Customer Reviews

The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay's New York And The Crisis Of Liberalism

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In this thorough account of the John Lindsay years, Vincent Cannato seems to have condensed a life's worth of research into the few years it took to write this book. Though Lindsay wasn't a success by anyone's imagination, there are important lessons to be learned from this story of his failure.

Cannato begins The Ungovernable City with a discussion of Lindsay's ideological moorings. Given what Lindsay became (he ran for president as a Democrat a notch to the left of George McGovern) he may have seemed like the most unlikely Republican to have lived in the last half-century. But his rationale on why is revealing: "It seemed to me... that this was the party of the individual... It's the party of Lincoln, of civil rights, the protection of the person and his liberties against a majority, even against big business or the federal bureaucracy." Lindsay would go onto to decry "antilibertarian" impulses in a way that might make today's conservative proud. In reality, Lindsay's "individualism" led him in a very different direction: a distaste for unions and the "power brokers" who were virtually sovereign over the city, an embrace of the mindless youth rebellion, with its iconic portrayal of the whimsical individual overcoming sprawling organizations, and a lukewarm commitment to law and order. Lindsay's reluctance to impose standards of civil behavior, even in the most disorderly parts of the city, degenerated into a government-assisted permissiveness where welfare recipients would not (and indeed, in the Lindsay worldview, should not) be required to work, and where (often radical) community groups would be given more control over neighborhood schools.

These policies created new political fault lines that aren't likely to be replicated ever again: a liberal Republican mayor allied with ghetto blacks and upscale Manhattanites, standing against the heavily Jewish teachers union (and labor unions in general), white ethnics in the outer boroughs, and the police. The eruptions that shook the Lindsay mayoralty were too many to count. From our own immediate perspective, perhaps the most symbolic of these confrontations took place in lower Manhattan in 1970, when blue collar hard-hats (including a contingent of constuction workers from the World Trade Center) clashed with anti-war protesters. The mayor was harshly critical of the blue collar workers in the dispute.

With the successes of the Rudy Giuliani years fresh in mind, this is an important time to read Vincent Cannato's story of good intentions gone terribly wrong. As others have noted, this is also very much a story about Giuliani, whose way of running the city contrasted sharply with John Lindsay's reliance on sentimental dogma as a substitute for sound management. One hopes that Cannato will follow up with an equally meticulous and well-researched account of the Giuliani era -- a story with a decidedly happier ending.

Dr. Cannato has done every student of urban history a favor with this eminently readable book that is not just the story of a promising politician who failed but of promising policies--and an era--which failed as well. They failed their promises and their constituencies and the story is well told, unlike too much history which is dry or not made relevant to current events, trends, and understandings of social policy. Mayor Lindsay was a "phenom," but so too were his failures in the most recognizeable city in the world during the most tumultuous times of the last century in America.

While a reader may not agree with all of Cannato's conclusions, s/he cannot help but understand the diagnoses in this thoroughly researched book about more than a man, more than a city--but urban policy in general.

The city and urban policy have gained more and more interest from social scientists for a generation now and this book explains that interest in that it explains the crucible of a time and of a person--all well-intended.

Race, religion, partisan intrigue and ambition--it's all here and generations from now when city politics and New York City are studied, I'd predict "Cannato" will be mandatory reading just as other great historians' books are known by the hisotrian's name; "Cannato" will be a standard and Cannato's future career as a social historian is well set from this, his maiden voyage.

I loved this book about a topic I only knew little about--before I read it.

My parents left the East New York section of Brooklyn in the mid 1960's. They moved to Long Island were I grew up. They always cursed John Lindsay. After reading this book I now know why. Vincent Cannato shows in brilliant fashion how Lindsay was in the wrong place at the wrong time. While Cannato does use the term WASP too many times to describe Lindsay, his WASP heritage (actually Scottish-Dutch, not English) was not his reasoning for not understanding NYC. Maybe it did not matter who was mayor of NYC from 1965-73. Lindsay was the in the wrong place at the wrong time. Whites were leaving the city for the suburbs. They were replaced with poor, low educated Blacks and Puerto Ricans. The demographics were changing. Lindsay did inherit a mess with NYC's grossly overpaid (even today) Civil Service workers asking for super pay raises. Lindsay handcuffed the police too much. Lindsay allowed black militants to run buskshot over the city schools which went downhill. Crime went out of control. Welfare dependency skyrocketed. Lindsay only cared for Manhattan and militant minorities. It was changing racial/ethnic demographics that made life for Lindsay tough, but he made the situation worse with his big government, appeasment of criminals attitude. What NYC needed in the 1960's was a Rudy Guiliani. Rudy came 30 years later to clean up the mess left by Wagner, Lindsay, and Dinkins. Lindsay may have been a good man, but he should have been mayor of Salt Lake City instead.

Vincent J. Cannato has written a book that will, I believe, rank alongside Robert Caro's The Power Broker as one of the finest books written about New York City and, by extension, about cities everywhere.

Cannato is highly effective at bringing the promise, tumult and disappointments of the sixties and early seventies back to life through Lindsey, the city's well-intentioned and charismatic mayor. Along the way, the book lets us revisit the New York of that era, with its quirks, difficulties, frustrations, and elegance. I also found that the book masterfully avoids easy judgements on Lindsey.

Overall, this is a fascinating and learned book that even veteran observers of the New York scene will learn much from.

Cannato's thesis is that John Lindsay was a political naif during his first term and that, taken together, his eight years as mayor of NYC revealed the bankruptcy of liberalism.

Lindsay was elected in 1965 as a reform mayor and, according to Cannato, was a throw-back to the crusading big-city mayors of the Progressive Era. He was honest, idealistic, open to new ideas, and didn't have a clue how to govern the City. His WASP-ish background (St.Paul's and Yale), which Cannato refers to a little too often, left him unprepared for the cynical hurly-burley of New York politics.

In 1965, Lindsay campaigned against the "power brokers," those influential business, community and labor leaders who, supposedly, had stolen the City from the people. Successful past mayors had depended on such people and cultivated them. Robert Wagner, for instance, never missed the Bar Mitzvah or First Holy Communion of the child of a prominent labor leader or precinct captain. Lindsay, on the other hand, was uncomfortable around such people (who were often vulgar) and his fastidious disdain alientated those who could make or break his administration. As a result, they broke it.

After running as an independent candidate in 1969 against weak opposition, Lindsay abandoned the Republican Party for the Democrats and cut deals with the "power brokers" he once denounced. The first four years, Cannato implies, were the expensive price New York City had to pay for the arrogant and distant Lindsay to learn the realities of ethnic/racial politics in NYC.

Lindsay is, for the author, the apotheosis of the "limousine liberal": the well-heeled, upper crust type who panders to the worst elements in society out of a cowardly sense of guilt. The mayor was rolled by black militants, who extorted money from the City as the price for not rioting. When crime soared out of control, as it certainly did, Lindsay refused to back the police and made it plain that he "understood" the reasons for the violence. A suppressed lower class was finally making itself heard.

Lindsay despised, or so the author claims, the working class in NYC: the Irish, Italians, and Jews who inhabit the "outer boroughs," obey the law, and just barely get by. While their mayor "made nice" (the author's repeated phrase) with black militants and college protesters (e.g. the 1968 Columbia University take-over), the hard-working white "ethnics" were left to rot in neighborhoods that grew steadily more dangerous, filthier, and poorly served by municipal agencies.

Under Lindsay, the welfare role simply exploded. His administration all but eliminated qualifications for public assistance and made it virtually a check-on-demand. Families disintegrated and illegitimate births soared, while Lindsay and his crowd regarded those (such as Daniel Monyihan) who warned of the consequences as hopeless reactionaries.

The author is correct in his assessment of the dismal state of NYC during the Lindsay era. I worked and lived in the City, rode its subways, and it was a dangerous, smelly, filthy place. The schools were appalling (and have only gotten worse.) Still, Cannato is less than fair to John Lindsay.

To begin with, many of the problems began under Wagner, who agreed to collective bargaining with public employees and thus put the City at the mercy of labor leaders. The transit and garbage strikes that paralyzed the City were, in part, a result of Lindsay's maladministation -- but the club in labor's hand was put there by Wagner.

The author also depicts the police force as demoralized by Lindsay's cozying-up to militants and his refusal to support "New York's Finest." Lindsay did pander to the militants but police bruality was not, and is not, a fiction. New York's cops lean hard. The egregious torture of Abner Louima and the panicky fusilade of shots (41 in all) that cut down Amadou Dialo (both men were black) are reminders of the excesses of the NYC police.

(Racial profiling is a problem througout the Northeast. New Jersey, for instance, persecutes black drivers. The problem is far bigger than just John Lindsay's New York.)

Cannato also underestimates the racism of the white lower middle and working classes in the City. The worst racial taunting I ever heard was directed, day after day, by an Irish crew against some unoffending Puerto Ricans. (I am Irish Catholic.)

And, Lindsay is blamed for some things he didn't cause: the disgraceful student take-over of Columbia is one instance. Not everything that happened in NYC from 1965 to 1973 was the mayor's fault.

But . . . a lot of it was. Mayor Guiliani, by way of contrast, has no patience for militant racism, is proud of his white, Italian heritage, backs NYPD to the hilt, and is friendly to business. He is also a "schmoozer," who never misses a chance to cement relationships with labor and community leaders. And, the City is now cleaner and safer than it has been in a generation.

The schools are still dreadful. Lindsay's catastrophic school-decentralization program bears much of the responsibility for the disaster. Albert Shanker, much demonized as head of the UFT, was all but backed into a corner in 1968 by Lindsay's stupid support of out-of-control black militants in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville schools. It was typical of him to slight the ultra-responsible Jewish middle class (the backbone of the schools for generations) in favor of the community loudmouths.

New York City is like the Balkans. During the 1960s, the only thing that united its inhabitants was what they hated. And, what they hated was each other. Lindsay's naivete, combined with his trendy "limousine liberalism," caused him to alienate the working class stiffs who made NYC function. In the end, he was discredited with nearly every segment of NYC life, except the "radical chic" liberals. He died, largely forgotten, in December 2000.

Like the NPYD, this book leans a little hard. The author does not like Lindsay. But, the volume is thoroughly researched and well-written. In the end, Lindsay comes off looking bad because he was a bad mayor. And, because liberalism was a bad philosophy. A generation later, we are still picking up the pieces.

Mr. Cannato's biography of John Lindsay provides an interesting and informative account of Lindsay's mayoralty. At the same time, he provides a great narrative of the major events that were gripping New York City at that time, and how they factored in Lindsay's governance of the city.

In a major way, Mr. Cannato portrays Lindsay as a tragic figure, a man who sincerely wanted to clean up the city, but proved himself to not be up to the job. Three examples from the book illustrate this nicely. For instance, he came into office on a warpath against what he called the city's "power-brokers" (unions, police, etc.), but ended up being strung up by these groups (who, in the case of the unions, ate him alive at the bargaining table). Moreover, Lindsay thoroughly alienated the city's middle class voters through a number of poorly thought out actions/policies (i.e., the Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment, the 1969 blizzard response, and the proposed Forest Hills housing project, to name a few). As a result, Lindsay was increasingly dependent on the support of the far-left and of disaffected minorities, forcing him to radicalize his message. Finally, Lindsay burned all of his bridges with the Republican Party, became a Democrat, and then immediatetly sought that party's Presidential nomination. This proved to be a complete disaster, as the Democrats owed him absolutely nothing.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in urban history and/or 1960s-70s American politics. It makes a great contrast to American Pharoah, which is a biography of long-time Chicago Mayor Richard Daley.

When John Lindsay was elected mayor in 1965, his supporters already perceived that New York was in decline. Lindsay's appeal was as a disinterested outsider, a liberal Republican brought in to reform a city run by a corrupt Democratic machine.

Lindsay was challenged from literally the first day he took office, when the transportation unions went on strike. Cannato examines the Lindsay administration as it lurched from crisis to crisis. Mostly Lindsay was grappling with larger historic forces unleashed by the civil rights and anti-war movements, as well as the changing demographics of a city which, like many others of the time, was losing population both to its own suburbs and the sunbelt.

But Cannato makes it clear that Lindsay's ignorance of the nitty gritty of New York politics left him vulnerable and unprepared for much of the wheeling and dealing of city government. A denizen of the affluent Upper East Side of Manhattan, he was successful in reaching out to African-Americans. He was much less successful in his relations with the white ethnics of the outer boroughs, who also filled the ranks of the police and fire departments.

When New York went bankrupt two years after Lindsay left office, it was climax of a narrative that had been developing over the course of thirty years. But Lindsay's years in office are perhaps the most significant in the telling of that story. One can more sympathetic to Lindsay's liberal instincts than the author and still appreciate the work Cannato has done to present a definitive history of the era.

Like many other reviewers, I found this to be an engaging review of some of New York's most recent history, and was pleased to have the opportunity to reflect on that tumultuous era. However, as a Native New Yorker who lived through Mayor Lindsay's administration, I was troubled by the inaccuracies of which I personally was aware, and therefore was led to question the scholarship generally. Otherwise, I share the same problem with many other reviewers: The fact that the book could have been better if the author had left his disdain for liberal policies on the floor with other discarded parts of the first draft.

I guess the theory that Lindsay's administration was a flop would have been appreciably harder to substantiate if there had been an accurate description of the racial turmoil New York avoided due to his leadership. I vividly recall what happened in the late sixties in Newark, and Detroit, Watts and a half dozen other cities. It matters not at all what the author says (particularly when it is a repetition of the mantra that because only two were killed and twenty arrested, Lindsay was wrong to deny that this constituted a "riot").

I don't know what another reviewer means when he speaks of a New Yorks's time as a "quiet riot" That seems rather onymoronic to me. The fact remains that New York avoided the turmoil that infected too many other cities because of Lindsay himself. Thousands correctly believed that Lindsay cared enough to actually interact with people who had been ignored (save at election time) in the past gave them a sense that there may well have been an alternative to destroying the City. I guess that the facts obscured the author's political agenda.

While it is certainly "Inside Baseball", I must point out that the author (in discussing Lindsay's relationship with teachers) describes the allegedly deteriorating relationship between teachers and kids at Springfield Gardens High School. Cannato quotes a teacher saying that prior to the strikes in 1968, life was better at that school. However, as a proud student of S.G.H.S. from those very same days, I know that the school didn't have its first graduating class until that year. Since it was not open in the years before (the good old days, I guess), I must question the validity of this comparison. Makes me wonder how legitimate some of the other justifications and his other "facts" are...

I grew tired of the unnecessary characterizations of some of the other individuals who were quoted. Noted sociology professor (of N.Y.'s Queens College) Andrew Hacker could have been quoted (like others) without having his political beliefs being labeled as he was. The truth will show itself, without varnish of this hyperbole.

Practically ignoring the fact that Lindsay inherited staggering deficits from his predecessor but responded with a string of balanced budgets reflects (at least to me) that Cannato is more interested in asserting his theory of the inadequacy of the Lindsay years than the facts. Without balance, there is simply no legitimate analysis.

Given the author's admitted bias, it is inexcusable to be so critical with NO suggestion whatsoever of what policies Mayor Lindsay should have put in place rather than those he did. What would Cannato have done with students at Columbia University, surrounded by the neighborhood hostile to its expansion on one side, and young activist students on the other? Ditto the New York municipal unions, like the Police, Transit Workers, Teachers and the Sanitation Department. Does Cannato suggest that the appropriate response would have been to bring in the National Guard to run the trains or teach the children? Or, should he have immediately capitulated to the Sanitation Workers, rather than seek the Court's intervention? It is so easy to be critical now, thirty years and some appreciable prosperity later. But even with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, we are not afforded the author's wisdom. Be nice to hear what he would have done differently, as opposed to just telling us what he thought was wrong.

The bottom line? The challenges faced by Mayor Lindsay in The Big Apple were later seen by big city and small-town mayors all across the country. It sure made it easier for some others to respond after they had the chance to see what New York had done first, and respond either by imitation or contrast. Cannato has shown that those who can do, and that some of those who cannot merely criticize.

I finished this book educated to the extent of the challenges Lindsay faced as mayor, but like most assessments of his leadership, am left ambivalent and confused about his legacy. In his defense, how can one take on "The cumulative effect of such concurrent factors as a declining population, a rising crime rate, and an eroding industrial and manufacturing base". As it turns out, the book is really a biography of a city in sharp and deep decline.

New York is an engaging subject at any time but I have always found the 1970's to be most intriguing given its woes. It may have been more fair to have expanded this book to cover the Wagner and Beame years as the author points out that the city's challenges really began in 1961 and culminated with its bankruptcy in 1975. Sandwiched in between is Lindsay's two terms described by Cannato as "John Lindsay's New York has come to symbolize a city in chaos within a society in turmoil". The crisis of decay, crime, racial tensions, riots, a giant bureaucracy, economic pressures were not invented by Lindsay but they clearly accelerated during his leadership.

I especially liked the coverage of the incredibly interesting Robert Moses and other Power Brokers, the extent of crime and vandalism (well documented and attributed to many factors including the change in the nature of policing), the changing demographics in neighborhoods, the student takeover of Columbia (really well done), Black anti-Semitism (I was unaware of its extent and depth), and the prolific practice of graffiti and other "victimless" crimes that would lead to more serious offenses (in 1973, 63% of all subway cars, 46% of buses, 50% of public housing was all heavily graffitied and in 1974, 40% of teenagers arrested for graffiti were arrested again within three years for more serious crimes). Clearly William Bratton and Giuliani's "broken windows theory" would have been helpful in the Lindsay years.

However, I could not muster any emotion about the man in this quasi-biography. A liberal Republican with a failed liberal ideology, Lindsay seems doomed to history as a man with too much style and very little substance. He is often described as distant, almost cold and he comes across that way in the book. It is interesting to note that more personable mayors like Koch and Giuliani experienced more success (not exactly fair I know as the period Lindsay led was unique in many ways). Overall, a very well done bit of research and analysis of a period in New York and American history that will continue to fascinate.

I bought this book over 5 years ago and it sat collecting dust on the shelf. It looked too long and too arcane to spend any serious time with 'The Ungovernable City'. Then last weekend I picked it up and could not put it down thru 600+ pages.

Cannato perfectly captures the time and the enormous societal changes that swamped mere mortals like John Lindsay. The fact that Lindsay was mayor at a time like this is almost poetic tragedy: the sensible man of upper income gentility suddenly faced with the disenfranchised demanding a piece of the pie.

Also great are the descriptions of how politics was changing in America....old coalitions were fracturing and in the rush by government to address rising minority demands the white, ethnic working classes were becoming 'forgotten men'. One can see the seeds of the 80s Reagan Revolution being planted in John Lindsay's 60s NYC. This is the most fascinating part of the book. Cannato does a fantastic job of describing the dynamics that led people to switch sides: Lindsay eventually becoming a Democrat and millions of working class becoming Republican.

This book is would be an excellent reader for a course on the 60s social studies.