The LaGuardia myth

HAILED as "America's greatest mayor" in a 1999 national survey, Fiorello LaGuardia is a figure of enduring appeal. According to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, LaGuardia gave Gotham the "most honest and I believe the most efficient municipal government of any city within my recollection." This oft-repeated sentiment has made LaGuardia's Depression-era mayoralty a touchstone for proponents of activist government both nationally and locally. But following his lead would be a mistake.

LaGuardia was initially a savior of sorts. When he entered office in 1933, the city of New York was literally bankrupt. A quarter of the population was out of work. LaGuardia rescued New York from the 50-year rule of Tammany Hall, which he described as an "army of parasites fattening at the trough of the city treasury." Thanks to Roosevelt's federal subventions, he fended off the Depression's worst moments through a massive and largely successful public-works program. Historians, both popular and academic, echo Robert Moses, LaGuardia's ally and rival, when evaluating his mayoralty: "Only those who remember the cynicism of the late Twenties and early Thirties and remember how low the City's credit and civil morale had fallen can properly gauge what this man did to lift us up and to attract to New York the lost respect of the nation."

But widen the time frame and a different picture emerges. LaGuardia's administration obscured the extraordinary achievements of the earlier, self-sufficient city that made itself into the commercial hub of the United States. Success came at the price of remaking New York from a dynamic commercial city into the "New Deal City," where social-democratic ideals of government and society were institutionalized at the price of economic vitality.

TWO new LaGuardia biographies have further augmented the mayor's already formidable reputation. H. Paul Jeffers' The Napoleon of New York [dagger] paints a picture of LaGuardia's colorful personality. The mayor emerges here as a quipster and source of urban folklore but also as a highly competent statesman. The title refers to the fact that LaGuardia, prickly about his five-foot two-inch stature, kept on his desk a bust of another short man who cast a long shadow. Alyn Brodsky's The Great Mayor [dagger][dagger] is a first-rate popular biography highlighting the rage and resentment that often motivated LaGuardia. Both are testaments to his enduring appeal. Neither biography shows much interest in the mayor's long-term legacy. This is unfortunate, since LaGuardia's favorable treatment speaks worlds about New York's New Deal inheritance, and our attitude toward it.

LaGuardia, both as mayor and in memory, has been the beneficiary of an enduring case of mistaken identity. This is because he was so hard to categorize. As a half-Italian, half-Jewish Episcopalian, LaGuardia was sometimes described as a "one man balanced ticket." Usually considered the consummate New Yorker, LaGuardia did not settle there until the age of 24. He was raised in Arizona, North Dakota, and Missouri, where he developed the political sensibilities of a Western Progressive. By the time he settled in New York in 1906, his views of the world were already fully formed. He was a loner who had few friends and great difficulty forming human attachments, but he nevertheless had a gift for inspiring loyalty and devotion.

A nominal Republican, LaGuardia was the mayor most closely identified with Roosevelt and the New Deal. His crusade against the "boodlers" of Tammany and its "club-house loafers" brought him into an alliance with anti-Tammany patrician allies in the city and the anti-Tammany patrician president from upstate New York. LaGuardia fashioned a successful coalition between good-government reformers and the immigrant poor by putting government efficiency in the service of the poor. He could speak to both groups: His angry and emotional speeches appealed to the poor, while he incorporated the Brahmin reformers by hiring them to run his agencies.

LaGuardia often talked of "efficient scientific government," and his bargain with Roosevelt enabled the mayor to showcase the New Deal approach to government. In the short run, it was an enormous success. To Tammany's deep chagrin, LaGuardia dispensed city services fairly and effectively through a vastly expanded civil-service bureaucracy and an increasingly unionized work force. His goal, he said, was to make New York a "100 percent union town."

Federal grants and loans reshaped the face of the city. LaGuardia collaborators Harold Ickes of the Public Works Administration and Robert Moses built East River Drive, the Henry Hudson, Grand Central, Cross Island, Gowanus and Interborough Parkways, the Triborough Bridge, the Lincoln Tunnel, the Queens Midtown Tunnel, Marine Parkway, piers, public schools, public-housing projects, public baths, parks, prisons, paved streets, Hunter and Brooklyn Colleges, boardwalks, swimming pools and more. The face of urban employment also changed significantly for the better. Shortly after LaGuardia entered office the city had a half-million people on government relief. By 1943, the number had fallen to 73,000.

LOOKING at these achievements today, however, we can see that they were based on a set of idiosyncratic conditions unlikely to ever be repeated. For one, LaGuardia's "depression-era geniuses" were uniquely effective in enabling the mayor to deliver on his bargain. Before the reform victory of 1933, Tammany had awarded most city government jobs to fellow Irishmen. LaGuardia broke Tammany's political and patronage monopoly with a flood of brilliant young Italians and Jews who moved en masse into city government. These eager and talented acolytes helped release the pent-up energy of a new generation hoping to make it in America. But their enthusiasm and loyalty would not carry over in the generations of city workers to follow.

For another, LaGuardia used exceptionally harsh management techniques to goad underperforming city workers. These techniques would never stand in today's public-sector work culture. LaGuardia treated his staff like "dogs," according to New Dealer Rex Tugwell. "It would be almost but not quite fair," he wrote, "to say that he was an instinctive dictator." Like his hero Theodore Roosevelt, LaGuardia would pop in unannounced to city offices to see how things were going. He gave the "Order of the Shankbone," a mock prize, to the official who made the biggest mistakes. In spite of all this, he was beloved. As Felix Frankfurter once explained, LaGuardia "translated the complicated conduct of the City's vast government into warm significance for every man, woman and child."

LaGuardia's soak-the-rich rhetoric and hostility to business endeared him to unionists to an extent unrivaled by successors. LaGuardia consistently backed local labor in disputes--even to the point of turning a blind eye to picketing violence. But the mayor drew a sharp distinction between rules governing public and private sector workers, and he kept public servants from becoming too comfortable in their positions.

In the long run, these were untenable distinctions. As the city added union power to civil-service protections in the 1950s, city employees gained the ability to define their jobs in terms of their own interests. LaGuardia's own policies thus made it nearly impossible for his successors to match his success. The Tammany hacks he displaced could be fired, but the civil servants he put in their place were headless nails. Protected by civil-service rules, they were insulated from the consequences of their own actions, let alone the actions of a future mayor angered by their underperformance.

LAGUARDIA kept the budget in tenuous balance in part through substantial tax hikes. Levies such as the rentoccupancy tax and the sales tax--passed in the 1930s as emergency measures--became permanent. The mayor added a utilities tax and raised the property tax to record levels. These new taxes forced many businesses to flee the city. A 1944 report spoke of "the alarming flight of industry to younger cities" that had created "ghost neighborhoods." But when the New York Board of Trade told the mayor about the exodus, he attacked the news as "cheap propaganda" and a "cowardly despicable, a malicious, deliberate lie."

The glory years were brief. By the late 1930s, not even LaGuardia's special relationship with FDR's federal treasury could keep the city fiscally solvent. LaGuardia used federal money to pay off the city's debts to J.P. Morgan and other banks, but by the end of his three terms, the city was once again in hock to the bankers. World War II temporarily rescued the city from its fiscal decline. The return of machine politics in the 1950s also temporarily slowed the rate of increase in city spending. But except for boom times, New York City would never again be able to afford its government.

FOR most of America, the 1930s were an aberrance, an emergency that required immediate remedy but no more. Thanks in large part to LaGuardia, New York was different. It came to see the 1930s as the norm. LaGuardia thought of the post-war years not in terms of a revival of the private economy but of a permanent New Deal. As early as 1937, speaking on behalf of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, LaGuardia insisted that "this country will always face an unemployment problem" of near-1930s levels. The employment surge of World War II did little to change his mind. He anticipated that the post-war "dislocation of industry," combined with the "demobilization of millions of men" would produce "a picture just too terrible to contemplate." To avoid the imminent violence, he drew up plans for more than $1 billion in public-works projects to provide immediate employment for the returning servicemen. Taken by itself, this might be judged no more than an unorthodox effort at prudence. But as a long-term approach to the relationship between government and the economy, Fiorellism spelled trouble for New York's economy.

Nonetheless, LaGuardia remains the standard against which all mayors are judged today. More than two decades after Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan showed that the federal government drains many billions of dollars from New York annually, Gotham politicians still believe in Washington more than Washington believes in itself. And they still shift current costs onto future generations. Aspiring New York mayoral candidates still cast themselves in the mold of LaGuardia in spite of this, and give speeches calling for a new FDR to ride in and rescue the city from its latest fiscal crisis. Clearly, Fiorellism is an illusion that has not passed.

[dagger] John Wiley & Sons. 329 pp. $35.00.

[dagger][dagger] St. Martin's Press. 530 pp. $40.00.

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