7-12-05,10:35am
A new book, Prince of the City: New York and the Genius of American Politics, hails Rudolph Giuliani as a hero leader who saved New York from itself, from its romantic and corrupt faith in “big government,” and from welfare statism. The book, written by Fred Siegel, conservative historian and Giulianist (ite?) with pizzazz, respectable documentation and what one might call the world-view of neighborhoods like Bay Ridge and Staten Island in the service of neighborhoods like Park Avenue and Riverdale got me to thinking about why I no longer consider myself a New Yorker. Even though I was born there and lived nearly half of my life off and in what all New Yorkers call with a kind of imperial arrogance “the city.” I have lived in New Jersey for the last twenty-four years and worked there for the last thirty-four years. Today, I marvel at the fact that New Jersey’s governor and Senators and most of its political establishment towers above New York. The New York that I grew up in the slums of the South Bronx had great poverty, racism, and brutal cops, but it had rent control, which prevented poor people like my parents from becoming homeless. It also had the most extensive system of social welfare and public hospitals in the United States, a system that with all of its great faults and flaws kept the poor from becoming the feral “street people” of the Reagan -Koch 1980s and beyond.
It was always a city of hustling capitalists (big machers in the Yiddish term for those who admired them: goniffs (or thieves) in the Yiddish word for those who didn’t). But it had a strong labor movement and the most extensive and affordable public transportation system in the country (15 cents a ride when I was a kid and everybody still remembered the 5 cent fare) and public parks and zoos and many museums that were free to public.
This was the New York that right-wing politicians sneered was not an “American city,” the New York that reactionaries everywhere hated as much for its progressive social policy as its ethnic diversity. This was the New York that I remember fondly, the New York, which literally saved my life, and the New York that capitalist economic stagnation, its fiscal crisis, and politicians like Ed Koch and Giuliani destroyed.
Fiorello La Guardia, the Mayor who began as a Republican and ended as the candidate of the Communist supported American Labor party, as Siegel from his rightist perspective understands, symbolized and best represented that New York. It was La Guardia the congressman from East Harlem who fought for slum clearance and against rent-gouging landlords and price gouging merchants. La Guardia the congressman who co-sponsored the Norris La Guardia Act, which outlawed the yellow dog, contract (contracts employers forced workers to sign that they would not join unions. And it was La Guardia the Mayor who was essentially the New Deal’s man in New York, allying himself with labor and sections of the left to the point that outraged Republicans denied him renomination on their ticket in 1941 and hated him far more than they did their local Democratic party opponents. La Guardia to this day is the most revered Mayor in modern New York history, the Mayor whom both Koch and Giuliani pay lip service to even as they undermined everything that he had represented.
In the 1970s, in the aftermath of the stagflation economic crisis and the Watergate political crisis many of us thought that the country would move to the left (I did personally by voting for Gus Hall in 1976 and joining the Communist Party in 1978). We were wrong, though. Wall Street responded to New York’s debt crisis by in effect blacklisting its bonds. The Ford administration refused any financial assistance and the administration of machine Democrat Abe Beame turned the city over to a Financial Control Board dominated completely by Wall Street leaders. The board or junta as New Yorkers called it fired thousands of pubic employees, forced tens of thousands out of various public assistance programs, and sharply raised the fares and fees for public transportation and social services. Free tuition and free museums ceased to exist as a part of the city was compelled to cannibalize itself to pay off the bankers and the brokers who held the real power.
Since New York’s and America’s big money were moving sharply to the right, a politician like Ed Koch, regarded as a liberal Democrat and ambitious to be city Mayor moved to the right in 1977 to get big capital’s support. As the Son of Sam killings that year terrified New Yorkers, Koch announced his support for instituting the death penalty. Koch also criticized rent control programs, city unions and social welfare programs, which made him acceptable to the banks and Wall Street. Narrowly defeating Mario Cuomo in both a runoff and a general election, where Cuomo ran on the Liberal party line, Koch then served three terms as Mayor, endorsing Ronald Reagan for president and as a Democrat acting as Reagan’s man in New York in the 1980s as La Guardia was Roosevelt’s man in New York in the 1930s.
New York, “the city,” was a different place after the Reagan-Koch era. Manhattan glittered but slums were worse than ever before. Homelessness became a significant social problem for the first time since the early years of the Great Depression while stock brokers snorted cocaine and those whom Franklin Roosevelt called the “forgotten man at the bottom of the economic heap” in his 1932 campaign became the bogeyman of rightwing politicians. Public housing was destroyed, public hospitals were shut down and prisons were built. Working class neighborhoods were gentrified and police forces expanded to keep the poor moving to the outer boroughs away from the commercial and high rent districts. .
New Yorkers elected David Dinkins to end the farce and the shame of the Koch era as Americans elected Bill Clinton to end the Reagan-Bush era three years later. Unlike Clinton, Dinkins really tried, giving New York its first taste of a moderately progressive government since John Lindsey, the best mayor I ever saw even though the mean-spirited and the bigoted hate him to this day, left office in 1973. But Dinkins was Black and he had narrowly defeated federal prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani, hero of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post and the white backlash crowd in places like Bay Ridge and Staten Island who in the 1980s were euphemistically called Reagan Democrats.
He sought to carry water politically on both shoulders, deal with the brokers, bankers, and real estate interests who were in a much stronger position then they had been in the 1960s and represent the interests of working class and minority communities.
Although he was doing a credible job, the long Bush recession of the early 1990s, ethnic conflicts which the tabloids used to attack him and a police demonstration which turned into an anti-Dinkins riot, enabled Giuliani to narrowly defeat Dinkins in 1993. That the new “Democratic president,” Bill Clinton didn’t do what Democratic administrations had done in the past and were expected to do—pour federal funds into New York (and New Jersey for that matter where Democratic governor James Florio was narrowly defeated by an anti-labor fiscal conservative) was also a factor in Dinkins defeat.
The Giuliani years that Siegel celebrates were nightmare years for anyone who remembers New York as America’s most progressive city. Like right-wingers everywhere, Giuliani believes in a punishment society, and the police face of punishment was everywhere in New York, particularly in the commercial districts. Giuliani pulled publicity stunts like sending an army of police into Gangster John Gotti’s Queens neighborhood to disrupt Gotti’s Fourth of July festivities (in terms of street crime the neighborhood was probably the safest in the city). Unlicensed peddlers were harassed and arrested (my father had been a second-hand peddler). Prostitutes were driven from Time Square into much less visible districts and Times Square itself took on a Disneyland quality.
The crime statistics kept on going down or so they said. I ran into old friends with comfortable jobs who lived in the outer boroughs and praised Giuliani for the declining crime rate. Many told me that they had been victims of crimes recently but New York was much safer than it was in the 1960s and 1970s when they had never experienced crime. Who, however, am I to argue with statistics?
Given the fact that there were four times as many people in jails and prisons then in the 1960s and many were there for long sentences, the crime rate had to go down. There were sociologists who had told us for a long time that crime is a condition of poverty, particularly destitution poverty, and that the great majority of criminals come from the slum districts. So, literally weed them out, warehouse them in prisons for as long as you can, and then build more prisons to weed out and warehouse future generations, creating in effect a prison industrial complex that became a growth industry
Restrict welfare while rents rise spectacularly. Demonize the city unions while the city itself became more and more a money trap for tourists, a city of boutiques whose economy resembled John Hobson’s famous prediction of what Britain would become in his class work, Imperialism, Hobson saw a parasitic city whose legions of shopkeepers and professionals served the interests of those living off their investments abroad, a city where goods were imported and the only product everyone scurried about to get was money, which was exchanged, leveraged, merged, borrowed and wasted for luxury goods.
Hobson, whom Lenin both respected, learned from, and called a social liberal, meaning that he wished to do the impossible and save modern monopoly capitalism from itself, wanted to change that parasitic system by ending imperialism and its militarism and export of capital. Hobson, like progressives today wanted to use the money to provide jobs and education and social welfare, everything that Siegel and Giuliani detest, reconstructing a liberal British society. Imperialist politicians were making that less and less possible until the Russian revolution provided a socialist alternative to imperialism and a government of a large and important nation that actively supported anti-imperialist movements.
Giuliani’s New York, with its extreme class divisions, unprecedented by modern New York standards police brutality, and bread and circuses atmosphere, built on the Reagan-Koch era to wound the city deeply. The unreality of it all was heightened in the September 11 attacks when the Murdoch and other national media made Giuliani into a hero for stepping forward on the day of crisis, which George W. Bush didn’t do. All the police protecting the rich, all the prostitutes and petty criminals driven into the underworld of the outer boroughs and Manhattan’s invisible districts didn’t make a difference in curbing or limiting the attack.
Unlike Winston Churchill in the Blitz of 1940 or Joseph Stalin in Red Square on November 7, 1941, when Hitler’s armies were at the gates of Moscow, or Franklin Roosevelt on December 8, 1941 before Congress the day after Pearl Harbor, Giuliani really rallied no one, came out with no policy or vision, but functioned as a plant manager in the midst of an emergency. But the most powerful media on earth were around to build the last episode up to now of the Hero-Leader myth.
Giuliani now makes a fortune in various security enterprises, is married again after very openly and shabbily both cheating on and humiliating his former wife, Donna Hanover, and is maybe one of the top ten nastiest celebrities in the United States.
But the personal isn’t the political, and Giuliani’s New York, the richest city on earth with so many poor people and such a stressful daily life, like America itself under Reagan and the two Bush presidents, is rising only in the arrogance of its rulers and servants. The city and the nation have faced both stagnation and decline for the majority of its people, a decline hidden in the United States primarily by cheap consumer goods from abroad and in New York also by Wall Street booms, both of which produce no real long-term growth industries or stable and prosperous work force
Fred Siegel thinks Giuliani is a great hero because he challenged a culture of “dependant individualism.” And big government, even though he made his career working for and through government, and no lives in a world of privilege as great as any hereditary aristocrat. Giuliani’s “gifts” to the banks and real estate interests, the waste and debt created don’t exist for Siegel, since he seems to think like Victorian economists that anything private is good and anything public, except police and army are bad and wasteful.
Siegel calls his book The Prince of the City, the title of a famous 1990s crime film. Actually, what Giuliani represented for New York, at least from my vantage point in New Jersey, could be summed up in a line from a much greater crime film of the 1970s, The Godfather Part II. I am thinking of the scene on the hotel balcony in Batista’s Cuba shortly before the revolution when, as the gangsters are cutting up a cake with the map of Cuba on it, Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg) tells Michael Coreleone (Al Pacino) “we have here what we have always looked for – a government we can really work with.”
Well short of revolution, a progressive government retaxing the rich and corporations, creatively reconstructing education and social services is both necessary and possible in New York as it is in the U.S., since deepening inequality maintained by both denial and fear is now and always has been a recipe for social disaster.
--Norman Markowitz can be reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.
