Ahead of His Times
WADE, RICHARD C.
Ahead of His Times Mayor LaGuardia and New York's Legendary Years By August Heckscher with Phyllis Robinson Norton. 412 pp. $15.00. Reviewed by Richard C. Wade Distinguished Professor of A...
...His grand ethnic mixture, which served him so well politically, also fed that insecurity...
...landlords deferred maintenance or walked away from buildings...
...Any kind of action was better than brooding procrastination...
...The first 30 years of the present century were the high point of this metropolitan golden age, and New York was the Imperial City...
...Worse, the previous administration had been singularly inept, when not wonderfully scandalous...
...For a period of 100 years, an evergrowing tax base allowed cities to expand, improve their facilities and perfect services without outside aid...
...His morality was almost puritanical...
...public resources, whether state or municipal, were hopelessly inadequate...
...LaGuardia was precisely the person to forge the link...
...It was," he asserted, "the first time the conditions of the cities had been considered by the Federal government in any plan for the whole country...
...still other Federal funds kept artists, musicians and librarians alive while they exercised their crafts...
...It is why no other center of power grew up inside his administration, too...
...Unemployment was the highest for large cities in the country...
...he had to be forced from office to sustain any confidence in the city...
...Even nature was hostile as one of the most severe winters on record gave way to one of the hottest summers...
...He had just read the book and discovered that he had not been treated with the fawning reverence his majestic ego requires...
...Conference of Mayors...
...Gotham, moreover, had little to fight back with...
...He cut municipal wages, laid off patronage appointments, raised taxes, and announced a balanced budget within a month...
...Perhaps this approach was dictated by their main source, newspapers...
...Robert Moses accepted an invitation...
...Reviewed by Richard C. Wade Distinguished Professor of A merican History, City University of New York Graduate Center Fiorello LaGuardia was the first modern mayor...
...His keeping aloof from—and his sometimes callous treatment of —his closest associates meant that decisions would be his and his alone...
...The infusion represented a new policy in Washington...
...Libraries cut hours or closed down...
...August Heckscher and Phyllis Robinson, the authors of Mayor LaGuardia and New York's Legendary Years, make no claims for definitiveness...
...But their chronological organization (the sections are numbered consecutively by year), makes impossible a deep analysis of problems that stretched over the whole period...
...LaGuardia's response to the crisis he found was simple and sensible...
...Nevertheless, no other mayor enjoyed such a special position...
...Yet beneath La Guardia's apparent moral certainty there lurked an inner uncertainty...
...But his most striking moves were made in Washington, where he extracted support for public works on a large scale...
...He discovered in the cauldron of the Depression what the present generation is just discovering under difficult yet much more benign circumstances: that American cities are no longer self-sufficient and require increasing state and Federal assistance if they are to maintain even essential services...
...Although Jimmy Walker's antics diverted attention from some of the gruesome consequences of the Depression, they left the deeper problems unmolested...
...He had no really intimate friends, and he carefully shielded his family from the hectic pace of his public life...
...It seeks to set in perspective the issues with which he dealt, the almost constant crisis he found...
...To mark the publication of Mayor LaGuardia and New York's Legendary Years, the publishers gave the customary party for the authors...
...He closed burlesque houses, sledgehammered pinball machines, drove the patronage dealers out of City Hall, cracked down on wartime chiselers, and summarily dismissed subordinates suspected of hanky-panky...
...and he loved to play the righteous archangel smiting the devil's legions...
...They remain content to merely describe the tumultuous 12 years (three terms) and let the reader do the interpreting...
...To be sure, urban expansion continued, but at a slower pace and with different revenue arrangements...
...Like Franklin D. Roosevelt, he came from New York...
...and they both gloried in personalized politics...
...Private charitable funds had dried up...
...And he did it all with calculated gusto—on the front page or over his own radio station, WNYC...
...When LaGuardia took office on January 1, 1934, it was slipping into bankruptcy...
...To LaGuardia, easy and personal access to the President assured New York of at least its share of new Federal programs and protected him against Tammany revanchism at home...
...But they are being modest—indeed, too modest...
...most had not held jobs for two or three years...
...the two men shared a general progressive philosophy, if not the same party label...
...It is, in short, a good book—worthy of Robert Moses' contempt...
...The Depression brought all that to an end...
...Nonetheless, Heckscher and Robinson bring life out of those old newspaper files, exhume some important forgotten figures and indirectly remind us that ours are not the worst of times...
...The entire city, said one observer, had "a death-in-life quality...
...The newspapers kept the grim daily tally of corporate failures...
...He believed that many people, including some important ones, secretly scorned the flamboyant "roly poly wop" despite, or perhaps because of, his contagious popularity...
...It produces, as well, an awkwardness that interrupts a generally felicitous style, for the authors often feel compelled to resort to "as we will see later" or "but we are ahead of our story...
...Fourteen-and 16-hour work days let the voters (and reporters) know that the forces of the Lord seldom slept...
...Some private collections were consulted, but a more analytical consideration would have required the use of city agency files, now being organized, and work in Washington...
...There were no vacations, seldom even a quiet weekend...
...LaGuardia noted its historical importance when he was appointed to the Advisory Committee on Allotments as representative of the U.S...
...The relationship was never equal, of course, and at the end LaGuardia had every reason to resent FDR's cavalier treatment...
...The fiscal problem, though, only reflected a deeper malaise...
...For they have managed to recreate the excitement, the conflicts and the perpetual motion of the Empire City during the Depression and the War...
...Parks were unkempt and overgrown...
...Insofar as was possible, he reduced every issue to good and evil...
...This was one reason for his often erratic behavior and why he seemed to many to be all sail and no ballast...
...As John Mor-ley observed of Theodore Roosevelt, "He was the greatest source of natural energy in the country outside of Niagara Falls...
...Boarded shops lined once thriving commercial arteries...
...Robert Moses, his commissioner of parks (and of almost everything else), used WPA funds to put an army of the unemployed into rehabilitation and cleaning the streets...
...But on the day of the occasion he fired off a supercilious note saying he couldn't make it after all...
...At the same time, they have given us an intriguing personal portrait of LaGuardia...
...The Little Flower" comes across as, at once, simple and complex...
...He would ride on the back of fire engines, join police raids, conduct housing courts, read comics on the radio, drop in on an agency unexpectedly—always something...
...LaGuardia's insecurity was, in addition, the reason for his frenetic motion...
...This book," they say, "relates the principal events in the long LaGuardia administration in New York...
...Avoiding the obvious temptations, the authors wisely do not enter the fog bank of psychohistory...
...Soon, 23 per cent of the population would be on relief...
...To FDR, LaGuardia's reliable deference made dealing with the nation's largest city in the largest state eminently manageable...
...Housing construction had ceased...
...New York was particularly hard-hit...
...No one gets more than his due in this volume...
Vol. 61 • December 1978 • No. 24
