The Wagner 'Miracle'

...The great strength of the reform Democrats, especially on Manhattan's West Side, was based on their ability to dramatize the issue of party democracy and to enroll under the reform banner large numbers of alert, college-trained recruits...

...A single continuous city will soon stretch from Portland, Maine, through Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore, to Washington, D. C. Nobody has seriously grappled with the new intricacies of transportation, zoning, housing, municipal services and taxation which these burgeoning metropolitan regions entail...

...If such is indeed the outcome, the independent role of the reform movement within the Democratic party will be seriously, if not fatally, compromised...

...This affecting tale glosses over such contradictory bits of political history as the Mayor's repeated flattering references to party bosses Carmine De Sapio of Manhattan, Charles Buckley of the Bronx, and Joseph Sharkey of Brooklyn in the very recent past...

...If the primary proved nothing more, it demonstrated that nobody loved the bosses' candidate...

...Now even many of Wagner's supporters tacitly admitted a measure of truth in some of these charges...

...The election which followed was a wild and gaudy affair, marked by the triumph of animosity over party regularity...

...his frantic wooing of Buckley as late as early July...

...De Sapio's Tamawa Club in Greenwich Village openly campaigned against Wagner and for Gerosa...

...Following an equally strong tradition, the office-holder dismisses every dereliction as trivial and accepts modest credit for everything good which has happened in the City during his term of office...

...Of course, it was to no avail...

...As for the Republicans, the hardrunning Attorney General did his best, under the grave handicap of his party's imprint, to impress the populace as the poor man's candidate...

...Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who had campaigned for Lefkowitz and for James Mitchell, the New Jersey gubernatorial loser, was slowed in his drive for the 1964 Republican Presidential nomination...

...Similarly, the Board of Estimate is now firmly within the Mayor's grasp...

...Thus, an unparalleled combination of political and legal accretions to his authority places Robert F. Wagner in a unique position to impose his administrative will upon a waiting city...

...The powerful bureaucracies which, under the protection of civil service, run the police, fire, sanitation, prison and hospitals departments, can be swayed only by the most resolute of mayors—and the Fiorello La Guardias are exceedingly rare...

...And, despite his conversion to party reform, Wagner ran quite badly in several reform areas in Manhattan...

...To this end, he appointed efficient commissioners, established the office of City Administrator, and appropriated for their use as much money as he could squeeze out of a hostile State Administration and an uncooperative Board of Estimate...

...While winning only slightly more than half the vote, the Mayor rolled up a plurality of approximately 400,000 over his Republican opponent...

...But the reformers failed to agree on either a leader or a public program for New York City...

...and Abraham Bearne, the Budget Director, for City Controller...

...The Mayor was a patient man, according to the myth, but he never relished the influence of the bosses...

...Screvane and Bearne are generally considered competent career officials, a judgment which the New York Times endorsed when it backed them along with Lefkowitz...

...On November 8 the Mayor was master of all he surveyed...

...Nevertheless, the story enabled the Mayor to win the September Democratic primary very handily over the organization Democrats' selection, State Controller Arthur Levitt, a colorless and somewhat half-hearted contender...

...And, until he mercifully accepted the 1964 World's Fair in lieu of severance pay, Robert Moses operated as a virtually independent power over the City's housing, park, bridge and tunnel programs...

...In the past, too, every Democratic mayor has been forced to deal with the party organization, usually in the person of the County Leader of Tammany Hall, the Manhattan Democratic organization...

...Certainly, Wagner has little to fear right now from the reformers...

...Another major problem of the big cities is the large-scale migration of Negroes from the South to the North...

...Wagner's new freedom was signalized, above all, by the selection of his own running mates for office: Paul Serevane, the incumbent Deputy Mayor, for City Council President...

...Although these problems are national, or at least regional, in scope, the City is able to face them only with the power and resources which the State chooses to grant it...

...Possibly worst of all, any mayor of New York enjoys—or suffers— enormous public visibility and corresponding responsibility for the City's acts...

...The Mayor's party and public position is stronger than that of any New York City Democrat of recent times...

...It is also an unusual one...

...The Mayor himself urged all good Democrats to vote for two judicial candidates who were listed only on the Liberal party line (they ran third...

...Emphasizing this worthy theme, his supporters issued an eight-page comic book entitled Only in America the Story of Louis J. Lefkowitz, which in four colors traced their man's career from East Side tenement and family tailor shop to his present eminence as the State's top legal official...

...De Sapio is gone...

...They focused on such evidences of bad government and personal incompetence as defects in school construction and maintenance, corruption in the City's inspection services, inadequate police protection, confusion in housing programs, and general indolence and slackness on the part of the Mayor...

...The first omission became painfully clear last winter and spring when reformers, unable to counter with an agreed-upon candidate of their own, yielded to the skillful pressure and persuasion of their elder statesman, Herbert Lehman, and almost without their knowing it discovered themselves in the Wagner camp...

...At present, for example, a bitter enemy, Controller Gerosa, still serves on the Board, and the borough presidents, Manhattan's Edward Dudley excepted, owe more to the party organization than they do to Wagner...

...On the night of November 7, election day, the implausible transition of Mayor Wagner from a complacent instrument of the bosses to "Fighting Bob," scourge of the machine, was completed in the amazed sight of all...

...The New York Post, for example, handled the inconvenient past, including its own previous criticism of the Mayor, by advancing the theory of the political miracle...

...The second omission is obvious today...

...Now members of a victorious Wagner coalition, the reformers have suddenly realized that on the great public issues of housing, city planning, City-State relations, minorities, schools and transportation, they have no position of their own...

...Everywhere the regulars are routed, retreating or suing for peace...

...The reform movement within the Democratic party, one of the ostensible sharers of the Mayor's triumph, deserves a word of its own, if only to suggest that reality and appearance are frequently at variance in politics...

...In New York a considerable influx of Puerto Ricans complicates the Negro inflow...

...Yet it is the Board of Estimate which regulates the City's taxing and spending policies, and of the Board's 22 votes, the Mayor casts only four...

...The convenient symbol of the evil which the reformers fought was Carmine De Sapio, in some ways the most enlightened leader in Tammany's checkered history...

...De Sapio unified the reformers as long as he remained in office...

...As the Post's hagiographers created it, the miracle of Wagner began with the image of a good, humane official who did his best to care for the City's poor and educate its children...

...Finally, in response to the urgings of former Governor Herbert Lehman, the Liberal party's Alex Rose, some elements of the reform movement within the Democratic party and, of course, the New York Post, he promulgated his political declaration of independence...

...These programs, the legend continues, only partly succeeded because the Democratic political bosses intervened at every turn, placed their own men in subordinate but important offices and thwarted Wagner's vision of a better city...

...NATIONAL REPORTS The Wagner 'Miracle' By Robert Lekachman At the end of his massive treatise on Governing New York City, Wallace Sayre observes that "New York can confidently ask: What other large American city is as democratically and as wellgoverned...

...Many New Yorkers may doubt that the Mayor is the man to make the most of his new powers, but all should hope for the sake of their City that the Wagner miracle is theologically valid...

...Even the largest of the cities within the inter-urban agglomeration lacks the authority to control resource deployment and land utilization sensibly within its own boundaries...

...Buckley's power has been severely dented by Wagner's strong showing in the Bronx and his own failure to elect a hand-picked candidate for Bronx Borough President...

...each of the five borough presidents possesses two votes...

...The likelihood is, therefore, that the reformers will look to the Mayor for both guidance and patronage...

...In practice, then, the power of any New York mayor is restricted by his need to win State authorization for many acts, the equal necessity to negotiate with his own bureaucracies, and his comparatively minor role on the Board of Estimate...

...Nor does this exhaust the tale of a New York Mayor's woes...

...The President of the City Council and the Controller each cast an equal number...

...The idea of housing projects as a solution to slums seems to be verging on bankruptcy...

...True, the Mayor appoints the Board of Education, but once appointed it deploys independent powers over a term of years longer than the Mayor's tenure in office...

...And President Kennedy, who had picked only winners, advanced in the prestige sweepstakes...

...And a mayor cannot always count as his friends the ambitious politicians who cast these votes...

...The significance of Wagner's victory lies in the number of these limitations which have been either eliminated or diminished...

...In addition to the Mayor's recent party and administrative gains, he has also acquired new powers and benefited from the reduction of the Board of Estimate's authority under the new City Charter...

...Professor Sayre is one of the nation's leading authorities on municipal administration, and his opinion is well-qualified...

...It is the delusion of every municipal campaign that the election of a given candidate will lead to the rapid solution of difficulties which the pattern of rapid American urban development has created...

...Manhattan reform clubs used the boss issue to profitable effect in electing William Fitts Ryan to Congress, Manfred Ohrenstein to the State Senate and Mark Lane to the Assembly...

...Now that the din and the clatter of the campaign are over, the serious problems of American municipal administration, of which New York is the microcosm, remain...

...New York is a grimly Democratic city...

...According to the scrupulously observed tradition of the political campaign, an incumbent mayor's opponent blames him for every rat which scampers through a classroom and every bribe which passes over the palm of the City's building inspectors...

...State Democratic Chairman Michael Prendergast, overcome with a political death wish, publicly blasted Mayor Wagner and threw his support to the City's outgoing Controller, Lawrence Gerosa, running as an independent...

...Louis, Minneapolis or any of the others he studied...

...and his willingness to substitute the mediocre Abe Stark for the able Abraham Bearne as his Controller candidate...

...The charges which State Attorney General Louis Lefkowitz, the Republican candidate for Mayor, laid against the incumbent, Robert F. Wagner, during the City's recent election campaign support Reston's view...

...For all practical purposes he now combines in himself the powers both of the Mayor and of the Tammany organization, and can dictate the name of the new County Leader...

...Much more typical is James Reston's measured judgment that "it is now 57 years since Lincoln Steffens wrote The Shame of the Cities and he was able to say what no good reporter could say today: that New York was better governed than Chicago, Philadelphia, St...

...New York has solved neither the human problems of housing and educating these new settlers, nor the fiscal problem of raising the funds which are needed to do so...

...Few mayors cared to differ with Moses and none dared to discharge him...

...The Mayor of New York, like the mayors of many other American cities, has—by statute and custom—much less control over his own administration than either he or his opponent is likely to admit during a campaign...

...Robert Lekachman, Associate Professor of Economics at Barnard College, writes regularly in these pages...

...Its responsibility to the State Commissioner of Education is as great as any debt it owes the Mayor...

...The Controller, the President of the City Council and the Borough President of Manhattan, all owe their posts to the Mayor...

...Police Commissioner Stephen Kennedy and Park Commissioner Moses, formerly wielders of independent power, have been replaced by less flamboyant officials...