The Prosecution and Imprisonment of Mike Quill by the Transit Authority as Performed in New York Under the Direction of Mayor John V. Lindsay
Hausknecht, Murray
Using the metaphor of the theater for political comment has its dangers. Style may easily be mistaken for substance and aesthetic for political judgments. Since there is a widespread...
...A SNCC leader, like Quill, is highly distrustful of authority ("the Establishment...
...In doing this SNCC, SDS, and the Berkeley students proclaim that the economic and social underclass is morally superior to the middle class...
...The eternal yearning for a virginal politics was one source of Lindsay's electoral support...
...Execution of such a court order for imprisonment depends wholly upon the other party...
...Even the brogue, seemingly untempered by a long absence from Ireland, played a role...
...It called attention to the immigrant, and its retention in a rich, verdant form proclaimed a conscious ethnic identification...
...Yet some of the reaction to the strike was also a reaction to his "style," and this response may tell us something about political behavior in the United States today...
...those with authority and power would not behave reasonably until the transit workers were forced to reduce New York to "a shambles...
...IV A clash between the rhetoric of alienation and the rhetoric of moral indignation can be found in other areas of politics...
...Eventually, however, he made us uneasy...
...Irish and Harvard graduate" reaffirms one's faith in the American Dream...
...In any case, once Mike Quill appeared on the scene, it is almost impossible to resist the language of the theater critic...
...Putting Quill in jail makes sense only if we see it as having nothing to do with the immediate problems of the strike...
...Once prodded they were willing to acknowledge what they knew all along, that Negroes were deprived of their rights as citizens...
...Listening to Quill was to be reminded that there are many sons and daughters of immigrants who have not made it into the middle class and are not likely to...
...If the war in Vietnam goes on and the protest grows, if the student ferment continues, if SNCC and SDS ideology can become the basis of political action by Negroes and the poor, we can expect a growth of irrational and morally impermissible repressive measures...
...The Civil Rights Movement, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and the Vietnam Protest all involve elements of the drama played out in New York...
...Hours later all reappeared with a settlement, and the next day the newspapers analyzed how "the deal" had been made...
...What began as engaging eccentricity ended as irrationality too close for comfort...
...A view of authority implacably ranged against one is a characteristic feeling of lower and working class groups, and no matter how shocked the middle class was by Quill's "disrespectful" treatment of court orders, one can be certain that his performance satisfied many other New Yorkers...
...The Times continually congratulated Lindsay for not seeking a settlement that was "more political than economic," as in the bad old days of Mayor Wagner...
...and when he publicly ripped up court injunctions and said that "the judge can drop dead in his black robes," we felt he had gone "too far...
...To say that all of this can be accounted for in terms of internal union politics is of course true, but, by itself, misses the point...
...III Before the strike the Transit Authority secured an injunction against the leaders, and when the strike was called they were found guilty of civil contempt...
...society more than the Civil Rights Movement as a whole has ever done...
...As a result, many white Americans enjoy a great deal of self-satisfaction from their response to Civil Rights...
...The response to Quill, though in part caused by our anger at the loss of time, energy, and pay resulting from the strike, is also caused by the uneasiness he provoked by implicitly challenging "proper conduct...
...Young, clean-cut and sincere, he was going to get New York moving toward the Great City...
...Every two years Quill would threaten a strike, and as the deadline neared, he and the Transit Commissioners would be called to City Hall...
...In a curious way the entire struggle for civil rights has made Americans more complacent than ever...
...they were even willing to condemn the recalcitrant Southerners...
...Lindsay had campaigned on a traditional reformer's platform decorated with some modern touches...
...The rhetoric of selfrighteousness and moral indignation echoed across the city...
...Yet for events like the New York transit strike, the metaphor can be useful...
...But even as he reminded us of a bad performance in an impossible melodrama, he managed to capture a certain sympathy...
...Quill's position before the strike was that the Mayor, the Transit Authority, and The New York Times were responsible for the crisis...
...The differences are obvious enough, yet the similarities of style are suggested in the similar responses they evoke...
...His opponents were bossridden, tired and bumbling mediocrities corrupted by traditional politics...
...SNCC, in its own way, exemplifies a style similar to Quill's...
...He symbolizes the presence of ethnic lower and working classes that may not share the middle-class ethos...
...When faced with the strike, Lindsay was at the mercy of his own rhetoric and political stance...
...they had to beware of the charge of "selling out...
...Of course, he was not helped by the strike itself...
...What seemed like reason and rationality to others was rejected by Quill...
...Since there is a widespread adaptation of the techniques of entertainment to politics, there is the further danger of reinforcing the effects of those techniques...
...A political orientation based on suspicion, distrust, and hostility to authority evoked a response defending the values and sentiments being attacked...
...SNCC disturbs the complacency of U.S...
...Moreover, it brought other unions to the support of Quill which were actually unsympathetic to the idea of a transit strike...
...Using the metaphor of the theater for political comment has its dangers...
...But SNCC won't let them off the hook that easily...
...It articulated a denial of the official pieties of the society, its middle class morality...
...Coercion of the leadership could only make the Transit Workers more intransigent...
...Even if it would help cut the strike short, he could not use any tactic that smacked of "the deal," while jailing Quill validated his claim to superior political and moral virtue...
...both pro• claim an ethnic and class identification by those who can easily become tweedy, pipe-smoking academics, or bluesuited, golf-playing labor statesmen...
...From any reasonable point of view the jailing of Quill was an error...
...Quill would have remained free if the Authority had chosen not to have the order served...
...The implications are clear...
...Quill's eccentric style came as a welcome relief to a public aware of the techniques used to manipulate it...
...both are quick to identify the finks about them...
...It maintains that guaranteeing civil rights is the beginning, not the end...
...Nothing remotely resembling this picture appeared in the mass media...
...His was to be an administration of clean, efficient government, untainted, by partisanship...
...II Quill's style was something more than an idiosyncracy...
...the mispronunciation of "Lindsley" for Lindsay became less funny...
...but listening to Quill we became aware that the ethnic identification may mean something more than mere sentimentalism about the "auld sod...
...From the perspectives of the working classes, however, this action may not have seemed at all unreasonable...
...More important, by articulating the values of another class and by attempting to create a political ideology drawn from those values, it challenges the very basis of the belief that there is a consensus on middle class values...
...With a new Administration coming into office at the very moment the strike was to get under way, and in view of the fact that a settlement depended on the size of the city's subsidy to the Transit Authority, it would seem that Quill had nothing to lose by postponing the strike for a while to give Lindsay a chance, as he put it, "to take hold on the situation...
...In a city like New York, identification with an ethnic group is a political advantage...
...This kind of indignation supports the exercise of an immoral and irrational use of power...
...We cannot escape awareness that underneath the surface harmony of the society there are groups who do not share "natural" and "normal" modes of behavior...
...Quill was not an issue during the campaign, but he could be made into an excellent symbol of what Lindsay had opposed...
...And just as New Yorkers did not protest the jailing of Quill but felt that he got his just desserts, there will be other Americans, their moral sensibilities dulled by indignation, who will not protest similar measures...
...Quill reflected the attitudes and sentiments of a good part of his rank and file, and by magnifying these on the public stage forced them on our attention...
...it caused frustrations that made Quill a natural for the role of scapegoat...
...Style may easily be mistaken for substance and aesthetic for political judgments...
...It was as cold-blooded a political move as any in our baroque municipal politics...
...The jailing of Quill was greeted as a victory over the forces of anarchy...
...His brogue and his rhetoric combined to give so theatrical an effect that "ham" became an instinctive response...
...but it is one thing to proclaim an Irish identity in the Harvard accents of a Kennedy and another in the accents of a Quill...
...The brogue began to grate...
...The overalls of a James Forman are the equivalent of Quill's brogue...
...A Kennedy-like identification is reassurance that the "melting pot" is at work...
...It was the complement of the rhetoric of class alienation articulated by Quill...
...The deal" is practical American politics on the day-to-day level, but it is also what Americans have in mind when they say "politics is a dirty business...
Vol. 13 • March 1966 • No. 2
