Word: sapio
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Where the old Tammany was formerly organized from the top down, De Sapio sponsored a new law which will make it much easier for insurgents to become Democratic district leaders by direct election...
...When De Sapio seized the leadership of Tammany Hall in 1949, he found himself in command of a rotten, rat-infested political hulk. From its days of corrupted power, Tammany stank. It exacted a heavy price in public money and civic decency for a service. To New York, as to many another U.S. city in the period 1820-1920, came immigrants by the thousands and by the tens and hundreds of thousands-Irish driven by famine, Italians by population pressures, Jews by persecutions. These were not all or mostly the brave or the gallant; many were the fearful, the rootless...
...social services, sublimated and institutionalized the old relationship between the political machine and the helpless. After Charles F. Murphy, the bosses of Tammany Hall lived with their memories and on petty political thievery, fought among themselves, and scratched their heads in wonderment at their low estate. Then Carmine De Sapio came along to tell them what had happened, and how a different Tammany might live in a different world...
Where the old Tammany used to pass around food baskets and coal buckets, De Sapio's Tammany makes public-minded donations to blood banks. Where the old bosses packed the City Hall with hoodlums and hacks, De Sapio helps to find good men-Tammany men, that is-to work in Mayor Robert Wagner's administration. Says Wagner: "I have never made any commitments to Carmine." Then he adds: "Of course, it's often good to get his reaction to an appointment because his advice is usually good." Where the old bosses chewed cigars in back rooms...
Long Live the King. De Sapio had to fight every inch of the way to where he is. Even his nativity carried a brand that still sears his political outlook. He was born 46 years ago, an Italian in an Irish sea. The lower Greenwich Village neighborhood of his birth was about 95% Irish, about 5% Italian. (Today, the ratio in that neighborhood is almost precisely reversed.) His father, Gerard De Sapio, came to the U.S. at the age of ten from Avellino, some 30 miles inland from Naples. Recalls Gerard: "We were on a flat-bottomed scow, maybe like...