102 THE CLASS STRUGGŻE 103 CURRENT AFFAIRS way they could. For the first time in the history of the Socialist movement of New York our meetings were crowded with audiences made up of such newcomers. To speak to these people in the phraseology of scientific Socialism would have been more than futile.
One might, perhaps, find fault with the exaggeration of the importance of municipal reform. This is, however, a fault common to all municipal campaigns. to who, like the Mayor himself, is a graduate and a former ardent and obedient member of Tammany Hall, believed the choice of the reform element to be an unfortunate one, and was sure that Mitchel had no chance of election and supported our candidate, therefore, not from choice, but as the lesser of two evils. Surely, this is the impression that his constant reiteration of the cry: beat Tammany you must vote for Hillquit, was bound to create.
But even herein he was not quite above board; for he repeatedly emphasized in public statements for the press and at meetings, that he would gladly have supported Tammany Hall had it been led by an upright man like Mr. Smith, the Democratic candidate for President of Board of Alderman, instead of a man like Murphy. Tammany led by a man with the outward appearance of decency of Gaynor fame, would to him have lost all of its terrors.
The one real mistake made in this campaign was the exploitation of a common garden variety politician like Mr. Dudley Field Malone. If this campaign was a fight for Socialism, this man, an avowed adherent of the present system, surely had no place in it. Neither should he have been allowed to speak from the same platform with Morris Hillquit, Sieverman and Cassidy in a campaign fought with the slogan Down with the war! For he declared frankly and unhesitatingly, at every meeting at which he spoke, that he was in full agreement with the National Administration as far as the war was concerned, that there was only one point of disagreement between them: the federal woman suffrage amendment. He supported from the platform conscription, favored a thorough war policy, and indorsed, with special emphasis, the Wilsonian peace idea. He went out of his way to contrast President Wilson favorably with war shouters of the Root Roosevelt type, contending that they stood for conquest and imperialism, while Mr. Wilson symbolized the highest ideals of Democracy and Progressivism.
To the business mind, there was, of course, a third issue in the mayoralty fight. The good people of New York had united to defeat the bad boy of New York politics. All respectable men and women had joined hands in the Fusion camp once more, to kill that much hunted beast that has the unfortunate habit of always surviving his most expert hunters. Mr. John Purroy Mitchel, this noble representative of the finest of goodygoody politics, controlled and operated exclusively by the big capitalistic interests, was chosen for the second time, to be the savior of society, from the evils of Murphyism. But Mr. Malone, It is already rumored. and Mr. David Lawrence, the wellinformed Washington correspondent of the Evening Post, indicated this in the columns of his paper that Mr.
Dudley Field Malone will be a gubernatorial candidate in the coming state election on one of the capitalistic reform tickets.
This rumor receives support from the fact that the new mongrel political organization, The National Party, has announced this oratorically gifted gentleman as one of the twenty members of its National Executive Committee.
It seems to us extremely poor politics from any point of view to have allowed Mr. Malone to present himself before tremendous audiences of the working class as its friend, and to assist him, in this way, in his hunt for bigger game. review of the municipal campaign would be incomplete without giving due attention to the activity of those of our excomrades, who under the guise of Internationalism took pains to attack and calumniate the Socialist Party, its membership and, with special venom, Comrade Hillquit. If ever there was a disgusting and sorry spectacle, it was the one we were forced to witness in New York, during the month of October 1917.