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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 Schénley 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.