Servants of the People

Servants of the people are not happy unless they serve. To stand and wait is not their forte. Congressmen before whose names the people have written "ex" instead of "X" become ambassadors to the Sublime Porte or Commissioners of This and That. Tammany Hall has no power to supply such opportunities for service to its late great, but its Spirit of Service operates in spite of obstacles. It was the motive force behind a business announcement of last week.

Ex-Mayor John F. ("Red Mike") Hylan for 29 years served the People. As magistrate he protected the underdog, as mayor he championed the 5-c- fare. For more than three years since his retirement as mayor, chafing under his inability to serve, he has started abortive booms for reelection. Failing in his latest he announced last week:

"I feel that by giving the small investor a chance to participate in the profits made in a sound enterprise is the surest way to prevent dishonesty and losses to those who can ill afford them."

The occasion was the announcement that he had become Chairman of the Board of a new Five Borough Trading Corp. (his first venture in business outside of politics). The Five Borough, fostered by Jerome B. Sullivan & Co. of the New York Curb Exchange, is to finance "small, sound, growing businesses" for the benefit of the people, to save them from losing their money to tipsters and bucketshops.

Another announcement of last week was made by no less a personage than Alfred Emanuel Smith. Press and public had long waited to hear what he would do instead of being President of the U. S. He is to become president of Empire State Building Corp., a company formed to erect an 80-story office building on the site of the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan. It is to be nearly 1,000 feet tall (nearly five times its 200 foot frontage on Fifth Avenue), to contain 34.000,000 cubic feet of habitable space, making it not only the tallest but the largest building in the world. As executive in charge of the construction and management of the building Mr. Smith is to receive a salary unofficially reported as $50,000 a year.* Instead of repeating political platitudes about Service, Mr. Smith exercised his famed talent for reciting "the facts" and described the new building as follows: "It can house at one time more than 60.000 people, which is about half the population of the city of Syracuse, enough people to match the population of the city of Troy, three times more than the population of the city of Watertown. 10.000 more than there are in the city of Binghamton and three times as many people as are to be found in the largest village of the State. Only 24 counties out of 63 in the whole State have a population in excess of the number of people that can be housed in this building."

Rejoicing in his post at the head of a community of 60,000 people and an investment of $60,000,000, Mr. Smith added, "I am in very good company" This was a reference to his board of directors, which includes: John Jacob Raskob, financier-politician; Pierre Samuel du Pont, chairman of du Pont de Nemours Chemical Co.; Louis Graveroet Kaufman, president of Chatham-Phenix National Bank; August Heckscher, financier-philanthropist ; Col. Michael Friedsam, president of Altman's department store; Ellis P. Earle, president of Nipissing Mines, great Canadian producers of silver, cobalt, nickel, arsenic.

*The same salary that he received for two years as Chairman of the United States Trucking Co. during the interlude (1920-22) following his defeat for Governor in the Harding landslide.