The morning John F. Kennedy spoke to the New York delegation prior to the voting at the Los Angeles convention, he reminded the New Yorkers that the Democratic party was founded in the course of a botanizing expedition up the Hudson River valley, which had brought Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr together to talk politics. By almost any calculation, this would make the New York Democratic party the oldest political organization on earth: the British Tories, the American Republicans, the French Radicals are all venerable institutions, but the New York Democratic party was in the second half of its first century before even the oldest of these others was established as a permanent organization.

Of all the institutions that Jefferson helped to found, there is surely none that would please him more, in its freedom from the burdens of tradition, than the New York Democrats. They have no ceremonials, no mace, no ancient customs; it is unlikely that anyone could say for certain just where, if anywhere, the records of fifteen or twenty years back are stored. (But would even Jefferson have dared hope that after one hundred and sixty odd years of continuous existence, the oldest political party in the world would still have its offices in a hotel room?) To be free of tradition, however, is not to be free of the past. In the months since Los Angeles, the New York Democrats, after helping Kennedy to carry the state by 375,000 votes, have been torn apart by a controversy—involving the related efforts of the “reform” Democrats to get rid of Carmine De Sapio as leader of Tammany, and those of the Kennedy administration to get rid of Michael H. Prendergast as state chairman—that has its roots in the very origins of the party.

It is helpful to think of the dichotomy that shaped those origins: Jefferson and Burr, aristocratic idealist and Tammany politician. (But this is helpful only if one avoids stereotypes concerning which type knows most about getting on in the world: consider the outcome of Jefferson’s career as against that of Burr.) The more immediate source of the present controversy, however, can be found in the choice of Franklin D. Roosevelt over Al Smith for the Presidential nomination in 1932. Smith’s defeat was a sharp blow to the dominant Irish Catholic group in the party, but it was nothing compared to the shock of the New Deal politics that followed. The “regulars,” the old time Democrats, were “out on a limb,” Smith told a 1936 campaign audience, “holding the bag, driven out of the party, because some new bunch that nobody ever heard of in their life before came in and took charge of things and started planning everything.” James A. Farley’s break with Roosevelt in 1940 left the New York Democratic party completely in the hands of the “regulars,” mostly conservative Irish Catholics who felt little enthusiasm for what was going on in Washington. The leaders of this group were not necessarily poor men, but their constituencies were emphatically made up of the Catholic working class which produced the great bulk of the Democratic vote.

During this period a change of profound consequence took place that was to give the present controversy its distinctive coloration. The great mass of the New York Jews emerged from the slums to become middle class almost in one generation. However, they remained loyal to the Democrats in far larger numbers than might have been expected from their new economic position, while at the same time a fair number of middle-class Protestants were also developing attachments to the New Deal. Thus was created the special feature of New York politics: the existence of a large, middle-class Democratic vote.

Neither the Jews nor the Protestants entered the party leadership in New York; in a sense they did not even apply for admission, for their main interests and loyalties were concentrated on national politics. It was not really until the New Deal era came to an end in 1952 that the attention of these groups was turned, faute de mieux, to state and local politics, where they found in control people with views remarkably different from their own.

The first shock involved Adlai Stevenson. The liberals gave their hearts completely to the 1952 Democratic candidate; the regulars considered him soft on Communism. (“Like sending the cabbage patch to the goat,” said James A. Farley, at a later date, concerning the prospect of Stevenson negotiating with Khrushchev.) Besides, it was obvious to the regulars that Stevenson was going to lose. At that point the “reform” movement began to erupt in Manhattan. Significantly—symbolically—the leaders of the reform group were Roosevelt’s wife, his Lieutenant Governor (Herbert Lehman), and a former special assistant to his Secretary of State (Thomas K. Finletter).

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The nature of the reform movement is best seen by the neighborhoods in which the new clubs have taken hold. They are concentrated in Manhattan because that is where the very young, or the very well-to-do, of New York live. The archetype is the Lexington Club, an alliance of millionaires and law clerks, located in the “Silk Stocking” district of the East Side. Typically the reform clubs have succeeded in districts which have a Republican (i.e. middle-class) majority, or in heavily Jewish districts which are middle class but vote Democratic. Generally the reform clubs have replaced old Irish organizations which have outlived their neighborhoods.

Although the reform movement now controls a quarter of the votes on the Tammany executive committee and has elected a Congressman, two Assemblymen, and a State Senator, its success has so far been limited. The main obstacle is geography. Given their choice, liberals live in Republican neighborhoods, and they tend to have virtually no connection with the working class. Therefore, so long as the Democrats remain a basically working-class party, the reform group will remain a decided minority within it.

This in itself is unexceptional; the middle class is always a minority—but it almost always runs things. Here is where the real source of conflict lies: for so long as the Democratic party in New York remains as well a predominantly Catholic party, the reformers are not going to run things either. Their perfectly natural inability to understand this has led to much of the present discord.

The divergence in the party between “regulars” on the one hand and “liberals” on the other, operates on three levels. First, there is the difference in class. The regulars tend to be working class or lower middle class in origin and, in a curious way, in outlook. The liberals tend to be middle class in outlook, if not always in origin. (The Jewish working class in New York, while decidedly liberal, is to a considerable extent organized in the Liberal party and its influence is therefore hardly felt in the Democratic ranks.) The liberals have been fighting for the class interests of the workers for half a century, but of late—as their efforts have borne fruit—this has resulted in a certain impairment of their own interests as members of the middle class. In any event, they do have class interests distinct from those of the mass of the Democratic party, and their actions have recently been demonstrating this fact. A case in point is their penchant for Governor Rockefeller, whose program is aimed directly at what might be called the first-generation bourgeoisie. When liberal Democrats say that Rockefeller has had the “courage to face up to the tax problem,” what they perhaps mean is that his revenue program has added one million workers to the income-tax rolls.

On the second level there is the religious difference. The regulars include every religious and ethnic group in the city except white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. (There is a small group of elite Protestants who will work with the regular party, but they usually do so as a result of a deliberate decision on each side to vary the normal pattern.) Similarly, the liberals include every middle-class religious and ethnic group in the city except Catholics. (Again there are calculated cross-overs, but these only emphasize the pattern.) In terms of predominance, the Catholics can be said to run the “regular” party, just as the Jews can be said to run the liberal movement. Jews have great influence, as they have great numbers, within the regular party, but their most vigorous types tend to avoid the role of party bureaucrats. The Women’s Division of the Democratic State Committee, however, is dominated by the energetic wives of Jewish businessmen. When the ladies are rewarded for services it is commonly in the form of honorary positions for their husbands.

The main problem on this level is that the Catholic Democrats—as Catholics—no longer have any distinct political purpose in New York State. Catholic legislators from Brooklyn and the Bronx are dependably liberal in their voting records, in fact are hardly to be distinguished from the most ardent ADA member on that account. But their energies are immobilized by two equally powerful and contradictory impulses: almost any large, new program that would appeal to the secular interests of the Catholic population involves an increase in the functions of the state, which almost necessarily involves a diminution in the functions of the church. At the very least, it diverts yet more resources to the public domain. The problem for Catholic politicians is further complicated by a harsh streak of anti-liberalism which is to be found on every level of Catholic society, and which has produced a considerable body of extreme conservatives who nonetheless remain Democrats. Just as serious, until recently the Catholic intellectual community has been too small and too weak to prod Catholic legislators into a concern with the more important political problems of the day.

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All this has greatly strengthened the tendency of the regulars to avoid issues altogether. The regular Democrats in the state legislature, for example, are practically an inert mass. What patronage they get from the Republicans is mainly used on bartenders and co-leaders. For a legislative program, the leaders get out a press release at Christmas-time calling for stricter rent control and lower taxes. (By contrast, the Liberal party, which does not elect a single legislator, and cannot hope to do so, comes forth each year with an exhaustive legislative program.) The New York electorate knows what it might expect from a Democratic legislature: it has sent a Democratic majority to Albany for only three years of the 20th century.

The liberal Jews and Protestants, on the other hand, have no great problem with the secular state—they more or less invented it. They are extremely program-minded, and marvelously adept at devising new ways to spend money. In the regular party, conferences on issues are regarded as women’s work. Once each year the Women’s Division has a meeting in Albany which is on the whole well done—but there it ends. By contrast, among liberals, conferences abound on every conceivable issue. Such gatherings, however, are rarely conducive to party unity. For example, the New York Committee for Democratic Voters recently held a large, day-long conference on state legislative issues at which the featured luncheon speaker warned that a higher education bond issue being proposed in Albany would permit building loans to parochial colleges. The regulars react to this much as the liberals would respond to a speech by a Bronx Italian protesting that an increase in competitive state scholarships for higher education would only give further advantage to the children of middle-class Jews—a view not unknown in Albany, but emphatically not expressed. This is not the way regular Democrats conduct political business.

The third level of divergence is cultural in a broad sense. The liberals are people with what is called a high rate of upward mobility. Not so the regulars, who incline to stay near the old neighborhoods, speaking with the old accents, even after they have become rich and successful. This makes for quite different views of what constitutes proper conduct in the political game. To be upwardly mobile means to be successfully aggressive—a preeminent trait of liberals, for all that their aggressiveness tends to be of the sophisticated variety. The regulars generally view such liberals as persons without enough manners to wait their turn.

The liberal combination of energy and ability has been an invaluable asset in appointive politics; when an elected Democratic (or Republican) official comes to choose his staff, he chooses liberals. Thus President Kennedy has appointed a host of New Yorkers to his cabinet and sub-cabinet—from the Secretary of State on down—but these have almost without exception been liberals with, at best, a fleeting and embarrassed relation to the regular party organization. But there were no organization candidates for Secretary of State. Neither were there any Catholic candidates. Although any number of highly educated and intelligent persons can be found among the conservative Catholics in the party, Catholic education does not, it would seem, produce the kind of excellence American society wants.

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This, however, is not the whole story; the success of the liberals in private life and in appointive politics is balanced by their relative failure in elective politics. Politics is a neighborhood business, and liberals are not neighborhood people. Consequently, while they have been getting all the glamorous jobs, the party organization has remained solidly in the hands of the conservative regulars. The sixty-two Democratic county chairmen in New York are as unrepresentative in one direction as are the members of the Lexington Democratic Club in the other. There are, for example, only two Jews in the entire lot, and these are relative newcomers. (Invariably a majority of the county chairmen are Irish Catholics.) The Democratic party in New York City does not send a single white Anglo-Saxon Protestant to the state legislature, or to the United States Congress. And the five county leaders of New York City are normally all Catholics, either conservative or apolitical.

At the risk of simplifying a most complex subject, it can be said that the liberals, accustomed as they are to success in every other sphere of life, simply do not understand how and why people like the regulars should have come to dominate them in the party offices and legislative posts, and therefore they have resorted to “bossism” as an explanation. On the other side the party regulars regard the liberals as pushy, arrogant newcomers who do none of the work in turning out the vote and yet get all the gravy. This feeling—aggravated by the liberal habit of impugning the motives of anyone they disagree with—has led many of the regulars to the point of high irrationality. Men who started out as perfectly sensible practical politicians in Morrisania and Greenwich Village and the like, have ended as snarling monomaniacs who go about proclaiming that they would prefer to lose every judgeship in the city before taking a solitary vote from “that ADA crowd.” And since many of the regulars are men of capacity (which tends to be overlooked because their abilities are not marketable in midtown New York), their opposition to liberal encroachment has been effective.

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Yet, in order to put together a majority of the votes at the state level, neither group can do without the other and both together must have the support of the Liberal party. Since World War II, out of all the elections that have been held, Democratic candidates have carried the state only six times, and only four men (Herbert Lehman, Averell Harriman, Arthur Levitt, and John Kennedy) have been able to pull off the trick. Of these, two—Lehman and Kennedy—won largely on personal appeal. Only the election of Harriman and Levitt in 1954 was a genuine party victory, brought about by a successful coalition put together by Carmine G. De Sapio.

De Sapio is incomparably the most able politician the New York Democrats have produced since Farley. He is just that, a politician. The extent of his ideological commitment may be measured by his pronouncement to the Holy Name Society Communion Breakfast of the New York Sanitation Department that “there is no Mother’s Day behind the Iron Curtain.” This is, of course, the source of his ultimate failure: he is not in the least interested in government, only in politics. It is simply too bad that he should have come to power in a world in which this was no longer good enough.

Having grown up as an Italian among the “outs” of an Irish Catholic party, De Sapio was always perfectly aware that the party executive committee does not necessarily reflect the exact composition of the party constituency. When he took over the leadership of Tammany his position was quite clear. He already had the votes of the conservative Democrats; the next step, therefore, was to win the liberals. This he accomplished by making liberal speeches and nominating liberal candidates: Robert Wagner, Averell Harriman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., and so on through the list—an approach that worked extremely well once it got organized. Tammany had touched bottom in 1952. In 1953 De Sapio elected Wagner Mayor of New York. In 1954 he sent Harriman and Levitt to Albany. By 1956 he even had a candidate for the Presidential nomination. But here his downfall began.

De Sapio’s support for Harriman against Stevenson at the 1956 convention alerted the Roosevelt-Lehman-Finletter group to the fact that there were limits to De Sapio’s liberalism. These limits were definable as the point where the gain in liberal votes at one end of the spectrum was outweighed by the loss of conservative votes at the other. De Sapio knew his party; in 1956 Stevenson lost the state by 1,589,571 votes, but the New York Democratic party itself—having supported Harriman at the convention—did not suffer a grievous defeat.

A similar situation brought about the debacle of the 1958 Democratic state convention, which led to the downfall of almost everyone concerned. The significant feature of De Sapio’s 1954 slate had been that for the first time in memory there was no Irish Catholic among the candidates, and therefore the 1958 nominee for United States Senate had to be an Irish Catholic—unless Wagner, who is Catholic and half-Irish, were to be chosen. When Wagner declined after the two-day convention got underway, a bitter dispute arose over which Irish Catholic candidate the party should offer.

The New York City party chairmen wanted the Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan—a man who was living evidence that there existed able and distinguished party regulars who had stayed at home, as it were, but had yet rendered service of the highest order to American government. (Farley’s gibe that Hogan’s knowledge of foreign affairs was limited by the Battery on the south and the Harlem River on the north, was in a sense a recommendation.) Wagner and Harriman had nothing whatever against Hogan, but felt that liberal sentiment would demand a candidate more closely identified with foreign affairs, and thus they backed Thomas E. Murray of the Atomic Energy Commission. Lurking in the background of this move was the fear that Hogan’s candidacy would be labeled as an attempt by Tammany to get rid of the one man who had maintained a modicum of law enforcement in Manhattan over the previous decade and a half.

No one present in the hotel room during this argument was behind Thomas K. Fin-letter for that nomination, and when the meeting broke up in an impasse—the tempers of proud men having been lost—the party leaders went off to nominate Hogan, and Wagner (with Harriman’s support) went off to nominate Murray. On the way to the convention hall, however, Wagner was persuaded by Finletter supporters not to announce a preference for either Murray or Finletter, at the risk of incurring the wrath of the liberals. Since the party leaders had the votes anyway, Wagner let it go at that. He spoke for no candidate and a free contest ensued. Hogan got 772 votes, Murray 304, and Finletter 66.

Despite this emphatic evidence that Finletter, although widely respected and esteemed, was the choice of hardly anyone for the 1958 Democratic nomination for U.S. Senator, the liberal group in the party decided that Hogan’s victory had been dictated by bosses, which in turn produced the impression that Harriman had been for Finletter, but had been unable to enforce his wishes.

In Connecticut at this time a strikingly similar situation arose with, however, very different consequences. Thomas E. Dodd, an Irish Catholic party regular, and Chester E. Bowles, a foreign policy-oriented Protestant liberal, were both candidates for the Democratic Senatorial nomination to run with the liberal—and in this case, Jewish—Gubernatorial candidate, Abraham E. Ribicoff. The Catholic party leaders made exactly the same decision as in New York, with Ribicoff’s approval. Dodd was nominated for the Senate, Bowles was persuaded to accept an unlikely Congressional nomination as a gesture of unity and support. In the upshot, everybody won. By contrast, in New York, liberals deserted the Democratic ticket in hordes. Harriman lost to Rockefeller by 593,034 votes. Significantly, Hogan lost by only 132,992 votes, and the Jewish candidate for Comptroller, Arthur E. Levitt (a most able man by any standards), ran 600,000 votes ahead of the ticket and managed to win.

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Having been beaten, De Sapio completely lost his standing among the liberals. Where they had once praised him as the new-style political leader, they now denounced him as an old-style political boss. The Roosevelt-Lehman-Finletter group was formed to rid the party of the “image of bossism” (Harriman, who had the most to complain about, did not join in), and soon the battle was on. Prevented now from exercising his special talent for balancing liberals and conservatives, De Sapio had no choice but to side with the old guard. And once under attack, his judgment began to go wrong. In return for some kind words of support from former President Truman, he toyed with Symington’s candidacy for the 1960 nomination long after it should have been evident that Kennedy was the one man both his party and the voters would support. Other county leaders came out for Kennedy, and only at the last moment did De Sapio follow suit.

His final act of folly was the attempt to exclude Herbert Lehman—the most respected and distinguished Jewish political figure in New York—from the 1960 Democratic delegation. This move involved De Sapio in a conflict not only with liberal Jewish Democrats, but with all Jewish Democrats—probably a quarter of the party following. The effort collapsed almost the moment it was announced, it being evident to the dimmest clubhouse denizen that here were the makings of party disaster. The state chairman, Michael H. Prendergast, who had at first joined in the move to exclude Lehman, gave up his own seat to make room for the elder statesman. At this point, Prendergast’s troubles began.

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“Mike” Prendergast is the quintessential regular. Politics is his profession—his only profession. As if by design, he was born in Jim Farley’s home town of Grassy Point in Rockland County, just up the Hudson from New York. He graduated from Haverstraw High School and was in politics before he was old enough to vote. He got his first patronage job (with the Democratic National Committee) at the age of twenty-two, served on the Rockland police force, went to work for the National Catholic Welfare Conference, and in time became county chairman, a post he filled very successfully. In 1955, Harriman, the newly-elected Governor, chose him as state chairman to work at building the party organization in upstate New York.

Politics, Prendergast style, is a decent, quiet, family affair, and the highest priority is assigned to those things which keep it so: patronage, small and not-so-small favors, the strict observance of the complex prerogatives of party members on various levels. “Issues” in the world of Prendergast are viewed as essentially divisive influences that one would hope to do without.

The Democratic party is the life of men such as Prendergast, and—resembling nothing so much as old-time radicals in their passion for the One Big Union—they have a sharp dislike for those who disrupt its orderly, hierarchical functions. Although Prendergast had opposed De Sapio at the Buffalo convention, after the 1958 election he had no recourse but to turn to the Tammany leader for support. When the liberals began to include him in the list of bosses who must go, he responded by trying to act like a boss, although this was not by any means his normal manner.

Prendergast’s difficulty with the Kennedy administration was inevitable. During the Presidential primaries, the Kennedys had worked out a highly effective technique for moving into a territory and setting up a campaign organization. This included the brilliant political invention of having the Kennedy representative in any given area be a man from an altogether different state, as often as possible someone with a personal relation to Kennedy himself. The brilliance of this technique was that in one stroke it cut through the tangle of jealousy, interest, and intrigue which normally surrounds the campaign chairman and frequently drains the energy from the operation itself. Accordingly, three of Kennedy’s best men were sent to New York. They promptly set about establishing “Citizens for Kennedy” organizations designed to bring into the campaign the great range of groups who were attracted to Kennedy but were not part of the regular Democratic organization, and to serve as a vehicle for reaching others who were not even necessarily Democrats. In New York City the object was largely to reach liberal Jews. Upstate the target was conservative Catholics. In between, there was the usual wonderful mixture of all shapes and sizes.

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To Kennedy’s men these methods seemed the essence of a rational, dispassionate approach to a political problem. Armed with Lawrence O’Brien’s masterful campaign manuals, the citizens’ groups got underway with much vigor—only to find the Democratic state committee opposing them at every turn. Or so, at least, it seemed. (There is no such thing as objective truth in party politics.) One party, one organization, said the regulars. The Kennedy men pleaded, cajoled, warned. Prendergast’s reaction was to try to get one of them removed. By mid-campaign the Kennedy men had concluded that Prendergast simply did not understand how to win an election and would himself have to go.

As the campaign neared its conclusion in New York, the only remaining question was how many Jews could be brought out to vote for the man who had vanquished Adlai Stevenson. At the penultimate moment of the campaign, a great rally was held in New York City with Kennedy on hand. Either deliberately, or through a misunderstanding, Lehman was not permitted to speak, although Kennedy had expected he would. Thus a doubt as to Prendergast’s integrity was added to the doubts about his good judgment in the mind of the future President, and Prendergast was in deep trouble with the new administration even before it took office.

Shortly after the election, it was made clear that the administration wanted a new state chairman in New York—one not disposed to face the future with a loss of 25 per cent of the Democratic vote. The difficulty in bringing about a change is that the very people who would have to persuade Prendergast to step down—the county leaders—do not in their hearts feel that he has done anything wrong. The most conspicuous example is Congressman Charles A. Buckley, the Bronx leader. If splinter organizations are distasteful to Prendergast, they are anathema to Buckley. Fighting them is the passion of his life. Thus, with the rarest exceptions, no Bronx Democratic candidate is permitted to accept the Liberal party endorsement, even if it means losing the election. Buckley regards Prendergast as a slow, but honorable man, and though he and the other leaders would like to see “Mike” step aside in order to please the President, they can rouse no passion in insisting that he do so. Prendergast, for his part, feels that his integrity was insulted when the administration offered him a federal job if he would resign: if his political decisions could be affected by offers of money, he would not, he declares in private, need a job.

In resisting the President, Prendergast was presumably supported by De Sapio, who carries on his now hopeless fight with dignity and courage. Tammany did without the help of Grover Cleveland, Wood-row Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. It can, in fact, do without John F. Kennedy, but it will most likely in the near enough future prefer to do without Carmine De Sapio instead. But the New York Democratic party cannot easily do without either. Unless there is a dramatic reversal of the present trend toward complete fragmentation, the 1962 elections will go by default. The party leaders know this—one of the best informed estimates of the moment is that, barring such a reversal, Rockefeller will be returned to office by a million votes. Probably Kennedy’s best strategy would be to write off the election, rather than to have it appear a test between him and a likely Republican opponent in 1964. But this is not the Kennedy style. He wants to see the New York Democratic party rebuilt.

The logical man to unite the New York Democratic party, as the President realizes, is a Catholic liberal. (A working description would be an Irish Catholic county leader who reads Commonweal.) A number of such already exist, and each year sees more of them appearing: typically, they have come to power in suburban counties where an old-line Catholic party membership has been augmented by a flood of middle-class liberals from the city. William F. Luddy in Westchester and John F. English in Nassau are excellent examples. Both are vigorous, intelligent young men who have ethnic, religious, or intellectual ties with all the elements in their party. Each has brought large numbers of middle-class workers into the party bureaucracy.¹ Neither Westchester nor Nassau has yet gone Democratic, but the Republicans no longer take them for granted.

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In casting about for a Catholic liberal to succeed Prendergast, the President chose Peter J. Crotty of Buffalo. Crotty is a working politician from a big, ugly, turbulent city, where tens of thousands of Democrats but very few liberals live. He has managed to bring together a baffling collection of Democratic factions to produce an effective party organization in Buffalo. He is a man of intellect, a diligent student of Catholic social theory, a formidable labor lawyer, and a passionate believer in racial equality. (He once resigned as county chairman when the party balked at making the first major Negro political appointment in Buffalo. The party gave in and he withdrew his resignation.) Given all this, Crotty should have been acceptable as state chairman both to the regulars and to the liberals. But the depth of the Democratic division turned out to be deeper than anyone knew, and the New York reform movement promptly announced that Crotty was unacceptable. The reason was visceral rather than logical, much as was the Liberal party’s refusal to endorse Crotty when he ran for state Attorney General in 1958. Organized liberals cannot help being suspicious of the liberalism of Irish Catholic county leaders who are at ease on city councils and who get along with police chiefs.

Catholic liberals also have their difficulties with the regular party organization. Such Catholics are almost invariably Irish, which gives them a certain tribal acceptability to the (still largely Irish) Democratic leadership, but they do not generally fire the enthusiasm of the Italians, who (with the Poles coming along) are far the most vigorous of the rank-and-file Catholic Democrats. Of all the ethnic groups active at the moment in New York State, the Italians have the strongest political purpose: they are fighting for social equality. De Sapio’s demise would be a setback for them, especially since he himself has systematically cut short the careers of a number of promising Italian leaders. (They were usually sentenced to life on the state Supreme Court bench.) Thus if De Sapio goes, there will be a gap in Italian leadership, which is not likely to be filled—in Italian eyes—by yet another Irishman.

In any event, the present Catholic leadership of the party is doomed. It is the fag-end of a succession which made some social sense in the mid-19th century but which knows no purpose today other than to persist in the joyless distribution of increasingly empty emoluments. (What, after all, is achieved by becoming the 116th Irishman to get on the Court of General Sessions? The ennui is even showing among the Italians.) The one honorable course open to the present leaders, to elect a brilliant Congressional delegation and keep it there, has not, with but a few exceptions, been followed. The only power left to the city Democratic leaders is to keep the party impotent at the state level—which they may or may not choose to do.

For the moment, all is stalemate. Prendergast, with about fifteen months of his term left to go, refuses to resign, and he cannot be made to do so. (He is elected under the election law and has as much right to his job as, say, the Governor does to his.) A good many upstate county leaders refuse to turn on him for acting as they themselves would have acted (there is a high content of honor in American politics—most politicians, if they only knew it, have a right to feel morally superior to their constituencies), and the Kennedy administration will presumably come for a time to deal with these leaders through Prendergast. But this will hardly change matters. Prendergast is the victim of a deep misunderstanding, but he is not for that reason any the less a victim.

Though the logic of the party’s situation now demands a Catholic liberal like Crotty to succeed Prendergast, all the signs are that the New York Democrats are heading ultimately for a period of Jewish leadership. The Jews have heavy influence in the regular organization and predominate in the reform movement and the Liberal party. Unlike the members of other ethnic groups, Jews in different factions are able to talk to each other and to respect each other. The most hard bitten Jewish district leader in Brooklyn, for example, thinks of himself as a liberal, and consequently there are no semantic gulfs to separate him from the reformers and the Liberal party. A liberal Catholic, then, or a conservative Jew: one or the other seems likely in New York before long. The winds of change are blowing, and the New York Democrats are moving into an era of the balanced party bureaucracy—a device that may prove as formidable in the future as was the balanced ticket in the past.

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¹ In Nassau 50 per cent of English s committeemen are Jews, 40 per cent are Catholics, and 10 per cent are Protestants. Some 73 per cent have one—or more—college degrees. This, of course, is not a statistically representative group. It is much too middle class—in Great Neck, English says, he probably hasn't a single committeeman who makes less than $15,000 a year. There is also a disproportionate number of Jews, who account for only 17—18 per cent of the population. But the high percentage of middle-class people and Jews does give an accurate reflection of the distribution of Democratic energies in a suburban county with no party patronage to dispense.