The New York City mayoral election of 1933 took place on November 7, 1933, in New York City.[1] Incumbent Democratic Mayor John P. O'Brien, who was elected in a special election after the resignation of Mayor Jimmy Walker, faced RepublicanCongressman and 1929 mayoral candidate Fiorello La Guardia, and former acting mayor and President of the New York City Board of AldermenJoseph V. McKee, who became acting mayor after Walker's resignation until the special election, and ran on the Recovery Party line.[2] This was the first time since 1901 that Republicans won a mayoral election in New York City.
The City Fusion Party was formed in opposition to Tammany Hall following O'Brien's victory, inspired by the Charter Party of Cincinnati, which defeated Rudolph K. Hynicka's political machine in the 1920s, and grew out of William Jay Schieffelin's Committee of One Thousand. The Fusion Conference Committee, a group of reformers and Republicans, was formed to select a candidate to oppose Tammany Hall in the mayoral election. The main leaders of the committee were former governor Charles Seymour Whitman, J. Barstow Smull, Joseph M. Price, and Maurice P. Davidson.[6]
There were 2,324,389 registered voters in New York City in 1933, with 435,966 of them being Republicans. Herbert Hoover failed to win New York City in the 1928 and 1932 presidential elections.[7]
Mayor O'Brien ran for re-election with the support of Tammany Hall and the Brooklyn party machine, led by John F. Curry and John H. McCooey respectively.[8] He was opposed by two insurgent candidates, U.S. Representative Loring M. Black Jr. and Assemblyman Jerome G. Ambro.[8]
In the waning days of the campaign, there were calls[by whom?] for O'Brien to withdraw from the race. In an interview at City Hall, O'Brien emphatically denied that he would withdraw and predicted his own re-election.[8] Both insurgent candidates predicted they would win the primary, which party organization men characterized as absurd, predicting a large plurality for O'Brien.[8]
Although many members were Republicans, the committee sought to give its support to an independent Democrat, due to four-to-one advantage in voter registration in favor of the Democratic Party in the city.[12]
Samuel Seabury, whose investigations led to the resignation of Mayor Walker, declined to be a candidate for mayor, as he felt that he would be accused of conducting the investigation for political ambition.[12] A draft movement sought to bring Al Smith into the election as the head of a coalition, but he declined to run on May 15.[11] The committee then considered Raymond Ingersoll, John C. Knox, George Vincent McLaughlin, Richard Cunningham Patterson Jr., Clarence J. Shearn, and Straus for the nomination,[13] but Straus declined, stating that he was afraid of increasing anti-Semitism if both the governor of New York (Herbert H. Lehman) and the mayor of New York City were Jewish.[14]
Having failed to recruit a Democratic candidate, the committee narrowed its choices to Fiorello La Guardia, Robert Moses, and John F. O'Ryan. The committee voted to give its nomination to Moses on July 26, without telling Seabury, who was opposed to Moses and supported La Guardia.[13] However, Moses called Price to decline the nomination as Moses failed to gain Smith's endorsement.[15]
Whitman, who was also the chair of the Republican mayoral nominating committee and opponent of La Guardia, suggested O'Ryan,[16] and Joseph M. Price stated that "If it's La Guardia or bust, I prefer bust!".[17] The committee voted to give O'Ryan the nomination, and he accepted. However, Seabury opposed Whitman, who had defeated him in the 1916 gubernatorial election, and O'Ryan, stating that he was inexperienced in politics. Seabury formed a competing committee with Charles Culp Burlingham, Roy W. Howard, and George Z. Medalie to replace the Fusion Conference Committee. To avoid a split, W. Kingsland Macy asked for O'Ryan to withdraw, and O'Ryan agreed to do so if he failed to receive a "convincing unanimity" from the Republican mayoralty committee. La Guardia likewise stated that he would support O'Ryan if the latter received the nomination.[18]
When a majority of the Republican mayoralty committee voted to support La Guardia on August 4, he secured the City Fusion nomination as well.
The Republican mayoralty committee met on August 3. Whitman introduced a resolution to endorse O'Ryan, but it was filibustered by Ed Corsi, Stanley M. Isaacs, Vito Marcantonio, and Charles H. Tuttle. Seabury was offered the nomination, but he declined it. The majority of the committee initially supported O'Ryan, but a majority later supported La Guardia and O'Ryan released his supporters. La Guardia was given the nominations of the Republican and City Fusion parties after midnight on August 4.William Chadbourne served as La Guardia's campaign manager.[19][20]
General election
Background
Samuel S. Koenig, the leader of the Republican Party in Manhattan and a political machine, was defeated in the September primaries and replaced by Chase Mellen, a reformist who supported La Guardia. Three of the eight Tammany Hall district leaders lost reelection in their primaries.[21]
La Guardia's ticket was selected for ethnic and political considerations. W. Arthur Cunningham, the candidate for New York City Comptroller, was a reformer and a Catholic. Bernard S. Deutsch, the candidate for President of the Board of Aldermen, was the chair of the City Fusion Party in the Bronx and president of the American Jewish Congress. Jacob Gould Schurman Jr., the candidate for New York County District Attorney, was the son of Jacob Gould Schurman, who had served as the president of Cornell University and in United States foreign affairs. It was the first time in the history of New York City that the four highest positions had Italian, Irish, Jewish, and WASP candidates on the same ticket.[26]
The Law Preservation Party did not nominate a candidate for mayor.[25]
Polling conducted by The Literary Digest showed La Guardia defeating O'Brien by a margin of four-to-one. President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent James Farley and Edward J. Flynn to convince McKee to run in the election as O'Brien was predicted to easily lose to La Guardia. Roosevelt's attempts were leaked on September 23, and La Guardia unsuccessfully appealed to McKee not to run. McKee announced that he would run for mayor on the ballot line of the Recovery Party on September 30, with Harry M. Durning as his campaign manager.[27]
McKee's late entry into the race placed him at a serious disadvantage, and the Recovery Party was unable to nominate a full slate of candidates or lead a voter registration campaign.[28][29] Although he had a large fundraising advantage of two-to-one over La Guardia and the support of a broader circulation of newspapers, La Guardia had made up ground from his 1929 campaign, due to financial support from figures such as John D. Rockefeller Jr. Unlike 1929, La Guardia ended the campaign with more money than he had spent.[29]
Ed Corsi, Leonard Covello, and Vito Marcantonio were tasked by the La Guardia campaign with outreach to the Italian community. The F.H. La Guardia Club was formed and grew to almost one thousand members and the Honest Ballot Association, while officially non-partisan, was led by supporters of the Fusion campaign, had 20,000 of its members march on election day to prevent voter intimidation.[30] By election day, La Guardia's campaign had increased the total number of registered voters from around 1,500,000 to 2,324,389. [29]
During the campaign, McKee faced renewed scrutiny for his essay "A Serious Question", which questioned the moral and political reliability of young Jewish people in New York City. The essay, which had been published in Catholic World in 1915 when he was a high school teacher, had been used against him during the 1925 election, but it was not effective.[31] To appeal to Jewish voters, who composed around twenty-five percent of the New York City electorate, McKee tied himself to Governor Herbert H. Lehman and sought to tie La Guardia to Seabury, who had criticized Lehman in multiple speeches, which McKee supporters attributed to prejudice. Though La Guardia sought to appeal to Jewish voters and asked Seabury to avoid targeting Lehman, Paul Windels convinced Seabury not to. McKee sent a telegram to La Guardia demanding that he disavow Seabury, but La Guardia refused to after Windels shared "A Serious Question".[31] The telegram conversation between La Guardia and McKee and McKee's essay were published in newspapers, bringing fresh criticism. Samuel Untermyer, who had supported McKee, withdrew his endorsement and called the essay a "reverberation of Hitlerism". President Roosevelt also withdrew an invitation for McKee to visit the White House, intended as an unofficial show of support, and Al Smith declined to endorse any candidate. McKee defended himself on the radio, stating that his words were taken out of context. Jewish supporters Jonah Wise, Henry Morgenthau Sr., Nathan Straus Jr., and Irving Lehman defended McKee and referenced his friendship and sympathy with Jewish people.[31]
La Guardia was attacked from both the left and right. McKee accused La Guardia of being "a Communist at heart" and O'Brien's campaign released anti-La Guardia pamphlets entitled "No Red, No Clown Shall Rule This Town". However, left-wing parties were critical of La Guardia. The Socialist Party of America accused him of being an opportunist. The Socialist Labor Party of America referred to him as an instrument of the ruling class, and the Communist Party USA stated that he was a "capable and valuable servant of finance capital" and "a dangerous foe of the American working class".[32]
Endorsements
Roy W. Howard's New York World-Telegram offered its support to McKee in early 1933, but now opposed "the present effort to boost him over the back fence".[33] The newspapers that endorsed McKee had a combined readership of 4,137,792 while the ones that endorsed La Guardia had a combined readership of 1,370,953.[34]
Despite his private efforts to recruit McKee, President Roosevelt maintained neutrality, causing Adolf A. Berle, a supporter of La Guardia, to accuse McKee of not supporting the New Deal.[35][why?]
La Guardia was the first Italian-American to be elected as mayor of New York City.[42]Charles Solomon, the Socialist nominee, received 59,846 votes which was less than the 122,565 votes received by Norman Thomas in the presidential election and the 249,887 votes that Morris Hillquit received in the previous mayoral election.[43] La Guardia, who had lost in all of the assembly districts in the 1929 election,[3] placed first in all five boroughs and forty-six of the sixty-two assembly districts, while O'Brien won thirteen districts and McKee won three. However, the Democratic Party retained control of the Board of Aldermen, and the combined vote for McKee and O'Brien was 327,203 votes more than for La Guardia.[44]
La Guardia's 40.37% of the popular vote was an improvement on former President Herbert Hoover's results from the 1928 and 1932 presidential election when Hoover 36.71% and 26.62% of the popular vote in New York City respectively,[45] while the combined vote for McKee and O'Brien's was 260,451 fewer than for Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 election. Roosevelt had received 66.32% of the popular vote, while O'Brien received 27.27% and McKee received 28.31%.[46]
La Guardia had the same level of support among Italian-Americans, around 80 to 90 percent, that Roosevelt received for president.[47] La Guardia, who was Jewish, won a plurality of the Jewish vote while O'Brien and McKee's combined Jewish vote was below the 387,000 Roosevelt had received.[48]
McKee's anti-Semitism controversy was blamed for his defeat. Flynn stated that "The damage has been done by the assertion that McKee was anti-Semitic" and Henry Moskowitz stated that the "Jewish controversy had a great deal to do with McKee's defeat. The Jews at that time were under the influence of the Hitler business and a great deal of harm was done to McKee because of the anti-Semitic articles". McKee previously did well in Jewish areas in his elections and received an average of 11.35% of the vote in the eighteen most Jewish assembly districts during the 1932 write-in campaign. McKee and O'Brien split the Democratic vote and both had support from different Democratic political machines.[51]
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