The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York

Rating:
Summary: The system, not the man
Review: An excellent book, but Cannato is too quick to criticize Lindsay without pointing out the constraints that New York and other cities are tied with. Cannato asserts that Lindsay's failings came from his personality and liberalism, but I believe they came as much from the structure of NYC's governance and from the turbulence of the 1960s than the mayor himself.

New York City is burdened with more local responsibility for programs for the poor than any other county/city. Everywhere else in the country, Medicaid is entirely federal and state, not so in New York. No where else in the country does a city have to pay 50% of non-federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children (and w/ the successor too). Most states have neutral school funding, or funding that tries to help poorer districts, not so in New York, where the formula actually aggravates existing disparities. In common with other cities, New York City is home to concentrated poverty, unlike other cities, New York is made to deal with those problems alone.

NYC's mayor is also a weak one. He has/had to share power with the Board of Estimate, borough presidents, and independent school boards. Due to there not being a machine, to win elections you must pay off public sector unions. Lindsay had not been backed by the unions, but the years of appeasement of previous mayors had made the unions the most militant in the country, there was little Lindsay could do to temper them. Chicago has its problems, but public sector strikes are not one of them. New York also is an experiment in socialism in one city. It was during Lindsay's administration that New Yorkers realized the impossibility of that dream.

With more resources, and in a calmer time, Lindsay might have been a success. In another environment Lindsay might be remembered the same way Robert Kennedy is remembered, and not as a dupe.

Rating:
Summary: The City That Doesn't Sleep
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The failure of Liberalism
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Should have left out the political bias
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The Late Great City of NY
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A View From the Far Right
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Enough Balance?
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The Definitive History
Review: 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.