OVERRATED/UNDERRATED
AMERICAN MAYORS
Underrated
John Vliet Lindsay was hardly New York’s greatest mayor.
(In fact, the first city in history to be ruled by the common
man has had only two truly outstanding mayors, DeWitt Clinton
and Fiorello La Guardia—any pretensions of the current incumbent
notwithstanding.) Lindsay made plenty of mistakes, particularly
when it came to the bungled decentralization of the city’s
school system. Yet he had the misfortune to preside over a period
of almost unrelenting urban crisis—a time when American
cities were beset by racial tensions, drugs and skyrocketing crime
rates, aging housing and infrastructure, deinstitutionalization
and both white and black flight. Lindsay took the brunt of it
all; typically, he was pilloried both for giving generous salaries
to city workers and for neglecting the white, outer-borough
middle-class who made up most of the municipal workforce. His
recent obituary still dwelled on the fact that he was slow to
get some Queens streets cleared of snow after a blizzard—back
in 1969.
For all that, New York was almost the only American
city never to suffer a major riot during his eight years in office—not
even during the plague year of 1968. This was due in large part
to Lindsay’s willingness to reach out to the city’s
minority communities, and to his courageously walking the streets
to ease tensions in the wake of events such as the assassination
of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He stuck to this response of reason
and moderation, even as his opponents offered an array of alternative
political fantasies ranging from the Marxist to the neofascist.
Oh, and for all you good folks still complaining about a single
snowstorm, 32 years ago—go buy a shovel.
Overrated
In contrast to New York, Chicago endured two major riots in 1968
alone, one of them a police riot, largely instigated by the legendary
Richard Daley, Sr.. Daley’s advocates liked to refer to
Chicago as “the city that works” and the fact that
he made the buses run on time—what could be called the Benito
Mussolini School of Urban Theory. Daley’s actions during
the 1968 Democratic Convention—in which his police ran amok,
beating up demonstrators, delegates, and passersby alike, while
he himself screamed obscenities at speakers from the convention
floor; and all in favor of a war he did not actually believe in—left
an indelible stain on American democracy. Moreover, for all of
Daley’s vaunted efficiency his decades-long support for
de facto segregation, especially his willingness to pack
much of Chicago’s African-American population away in dreadful,
oversized developments cut off from the rest of the city by superhighways,
had very costly and negative consequences for his city. If you
don’t believe it, just ask yourself who’s footing
the bill the next time you watch Chicago dynamiting another forty-year-old
housing project.
