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"Are you trying to draw a red herring across the cowardly, contemptible and unjust attack that you have made and published against a great race so gloriously represented by our governor?" reported Candidate LaGuardia. "Answer that, Mr. McKee. and think twice before you send me another telegram." An article McKee wrote for Catholic World in 1915 which slurred the character of the average Jewish student in New York's schools, was thus added as fuel to the leaping fires of altercation.
The Times, Herald Tribune, World-Telegram and Post joined battle for Fusion. The Daily News, Sun and Hearst-papers did yeoman service for Recovery. As the whooping & slamming grew noisier, old Mayor O'Brien felt more and more like a political wallflower. Nobody paid any attention at all to him.
John Patrick O'Brien's speech sonorously accepting Tammany's renomination was loyally cheered by several hundred city employes but, since no newspaper was interested in him, it made scant news. Accurately he observed: "Everyone knows that the 5¢ fare does not permit a sufficient return on the city's enormous rapid transit investment. But the people have chosen to pay the interest on this investment in another form; that is, by taxation." The earnest, bumbling Mayor took credit for having dismissed 8,000 city employes, for saving $15,000,000, even for Samuel Untermyer's four-year financial rehabilitation plan worked out with New York bankers. "I'm glad to be able to pass on to my children," he remarked a little forlornly, "the record of what I tried to do, putting in a full day's work and playing the game, playing a man's card, in bringing a ray of sunshine to those who fell in the battle of the Depression."
On Columbus Day, the pathetic 60-year-old politician stoically declared: "I will lead my party to victory. That's the heart and that's the courage that God blessed me with. Forward and onward, just like Columbus!"