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The Ungovernable City, by Vincent Cannato
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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.
- Sales Rank: #1120369 in Books
- Color: Multicolor
- Published on: 2002-05-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.25" h x 1.82" w x 6.13" l, 2.38 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 720 pages
- ISBN13: 9780465008445
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
From Publishers Weekly
"[Being mayor is] like being a bitch in heat. You stand still and you get screwed, you start running and you get bit in the ass," wrote John Lindsay in his 1976 roman … clef, The Edge. Elected in 1965, Lindsay was an unlikely mayor of the Big Apple: a liberal Republican and a Yale graduate, he was good-looking, sophisticated, patrician and Protestant, in contrast with former mayors who, modest in background and appearance, more closely resembled the average working New Yorker. Cannato's biography as much about New York, postwar electoral politics and "the decline of the city and the crisis of liberalism" as it is about Lindsay himself portrays a politician who valued reform over party lines, intelligence over cant, and who ultimately failed (some claim spectacularly) with the best intentions. Lindsay's mayoral career was a political obstacle race: on his first day in office, the city's transit workers went on strike; within months, to ward off a dire financial deficit, he instituted a city income tax; in the summer of 1967, racially charged riots broke out citywide and Lindsay battled the police over a civilian review board. Then, in 1968, antiwar protestors took over Columbia University, which was already at war with its neighboring black community. Lindsay weathered these fights with some success, was elected for a second term, became a Democrat and then found that his career was over. Cannato, an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute, has written an exhaustive and nuanced, compulsively readable narrative, salted with measured, on-target judgments. By far the best work to be done on Lindsay, this biography is an important contribution not only to the literature on New York City but to the broader fields of urban and political studies.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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.
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
Most helpful customer reviews
17 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
An Unsympathetic, but Scholarly, Account of John Lindsay.
By A Customer
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.
20 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
A memoir of false hope
By Patrick Ruffini
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.
20 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
The Late Great City of NY
By A Customer
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.
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