End of Tammany?

It never occurred to Christy Sullivan that the Tammany Tiger might turn on him. All his life he had stood for the Tammany kind of loyalty; in ten years in the New York State Senate he always voted as he was told; in 24 years in Congress, he never made a speech.

At 71, he was the last white-haired, Paddy-faced survivor of the old Sullivan clan which was the Bowery's gift to Tammany: notorious "Big Tim" and "Little Tim" Sullivan (no kin to Christy) and "Big Florrie" Sullivan (Christy's brother). In 1937 Tammany had unanimously elected Christy Sullivan its leader, and only once had Tammany ever stopped playing follow-the-leader long enough to depose a boss.*

After Tammany lost its second straight mayoralty election under Sullivan last November, District Chief Jeremiah T. Mahoney wrote him a letter that would have stung a less stolid man: ". . . The frightful defeat just inflicted . . . [was] due to your mismanagement and bad leadership. . . . The word Tammany . . . has become a load that no one can carry. . . . Throughout the nation it has become a term of opprobrium and a symbol for everything that is rotten and sordid in public life. . . ."

Old Christy Sullivan shrugged the critics off. Only mildly annoyed at this interference with his leisurely tastes for race horses and good food, he grumped: ". . . A disappointed seeker after power. . . ."

But there was more to the revolt than search for power, or the yen of new-day Manhattan Democrats to burn Tammany's old linen. Even the most hard-boiled ward heelers knew that Christy Sullivan had stubbornly helped beat his own ticket by running Lawyer Paul P. Rao, opposed by all Manhattan and Bronx bar associations, for Supreme Court Justice. They knew that Tammany, cut off from Federal patronage and an also-ran at the polls, was slowly starving to death.

Last week the rebels asked Sullivan to resign. Still confident, he demanded a vote. His opponents, none too sure of themselves, drafted a weasel-worded meeting call "for the purpose of creating a vacancy in the leadership."

Before the meeting Christy Sullivan sat in his glass-paneled office in Tammany's red brick Wigwam, his face a little ruddier than usual, his thin lips pressed tight. His friends gathered near by, his foes outside a lobby railing. The executive committeemen filed into their third-floor chamber. After an hour one of them ran down the stairway, jerked his thumb over his shoulder like an umpire, shouted: "Out!"

At the showdown, 21 district chiefs had voted against Sullivan, only 13 for him. The rebels began talking about changing Tammany's name, abandoning its Wigwam, burying the 153-year-old Tammany Tiger for once & all. The new leader, to be elected at month's end, may be Tammany's last.

Said Christy Sullivan, used to taking things as they come: "I'm very happy that I will still be playing politics in a small way."

*John F. Curry, ousted in 1934 for a series of wrong guesses: backing Al Smith instead of Roosevelt for the Presidency; sticking by Jimmy Walker; opposing the nomination of Governor Lehman; foisting bumbling John Patrick O'Brien on the city as mayor.

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