National Affairs: Haruspicy in Albany

While Democrat Averell Harriman told the U.S. about the good government he has brought to New York, his Republican foes fumed in frustration. They insistently pointed out that Governor Harriman drastically underestimated state revenue for 1955, and loaded the taxpayers with an 11% increase in state income taxes to cover a budget based on his error. But there was remarkably little public reaction. One reason: a point about a state budget often gets lost in a maze of statistics, analyses and charts. Last week, however, Oswald D. (for David) Heck, speaker of the New York state assembly, found a way to make the case in a word.

Reading Harriman's 1956 budget message, Republican Heck suddenly leaped to his feet and cried: "Haruspex!" Some of his associates thought of answering "Gesundheit," but others quietly went to the dictionary. Heck soon had Albany reporters flipping through Webster's, after he and Senate Majority Leader Walter Mahoney issued a statement that said, in part: "If, as Governor Harriman seems to infer, Republican clairvoyance was required last year to determine that he did not need the $127 million tax increase which he demanded, our forecast has proven far more accurate than the divinations of the Democrat haruspex, which also failed to foresee an admitted $80 million surplus."

Haruspices, the reporters soon found out, were diviners, usually Etruscans, who deduced the will of the gods and foretold the future chiefly by examining the entrails of sacrificed animals, from birds to bulls. With a word, Speaker Heck had at last aroused public interest in the $127 million error of Haruspex Harriman.