USA > New York > A short history of New York State > Part 46
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Lehman combined a deep-seated interest in reform with undoubted ability as an executive. His administration was seldom-and then only in campaign years-charged with inefficiency, and there was a minimum of friction among his subordinates. His political opponents might complain of his fondness for New Deal reforms, but they could find little to criticize in the way that he administered the government's finances. When he entered office, the Depression was making heavy demands on the state treasury, and an accumulated surplus of $99,303,000 for the fiscal year 1930 3 had, by 1933, become a deficit of $94,428,000. In the next five years Lehman was able to wipe out the deficit, and in 1938 the state had a sur- plus of $6,469,000. For the remaining years of his administration, the state always operated well in the black, and in 1942 the state income tax was reduced 25 per cent. Lehman was a New Dealer in everything but his fiscal policies.
Lehman's outstanding record as a public financier was the product of careful planning and good fortune. It was achieved in part by drastic economies in administrative expenses. While grants-in-aid to localities and appropriations for state services were generally increased, the cost of administration was sharply cut. His success was also due in part to the large amount of federal monies received by New York during the De- pression. Finally, he was able to accumulate a surplus by securing new sources of revenue. In the process New York City became the loser. When La Guardia became mayor, the city was practically bankrupt, and to obtain needed revenue he instituted cigarette, sales, and public utility taxes. But by the end of the 1930's the state had enacted cigarette and
3 The fiscal year at that time extended from July 1 to June 30. In 1943, the begin- ning of the fiscal year was changed from July to April 1. Subsequent references in the above paragraph are to fiscal years.
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utility taxes, and the city had to look for other forms of revenue. Although these taxes helped Lehman build up a surplus, the bulk of the state's reve- nue, as in the past, was derived from taxes on personal incomes, business, motor vehicles, liquor, and ( after 1940) horse racing.
Lehman's appointments as governor provided little indication of his party affiliation. Positions at the policy-making level went to specialists rather than party leaders, while all other jobs in the executive branch of the government were filled with appointees selected and promoted on the basis of their civil service ratings. In addition to vetoing countless bills that would have undermined the civil service, he supported and signed measures prohibiting inquiry into the political affiliations of civil service employees, authorizing group insurance for those on the merit system, forbidding racial or religious discrimination in the civil service, and establishing minimum salaries with annual increments for those in both the competitive and noncompetitive classes. The New York Times wrote that Lehman deserved to be called the "Civil Service Governor"; the Civil Service Reform Association considered his record "excellent"; the Associa- tion of the State Civil Service Employees declared that he was "the out- standing champion of clean and efficient government in the United States" and "the greatest Governor the Empire State has ever had"; and the executive secretary of the National Civil Service Reform League stated that he was "a Governor who sincerely stands for the merit plan-not mere lip service such as most executives give it."
During Lehman's last two years in office his reform programs were forced into the background by the demands of World War II. A militant opponent of the dictators throughout the 1930's, he became an outspoken interventionist after the outbreak of the war. Before the United States became a belligerent, New York under Lehman's direction had created a State Guard to supplant the federalized National Guard, established local defense councils throughout the state, trained thousands of vol- unteers for civil defense, surveyed the state's industrial resources for war, and organized defense production clinics. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a State War Council with Lehman as its executive officer assumed the ultimate responsibility for directing New York's war effort. In addition to doing all within its power to expand military production, the council supervised programs for training war- workers, employed a variety of expedients to relieve the shortage of farm labor, and sought to strengthen the state's civil defense organi- zation. An attempt was also made to prepare the state and its peo- ple for the postwar years. In 1942 Lehman appointed a Committee on Post-War Employment "to start planning now to provide for the security of our citizens after peace has come." Between three and four hundred million dollars from bond issues was earmarked "for use after the war in
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the construction of low-cost housing, grade-crossing eliminations and highways."
When Lehman resigned as governor on December 2, 1942,4 to be- come director of the Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, he brought to a conclusion one of the outstanding administrations in the state's history. A rich man, he had spent his governorship converting the state government into an agency for aiding the poor. Rejecting the social Darwinist notion that the poor deserved their lot and that charity was nothing more than a handout to society's weak sisters, he believed that every human being, by the mere fact of being human, had certain rights and that it was the function of the government to guarantee such rights. In his farewell address, delivered in the midst of war, he restated the principles that had guided him throughout his administration:
My greatest satisfaction has come through the part which I have been privileged to play in enacting enlightened and beneficial social [and] labor legislation. New York State has been a leader in social progress. Our code of social and labor legislation in its humane and its practical aspects has, I believe, no superior anywhere in this country.
I am more strongly convinced today than ever before that wise, sound and workable social legislation is in the interest of all the people of a community. Thinking people must realize that the interests of all groups-worker and management, farmer and city dweller, the rich and the poor, the strong and the weak, are today interdependent. If the chain of our social and economic life is to be strong, we cannot afford to have any weak links. . . .
Throughout my public service, my philosophy of government has been simple and clear. I believe with all my heart that government is for the people. It must be clean and honest and efficient, but it must be more than merely an administrative machine. It must ever concern itself with the solu- tion of human as well as material problems. It must satisfy the needs and aspirations of its people, and in order to satisfy those needs and aspirations it must be flexible enough to meet the changing conditions of the world today.
4 Lieutenant Governor Charles Poletti served as acting governor for the remainder of Lehman's term, which ended on December 31, 1942.
Chapter 33
Republican Rule in War and Peace
The barriers are breaking down. . . . We are on our way, leading the Nation toward a recognition of the great funda- mental that all men are, in truth, created equal. Most impor- tant of all, we are achieving an acceptance of genuine equality of opportunity in all walks of life, and the war against preju- dice and discrimination is being won.
-THOMAS E. DEWEY, June 15, 1950
IN THE election of 1942 the Republicans elected a governor for the first time since 1920. During the next twelve years Thomas E. Dewey and successive Republican legislatures dominated the state government. Al- though Dewey carried to completion many of the programs inaugurated by Lehman, he gave an unmistakably Republican stamp to the govern- ment. Aggressive, efficient, and imaginative, he both revived his party and provided New York with an administration that maintained the gen- eral standards of performance set by his immediate predecessors. Despite different party affiliations, he agreed with Smith, Roosevelt, and Lehman that the governor should lead the state and that the state should lead the nation.
Dewey's industry, ambition, and perfectionism were all revealed long before he became governor. Born in 1902 in Owosso, Michigan, he grew up in a politically oriented family, for his father was Republican county chairman, local postmaster, and publisher of the Owosso Times. A choir- boy and Boy Scout, he set some sort of local record by never being late or absent during his entire school career. After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1923, he went to New York City to study music and law. Although he had to earn his living by singing in churches and synagogues, he was able to complete the regular three-year law course at Columbia Law School in two years. In 1931, after six years of private prac-
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tice, he became chief assistant to George Z. Medalie, United States at- torney for the Southern District of New York. He also joined the local Republican organization and spent many evenings working for the party in his Manhattan district.
Dewey's rapid rise in politics was the direct result of his success as a public prosecutor. He first demonstrated his remarkable ability in this field when, following Medalie's resignation, he was in sole charge for five weeks of the prosecution of Waxey Gordon, a notorious gangster who was subsequently sentenced to ten years in prison for tax evasion. After an eighteen-month interlude in private practice, Dewey returned to public life. In July 1935 Lehman was requested by a "runaway" grand jury to institute an investigation of racketeering in New York City. Lehman re- sponded by agreeing to appoint any one of three well-known Republican lawyers as a special prosecutor. But at Medalie's suggestion, all three pro- posed that Dewey be named. Although the governor thought Dewey too young and inexperienced for the post, he offered him the job, and Dewey accepted.
Surrounding himself with a group of young and extremely able at- torneys, Dewey began a series of prosecutions that were to make him a figure of national prominence. Of the many cases he conducted, none attracted more attention than that of Lucky Luciano, an Italian immigrant who ran the business of prostitution like a grocery-store chain. Luciano and eight others were found guilty, but in the protracted trial it was im- possible to tell whether newspaper readers were more interested in the exploits of the "King of Vice," the lurid and detailed testimony of a suc- cession of prostitutes, or the triumphs of the relentless special prosecutor. Hostile critics asserted (but did not substantiate the charge ) that the trial cost the taxpayers $111,000. But regardless of cost, the press and its read- ers agreed that they had received their money's worth. Dewey's subse- quent investigations of racketeering in the trucking, restaurant, poultry, and baking businesses, while in some respects more significant than the Luciano case, seemed almost anticlimactic, but one observer thought that they were "a sort of front-page Arabian Nights series about New York, with the same hero for each installment."
As special prosecutor Dewey instituted a number of innovations that proved highly effective. Through the care with which he picked his staff and the firmness with which he ruled its members, he prevented all leaks to the press and underworld. He assured witnesses of protection, and once they realized that he would safeguard their lives, they willingly testified. He obtained from the legislature special conspiracy laws which made it possible to convict a group through evidence that linked members of the group individually to parts of the crime. Finally, he relied heavily on "blue ribbon" juries whose members were usually well-to-do and more
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intelligent and better educated than run-of-the-mill jurors. Some critics complained occasionally of the methods employed by Dewey to secure convictions, but the people thought differently. To them he was a "gang- buster," and radio serials that were thinly disguised rehashes of his ex- ploits were never quite as convincing as the original.
It was Dewey's repeated triumphs over the racketeers that set him on the road to Albany and led him up to-but not through-the doors of the White House. In 1937, when the anti-Tammany coalition was looking for a candidate for district attorney of New York County on the La Guardia ticket, Dewey was the logical and obvious choice. Campaigning on his record as a conqueror of the underworld, he was elected by more than 100,000 votes. He was such a popular candidate that on election day Brooklyn officials posted signs on polling booths reading, "Dewey is not running in this county," so that the borough's voters would not feel cheated when they did not see his name on the ballot. A year later he was the Republican candidate for governor and missed defeating Lehman by a narrow margin. As district attorney, he broke up a ring of thieving subway employees, sent dishonest landlords to jail, secured convictions of lawyers for ambulance chasing, and bagged such assorted big fish as Richard Whitney, a prominent Wall Street broker; Fritz Kuhn, head of the German-American Bund; James J. (Jimmy) Hines, a Tammany big- wig; and Louis ( Lepke) Buchalter, a leading member of the underworld's upper classes. Although he was still only a district attorney in one county of one state, the press had made his record known to almost every news- paper reader in the nation, and in 1940 he was the leading preconvention candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. He received 360 votes on the first ballot, but he was soon outdistanced by Robert A. Taft and Wendell Willkie, and the latter was eventually nominated. In 1942, he was elected governor by more than 600,000 votes.
Dewey's victory in 1942 was due at least in part to the political bank- ruptcy of the Democratic party in New York. When Lehman announced that he would not run again, the Democrats had no other candidate of comparable stature. Although James Farley had broken with Roosevelt, he remained Democratic state chairman and was easily the most popular figure in state politics among organization Democrats in New York. Mov- ing into the void created by Lehman's withdrawal, Farley decided to make John J. Bennett, Jr., the state attorney general, the Democratic candidate for governor. Bennett had been an able attorney general, but he had little vote-getting appeal and was considered too conservative by New Dealers in general and organized labor in particular. With Roosevelt's support the New Dealers tried to block Bennett, but Farley had the votes, and his choice was nominated. The party was, however, hopelessly split. The break-up of the coalition that had repeatedly elected Lehman was
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still further emphasized when the American Labor party nominated Dean Alfange for governor instead of supporting the Democratic candidate, as it had done in the past. These developments all but ensured the Demo- crats' defeat, and on election day Dewey polled more votes than the total cast for both his opponents. He ran particularly well upstate, but there is also reason to believe that many New York City Democrats sought to punish their party by voting for Dewey.
The election of 1942 proved to be only the first of many Republican victories in New York. In a 1943 by-election to fill the vacancy caused by the death of the lieutenant governor, the Republican candidate, Joseph R. Hanley, defeated his Democratic opponent by 350,000 votes. Although Dewey lost the state and the nation in the 1944 presidential election, two years later he inflicted a crushing defeat on James M. Mead in the cam- paign for governor. In the same year, Irving M. Ives beat Lehman for the United States Senate. Once more, in 1948, Dewey lost the presidency- this time to Harry S. Truman-but in 1950 he was re-elected governor by more than 572,000 votes. In 1952 Ives was returned to the United States Senate with the largest plurality ever accorded a candidate in a state- wide election. Although Lehman was elected to the Senate in 1948 to fill an unexpired term and was re-elected in 1950, this was evidence of his own, rather than his party's, popularity. For two decades the Democrats had been led by a trio of remarkable vote-getters; in the 1940's no one appeared on the scene to take their place, and a decrepit organization virtually let the elections go by default.
The decline of the Democrats in New York State politics was due as much to Dewey's skill as a party leader as to their own failure of nerve. As governor, he was his party's leader in fact as well as in theory. Dewey's original political sponsor had been Kenneth F. Simpson, the Republican leader in New York County in the late 1930's, but in 1940 Dewey became his own and his party's boss. He was unopposed for the gubernatorial nomination in 1942, and soon after assuming office he built up one of the most effective state-wide political organizations in the his- tory of New York. The basis of the newly revived Republican party in New York under Dewey's leadership was the support of the county chair- men. By skillful-his opponents called it "ruthless"-use of the patronage he held the county leaders in line. Those who were not amenable to this type of control were replaced by others who were. The local bosses, in turn, got out the voters in record-breaking numbers and put their influ- ence behind the governor's program between election days. As was to be expected, this technique was particularly effective upstate, where the Republicans had always been strong, but Dewey also revitalized the party in metropolitan New York. The Republican vote downstate increased markedly, and in 1952 Ives actually carried the city.
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Throughout Dewey's three terms, his all but absolute control of the party made it relatively easy for him to dominate successive Republican legislatures. During the 1930's the Republicans had built up a progres- sive and enlightened legislative leadership that presented a genuinely constructive opposition to Lehman. The most prominent of the new lead- ers, all of whom were in the Assembly, were Speaker Oswald D. Heck, Majority Leader Irving M. Ives, and Ways and Means Chairman Abbott Low Moffat. Young, forward-looking, and opposed to the Old Guard, they became the party's policy makers. But when Dewey became gov- ernor, he assumed this task, and the former legislative leaders either accepted the new dispensation or moved on to other fields. Dewey's power over the legislature was so complete that he was able to institute a so- called "pre-veto" system, by which he informed Senate and Assembly leaders in advance of measures to which he was opposed. These bills were then killed in committee, and he was spared the necessity of publicly going on record against acts passed by his own party. Only on rare occa- sions did some legislators reveal their opposition to this system, and those who did were usually disciplined.
Dewey's power over both his party and the legislature was in the last analysis the product of his popularity with the electorate. He was obeyed because he was a vote-getter. He could, in short, deliver. Many of his political opponents complained that he had an excessively cold personal- ity and that he subordinated all other considerations to his political ambi- tions. But if these criticisms were correct, they had little appreciable effect on a majority of New York's voters. In the northern and western portions of the state he repeatedly piled up huge majorities. In part, his strength upstate was the result of the organization that he had developed, but it was also due to his undoubted appeal to the bias of the region. Sus- picious of the city and all its ways, upstate voters viewed him as a small- town boy who had invaded the metropolis and beaten it on its own terms. To them his career was a succession of battles in which rural virtue had invariably triumphed over urban sin.
The other major source of Dewey's voting strength was in the suburbs, which had expanded rapidly at the expense of the city during the war and postwar years. As land in New York City was increasingly pre-empted by slums and office buildings and by such public structures as bus termi- nals, bridge approaches, and arterial highways, those who could afford it often fled to the suburbs and became commuters. Many of them were young couples who wished to raise their children in what they liked to call "the country." Many, moreover, were urban Democrats who became suburban Republicans. This shift in party allegiance can be explained in part by the fact that the environment into which they were moving was predominantly Republican, and it was both easy and natural to vote the
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way their neighbors voted. The rise in income which had made possible their escape from the city also inclined them toward Republicanism. Fi- nally, it should not be overlooked that Dewey was their kind of candi- date. He, too, was a young man who had made good, and he believed in a type of middle-of-the-road Republicanism that former Democrats found far more palatable than Old Guardism. In the Depression of the 1930's, most young voters were Democrats; in the 1940's the simultaneous rise of Dewey and the suburbs substantially undermined what had once been an important bloc of New Deal voters in New York.
Dewey imparted to the state administration a more partisan tone than had prevailed under Lehman. The major appointive posts went to Re- publicans, most of whom, while admittedly able, were not averse to promoting their party's welfare. In addition, by selecting Republicans rather than members of the opposition to serve as special prosecutors, he broke a precedent that had been followed by his three Democratic predecessors and that had been partially responsible for his own spectacu- lar rise in politics. To spread before the people his own and his party's accomplishments, he established what one veteran Albany correspondent called "the most elaborate public-relations set-up the capital had ever seen." Numerous newspapermen, press agents, and speech writers were given state jobs, and the position of press secretary was created. Although Dewey generally received a good press, he was not overly popular with the reporters, many of whom complained that he often withheld material from them and that he attempted to prevent them from using other sources to obtain information about the state government.
Dewey's enthusiasm over the accomplishments of his administration and party often led him to a degree of partisanship that his opponents considered extreme. Moreover, in praising the Republicans, he was not always altogether just to his Democratic predecessors. He once, for ex- ample, stated that the Democrats had talked for years about reappor- tionment but that it had remained for the Republicans to act on the proposal. What he failed to add was that the Republican reapportionment bill of 1944 made it a virtual certainty that the Democrats would never again control the legislature. In his campaign speeches on his fiscal achievements he never mentioned that he had inherited a surplus from Lehman, and he repeatedly created the erroneous impression that the Democrats had starved the schools. Although students of state govern- ment have found much to praise in the administrations of Smith, Roose- velt, and Lehman, Dewey complained that his Democratic predecessors had bequeathed him a "mess" and "twenty years of cobwebs and dry rot." His record as governor was in many respects outstanding, but in- vidious comparisons-and at times, misleading comparisons-were not needed to prove this point.
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Dewey entered office with a reputation as an efficient, hard-working, absolutely honest public servant. His record as a war governor demon- strated that this reputation was deserved. Although he retained the ad- ministrative framework that he had inherited from Lehman, he expanded the state's war efforts in many areas and shifted the emphasis of the gov- ernment from the protection of civilians to an expansion of military pro- duction. The War Council, with Dewey serving as its chairman, was at various times concerned with such diverse matters as housing for war workers, shortage of farm labor, gasoline rationing, civilian defense, military production, salvage campaigns, lack of cattle feed, care of the children of working mothers, vocational training, the Civil Air Patrol, repair of farm machinery, and conservation of food.
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