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Bedside Manner-The man on whom Tammany last week bestowed its standard was a U. S. Senator. Certain was Tammany that it needed a potent vote-getter to win and who could be better than one of its own sons, Bob Wagner, son of a German janitor, brought up in Yorkville (Manhattan's East Side German district), beloved of Labor because lie is credited with authorship of the Wagner Labor Relations Act. But Senator Wagner, although he called politely at Tammany Hall, declined the honor. So Tammany finally staked its bets on a onetime Republican mayor of Ann Arbor, Mich., New York's other Senator, Royal S. Copeland, M. D.
Dr. Copeland did not become a New Yorker until 1908 when he was 40. At that time he was an eye & ear doctor and he got a job with New York Flower Hospital Medical College. Soon he began to have Democratic leanings and was on good terms with Hearst for whose newspapers he wrote popular health treatises. John F. Hylan, a Tammany mayor who was the darling of Hearst, made him city health commissioner. In 1922 when Al Smith was running for Governor, a piece of good fortune fell into the doctor's lap. Since Smith refused to have Hearst, who wanted nomination for U. S. Senator, on the same ticket, someone suggested Copeland. He proved a surprising vote-getter, for, like elephants, mothers never forget; they had not forgotten all the worthy advice Dr. Copeland as columnist and health commissioner had given them on the care of babies. He was elected, re-elected in 1928, re-elected in 1934, for though Jim Farley and Franklin Roosevelt did not love Dr. Copeland, they did not dare challenge the potency of the bedside manner in politics.
No sooner had he undertaken the mayor's race for Tammany than Dr. Copeland made an unusual announcement. He would likewise enter the Republican primary and welcome nomination on the Republican ticket. The reason for this was obvious: he runs altogether too serious a risk of being beaten in the Democratic primary. That risk is not so much his as Tammany's, for he indicated that he would not resign his place in the Senate to make the race.