National Affairs: City Sewers

Some day, graft charges against municipal officials may accumulate above ground, perhaps in connection with airports or chutes for rockets to the moon. For the present, sewers are the conventional source of civic turpitude. Last fortnight's effluvia from the sewers of Queens, a Borough of New York City, were characteristic of a predominant type of big-city government in the U. S.

The borough of Queens has had for its president since 1911 a corpulent Irish-American, Maurice E. Connolly, whose father used to hoe corn and dig potatoes where all is apartment buildings, pavements and sewers today. President Connolly, next-to-youngest in a family of eight, climbed to fame by willing work for the politicians whom he found in power when he emerged from the public schools and Columbia University's law department.

In 1914, President Connolly decided that the sewer construction that had to be done in Queens was "the biggest job in the country." He told the civil service commissioners that he wanted "a man having peculiar knowledge of sewer construction" to boss the job. He said he had found just such a man in James Rice, a graduate of English Army schools, who had (according to Mr. Connolly) supervised more than $100,000,000 worth of sewer and road construction in the Far East and whose advice was constantly being sought by U. S. Sewer contractors.

In subsequent testimony it developed that Mr. Rice had built only one $300,000 sewer in the Far East, that he was a free lance engineer who was taking "anything I could get in an engineering way." After he had been bossing "the biggest job in the country" for three years, Chief Engineer Rice wrote a new feature into the specifications for Queens sewers. After this specification was inserted, sewer assessments soared. Taxpayers grumbled, politicians muttered about graft, but nothing was done until the past Autumn when Lawyer Henry H. Klein, representing a group of Queens taxpayers, charged that $8,000,000 had been "wasted" by the Queens sewer builders. It developed that the only kind of sewer pipe that would meet Chief Engineer Rice's specifications was a patented product for which one John M. Phillips, good friend of President Connolly's, had the sole sales agency in Queens.

A newly-elected alderman in the Flushing district of Queens took over Lawyer Klein's evidence and charges and passed them up to Albany, asking Governor Smith to suspend and investigate the entire Connolly regime. Since President Connolly is a Democrat, the Republican Legislature of New York yearned to conduct this inquiry. In Manhattan, Mayor James J. Walker yearned to conduct the inquiry because President Connolly had opposed Mayor Walker's election, being a political brother of famed John F. Hylan, Mayor Walker's old-style predecessor.

But Governor Smith acted with dispatch, and ordered the inquiry himself. Last fortnight he appointed Justice Townsend Scudder of the New York Supreme Court to hear the evidence. Justice Scudder in turn chose special counsel to collect the evidence and prosecute. Justice Scudder's choice of a prosecutor was interesting because it brought into play against the Irish-American political tradition represented by President Connolly, two wholly opposite traditions personified in Lawyer Emory Roy Buckner.