Battling Bella: The Protest Politics of Bella Abzug

Reviewed by Dylan Gottlieb

“She is loud. She is good and rude,” wrote Jimmy Breslin, the redoubtable New York newspaperman. Like “a fighter in training,” he continued, Bella Abzug was “pushing, brawling, poking, striding her way toward the Congress of the United States.” In the 1970s, as New York approached its nadir, Abzug emerged onto the political scene as a pugilist for the people: a “tough broad from the Bronx” (to borrow the title of another biography), whose combative style and populist message fit the tough times.

Battling Bella: The Protest Politics of Bella Abzug
By Leandra Ruth Zarnow
Harvard University Press, 2019
443 pages

But Abzug was much more than a gruff façade and a cavalcade of famous hats. She was a labor lawyer, a political radical, a socialist Zionist, an anti-war activist, an intersectional feminist avant la lettre. Her five-decade political career, reconstructed beautifully in a new biography by Leandra Ruth Zarnow, reveals the peregrinations of American leftism during the twentieth century. It also documents the battles within the Democratic Party as its working-class base diversified and it faced challenges from the left and the right. Ultimately, Abzug’s life allows us to see unexpected continuities across American politics—how the lessons of the Popular Front echoed into the 1960s, and how ethnic socialism, incubated in the five boroughs, shaped long-running debates over welfare, identity, foreign policy, and human rights.

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From its origins in the 1930s, Abzug’s “pragmatic radicalism” had a particularly New York — and more precisely, Jewish New York — flavor.  Her introduction to socialism and Zionism came at an upstate Jewish youth camp. At Hunter College in the 1940s, she joined the American Student Union, the college-age wing of the Popular Front. A critic of the New Deal from the left, she canvassed locally for the American Labor Party and voted for Henry Wallace in 1946. After graduating from Columbia Law School, where she was one of nine female students in her class, she defended longshoremen and furriers at a leftist labor law firm (it was during this period that Abzug adopted her trademark millinery, which she believed signaled that she “was there for business”). Litigating civil rights and First Amendment cases, she challenged Jim Crow and McCarthyism — joining the robust New York, and often Jewish-led, civil libertarian legal tradition.

In the early 1960s, Abzug would move more fully into politics, spearheading grassroots anti-war campaigns and, by mid-decade, reluctantly joining the Democratic Party. A change in geography mirrored her increasing involvement in movement and electoral politics. In 1965, she sold her suburban Mt. Vernon home (to Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow) and moved to Greenwich Village. Her townhome became a clearinghouse for collaborators — pacifists, feminists, and labor-leftists trying to channel radical protest into policy. Never drawn to civil disobedience or the absurd theatricality of the New Left, Abzug pushed her allies to “use conventional political techniques for radical goals.” Locally, that meant supporting reform Democratic candidates who opposed the Tammany machine as well as the escalating conflict in Vietnam. Nationally, that meant joining the nascent New Politics wing of the Democratic Party in their support of anti-war presidential candidates in 1968: first Eugene McCarthy, then, more enthusiastically, Robert F. Kennedy.

During his 1969 re-election campaign, Mayor John V. Lindsay tapped Abzug as a surrogate in an attempt to solidify his liberal credentials. At the time, Lindsay’s reputation was in tatters. Coming after years of deindustrialization, budgetary crises, and mounting poverty, the 1968 Ocean-Hill Brownsville teacher’s strike had only deepened Lindsay’s unpopularity. Abzug, he believed, could help him renew neighborhood-level support for his vision of urban liberalism. But Lindsay’s progressivism only went so far. Even as he sought to appease Abzug and her coterie of social justice types, he feared alienating Wall Street or hastening the flight of corporations from Manhattan. As the city’s fiscal crisis deepened, those concerns would win out. Abzug’s community-driven activism was sidelined. Lindsay and his successors would focus instead on growing New York’s financial and professional sectors — which, they hoped, would bring a new cadre of white-collar residents to the city.

By 1970, Abzug had turned her sights towards Congress. In Washington, she figured, she could best advocate for the issues that mattered to “city people” like herself: more robust social welfare spending, protections for workers, and an end to the war in Southeast Asia. But she was also committed to a new sort of politics, one increasingly organized around identity-based rights claims. In this respect, Abzug was Janus-faced: gazing backwards at the class-centric appeals of the Old Left, even as she looked ahead to emerging struggles over gender, sexuality, and race. Once again, Abzug’s choice of Manhattan real estate signaled her commitments. Her campaign headquarters, at 61 Christopher Street, stood less than 100 feet away from the Stonewall Inn, the site of watershed gay liberation protests in 1969. Abzug took her campaign onto the streets of her West Side district, shaking hands and kibitzing in Yiddish with passersby. That November, she eked out a victory and headed to Washington.

In Congress, Abzug worked to funnel federal funds to the city while advancing her brand of legal feminism. Zarnow is masterful at untangling the possibilities and alliances of 1970s progressivism, from legislation guaranteeing childcare to campaigns for and against the Equal Rights Amendment. She also details the misogynistic backlash to Abzug from the “old boys” in Congress and the media. And in perhaps her most fascinating chapter, Zarnow puzzles over Abzug’s celebrity. Her brassy, embodied persona brought her fame, but it also revealed the tenacity of gendered expectations for women working in the public eye. 

Perhaps here, Zarnow could have also explored more deeply the class and ethnic dimensions of Abzug’s personality. Why did her echt-New York, working-class demeanor resonate so deeply in the 1970s? Perhaps it was because it was at this moment that the older vision of New York’s working class that she represented—gritty, white, ethnic — was fading from the scene. Suburbanization and the diversification of the city’s population had changed the face of New York, pushing some blue-collar whites into a reactionary posture.[1] Meanwhile, a rising tide of white-collar professionals had begun to remake select neighborhoods, along with the political orientation of the local Democratic Party. What remained for white ethnics, then, was a hazy nostalgia for their immigrant past.[2] And Abzug’s public persona — “mighty, but authentic” — fit the bill. In the following decades, local pols from both parties (Alfonse D’Amato, Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, Mario Cuomo) would mimic Abzug’s performance of earthy ethnic populism. They would find favor among white ethnic voters — even if their policies seldom benefitted the city’s existing (and not coincidentally, more diverse) working class.

Abzug’s tenure in Congress ended in 1976 after she lost her bid for a New York Senate seat to Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The race dramatized a split in the party, with Abzug’s dovish, feminist New Politics wing facing off against Moynihan’s hawkish, neoconservative bloc. She managed to rally a diverse coalition of voters. But she faced skepticism from white blue-collar Democrats who tarred her positions — affirmative action, gay rights, gender parity, welfare, environmentalism — as anti-labor or as an affectation of the liberal elite.[3] She followed that defeat with a fourth-place finish in the 1977 New York mayoral race. In an age of limits, Abzug’s social-democratic ideals seemed to belong to an earlier decade — not to mention an earlier incarnation of the Democratic Party.

Zarnow’s impressive political biography ultimately raises crucial questions for our own time. What is the relationship between the politics of class and the politics of identity — are they always antagonistic? Or can they coexist within a robust, intersectional progressive movement? And what do we make of radicals like Abzug, people who “pushed from the left to shift the center”? Perhaps Bernie Sanders — in many ways a similar figure — will someday be seen in the same light as Abzug: a leader who drew on America’s socialist heritage to pursue an as-yet-unrealized dream — a society at once more equal, more moral, and more inclusive than our present.

Dylan Gottlieb is a PhD candidate at Princeton University and a National Fellow at the Jefferson Scholars Foundation at the University of Virginia.

[1] See, for example, Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).

[2] On nostalgia for New York’s immigrant past, see Hasia Diner, Lower East Side Memories: A Jewish Place in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000);

on eclipse of the white working-class in the 1970s, see Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010); on the history of the working class in twentieth-century New York, see Joshua Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000).

[3] Timothy Lombardo, Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo's Philadelphia and Populist Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).