A New Kind of Tiger

(See Cover)

Until the Democratic Party meets a year hence to nominate its candidate for President, the U.S. political grassroots are in for a real combing. Last week, in a symbolic scene, Presidential Hopeful Averell Harriman and Presidential Hopeful Adlai Stevenson met at Stevenson's Libertyville (Ill.) farm, sat on white wicker chairs and gazed around at the smooth lawns. In a tone that meant he was merely being polite, Ave murmured: "Your grass is greener than mine." Adlai said nothing; he just chuckled.

In nearby Chicago most U.S. state governors, attending their annual conference and busily swapping guesses on 1956, agreed that Adlai's grass was indeed the greener--but that Ave's had considerable promise.

And in Manhattan, the man who is responsible for cultivating Harriman's political future retired early in his apartment at 37 Washington Square West. Harriman's head political gardener, Carmine Gerard De Sapio, sachem of the Tamawa political club, leader of the First Assembly District South, Boss of Tammany Hall,* National Committeeman, New York Secretary of State, who will control the largest state bloc of delegate votes at next year's national convention, went to bed with a slight fever. Carmine De Sapio* had the summer sniffles.

His sneezes and wheezes aside, what hefty (6 ft. 1 in., 196 lbs.) Carmine De Sapio says and does for the next few months will be topics for endless speculation by politicians and pundits. For De Sapio's political skills will go a long way toward deciding whether the Democratic Derby is to be a real horse race or a Stevenson walkaway. As Harriman's political trainer, and as a man who has spent a lifetime preparing himself for the part of kingmaker, De Sapio is one of the most fascinating figures on the U.S. political landscape. He is a new kind of Tammany tiger.

Kitchen-Table Medici. The new kind of tiger keeps his nails closely trimmed and highly polished, spreads a heavy coating of talcum over his blue-shaven jaws, wears dark blue suits bought (price range: $75-$90) at Abe Stark's Brooklyn store, has the worldly and weighted mien of a Medici, and goes by the nickname of "The Bishop." He lives in a four-room apartment furnished in a style something less than half way between 1920 Grand Rapids and 1955 Park Avenue. There, one recent morning, Carmine De Sapio was taking his own sort of grassroots samplings.

By 8 o'clock, De Sapio had begun the workday that would last for 18 hours (seven days a week). His wavy black hair, streaked at the temples with silver, was meticulously combed. The talcum was in place. He wore the tinted glasses that are his trademark. He sat at a grey, formica-topped kitchen table and, in the manner of a man aware of his clothes, hiked up his big shoulders, thereby pulling up his coat-sleeves to reveal his gleaming cufflinks. Passing through the kitchen was De Sapio's 17-year-old daughter Geraldine (whose fierce pride in her father has led to her attaching to his initials. C.G.D., the phrase, "Country's Greatest Democrat"). About to begin her freshman year at Notre Dame College on Staten Island, Geraldine is working this summer, but not very hard, as a stenographer in De Sapio's national committee-man's office. That morning she was late. De Sapio looked anxiously at his watch. "You better get going," he admonished. "You want to get docked?"

Since dawn, the telephone had been ringing. At 8 the house phone began croaking as the doorman, 16 floors below, helped to screen visitors. De Sapio's wife answered the calls. De Sapio stayed at the kitchen table, talking to a visitor he deemed highly important.

The guest was a pollster who had just completed a postcard survey, ordered by De Sapio, as to the presidential preferences of Democratic voters in New York state. De Sapio places great stock in his polls, used them to confirm his choices of Robert Wagner (over Vincent Impellitteri) for mayor of New York City in 1953, and of Harriman (over Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr.) for governor in 1954. Says De Sapio: "You can't impose your will on the people any more. If they select the candidate in a poll, they'll elect him." De Sapio's surveys also serve the practical purpose of deflating the political stock of the candidates he plans to oppose, and inflating the prestige of the man he favors. Carmine De Sapio has lost some elections--but he has never yet lost one of his polls.

Now he learned that he had won an other. The pollster reported that among New York Democrats, 76% are foursquare behind Averell Harriman for President, only 19% favor Adlai Stevenson (a diehard 1% named Jim Farley, while 4% are undecided). The Boss of Tammany Hall was immensely gratified to receive the glad--but not unpredictable--tidings.

A Long Row to Hoe. For a leader of Tammany to be taking postcard surveys like a sort of political science professor must set the bones of Boss Tweed and Dick Croker to rattling about in their coffins. But the public-opinion poll is only one of the many ways in which Tammany Hall, under De Sapio. has changed, is changing, and will continue to change.

When De Sapio seized the leadership of Tammany Hall in 1949, he found himself in command of a rotten, rat-infested political hulk. From its days of corrupted power, Tammany stank. It exacted a heavy price in public money and civic decency for a service. To New York, as to many another U.S. city in the period 1820-1920, came immigrants by the thousands and by the tens and hundreds of thousands--Irish driven by famine, Italians by population pressures, Jews by persecutions. These were not all or mostly the brave or the gallant; many were the fearful, the rootless, the lost. Tammany cared for them when the U.S. Government and most of its higher-minded citizens were unwilling or unable to do so. Tammany fed them, led them, got them houses, found them jobs--and used their votes to sustain itself in power.

Tammany Boss Richard Croker was a harsh, cold man. But even Croker well understood the function of Tammany Hall, and he could speak of it with eloquence and emotion. "Think," he said, "what New York is and what the people of New York are. One half, more than one half, are of foreign birth . . . They do not speak our language, they do not know our laws, they are the raw material with which we have to build up the state . . . There is no denying the service which Tammany has rendered to the Republic. There is no such organization for taking hold of the untrained, friendless man and converting him into a citizen. Who else would do it if we did not? Think of the hundreds of thousands of foreigners dumped into our city. They are too old to go to school. There is not a mugwump in the city who would shake hands with him. They are alone, ignorant strangers, a prey to all manner of anarchical and wild notions."

Tammany, said Croker, "looks after them for the sake of their vote, grafts them upon the Republic, makes citizens of them, in short; and although you may not like our motives or our methods, what other agency is there by which so long a row could have been hoed so quickly or so well?"

Here Comes the Commander. But the torrent of immigration after 1920 was slowed, by national law, to a trickle. The children of the foreigners went to U.S. schools and learned U.S. ways. The welfare state, with its vast governmental social services, sublimated and institutionalized the old relationship between the political machine and the helpless. After Charles F. Murphy, the bosses of Tammany Hall lived with their memories and on petty political thievery, fought among themselves, and scratched their heads in wonderment at their low estate. Then Carmine De Sapio came along to tell them what had happened, and how a different Tammany might live in a different world.

Where the old Tammany used to pass around food baskets and coal buckets, De Sapio's Tammany makes public-minded donations to blood banks. Where the old bosses packed the City Hall with hoodlums and hacks, De Sapio helps to find good men--Tammany men, that is--to work in Mayor Robert Wagner's administration. Says Wagner: "I have never made any commitments to Carmine." Then he adds: "Of course, it's often good to get his reaction to an appointment because his advice is usually good." Where the old bosses chewed cigars in back rooms, De Sapio sees himself as Tammany's good-will ambassador ("He's to Tammany what Commander Whitehead is to Schweppes," says an admirer). He averages a dozen speeches a week (generally beginning, "I am very happy to be here tonight") before all sorts of groups, ranging from Israel Bond Drivers to the Harvard Law School Forum.

Where the old Tammany was formerly organized from the top down, De Sapio sponsored a new law which will make it much easier for insurgents to become Democratic district leaders by direct election.

Long Live the King. De Sapio had to fight every inch of the way to where he is. Even his nativity carried a brand that still sears his political outlook. He was born 46 years ago, an Italian in an Irish sea. The lower Greenwich Village neighborhood of his birth was about 95% Irish, about 5% Italian. (Today, the ratio in that neighborhood is almost precisely reversed.) His father, Gerard De Sapio, came to the U.S. at the age of ten from Avellino, some 30 miles inland from Naples. Recalls Gerard: "We were on a flat-bottomed scow, maybe like the Staten Island ferry, if you know what I mean, but I thought it was the greatest ship in the world. I used to go up on the deck and look at the sea and dream we were all going to be rich." Carmine's mother, Marietta, was born in New York of Avellinan parents, and a shrewd, enterprising girl she was: by the time she married at 17, she had bought a couple of horses, hired some drivers, and was running her own hauling business.

With Carmine, Marietta was in labor for six days. During that time, Avellinans camped anxiously and uproariously in the De Sapio apartment. Says Marietta: "When my Carmine came, God bless 'im, it was like I had a king born. Altogether, the people stayed in the house nine days--maybe 30 of them. I was very sick, but I had no time to think about it. We ate and sang and had a big party all the time. Carmine was a king."

Carmine found out soon enough that kings are made, not born, in New York's racial and cultural jungles. De Sapio still winces when reminded of the "Wop" cry that came at him from all sides in his boyhood. The fact of his Italian ancestry has followed him always. It held him back in politics for precious years. De Sapio is talking about the old Irish bosses when he says, with low-keyed but intense anger, "I was the first leader they really gave the treatment to; I had to win three elections before they would seat me."

Even after he became Tammany's top tiger, De Sapio was plagued by his Italo-Americanism. When Racketeer Frank Costello (born Castiglia) casually told the Kefauver committee that he knew De Sapio "very well," the public assumed the worst. After all, weren't both men Italians? "What do I have to do?" asks De Sapio. "Send a special scout ahead all day everywhere I go to case a joint before I step inside? About a week ago, I was having lunch with some friends at one of the best restaurants in town./- We're all having a pleasant time, when suddenly someone comes up and tells me Costello is in the next room. Well, I called the owner and asked him, look, should I leave? No, he says, that's all right. He's going in a minute. Stay where you are. So I stayed, Costello left, and I never even saw or talked to him. But some people can construe that to mean all sorts of things. It makes ya sick."

One of De Sapio's reactions to his problem is to bear down on the Italians around him. An aide says: "If an Italian name comes up at the Hall for a prominent public job, Carmine goes into his background with as much thoroughness as J. Edgar Hoover, a thing he never does with an Irishman or a Jew." De Sapio can also set a personal example. His present job as Secretary of State pays him $17,000 a year, the most he has ever made, and never once in his career has there been any evidence that he makes money from hidden sources. If Carmine De Sapio is acting when he talks about personal honesty and political integrity, then he is indeed a magnificent actor.

"I don't want to get sentimental or dramatize this thing," says De Sapio, "but I want to tell you--I swear to God that if the day ever comes when those guys or their kind [Costello & Co.] have any hold over me whatever, I'm going to get out so quickly it'll make your head swim. The thing you have to remember is that an awful lot of people are depending on me--on my political integrity--for their political futures, their jobs--everything. I couldn't possibly afford to get mixed up with mobsters or hoods, and believe me. I don't intend to--ever."

Tammany's new public-relations approach may either be sincere or "sincere"--but it is certainly the reverse of the old easy, open cynicism. There have been no grave city political scandals involving De Sapio's men, and until there are, fairness requires the assumption that things are better in City Hall--although experience whispers a caution against a conclusion that graft has stopped. As for municipal services, New York is still far behind many other cities, but its filthy, potholed streets and clumsy police may be blamed as much on an apathetic citizenry as on Tammany Hall.

"He Would've Been a Judge." Carmine De Sapio, the first Italo-American leader of Tammany Hall, understands only a few words of Italian (he recently sat next to an Italian diplomat at a dinner, listened politely for an hour, did not learn until later that he had accepted an invitation to visit Italy). He does not remember ever hearing his parents converse in Italian; quick-witted Marietta and hard-working Gerard De Sapio spoke English, tried to teach their son that he was an American, pure and simple. Between them, they established a solid little trucking business, came to own a stable of 14 horses. They lived in a comfortable if modest first-floor apartment, with their stables out back. De Sapio recalls the stablemen "often taking a short cut with the horses through the hall." Young Carmine helped out in the stables, brushed and curried the horses "until you could see your shadow in their coats," and entered them in the annual parade for work teams up Fifth Avenue (he won a blue ribbon at 13).

He had enduring qualities. As a boy he was quiet and reserved; he still is. He had no capacity then for making intimate friends; he still doesn't. He worked tirelessly; he still does. He helped keep the accounts for the De Sapio trucking firm, hustled new customers, many times was out on the docks at 3 a.m. on hauling jobs. He planned to be a lawyer, took pre-law courses at Fordham and attended night classes for a year at the Brooklyn Law School. But iritis, a chronic eye ailment that was the residue of an earlier bout with rheumatic fever, ended his schooling. (His mother still mourns his failure to become a lawyer, saying, "A solid thing. He would've been a judge by now.")

Experience with Frogs' Legs. Foreclosed from the law, De Sapio got into politics. "I never planned politics," he says. "You just find yourself in an environment. You get deeper and deeper. You get activated." As an activated young man De Sapio made himself useful around the Huron Club, long the Tammany stamping ground and ruling place of the Finn family, beginning with "Battery Dan" Finn, then his son, then his son's son, Sheriff Dan Finn. "I carried coal baskets around the neighborhood. I used to go down to the markets, let the merchants know it was the Democratic Party calling, and get them to give us turkeys to hand out to the voters." He ran errands for the district captain, chauffeured for Court Clerk Tommy O'Connell. Old Tommy once took Carmine to a restaurant and ordered frogs' legs, the first time De Sapio had ever heard that they could be eaten. Just as De Sapio took his first bite, O'Connell leaned over on his shoulder, dead of a heart attack.

Sheriff Finn wangled De Sapio a job as secretary to City Judge Vincent S. Lippe at $3,500 a year, and that put De Sapio in a position to marry Theresa Natale (her friends call her Tess, her husband calls her "Girlie"), a pretty secretary from Hoboken whom he had met at a dance several years before. By now, De Sapio was obviously a rising young pol, and Sheriff Finn, a pallid imitation of tough old Battery Dan, was on the skids. In 1939, egged on by Huronites dissatisfied with Finn's sorry leadership, De Sapio founded his own Tamawa Club (he made up the name, thinking it sounded properly Indianish) and stood against Finn for district leader. He was elected.

This was unforgivable. "In those days," recalls De Sapio bitterly, "the Irish leaders used to give the Italians important-sounding jobs--without power--to keep them happy; something with a nice fancy-sounding title, like Superintendent of Sanitation, that an Italian would love." But district leader? Never. Tammany's executive committee refused to seat De Sapio. When De Sapio's followers picketed both the hall and Finn's office, Finn cried foul. "It's in line with all the tactics they've been using," he said. Then, darkly: "I might even say it smells strongly of Communism."

De Sapio fought Finn for district leader again in 1941, won again, and was again refused Tammany's recognition. In 1943, with another De Sapio victory, the Tammany sachems at last gave in (partly because Finn had become involved in a factional dispute with Tammany Leader Mike Kennedy). That year De Sapio took his place on the Tammany Hall executive committee. Within six years he was the Boss.

"I Gotta Go On." His rapid ascension came partly because Tammany was torn by factionalism, partly because of his capacity for work and his attention to political details, partly because the late Bronx Leader Ed Flynn, the real power in New York politics during Tammany's dog days, spotted De Sapio as a comer. Says Julie McArdle, who was Flynn's secretary for 20 years and is now De Sapio's: "I remember Mr. Flynn saying Mr. De Sapio was the only Tammany leader he could sit down with since Mr. Murphy, and not have to talk out of the side of his mouth.'' Flynn advised De Sapio, brought him along, and was delighted to see him made leader of Manhattan, the borough just south of Flynn's Bronx.

But for all Ed Flynn's influence, he could not make De Sapio's position secure. Beneath De Sapio's shaky perch slavered a whole litter of lesser tigers just waiting for him to make his first slip. He slipped, and soon. With Flynn, he supported Judge Ferdinand Pecora, an honest man cursed with every outward attribute of the typical Tammany stooge, against a Tammany outcast. Vincent Impellitteri, who looked to the voters like a brave little David slinging stones at a Goliath. "Impy," without machine support, won easily. Never had Tammany Hall suffered a more galling defeat. De Sapio was on the way out; at one point he managed to hold on by only two committee votes.

Then, with the cold introspection that may be his greatest political strength, De Sapio took stock of himself and his situation. "After Pecora," he now says, 'I felt something drastic had to be done to disprove the public impression of me and my organization. As time went on, I could only see that, unless we put our house in order, the Democratic Party in New York would have no value as a party at all. I watched very carefully for the right places to push for or against the right program."

As he continues, the careful, self-conscious diction breaks down, the sidewalk elisions appear. "Either we were gonna get the confidence of the people or perish. I'd been in the business a long time. It was the only one I knew. I figured I'm in so deep I gotta go on."

From this assessment came the postcard polls, the dogged rectitude, the organizational reforms, the constant salesmanship--and, most important, the elections of Bob Wagner as mayor and Averell Harriman as governor.

Arabs & Oaths. He still has problems, scores of them, nearly all deriving from the scarcity of hours in the day. No sooner does he leave his kitchen table in the morning and pass through the Moorish lobby of his apartment building than he is besieged by a horde of political suppliants who have been crouched there like Arab beggars since daybreak. No sooner does he arrive at his office as Secretary of State than in troops a platoon of prospective cosmetology board officials, ready to have De Sapio administer the oath in which, as required by law, they swear to adhere to the Constitution of the United States of America and to the constitution of New York as they supervise the state's hair wavers. Then, moving uptown, he holds forth for at least a few hours each day in his national committeeman's offices in the Biltmore Hotel. On Mondays and Fridays De Sapio holds court across the street in the quarters of Tammany Hall, whose seediness belies their Madison Avenue address.

And all the while he is trying to chart the presidential candidacy of the Governor of New York, Averell Harriman.

"Hard, Hard!" How can Harriman overhaul Stevenson for the Democratic nomination? How, if nominated, could he have a prayer against Dwight Eisenhower? For his answers, De Sapio can only draw on his rugged New York political schooling. In discussing the national situation, he likes to dwell on his experiences with Republican Tom Dewey (De Sapio insists that Dewey, not Candidate Irving Ives, was the real loser in the 1954 gubernatorial election).

"I say that the Eisenhower myth of invincibility in the White House is comparable to the Dewey myth of invincibility in Albany," says De Sapio. "I may be wrong. These are my ideas. I have discussed them hardly at all with leaders from any other state. But my experience beating Dewey here leads me to believe that the situations are closer than people think.

"Dewey was a cutie. I don't think Eisenhower is half as cute as Dewey. His strength is in being folksy, homey, and that puts a little different light on beating him, but essentially the situations are the same. Now Dewey was a master at looking good. If there was a scandal in his administration, he investigated the Democratic Party--and got away with it. That State Crime Commission stuff--all directed at me, don't kid yourself . . . O.K., what could I do?

"I waited for him to slip--just a little --then I banged him." De Sapio clenches his big fists in front of his chest. "Banged him. He made two mistakes. He put through the rent increases and raised the subway fare to 15-c-. That was enough.

"Now I say the way to beat Eisenhower is to bang him. Hard. Hard! I don't know exactly when, but soon, soon. He is not invincible. We have plenty to work with. We have the record of this Congress, which put patriotism above partisanship in foreign policy so that he could effectuate the Democratic policy he's following. The Democratic Congress freed him from guys like McCarthy and Jenner. who had the executive branch in their hip pockets. We have the fact that his Administration has slipped on things like Dixon-Yates, Talbott, and so on. These facts are enough to work on. They're enough because they detract seriously from the very things--his talents for appearing folksy, homey and highly moral--that are supposed to make Eisenhower so strong.

"All of this of course assumes he is going to run. I am assuming he is going to run until he says he isn't. He is the toughest man to beat. I think he can be beaten."

Carmine De Sapio passionately believes that Ike can be licked. What is more, he thinks that Averell Harriman (managed by Carmine De Sapio) is just the boy to do it. He may be wrong, he may be right. He is certainly going to try to find out whether the people can be made to want what he wants.

* Tammany Hall began as a club, but for more than 130 years it has been the official organization of the Democratic Party in New York County (Manhattan). Many U.S. political clubs have come to dominate their party locally; Tammany is one of the very few that has actually become legally merged with the party machinery. Its members are proud of the name Tammany Hall, but the official name of the organization, placed on the primary ballot as such, is The New York County Democratic Committee. The other four counties in New York City--The Bronx, Queens, Kings (Brooklyn) and Richmond (Staten Island)--all have their own Democratic committees, which are sometimes allied with Tammany, sometimes dominated by it and sometimes at war with it.

* His first name is pronounced to rhyme with "far mine." The second syllable of his surname rhymes with "map."

/- The place: Danny's Hideaway, which is merely expensive.

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