The Unmaking of a Mayor. William F. Buckley Jr.
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something of the effect of causing the crisis of New York to recede from the public consciousness.) The crisis of air pollution in New York, for instance, has occurred partly because the air is very dirty and actually dangerous to those who suffer from asthma and emphysema; but partly also because crisis-collectors discovered it, as they recently discovered the poverty crisis, and can, one gathers, be counted upon to discover crisis after crisis in the Dominican Republic, which seems to have developed as a year-round crisis resort.
There was, however, a considerable spontaneous restlessness in New York in the spring of 1965 which seemed to center on the widely held conviction that the incumbent administration had exhausted its powers of problem-solving. The question, rather surprisingly, was infrequently raised as to whether such derelictions as had crystallized could be corrected merely by electing a new Mayor. Quite possibly the aspirant mayor, in order to get himself elected, would need to make precisely those commitments to the old order which preclude the very actions needed to overcome those crises. Lincoln Steffens’ aphorism is frequently quoted, that one should “always vote against the incumbent,” the theory being that incumbents are necessarily corrupted by the exercise of power. The aphorism is refreshing, even as a little trace of anarchism is always refreshing: but the myth it stealthily subsidizes—the myth that things will improve with a change in personnel—is tricky. Because sometimes that is what happens; but on the other hand, sometimes, notoriously, that isn’t what happens. What is sometimes most greatly needed is not a change in personnel but a change in political ideas. For instance, almost every problem in New York that doesn’t have to do merely with maladministration arises out of a series of capitulations to special interests. Now it is sometimes both wise and prudent to capitulate to a special interest (e.g., to avoid revolutions, or to right a grave wrong), but it should be recognized that that is what was done in order that the relationships between crisis and cause be manifest.
It is difficult for an ambitious politician to talk seriously about New York City’s problems insofar as they spring from such relationships. But it shouldn’t be all that difficult for critics to talk seriously about New York: which leaves one wondering why the literature of protest is so slender on the subject of those special relationships.
My own estimate is that some of New York’s problems cannot be solved by politics, and that those that can would first require tweaking a few taboos by the nose. But since political taboos exist precisely for the benefit of one or another class of voters, it is unlikely that the taboos will be violated and therefore unlikely that the problems will be solved; and I expect that it is the general intuition of that dilemma that lies at the heart of the demoralization that New York’s critics have so eloquently berated in article after article, book after book. “It is not the economic disorders of New York,” writes Mr. Richard Whalen in his galvanizing book, A City Destroying Itself,11 “that throws a shadow across an urban civilization. The truly terrible costs of New York are special and spiritual. These accrue in endless human discomfort, inconvenience, harassment, and fear which have become part of the pervasive background, like the noise and filth, but are much deadlier. For it is people who breathe life into an environment, who create and sustain a healthy city. If people are driven and their senses dulled, if they are alienated and dehumanized, the city is on the way to destroying itself.” It seems to me highly unlikely that very much can be expected in the way of the people’s reanimation if the people’s leaders keep missing the point.
Richard Whalen, A City Destroying Itself (New York: William Morrow, 1965).
What is wrong with New York? The taxes are high, and the means of collecting them barbarous. The cost per person of operating the government of New York is $412. The comparative cost per person of operating Philadelphia is $264; of Chicago, $293.
Yet no matter how high the taxes soar, things somehow do not appear to improve. The public schools are not as good as they should be; or, at least, the children aren’t as well educated as they should be. The recreation areas are drab and, worse, unsafe. Police protection is inadequate. Garbage collection is irregular and discriminatory. The surrounding rivers are dirty, the air unclean. The traffic congestion is appalling, and the facilities of the rapid transit system are inadequate. Low-cost housing is scarce, and especially scarce for Negroes and Puerto Ricans. Much of the new architecture is dispirited and graceless.
Great jeremiads can be written—and indeed have been—on each of these major deprivations which, taken together, underwrite such a categorical disillusion as Mr. Whalen’s. A modern Justine could, in New York City, wake up in the morning in a room she shares with her unemployed husband and two children, crowd into a subway in which she is hardly able to breathe, disembark at Grand Central and take a crosstown bus which takes twenty minutes to go the ten blocks to her textile loft, work a full day and receive her paycheck from which a sizeable deduction is withdrawn in taxes and union fees, return via the same ordeal, prepare supper for her family and tune up the radio to full blast to shield the children from the gamy denunciations her next-door neighbor is hurling at her husband, walk a few blocks past hideous buildings to the neighborhood park to breathe a little fresh air, and fall into a coughing fit as the sulphur dioxide excites her latent asthma, go home, and on the way, lose her handbag to a purse-snatcher, sit down to oversee her son’s homework only to trip over the fact that he doesn’t really know the alphabet even though he had his fourteenth birthday yesterday, which he spent in the company of a well-known pusher. She hauls off and smacks him, but he dodges and she bangs her head against the table. The ambulance is slow in coming and at the hospital there is no doctor in attendance. An intern finally materializes and sticks her with a shot of morphine, and she dozes off to sleep. And dreams of John Lindsay.
The statistician for the defense (Mr. Beame?) appears on the scene with a great big file. (1) Even though the population of New York did not grow at all between 1950 and 1960, 255,178 housing units were constructed during that period by private and public sources; so that, with regard to housing Justine is better off, statistically, than she was before. (2) The trains into Manhattan are sure to be crowded during the rush hours, but in the past ten years new approaches have been built into the city for automobiles, so that the city has not been derelict in providing more means of ingress; and, besides, a new tube is planned which will make things easier. (3) Yes, crosstown traffic is bad, but a new traffic commissioner who performed prodigies in Baltimore is now in charge and very soon brand-new electronically operated devices will greatly reduce the time it takes Justine to go from the subway stop to her place of employment. (4) A new building code is in force which will require thicker, more soundproof walls, which will insulate her children against contiguous obscenities. (5) A million dollars was spent last year by the city on the special question of air pollution and Consolidated Edison has spent over one hundred million dollars on a program to reduce its contribution to air pollution. Meanwhile the city has passed ordinances prohibiting the burning of fuel oil with a high sulphur content and New York State has passed laws requiring cars to carry special devices—recirculating exhausts—which will mitigate the toxification of the air. (6) The educational budget in New York City in 1950 was $240 per child. In 1964 it was $850 per child, which means, among other things, that the student-teacher ratio is now at 23 to one, an improvement over the 27 to one ratio back in 1950. (7) In 1950 there were only 19,000 policemen in New York City. Now there are 28,000. (8) Many of those policemen are especially concerned with the dope traffic, and if Justine will let me have the name of that pusher . . . (9) The hospitals are understaffed, but the public hospitals plus city subsidies to (voluntary) private hospitals are costing $176 million per year compared to $105 million in 1950.
By statistical analysis, Justine lives in an enlightened, progressive city.
In purely positivist terms, the counsel for the defense makes a good case—provided two premises are accepted. The first is that the administrative overhead of the city is not soaking up most, or at any rate too many, of the funds originally appropriated for the relief of Justine. The second is that the crisis of New York is largely a function of money.
There is no doubt that the administration of the New York government was overlarded in the spring of 1965, and in this respect Lincoln Steffens’ axiom is directly to the point. Except, of course, that it seldom happens that reform government succeeds in shrinking the expenses of government