The Unmaking of a Mayor. William F. Buckley Jr.
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postpone for another occasion a discussion of the difficulties of introducing radical analysis into a general campaign. He did agree that I had an opportunity the major candidates did not have, but also he agreed that I had certain difficulties in communicating those ideas, in any substantial detail, to the general public. We met before I made the talk which included the remarks above, which were not, so far as I am aware, relayed by any of the communications media (granted, all except for a single daily newspaper were, at that moment, struck down). But I noticed—and I say this fully understanding that Mr. White’s professional commitments to the two major candidates necessarily dictated the allocation of space in his article for Life—that he ended up in his own piece dealing with the subject as follows: “Knowing himself to be absolved from the dreadful prospect of actually governing the city, Buckley revels in candor: he can muse aloud that New York would be better off if it had less, rather than more, people—if it shrank from eight million to six and a half million.” And then his section on my candidacy concludes with a passage which, if I may revel in candor, is a cliché which political typewriters can reel off by depressing a single key: “What, in effect, asks Mr. Buckley, is the purpose of city government? Is it really to care for the worn and the tired, the huddled and hopeless, the refugees who, today, come from the Black South or Spanish Puerto Rico, as 90 years ago they came from Europe to pass through Castle Garden and Ellis Island? Has the city—has, indeed, all American government—promised too much? Should government, therefore, cut and run from its promises?”
Letter to the author, December 2, 1965.
Ah, the ideological coda, how it afflicts us all! And how paralyzingly sad that someone who can muse over the desirability of converting New York City into an independent state should, having climbed to such a peak, schuss down the same old slope, when the mountains beckon him on to new, exhilarating runs.
1. Richard Whalen, A City Destroying Itself (New York: William Morrow, 1965).
2. The (private) New York Community Council’s Budget Standard Service sets $6,400 per year as the acceptable income for a family of four. The median income of New York’s white population is $6,600; of the nonwhite population, $4,440.
3. Letter to the author, December 2, 1965.
The Political Scene The Political Scene
1. The Republican Party 1. The Republican Party
THE TABLES OF ORGANIZATION of New York City politics are far less interesting than the unspoken sociology of New York City politics. The salient features are quickly related, and quickly understood, without the necessity to explore the mazes, or to absorb statistical tables. The most noticeable political fact about New York is that it is a Democratic city and has been one for about as long as can be remembered. It is a Democratic city in part because it is a left-minded city, about which more anon; and in part because the lubricants of a one-party city flow freely, with the result that the Democratic organization is everything that the Republican organization is not. It is merely suggestive to note that there are an estimated twenty thousand Democratic clubhouse workers as contrasted with a pitiable two thousand Republicans, a ratio greatly exceeding the registered Democratic plurality of about three and one-half to one. Democratic judges overwhelmingly outnumber Republicans, and it is generally conceded that such Republicans as there are, are there simply because, at some point, judicial seemliness requires that a second party should be seen, if not heard—if only to provide those comfortable democratic delusions which are formally satisfying. Indeed, of the seven Republican (out of twenty-eight) City Councilmen, five are mandatorily there because the law expressly requires a minority representation by the other party. The most prominent Republican Party leader in the city is Mr. Vincent Albano, the Republican boss of the unbossable county of New York (Manhattan), who was an orthodox Democrat until circumstances impelled him to back Dewey in 1948, from which point he elided gracefully into Republican County leader. Even less noisily he slipped into a position as chairman of the board of a brand-new commercial bank which achieved its charter (the first in Manhattan since 1930) by special action of a Democratic-controlled federal agency. He quickly made a stock killing; the general inference being that a few highly compliant Republicans situated here and there are useful coloration for the Democratic Party, and that those Republicans who cooperate will be remembered, if not hereafter, certainly in this world.
This does not mean that “Republicans” never got elected in New York. Four mayors during this century, the incumbent included, were “Republicans,” all of them fusionists and the penultimate, Mr. La Guardia, a gentleman who, like his successor Republican, took considerable pains to endure his congenital deformity with a heroic disregard, leaving him, for all that one would notice, as clean-limbed as a freshly minted Democrat. The upstate Republicans, who have predominated in the governorship since the long reign of Thomas Dewey began in 1942, have acquiesced in the situation—for one thing because the patronage powers of the Governor within New York City are exiguous, for another because Messrs. Dewey and Rockefeller, having measured the odds, appear to have thought it the wiser counsel not to attempt seriously to organize the Republicans in New York City, or even the latent Republicans. So long as New York City behaved sportingly as regards its own elections, the danger was that the Republicans might, by serious attempts to organize New York City Republicanism, so antagonize the very powerful Democrats as to cease to qualify for their discreet cooperation, which has been given to the Republicans from time to time; the most newsworthy recent example was the collusion between Governor Rockefeller and Mayor Wagner in the spring of 1965 on the matter of organizing the Albany legislature.
Besides, assuming it were organizationally possible, around what is the Republican Party of New York to organize? The notion that it should organize around certain political ideas different from ideas regnant within the Democratic Party appears to have been discarded as, simply, ridiculous. Would the GOP run on the integrity of its racial stock? It sometimes appeared to be doing so, complained Mr. Leonard Hall, a highly competent political technician, though not competent enough to have secured for himself the Republican nomination for Governor in 1958, at a time when Rockefeller also desired it. Hall added his voice to the chorus of breast-beaters after the ignominious defeat of Senator Goldwater. “We have permitted our party,” he said, “to become too exclusive. We have been trying to elect national candidates with the descendants of the people who came over on the Mayflower, and that boat just wasn’t big enough. . . . Our party gives the appearance of being an organization of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.” (The WASP vote in New York City is 12 per cent, somewhat less than the Negro vote alone.)
There has been lacking in the Republican Party of New York, everyone appears to agree, a fighting faith through which to distinguish the GOP from the Democratic Party and through which to lure the services of ideological partisans who cannot be commandeered by patronage. Indeed, on those occasions when the Republican Party has won municipal elections it has done so precisely by effacing any distinguishing characteristics of the Republican Party; by tagging along with the idea of Fusion, as was done so successfully by Mr. Fiorello La Guardia, hereinafter not referred to as the Little Flower. The voters of New York, on the other hand, are not immobile. There was, for instance, the insufficiently remembered victory of Mr. Vincent Impellitteri, who, in the special election of 1950, running as an Independent, beat the Democratic-Liberal and (needless to say) the Republican candidate. Mr. Impellitteri ran as himself; as a man who had been denied, brusquely, inhumanly, the Democratic nomination which was popularly supposed to have belonged to him. In any case, he won 1,161,175 votes, as contrasted with 935,000 for Ferdinand Pecora, the Democrat-Liberal, and 382,000 for Edward Corsi, the Republican. It is a matter of minor historical interest that that year, two years after Mr. Dewey practically