I’m in the middle of one of the finer pieces of popular history I’ve read in a long time. No, it’s not a history of the Civil War or the American Revolution or the 1960s or some other riveting moment in American history. The book is about New York City in one year: 1977. Within that tumultuous year, the city tried to climb out of bankruptcy amidst spiraling crime, a blackout riot, an explosion of porn shops in Times Square, a cascade of public labor union strikes, the collapse of infrastructure, a legendary serial crime spree (Son of Sam), a chaotic Mayoral election and, of course, the raucous revival of the New York Yankees. The book, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City, by Jonathan Mahler captures each of these tragi-comic events and weaves them into a rich tapestry of urban despair and, ultimately, hope.
I vaguely remember New York City in those days, or at least the few years following. I was born in New Jersey in 1973 and my father commuted by train, bus and subway to the New York Telephone offices on 140 West Street in Lower Manhattan every day. Though he finally emerged from his commute in the shadow of the gleaming, if bland, World Trade Center towers, he regularly traversed some of the great cesspools of 1970s America. Walking through Times Square every day he avoided the puke and urine (and worse) as he joined the throngs headed for ever-shrinking jobs in the heart of New York City. Occasionally, I would get to visit his office, which I called simply “The Building.” Or I’d get to go to the eye doctor on 88th and West End Avenue with my mother as a treat; she grew up just outside Queens on Long Island and continued to see our ophthalmologist there so we could get our “New York fix.” Great pizza. Zabar’s! And Chinese candies with edible wrappers were the delights I experienced as a young child coming in from the suburbs for a day of adventure. It was just a few years after 1977, but the city Mahler describes was every bit the one I remember.
Who, I wondered, would actually live in those bombed out buildings over the George Washington Bridge? You mean to tell me that a great university – Columbia University – was on the other side of the barrier separating beautiful West Side Highway from Harlem (Morningside Heights, actually, but I didn’t know the difference)? I was incredulous at the notion that New York City was ever anything but a dump.
Later I had the chance to go to Mets and Yankees games too. I distinctly remember a man urinating next to his stalled car in traffic on the Major Deegan Expressway outside Yankee Stadium. He didn’t even bother to face the other direction. Meanwhile, local South Bronx teenagers chirped in Spanish at my 12-year old sister.
New York City in those days – the 1970s and early 1980s – was an exciting place. But it was a very dangerous, dirty, and deranged place. When New York State issued its “I Love New York” ad campaign in the early 1980s I, like most New Jerseyans, thought it was a joke.
My perceptions of New York City as a child were grounded in reality. It really was a terrible and trying moment for the Big Apple. Mahler’s wonderful book lays out everything afflicting the city at that time in lurid detail.
That bad old New York City is no longer. A variety of forces put it to an end – from Wall Street’s boom to Rudi Giuliani to the general revival of urban chic to Disney to, well, a lot factors. New York City is now one of the safest big cities on Earth. It’s filled with highly-educated, creative people who have helped restore the rotten city of the Taxi Driver era to its former greatness.
But one thing has occurred to me as I read over the tribulations of late 1970s urban America. The great liberal dream of big city public services available for free to all had fallen apart. New York was the poster child for what ailed America in that era. And nobody seemed prepared to turn the clock better than Ronald Reagan. His sunny idealism, law and order bona fides, and small government conservatism fit perfectly at the end of that tumultuous decade. If the 1960s promised new horizons for America, the 1970s witnessed either the consolidation of those ideals (especially in the area of women’s rights) or the collapse of them. By 1980, America was desperately ready for change. One only had to ride into New York City that year to see why.
1980, as it turned out, was a unique time in America. A confluence of factors came together to usher in a new era of conservative Republicanism. Even New York and Massachusetts voted for Ronald Reagan, after all. New directions in domestic and foreign policy altered the tax code, the regulatory environment, and the culture as a whole. People didn’t even storm the baseball field after winning a championship anymore (witness the mayhem at Yankee Stadium when Chris Chambliss deposited the ALCS-winning home run in the bleachers in 1976; he couldn’t reach second base because a fan stole it.) It was, as Reagan famously declared, “Morning in America again.”
It’s easy to forget just how depressed much of America was at that time.
But, alas, there’s a rub. It was a crowning moment in the history of the modern Republican Party too. Yet, it was a particular historical moment that has, quite simply, not replicated itself again. Partly because of the successes of the Reagan Administration – and the Clinton Administration to follow in the 1990s – that long nightmare is over. The GOP agenda of that year perfectly fit the demands of 1980. But does that mean the GOP agenda of 1980 will ALWAYS fit the time?
Here, I think, is the greatest problem facing the modern Republican Party. Just as the Democrats could never get over the fact that it was no longer 1932 or 1960, the Republicans seem stuck in a time warp of 1980. Their economic agenda is still: tax cuts, tax cuts and more tax cuts. Add in a little “de-regulation” to boot. That may have made perfect sense in the backdrop of 1970s stagflation and confiscatory tax rates at the state and Federal level. But it makes no sense today after 30 years of lower taxes and exploding deficits. Much the same can be said for the GOP social agenda and foreign policy. One can only strike up the band so many times.
I understand the temptation to relive the glory years. I had hoped that the 2008 election would force the Republican Party to modernize its economic outlook, and take advice from smart young thinkers like Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam. That simply has not happened. The Tea Party seems like three time warps – 1784 (the Articles of Confederation’s glory days), 1880 (Robber Baron heaven) and 1980 – all nested together like one of those Russian egg dolls. The GOP still seeks out its three-legged stool that brought it glory under Reagan and polarized power under the Bushes.
I’m sure I sound like a “concern troll” in pushing the GOP to rethink its ways. I’m a solid Democrat, after all. But just as I want my party to enjoin the pragmatic leadership of Obama (and Clinton before him) with progressive values for today, I’d think the Republican Party should update its countertops and wallpaper too. Nostalgia may win votes for a while. But then the older generation dies off, the contradictions of power emerge, and then the country yearns for something like hope and change again.