City of ambition : FDR, La Guardia, and the making of modern New York

458 Pages·2014·4.71 MB·English

by  Williams

CITY OF AMBITION
FDR, LA GUARDIA,
AND THE MAKING OF
MODERN NEW YORK
MASON B. WILLIAMS
Dedication
For Alexis
Epigraph
In another few years, New York will have eight million people. It will do more
than one-sixth of the business of all of the United States. As war tears the vitals
out of the great cities of Asia and Europe, the countries of the world must look to
New York as the center of progress, international culture, and advance. Maybe
this ought not to be so; maybe the country ought to be centralized. But I know
that is not happening.
You will see that New York has collectivized great masses of its enterprise. I
am not arguing whether this is good or bad. I am merely pointing out that it must
be so: eight million people crowded together do this automatically. . . .
New York’s relations with Washington will be even closer than New York’s
relations with Albany. I don’t know whether this will be a good or a bad [thing];
but I know that it will be so.
—Adolf A. Berle, Jr., 1937
These men certainly had tremendous advantages, one working with the other to
accomplish similar purposes.
—Reuben Lazarus, 1949
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
PART I: FOUNDATIONS
1 Beginnings
2 A Season in the Wilderness
3 The Deluge
PART II: THE NEW DEAL
4 “Jobs Is the Cry”
5 The New Deal’s “Lost Legacy”
6 From Fusion to Confusion
7 New Dealer for the Duration
PART III: WAR AND POSTWAR
8 The Local Politics of Foreign Policy
9 The Battle of New York
10 “I Hope Others Will Follow New York’s Example”
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Photo Credits
Index
Illustrations
Praise for City of Ambition
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
T
oday, many New Yorkers take the FDR to get to La Guardia. If their journeys
originate in Manhattan north of 42nd Street, they may pass beneath Carl Schurz
Park en route to the Triborough Bridge, which will carry them over the sites of
the old Randall’s Island Stadium and the Astoria Pool before depositing them on
Long Island. If they leave from south of 42nd Street, they may cross under the
East River by way of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, entering the borough of
Queens not far south of the Queensbridge Houses and passing within a few
blocks of William Cullen Bryant High School. These and many similar
structures are physical remnants of a time when the federal government under
Franklin Roosevelt met the greatest domestic crisis of the twentieth century by
putting unemployed men and women to work on public projects largely designed
and carried out by local governments. In New York City, Roosevelt’s partner
was Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.
Other monuments from this time remain lynchpins of the city’s infrastructure:
the Lincoln Tunnel, Henry Hudson Drive, the Belt Parkway. Countless more,
stretching from Orchard Beach in the Bronx to the Franklin D. Roosevelt
boardwalk on Staten Island’s south shore, have become part of the landscape
within which life is lived in New York. In a city whose favorite amusements
have long included putting up and pulling down, these projects have endured.
And yet if the physical legacy of the New Deal still pervades the city, the history
that produced it is only dimly understood. The public works projects of the
1930s stand today as mute testaments to an era of tumult and creativity, and to a
conception of government which reached its apotheosis in interwar America and
which shaped New York City profoundly—but whose history, obscured in turns
by ideology and neglect, is too little known.1
This book is an account of the relationship between two of the most
remarkable political leaders of the twentieth century: Franklin Roosevelt, the
thirty-second president of the United States, and Fiorello La Guardia, the ninety-
ninth mayor of New York City. The products of starkly different personal
backgrounds and reform traditions, they rose in counterpoint through the ranks
of New York politics before coming together in the 1930s to form a political
collaboration unique between a national and a local official. Sworn in as the
executives of America’s two largest governments at the depths of the Great
Depression, they kept the nation’s biggest city together during one of the most
trying periods in its history and helped to establish the course of its politics in
the postwar decades.2
It is also a study of how government came to play an extraordinarily broad
role in a quintessentially market-oriented city—of how the public sphere,
embodied physically in the structures and spaces built up and carved out in the
1930s, was forged. This story has its roots in the Progressive Era, which marked
the beginning of a decades-long debate over the ideal relationship among
“individuals, society, and government.”3 In a modern, interdependent society,
what rights did each of these groups possess, and what responsibilities? And
how could collective action be deployed in the interest of social progress?
Particularly in urban politics, the Progressive Era witnessed the introduction of a
new set of policy approaches meant to improve the quality of life, mitigate the
social costs of capitalist urban development, and render government more
efficient and effective.
A crucial moment in this history came in the 1930s. During that turbulent
decade, Franklin Roosevelt and his Democratic Party chose to channel the
resources of the federal government through the agencies of America’s cities and
counties. Fiorello La Guardia’s coalition of reformers, Republicans, social
democrats, and leftists rebuilt New York’s local state, chasing the functionaries
of the city’s fabled Tammany Hall political machine from power and implanting
a cohort of technical experts committed to expanding the scope of the public
sector. As depression gave way to war, the experience of total mobilization
politicized market transactions, allowing grassroots activists and political leaders
alike to make fair employment and fair prices a central part of city politics.
THE BOOK’S TITLE, borrowed and adapted from Alfred Stieglitz’s famous
photograph of the lower Manhattan skyline, suggests its principal theme. New
York in depression and war was a city of decidedly public ambitions: if
Stieglitz’s skyscrapers captured the ebullient commercialism of the early
twentieth century, the New York of the thirties and forties was, as one of its sons
has recalled it, a city of “libraries and parks.”4 It was also a city of municipal
markets and public radio, of neighborhood health clinics and free adult education
classes, of model housing, of bridges and tunnels and airports intended to
integrate the five boroughs and to link the city to the metropolitan region and the
wider world. Under La Guardia’s leadership, the city built a physical
infrastructure in which commerce could thrive and the interdependent processes
of urban enterprise function efficiently. It also expanded the provision of public
goods and services, envisioning these programs as means of lifting or mitigating
constraints which impeded the happiness of individuals, families, and
communities as they went about their lives—constraints such as unemployment,
poverty, high prices, poor health, inadequate housing, a shortage of educational
and recreational opportunities, and a stifling urban environment. During the
Second World War, it sought to afford city dwellers protection from high prices
and rents and to make available useful information to help them navigate
consumer markets. These efforts were linked ideologically by the core belief that
government should act as the mechanism by which the great productive energies
and scientific and technological advantages of the age could be channeled to
produce social progress. They were linked operationally by their self-conscious
reliance on government as a technology of public action.5
This is, then, a history of “public economy”—a history of the ways in which
government acted to produce wealth and shape the distribution of wealth in a
society whose bedrock commitments include a separation between property and
sovereignty, at a particular moment in time. That history took shape against the
immediate background of the Great Depression and the Second World War, both
national crises which forced Americans to search for new means of collective
action. It was formed within the context of a broad shift in the American
political landscape, as the lineaments of the American federal system, the
relation between local and national authority, were being renegotiated.
At the time Roosevelt came to power, politics for many Americans remained
primarily a local affair, with the municipality occupying a central position it
would forfeit in the second half of the century. Even at the New Deal’s high tide,
the political scientist Samuel Beer recalled, New Deal reformers recognized the
“great change in public attitudes” involved in their efforts to “persua[de] people
to look to Washington for the solution of problems. . . .”6 Yet under the
influence of economic and social integration, the development of new forms of
media, and such profound shocks as the two world wars and the Great
Depression, American politics was also undergoing a process of nationalization.
Local governments remained in many ways the strongest entities in the
American governmental system (in their operational capacity and infrastructural
presence, if not in their potential legal and fiscal authority). And as the
Progressive reformer Frederic Howe had written a generation earlier, they were
the governments primarily concerned with “the elevation of the standard of
living, with equality of opportunity, with the uplifting of life, and the betterment
of those conditions which most intimately affect mankind”—central concerns of
American politics as it developed since the late nineteenth century.7 Yet the
national government, long a powerful (if unseen) presence in the American
governmental system, was entering more fully and more visibly into what had
been the domains of state and local governments, ushering in an age of
“cooperative federalism” characterized by shared national, state, and local
responsibility.8 The equation was further complicated by the makeup of the New
Deal coalition, which numbered a few genuine national state builders but many
more men and women who endeavored to share political authority across the
federal system. This was as true of Roosevelt, who valued American localism
and sought to preserve and utilize it, as it was of the southern Democrats who
ruled Congress and used the structures of American federalism to defend the
low-wage regional economy and the system of racial discrimination which was
inextricable from it. Under these conditions, it is hardly surprising that major
shifts in national politics, such as those embodied in Roosevelt’s New Deal,
should implicate local governments, feeding back into local politics in powerful
and sometimes surprising ways.9
The story of Roosevelt and La Guardia’s relationship is the story of how these
two political leaders maneuvered amidst the constraints of a system in flux, how
they worked creatively to exploit that system’s potentialities, and ultimately,
how decisions taken at the national level reshaped the political landscape at the
local level. Roosevelt and his administration, confronting the paramount
problem of inadequate state capacity, responded by leveraging the particular
strengths of the American polity—and local governments, with their
infrastructural capacities and traditional responsibilities in public welfare and
public health, represented one of these strengths. La Guardia became a major
figure in the New Deal project because the New Dealers, finding few other
options, designed programs that utilized local states for auxiliary capacity at a
time when the national government’s reach was exceeding its grasp. As a result,
state and local governments played a vital role in some of the New Deal’s
greatest achievements: its bold and vigorous response to mass unemployment
and its extensive contributions to the public wealth.
We tend to think of American federalism as a zero-sum game: power asserted
by the federal government comes at the expense of state and local authority;