Gashouse Trio

The Gashouse is what old Tammanyites call New York's 16th Congressional District, a long, jagged strip of Manhattan Island that touches Park Avenue, stretches across proletarian jungles under roaring elevated lines and brings up at the piers of the murky East River. There lived and reigned such Tammany greats as Richard Croker and Boss Charles Murphy and in the Gashouse stands Tammany Hall itself. There today live some of Manhattan's poorest and some of its richest, for just uptown from the East River gas tanks that gave the district its name, the rich have built a riverside colony of towering apartment houses. Through this home of doormen, poodles, gamins and Irish politics last week reverberated the angry sounds of a highly important skirmish in Franklin Roosevelt's Purge.

Purgee-designate was the man who has represented the Gashouse in Congress for 15 of his 52 years, squarejawed, redheaded, truculent Representative John Joseph O'Connor. A Massachusetts Irishman who has two blood ties with the New Deal (his younger brother Basil was Franklin Roosevelt's law partner and Janizary Thomas Corcoran is his fourth cousin), Tammany's O'Connor has been only an off & on New Dealer. He has been off more than on since the White House helped Texas' Sam Rayburn beat him for the House Leadership, a situation not unlike that created when the President pushed "Dear Alben" Barkley into the Senate leadership ahead of Mississippi's Pat Harrison.

Careful to keep a protective New Deal coloration on his voting record, John O'Connor used his chief function--as chairman of the powerful Rules Committee--to bottle up New Deal legislation, notably the Wages-&-Hours Bill, which Rules twice kept off the floor until the White House prodded the House into discharging the bill from committee. Already marked for Purge when he went back to the Gashouse to campaign this spring, Congressman O'Connor wrote a letter to the New Dealish Daily News, claiming that his only actual anti-New Deal vote was against Reorganization. But he was too late, and Franklin Roosevelt branded his brow along with that of Millard Tydings by declaring that a New York Post editorial denouncing both expressed his sentiments (TIME, Aug. 29).

Purge-sponsored candidate, selected by the New Deal's chief metropolitan patronage dispenser, Boss Edward J. Flynn of The Bronx, was James Herbert Fay. Purgee O'Connor and Candidate Fay are to the naked eye as much alike as two Irish politicians, but Mr. Fay, unlike Mr. O'Connor, was born in the Gashouse, has lived there all his 39 years. Short, barrel-chested, he lost his left leg in the Argonne at 19, now gets about nimbly on an artificial one. President of Tammany's Anawanda Club, Jim Fay ran against John O'Connor for Congress in 1934, lost by 101 votes. Since 1935 he has held a $4,600 job as Chief Field Deputy Collector of Internal Revenue. His platform this year: 100% for Roosevelt. His most earnest hope: that Franklin Roosevelt or James Aloysius Farley will have time for at least one speech in the Gashouse before election.

Gashouse politics are always shrewd and this year John O'Connor introduced a daring improvement. When Democrat Fay assured himself a place on the ballot by running unopposed in the American Labor Party primary, Democrat O'Connor topped that by entering the Republican Primary. This move was gladly hailed by Roosevelt-haters like Representative Hamilton Fish Jr. and Michigan's Arthur Vandenberg, who declared in Chicago last week: "O'Connor personifies and dramatizes an issue larger than votes." It was not hailed at all by the regular Republican candidate, Lawyer Allen W. Dulles, and his able sponsor, Representative Bruce Barton.

In Lawyer Dulles, Republican leaders thought they had an ideal candidate. Grandson of Benjamin Harrison's Secretary of State, nephew of Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State Robert Lansing, Republican Dulles at the age of 8 wrote and had published a critique of British policy in South Africa which sold 2,000 copies. The proceeds were donated to the then struggling Boers. Mr. Dulles left diplomacy for corporation law, remained a faithful companion and legal adviser to Roving Ambassador Norman Hezekiah Davis. Although his Gashouse home is a five story residence that cost him $90.000, social-minded, distinguished Republican Dulles was doing as well as either of his fellow members of the campaigning Gashouse trio. Said he of John O'Connor: "Is it to be our only requirement for the selection of a Republican candidate that he hates Roosevelt? Or rather, in this particular case, that Roosevelt hates him?"

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