Fusion’s Greatest Triumph: Major Parties Play Minor Role in 1933 NYC Mayoralty Campaign

At the height of the Great Depression, New York City experienced one of the most fascinating mayoral elections in American history, a campaign dominated by two distinct new party movements.

The 1933 mayoral race pitted Fiorello H. La Guardia, a fiery former progressive Republican congressman running on a fusion ticket consisting of the GOP and the newly-formed City Fusion Party, against Democratic incumbent John P. O’Brien and the Recovery Party’s Joseph V. McKee.

Given the antipathy of New York City voters for the Republican Party during the Great Depression, La Guardia’s stunning victory in 1933 would probably not have been possible were it not for the long-forgotten City Fusion Party.

Hoping to create an organization that would become a permanent force for good in New York City politics, the City Fusion Party, originally founded in late 1932 as the City Party, an outgrowth of the New York Committee of One Thousand, which in turn was created under the auspices of the Citizens Union — a good government group long opposed to Tammany — quickly organized branches in each of the city’s five boroughs.

Within its first year of existence the Fusion Party enrolled nearly 50,000 voters, an astounding feat for a new party.

Ironically, the Fusionists — including La Guardia himself — initially pinned their mayoral hopes on the relatively popular McKee, but the former acting mayor had taken his name out of consideration when he accepted a position as president of the Title Guarantee & Trust Company earlier that year.

Fusion leaders believed that McKee, a Fordham-educated Wall Street attorney and longtime president of the New York City Board of Alderman, would have been an ideal candidate for the fledgling reform-minded party.

McKee, a former schoolteacher, had served as acting mayor for four months the previous year following the resignation of Mayor Jimmy Walker, the colorful song-writing and wisecracking politician who left office under the threat of criminal indictment some sixteen months before the end of his term.  Personable and well-liked by voters in both parties, McKee certainly would have been a viable candidate on any ticket that year.

After all, the 44-year-old Wall Street banker received an astounding 232,501 votes as a reluctant, last-minute write-in candidate in the 1932 special election to fill the remainder of Walker’s four-year term.  McKee’s integrity set him apart from most of the city’s politicians, making him something of a favorite among voters tired of the cesspool of corruption that dominated politics in the Gotham City during that period. 

When longtime reformer Samuel Seabury and Robert Moses, the controversial “master builder” who reshaped New York City while profoundly influencing urban renewal in the United States, refused to seek the party’s nomination, the Fusion Party turned to the five-foot-two La Guardia, who had anxiously desired the party’s nomination all along.

La Guardia, whose dramatic gestures and theatrical speaking style were well known to New York voters, had long had his eye on the mayor’s office, an ambition that was hardly quelled after unexpectedly losing his congressional seat only nine months earlier when he was unseated by a little-known Tammany Democrat riding a national tidal wave.

The “Little Flower,” as he was dubbed, had tried unsuccessfully to capture the mayoralty on two earlier occasions, losing the Republican nomination for mayor in 1921 and being trounced by the dapper and debonair Walker in 1929 — a race in which he was outpolled by a lopsided margin of 865,549 to 386,384.

Though an outspoken and caustic critic of Tammany Hall, frequently railing against the orgy of corruption that had been ignored by previous administrations, La Guardia — unsure that he could even win the Republican nomination — hadn’t been anybody’s first choice as the 1933 mayoral election approached.  Many GOP and Fusion leaders viewed him as a two-time loser, a perennial also-ran of sorts, while others considered him something of a demagogue.

Judge Seabury thought otherwise.

More than anybody else, it was the courageous Seabury, whose widely-publicized investigation into Tammany corruption forced the boyishly disarming Walker to flee the country with his showgirl mistress in a desperate attempt to avoid prosecution, who encouraged the forces of good government to rally behind La Guardia’s candidacy.  La Guardia was the ideal candidate, the stern, blue-blooded judge told New Yorkers, “because he’s absolutely honest, he’s a man of great courage, and he can win.”

The white-haired Seabury proved prophetic.

Seabury’s blessing carried tremendous weight and the City Fusion Party wasted little time throwing its support to the “Little Flower,” who was also actively seeking the Republican nomination.

As expected, La Guardia easily captured the Republican nomination and prepared for a fight-to-the-finish tussle with the powerful Tammany Tiger in November.  As it turned out, the GOP acquiesced to the highly-regarded Seabury and the City Fusion leadership at almost every step in the candidate-selection process. 

The campaign, however, turned unexpectedly — and dramatically — complicated with the late entry of the Recovery Party’s Joseph V. McKee, the popular ex-mayor initially favored by the fusionists to head their ticket.

In declaring his candidacy on September 29, less than five weeks before the election, McKee argued that La Guardia was “as objectionable” as Tammany’s handpicked candidate, “a poor compromise by a faction of would-be bosses.”  The people of New York City, he declared, “want in the municipal government what they now have in the nation — a new deal.”

Believing that he had Roosevelt’s unconditional support, McKee was clearly running to win.  “A vote for McKee is a vote for Roosevelt,” the Recovery Party nominee told the city’s depression-weary citizens that autumn.

Impressively, the Recovery Party submitted more than 115,000 signatures to quickly earn a spot on the ballot.

Like the City Fusionists, the Recovery Party, which didn’t complete its ticket until October 5 — only a month before the election — ran a nearly full slate of candidates that autumn, including Brooklyn lawyer James I. Cuff for City Controller. Former State Senator Nathan Straus, Jr., the wealthy son of the Macy’s department store founder and nationally-known philanthropist of the same name, was the Recovery Party’s nominee for President of the Board of Aldermen.

Straus, who later served as state director of the National Recovery Administration’s National Emergency Council, campaigned as something of a fiscal conservative, promising to cut the New York City budget by $100,000,000 without affecting essential city services or “reducing the pay of one employee who is doing an honest day’s work.”  The Princeton-educated Straus was determined to end waste and abuse in the city’s Tammany-dominated government.

“This is not a political campaign,” thundered one of the party’s candidates that autumn, “this is a political revolution.”

The short-lived Recovery Party had been organized by powerful Bronx Democratic leader Edward J. Flynn, one of FDR’s closest allies.  Curiously, it also enjoyed the unwavering support of Postmaster General James P. Farley, who simultaneously chaired the Democratic National Committee.  Although Franklin D. Roosevelt remained largely above the fray during the mayoral campaign — later reneging on a promise to meet privately with McKee at the White House — the new party’s ties to his presidency were unmistakable.

Imagine a sitting President or the chairman of one of the two major parties today supporting a third-party candidate. It’s almost unimaginable.

Yet it happened.

Flynn and Farley were convinced that McKee could win in a three-cornered race, especially given O’Brien’s lackluster leadership style.  Coupled with the city’s widespread joblessness — the nation’s unemployment rate peaked at 25 percent that year — O’Brien’s austerity measures, resulting in the layoffs of thousands of municipal workers, surely made him vulnerable.

With friends in high places, McKee easily outspent his rivals that fall, raising more than $265,000 to O’Brien’s $197,000.  La Guardia, on the other hand, reported expenditures of only $106,807.

All kinds of intrigue and conspiracy theories ensued regarding McKee’s candidacy.

Leaders of the City Fusion Party, who symbolically opened their campaign with a rally at historic Cooper Union — site of the gathering that led to the notoriously corrupt Tammany Boss William Tweed’s downfall sixty years earlier — were skeptical about McKee’s last-second candidacy, arguing that it was some sort of clever Tammany trick to siphon votes from La Guardia, thereby assuring O’Brien’s re-election.

Even the Socialist Party’s Charles Solomon seemed to agree, suggesting that McKee’s candidacy was “enough to make the gods laugh.” McKee, argued the Socialist candidate, had been in “collusion with the Tammany gang” for years.

The 44-year-old Solomon, who later served as a New York City magistrate where he earned a reputation as a principled yet somewhat unorthodox judge, spent the autumn campaign denouncing both McKee and La Guardia as agents of the banking industry.  (The Socialist nominee, however, saved his sharpest criticism for the “Janus-faced” La Guardia, whom he delightfully denounced as a “political weather vane.”)

Tammany leaders, on the other hand, viewed McKee’s candidacy differently and were convinced that the former acting mayor’s third-party candidacy was a far greater threat to its survival than the fusion ticket headed by the flamboyant La Guardia.

McKee, after all, had been one of the organization’s sharpest critics, forcefully contending that Tammany Hall had “levied unjust taxes,” splurged in “waste and extravagance” and had given New York “a mockery of government.”

Except for Flynn in the Bronx, most Tammany leaders decided to “sink or swim” with the mediocre O’Brien, who had easily disposed of Loring M. Black, Jr., a six-term congressman from Brooklyn, and two other challengers in the Democratic primary.  Despite O’Brien’s plurality of more than 175,000 votes, the September 19 primary was widely viewed as a repudiation of Tammany Hall, the result of a stunning upset in the city comptroller’s race and the fact that three of Tammany’s eight district leaders went down to defeat.

A Literary Digest in October showed La Guardia leading McKee by twelve percentage points with O’Brien running a distant third with only 12.4 percent of the vote.

The powerful Tammany machine was in trouble. 

As the anti-Tammany revolt continued to grow, panic-stricken Democrats feared the worst and briefly flirted with the idea of replacing O’Brien with former Gov. Al Smith, who was reputedly supporting the beleaguered mayor, but the aging “Happy Warrior” remained curiously aloof to Tammany’s overtures that fall, mystifyingly putting a great deal of distance between himself and the organization that did so much to sustain his long political career.

Stuck with O’Brien, Tammany largely ignored La Guardia and aimed most of its firepower at McKee, a fellow Democrat, during the autumn campaign.

“In any three-sided war, the hostility is always greatest toward the renegade than toward the outsider,” recalled one Tammany politician.  “Things were said about McKee which were very much more abrasive and vituperative than were ever said about La Guardia.”

In retrospect, McKee’s independent candidacy wasn’t a Tammany trick, as La Guardia’s supporters believed, nor a clever ploy by the City Fusion Party to split the city’s overwhelmingly Democratic base, as Tammany was firmly convinced.

As it turned out, it was really an attempt by FDR to quietly build an organization in New York City independent of the notoriously corrupt Tammany machine with which he had been openly feuding for more than twenty years.

La Guardia and the Fusionists simply capitalized on the rift.

“There is only one issue,” La Guardia maintained throughout the campaign, “and that issue is Tammany Hall.”

La Guardia, who had suffered one of the worst mayoral defeats in the city’s history only four years earlier, knew he was destined for victory when he addressed an overflow crowd of 25,000 boisterous supporters at Madison Square Garden a few nights before New Yorkers thronged to the polls.

Pledging to clean up the city while shattering Tammany’s stranglehold on the city government for the first time since 1917, the short and stout La Guardia — promising “a more beautiful and humane city” — rolled to an impressive victory in the heated three-way race.  The Republican-Fusion candidate carried all five boroughs while polling 868,522 votes to 609,053 votes for the Recovery Party’s McKee.

Incredibly, nearly half of La Guardia’s votes — 421,689 in all — were cast on the City Fusion line. It was a stunning achievement.

McKee, who believed that he had been shortchanged by Tammany’s Election Day shenanigans, nevertheless finished ahead of Democratic Mayor John P. O’Brien.  In a stinging rebuke, Mayor O’Brien, who had plodded his way up the Tammany ladder as a loyal ward heeler, garnered 586,672 votes, finishing third in the balloting.

Though unable to duplicate the late Morris Hillquit’s impressive 252,000-vote showing in the 1932 mayoral special election, Socialist Charles Solomon, an able lawyer and labor leader who had been one of five Socialist assemblymen expelled from the New York legislature during the infamous Red Scare, garnered 59,846 votes while the Communist Party’s Robert “Fighting Bob” Minor, the brilliant radical cartoonist for the Daily Worker, finished far behind, polling 26,044 votes.

Solomon’s three percent share of the vote — a sharp drop from the 175,000 votes cast for Norman M. Thomas in the city’s 1929 mayoral contest — began the Socialist Party’s long decline at the ballot box in New York City elections.

Another few thousand voters in the Big Apple cast their ballots for one of four minor aspirants, led by self-styled public watchdog Henry H. Klein, a lawyer and noted corruption fighter who ran under the “Five-Cent Fare and Taxpayer” label, and the Socialist Labor Party’s Aaron M. Orange, a public schoolteacher from the Bronx.  Others supported the Industrial Labor Party’s Joseph Brandon, a conscientious objector who had once been sentenced to death during World War I for refusing to carry a rifle, and Adolph Silver, a legendary soapbox orator who was running on the tiny Industrial Union ticket — both of whom were former members of the Socialist Labor Party, the country’s oldest socialist party. 

Astonishingly, more than 1,119,000 New Yorkers voted for mayoral candidates, including La Guardia, on independent or minor party tickets that year, while barely a million voters pulled the Democratic and Republican levers.

La Guardia’s immense popularity, of course, had always transcended party lines. During his political career, La Guardia ran for office under nine different party labels, including five in one election and once on a seemingly incongruous Republican-Socialist fusion ticket.

“Listen,” he once boasted, “I could run on a laundry ticket and be elected!”  That was more than mere hyperbole; La Guardia, who courageously risked his committee assignments while earning the wrath of his party’s leadership as a Republican member of the U.S. House when he supported Bob La Follette’s independent progressive campaign for the White House in 1924, was twice elected to Congress on third-party tickets.

La Guardia, who arguably might have been the greatest mayor in U.S. history, was reelected as a fusion candidate in 1937— running that year on the Republican, American Labor and Communist tickets, the latter of which he repudiated — and again in 1941 when he won a third term as mayor as the nominee of the Republican and American Labor parties.

While the short-lived Recovery Party petered out in 1934, the City Fusion Party survived for nearly a quarter of a century and was instrumental in the election of Vito Marcantonio to La Guardia’s old seat in Congress in 1934, furnishing the leftist lawmaker with 655 votes in a race decided by only 247 votes.  Along with colorful Minnesota Farmer-Laborite John T. Bernard, a suspected Communist, the 32-year-old Marcantonio, a New York University-educated lawyer and longtime congressional aide to La Guardia, was perhaps the most radical congressman of the twentieth century.

The City Fusion Party also supported La Guardia’s re-election campaigns in 1937 and 1941, but played only a minor role in those later efforts, providing the colorful mayor with about 160,000 votes in 1937 and 63,000 votes in 1941. La Guardia himself joined the left-wing American Labor Party in late 1937.

In the former campaign, the City Fusionists took advantage of proportional representation — a system used during five biennial elections for the New York City Council between 1937 and 1945 — to elect three council members in its own right, including Genevieve B. Earle of Brooklyn, the first woman ever elected to the city council.

Later ignored by La Guardia and forced to compete with the better-organized and much larger American Labor and Liberal parties, the City Fusion Party grew increasingly insignificant, yet continued to appear on the ballot in New York City until 1957.

While thousands of New Yorkers had grown accustomed to seeing the party’s four-leaf clover emblem on the ballot, the party was essentially a paper organization in its waning years, but nevertheless continued to occasionally slate anti-Tammany candidates until its demise.

Though still a symbol of honest and efficient government while stubbornly clinging to its ideals of a non-partisan city government, the party’s last gasp in New York City politics occurred in 1961 when it tried unsuccessfully to give Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr., an additional line on the ballot.

Excerpts from Darcy G. Richardson’s forthcoming book, OTHERS: Third Parties During the Great Depression.  A slightly different version of this article appeared recently in Damon Eris’s “Third Party Independent,” a New York City-based newspaper covering independent politics, business and culture.