New York in Search of a Bard
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union NEW YORK IN SEARCH OF A BARD BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS A stillness and a sadness Pervade the City Hall, And speculating madness Has left the street of Wall -GEORGE POPE MORRIS,...
...Ah, what a stirring and a seething...
...E. B. White's gossamer offering, Here Is New York (1949), and Alfred Kazin's loving reminiscence, Walker in the City (1951), may have been the last ungrudging, unstinting paeans to New York, the end of a votive tradition that began, possibly, with James Fenimore Cooper's praise of "Gotham,' or a bit later with Whitman's extravagant tribute to his "City of orgies, walks, and joys...
...O frabjous day...
...no longer can the President of the United States laugh all the way to the bankruptcy...
...David asks as together they gaze out over New York harbor...
...New York," rhapsodized Christopher Morley in 1939, "the nation's thyroid gland...
...Callay...
...piling up of undone work and unsolved practical problems...
...I doubted that they would act unless ordered to do so by a Federal court...
...meaning, one guesses, that as the city's metabolism went so went the nation's...
...a seemingly compulsive repetition of existing ways of doing things even though it is evident that what arc being compulsively repeated are mistakes...
...Zangwill, remarked Jane Addams, performed "a great service to America by reminding us of the high hopes of the Founders of the Republic," and while she did not specify which hopes she had in mind, most people doubtless assumed she was drawing some vital connection between the Founding Fathers and those tired, poor, and huddled masses who were pouring into Ellis Island...
...In truth, it was an embarrassingly flimsy work-"romantic claptrap," declared the New York Times reviewer-about a young, povertystricken composer named David Quixano, a Jewish immigrant, who falls in love with a rich, beautiful gentile of the sort that is capable of exclaiming, "Oh, David...
...I have quite frankly been surprised that they have come as far as they have,' he remarked to reporters the day before Thanksgiving...
...I believe," said Lindsay, "that...
...Many Americans still believe in New York as melting pot, thyroid gland and city of joys...
...government decided to illuminate it with floodlights...
...In the same book Lindsay struck a note of complaint his successor would happily return to again and again...
...States of the Union NEW YORK IN SEARCH OF A BARD BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS A stillness and a sadness Pervade the City Hall, And speculating madness Has left the street of Wall -GEORGE POPE MORRIS, Dark Days (c...
...Is it any wonder that even Mayor John V Lindsay, that no-sweat optimist from Manhattan's affluent Upper East Side, was beginning to feel edgy about New York, maybe even a bit paranoid...
...After that it became more common for writers to confuse the city with the whole country...
...I speak from the heart, not the head, and I say that if the people of New York need my help, I'll be right there with it...
...You cannot care for me-you so far above me") and to long, grandiloquent speeches about The Meaning of America...
...The Statue of Liberty arrived in 1886, but it wasn't until 30 years later that the U.S...
...lack of new kinds of manufacturing work to compensate for the losses of the old...
...Come to my arms, my beamish boy...
...We're trying to hold the city together against the forces that are steadily eating away at it," he confided in 1970 to readers of his book, The City...
...Why should the United States government bail out Chase Manhattan...
...Zangwill, an Englishman, dedicated his 1909 drama to Theodore Roosevelt, "in respectful recognition of his strenuous struggle against the forces that threaten to shipwreck the Great Republic...
...Mayor Beame was telling the President something similar all this past summer and autumn...
...It mattered not that many of the scuttled programs had nourished, sheltered and sustained life...
...Some of them, like Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, gave their lives for us...
...O. Henry, meanwhile, was christening the city with such affectionate nicknames as "Yaptown-on-the-Hudson" and "Noisyville-on-the-Subway...
...Of course, before he endorsed the $2.3 billion assistance package he made the city prove its bad intentions-to shut down clinics, reduce child-care programs, curtail welfare payments, cancel housing construction projects in short, to follow the example set by the Ford Administration...
...Gerald Ford's message to Mayor Abraham Beame was straight from Alice in Wonderland: "And hast thou slain the Jabberwock...
...the [view] of urban America as a dark desolate place undeserving of support or help has become fixed in the American consciousness...
...This may be true, but only up to a point...
...With the throwing of the switch New York City and the melting pot could be said to have become part of the American mystique...
...persistent growth in the numbers of idle and underemployed poor...
...remarkable growth of unproductive make-work in the city bureaucracies which is depended on to take up the slack of insufficient useful work for the city's high school and college graduates...
...So there's no way Senator, that I'll turn my back on New York City...
...The play's climax is awash with Whitmanesque prophecy as the two lovers come together in a kind of mutual and molten assimilation, living proof that the melting pot works...
...IN THEIR place came urban planners, social scientists and politicians, replete with jeremiads...
...And the city's response pleased the Chief Executive...
...By the 1950s the urban glow was definitely fading-possibly it had fled to the suburbs-and what had seemed romantic and freighted with democratic symbolism to previous generations of writers now seemed tawdry and trivial to their successors...
...The subject seems to have brought out the worst in America's writers-an unpleasant mixture of hostility and inanity...
...Silly as the play is, it did give New Yorkers something to ponder 65 years ago-a sense, perhaps, of their nuclear importance in the unfolding American drama...
...Recently in Washington I was privy to a conversation about New York between Aaron Henry, the veteran Mississippi civil rights leader, and Democratic Senator James Abourezk, the capable populist from South Dakota...
...In 1958, in a preface to Max Weber's The City, the sociologist Don Martindale declared that "The age of the city seems to be at an end," and used New York as a salient example...
...the President was telling the city and its mayor to live and let die...
...B. WHITE, Here is New York (1949) NEW YORK finally got lucky in its loans...
...Morris was plainly a rotten poet, but he occasionally did get off a memorable line-e.g., "Woodman, spare that tree"-and in his ungainly verse cited at the outset he at least caught the mood of New York during one of its unfortunate lapses into fiscal melancholia...
...But let me return to George Pope Morris, founder of the New York Mirror and coiner of "Tippecanoe and Tyler, too," the slogan that carried William Henry Harrison to the White House and thence to the grave (he caught pneumonia in the chill Inaugural rain...
...As things turned out the ocean became a highway for immigrants, which is why Emerson's "sucked orange" eventually was dropped into The Melting Pot, Israel Zang-will's fresh figure of speech-soon to be a tired cliche-for New York's pluralistic stew...
...1860) No one should come to New York unless he is willing to be lucky...
...All these are classic signs that a great city is dying economically...
...You know, during the '60s when we in the South were morally bankrupt, many New Yorkers rushed to our aid...
...And we are paying for that attitude in our cities today...
...The Senator expressed doubts about the wisdom of using Federal funds to rescue New York from bankruptcy...
...In addition, the short-story writer was first to pose the following important and still unanswered question: "What else can you expect from a town that's shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other...
...It was not the last time that the city lapsed or that writers groped for metaphors that might suitably describe its special predicament...
...If you were going to dedicate your play to TR, it made no sense to understate the matter...
...Lindsay never named the forces, but no doubt they were the very ones that Zangwill had mentioned to Teddy Roosevelt-"the forces that threaten to shipwreck the Great Republic...
...In any case, Roosevelt is said to have attended opening night at the Columbia Theatre in Washington and to have pronounced the play bully...
...This was Aaron Henry's answer: "My concerns aren't fiscal...
...Callooh...
...New York is a sucked orange," announced Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Bostonian's complacent reference, it appears, to New York's culture and not to its coffers...
...He chortled in his joy...
...Moreover, much of the writing about New York has been remarkably bad, full of fraudulent rhythms and neon-like contrivances...
...A decade later, in The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs made the same devastating point and listed some of the many signs of erosion: ' absolute declines in the sheer numbers of enterprises in New York...
...he wanted to know...
...Can't you hear the roaring and the bubbling...
...And to think that I was brought up to despise your race.' He is no great catch, either, being given to boring bouts of humility ("It is a dream...
Vol. 59 • January 1976 • No. 1
