Gashouse Finale

Honking motorcades, truckloads of young street sheiks making faces and tooting horns, brought to a close last week the last of the Purge primaries, in New York's 16th or "Gashouse" Congressional district, Manhattan. It had been the perfect picture of a Tammany fight, with plenty of mud-slinging at the finish, between two Irishmen alike as two of Paddy's pigs in outlook except that one of them had been cursed by Franklin Roosevelt for breaking out of the New Deal pen and the other had promised to be good.

To Mr. Roosevelt's genuine surprise, his man won. After seeing his three other prime Purge efforts defeated in Georgia, South Carolina, Maryland, he had predicted that disobedient Chairman John J. O'Connor of the House Rules Committee would defeat obedient, one-legged James H. Fay by 500 votes. It was just the other way around: Mr. Fay won by 553 votes out of 16,000 cast.

Now carded for November is another fight between Messrs. Fay & O'Connor, for the latter, to be on the safe side, entered the Republican primary also, on a straight anti-Roosevelt platform. To the disgust of young Republican leaders who are trying to "liberalize" their party, Roosevelt-hating Republicans rewarded Tammany's O'Connor for his long public service (eight House terms) by picking him as their party's nominee in the Gashouse district by majority of nearly 1,000 votes (out of 4,900 cast) over Allen Welsh Dulles, a young lawyer of considerable polish and attainments, but no political experience. Not for generations has this G.O.P. nomination been considered worth the red fire to illuminate its defeat, but with a Tammany Irishman carrying it, with perhaps 8,000 anti-Roosevelt Democrats swinging in behind the Republican voters, the Gashouse district may well retain its Representative with only a change in his party label.

Nominee Fay also won the designation of the American Labor Party in his district. To be sure of getting all the anti-Roosevelt votes available in November, Nominee O'Connor last week prepared to run also as an Andrew Jackson Democrat. Should he win under that label it might save for him his chairmanship of the Rules Committee which must otherwise be taken from him as an elected Republican. To oust him from that post was, in fact, the Purge's chief aim in his case. For the Rules Committee, with power of life & death over much legislation (unless by petition the House membership calls bills out of it to the floor), is now composed of ten Democrats, four Republicans. Of the Democrats, six were non-New Dealers until the defeat of Representative Driver of Arkansas and now of New York's O'Connor. With Republican aid the six non-New Dealers have blockaded Administration measures, notably the Wages-&-Hours Bill. A chair-man far more amenable than John O'Connor would be the next man in line by seniority: Chicago's diligent old Adolph J. Sabath. But Mr. Sabath, 72, is not forceful. Gossip in Washington last week was that he might be asked, as a good New Deal soldier, to step aside and let a stronger man take the great Rules chair --perhaps a veteran drafted from some other committee like California's Lea (Interstate & Foreign Commerce), New York's Cullen (No. 2 on Ways & Means, Tammany manager in the House, but tractable), or Virginia's Drewry (Democratic Congressional Committee). In Chicago, Mr. Sabath, who was born in what later became Czechoslovakia, hopefully said: "Whatever power I can wield [as chairman] will be used to see that Chicago gets its share of Federal appropriations."

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