John Lindsay

John Vliet Lindsay (November 24, 1921 – December 19, 2000) was an American politician who served as a Congressman (1959-1965) and mayor of New York City (1966-1973).

Mayoralty

Lindsay inherited a city with serious fiscal and economic problems. The old manufacturing jobs that supported generations of uneducated immigrants were disappearing, millions of middle class residents were fleeing to the suburbs, and public sector workers had won the right to unionize.

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Public sector union activism would turn out to be the bane of Lindsay's administration. On his first day as mayor, the Transport Workers Union of America (TWU) led by Mike Quill shut down the City with a complete halt to subway and bus service. The transit workers truly were underpaid, but the strike was also an effort by an old guard Irish leadership to reinforce its power over a union which by 1966 had more black and Hispanic members than ethnic Irish. The leader of TWU had predicted a nine-day strike, at the most, but Lindsay's refusal to negotiate delayed a settlement, and wound up making the strike a twelve day torment and a grievous wound to the City. Quill's mocking press conferences gave the city the impression that Lindsay was not tough enough to deal with the city's real sources of power.

Related Topics:
Public sector - Transport Workers Union of America - Mike Quill

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The settlement of the strike, combined with increased welfare costs and general economic decline, forced Lindsay to push through the State Legislature in 1966 an income tax and higher water taxes for New York City residents, plus a new commuter tax for people who only worked in the City. By 1970, New Yorkers would be paying $384 per person in taxes, the highest in the nation. For reference, the average Chicagoan paid $244 per person. (source, Can Cities Survive? The Fiscal Plight of American Cities, Pettengill and Uppal, p. 76.)

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The transit strike was to be the first of many struggles with organized labor for the City to endure. In 1968 the largely Jewish teachers' union (the United Federation of Teachers – UFT) went on strike over the firings of several Jewish teachers in a school in the neighborhood of Ocean Hill-Brownsville. Demanding the reinstatement of the dismissed teachers, the four month battle became a symbol of the chaos of New York City and the City's inability to deliver what suburbanites could take for granted.

Related Topics:
United Federation of Teachers - Brownsville

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That same year, 1968, also saw a week long sanitation strike. Here, Lindsay was widely blamed for letting the disaster happen by his neglect to make a counteroffer to a pre-strike proposal made by the union. During the strike, quality of life in New York reached its nadir, as ten foot tall mountains of garbage grew on New York City sidewalks.

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The summer of 1970 saw another, particularly damaging strike, as over 8,000 workers belonging to AFSCME District Council 37 walked off their jobs for two days. Those 8,000 included the workers on the City's drawbridges and sewer plants. Drawbridges over the Harlem river were locked in the up position, barring transit by cars and hundreds of thousands of gallons of raw sewage flowed into area waterways.

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This was also the year of the Hard Hat Riot on Wall Street and Broadway on May 8th, in which Hippy youth protestors and construction workers from the World Trade Center construction site among other places clashed. The anti-war protesters had set up along the statue of George Washington on Wall Street and were reportedly waving Viet Cong flags and defiling American flags in a protest against the Kent State shootings. The "Hard Hats" proceeded to storm the statue's base in anger and set up American flags, then pursued the fleeing protestors. The resulting chaos then spilled out to the Pace University campus and New York City Hall. This was understandably one of the slowest days on New York Stock Exchange in months, as the construction workers were unexpectedly joined by white collar office workers from the exchange. Lindsay had ordered that all flags on City buildings be lowered to half mast in recognition of the Kent State shootings, which the construction workers were overwhelmingly opposed to. They threatened to overwhelm City Hall unless the flag was raised to full height, which it was. Lindsay also took the blame for the lack of action by the New York City Police Department, who made little attempt to stop the construction workers from rioting. Reportedly as the American flag was raised to full over City Hall, the construction workers demanded that the fifteen officers remove their riot helmets in respect. Seven did.

Related Topics:
Hard Hat Riot - Wall Street - Broadway - Hippy - World Trade Center - George Washington - Kent State shootings - Pace University - New York City Hall - New York Stock Exchange - New York City Police Department

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Aside from labor problems, New York City also became a major home to the counterculture. Thousands of hippies set up in Greenwich Village. In hope of finding someone to control the hippies, the Lindsay administration put Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin on the City's payroll at $100 a week.

Related Topics:
Greenwich Village - Abbie Hoffman - Jerry Rubin

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1968 also saw the student occupations of administration buildings at Columbia University over the university's displacement of local residents to construct a gym in Morningside Park. Columbia was closed down for several weeks; no one was killed, and Lindsay was not to blame, but one policeman, Frank Gucciardi, was paralyzed when a student jumped on him from a second story window.

Related Topics:
Columbia University - Morningside Park

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Despite NYC's avoidance of a major race riot, unlike Newark, New York was no interracial utopia during Lindsay's term. Protestors would march on city hall with signs saying "no money, no peace". Sonny Carson in 1967 sent a letter to Lindsay saying it "would be a 'cool summer' if Lindsay kept funneling money to the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)."

Related Topics:
Newark - Congress of Racial Equality

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Lindsay's position in the Republican Party grew increasingly tenuous over time. He had nominated Spiro Agnew (then seen as something of a moderate) for Vice-President in 1968 at the GOP Convention, but was out of sympathy with Nixon's policies and the post-Goldwater GOP generally. In 1969, a backlash against Lindsay's policies caused him to lose the Republican primary to State Senator John Marchi, who was enthusiastically supported by Buckley. In the Democratic primary, the most conservative candidate, City Controller Mario Proccacino, defeated several more liberal candidates with only a plurality of the votes. "The more the Mario," he quipped.

Related Topics:
Primary - John Marchi

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Despite not having the Republican nomination, Lindsay was still on the ballot as the candidate of the Liberal Party. Running as the only liberal candidate in a heavily liberal city, Lindsay formed a coalition of minorities, Jews and public sector unions to eke out a win by a plurality. He admitted that "mistakes were made" and called being mayor of New York "the second toughest job in America". Lindsay re-entered City Hall, however, in a politically weakened position, neither aligned with Democrats or Republicans, nor having support from the majority of the electorate. In 1971 Lindsay became a Democrat and shortly thereafter began a brief and quite unsuccessful bid for the Democratic Presidential nomination.

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The bargains Lindsay made with the unions later contributed to the fiscal crisis of Abe Beame's administration. To secure their political support, Lindsay offered unions large raises — the transit workers managed an 18 percent salary increase, an extra week of vacation, and fully paid pensions; District Council 37 got a raise and retirement after 20 years; the teachers received increases of 22 to 37 percent.

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Crime soared in NYC during Lindsay's term, as it did in other cities. From 1961 to 1965 NYC had 7.6 homicides per 100,000 people; from 1971 to 1975 it had 21.7 homicides per 100,000. (source Encyclopedia of New York City, 297). Unfortunately, even though whites committed the majority of crimes, many white New Yorkers associated crime exclusively with minorities. Jonathan Reider, in his well known study of the white backlash in Canarsie, Brooklyn, had this to say: "Canarsians spoke about crime with more unanimity than they achieved on any other subject, and they spoke often and forcefully ... One police officer explained that he earned his living by getting mugged. On his roving beat he had been mugged hundreds of time in five years. 'I only been mugged by a white guy one time'" (Canarsie, 67).

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Lindsay was seen as being far from sympathetic to the needs of working class white ethnics. Republican State Senator Joseph Calandra said in 1968:

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:"The North Bronx area has suddenly and without any prior notice had its garbage collection reduced from 3 weekly pickups to 2 ... Why the decline in service by City Hall, which had a record $6 billion approved for it by our "rubber stamp," so called City Council? Rumor has it that men and equipment have been diverted to the South Bronx. The North Bronx pays most of the taxes yet the South Bronx, which pays hardly any at all, gets all the services and facilities from our Mayor and City Departments. If more money is needed for our Sanitation Dept., then I suggest that our fun-loving Mayor 'find it' in the same way he found $7 million for the Youth Corps after that disgraceful, illegal, and wanton riot at City Hall." (Cannato, 391)

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