John Lindsay

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John V. Lindsay
103rd Mayor of New York City
In office January 1, 1966 – December 31, 1973
Preceded by	Robert F. Wagner, Jr.
Succeeded by	Abraham D. Beame
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New York's 17th district
In office January 3, 1959 – December 31, 1965
Preceded by	Frederic René Coudert, Jr.
Succeeded by	Theodore Kupferman
Born	November 24, 1921(1921-11-24) New York, New York
Died	December 19, 2000 (aged 79) Hilton Head Island, South Carolina
Political party	Republican, Liberal, Democratic
Spouse	Mary Harrison Lindsay (1926–2004)
Profession	Attorney
Religion	Episcopalian

John Vliet Lindsay (November 24, 1921 – December 19, 2000) was a American politician who served as a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1959 to 1965 and as mayor of New York City from 1966 to 1973.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Mayoralty 2.1 Labor issues 2.2 "Fun City" 2.3 Contentious times 2.4 Party politics 3 1972 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination 4 Assessment 5 Later life 6 References 7 Bibliography 8 External links

[edit] Early life

Lindsay was born in New York City on West End Avenue to George Nelson Lindsay and the former Florence Eleanor Vliet. Contrary to popular assumptions, John Lindsay was neither a blue-blood nor very wealthy by birth, although he did grow up in an upper middle class family of English and Dutch extraction. Lindsay's paternal grandfather immigrated to the United States in the 1880s from the Isle of Wight, and his mother was from an upper-middle class family that had been in New York since the 1660s. John's father was a successful lawyer and investment banker, and was able to send his son to the prestigious Buckley School, St. Paul's School, and Yale, where he was inducted into the secret society, Scroll and Key. Lindsay received his bachelor of arts degree from Yale in 1944 and his law degree from there as well in 1948.

During World War II, Lindsay joined the United States Naval Reserve and obtained the rank of lieutenant. His service extended from 1943 to 1946. He was admitted to the bar in 1949 and practiced law for a few years before gravitating towards politics.

Elected to Congress as a Republican from the "Silk Stocking" district in 1958, Lindsay established a liberal voting record, known for his strong support of civil rights legislation and social programs. In 1965, Lindsay was elected Mayor of New York City as a Republican with the support of the Liberal Party of New York in a three-way race. (He switched to Democratic allegiance in 1971.) He defeated Democratic mayoral candidate Abraham D. Beame, then City Comptroller, as well as National Review magazine founder William F. Buckley, Jr., who ran on the Conservative line. In 1968, after the assassination of popular U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Lindsay turned down an offer from Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller to take over Kennedy's seat[1]. Rockefeller then chose the liberal Republican Charles E. Goodell, who was unseated by Bill Buckley's older brother, Conservative Party nominee James L. Buckley, in 1970.

[edit] Mayoralty

Lindsay inherited a city with serious fiscal and economic problems left by outgoing Democratic Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. 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.

[edit] Labor issues

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 of subway and bus service. The leader of the TWU had predicted a nine-day strike at most, but Lindsay's refusal to negotiate delayed a settlement and the strike lasted twelve days. Quill's mocking press conferences gave the city the impression that Lindsay was not tough enough to deal with the city's sources of power.

The settlement of the strike, combined with increased welfare costs and general economic decline, forced Lindsay to push through the New York state legislature in 1966 a municipal income tax hike and higher water rates for city residents, plus a new commuter tax for people who worked in the city but resided elsewhere. By 1970, New Yorkers were paying $384 per person in taxes, the highest in the nation. In contrast, the average Chicago resident paid $244 per person. ^[1]

The transit strike was the first of many labor struggles. In 1968 the teachers' union (the United Federation of Teachers (UFT)) went on strike over the firings of several teachers in a school in the neighborhood of Ocean Hill-Brownsville. ^[2]. 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 difficulty to deliver a functioning school system.

That same year, 1968, also saw a week-long sanitation strike. Quality of life in New York reached a nadir during this strike, as ten-foot tall mountains of garbage grew on New York City sidewalks.

The summer of 1970 ushered in another devastating strike, as over 8,000 workers belonging to AFSCME District Council 37 walked off their jobs for two days. The strikers included workers on the city's drawbridges and sewer plants. Drawbridges over the Harlem River were locked in the "up" position, barring transit by automobile, and hundreds of thousands of gallons of raw sewage flowed into area waterways.

[edit] "Fun City"

During the first days of Lindsay's term, as New Yorkers endured the transit strike, the Mayor remarked, I still think it's a fun city., and walked four miles (6 km) from his hotel room to City Hall in a gesture to show it. Dick Schaap, then a columnist for The New York Herald Tribune, coined and popularized the sarcastic term in an article titled Fun City. ^{[3] [4]}. In the article, Schaap sardonicly pointed out that it wasn't. The term continued to carry with it a derisive tone as the city became more dangerous and corporate headquarters began moving to suburban locations in Westchester County and Fairfield County. ^[5]

[edit] Contentious times

1970 was also the year of the Hard Hat Riot on Wall Street and Broadway on May 8, in which construction workers mobilized by the New York State AFL-CIO attacked about 1,000 high school and college students protesting the Kent State Shootings, the American invasion of Cambodia, and the Vietnam War. Attorneys, bankers and investment analysts from nearby Wall Street investment firms tried to protect many of the students but were themselves attacked, and onlookers reported that the police stood by and did nothing. More than seventy people were injured, including four policemen; only six people were arrested.^[6][7][8] Lindsey took the blame for this lack of action by the NYPD.^{[citation needed]}

However, during the "long, hot summers" of 1965 and 1969, Lindsay was widely credited with peacefully averting any major race riots in New York, due largely to his unescorted walks through ghetto neighborhoods to show solidarity and urge residents to keep calm.

[edit] Party politics

Lindsay's position in the Republican Party grew increasingly tenuous over time. He had nominated Spiro Agnew (then seen as something of a Maryland "moderate") for Vice President in 1968 at the GOP Convention, which met in Miami Beach. Lindsay soon opposed Nixon's policies. In 1969, a backlash against Lindsay caused him to lose the Republican mayoral primary to state Senator John J. Marchi, who was enthusiastically supported by Buckley and the party conservatives. In the Democratic primary, the most conservative candidate, City Controller Mario Procaccino, defeated several more liberal contenders and won the nomination with only a plurality of the votes. "The more the Mario," he quipped.

Despite not having the Republican nomination, Lindsay was still on the ballot as the candidate of the New York 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 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.

[edit] 1972 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination

Lindsay launched a brief and unsuccessful bid for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination. He attracted positive media attention and was a successful fundraiser. Lindsay did well in the early Arizona caucus, coming in second place^[9] behind Edmund Muskie and ahead of eventual nominee George McGovern. Then in the March 14th Florida primary he placed a weak 5th place, behind George Wallace, Muskie, Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson (though he did edge out George McGovern). Among his difficulties was New York City's worsening problems, which Lindsay was accused of neglecting; a band of protesters from Forest Hills, Queens who were opposed to his support for a low income housing project in their neighborhood, followed Lindsay around his aborted campaign itinerary to jeer and heckle him.^{[10] [11]}. His poor showing in Florida effectively doomed his candidacy. Meade Esposito called for Lindsay to end his campaign with the much-publicized comment "I think the handwriting is on the wall; Little Sheba better come home".^[12] After a poor showing in the April 5th Wisconsin primary, Lindsay formally dropped out of the race.

[edit] Assessment

Lindsay left office in 1973, having declined to seek a third term as mayor, which was then permitted. His critics have argued that mistakes he made played a large part in causing the city's fiscal problems in the 1970s; Lindsay had allowed one in seven New Yorkers to work for the city, with almost as high a proportion receiving welfare; he was perceived as too sympathetic to organized labor, and he had borrowed for operating expenses. The bargains Lindsay made with the unions later contributed to the fiscal crisis of 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 twenty years; the teachers received increases of 22 to 37 percent.^{[citation needed]}

In his critical biography The Ungovernable City, Vincent J. Cannato argued that Lindsay was the wrong man for the job of mayor, as he was more concerned with solving the enormous social problems of NYC's poor instead of delivering basic services. Nevertheless, Lindsay's concern for racial minorities and the poor in New York helped guide the nation's largest city through the years of the "long hot summers" between 1965 and 1969 and averted massive, violent unrest, a significant accomplishment.

Years after Lindsay was out of office, his budget aide Peter Goldmark would admit that his administration's basic problem was this: "We all failed to come to grips with what a neighborhood is. We never realized that crime is something that happens to, and in, a community." Assistant Nancy Seifer said "There was a whole world out there that nobody in City Hall knew anything about. . . If you didn't live on Central Park West, you were some kind of lesser being." ^[13]

According to a Pat Buchanan column on April 15, 2008, Frank Manckiewicz, a former press secretary to the late U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, described Lindsay as "the only populist who played squash every day at the Yale Club."^[14]

[edit] Later life

Lindsay retired to practice law but never lost his faith in the "liberal dream". His 1980 campaign for the Senate was unsuccessful, as he lost the Democratic primary to Elizabeth Holtzman, the U.S. representative from Brooklyn and later the New York City comptroller. Lindsay polled 146,815 votes (15.8 percent). His previous liberal Republican ally, Senator Jacob K. Javits, lost renomination to the more conservative Alfonse D'Amato of Long Island. D'Amato defeated Holtzman in the general election.

After the folding of several law firms for which he had worked, including Webster & Sheffield, Lindsay in the 1990s was left in failing health and without health insurance. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani appointed Lindsay to several largely ceremonial posts as a way to qualify him for municipal health insurance.^[15]

In 2000, he died at the age of seventy-nine of complications from pneumonia and Parkinson's disease, in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, where he and his wife, the former Mary Harrison (October 30, 1926 – March 9, 2004), had moved the previous year. The couple had married on June 18, 1949. In addition to Mary, Lindsay was survived by their son, John V. Lindsay, Jr.; three daughters, Katharine Lake, Margaret Picotte, and Anne Lindsay; two sons-in-law, Stephen Lake and Michael Picotte; a brother, Robert V. Lindsay; and grandchildren Jessica and Stephanie Lake and Nicole, Joseph, and Michelle Picotte. Memorial services were held on January 26, 2001, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Lindsay was Episcopalian. Memorial contributions were requested to the John V. Lindsay Fund, Lincoln Center Theater. For many years, Lindsay was a Lincoln Center trustee.

Anne Lindsay found inspiration in her father's career and actively participated in the presidential campaigns of Democrats Howard Dean and then John Kerry in 2004.

There are no city landmarks dedicated to Lindsay's memory.^[16] He is featured on a poster picture with Governor Rockefeller at the groundbreaking of the former World Trade Center in the city history section of the Museum of the City of New York at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street.

[edit] References

[edit] Bibliography

The only substantive biography of Lindsay is Vincent J. Cannato's The Ungovernable City. Nevertheless, an in-depth discussion of Lindsay's fiscal policies is contained in Mayors and Money by Ester R. Fuchs. Two pro-labor treatments of New York City public sector unions are In Transit and Working-Class New York by Joshua Freeman. Lindsay's 1967 autobiography is titled Journey Into Politics.

[edit] External links

• John Lindsay at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/12/20/lindsay.obit/index.html
• http://ssdi.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/ssdi.cgi?lastname=Lindsay&firstname=MARY&start=21
• John Vliet Lindsay, Who's Who in America, 1966–1967

Preceded by Frederic Coudert, Jr.	Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New York's 17th congressional district 1959–1965	Succeeded by Theodore Kupferman
Preceded by Robert F. Wagner, Jr.	Mayor of New York 1966–1973	Succeeded by Abraham D. Beame

v • d • e Mayors of the City of New York (since the 1898 Consolidation) Van Wyck • Low • McClellan • Gaynor • Kline • Mitchel • Hylan • Walker • McKee • O'Brien • La Guardia • O'Dwyer • Impellitteri • Wagner • Lindsay • Beame • Koch • Dinkins • Giuliani • Bloomberg