Читать книгу The Unmaking of a Mayor - William F. Buckley Jr. - Страница 11
ОглавлениеNew York, Spring 1965 New York, Spring 1965
1. The Declining City 1. The Declining City
THE HORROR-STORIES piled up, and the word was “crisis.” The Tribune embarked on an extensive and highly useful series identifying the constituent crises. Long exposés tumbled out, one after another, concerning the crisis in education, the crisis in housing, the crises in traffic, in crime, in air- and water-pollution, in dope traffic, in the economy, and—what was perhaps most significant—in the public morale.
They are not crises in the technical sense that the situation must improve or else the patient will die. Excepting the fiscal deficit, which presumably cannot be kited indefinitely, things could probably stumble along pretty much as before without causing New York City to close down its doors. But even discounting the irresistible urge to melodramatization during political campaigns, New York was—is—in bad shape. This was no phony missile gap of the kind a Presidential campaign had been fought over in 1960; nor, on the other hand, was it anything that had just recently afflicted New York. The crises had been around for quite a while but hadn’t attracted very much public attention. Some crises are of course more modish than others, and they tend to have their day in court, as, for instance, the poverty crisis has recently had. The crisis of Cuba, as another example, was on everybody’s mind for several years and was all but washed away by the sigh of relief that followed the great confrontation of October 1962, even though the net result of the showdown was merely to return Cuba to the status quo ante—which up until then was precisely what the crisis was all about. (Already the election of a new Mayor of New York seems to have had something of the effect of causing the crisis of New York to recede from the public consciousness.) The crisis of air pollution in New York, for instance, has occurred partly because the air is very dirty and actually dangerous to those who suffer from asthma and emphysema; but partly also because crisis-collectors discovered it, as they recently discovered the poverty crisis, and can, one gathers, be counted upon to discover crisis after crisis in the Dominican Republic, which seems to have developed as a year-round crisis resort.
There was, however, a considerable spontaneous restlessness in New York in the spring of 1965 which seemed to center on the widely held conviction that the incumbent administration had exhausted its powers of problem-solving. The question, rather surprisingly, was infrequently raised as to whether such derelictions as had crystallized could be corrected merely by electing a new Mayor. Quite possibly the aspirant mayor, in order to get himself elected, would need to make precisely those commitments to the old order which preclude the very actions needed to overcome those crises. Lincoln Steffens’ aphorism is frequently quoted, that one should “always vote against the incumbent,” the theory being that incumbents are necessarily corrupted by the exercise of power. The aphorism is refreshing, even as a little trace of anarchism is always refreshing: but the myth it stealthily subsidizes—the myth that things will improve with a change in personnel—is tricky. Because sometimes that is what happens; but on the other hand, sometimes, notoriously, that isn’t what happens. What is sometimes most greatly needed is not a change in personnel but a change in political ideas. For instance, almost every problem in New York that doesn’t have to do merely with maladministration arises out of a series of capitulations to special interests. Now it is sometimes both wise and prudent to capitulate to a special interest (e.g., to avoid revolutions, or to right a grave wrong), but it should be recognized that that is what was done in order that the relationships between crisis and cause be manifest.
It is difficult for an ambitious politician to talk seriously about New York City’s problems insofar as they spring from such relationships. But it shouldn’t be all that difficult for critics to talk seriously about New York: which leaves one wondering why the literature of protest is so slender on the subject of those special relationships.
My own estimate is that some of New York’s problems cannot be solved by politics, and that those that can would first require tweaking a few taboos by the nose. But since political taboos exist precisely for the benefit of one or another class of voters, it is unlikely that the taboos will be violated and therefore unlikely that the problems will be solved; and I expect that it is the general intuition of that dilemma that lies at the heart of the demoralization that New York’s critics have so eloquently berated in article after article, book after book. “It is not the economic disorders of New York,” writes Mr. Richard Whalen in his galvanizing book, A City Destroying Itself,11 “that throws a shadow across an urban civilization. The truly terrible costs of New York are special and spiritual. These accrue in endless human discomfort, inconvenience, harassment, and fear which have become part of the pervasive background, like the noise and filth, but are much deadlier. For it is people who breathe life into an environment, who create and sustain a healthy city. If people are driven and their senses dulled, if they are alienated and dehumanized, the city is on the way to destroying itself.” It seems to me highly unlikely that very much can be expected in the way of the people’s reanimation if the people’s leaders keep missing the point.
Richard Whalen, A City Destroying Itself (New York: William Morrow, 1965).
What is wrong with New York? The taxes are high, and the means of collecting them barbarous. The cost per person of operating the government of New York is $412. The comparative cost per person of operating Philadelphia is $264; of Chicago, $293.
Yet no matter how high the taxes soar, things somehow do not appear to improve. The public schools are not as good as they should be; or, at least, the children aren’t as well educated as they should be. The recreation areas are drab and, worse, unsafe. Police protection is inadequate. Garbage collection is irregular and discriminatory. The surrounding rivers are dirty, the air unclean. The traffic congestion is appalling, and the facilities of the rapid transit system are inadequate. Low-cost housing is scarce, and especially scarce for Negroes and Puerto Ricans. Much of the new architecture is dispirited and graceless.
Great jeremiads can be written—and indeed have been—on each of these major deprivations which, taken together, underwrite such a categorical disillusion as Mr. Whalen’s. A modern Justine could, in New York City, wake up in the morning in a room she shares with her unemployed husband and two children, crowd into a subway in which she is hardly able to breathe, disembark at Grand Central and take a crosstown bus which takes twenty minutes to go the ten blocks to her textile loft, work a full day and receive her paycheck from which a sizeable deduction is withdrawn in taxes and union fees, return via the same ordeal, prepare supper for her family and tune up the radio to full blast to shield the children from the gamy denunciations her next-door neighbor is hurling at her husband, walk a few blocks past hideous buildings to the neighborhood park to breathe a little fresh air, and fall into a coughing fit as the sulphur dioxide excites her latent asthma, go home, and on the way, lose her handbag to a purse-snatcher, sit down to oversee her son’s homework only to trip over the fact that he doesn’t really know the alphabet even though he had his fourteenth birthday yesterday, which he spent in the company of a well-known pusher. She hauls off and smacks him, but he dodges and she bangs her head against the table. The ambulance is slow in coming and at the hospital there is no doctor in attendance. An intern finally materializes and sticks her with a shot of morphine, and she dozes off to sleep. And dreams of John Lindsay.
The statistician for the defense (Mr. Beame?) appears on the scene with a great big file. (1) Even though the population of New York did not grow at all between 1950 and 1960, 255,178 housing units were constructed during that period by private and public sources; so that, with regard to housing Justine is better off, statistically, than she was before. (2) The trains into Manhattan are sure to be crowded during the rush hours, but in the past ten years new approaches have been built into the city for automobiles, so that the city has not been derelict in providing more means of ingress; and, besides, a new tube is planned which will make things easier. (3) Yes, crosstown traffic is bad, but a new traffic commissioner who performed prodigies in Baltimore is now in charge and very soon brand-new electronically operated devices will greatly reduce the time it takes Justine to go from the subway stop to her place of employment. (4) A new building code is in force which will require thicker, more soundproof walls, which will insulate her children against contiguous obscenities. (5) A million dollars was spent last year by the city on the special question of air pollution and Consolidated Edison has spent over one hundred million dollars on a program to reduce its contribution to air pollution. Meanwhile the city has passed ordinances prohibiting the burning of fuel oil with a high sulphur content and New York State has passed laws requiring cars to carry special devices—recirculating exhausts—which will mitigate the toxification of the air. (6) The educational budget in New York City in 1950 was $240 per child. In 1964 it was $850 per child, which means, among other things, that the student-teacher ratio is now at 23 to one, an improvement over the 27 to one ratio back in 1950. (7) In 1950 there were only 19,000 policemen in New York City. Now there are 28,000. (8) Many of those policemen are especially concerned with the dope traffic, and if Justine will let me have the name of that pusher . . . (9) The hospitals are understaffed, but the public hospitals plus city subsidies to (voluntary) private hospitals are costing $176 million per year compared to $105 million in 1950.
By statistical analysis, Justine lives in an enlightened, progressive city.
In purely positivist terms, the counsel for the defense makes a good case—provided two premises are accepted. The first is that the administrative overhead of the city is not soaking up most, or at any rate too many, of the funds originally appropriated for the relief of Justine. The second is that the crisis of New York is largely a function of money.
There is no doubt that the administration of the New York government was overlarded in the spring of 1965, and in this respect Lincoln Steffens’ axiom is directly to the point. Except, of course, that it seldom happens that reform government succeeds in shrinking the expenses of government after the initial period of flamboyant husbandry. It has not proved that way, however strongly economy is emphasized by the challenger, whether he is Franklin Roosevelt calling for a balanced budget, Dwight Eisenhower calling for a reduction in the bureaucracy, or Lyndon Johnson decreeing that the unused light at the White House be snuffed out. The probabilities are small that the cost of any modern government will reduce; which puts the onus on the private sector to generate additional revenues, and ends us up back with the question: Is the scarcity of public funds the major problem?
It was my contention during the campaign that the money shortage was not at the root of all evil; that although there are problems in New York, in other cities, and in the United States, which cannot be solved except by the expenditure of public money, there are problems in New York—and elsewhere—that cannot be solved through the expenditure of public money. But every one of these problems called for an approach highly unpalatable to somebody; and somebody, in an advanced democratic society, tends, unless he has been horribly forsaken, to be a vested interest, whose good favor is either essential to a successful political campaign or, at any rate, thought to be essential to a successful political campaign. I tried to make the point that catering to more and more private interests, under the competitive pressures of democratic elections, tends to elevate to politically preferred positions as many private interests as do not, by their elevation, alienate the more powerful private interests. And that what then happens is that—as I put it to the Washington Press Club—the marginal disutility of bloc satisfaction sets in; whereat the opportunity arises to speak directly to the apparently indulged bloc voter, and suggest an avenue for his escape, hoping to be able to make the demonstration that even by the application of strict utilitarian logic he is better off surrendering his synthetic political advantages in favor of the superior blessings that would then shower down on him.
I proceeded to do so. As it is elsewhere recorded, Mr. Lindsay won the election.
2. New York Is Not Hong Kong 2. New York Is Not Hong Kong
If we accept such categorical indictments of New York as Richard Whalen’s, quoted above, we should certainly ask why the free market hasn’t asserted itself to drain the city of its population. Or ask, at least, whether we have unconsciously accepted the proposition that rather than endure emigration, urban residents will be progressively bribed to stay where they are. In the postwar years, hundreds of thousands of men, rich and poor, skilled and unskilled, fled East Berlin to go to the West, resulting finally in the erection of a Great Wall to stanch the costly and humiliating flow. It is no one’s contention, of course, that New York is East Berlin; on the other hand, those who leave New York need not, in order to do so, make such sacrifices as are made by those who, leaving East Berlin, have left their families, their friends, and whatever goods they had accumulated. The United States, as we all know, is a highly transient country—an incredible twenty per cent of the population changing its address every year. To pick up and go requires, of course, that there be some place to go to. There are places to go to, outside New York. Places where there are more jobs, where housing is cheaper, the crime rate lower, the traffic less congested, the air cleaner, schooling better. Then, too, there are places outside New York where, by the testimony of those who have described the relative hardships, it is less miserable to be poor—where, for instance, one can, for the same amount of money, escape life in the rat-infested tenement. To what extent is the existence of spurned alternatives testimony (a) to the net desirability of living in New York, even after accounting for the special pains and annoyances of life there? To what extent (b) is New York, for mysterious ecological reasons, a kind of major dumping ground toward which the inertial forces of despair tend to propel the loose and the restless who, having come there, huddle down and will not go away, no matter what the attendant miseries of their new life, because by now they are spiritually exhausted? To what extent (c) is mobility simply a factor of wealth?
The very rich, it appears, do not feel the pressure to leave New York because except for occasional interruptions—a sneak-thief, a mugger, a murderer—they can afford to insulate themselves from the major inconveniences. To be sure, they must breathe the common air and strangle in the same traffic jams. But they do not need to use the subway, or live in crowded conditions, or use the public schools. That class of people is in absolute terms tiny, in relative terms large, because New York has a high concentration of very rich people. Mr. Richard Whalen tells us that, asking around, he came up with the figure of three thousand dollars per month after taxes (!) to finance that kind of life: a big apartment in a highly habitable area of Manhattan; private schools for the children; vacations, maybe some sort of cottage in the country.
There is movement from the middle class out of New York. The suburbs grew by 40 per cent during a period (1950–1960) when New York City’s population diminished by 10,000. The principal complaint of middle-class emigrants from New York, by various accounts, is the public schools, which, the famous exceptions aside, are academically backward, unruly, and, increasingly, the arenas for interracial experiments which, at least over the short run, bring dislocative social and intellectual consequences. (The white population of Manhattan schools was 62 per cent in 1958; 51 per cent in 1963.) The next complaint is living space—New York, it is not widely known, actually had, in 1960, more living space per inhabitant than in 1940 (between 1941 and 1961 housing units increased by about 400,000, while the population during that period increased by less than 350,000). But by 1960 more people desired, if they could possibly afford to do so, to stretch out a little bit, and so began to flock to areas where they could do this at the same cost that would be required in New York City, or even less. And, third, there is the much-discussed dissatisfaction with the business climate. (The cost of city government rose 138 per cent between 1954 and 1965 [during the Wagner administration], while average income rose by 46 per cent.)
According to the data, over 800,000 white people left New York between 1950 and 1960, during which period the Negro and Puerto Rican population in New York increased by almost the identical figure. Of those 800,000-plus, many of the breadwinners continue to come into New York to work, and thereby, of course, contribute to New York City’s revenues through taxes paid to the State of New York, a portion of which is remitted to the city, and through old-age retirement taxes, and excise taxes on whatever they purchase while in New York.
Among the lowest income groups, which arbitrarily (though not unreasonably) one might define as those families whose income is four thousand dollars per year or less,22 the emigration is considerably less than the national average—even though unemployment in New York is above the national average. In 1960, the unemployment figure among Negroes was 11 per cent; in New York, it was 14 per cent. Among the general population, 6½ per cent were unemployed. In New York (the figures differ) it was, by all accounts, higher.
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.
One wonders about the extent to which free-market pressures continue to be culturally relevant to the distribution of human beings. I do not remember just when the principle that natural economic pressures ought to bear on the movements of the population was formally abandoned by social theorists, but somewhere along the line it seems to have been. It used to be taken for granted that if in one place there is overcrowding, unemployment, obloquy, whereas somewhere else there is room and work, and there is no barbed wire between place A and place B, there is sufficient reason for a flow of people from the one to the other locality. I remember a photograph in Life of Senator John Kennedy, campaigning in West Virginia in the spring of 1960 for the Democratic Presidential nomination. He was talking to a miner who, the caption revealed, had worked a cumulative total of three years out of the preceding twenty, and was now, with Life as his witness, receiving from the future President the pledge that he would be looked after by special legislation under the forthcoming dispensation: that he would, in effect, be paid not to mine coal for a living. There are any number of arguments, and I am acquainted with them—having to do with absent skills, with family ties, with other tangibles and intangibles—that make it difficult to suggest to someone that he move to another area, even if the objective is his own happiness and the general productivity. But one wonders whether it is not shortsighted of those who, in deference to the inertial logic that people should stay where they are, appear to refuse to probe the alternative that they might be better off elsewhere than in New York City, with its inhuman living conditions, its 200,000 unemployed, and its 500,000 on relief. The case might be made, however paradoxical it may sound, that although New York should not positively discourage immigration, at least it should positively encourage emigration.
This isn’t the moment to speculate on means by which private and public agencies might either encourage unemployed West Virginian coal-miners to retrain for jobs elsewhere, or, compassionately, discourage people from coming to New York to be poor. I touched, in the course of the campaign, on the theme that New York was thoughtlessly concerned with its size, and intended to probe the question whether an inverted kind of subsidy, to middle and big business, was, in fact, going on under our eleemosynary noses—by our encouraging, with social welfare schemes, a cheap labor market. I never got around to it, in part because of the lack of time, in part because, of course, it would not, in the hurly burly, have been publicly pondered. It is worth noting, however, that it costs the City of New York more money to sustain a great many of its employed workers—in schooling for their children, in free hospital care, in subsidized housing, etc.—than those workers produce; that we have going, then, a strange kind of subsidy which might be understandable if the workers were themselves the beneficiaries, but is less so when third parties who pay substantial dividends to their stockholders might be shown to be the beneficiaries. On the one hand, General Electric in New York will not pay a janitor as much money as the janitor needs in order to bring up his family; and on the other hand, the structure of taxes and social services contrives to put the janitor at the disposal of General Electric. The effect is to permit GE to underbid even the iron law of wages—by paying even less than those straitened wages which Marx predicted the capitalist community would inevitably end up paying—i.e., just enough to keep the workers alive. General Electric, of course, pays heavy taxes, in about as many directions as its light bulbs throw out rays. It would require the services of a first-rate economic sleuth to figure out exactly who is subsidizing whom. But the existing economic tangle is at least one of the results of the crazy situations encouraged by impenetrable social accounting practices and by the proliferation of “free” services whose residual beneficiaries are as difficult to track down as Hetty Green’s. And one of whose side effects is to encourage unnatural movements of the population; and the crisis of the cities.
I touched on the theme, as I say, early in the campaign. I was speaking in the Bronx at a Party Rally:
I have been wondering about New York City’s unthinking obsession with Size. We are expected to work ourselves up into a great lather any time we learn that the population of New York City has shrunk, as the 1960 census showed it had done, rather than grown. I wonder why this should be so. If this were a compassionate reason to take pride in the growth of the city, that is one thing. But surely we are not entitled to feel that we can take pride in the growth of the city in the sense, let us say, that the Maryknollers can take pride in the growth of a mission in Latin America, or Africa. A growth in the population of New York City is hardly to be considered a growth in the parish of the evangelized.
New York should always be prepared to do emergency duty, to act as a haven for the politically oppressed; to do, subject to our raw capacity, what we can for refugees, even as we have done in the past. But there is no such stream crowding in at our gates. New York is not Hong Kong, which feels the moral burden of admitting people by the hundreds of thousands in order to save them from persecution and even death.
If, then, we cannot take any spiritual satisfaction from the number of people who live in New York City, is it for material reasons that we encourage them to come in? Is it the kind of growth that is rationally welcomed by the New York Chamber of Commerce?
Why should it be? Just as it is safe to say that people do not come to New York for the same kind of reason that they go to Lourdes, it should be safe to say that they do not come to New York because New York is an Emerald City. There are emeralds in New York, but they are very scarce; and available only to the very few who combine a happy mixture of skill and good luck. Many people come to New York because they are deluded, at least momentarily, into believing the myth of New York’s munificent opportunities. And, indeed, New York’s improvident policies encourage some people to stay in New York who would be better off to return from whence they came, where job opportunities are better, living conditions more spacious, and the temptations to crime and vice less alluring.
But many people stay in New York, at New York’s expense, for reasons of their own which are only dimly understandable; for reasons, from New York City’s point of view, which are utterly inexplicable. The half-million-plus people in New York City who are unemployed and/or on relief do not contribute anything tangible to the city’s welfare. What is the point in encouraging them to stay, when they might go elsewhere, where employment opportunities are greater, the cost of living less, living conditions better? Why that false sense of civic pride that automatically assumes that New York City is only better off for so long as it continues to grow bigger? What is the argument, and what are its bases, that holds that New York is better off now than it would be with several hundred thousand fewer people living here, whose absence would relieve the congestion in housing, ease the unemployment figures, diminish the welfare rolls, reduce the general demoralization that is attendant on idleness, trim back the crime rate?
I appear before you as the only candidate for Mayor of New York who has not a word to say in defense of the proposition that New York ought to stay as big as it is, let alone grow bigger. I ask, Why? Leave aside all the other arguments, is there an economic argument in defense of this shibboleth? There are 500,000 people on relief in New York today. What do they contribute—I reduce the argument now to purely material terms—what do they contribute materially to New York? It costs a minimum of $700 to furnish public school education for a child in New York. It costs about $500 per year per person for those on relief; and that much again for public housing. What is the residual benefit to New Yorkers of the sacrifices they endure in order to attract to the city men, women, and children who, in this city—as distinguished from elsewhere—are unemployable, and become structural welfarists? Do we easily justify, in our consciences, luring them into New York by the promise of easy welfare payments? That was the lure of such of our politicians as Vito Marcantonio—and, having got their vote, the politicians let them institutionalize themselves as social derelicts, at liberty to breed children who, suffering from inherited disadvantages, alternatively seek surcease in hyperstimulation—in crime and narcotics—and in indolence—as school dropouts or as poolhall conscientious objectors to work; giving that jaded tone to the city which we recognize as among the most considerable obstacles to its liberation.
I recall a happy event of the campaign, a meeting with Mr. Theodore White, a brilliant man, an irresistible writer, and a super-engaging human being. His standard in approaching people personally—as distinguished from writing about them at second hand—has become whether he has reason “to suppose that they were men of good will,”33 in which classification (he subsequently wrote to me), he presumed to place me, and hoped that I, having met him, returned the judgment—which I most emphatically do, however puzzled I continue to be by the absence of any sense of shared oppressors. All of which is an aside, the point being that he appeared to be much taken—as by nothing else, I hasten to absolve him—by what I had to say concerning the unnatural size of New York City. He found it an arresting observation, worth serious thought. He did upend me, I remember, by proffering the suggestion that, however radical I thought my observation to be, he had a better one: oughtn’t New York City to petition to become an independent and sovereign state? I gulped, and quite lost my cool, dismissing his proposal with insufficient reflection, even though I confess to have found the time to smile at the ironic conjunction of proposals made half seriously by Theodore White and altogether in fun by Barry Goldwater. Never mind, he soothed me, he had asked both Lindsay and Beame the same question, and they too had bugged out: which is understandable, considering that Messrs. Lindsay and Beame were running for Mayor of New York, not for President of a new republic. We had other matters to go over (Mr. White was preparing a story for Life), and so we agreed to 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.
