The Gary Committee [ 347 ] they constantly disappointed. The Gary committee, like the Mitchel administration in general, had. failed not from lack of trying but because it treated the working class as warMrather than constituents. An unemployment committee that concluded its relief-giving program after aiding less than four percent of the admitted unemployed, with a surplus of funds still in its accounts, could expect little sympathy from jobless dock workers or city employees on half time at half pay. Public disillusionment with the Gary committee, added to a whole series of administrative blunders, eventually led to Mitchel's crushing defeat in the election of 1917.45 Among the Democrats swept into municipal office in that election was Alfred E. Smith, the new president of the Board of Aldermen. A new urban reform movement, closer to the people, with solutions less reliant upon businessmen, was in the ascendancy. 45 See Eda Amberg and William H. Allen, Civic Lessons from Mayor Mitchel's Defeat . . . (New York, 1921), and Charles Garrett, The La Guardia Years: Machine and Reform Politics in New York City (New Brunswick, N.J., 1961), 43-45.