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

by Vincent J. Cannato

Book Overview

Vincent Cannato takes us back to the time when John Lindsay stunned New York with his liberal Republican agenda, WASP sensibility, and movie-star good looks. With peerless authority, Cannato explores how Lindsay Liberalism failed to save New York, and, in the opinion of many, left it worse off than it was in the mid-1960's.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0465008445
• ISBN13: 9780465008445
• Release Date: May 2002
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 720 Pages
• Weight: 2.22 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.8" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

The face of New York's decline

Mr. Cannato's biography of John Lindsay provides an interesting and informative account of Lindsay's mayoralty. At the same time, he provides a great narrative of the major events that were gripping New York City at that time, and how they factored in Lindsay's governance of the city. In a major way, Mr. Cannato portrays Lindsay as a tragic figure, a man who sincerely wanted to clean up the city, but proved himself to not be up to the job. Three examples from the book illustrate this nicely. For instance, he came into office on a warpath against what he called the city's "power-brokers" (unions, police, etc.), but ended up being strung up by these groups (who, in the case of the unions, ate him alive at the bargaining table). Moreover, Lindsay thoroughly alienated the city's middle class voters through a number of poorly thought out actions/policies (i.e., the Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment, the 1969 blizzard response, and the proposed Forest Hills housing project, to name a few). As a result, Lindsay was increasingly dependent on the support of the far-left and of disaffected minorities, forcing him to radicalize his message. Finally, Lindsay burned all of his bridges with the Republican Party, became a Democrat, and then immediatetly sought that party's Presidential nomination. This proved to be a complete disaster, as the Democrats owed him absolutely nothing. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in urban history and/or 1960s-70s American politics. It makes a great contrast to American Pharoah, which is a biography of long-time Chicago Mayor Richard Daley.

A memoir of false hope

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.

The Definitive History

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.

An Urban Classic

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.

The City That Doesn't Sleep

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.