The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to SaveNew York By Vincent J. Cannato. Basic Books, 702 pages, $35.00
Before the sun had risen on John Lindsay's first dayas mayor of New York City, the Transport Workers Union went out on strike. It wasthe dead of winter in 1966, and the city's subways and buses would remain idlefor 12 more days. Labor leaders thumbed their noses at the new mayor, and theyweren't alone. Even Lindsay's immediate predecessor, Robert F. Wagner, snubbedLindsay by leaving for a Mexican vacation instead of attending the inauguration.
Yet the strike turned out to be more than the new administration couldhandle. In his negotiations with the TWU, Lindsay revealed not only a disregard for the conventions of collective bargaining, according to Vincent Cannato'sUngovernable City, but a fundamental lack of political skill. The mayor was unable to convert public disgust for the union's actions to his own advantage. Instead, he gave the TWU everything it asked for, including a 15 percent raise.
In Cannato's biography, the mayor's mishandling of the transit strike is butone of many painful episodes that, in sum, describe eight years of naive liberalidealism in action. For Cannato, a fellow at the neoconservative HudsonInstitute, Lindsay personifies the beginning of the end of the liberalism Americaonce knew. And in this version of the story, the mayor's wrongheaded politics andpolicies accelerated, even caused, the demise of a great city that was crashingtoward fiscal insolvency and a calamity of crime, welfare dependency, antiwhiteracism, and disregard for the city's hardworking white middle class. "JohnLindsay failed because he could not make the city work," Cannato writes."Liberalism sputtered because of the tragic failure of men like Lindsay."
While The Ungovernable City, in its 579 pages of narrative, is ostensibly about Mayor Lindsay, another character looms throughout: the current mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, also an idealistic leader inclined to moral passion. There's not much direct comment about Giuliani until the penultimate chapter, but his approach to governing is quite obviously the filter through which this entire account was conceived and written.
The title is intentionally ironic. A quarter-century ago, a book of the samename was written by the Yale political scientist Douglas Yates, and it became aminor classic in urban studies. Yates argued that New York and other large citieswere burdened with an outdated City Hall-based governance structure that couldn'tpossibly cope with the complexities of modern urban life. Each major city'sproblems were usually regional or even national in scope, he wrote. As thedemographic makeup of cities became ever more fragmented, the variety of servicesCity Hall had to provide had simply become unmanageable.
Cannato's book makes the counterargument. In placing the spotlight on theflawed ploys of stumbling liberals, he attempts to show that New YorkCity--under the right kind of leadership--is governable after all. Evidently, theauthor would have us conclude that New York could have been spared a trulyhorrific period in its history had its leaders been guided by hard-nosedGiuliani-esque values and respect for the white middle class instead of so muchmushy liberalism.
Is it a legitimate comparison? Like Giuliani, Lindsay was a crusader and verygood at making enemies of potential friends and allies. His moral compass,however, was nothing like Giuliani's. While the current mayor made pariahs ofwelfare recipients, homeless people, truants, and pot smokers, Lindsay wascommitted to a fault to fighting poverty, to making government more responsive tothe demands of communities long excluded from power, and to the notion thaturban problems could be solved through technocratic innovation.
He began his political career as a Republican congressman from Manhattan'sUpper East Side and eventually served four terms. During the late 1950s and early1960s, Lindsay championed civil liberties and helped lead congressional effortsto shut down the reactionary House Un-American Activities Committee. In 1964 hewas a key strategist in the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Although hiselectoral base in the socially liberal and wealthy Manhattan district was secure,he was no more than a marginal player in the national Republican Party.
While still in the capital, Lindsay stated his devotion to an ideal ofleadership freed from the controlling hands of "antiindividual, antilibertarianforces that stem from every organized power group, whether that power group bethe central government, the industrial-military complex, the big city machine orthe local constabulary." In 1965, as a fusion candidate of the Republican andLiberal Parties, this focus on independent-mindedness and good governmentpropelled him to victory in a three-way mayor's race against the Democratic Partyclubhouse candidate Abe Beame and National Review founder William F. Buckley,Jr., who was running on the Conservative Party line.
Lindsay's winning coalition included wealthy Republicanfinanciers and liberal reform Democrats, blocs that would stick with him throughmuch of his career. But the 1965 victory also depended on the votes of whiteRepublicans from the boroughs outside Manhattan, as well as middle-class Jews.The deterioration of his relationship with these voters is one theme of Cannato'sbook. Throughout his first term, as the mayor churned his staff and divedheadfirst into racial politics, he seemed to forget entirely the basic politicalwork of solidifying and expanding his electoral base. Instead, while reaching outto blacks and Puerto Ricans, he largely abandoned the constituency ofmiddle-class white voters who had helped put him in office.
Still, Lindsay had some early successes. He won state-legislativeassent in implementing a more progressive revenue structure, including a cityincome tax. And although Cannato tries hard to debunk Lindsay's reputation as ariot stopper, there's no denying that New York's black communities avoided thekind of rampant destruction other U.S. cities experienced in 1966 and 1967.
The late-1960s economy was strong, and rising tax revenues kept Lindsay'sexpanding city budgets balanced. But the social tumult that defined the state ofthe nation at the time made the mayor's job demanding in the extreme. The VietnamWar and the antiwar movement, fast-rising crime rates, angry white cops, andincreasingly harsh, racially charged vitriol in black as well as in whitecommunities across the city came to dominate his first term.
The worst of it arrived in 1968 with the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school-controlbattle and its aftermath. An ill-defined, Ford Foundation-funded experiment incommunity oversight of a handful of schools went badly awry after an activistboard of residents of the Brownsville section of Brooklyn tried to transfer 13white, unionized teachers out of the five schools under its control. The ensuingwalkout by 350 fellow union members and the battle for school leadership thatfollowed led to a series of citywide teachers' strikes that pitted blacksdirectly against the heavily Jewish teachers' union. Though Cannato acknowledgesthe prominent role of Jews (and a white Catholic priest) in the Brownsvillecommunity-control movement, he is especially keen to document the anti-Semiticepithets and low-level violence that became routine in some schools, as well asthe racist wrath that punctuated the media statements of several black leaders.
The anti-Semitic fringe of the black community came to the fore, furtheralienating middle-class, outer-borough Jews from Lindsay, whom some perceived asan ally of black leaders. Worse, the bewildering, autumn-long teachers' strikesleft a million students coming up short on their education and working parentsstruggling to find care for their children. Then, in February, an unpredictedsnowstorm shut down the city and the administration was slow to plow the streets.It was a classic foul-up. The mayor and his city were stumbling from crisis tocrisis.
It seemed that the city had slipped out of control. Is Cannato right, though,in placing all the blame on racist blacks in Brownsville and Harlem, on thecountercultural youths who flouted the authority of police, on the studentradicals who held Columbia University hostage, and on liberals like Lindsay whotolerated the intolerant and failed to challenge extremism forcefully? This linehas been championed for so long by the neoconservative movement that it hasbecome almost a kind of conventional wisdom. But, of course, it is anoversimplification.
Cannato fails to offer a reasonable assessment of the social and economicforces that buffeted urban America at the time. Think about the way that cityneighborhoods had changed. With the federal government guaranteeing cheapmortgages and building highways to the suburbs--even as banks and the FederalHousing Administration turned away from financing homes in urbanareas--middle-class whites began to abandon whole swaths of the city. Between1946 and 1960, more than 1.7 million whites moved out of New York City. Theirhomes often were rented to very poor migrants from the American South and PuertoRico. Meanwhile, urban-renewal projects destroyed hundreds of city blocks,uprooting and destabilizing countless families. Little of this history commandsCannato's attention; instead, his narrative describes whites driven from the cityby integration and the threat of black-on-white crime.
Rates of violent crime, which had nearly doubled under Mayor Wagner, continuedto rise. The New York Police Department was operating with outdated systems andstrategies. Lindsay desperately wanted reform, but the police departmentresisted. Cannato seeks to lend credence to charges that Lindsay's staff"handcuffed" the cops, restraining them from enforcing the law against radicals,hippies, and other miscreants. In fact, a quick check of NYPD data reveals thatarrests kept pace with crime during the Lindsay administration. Even misdemeanordrug arrests increased more than 25 percent between 1965 and 1968. Lindsay'sfailure on crime was essentially political: His police commissioners, unlikeGiuliani's, were incapable of gaining control of the uniformed command structureof the department.
Cannato's sympathies lie squarely with the white ethnics of the outerboroughs, the men and women he depicts as the core working class of the urbaneconomy: teachers, drivers, police, construction workers, and others alienated byLindsay's elitist, Manhattan-centric attitudes and his policies designed forblack and Latino constituents. By comparison, the author depicts blacks andPuerto Ricans almost exclusively as troublemakers, radicals, racists, or theirpatsies. He makes no significant attempt to describe life in their neighborhoodsor to depict their political efforts as anything other than extremist.
Nor does he mention that throughout the postwar period, blacks and PuertoRicans had been excluded by whites from the traditional neighborhood-based patronage system that had been the standard tool of political incorporation forthe city's white ethnic groups. Is it any surprise that black and Latinoneighborhood activism, so long suppressed, exploded with such vengeance in thepost-civil-rights-movement 1960s?
Despite these glaring weaknesses, Cannato's wealth of detail and research doesmake clear why Lindsay's mayoralty was a turning point in New York City history.This is the first Lindsay biography written since the man was in office, andCannato tells stories that are well worth telling. Despite ideological blindspots, he does a decent job describing how the modern urban crisis explodedonto the national stage in the 1960s.
Lindsay was no hero; during his second administration, he began to turn intothe kind of patronage-minded, machine-building politician he had earlierdespised. But Cannato's imposition of wry, late-1990s neoconservative sensibilityon nearly every topic discussed in the book is facile. This approach to historyshifts blame for the urban disasters of the 1960s and 1970s away from Americanpolicies and culture that, in fact, did not represent liberalism at all. Thesewere years when America was sending its poor and working-class youth to fight alosing war in Vietnam, when powerful incentives were in place that encouragedwhite abandonment of the cities, and when the nation had yet to provide much inthe way of equal opportunity to blacks and Puerto Ricans.
Perhaps New York City is governable today. That doesn't mean it was 30 yearsago.
