The New York press last week ran down and mangled a political career that until then had looked, fairly promising.
Swarthy, thick-maned Charles Poletti is a left-leaning lawyer, usually politically astute. As New York's Democratic Lieutenant Governor, he ran last November to succeed himself, was also backed by the American Labor Party. He lost by a mere 20,000 votes when Rival Thomas W. Wallace rode in with Republican Thomas E. Dewey. But when Governor Herbert Lehman stepped down to become U.S. Director of Foreign Relief, Charles Poletti, licked at the polls, became New York's Governor.
For 29 days he governed the State. After Tom Dewey's inauguration Jan. 1, Poletti was jobless three days, then on Jan. 4 was taken care of by the New Deal. The job: "special assistant" to War Secretary Stimson. Of his new duties Charles Poletti said: "I don't know what they are. What difference does it make?"
But on Dec. 19 Governor Poletti had paroled 15 New York convicts, twelve of them on recommendation of New York's Parole Board. The other three, all convicted of labor-union terrorism, were freed without Parole Board recommendations. In New York City only the Daily Worker, Communist organ, carried the news. Other papers ignored it for ten days. The Worker carried another story, welcoming the labor terrorists back to the fold. Then the New York World-Telegram dug up the story, belatedly revealed that Poletti had not consulted the Parole Board. Things began to pop. The austere, thorough New York Times reported: "As one of his last acts in office, it was learned yesterday, Governor Poletti commuted the sentence of Alexander Hoffman, C.I.O. union official and Left Wing sympathizer, who was sentenced on Dec. 4, 1940, to four to eight years in Sing Sing for attempted arson . . . and conspiracy."
New York's conservative press charged in. Scripps-Howard's Columnist Westbrook Pegler let go: "Of late it seems that a card of membership in the traitorous organization known as the Communist Party or a record of affiliation with avowed traitors of this group is one absolutely safe certificate of immunity. . . ." He called the commutation a "sordid, nasty deal."
Editorially the World-Telegram bemoaned the "prison-opening impulses of transient, interim governors" and implied that by paroling Arsonist Hoffman, Poletti was currying Labor's favor "as a future political asset."
Hearst's Journal-American poured huge black headlines on Poletti. Out came Hoffman's record of arrests: felonious assault, 1929; assault, 1931; felonious assault, 1932; malicious mischief (planting "stink bombs"), 1937. The tabloid Daily News, strongly anti-New Deal, swung from the floor with a double-truck haymaker, telling how Hoffman, in 1940, was convicted for trying to start a fire in a non-union cleaning & dyeing plant by sending clothes in which had been hidden incendiary phosphorous pellets coated with paraffin (which would melt when heated during the cleaning process).
Only the Times, of all New York's conservative papers, maintained an unruffled calm. It carefully printed all possible news about Poletti's troubles, but editorially it studiously refrained from opinions.