Word: wagnerism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...tactics they used were at the same time crude and organized. Money was spent freely. The owner of a large racetrack buttonholed vacillating legislators, presumably offering rewards (campaign contributions) in return for support of the leaders' candidates--Stanley Steingut, the anti-Wagner leader in Brooklyn, and Jack Bronston of Queens (both, incidentally from New York City, hardly a major concession to upstate interests). One Manhattan legislator reported being offered a campaign contribution and the payment of a primary fight should he switch his allegiance to Steingut. A New York City reformer shifted his support after an organized series of telephone...
...revolt sprang from the ambitions of a number of county leaders eager to limit New York City Mayor Robert Wagner's influence over the Democratic party. These leaders sought to counter Wagner's 1961 victory over the party organization. In addition, all of them (except George Palmer of Schenectady) had been early supporters of Kennedy's entrance into New York politics. They had urged him to run and had worked diligently for his election. Clearly they hoped to protect their renaissance by using the umbrella of his name...
...nature of what the New York newspapers called the anti-Wagner coalition hinted at a larger Kennedy role. The coalition's chief, the aggressive young leader of Nassau county, John English, had long been Bobby's man in New York. A frequent visitor to the Attorney General's office in Washington, he was the first to urge Kennedy's Senate race. Peter Crotty, Erie's leader and the chief up-state coalition member, stood in 1961 as Kennedy's candidate for New York Democratic State Chairman. The Bronx's aging Charles Buckley, once a business associate of Joseph Kennedy...
Around them flocked William McKeon, the vain, insecure State Chairman who owed his office to Wagner but felt the Mayor treated him like a "file clerk;" Stanley Steingut, a Wagner enemy who was cager to be the Assembly's Speaker; several upstate leaders seeking a more influential role; and two pragmatic reformers from New York City's West Side, impatient for advancement and irritated by Wagner's indifference. As the coalition's efforts seemed to approach success, others desirous of a share of the legislature's $4.3 million patronage joined...
...jobs on the basis of patronage, not ability. But the letter's tone was so unfriendly that its point was obscured, and even seemed mysterious. At the time only three jobs had been assigned--one to Bernard Ruggieri, a favorite Kennedy campaign assistant and a former assistant to Mayor Wagner; one to George Van Lengen, a graduate of Harvard Law School; and sergeant-at-arms to a former New York City policeman and military horo from Westchester, the province of one of the anti-Wagner coalition's main supporters James Luddy. The motive behind such a letter, with its frigid...