Portrait of a Mayor: Fiorello La Guardia
I
FIORELLO H. LA GUARDIA is everywhere known as ‘The Little Flower.’ As a term of affection or of derogation, it does not fit the Mayor of New York. There is nothing flowerlike about him. Instead of reminding one of anything with its roots in the soil, he calls to mind nothing so much as an engine. He is a heavy-duty mechanism, whirring away at a tremendous rate of speed, every cylinder hitting. But it seems to be fed by an imperfect mixture, for every so often it backfires with terrific frenzy, all but tearing itself loose from its bed. On these occasions one turns instinctively to look for the pieces; but even as one recovers from the blast, the engine is whirring merrily on, and no discernible damage has been done — except to the nerves of those near by.
The La Guardia engine is compactly built out of durable metal. Over a long period of time, and under a considerable amount of punishment, it has stood the gaff. For it is a simple enough mechanism and easily understood. The fluid which feeds it is the mystery.
More than one analyst has tried to break down this fluid into its component parts, but, political analysis being what it is, the task has too seldom been approached with scientific detachment. It is difficult to be detached about Fiorello La Guardia. Nevertheless, for the lay chemist it is a fascinating study, trying to find the bases of this fluid, which is bound together by that easily detected substance, ambition.
The Mayor of New York, who very conceivably may occupy an even more dominant position in American life before he is through with what politicians call the Public Service, is a squat and almost ugly figure of a man. I think the word which best describes his physique is ‘pudgy.’ Sartorially, he is not the typical New Yorker. He has a fat face, a short neck, a barrel-like body. Although he is neat, — except in the heat of battle, — his well-fitted clothes do not make him look well-dressed. He affects a Congressional black hat. He is forever putting on or taking off his horn-rimmed glasses. His voice is pleasant, except when it rises to a screech, which is often enough; but it does not carry well over the radio. He likes to shout and pound and make noise, for he was brought up in the hurly-burly of politics in the days before the technique of the fireside chat was invented. He likes to hammer his thoughts home, rather than win you with persuasion or guile. Yet behind his rasp there is an adequate vocabulary; and behind the words (in half a dozen languages) there is a mind which has been sharpened in conflict and not dulled by too frequent forays into the realm of theory. And when the occasion arises he can throttle the explosions and settle down, a third party, to calm and collected mediation, especially if he has respect for the minds of the adversaries or sympathy with one side of their cause.
Because of his impatience with stupidity and his hatred of cupidity he has earned the reputation of an irascible man, a dictatorial individual, and the terrible-tempered Mr. Bang of politics. That he has a temper even his best friends will not deny. They could not, for they have often felt the fire of his scorn. This is not unusual. As chief executive of New York, he has myriad and immense problems, and must keep his mind upon a thousand and one subjects, ranging from the pettiest details to the expenditure of a million dollars. Determined to do his work, and congenitally unable to shunt enough of it off upon subordinates to give him the proper leisure for reflection and contemplation, he lives in a mental whirl which would long ago have wrecked a less lively intellect. The truth, of course, is that he enjoys work, enjoys making others work, despises the sluggard, and from his young manhood has existed in a world of red tape which he refused to let become entangled about his mind or his soul. When he finds laziness, either mental or physical, retarding his progress — he explodes. When he thinks the red tape is drawing too tight — he explodes. When he is thwarted in any phase of his ambition— he explodes. He is not irascible. He merely hates to be balked, and does not care who knows it. He has the makings of a dictator.
This propensity for explosiveness has cost him friends in the past, but it has not kept him from achievement. Coupled with it is another quality, which perhaps best goes by the word ‘irregularity.’ In politics this term is opprobrious, for it means that one has been ‘disloyal’ to the party to which one ‘belongs.’ In Mr. La Guardia’s case the word has been used so often that it has already lost its sting. As far as he is concerned, he has suffered very little for the cavalier manner in which he has ever and again been ‘disloyal’ to the party of his first choice, the Republican. Although the voting public has found it not sinful on his part, it seems to me a dangerous characteristic, for one who has shifted his allegiances as often as he has can hardly be actuated by any deeper political philosophy than is encompassed in the word ‘expediency.’ These three words, ‘explosive, irregular, expedient,’ and the larger word, ‘ambitious,’ do not wholly express the man La Guardia, but as chemicals in the mixture that make his engine go they are extremely important.
All four of them can, of course, be reduced to a single term— ‘politician’; for those are the elements of politics. But in Mr. La Guardia’s case that is being too simple. He is a politician, in the highbrow sense of the word as well as in its more common usage. But, as they say, there are politicians and politicians, and he is of the latter. The record of his years on the public payroll amply proves this, in my opinion, for although it is dotted with the tricks of the exhibitionist and the words of the opportunist, the acts and the words add up to something. He has arrived where he is over the hard road, which means that he has consistently espoused those causes which, although unpopular or demagogic at the moment, have had a way, sooner or later, of attaining historic approval.
As a result of this he has been called every name that, coming from the lips of a Union Leaguer, should be accompanied by a smile. The jaunty, irresponsible Jimmy Walker was the first to use the charge of ‘radical’ against him with telling effect. That was before the depression, when the smile on the lips of the tiger was more to be sought than a place on the WPA. But thoughtful people — and the voting public has been thoughtful these past few years — no longer think of Mr. La Guardia as a Red, despite the official but quite unsolicited support given him by the Communist Party, of which his opponent made such loud and ineffective use in the campaign of last November. They have come to believe that his radicalism has been another name for honesty of conviction, honesty of action, and progressivism in politics. If Mr. La Guardia must be given a label, Robert M. La Follette bore it first. Since then it has been worn by Mr. Roosevelt. And if, in your opinion, Mr. Roosevelt is a dangerous radical, then the Mayor of New York is dangerous, too — and for nearly the same reasons. The one great difference in the two men is that no one has ever accused Mayor La Guardia of being disloyal to his ‘class.’ Through different ways of life, and with varying degrees of confusion, each has managed to pass over a multitude of switches to get on parallel political rights-ofway.
Mr. La Guardia’s political engine started throbbing along an obscure siding in the ominous year of 1914, and most of the journey to the New York City Hall has been accomplished by making judicious turnings to the left. At occasional forks, Mr. La Guardia has either gone down the middle rail or turned right. Here are some of the reasons why he has been called a radical. He voted for the Nineteenth Amendment and he fought bitterly for the repeal of the Eighteenth. He has always opposed child labor. Although a veteran with an enviable and dramatic war record, he opposed the drastic and burdensome appropriations which President Wilson sought to build up the army and navy to a peacetime record in 1919; and although a propagandist for patriotism in the war, he was a scourge in the side of Mr. A. Mitchell Palmer when that gentleman tried to put across the espionage acts. He insulted the Brothers Insull when they were kings of an empire, and he sought to impeach the greatest Secretary of the Treasury since Alexander Hamilton and to keep him from reducing the income taxes at a time when incomes could afford to be taxed. He advocated the five-hour day, the guaranteeing of bank deposits, and the relief of mortgage holders. He passed a law against the indecent use of Federal injunctions in labor disputes. He drove from the bench two corrupt judges and got another judge a severe dressing down. He had the impudence to predict the depression and to write a Republican platform because he did not think that Mr. Herbert Hoover was capable of such strenuous composition. Men like Senators Wagner and Wheeler, Norris, Brookhart, and La Follette, liked him, and he worked with them. He was, and is, a political reformer at heart. But, being a realist, he is a politician before he is an idealist, and an opportunist before he is one with a programme for saving the world. He could never be a Communist if he wanted to, which is a wish farthest from his heart.
And neither, I suppose, could he ever be a Republican — at heart. He first became one because there was nowhere else he could go, except to Tammany Hall. He is a member of that party by expediency, and he joined it years ago, before the phrase ‘economic royalists’ had been used, and before the Democratic Party had been told about the New Freedom by Mr. Wilson. It has been expedient since for him never to get too far away. I think he has a fondness for the party of Abraham Lincoln, and, should the opportunity come, would like to be asked to lead it away from California, or Kansas City, and into the White House, with himself riding the white horse of Progressivism as marshal of the parade.
II
Mr. La Guardia, a second-generation American, was born on the lower West Side of New York, but he grew up with the strong air of Arizona ruffling his black hair and the keen sun of the prairie tanning his swart face. His father, an army bandmaster, had gone to wield his baton at a post in the broom sage, and Fiorello Henry — he was born in 1882 — spent all of his childhood in that exciting and healthy environment. A little squirt of a fellow, he dreamed alternately of being a jockey, a prize fighter, or a ball player— anyway, some kind of man of action. Achilles, his father, wanted him to be a musician; and whether owing to inheritance or to fidelity, he is to-day passionately fond of music. Above all else he loves the Ring.
When he was about fifteen years old the family was transferred to Tampa, Florida. Fiorello had already passed through an Arizona high school and was continuing his education as a correspondent of a St. Louis newspaper. Then the War with Spain broke, and his father died suddenly; he had eaten some rotten army beef. Mrs. La Guardia, who had been born Irene Coen Luzatti and who was partly Jewish, took her only son to her home in Budapest, and in that strange environment he learned to speak Yiddish, German, and French. He already spoke Italian fluently. He picked up a few other dialects somewhere at this time. When he was nineteen he got himself a job as a clerk at the United States consulate in that city, but within a few months he was transferred to Trieste, where he served briefly as an interpreter. In his twenty-first year he was made consul at Fiume.
He was young, impetuous, and very American, the son of a soldier, and a Westerner except by the accident of birth. There is nothing very surprising, then, in his actions in his first responsible post. When he discovered that certain steamship lines were in the habit of accepting immigrants to America whose state of health caused them to be turned back at Ellis Island, penniless and heartbroken, he became very angry. While he was consul, no immigrant was cleared until he had passed a physical examination at the steamship companies’ expense. His first official explosion was thus in keeping with his later tirades in Congress and in City Hall. His second was also typical. When the Austrian authorities asked him to delay the sailing of a New York-bound ship, so that the Archduchess Josepha might, at her leisure, review her subjects who were bound for the land of opportunity, he rebelled. The authorities were aghast, but Fiorello was adamant, and when the matter was finally taken up at Washington his decision was approved by the State Department. A short time after that Fiorello resigned and came home.
While acting as an interpreter at Ellis Island and studying law during the evenings at New York University, he came to know the city well. It was to his advantage that he saw New York through the eyes of a newcomer, quite unjaundiced by a boyhood spent on its streets and undimmed by a young manhood spent in the smoke-filled Tammany clubhouses that might otherwise have claimed him. Living in the 14th Congressional district, where the Irish, the Jews, and the Italians mingled in lower Manhattan close to the dreariness of the Bowery, and possessing the gift of tongues, he quickly became a part of all that he saw. He would have been a useful worker for Tammany, had he been of that stripe. But from the beginning he had been a reformer; he loved a fight, and so he joined the minority and enrolled as a Republican.
A young lawyer with his shingle hanging above a city street soon learns the financial necessity of knowing the political leaders of his district. Young La Guardia became a familiar figure in the Republican clubhouses of lower Manhattan Island, and in 1914 walked up to the district leader and announced that he would like to run for Congress. The party had not even considered putting up a candidate in this predominantly Democratic neighborhood, but, after much confusion over the spelling of his name, he was amusedly told to go ahead. He lost the election, but he got so many votes that Tammany Hall was as astounded as were the Republicans. Two years later they took the young lawyer seriously and he squeezed into Congress with a small plurality, the first Republican to go to Washington from that district in the memory of man. In the meanwhile he had been supporting himself as a deputy in the State Attorney General’s office, a reward for giving Tammany Hall its scare.
Mr. La Guardia has always hated Tammany Hall, but he was never so stupid as to ignore its efficiency. Not having any kind of machine behind him, or enough money to see that his constituents received free coal on a winter day, he knew that after his first defeat he had to pass out something if he wanted votes. What he had to offer was free advice — not moral advice, but hard, legal help in the courts for the pushcart peddlers, the icemen, the shopkeepers of his neighborhood. He gave this freely and made friends. He was a veritable people’s advocate in a corrupt and crowded district during those days before the war. Upon arriving in Washington he did not change. He was hardly settled in his office when he was in a row. Forgetting all about his Republican label, he sought out the House liberals, most of whom were from the Middle West, and joined in their unpopular battle for the liberalization of the House rules. From the headquarters of his party in New York came a warning, accompanied by the threat of a recount of his vote if he did not calm down. Mr. Congressman La Guardia laughed.
Although he had instinctively sat down on the left, he was not a willful enough man to vote against the entrance of this country into the war, or against the draft. A man of action, he learned to fly a plane, browbeat his way into the army after having been refused admittance to the officers’ ‘club’ at Plattsburg because of his lack of height, and got sent to Italy with a bombing squadron. His men adored him because he refused to allow them to fly in unsafe planes, because he was himself injured twice in crashes, because he slashed at red tape. When he was not flying he was making speeches to the Italians, whipping them into renewed patriotism, telling them that the Americans were with them and the war was all but won. His campaign of propaganda after Caporetto was memorable. The Italian Government honored him for it, and he came back a major. He found his friends had already nominated him for his old seat in Congress. A war hero who campaigned without his uniform, he had no difficulty in winning his election. He even had the endorsement of Tammany Hall. At this term of Congress his outstanding efforts were his fusillades against the military appropriations and the espionage acts. And then the Republican leaders called him back to New York because they had a job which only he could do.
III
Fiorello La Guardia became President of the Board of Aldermen of the City of New York in 1920, and the moment that he stepped into that estimable bureau’s chamber the second phase of his political life began. In Congress he had already proved himself a master of parliamentary procedure, a tenacious debater, and an irritant to the political status quo. He loved the give-and-take and rough-andtumble atmosphere of politics, and now that he had become the first Republican in twenty years to win this office he had no intention of being a figurehead. His term was hectic and noisy, and the more austere members of his party threw up their hands, aghast at his lack of dignity. But Mr. La Guardia rightfully knew that dignity was not a weapon against Tammany Hall. Somebody called his tactics ‘ blackguardia ’ and somebody else once told the Comptroller, Charles L. Craig, to ‘hit that little wop over the head.’ Unfortunately the city, then completely under the paw of the tiger, did not take Mr. La Guardia seriously in his violent attacks upon graft and corruption; but if his achievements as aldermanic president were negligible, his experiences helped harden him and gave him an invaluable schooling in municipal politics. Nor is the disaffection with his own party to be taken too seriously, for in those days the alliance between its leaders and Tammany Hall was not wholly imaginary.
This period of his life was marked also with tragedy. While in Italy he had met and fallen in love with a beautiful, dark-haired girl who was a native of Trieste. They had married in 1919, and she had borne him a daughter whom they had named Fioretta. At that time, as has been the case since, Fiorello La Guardia cared little for social activities outside his own home, where he enjoys cooking sumptuous Italian dishes and entertaining his intimate friends. He was supremely happy. Then, suddenly, his little daughter was taken ill. She was but a year old when she died from spinal meningitis. Within a week Thea, her mother, worn out from attending her, died also. For a long time after this his friends were worried about Mr. La Guardia’s health and well-being, but after his recovery from the shock he did the sensible thing — threw himself into his work with a new frenzy, finding an active mind the best cure for despair. Later he married again, a charming woman of German ancestry who was his secretary in Washington. They have two adopted children of whom Mayor La Guardia is inordinately proud. Except when the exigencies of a campaign call for it, they are kept from the public eye, Mr. La Guardia firmly believing that home life and public service are separable.
An anecdote concerning his children, however, is often told. I repeat it here because it sheds, I believe, some light upon his political philosophy, and has some bearing upon the fundamentals of his progressivism. Each Fourth of July he gathers his family about him and reads to them — without bombast, but as a serious matter — the Declaration of Independence.
Returning to the aldermanic chamber, we find Mr. La Guardia scrapping with the party leaders over what he charged was an insidious attempt to scrap New York City’s precious five-cent fare. No politician in New York can escape dealing at some time or other with this sacred issue! This, as much as anything, robbed him of the Republican mayoralty nomination in 1921. But he was successful in his attempt to return to Washington at the next Congressional election, and when he got there he found Calvin Coolidge in the White House.
IV
Fiorello La Guardia has always regretted that he was not in Washington when the Ohio gang was in power. But the silent presence in the White House afforded him a range for his attacks and he made every use of his opportunities. Persistently and consistently he followed a leftward path during the decade that was to come. He was forever on his feet objecting to conditions which he conscientiously believed were wrong. Not long ago he recalled those days in talking with Mr. S. J. Woolf, the artist-reporter for the New York Times, and his apologia is worth quotation: —
‘When anyone wants to change anything he is called either a reformer or a radical. It has been my lot all my life to be called radical. . . . When I spoke in Congress against the wild orgy of speculation I was an alarmist. When I filed a protest with the Comptroller of the Currency urging a check upon the Harriman Bank, I was a. destructive influence. That was just about the time that I suggested spreading employment so as to take up the workers displaced by machines. For years I was a radical because I spoke against the crooked manipulations of the stock market. I was dangerous. Was I half as dangerous as the conservative gentlemen carrying on those manipulations? Ask the investor. If fighting against existing evils is being a radical, then I am content to be called one. But it is strange how many people who called me a radical a few years ago are now backing the things I advocated then.’
There were enough voters in 1924 who believed in his fights against existing evils to return him to Congress. In that year Single-taxers, Farmer-Laborites, Socialists, liberals, and progressives fused their interests and voted for him, thus relieving him of the onus of the Republican label and leaving him freer than before to carry on his campaigns against the ‘high cost of living,’ prohibition, and other ‘abuses.’ Probably no phase of his career, before or since, has been more enjoyable. His natural gusto asserted itself, often in melodramatic fashion, and the enemies he made were the measure of his success.
One day he would arise in the House and pull a piece of meat from his pocket to illustrate his tirade against rising prices. Another day would see him manufacturing beer in the Capitol while defying the police to arrest him. Tricks? Certainly, but the kind of tricks learned in New York political byways turned to effective use in the national arena, where dignity is at a higher premium, but where it can be overdone even as in a board of aldermen’s smoky chamber. More important than his political vaudeville, and more dangerous, were his vehement assaults upon the integrity of a man named Insull, then considered one of the untouchables of American life, his revelations of corruption on the Federal bench, his disclosure of the bribery of certain financial reporters by unscrupulous traders in securities.
Mr. La Guardia discovered that his radicalism was not yet sufficiently appreciated in New York when he campaigned against the smiling ‘Jimmy’ Walker. The playboy of Central Park and the Broadway night clubs found that all he had to do was to arrive late at a meeting and then call Representative La Guardia a Red. It seemed that even the conservative element of the city preferred wisecracks to reform. His former supporters deserted him in droves; there was laughter in Tammany Hall, and contentment in Wall Street. Mr. La Guardia returned to Washington and watched prosperity disappear around the corner. He fell victim to the Roosevelt landslide in 1932, Tammany Hall at last putting him to rout, despite the fact that he had sought the impeachment of Mr. Mellon, who, as much as anyone, he thought was the symbol of what the people had voted into limbo that historic November Tuesday.
As a member of the last Lame Duck Congress, however, he was able to depart from Washington in a blaze of liberal glory. Adolf A. Berlc, Jr., one of the original brain-trusters, made him his lieutenant in the House, and Mr. La Guardia sponsored several acts of New Deal legislation. Most of them were rewritten later, but on such matters as shorter working hours, relief for mortgagees, farm and railroad bankruptcy, and the guarantee of bank deposits, Mr. La Guardia was to all intents and purposes a New Dealer. In those days when party fines meant little and Mr. Roosevelt had dramatically impressed upon the nation the grim realization of the plight of America, Mr. La Guardia, returned to New York, became the man of the hour.
Jimmy Walker was in exile, Tammany was in disgrace, the temper of the people had changed. Not only was there a national sobering up, but in New York City Mr. Samuel Seabury had shown how widespread were graft and corruption. Mr. La Guardia stepped in, and, after the inevitable mumbo-jumbo that precedes any election, gave Tammany Ilall one of the worst. defeats in its history, and charged into City Hall.
V
The swarthy, rotund reform mayor rocked that building with his energy from the first day of his occupancy. He literally swept out its ancient incumbents and replaced them with capable executives without regard to their political alliances — at least, without slavish regard. He stormed, cursed, fretted, pushed his six buttons on his desk in fury, worked almost to exhaustion, hampered by the fact that never before had he been an executive. He was now mayor of the greatest city in the world — and the city was bankrupt. He cut salaries, not the least his own; held innumerable conferences with bankers and state executives, and — to make the story brief — brought order out of chaos. Whatever mistakes he may have made, and there were some, none of them were of sufficient importance to be turned into vital political issues by his opponents in 1937. The worst that Mr. Mahoney could say of him was what Tammany’s Mr. Walker had said in 1929 — that he was a radical backed by Moscow gold! This after four years at the head of the City of New York.
The sad Senator Copeland said he was not fit to continue as mayor because he was a New Dealer. The pugnacious Mr. Mahoney, calling upon Mr. Farley as witness, said La Guardia was n’t a New Dealer, and therefore should be retired. But Mr. La Guardia pointed to the parks and playgrounds, the new highways, the unusually high morale of the police department, the absence of bloodshed in labor disputes, the existence of lawful picketing during legal strikes, the solvency of the city, the dispersal of racketeers, the efficient handling of relief, among many other achievements. Being a politician, he took more credit than was his personal due, but the fact remains that he was the chief executive while all this came about. Even the arch-Republican Herald Tribune said he was the best mayor New York had had in generations, and its neighbor in Union Square, the Daily Worker, said the same thing, and for the same reasons.
Now the mayoral record of the last four years, and the campaign which followed in the autumn, are not without extra-municipal significance. In many ways they are more indicative of future political trends than the clear-cut issue in Detroit, where ownership, management, conservatism, and the A. F. of L. lined up against the avowed candidate of the Committee for Industrial Organization. In New York the issues were far more complex, and they were far more confusing. Mr. La Guardia became, therefore, more than a mere candidate for mayor. Isidor F. Stone, in the New Republic, has put it in this admirable way: ‘Mayor La Guardia is at one and the same time the hope of the Park Avenue conservative Goo-Goos who want to keep Tammany out of office, the New Dealers, and the Popular Fronters. Harnessed to his chariot is the desire of the reactionary Harvey for an alliance . . . against the Democratic machine; the eagerness of New York’s transit interests to unload their decaying properties on the city via “public ownership” before the junkman carts them away; the ambition of New York’s rightwing Socialists to run a labor party; the effort of the Communists to build a democratic coalition against Fascism; the fear of the unemployed lest a Tammany victory leave them at the mercy of the same Catholic reactionaries who blocked ratification of the Child Labor Amendment in New York State; the refusal of labor to be led about any longer by Tammany ward heelers . . . and its determination to keep in office a friendly and progressive, even though undependable, mayor.’
If one translates those issues and influences into national terms, which is not difficult, then one can see the fundamental importance of Fiorello La Guardia — if not as an actual personage within the next three years, at least as a symbol.
VI
Fiorello La Guardia, then, is ambitious, an opportunist, something of an egoist, and a politician. Throughout his career he has, in general, followed along the lines of the broad progressive movement of America. In the past four years he has shown himself a friend of organized labor and he has been efficient in his handling of the problem of relief. He has stood publicly for public ownership of the utilities, even if his yardstick power plant for New York has not materialized. He has goaded the financial interests of his city, but has also managed to let them realize his willingness to ‘play ball’ with them in the city’s interest. His shrill denunciations of Hitler were sincere, but one searches the record vainly to find condemnation of Il Duce; thus one is unable to determine his genuine beliefs concerning Fascism, while understanding the political motives involved in one who depends greatly upon both the Jewish and the Italian city vote.
Understandable also are the political motives behind two of his actions during the recent campaign. But, while they are understandable, they are not reassuring to those liberals and progressives who have been his most ardent admirers. I refer to his endorsement of George U. Harvey, Republican borough president of Queens, and his endorsement of Bruce Barton, the advertising man. Both, in the parlance of the day, are reactionaries. Mr. Harvey is the man who openly advocates the driving out of Communists at the end of a rubber hose and whose whole record has been antiprogressive. Mr. Barton is an admirer of Mussolini, the biographer of Calvin Coolidge, and the advocate of the repeal of as many laws as possible. Mr. Harvey is ignorant of the meaning of any progressive social force; Mr. Barton is not, but his wealth and business position, in the minds of many, preclude the hope of his ever taking the side of labor. Neither is liked by the New Deal, the American labor party, or any of the forces, except the ‘Goo-Goos,’ whose natural alliance has been with Fiorello La Guardia.
Has Mr. La Guardia sacrificed his integrity by taking on these strange partners? In his own mind this is only political strategy; or, if you will, expediency. But more than one observer, privately at least, sees something more sinister in these actions. It goes deeper than Mr. La Guardia’s penchant for opportunism; it is a part of his own confusion; it is in line with his lack of a political philosophy; and it undoubtedly indicates that, certain of reŏlection as mayor, he was making plans already for the future. For Fiorello La Guardia is an ambitious man — ambition is the strongest element in the fluid which makes his engine run.
Mr. La Guardia, a political individualist, has never submitted to the discipline of a doctrine. He has never been completely anything. By instinct, upbringing, and association he has gone along the liberal-progressive track, and has been an outstanding figure in that general movement. It is extremely doubtful if, when he comes to the next switch, he wall swing his engine to the right. But because of his lack of a fundamental philosophy, his dislike of discipline (that is, party discipline), his tendency to seize the main chance, and his determination to drive the engine until it drops apart, there is no reason to believe he will take the right-of-way to the left. Should a political movement be formed by 1940 which would attempt to take in all those elements which combined to reëlect him Mayor of New York, from Union Square across Park Avenue into the Queens borough hall, then the nation might very well hear the La Guardia whistle screaming and the engine humming down the middle road.