JOHN LINDSAY

'John Vliet Lindsay' (November 24, 1921 – December 19, 2000) was an American liberal politician who served as a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1959 to 1965 and mayor of New York City from 1966 to 1973.

Contents

Early life

Mayoralty

Activism and unrest

Counterculture issues

Students

African-Americans

Role in Stonewall Inn riot

Political machinations

Middle class problems

Murder at the Harlem Mosque

Assessment and later life

External links

Early life

Lindsay was born in New York City on West End Avenue to George Nelson Lindsay and the former Florence Eleanor Vliet. Contrary to popular assumptions, John Lindsay was neither a blue-blood nor very wealthy by birth, although he did grow up in an upper middle class family of English and Dutch extraction. Lindsay's paternal grandfather immigrated to the United States in the 1880s from the Isle of Wight, and his mother was from an upper-middle class family that had been in New York since the 1660s. John's father was a successful lawyer and investment banker, and was able to send his son to the prestigious Buckley School, St. Paul's School, and Yale, where he was inducted into the famous secret society, Scroll and Key. Lindsay received his bachelor of arts degree from Yale in 1944 and his law degree from there as well in 1948.
During World War II, Lindsay joined the United States Naval Reserve and obtained the rank of lieutenant. His service extended from 1943 to 1946. He was admitted to the bar in 1949 and practiced law for a few years before gravitating towards politics.
Elected to Congress as a Republican from the "Silk Stocking" district in 1958, Lindsay established a liberal voting record, known for his strong support of civil rights legislation and social programs. In 1965, Lindsay was elected mayor as a Republican with the support of the Liberal Party of New York in a three-way race. (He switched to Democratic allegiance in 1971.) He defeated Democratic mayoral candidate Abraham D. Beame, then City Comptroller, as well as ''National Review'' magazine founder William F. Buckley, Jr., who ran on the Conservative line. In 1968, after the assassination of popular liberal U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Lindsay turned down an offer from Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller to take over Kennedy's seat[1]. Rockefeller then chose the liberal Republican Charles E. Goodell, who was unseated by Bill Buckley's older brother, Conservative Party nominee James L. Buckley, in 1970.

Mayoralty

Lindsay inherited a city with serious fiscal and economic problems left by outgoing Democratic Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. The old manufacturing jobs that supported generations of uneducated immigrants were disappearing, millions of middle class residents were fleeing to the suburbs, and public sector workers had won the right to unionize.

Activism and unrest

Public sector union activism would turn out to be the bane of Lindsay's administration. On his first day as mayor, the Transport Workers Union of America (TWU) led by Mike Quill shut down the city with a complete halt of subway and bus service. Though it was often asserted that the transit workers were underpaid, the strike more than anything was an effort by an old-guard Irish leadership to reinforce its power over a union that by 1966 had more black and Hispanic members than ethnic Irish. The leader of the TWU had predicted a nine-day strike at most, but Lindsay's refusal to negotiate delayed a settlement and the strike lasted twelve days. Quill's mocking press conferences gave the city the impression that Lindsay was not tough enough to deal with the city's sources of power.
The settlement of the strike, combined with increased welfare costs and general economic decline, forced Lindsay to push through the New York state legislature in 1966 a municipal income tax hike and higher water rates for city residents, plus a new commuter tax for people who worked in the city but resided elsewhere. By 1970, New Yorkers were paying $384 per person in taxes, the highest in the nation. In contrast, the average Chicago resident paid $244 per person. (Source, ''Can Cities Survive? The Fiscal Plight of American Cities'', Pettengill and Uppal, p. 76.)
The transit strike was the first of many labor struggles. In 1968 the teachers' union (the United Federation of Teachers (UFT)) went on strike over the firings of several teachers in a school in the neighborhood of Ocean Hill-Brownsville. Demanding the reinstatement of the dismissed teachers, the four-month battle became a symbol of the chaos of New York City and the city's difficulty to deliver a functioning school system.
That same year, 1968, also saw a week-long sanitation strike. Lindsay was widely blamed for the disaster for not making a counteroffer to the union's pre-strike proposal. Quality of life in New York reached a nadir during this strike, as ten-foot tall mountains of garbage grew on New York City sidewalks.
The summer of 1970 ushered in another devastating strike, as over 8,000 workers belonging to AFSCME District Council 37 walked off their jobs for two days. The strikers included workers on the city's drawbridges and sewer plants. Drawbridges over the Harlem River were locked in the "up" position, barring transit by automobile, and hundreds of thousands of gallons of raw sewage flowed into area waterways.
This was also the year of the Hard Hat Riot on Wall Street and Broadway on May 8th, in which antiwar protestors clashed with construction workers from the World Trade Center construction site. The protesters had set up along the statue of George Washington on Wall Street and were reportedly waving Viet Cong flags and defiling American flags in protesting the Kent State shootings. The "Hard Hats" proceeded to storm the statue's base in anger and set up American flags, then pursued the fleeing protestors. The resulting chaos then spilled out to the Pace University campus and City Hall. This was one of the slowest days on the New York Stock Exchange in months, as the construction workers were unexpectedly joined by some white collar office workers from the exchange. Lindsay had ordered that all flags on City buildings be lowered to half mast to show respect for the four students killed at Kent State, a measure that the construction workers were overwhelmingly opposed, but many city residents applauded. They threatened to overwhelm City Hall unless the flag was raised to full height, which it eventually was. Lindsay also took the blame for the lack of action by the NYPD, which made little attempt to stop the construction workers from rioting. Reportedly, as the American flag was raised to full over City Hall, the construction workers demanded that the fifteen officers remove their riot helmets in respect. Seven did.

Counterculture issues

Students

During the late 1960s, thousands of hippies came to live in Greenwich Village. In hope of finding someone to control them, the Lindsay administration put Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin on the municipal payroll at $100 a week.

African-Americans

Protesters would march on City Hall with signs saying "no money, no peace". Sonny Carson in 1967 sent a letter to Lindsay saying it "would be a 'cool summer' if Lindsay kept funneling money to the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)." Unlike many American cities, New York avoided major race riots, due largely to Lindsay's walks through ghetto neighborhoods helping residents to keep calm.

Role in Stonewall Inn riot

In 1969 Lindsay was behind an effort to raid the gay bar known as the Stonewall Inn. Many historians suspect that this was done because Lindsay had lost the Republican primary and was trying to gather votes from John Marchi, the mayoral nominee of the Republican and Conservative parties. The riot that erupted as a result of the police raid is considered a major milestone in the American gay rights movement.

Political machinations

Lindsay's position in the Republican Party grew increasingly tenuous over time. He had nominated Spiro Agnew (then seen as something of a Maryland "moderate") for Vice President in 1968 at the GOP Convention, which met in Miami Beach. Lindsay soon opposed Nixon's policies. In 1969, a backlash against Lindsay caused him to lose the Republican mayoral primary to state Senator John J. Marchi, who was enthusiastically supported by Buckley and the party conservatives. In the Democratic primary, the most conservative candidate, City Controller Mario Procaccino, defeated several more liberal contenders and won the nomination with only a plurality of the votes. "The more the Mario," he quipped.
Despite not having the Republican nomination, Lindsay was still on the ballot as the candidate of the New York Liberal Party. Running as the only liberal candidate in a heavily liberal city, Lindsay formed a coalition of minorities, Jews, and public sector unions to eke out a win by plurality. He admitted that "mistakes were made" and called being mayor of New York "the second toughest job in America". Lindsay re-entered City Hall, however, in a politically weakened position, neither aligned with Democrats or Republicans, nor having support from the majority of the electorate.
In 1971, Lindsay launched a brief and quite unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, eventually obtained by the liberal U.S. Senator George McGovern of South Dakota. He attracted positive media attention and was a successful fundraiser. Lindsay did well in the early caucuses in Arizona, but dropped out after single digit showings in the Florida and Wisconsin primaries in March. A hardy band of disgruntled protesters, mainly from Queens, followed Lindsay around his aborted campaign itinerary to jeer and heckle him.
The bargains Lindsay made with the unions later contributed to the fiscal crisis of Beame's administration. To secure their political support, Lindsay offered unions large raises — the transit workers managed an 18 percent salary increase, an extra week of vacation, and fully paid pensions; District Council 37 got a raise and retirement after twenty years; the teachers received increases of 22 to 37 percent.

Middle class problems

Crime soared in NYC during Lindsay's term, as it did in other cities. From 1961 to 1965 NYC had 7.6 homicides per 100,000 people; from 1971 to 1975 it had 21.7 homicides per 100,000. (source ''Encyclopedia of New York City'', 297). Many white New Yorkers associated crime exclusively with blacks and Puerto Ricans. Jonathan Reider, in his well known study of the white backlash in Canarsie, Brooklyn, had this to say: "Canarsians spoke about crime with more unanimity than they achieved on any other subject, and they spoke often and forcefully... one police officer explained that he earned his living by getting mugged. On his roving beat he had been mugged hundreds of time in five years. 'I only been mugged by a white guy one time'" (Canarsie, 67).
Lindsay was seen as being far from sympathetic to the needs of working-class white ethnics. Republican State Senator John Calandra said in 1968:
:"The North Bronx area has suddenly and without any prior notice had its garbage collection reduced from 3 weekly pickups to 2. . . why the decline in service by City Hall, which had a record $6 billion approved for it by our ''rubber stamp,'' so called City Council? Rumor has it that men and equipment have been diverted to the South Bronx. The North Bronx pays most of the taxes yet the South Bronx, which pays hardly any at all, gets all the services and facilities from our City Departments and Mayor. If more money is needed for our Sanitation Dept., then I suggest that our fun-loving Mayor ''find it'' in the same way he found $7 million for the Youth Corps after that disgraceful, illegal, and wanton riot at City Hall." (Cannato, 391)

Murder at the Harlem Mosque

On Friday, April 14, 1972, Patrolman Philip Cardillo and Vito Navarra responded to a "10-13" call at 102 East 116th Street, which was a Nation of Islam mosque where Malcolm X used to preach. Upon arriving inside, they were ambushed by 15 to 20 men, one of whom, according to the ballistics report, shot Cardillo at point blank range. Most of the police were forced out of the mosque and locked out, leaving a dying Cardillo and officers Victor Padilla and Ivan Negron locked from within.
Police eventually managed to break down the door and witnessed a man named Louis 17X Dupree standing over Cardillo with a gun in hand. Before Dupree could be taken into custody, however, Louis Farrakhan and Charles Rangel arrived at the scene, threatening a riot if Dupree was not released. Just as the police forensics unit was about to seal off the crime scene, they were ordered out of the mosque by the police brass. Outside a mob had overrun the street and overturned a police cruiser, shouting, "I hope you die you pigs. I hope you drop dead." (Cannato 485-486)
One of the officials who hampered the ballistics investigation was Benjamin Ward who later became police commissioner under Mayor Ed Koch. Ward had ordered all white police officers away from the scene, aquiescing to the demands of Farrakhan and Rangel. (Cannato 487)
At the hospital where Cardillo lay dying, Lindsay and his commissioner Patrick V. Murphy met up with police officials. When a member of the NYPD brass termed the event a riot, Lindsay exclaimed, "Riot? What do you mean a riot? There can't be a riot...How can you say such a thing?" When the deputy commissioner of the NYPD wanted to send out a press release explaining the department's view of what happened, he was overruled by Ward, who convinced Lindsay of the need to keep Harlem from rioting again. Farrakhan and Rangel demanded an apology from the mayor. Farrakhan said that Cardillo and Navarra had "charged into our temple like criminals and they were treated like criminals." Lindsay and Murphy apologized to Farrakhan, dropped the charges against all Nation of Islam members arrested that night, and removed every white police officer from Harlem, leaving an all-black force in the area, hoping to neutralize racial tensions.
Neither Lindsay nor Murphy attended Philip Cardillo's funeral. Five years later, Dupree was found not guilty of the murder of Cardillo by a New York jury. (Cannato 490)

Assessment and later life

Lindsay left office in 1973, having declined to seek a third term as mayor, which was then permitted. His critics have argued that mistakes he made played a large part in causing the city's fiscal problems in the 1970s; Lindsay had allowed one in seven New Yorkers to work for the city, with almost as high a proportion receiving welfare; he was perceived as too sympathetic to organized labor, and he had borrowed for operating expenses. In his critical biography ''The Ungovernable City'', Vincent J. Cannato bluntly says that Lindsay was the wrong man for the job of mayor. Lindsay was more concerned with solving the enormous social problems of NYC's poor instead of delivering basic services. Nevertheless, Lindsay's concern for racial minorities and the poor in New York helped guide the nation's largest city through the years of the "long hot summers" between 1965 and 1969 and averted massive, violent unrest, a significant accomplishment.
Years after Lindsay was out of office, his budget aide Peter Goldmark would admit that his administration's basic problem was this: "We all failed to come to grips with what a neighborhood is. We never realized that crime is something that happens to, and in, a community." Assistant Nancy Seifer said "There was a whole world out there that nobody in City Hall knew anything about. . . If you didn't live on Central Park West, you were some kind of lesser being." (Cannato, 391).
Lindsay retired to practice law but never lost his faith in the "liberal dream". His 1980 campaign for the Senate was unsuccessful, as he lost the Democratic primary to Elizabeth Holtzman, the U.S. representative from Brooklyn and later the New York City comptroller. Lindsay polled 146,815 votes (15.8 percent). His previous liberal Republican ally, Senator Jacob K. Javits, lost renomination to the more conservative Alfonse D'Amato of Long Island. D'Amato defeated Holtzman in the general election.
After the folding of several law firms for which he had worked, including Webster & Sheffield, Lindsay in the 1990s was left in failing health and without health insurance. The decision of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani to hire Lindsay as a part-time legal counsel, at a rate of $10,000 per year plus health insurance, aroused little controversy.
He died at the age of seventy-nine of complications from pneumonia and Parkinson's disease, in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, where he and his wife, the former Mary Harrison (October 30, 1926 – March 9, 2004), had moved the previous year. The couple had married on June 18, 1949. In addition to Mary, Lindsay was survived by their son, John V. Lindsay, Jr.; three daughters, Katharine Lake, Margaret Picotte, and Anne Lindsay; two sons-in-law, Stephen Lake and Michael Picotte; a brother, Robert V. Lindsay; and grandchildren Jessica and Stephanie Lake and Nicole, Joseph, and Michelle Picotte. Memorial services were held on January 26, 2001, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Lindsay was Episcopalian. Memorial contributions were requested to the John V. Lindsay Fund, Lincoln Center Theater, 150 West 65th Street, New York, New York 10023. For many years, Lindsay was a Lincoln Center trustee.
Anne Lindsay found inspiration in her father's career and actively participated in the presidential campaigns of Democrats Howard Dean and then John Kerry in 2004.
The only substantive biography of Lindsay is Vincent J. Cannato's ''The Ungovernable City''. Nevertheless, an in-depth discussion of Lindsay's fiscal policies is contained in ''Mayors and Money'' by Ester R. Fuchs. Two pro-labor treatments of New York City public sector unions are ''In Transit'' and ''Working-Class New York'' by Joshua Freeman. Lindsay's 1967 autobiography is titled ''Journey Into Politics''.
There are no city landmarks dedicated to Lindsay's memory. He is featured on a poster picture with Governor Rockefeller at the groundbreaking of the former World Trade Center in the city history section of the Museum of the City of New York at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street.

External links

★ John Lindsay at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress

★ http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/12/20/lindsay.obit/index.html

★ http://ssdi.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/ssdi.cgi?lastname=Lindsay&firstname=MARY&start=21

★ John Vliet Lindsay, ''Who's Who in America, 1966–1967''