Why Mayors Go Nowhere

...Such a flow of decision-making capacity would in turn create a single political market, available without prejudice to the largest of ambitions...

...The city produces small minds and rewards narrow perspectives...

...Only the state has the perspective and the constitutional right to make that choice, and if the right were exercised we would quickly witness greater governmental capacity plus the emergence of a more systematic means of dispensing political rewards according to the scale of ambition and the boldness of ideas...

...The great political resources of New York simply do not seem to be available to New York mayors...

...While a judge in Brooklyn, he had almost made his permanent mark by enjoining Mayor McCiellan from implementing the first traffic laws, On the grounds that they infringed on the constitutional rights of individuals...

...He may be remembered mainly for his famous letter to the Civil Service Reform Association, in which he said, “We have had all the reform that we want in the city for some time to come...

...When, during the epoch of the Articles of Confederation, the states discovered that their relations were frazzled, they turned to greater unity, they agreed that the solution required giving up a little sovereignty...

...Some will continue to favor increased home rule despite its failure because they hold state government in such low esteem...

...But New York mayors don’t become New York governors...

...The results can be seen in Wagner’s second term, 1958-62, which produced an abominable stalemate in city government and cracked the popular base Wagner had once used and strengthened...

...In any event, the continuing crisis of the cities should suggest that we have little to lose by trying state government once more...

...His ambition was no threat to anyone...

...But it goes deeper than that...

...Sandwiched between these two Brooklyn products (1 9 14-1 9 18) is the mayor who might have permanently amended the Iron Law...

...This time it was the “paving block scandal” of late 1941, the only issue of corruption ever associated directly with the name of Ed Flynn...

...In his politics, he is a close parallel to Mayor Lindsay...

...For many reasons, the city has become its own worst enemy...

...We suffer our politicians until they reach high office, then, thanks largely to the status of the office, we forgive them their sins and honor their services...

...Worse, if the explanation is correct, it means that the great cities in the United States may never have the national political influence proportionate to their importance...

...Second, he got only as far as the nomination, and in accepting it, he probably lost far more than he gained...

...This is a cure that possesses all the wisdom of the medieval physician who proposed bleeding at the very time the patient needed all the blood he had...

...All of the rewardsin the system go to those with narrow minds...

...It is as though the two were former colonies trying to live as states under the Articles of Confederation...

...There are many examples of state-county cooperation...

...Thereafter, Hylan’s political support was insufficient for any office...

...The only meaningful explanation is gloomy counsel for Mayor Lindsay...

...and the city is supposed to massify its student body while the state looks toward differentiation among its campuses...

...But the effect of the mayoralty on mayors remained the same...

...If that is the loophole in the Iron Law, should Mayor Lindsay be punished for not having found it...

...Thus the Iron Law is a mere indication of the more general affliction, not its cause, not even its most important symptom...

...There must be an uninterrupted flow of decision-making, a governmental capacity to move its powers and resources quickly toward where the new problems are, regardless of pre-existing political boundaries...

...In order to win his third term, Wagner was led to an unholy marriageof-desperation with the top labor unions and largest city bureaucracies...

...We may gain...

...The same holds true for the governorship and other major state offices...

...Many local New York leaders have enjoyed national and state power...

...After being dumped in the usual fashion by the Republican organization after one term of Fusion, LaGuardia was reelected in 1937, and turned immediately, if secretly, to the Democrats...

...We simply have not looked at it objectively enough lately...

...These further political attractions have not gone unrecognized...

...New York City is the most important source of campaign money for all national elections, all New York state elections, and for a great many local elections all Theodore Lowi teaches political science at the University of Chicago...

...Yet, after six years in the mayoralty, he was politically dead...

...State officials often intervened unwisely, which overshadowed the more frequent instances of wise intervention against an unbelievably corrupt city system...

...There seems to be a discontinuity between city government and state government...

...New York governors, except for the Jewish incumbents, have been almost ex officio presidential candidates...

...LaGuardia might have found the loophole, but something always seemed to close it off...

...This discontinuity has been the cause of electoral antagonisms between city and “upstate,” which, once established, have furthered the conflicts...

...It is a big city that is the enemy of big-thinking...

...Should he suffer any less than his predecessors...

...In the arts of government, there is no Iron Law of Progress...

...Giving up local autonomy seems to be the only sure loophole through which the ambitions of the best mayors can be served in consonance with the needs of New York City government...

...Mayor Hylan (1918-1926), a Brooklyn Democratic regular who followed Fusion, had many qualities worthy of being taken seriously for higher office...

...It all leads back to the original puzzle: What lies at the bottom of the paradox of vast political resources that “top out” just above the intersection of the Hudson and Harlem Rivers...

...He made the best of it, of course, as any aristocrat makes the best of an arranged marriage...

...That is, perhaps mayors do not deserve to go anywhere...

...But this is an exception that proves the rule in at least two ways...

...Mayors are politicians, but as a class within the general species politician they don’t deserve the booby prize...

...Jimmy Walker, for example, had no aspirations for higher office because he could imagine no higher office to which to aspire...

...The discontinuity is even more curious because it seems to be limited to city and state executive offices and not to other offices and functions...

...Hylan was a victim of the 1922 breakup of the entente involving Boss Murphy of Tammany, Boss McCooey of Brooklyn, and William Randolph Hearst...

...To look at the same thing another way, one can compare former mayors to district attorneys, sheriffs, county clerks, surrogates, congressmen, and state senators in any state in the union and not be able to explain in terms of personal qualifications the failure of the mayors and the success of all the other types in reaching higher office...

...There was some discussion of Gaynor as a vice-presidential candidate, but scandals in the party, coupled with his own poor health, precluded consideration for any future post, including the mayoralty itself...

...Thanks largely to Mayor McClellan’s independence, Tammany lost control of the mayoralty for 16 years...

...Little but irrationality can come of it...

...Specifically, if discontinuity punishes mayors in direct proportion to their best and boldest ambitions, then the cure lies in continuity, not in more discontinuity...

...Consequently, New York City is a Jacob’s Ladder, cut off at the top by the antagonism and distrust of its own historic autonomy, and cut off from the bottom by its own effort to govern by irresponsible bureaucracies and sterile legislatures...

...City youth are partially cordoned off from state institutions by secret quotas, etc...

...Mayor Mitchel, however, never had a chance to test the Iron Law...

...Fusion Failures Of course, some of these mayors have to be discounted at the outset...

...The .Mayor’s Loophole The urge for separation is understandable, but it would be meaningful only if the state government were the malefactor...

...Authority over the city that rightfully belongs to the state is rarely exercised and is usually accepted only on pain of great financial need or threat of great financial punishment...

...LaGuardia remained a Republican simply by virtue of the fact that he walloped the regular candidate in the 1937 primary...

...The office of governor has come to reflect this fact by being organized to leave a maximum amount of time for each governor to play a national role...

...Sayre’s Law also makes Sayre an important author of puzzles and conundrums...

...Young, handsome, effective in office, he was also one of those rare mayors who actually came from somewhere...

...How else could such a law hold for America’s largest, richest, and most cultured city...

...Going Democratic and national may leapfrog the state barriers to the presidency...

...Thomas Dewey and A1 Smith, Carmine DeSapio and Ed Flynn are examples of locals who went beyond...

...The system that tends to close off all the loopholes would remain...

...In order to escape the city, LaGuardia sought an alliance with Boss Ed Flynn of the Bronx for the purpose of getting Flynn’s support for the Democratic nomination to fill the Senate seat of Royal Copeland, the conservative Democrat put up by the regular Republicans against LaGuardia in the 1937 primary...

...In fact, no former mayor ever polled more than three per cent of the Republican delegates...

...Probably not...

...But some of them were like Mayor Lindsay...

...In the end, his only lasting contribution was clearing the way for four years of Fusion, the hallowed name taken by the Reform Movement in New York on those rare occasions when reformers can get together long enough to run a candidate...

...Perhaps the Mayor’s only chance is to follow the Nixon pattern and move to the opposite coast...

...Mayor Lindsay began losing the GOP and his hope for state-wide political support proportionately as he came to recognize that the answer to New York’s problems might be in Vietnam and Washington...

...To many old mayor-watchers, the Iron Law of New York mayors is known as Sayre’s Law, after its framer, Wallace S. Sayre, professor of government at Columbia University and one of New York’s most astute political analysts...

...This year he is u visiting professor at the University of North Carolina...

...If he finds the loophole, it will be due to factors of an extraordinarily personal kind...

...LaGuardia’s mistresses were the comic strips and, for relief, civil defense and five-alarm fires...

...Statewide tickets frequently include former city council presidents and local district attorneys, judges, congressmen, and state senators...

...all the punishments are heaped upon the most ambitious, the most courageous...

...The antinomy seems to be precisely governmental...

...This is usually in tenuous association with the Republican Party...

...Mayor Gaynor (1910-1914) was a Brooklyn Democrat who came to office with a reputation for irregularity and independence...

...Growth, Depression, and Repeal had transformed the office of mayor...

...Eventually the cities, especially New York after Consolidation in 1898, began to add more of the essential governmental functions -education, welfare, planning, transit -and with that came a more active discomfort with state government...

...Politics is an artificial way of increasing a person’s self-esteem or padding his pocketbook...

...Without the Eisenhower landslide he might have been elected, but in any case the politics of getting the nomination set in train a series of developments that ended in ruination for Wagner’s political career and for the remains of the Democratic party in New York City and state...

...The city cannot govern itself because the main sources of its problems are beyond the boundaries and the power of the city...

...Jimmy Walker was the last of the old types who could view City Hall as the be-all and end-all...

...Cooperation between the two levels of government is even more rare, because cooperation must be voluntary...

...Others went no farther because the mayoralty was the happiest of hunting grounds...

...But state government does not always deserve the low reputation it has...

...It punishes great ambition by providing no institutions through which it can express itself...

...It is often forgotten that under our Constitution, all local principalities and agencies are mere creatures of the state and enjoy only those powers granted ultimately by the state...

...Since 1832, when presidential nominating conventions began, there have been 45 “first-time” nominees for President and 56 for Vice President...

...Mayor Lindsay probably comes as close as any mayor in New York’s history, or in the history of any other city, to a national thinker...

...New York City is only one, albeit significant, example of a general phenomenon...

...If the city were returned to its original constitutional status, as a subordinate unit of state government, it would provide choice among all shapes and forms of government...

...Why Mayors Go Nowhere by Theodore J. Lowi New York mayors come from anywhere and go nowhere...

...Yet New York City’s top political figure looks into this from the outside, despite the fact that the city offers at least half these prizes and has at times appeared to hold the national balance of power...

...The Small and Narrow During the 19th century and on into the 20th, city governments, including New York’s, did nothing but hand out privileges-jobs, franchises, and information...

...As mayor, he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t...

...LaGuardia’s Driveway Fiorello LaGuardia (1 934-1 946) was the first of the modern mayors...

...And none of them ever succeeded...

...For certain purposes, the conventional city is the right unit...

...He harbored appropriately large political ambitions, and to that end he had planned carefully and long...

...The state fears to get involved in the city, much as a patient with a gangrenous limb might pretend it doesn’t belong to him...

...Since the fate of New York mayors and the capacity of New York for self-government are tied together, they will stay or improve together...

...Fighting Bob Wagner, by garnering the 1956 Senate nomination, provides the sole exception to the regular fate of New York mayors...

...Inferiority, then, won’t explain why the big-city mayoralty is a dead end...

...During the entire history of the Greater City, from the time in 1898 when Manhattan was consolidated with Brooklyn and the other boroughs, elected in 1965, there were 12 mayors...

...Lindsay may find his loophole, though that is unlikely...

...He was a true urban politician, but was oriented toward issues and offices larger than the city’s...

...But actually, Hylan instituted several important and lasting improvements in city government, including the establishment of the Budget Bureau, the Purchasing Department, and the principle that Democratic administrations would adhere ,to civil service rules and regulations...

...While still in his twenties, he had proven his capability and effectiveness as leader of the reform forces under Mayor McClellan...

...His successors, Mayors O’Dwyer and Impelliteri, were not even as fortunate as that...

...The success of district attorneys, which is due to the continuity of the judicial process, begins to suggest the political advantages to city populations if their governments were less of a closed system than they are today...

...The city, in its turn, retains a full-time lobbying operation in Albany, and is treated as though the city were just one more pressure group...

...but in trying to find a way to govern this fractured system, while at the same time trying to find an opening to his own political future, he has become a vigorous proponent of more home rule, more separation of city and state...

...And a few of these mayors were patently inferior...

...None of them ever got anywhere...

...If the mayoralty is so generally a dead end, there has to be some explanation...

...On the other hand, if he had kept Tammany and the city constituency happy, he would never have had a prayer of larger, state-wide support anyway...

...McClellan had been a regular Tammany nominee-one of those respectables the party always trotted out whenever Reform was knocking at the door...

...New York City and state have, to the contrary, kept operating as though continued, and more, separation were possible...

...This relationship of opposites between governments was dramatically portrayed by the break between Mayor Lindsay and Governor Rockefeller...

...National committeemen from New York City are usually major figures at the conventions, proving that some obscure New York pols come from nowhere and actually go somewhere...

...The city cannot govern itself because, to gain efficiency, it has cut its functions up into bureaucracies where officials detest new problems whose definition extends beyond agency boundaries...

...The relationship between the city and state governments comes to what students of strategy call a zero-sum game...

...Home rule expressed the fact that it was no longer possible for city and state to exist in relation to each other...

...only three former mayors ever exceeded three per cent of the delegate votes in Democratic conventions...

...The immediate question is whether the mayoralty simply attracts inferior politicians...

...This affliction, the zero-sum game between governmental adversaries, is incentive throughout the state and city for narrow perspectives in policy formulation and execution...

...He only wanted to be universally loved, and his tragedy was not the corruptness of his administration, but only its tardiness...

...This is a fractured system, a system that is not a system at all...

...He joined with LaGuardia and many other young romantics to help build the World War I Air Force and in 19 18 was killed in training...

...Thus, in going hell-bent after the larger constituency, Wagner almost completely disoriented the political system of the city...

...Or should he be punished more severely for not having learned anything from the woes of his predecessors...

...Worse still, the system produces irrationalities among the best and biggest minds on those rare occasions when courage overcomes fear...

...City and state agencies tend to distrust each other, even in matters of welfare, police, pollution control, and transportation, where there is legal obligation as well as rational imperative for cooperation...

...Among these, there were no former big-city mayors...

...In a sense that is true, but only because it is true of almost all politicians...

...His father was Lincoln’s General McClellan, and the son himself served with some distinction in Congress for nine years prior to his election as mayor...

...Mayor George B. McClellan (1 904-1 9 10) was the first of the heavier weights...

...LaGuardia tried for weeks to keep the lid on the scandal but was foiled by his own Civil Service Commissioners, whose dedication to LaGuardia’s ethic of reform impelled them to reveal that sanitation workers had been sent to Flynn’s home on a weekend to surprise the Boss with a new driveway...

...for many other problems, units that cut across existing city boundaries would be better...

...First, Wagner was the only mayor with an established political family, one with a prefabricated state-wide constituency built by his famous senator father...

...All over the country big-city mayoralties seem to possess the seeds of their own destruction...

...What is gain for the city is treated as loss by the state, and conversely...

...They took themselves seriously, and seem to have been taken seriously, as potential candidates for President, Vice President, senator, or governor, or at least attorney general, appeals court judge, even state comptroller...

...Governments developed separately, political organizations and traditions developed separately, separate loyalties and outlooks bred jealousy and mistrust...

...The city and state university systems are overlapping and tied to the same fate, but different criteria apply to them, different functions are heaped upon them without regard to any central considerations...

...The failure of this alliance doomed LaGuardia to a third term in the mayoralty...

...An independent and a Democrat, he was generally acceptable to all enlightened elements in the liberal wings of both political parties...

...it was only an early expression of systematic distrust between governments in the same state...

...In his effort to run the office so as to attract a still larger constituency, McClellan lost Tammany and he was also unable to build his own political future...

...Meanwhile, we have nominated many former generals and businessmen, numerous senators and governors, many former district attorneys, and the like...

...This discomfort led to increasing pressure for home rule...

...But home rule was no solution...

...Like Lindsay, he spl‘it from the Republican organization after one term, and after losing in a three-way race for reelection (the big issue was the war, of which he was a supporter), he found himself an attractive number to the Democratic left, the Wilson progressives...

...and there are many examples of city and county officials other than mayors who have gone on to higher office...

...The public good, which indeed is often served, is nonetheless incidental to political ambition, just as the “wealth of nations” is incidental to the entrepreneur’s lust for riches...

...Under those conditions there was little need for strong continuity between levels of government...

...The state has sent the largest delegations to most of the presidential nominating conventions of both parties and has presented to one party or the other the largest single bloc of electoral votes in the presidential elections...

...Yet who can hope to be a major contender if he goes to the convention without the solid support of his own state delegation...

...John Purroy Mitchel was the perfect Fusion mayor...

...That is patently not the truth of the matter...

...Walker should have served in times when the city needed only ceremonial functions in the mayoralty...

...All the important laws were made by the state legislature, including the essential penal, health, and property laws administered by city agencies and courts...

...over the country...

...For others, units of much smaller size are better...