An Operatic Art
DOLMAN, JOSEPH
An Operatic Art The Great Mayor: Fiorello La Guardia and the Making of the City of New York By Alyn Brodsky St. Martin's. 530 pp. $40.00. Reviewed by Joseph Dolman Editorial writer...
...Which raises a question: Does it take someone as fierce as La Guardia to run New York City properly...
...During his tenure, too, the West Side Highway was extended and the IND subway line was completed...
...He talked about grocery shopping: "Remember what I told you last Sunday about snap beans...
...When all is said and done he and Moses, amid the worst fiscal crisis in U.S...
...But the Mayor actually discussed anything that popped into his mind...
...He was a figure of immense importance to immigrants who had received permission from Federal immigration authorities to bring their fiancées to America...
...Such scenes helped mold La Guardia into a progressive Republican, an odd affiliation for a politically ambitious man in a heavily Democratic town...
...And yes, the men who ran New York in 1906, as La Guardia arrived on the scene, knew their constituents very well...
...When a bride-to-be landed, she would be whisked directly to City Hall for the wedding...
...There was Big Tim Sullivan, for example, the East Side boss who ran the wedding chapel in City Hall's basement...
...The voters want far more from their mayor than a competent job performance and civic homilies...
...For all their faults, the old Tammany ward heelers who preceded him attended every wedding and every funeral in their districts...
...Was it just a happy coincidence that La Guardia blended an irrepressible human touch with a steely desire to make government work...
...They delivered for the faithful everything from patronage jobs to Christmas turkeys...
...The show always began with the Marine Hymn and the salutation, "Patience and fortitude...
...Reviewed by Joseph Dolman Editorial writer and columnist, "Newsday" New York City political consultant Hank Sheinkopf was trying to explain not long ago why he thought the popularity of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had gone into a tailspin...
...It is instructive that while his policies are straight out of the good government manual, New Yorkers still have not warmed up to him...
...The narrative is a bit too adulatory and insufficiently analytical...
...He railed about gamblers at Yankee Stadium who used the phonebooths there to call in bets...
...We got them down to 17 cents...
...The pois often debased the rites further with obscene jokes and anatomical references about the bridal pair...
...Another reading by the editors would not have hurt either...
...He emulated the Little Flower, as La Guardia was affectionately called, right down to his daily tantrums and his sidewalk supervision at every civil emergency...
...He was describing the modern New York City mayoralty that Fiorello H. La Guardia created almost 70 years ago...
...Even now his record is a marvel...
...Nor is it enough to plead—at carefully orchestrated press conferences—for greater public sacrifice...
...Yet he understood it was not enough to be efficient...
...But Brodsky's account serves as a useful reminder of the wretched world the old clubhouses in fact sustained...
...La Guardia's most famous moment, of course, came when he read the Sunday comics to children during a newspaper strike...
...And as soon as he was seated at the Mayor's desk, La Guardia hired top talent to bring his reform ideas to fruition...
...No mayor before or since has come close to La Guardia's record...
...Not only did La Guardia build a solid corps of professional city workers...
...La Guardia saw Sullivan's operation in action from his position as an Ellis Island interpreter...
...They were usually correct...
...Despite all the facts he packs into his book, Brodsky in the end gives us a two-dimensional portrait...
...As for Bloomberg, he began his administration with a declaration that the Mayor does not have to show up at every major fire or wrestle with the City Hall press corps every day...
...We see plenty of the public personality, good and bad: the grandstanding La Guardia, the creative La Guardia, the avenging La Guardia...
...Rudolph Giuliani clearly thought the answer was yes...
...Look...
...As the Mayor of New York for much of the Great Depression and all of World War II, he managed to liberate his domain from the larcenous grip of the Tammany Hall Democratic bosses, remodel the city from the Bronx to the marshes of Queens, and lay a solid foundation for the metropolis that has emerged today...
...They expect to smell you, and they expect to yell at you," Sheinkopf went on...
...His most intimate engagement with New Yorkers, though, began in 1942 on his weekly WNYC radio program, which attracted as many as 2 million listeners...
...Mainly, however, I wish Brodsky had done more to put the La Guardia years in historical context...
...It is tempting in our own age of hightech political gurus, instant sound bites, tracking polls, and pancake makeup to wax nostalgic about the high-touch genius of the Tammany machine...
...Alyn Brodsky has given us a narrative of La Guardia's rich political life that is not exactly packed with fresh facts or new insights...
...If they resisted, Big Tim would retort: "No fee, no wedding, your little bitch goes back on the next ship...
...It isn't enough to be smart and honest and creative in the face of a municipal cash crisis, Sheinkopf asserted...
...Long before Lindsay, he walked the streets of Harlem to help quell a riot...
...But we come away with frustratingly little knowledge of the private man: the politician who lost a wife and young daughter to tuberculosis, the chief executive who only reluctanctly moved into Gracie Mansion with his second wife and two children from an East Harlem tenement...
...Brodsky does not even try to tell us...
...He was sometimes selfish and cruel...
...The immigrants needed to marry as soon as the boat docked, and Big Tim was the man who could make that happen...
...history, created the infrastructure for the modern New York...
...They strengthened his resolve to fight for immigrants' rights and stoked his desire to create a competent, fair government...
...Brodsky repeatedly refers to New York City's black population as "the blacks"—a cringe-inducing formulation if ever there was one...
...Between 1934 and 1940, the La Guardia administration, with generous help from Washington, built the Triborough Bridge, the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, the East River Drive and what today is known as La Guardia Airport...
...Then he ordered the doors ripped off so police could hear their conversations...
...The columnist Walter Lippmann wrote that La Guardia took human sympathy— sometimes one of Tammany's greatest strengths—and wove it into the tradition of good government...
...Sullivan and his pals—often drunk—would overcharge the couple for the ceremony...
...It was a world where crooks and bums provided incompetent services to a mostly powerless constituency that had no choice except to meekly take what the boys in the backrooms threw their way...
...But no mayor yet has been able to match La Guardia's astonishing blend of personal intensity, political virtuosity and public achievement...
...They knew the streets...
...After 488 pages, it is still hard to say what made La Guardia tick...
...Remember...
...They built a skein of highways and subways and bridges and tunnels that allowed the city to flourish after World War II...
...Or was his method more calculated than he let on...
...And when their fury is spent, "they expect to love you...
...Or we get this description of a feud that took place some eight decades ago between La Guardia and a city comptroller: Each "tossed brickbats like Michael Jackson tossing kisses...
...They demand a leader who is larger than life, who intuitively understands their plight, who regularly takes to the streets to curse the wicked, beatify the righteous and ensure that a broad justice prevails...
...Years before Giuliani came along, he was inveighing against grifters and "tinhorns...
...La Guardia himself was a diminutive fellow with a squeaky voice who could somehow thunder like Thor...
...I wish Brodsky had at least ventured a guess...
...As a seven-term Congressman and threeterm Mayor, his lapses from the cause of good government were startlingly few...
...His love-hate relationship with Robert Moses, New York's public works impresario and La Guardia's equal in ego, tempestuousness and stubbornness, is the stuff of legend...
...And New Yorkers, at least those who enjoyed the franchise, always knew where to go if they needed help...
...Nevertheless, The Great Mayor is thorough and readable...
...he created some of the nation's first public housing, established scores of parks and playgrounds in all five boroughs and reorganized the police department...
...But most New Yorkers remained confident that for all his ungainlfness, he was leaping to the barricades on their behalf...
...It is hard to explain his incredible drive, his ferocious determination and his almost-crazed contentiousness...
...Some of the city's most memorable recent leaders—John V. Lindsay, Edward I. Koch, Rudolph W. Giuliani—mastered parts of this operatic art...
...They were asking 54 cents a pound and I told you to stop buying snap beans and the price would come down—and you did and it did...
...But together the two men, again and again, turned blithe dreams into stunning reality without the usual boondoggles and boodling...
...He appeared at major fires in a car specially outfitted for emergency runs...
...The formula worked for Giuliani...
...Indeed, La Guardia was almost unavoidable on the streets of New York...
...He was rumpled and noisy and quarrelsome and rude—and he could be outrageously wrong on occasion...
...It thrives to this day on psychodrama, headbutting, flesh-pressing, and posturing...
Vol. 86 • May 2003 • No. 3
