The Ungovernable City [Paperback]

Vincent Cannato (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2002

Vincent Cannato takes us back to the time when John Lindsay stunned New York with his liberal Republican agenda, WASP sensibility, and movie-star good looks. With peerless authority, Cannato explores how Lindsay Liberalism failed to save New York, and, in the opinion of many, left it worse off than it was in the mid-1960's.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Fate snubbed John V. Lindsay, the two-term mayor of New York (1966-73). A liberal Republican, Lindsay aspired to be his party's JFK, but his approach and timing were out of sync both with his party and the nation. Like LBJ, whose botched Vietnam policy parallels Lindsay's attempts at urban reform, the mayor was haunted by dreams of greatness. He made a gallant effort to expand his sphere of leadership, but the predictable political backlash doomed him to failure. In his first book, Cannato, a scholar in U.S. history and adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute, traces the Lindsay political disappearance to a failed liberal ideology. His is an ambitious work that integrates Lindsay's biography with a modern history of New York City. Ironically, the author's approach mirrors that of the mayor he liberally critiques it displays more style than substance. Despite the superficial explanations, this is a readable and useful book on modern New York politics. Recommended for public and academic libraries with urban collections. William D. Pederson, Louisiana State Univ., Shreveport
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Liberal Republican congressman Lindsay took office as New York's mayor in 1966 on a surge of hope for "Fun City." When he left office, in 1973, the city was intensely polarized over crime and welfare, had lost a million residents, and was on the road to fiscal disaster. Cannato, an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute, assesses Lindsay and his mayoralty, properly recognizing national trends--the "urban crisis" and the collapse of the New Deal liberal coalition--that complicated the job of any mayor but also critiquing the adequacy of Lindsay's response to the challenges he confronted. Cannato describes the full range of Lindsay's problems--"from his troubles with municipal unions to his poor fiscal management to his uneasy relationship with the police to his mishandling of the controversy over school decentralization"--concluding that "the political and policy choices Lindsay made added to the city's troubles." In office, Lindsay inspired extreme responses. Eighteen months after his death, this thorough biography is unlikely to end the debate between his fans and foes. Mary Carroll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 720 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (June 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465008445
• ISBN-13: 978-0465008445
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #527,558 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A memoir of false hope, January 5, 2002

By 

Patrick Ruffini - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay's New York And The Crisis Of Liberalism (Hardcover)

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.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The City That Doesn't Sleep, August 2, 2001

By 

Steve Johnson "Stevie" (Washington, DC United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay's New York And The Crisis Of Liberalism (Hardcover)

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.

19 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Late Great City of NY, October 30, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay's New York And The Crisis Of Liberalism (Hardcover)

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.