New York: Woise Than Ever

Despite the rain trickling down from a train trestle overhead, some 200 people last week gathered around a sound truck on a Bronx street to hear New York City's Democratic Mayor Robert Wagner plead for reelection. Smiling painfully, Wagner shook a few hands, then launched into a pallid denunciation of New York's Democratic machine bosses. The audience response, at best, was mixed. An enthusiastic urchin yelled: "Yay for Wag'ner baby!" A tenement dweller shouted down from his window: "Get outa here, yah bum!" In the crowd, a heckler chanted a bitter litany: "New York is woise than ever, New York is woise than ever."

If the quality of the campaign for mayor of the nation's largest city is any indication, New York may yet get worse. Heading toward primaries next week and the general election in November are four more or less major candidates who have turned the contest into a tragicomedy of charge and countercharge. The four:

Robert Wagner, Democrat-Liberal, was elected mayor in 1953 and re-elected in 1957, both times under the sponsorship of the Democratic organization bosses he is now attacking. His first term was plodding; his second has been studded with proliferating scandals: inadequate or nonexistent school maintenance, graft in the real estate bureau, profiteering in slum-clearance projects, conflict of interest in the city council, extortion in the police department, bribe taking in the controller's office and by inspectors of departments that supervise buildings, markets, water supply, gas and electricity. Trying to hold onto the support of reform Democrats, led by former Governor Herbert Lehman and Eleanor Roosevelt, Wagner last winter demanded that Tammany Boss Carmine De Sapio resign. Emboldened by the applause he got for that move, Wagner decided to drop his machine-honed running mates and pick his own candidates for deputy mayor and controller. That lost him the support of two borough bosses far more powerful than De Sapio: Brooklyn's Joseph Sharkey and The Bronx' Charles Buckley. For this belated display of courage, Wagner earned the endorsement of the New York Times, which admitted that his administration has been "shot through with an accumulation of defects and scandals." But, said the Times, Wagner was unlike Levitt in that he was at least "free of the old clubhouse control." The Republican New York Herald Tribune noted the endorsement "with puzzlement" under the editorial headline: OH, COME NOW, NEW YORK TIMES.

Arthur Levitt, Democrat, ran for a second term as state controller in 1958—and was the only Democrat to win statewide office in Nelson Rockefeller's Republican sweep. With that credential as a vote getter, and as a down-the-line party regular, Levitt was the organization leaders' logical choice to buck Wagner in the primary. Accepting the bosses' decision, Levitt amiably announced that he had received a popular "mandate." Where Wagner's platform style is spare and uninspired, Levitt's is florid and uninspired.