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July/August 2001

The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York By Vincent J. Cannato Basic Books Click on the title to buy the book

"L.A. Turns To The Left," heralded the Los Angeles Times after the June 5 victory of the city's next mayor, liberal Democrat James Hahn. The choice of the "Rainbow" tribune, congresswoman Maxine Waters, and local municipal unions, Hahn replaced departing centrist Republican Richard Riordan. The same day, voters in New Jersey's second largest metropolis, Jersey City, chose black liberal Glenn Cunningham to replace conservative Republican Mayor Bret Schundler, who's running for governor. In Philadelphia, another stalwart black liberal, John Street, has replaced once-touted centrist Ed Rendell. Detroit and Cleveland are bidding farewell to retiring fiscally conservative black Democratic mayors Dennis Archer and Michael White. And in New York, four liberal Democrats and two far-from-right-wing Republicans--media mogul Michael Bloomberg and former deputy mayor Herman Badillo--are battling to succeed Rudy Giuliani, the country's best-known scourge of Rainbow politics.

It seems only yesterday that the departing centrists, along with Chicago's Richard M. Daley and Washington, D.C.'s Anthony Williams, threw out mayors weaned on Great Society spending and racial grievance politics. The centrists tried to reshape municipal work forces, social-welfare bureaucracies, and the color-coding of civic life. Much of this was constructive, but in the short run, it hurt many of those with the thinnest wallets and political skins. Are the Los Angeles and Jersey City elections part of a liberal counterrevolution?

Not quite. In Los Angeles, Hahn vowed a crackdown on gangs and had strong backing from police unions; even some of his heavily black municipal-union support is more protectionist than liberal. And he beat his equally liberal Democratic opponent, Antonio Villaraigosa, by nearly eight points, thanks in part to ugly, suggestive ads tying Villaraigosa to the drug trade--this despite Villaraigosa's touting Giuliani's quality-of-life initiatives in New York. In Gotham, meanwhile, Mark Green, the leading liberal vying to succeed Giuliani (he was Mayor David Dinkins' highly visible Consumer Affairs Commissioner), has abandoned his opposition to welfare reform and workfare and taken on the teachers' union over hiring policies. In a move reminiscent of Hahn, Green sought and got the endorsement of Giuliani's former police commissioner, William Bratton.

Clearly, the terms of civic discourse and urban policy have changed. So have big-city populations, with hundreds of thousands of non-white immigrants whose understandings of race are more fluid and ecumenical than those of most American blacks and whites. The newcomers are carving out economic niches amid bigotry and isolation to win capital, connections, and economic skills. Their small-business networks, sustained at first by ethnic ties, soon transcend ethnocentrism. So do ethnically inflected but universalist struggles to organize new, exploited workers, as New York's heavily Jewish garment- workers' unions did decades ago and Los Angeles janitors and restaurant workers are doing now.

The question is whether new mayors like Hahn and Cunningham will fall back into the grip of government bureaucracies, public-employee unions, and racial-grievance-mongers who barely a decade ago paralyzed Rainbow mayors such as Coleman Young, Marion Barry, and David Dinkins. Will the new mayors and their supporters attribute past defeats like Dinkins' (and successes like Giuliani's) to ups and downs in crime, racism, and right-wing economics? Or will they admit that liberals let their preoccupation with such demons sap their fiscal and racial restraint?

They would do well to study the fate of New York Mayor John Lindsay, the ur-mayor of Rainbow politics, who from 1966 to 1973 elevated racial claims to levels that energized but soon palsied the political imaginations of his many emulators. It would be going too far to say that without him, there'd have been no Young, Barry, or Dinkins; but Lindsay legitimized fiscal fantasies and racial taboos that made dependency and resentment the only urban growth industries. He is the whipping boy for a failed urban liberalism in sections of Fred Siegel's The Future Once Happened Here and Tamar Jacoby's Someone Else's House. Yet memories of his crusading still moisten eyes among elites with clout in politics and media in New York and Los Angeles.

They might learn something from Vincent J. Cannato's The Ungovernable City, which chronicles Lindsay's long public agony dispassionately. That's surprising in a writer who comes from the white ethnic working class Lindsay misconstrued and who has been active in the conservative movement. (Cannato worked for Jersey City's Schundler.) Maybe his Columbia Ph.D. in history has tempered him; maybe his publisher had him bleach some polemics for a definitive political biography appearing so soon after Lindsay's death last December. Yet Cannato seems to have respected Lindsay's courage and integrity, if not his social intelligence.

Sir Galahad-on-Hudson

In November 1965, when the city chose Lindsay for its mayor, the swift currents of urban instruction that course through its neighborhoods and businesses to transform immigrants into Americans were faltering. It was a time of urban drift unparalleled since the 1930s, when Republican maverick Fiorello LaGuardia had defeated the Irish-run Tammany machine and broadened the city government's constituencies and mission. Lindsay vowed to broaden both even more. He defeated the white-ethnic, union-bound liberalism of LaGuardia's legatees thanks to a vague, media-hyped, yet justified unease at demographic undertows and civic decay.

In LaGuardia's Depression-wracked years, national immigration restrictions had helped the city digest half a century's deluge of newcomers, and even then only with fiscal and moral support from the New Deal and a just war. But when Lindsay arrived, the city had lost 800,000 of its immigrant success stories to suburbia and gained 800,000 poor black and Hispanic "in-migrants" from the South and Puerto Rico. LaGuardia's legatees feared them morally and materially, which amounted to the same thing in their fragile neighborhood ecologies. Murders had more than doubled since 1955, from 306 to 681 annually, and while those numbers would seem almost laughably low by the 1980s, New Yorkers were rightly alarmed by the trends.

Vivid Camelot memories, too, made the handsome young Yalie from Manhattan's Silk Stocking congressional district seem the second coming of an Ivy League prince martyred two years before. "He is fresh, and everyone else is tired," wrote Murray Kempton, and the phrase became Lindsay's slogan. The political chimes of the hour made him the herald of a liberal urban crusade, even if he was too glamorous (and white) to be prototypical of its new breed of mayor. His personal forays into streets roiling with racial tensions helped spare New York the riots that devastated other cities. Some of these visits by the tall, privileged WASP seemed at once expiatory and arrogant, but Lindsay wasn't wrong to say: "I think it's important for the people in the ghettos to see their mayor. They've got to feel somebody is interested in them. You can tell from the double-takes how much the visits are appreciated."

The question was what one did after visiting. Roger Starr, later Mayor Abraham Beame's housing administrator, observed that Lindsay seemed comfortable with two kinds of people: those with so little money that they needed more of it just to scrape by, and those who had so much that they needed to give some of it away. Lindsay thought the non-white poor the most public-spirited of all; they were where the action was, storming welfare centers, demanding control of schools. He didn't notice that "the poor" or those who spoke for them were active in public life only because they had nowhere else to go and that, the moment they did, civic spirit disappeared along with the megaphones.

As vice-chair of the national Kerner Commission on civil disorders, Lindsay wrote the "two nations, separate and unequal" mantra that raised and then froze liberal consciousness about race. With some twists and turns, Lindsay's Rainbow emulators replaced old- school white mayors like Sam Yorty in Los Angeles, Richard J. Daley in Chicago, Ivan Allen in Atlanta, Frank Rizzo in Philadelphia, and the functionaries Congress installed over the District of Columbia. But the shift from the old ethnic-machine politics to the welfare-state programs which Lindsay inaugurated replaced one kind of corruption with another. The new politics of protest traded on accusations and presumptions of racism and on denials of fiscal reality in a country based on a love-hate relationship with its cities. Cannato's accounts of Lindsay's role in this prompt a few double-takes now.

Here's one: he'd been mayor barely two months when he staggered from a humiliating transit-strike settlement to the CBS studios to tell New Yorkers, "Our city is facing a financial crisis." The city's expenses were enormous, no matter how one defined its social obligations, but Lindsay cast the latter so apocalyptically that in The Cost of Good Intentions, his former deputy budget director, Charles R. Morris, would note dryly that City Hall's war on poverty made about as much sense as a municipal program to explore outer space. Lindsay proposed the unthinkable: a city income tax, even on non-residents who worked in the city. Their "commuter tax" was justified by fairness, not to mention the tactical necessity of keeping the middle class from leaving town to escape the new levy. Suburban legislators were not amused, and since Lindsay's initiatives required state legislation, he stood alone. He moralized, playing Kant, not Machiavelli: "Let the objectors think about the city a little bit as they turn their backs on it every day at five o'clock with bitterness and condescension."

He won, with Governor Nelson Rockefeller's grudging help, because demographic upheavals and civil-rights imperatives trumped fiscal realism. He won also by turning his back on lower-middle-class Jews and Catholics in those fragile neighborhoods outside Manhattan, people who weren't the city's glitterati or gutterati but its glue--homeowners, shopkeepers, artisans, lawyers, teachers, and municipal engineers. Lindsay didn't hate them; he simply didn't understand them. He didn't share their assumptions about how to attack poverty, which they themselves had overcome, sometimes through ethnocentric demagogy and extralegal hustling, but often through hard organizing and work in tight families and communities.

They didn't find it as unthinkable as he that, since cities are wards of their states and playthings of capitalism, the only way to fund them is to spend and tax judiciously in order to keep private investment. Nor were these burghers as racist as we have since been indoctrinated to believe. They knew that the more productive a person, the less time and emotional energy he or she spends thinking about the color of someone who's ready to deal. A distinctive and enduring characteristic of New York liberals is that they deny this decisive truth.

Yet Lindsay hectored its believers, even in their Florida refuges, during his doomed 1972 presidential campaign to become national tribune of all cities. Cannato lets Theodore White recount how Lindsay tried to rouse a Florida audience of aging New Yorkers: "If there was any fight in them it was to defend the sun and the quiet to which they had come to doze...far from sirens in the night...And here was Lindsay...bringing to these green lawns and tranquil places the nightmares" they were trying to escape. Cannato's accounts of how their old neighborhoods had buckled in racial and economic riptides and ham-handed social engineering are so heartbreaking you want to cry, "Where was their mayor?" In Manchild in the Promised Land, a civil-rights classic in Lindsay's time, author Claude Brown wrote of his white landlords and employers, "They were all little people, and I was demanding that they suddenly become big, tremendous, and understand this gigantic problem that the nation was trying to solve." Lindsay kept demanding it, even as Brown was having second thoughts.

Another double-take: Lindsay defending what The Daily News called his "come-and-get-it" welfare programs before the Senate Finance Committee in 1969. Connecticut Sen. Abraham Ribicoff noted that New York looked filthy and asked why welfare recipients couldn't clean streets for their own benefit and the city's. Cannato reports the mayor's shock: "The use of welfare mothers with brooms and spikes in the middle of Fifth Avenue brings us back to the dark ages," he said, calling it "rather extraordinary in view of modern thought."

New York Yankees

Lindsay was irresistible to New York's legions of moralists, a word that in America carries the taint of itinerant revivalists dropping in on the lower orders to tell other people how to behave. Lindsay was quietly, genuinely moral, but he could get moralistic to the point of bombast, drawing others with streaks of a knight-errantry unsuited to urban governance.

Some white liberals, for example, fresh from symbolic forays into the South, returned to New York impatient with the anti-discrimination measures already gathering legitimacy and steam in the city's life. These they outstripped with Draconian plans for white-ethnic neighborhoods--doomed experiments in busing and scatter-site, low-income housing. The moralists did not understand how such neighborhoods were despoiled by urban renewal programs and subsidies to real-estate operators already "integrating" them to destroy them for tax write-offs and arson insurance. Lindsay administrators stumbled into unsavory alliances with such predators, even giving some of them awards for dumping welfare families next to old Jewish ladies. Policy savants who thought nothing of breaking up beleaguered white neighborhoods in this way championed black "community control" of the wreckage left behind.

They didn't understand how neighborhoods filter the city's hard knocks and dissonance, sustaining a balance of relaxed play and social obligation within which commitments to strangers can flower. A good neighborhood gives children spontaneous but manageable challenges beyond the front stoop. It introduces them to the satisfactions of roles which the market rewards only indirectly, if at all: nurturer, defender, uplifter, communicant, teammate, lover, friend. Cosmopolitan adults may find all this in non-spatial networks or at St. Paul's preparatory school and at Yale, as did Lindsay. But most New Yorkers' decency and generosity grow in parish halls and schools, community centers, taverns, diners, and parks. New York's capital and cultural resources come from all over the world, but its neighborhoods are the crucibles of its capacity to draw and transform them into the achievements of a civilization.

A delicate ecology, indeed, and as urban planners accelerated its destruction, moralists, and ideologues empowered hustlers of the poor tear at the same local structures and conventions. Although flight from cities began not with racial change but with the well-subsidized and marketed lure of greener suburban pastures, liberal moralism and policy accelerated it. The decay of the city's white-ethnic idiom, from Ralph Kramden's railings to the more cryptic "fuggedaboutit," was partly a bigoted reaction to racial change, but it was also a moral reaction to the sluicing of poor, dysfunctional households into stable neighborhoods. It also reflected a legitimate if unfashionable anger at liberals' endless, enraging rationalizations for violent crime. Cannato recounts how utterly antithetical delusions about where to place blame for it clashed in a referendum that ended Lindsay's civilian review board for the police.

Stunned by the ferocity of white-ethnic resistance, moralists redoubled their efforts to punish intransigents and affirm their own virtue. Few have reckoned with their role in the rapid-fire neighborhood decay whose specter haunts the politics of the outer boroughs. Upon leaving office, Lindsay wrote a novel, The Edge, so unnervingly vacuous in its stereotyping of bigots assailing a noble young congressman that Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times suggested we'd all be better off pretending it had never been published. By comparison, Ed Koch's Rudy Giuliani, Nasty Man (a book he, too, actually wrote and published) reads like Plutarch or Marcus Aurelius.

Reviewing how Lindsay and the Ford Foundation's empowerment of the poor's hustlers offended both middle-class teachers and poor blacks by ceding "community control" to people who hadn't enough integrity to carry the bags of a Martin Luther King, Jr. or a Malcolm X, the writer Martin Mayer offered an epitaph for political moralists 30 years ago: "As they say around the criminal courts, the lawyer always goes home. Like the criminal lawyer, the academician, or the foundation officer's...job is secure however many mistakes he makes, and if his advice gets his clients into even worse trouble, he just never sees them again."

Lindsay's Legacy

Giuliani grew up in the white-ethnic, racially changing New York which Lindsay misunderstood. Where the latter signaled a war on racism and poverty, only to accelerate neighborhood decay and offer window dressing, the former has sent different signals. Instead of applying window dressing, he fixes "broken windows," which, too, are only symptoms of decay but which, when left untended, deepen the isolation of those forced to live with them. Instead of championing public-housing bureaucracies, he has facilitated Nehemiah homeownership programs, affordable to social workers and transit employees, that are reviving neighborhoods like East New York, where Linsday sallied in vain. Welfare recipients now clean parks and streets, and by their own account are the better for it; the sanitation union is still in business, too, but not swaggering. Non-white immigrant business networks are proliferating, helped by the plunge in violent crime and by city economic-development programs.

Few of Lindsay's legatees in the press, politics, and philanthropies acknowledge these gains. Nor have they learned that a mayor who cares about the oppressed must wrest control of parks and subways from some of them to spare the others anarchy and give their decency a margin of green space, mobility, and hope. Giuliani has had to drag elites kicking and screaming into accommodating this. Some do accept it, if only because the city's new luster and vigor make members of its chattering and celebrity classes feel what they want to feel most: safe and important.

Whatever the reasons, the new round of mayoral elections in New York and other cities suggests not a regression to the race-and-entitlement-obsessed liberalism Lindsay pioneered but a forward-looking synthesis. Eulogizing him at a memorial service on January 26, Giuliani said that his legacy "will continue to be debated in the civic discussions that he loved so well. But let the record show that John Lindsay refused to give up on cities when others were abandoning them. He was determined to fashion a new kind of politics that reflected the unique and diverse spirit of the greatest city on earth. He was independent. He was outspoken. He was a reformer."

The same dispositions have been put to different uses by departing centrist mayors, both black and white. They have taught what Cannato's chronicle suggests: While municipal governance may be an adventure, it is not a morality play, even in a city as self-important as New York. A city is a trust for the benefit of people, especially "little people," who are struggling to be productive, whatever their color or culture. Those who dodge or disdain that struggle to grab what they can and protect it in municipal fiefdoms have to be shouldered out of urban politics, again and again. And those who try to ease their more-privileged consciences by doting on the unfocused vitality and rage of the poor have to be retired before they can do the poor and the city too much damage.