P. R. Post-Mortem

One night last week in the 105th Field Artillery Armory in The Bronx a weary group of men turned up their visors, pushed back their chairs on which they had been sitting for 24 days. They had just completed a count of 2,013,101 ballots. It had been going on since November 5, the longest and biggest counting job ever undertaken in any U. S. city. New York had replaced its old board of aldermen with a new city council, and the council's members were the first city officials ever to be elected by proportional representation. A few days before, counters in the four other boroughs had finished their share of the job. The preferential ballot is conceived so that if a voter's first choice candidate fails to win, his vote is counted for his second or third choice candidate until the offices up for contest are filled. One of the last candidates to be eliminated in The Bronx was Headmaster Frank S. Hackett of the Riverdale Country School. Exulted defeated Schoolmaster Hackett: "Proportional representation is the greatest advance in democratic processes in years. The system is here to stay."

To other New Yorkers, their first experiment with "P. R." seemed last week a little puzzling. In the first dragging days of the count, official action had to be taken against soldiering on the part of the 1,778 counters and officials whose salaries, ranging from $10 to $30 a day, finally ran the cost of the count to a staggering $850,000. And although P. R. was adopted last year as a reform measure to enfranchise minorities and protect them against Tammany domination, it had not only disfranchised that 16% of the voters who could not understand the ballots but had given the Democrats, snowed under by 450,000 votes for Fusionist Fiorello H. LaGuardia in the mayoralty race, a majority of 14 of the council's 26 members. Having earnestly supported the scheme before the election, the tabloid Daily News last week expressed its disillusionment with characteristic spice: "Unlike our contemporaries, we can make mistakes. ... P. R. as operated here smells."

Despite the fact that he had been one of the defeated candidates himself, P. R.'s "father," public-spirited Chemist William Jay Schieffelin, and such P. R. enthusiasts as Liberal Lawyer Morris Ernst remained stubbornly faithful to their device. They pointed out that with experienced counters Cincinnati had cut its counting time to a week and Cleveland to three days. If the city would authorize the voting machines for which Tammany's late board of estimate refused to appropriate $2,000.000. they claimed that P. R. ballots might be disposed of in one day. That Tammany was as overrepresented as it seemed, they also denied, recalling that two years ago the Democrats elected 95% of the aldermen with 66% of the vote, that in 1931 the 35% of non-Democratic voters got only one alderman out of 65. It was also probably true that many Democrats voted for the Fusion mayor. Democratic councilmen.

What neither side denied, however, was that P. R.'s 26 councilmen, who will enjoy more power to originate legislation than the old board of aldermen, were a far fresher and more prepossessing crew than the aldermen they will replace. Council President Newbold Morris, a highly respectable Wall Street lawyer of 35 whose tie vote will belong to Mayor LaGuardia and Fusion, can look down over his gavel at two sturdy old revolutionaries. Russian-born Baruch Charney Vladeck, last week slated to be the council's minority leader, is now general manager of the Jewish Daily Forward and belongs to the new American Labor Party (TIME, Nov. 15), but three of his 51 years were spent in Tsarist prisons. Another Fusion minority member elected by the American Labor Party in The Bronx was bull-necked Michael J. Quill, who once blew up Black-&-Tan lorries in Ireland and still carries a bullet in his left hip. Having worked in the U. S. since 1926, making change in subway stations and selling Catholic art to Pennsylvania miners, Mike Quill three and a half years ago organized the Transport Workers of America, a healthy C.I . 0. affiliate which this summer signed New York's Interborough Rapid Transit Co. to its first closed shop contract. Unionist Quill, who wears a shamrock stickpin and estimates that 80% of his transport workers are fellow Irishmen, jokes: "It took the labor movement of America to bring the Irish people together."

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