THIS YOUNG FELLOW MITCHEL

A Once-Over Sketch of the Mayor of New York

ARTHUR LORING PAINE

JOHN PURROY MITCHEL was 37 years old the other day. We will get rid of his biography by enumerating a few of the public jobs which he has held, and then we will get down to something a good deal more engrossing—the man himself. (Note.—For some reason or other the Mayor has always been more interesting than the jobs he has held down.)

For two and a half years, more or less, Mr. Mitchel has been Mayor of New York. Before that he was Collector of the Port. He had previously been President of the Board of Aldermen, and before that a Commissioner of Accounts, whatever that may be. Before that he was an Assistant Corporation Counsel, appointed especially to see whether a high public official was properly discharging his duties—or not. All I can remember about that is that the public official was removed.

AS the Mayor of New York, Mr. Mitchel sometimes goes out and plays a municipal solo. On those occasions he has nobody to help him, and he has nothing to rely on but his instinct for right and wrong, and the chemical composition of his backbone. Concerning the latter, it may be said to be about 100 per cent pure.

He recently had to rely upon his instinct for what was right, as well as upon his backbone, when he found himself in a controversy with certain people and certain organizations, as to whether needy children in public institutions were being properly cared for and looked after.

As soon as the question was presented to him he took a boat, eighteen or twenty secretaries and six or seven stenographers, and visited the public institutions in which the children were being cared for. His advance information was that the city was contributing enough money to keep the children clean, well fed, and reasonably well clothed. His personal investigation—that is to say, his own eyes— showed him that the children were not clean and were not well clothed. His ears quickly told him that the children were no better than half fed.

With his advance information, supplemented by his own investigations, he reached the conclusion that the children were getting the worst of it, and he immediately called upon the Governor to use his powers to discover who was at fault.

QUBSEQUENT events soon proved that various denominationalists, including coreligionists of his own, were either negligent, incompetent, or a great deal worse. A cry soon went up that the Mayor was trying to interfere with the Church. The Mayor's reply was quick and to the point. It was something like this, "The State is required to keep its hands off the Church. Well, while I am Mayor, I will ask the Church to keep its hands off the State." The thing was fought out on an unreasonably long battle line. The Mayor won at every point of attack. Offensively he fought alone; defensively he was supported by a host of men and organizations, not on account of their knowledge of the issues involved, but on account of their absolute belief in the Mayor's ability to see things clearly and in his courage to do things fearlessly.

ONLY a little while later the Mayor was called upon to settle a great controversy between the street railway companies and the motormen and conductors on them who asserted their right to organize themselves, and, through their leaders, to present certain of their claims to the railway companies.

The claims naturally included shorter hours and more pay. The responsible heads of the companies denied the employes the right to organize. This situation produced what is known as a strike. With the strike on, the first thing that the Mayor did was to insure the safety of the companies' property, and the safety of the lives of the men whom the company might see fit to employ. Insurance became assurance overnight, through the agency of the Mayor's wonderfully efficient Police Department. The second thing the Mayor did was to define certain rights as belonging to the strikers, and to assert, in no uncertain way, that these rights would be fully protected by the city.

Because he was certain and definite on these two points, it was easy for him to gain another point. He sent for the managers and owners of the railways, and for the leaders of the strikers themselves. He locked them in his room at the City Hall and kept them there from morning until night. What happened in that room I do not know, but when the session was over the newspapers were able to announce that the strike was over.

The Mayor was going to Plattsburg at 9:30 on that same night. He had time, however, to rush down to the Volunteer Hospital and shake hands with a convalescing policeman who—some weeks before, in a moment of despair—had attempted to take his own life. The writer saw the Mayor at the Volunteer Hospital that evening and rode uptown with him, hoping that he would talk about the strike situation, but the Mayor had turned his back upon that and was eagerly looking forward to Plattsburg. All he could talk about was whether he would be appointed a corporal, a sergeant, or a lieutenant, and what he hoped to do in the way of setting himself up physically and cleaning up his fellow soldiers on the rifle range.

AFTER the Mayor had been in Plattsburg for a few days, another serious issue arose between the railway employers and the strikers. The Mayor rushed back from Plattsburg. Again an all day session; again he had the warring parties in his room from morning until night, and, when the long session was over, he rushed back to Plattsburg, only having time to remark that this time the strike was "sure enough over."

At the Grand Central Station, while squinting through the barrel of a new rifle which he sent out to buy, he supplemented his remark on the strike situation by saying, "I am glad, of course, that the strike is over, and I hope that the owner, and the conductor and motorman, will get from each other substantially what they ought to get. As Mayor I have no concern with the employer on the one hand or with his two car operators, on the other. My concern is only with the one hundred and ten people, each with a nickel or a dime in hand, who want to get into that car and go from their homes to their work in the morning and back to their homes again at night."

WHATEVER you may think of Mr. Mitchel as a mayor, you must hand it to him as a man. If you are in any doubt about that, ask the city railroad people or the strike leaders, or better yet, go around to the children and the managers in the children's institutions and ask them what they think.

The Mayor is a great fellow to jump at a conclusion and then to find his reasons afterwards. If the reasons do not back up his conclusions, he throws away the conclusion and tries again. I am willing to bet that when he was a boy in school he looked for the answer first and then worked up to it. I imagine that if he reads a novel he looks at the last page first.

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THE Mayor is very much opposed to surprises. If he were taken by surprise he would be in a panic. If he ever found that he had surprised himself I think he would jump off a (publicly owned) dock. To anybody who is familiar with his penchant for card indexes, facts, figures, etc., my characterization may seem absurd, but, while it is true that the Mayor is a great collector of facts and figures, he only collects them so that he won't be taken by surprise by some citizen possessed of a smaller array of facts and figures. Some adversary confronts him with three pages of facts and figures; the Mayor will then show him 300 pages of more accurate facts and figures, and then, with a smile, he will tear up the 300 pages as well as the three pages and proceed to follow his instincts.

BOOKKEEPING has no terrors for him. Single entry, double entry, quadruple entry, octuple entry, they are all the same to him. Because of his knowledge of figures he is not afraid of them, and because he is not afraid of them he is never enslaved by them.

The Mayor is supposed to be a man who is afraid of nothing. On the contrary, there are some things of which he is inordinately afraid. He is afraid, for instance, that some man at Plattsburg is going to beat him on the rifle range. He lives in terror lest somebody may paddle a canoe up stream faster than he can. He is afraid of missing a grizzly bear, so that his companion can "wipe his eye." The Mayor is a very versatile and handy young man.

LET US now consider him a little as a Mayor. It must be borne in mind that the Mayor, while he occasionally plays a Municipal solo, is esentially the leader of the Municipal Band. The Band is composed of Commissioners, Deputy Commissioners, Superintendents, Foremen, Policemen, Firemen and Street Cleaners. We will say, for example, that the Police Commissioner plays the first violin, the Fire Commissioner the French horn, the Dock Commissioner some other instrument of tone, while out on the ends various Deputies play oboes and other wooden instruments. Every morning it is the Mayor's job to begin the day's conducting and direct the Municipal symphony. He labors under certain difficulties with which orchestra leaders never have to contend.

IN the first place his auditorium is ium is heavily mortgaged. Leading a band in a mortgaged building would not

be so bad if the taxpayers would sit in their seats, but they don't. They rush down the aisle singly and in delegations, and shout in the Mayor's ear, "They are going to foreclose the mortgage. They're going to foreclose! My God, Mr. Mayor, stop where you are." It is hard for the Mayor under these conditions to keep his baton free and his eye on the Band, and at the same time answer the delegations of frightened taxpayers. He seems to do it, however, not, perhaps, to the satisfaction of all of the taxpayers all of the time, but one notices that the Band goes on playing, and most of the time in tune.

NOW and then some low comedian in the band sets off some fireworks of his own with a tomtom or a bassoon, and the Mayor has to discharge him, fill his vacancy, and at the same time keep the band going. The discharged man leaves the building by a side door, enters the front door, comes running down the aisle, and adds his clamor to the general tumult.

IN a general way it may be said that the public does not pay much attention to civic matters until something goes radically wrong with them. It is then that the newspapers set up their wails of opposition, and that the public takes a part in the chorus. Our Police Department has usually been the center of such outbursts of disapproval, but it is a significant fact that since Mayor Mitchel took charge of the band concerts at the City Hall, there have been no public outbursts, and, more wonderful still, no outbursts on the part of the newspapers. The writer may be a little prejudiced; a perronal friendshin for the Mayor may have blinded him, but he believes that this young fellow Mitchel ought to be pretty regularly heard from during the next thirtv years or so.