In Philadelphia

Last week the nation's First Republican City remained Republican, but only after a Democrat-turned-Republican and a Republican-turned-Democrat had given it one of the wildest and weirdest mayoralty election campaigns in its history.

Last September Philadelphia Republicans nominated S. (for Samuel) Davis Wilson, a jack-of-all-political-trades, for mayor (TIME, Sept. 30). Once an assistant to the Attorney General of Vermont, once an assistant to the U. S. Senate's chaplain, once an assistant to Princeton's Bill Roper in organizing the Woodrow Wilson Independent League in Philadelphia, Davis Wilson assisted shy WillB Hadley two years ago to become Philadelphia's treasurer on a Democratic-Fusion ticket. At the same time Davis

Wilson, who was gifted with all the stumpster's arts which Mr. Hadley lacked, inserted himself in City Hall as controller. This summer both of these old friends reached simultaneously for the Republican nomination for mayor. Davis Wilson beat Hadley in the primaries, but split the local G. 0. P. so badly that Democrats from Postmaster General Farley down dared to hope that the City of Friends would this autumn be thoroughly friendly to Democracy for the first time in 50 years. John Bernard ("Jack") Kelly, an enterprising Irish oarsman and contractor who registered as a Democrat only in 1933, was picked by Publisher Julius David Stern of the Philadelphia Record and other ardent Pennsylvania New Dealers to put the city back on the Democratic map. This Nominee Kelly proceeded to do largely by promoting a grand jury case against Nominee Wilson charging that, as controller, he had diverted some of a $65,000 city appropriation into his campaign chest. Nominee Wilson, one of whose earliest and richest supporters was a contractor named Jerome ("Jerry") Louchheim, countered by insinuating that Nominee Kelly's backing was largely Jewish. On election day 715,560 Philadelphia voters went to the polls, the greatest number in the city's history for any kind of election. What evidently settled the matter was a solid phalanx of Republican jobholders. Forced to hang together or risk losing their bread & butter, Republican ward leaders somehow patched up the quarrels which had kept them wrangling since the death of Boss William Scott Vare. Boss Yare would have been glad to know that his successors managed to win by 47,000 votes, after an expenditure of about $600,000 which was only two hundred thousand more than the Democrats spent. One who was certainly glad to know it was Contractor Louchheim, Mayor-elect Wilson's patron, who was supposed to have retrieved all the money he put up on his man by collecting $125,000 worth of election bets.

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