right, has no terrors for me," he replied.

"The weakness of Mitchel and his fight is that he has failed utterly to keep in touch with the people.

Three years ago, after Mitchel had been in office nearly a year, I told him he was in danger of making his a 'swallowtail' administration; that he was putting too many men into office the people did not know, and some that they knew and did not like.

" I told him he would do well to put some man into responsible office who was really in touch with the best in the labor unions; that an occasional appointment of a clean cut young Irishman would be wise, warning him at the same time that he was surrounding himself with men not in touch with the people and who would surely isolate him from the masses.

"It was not enough, I told him, to give the people a good administration — he must not give the people the impression that he was not one of them, that he was a man aloof.

"Again, a year later, I told him he would be wise if he took an occasional night away from Fifth Avenue and went east two or three blocks and got acquainted, say, with Second Avenue, and that he might with pleasure and profit hire a chauffeur who knew the way to Brooklyn.  He would, I told him, have a lot of fun at a ball in, say, the Third Assembly District; a better time, perhaps, than he ever had in Fifth Avenue, find the girls just as good if not better dancers, and be a better Mayor for having the fun.  But he did not see things that way.

"The worst things that this fellow Hearst is saying against him, that he is a little brother of the rich, a sycophant at rich men's tables, a social climber, is due chiefly to himself.  His constant appearance in the papers as being at this, that, or the other weekend party has lent foundation and color for these things.

"No man seriously questions John Mitchel's honesty.  But many do insist that instead of buying his influence with cash, the so called interests secure it with invitations to tea or dinner.  In the public mind he is, I 'm sorry to say, a social climber.  He has only himself to blame for this.

"He made a fearful tactical blunder when the Vanderbilt car was in an accident and he insisted upon the chauffeur of the other car being arrested.  If it had been his own or John Smith's car that he was in at the time of the accident, that might have been the correct course to have taken, but the Vanderbilt car — never.

"He has blundered, too, in his very efficiency.  The so called Gary School System has become a liability, where, properly handled, it would have been an enormous asset.

"I believe it really solves the part-time, school problem.  That is a problem of the tenements, of the immigrants very largely.  Naturally it is so — they have the large families, there are more of them, they live in the crowded sections.

"You and I know the psychology of the immigrant, of the man who works with his hands.  With them, education for their children is almost an obsession.  The Irishman wants a priest in the family, or a lawyer; the Jew, a student, a doctor, or a rabbi, and so on.  It's understandable and commendable.  They want their children to be better off than they have been.  Lacking much of the higher education, they appraise it at a better value than many of us who have it.

'If Mr.  Mitchel had gone to them when this plan was decided upon, shown them where it would give their children more and better education, they would have been with him — they’d have called him blessed.  That would have been more than a politic thing to do — it would have been the decent thing to do; for, after all's said and done, the parent has the right to be consulted on anything so vital as his child's schooling.

"Instead, having agreed that the doctors had fixed up medicine that would be good for the school patient, he decided to let the doctors jam it down the patient's throat, whether the patient liked it or not.

"It's too late now, but we cannot blame the parents of the ninety thousand children on halftime if they are offended, or if they resent what has been made (and by one of the Gary School defenders) to appear as an effort to keep their children in the places of hewers of wood and carriers of water.

"No man in public office, in justice to himself, his office, and the public, can allow the impression to gain ground among the people that he is no longer one of themselves, that he is a man apart."

Later, while he was recuperating at Cooper's place in Stamford, having made the speeches for Mitchel that he had promised to make, Mr.  Mitchel went to him to ask for more aid.  Mitchel then felt that he was down, as a remark made while waiting to see the Colonel indicated.

"We are reelecting you, Mr.  Mayor," Miss Zoe Beckley had declared in answer to his question as to what she was doing there.

"That," said the Mayor, "is more than I seem to be able to do myself."

After he had talked with Mitchel, Colonel Roosevelt said he had agreed to make "half a dozen more speeches."

"They have put it up to me pretty hard," he said, "and I do not see but that it is up to me to do what I can.  The campaign, however, is being fearfully mismanaged.  The cry, 'A vote against me is a vote for the Kaiser,' is a mistake.  It is unfair and it will react.

" If Mitchel could be made to see it his only hope is to stand on his record and challenge Hylan to say what reforms he will undo.  He should stand pat on Arthur Woods's record in the police department and ask Hylan if he will bring the red lights back, the old days of Devery and police corruption and all these involve.

"He has a dozen such chances if he will only use them."

Later the Colonel, who really was very fond of Mitchel personally, expressed regret at the position in which defeat would probably leave him.

"If," said he, "this young man is defeated — and it looks as though he will be — he personally will be in a most unfortunate plight.  He will have to start fresh with the handicap of having been Mayor and he will then find that his society friends will have very little use for him.  They will, beyond the shadow of a doubt, drop him, and he will realize then, what he does not realize now, that it is the Mayor of New York to whom these attentions have been paid and not to Purroy Mitchel.

"The great weakness of Mitchel as Mayor is that he has had no popular appeal — he has not gripped the imagination of the masses."