LaGuardia v. Hitler

Jewish women are forever holding meetings in New York City. New York's 54-year-old Mayor, short, swart Fiorello Henry LaGuardia, is forever making speeches. No one would have paid much attention to a speech he made last week before the Women's Division luncheon of the American Jewish Congress at the Hotel Astor if the German press had not burst out after it in a paroxysm of rage prodigious even for Naziland.

"A dirty Talmud Jew!" shrieked the DNB, official Nazi press bureau.

"Procurer!" screamed Der Angriff, personal organ of Dr. Paul Goebbels, Minister for Propaganda & Public Enlightenment for Germany's 66,000,000 people. "Jewish lout . . . inciter . . . chief master of gangsters [who] having bribed him . . . have become still more insolent in murdering, looting and in kidnapping children. ... A Jewish ruffian . . . [who indulged in] an orgy of insult before a thousand Jewish women whom he fetched in from the streets."

"In States governed in a modern way," foamed Dr. Alfred Rosenberg's Volkischer Beobachter, "such a criminal as LaGuardia would be rendered harmless either in a lunatic asylum or in a jail."

Cause of Germany's paroxysm was found to be a proposal by Mayor LaGuardia that adjoining a proposed "temple of tolerance" at New York's 1939 World's Fair there be erected "a chamber of horrors" containing a figure of "that brown-shirted fanatic who is now menacing the peace of the world."

The State-controlled press of Germany is usually ignored by the U. S. State Department, but a formal protest from the German Government could not be. Secretary of State Cordell Hull apologized orally: "I very earnestly deprecate the utterances which have given offense. . . . They do not represent the attitude of this Government toward the German Government." Mr. Hull's words--"in this country, the right of freedom of speech is guaranteed by the Constitution to every citizen and is cherished as a part of the national heritage"--sounded like another veiled dig at the regimented Reich, but Germany let that pass and the incident was closed officially.

Mayor LaGuardia cheerfully repeated his remark, Showman Billy Rose put in a bid for the chamber of horrors fair concession, and the German press still growled, but the latter remained conspicuously silent about another passage in the "dirty Talmud Jew's" remarks. He had also said: "I mean the Hitler Government . . . irresponsible . . . because it is . . . financially bankrupt." And a statement much more injurious to Germany than Mayor LaGuardia's appeared last week on the front page of the New York Times, in a cable from Berlin Correspondent Otto D. Tolischus calling German finance "a blacker art than ever."

Before turning their minds from Mayor LaGuardia, observers of the U. S. scene paused to ponder his possible motive. Impulsive and loud-spoken though he always is, he may have fired his Hitler crack as an opening campaign gun. In New York City, as any political nose-counter knows, the hooked far outnumber the Aryan noses. New York's mayoralty situation is about due to warm up for the election this autumn. With a world's fair coming on in 1939, the next Mayor of New York will be a fine fellow indeed.

Mayor LaGuardia won on his Fusion ticket in 1935 with 868,522 votes, 300,000 less than the combined total of Tammany's John P. O'Brien (586,672) and Postmaster-General Farley's Joseph V. McKee (609,053). Talk of a Tammany-Farley deal to give Tammany the mayoralty this year and Farley the governorship of New York in 1938, is lively.* However, except for handsome Grover Aloysius Whalen, who would relish neither a licking nor the loss of his $75,000 job as glad-handing board chairman of Schenley Products (liquor), no potential candidate with any great popularity has yet loomed on the Tammany horizon. Fiorello ("Little Flower") Henry LaGuardia, Protestant, New York-born son of an Italian father and part-Jewish mother, was a registered Republican in 1936, plumped for Roosevelt and Governor Lehman last autumn, may be able to command this year's nominations by the Republicans, Fusionists and the locally potent American Labor Party. Insiders say he may even invade Tammany's domain, seek the Democratic primary nomination.

*Farley-for-President in 1940 is beginning to be mentioned as Franklin Roosevelt's deep-laid plot for guiding the country's destiny after his second term.

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