Book Review: Chris McNickle, The Power of the Mayor: David Dinkins, 1990-1993
Review by Jerald Podair
Chris McNickle, The Power of the Mayor: David Dinkins, 1990-1993 (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2013).
Review by Jerald Podair
There is an old saying that it is better to be lucky than good. David Dinkins, Mayor of the City of New York from 1990 to 1993 was, as Chris McNickle observes in his The Power of the Mayor, an extraordinarily unlucky leader. But was he a good one? Unfortunately, McNickle informs us, he was not. “David Dinkins failed as mayor,” reads the first sentence of this deeply researched, perceptive, and fair-minded study (xi). McNickle argues that while circumstances dealt David Dinkins a bad hand, he played it badly nonetheless. Elected as a racial healer and uniter, he left the city more fractious and divided than he found it.
Dinkins’ controversial responses to the three major racial incidents of his mayoralty essentially defined his time in office. The Korean grocery boycott of 1990-91 and the Crown Heights (1991) and Washington Heights (1992) disturbances all cast Dinkins in the eyes of his critics as a hesitant leader at best and at worst a panderer to radicalized violence and reverse bigotry. McNickle’s analysis of these three crises is as detailed and balanced as we are likely to get from any biographer.
McNickle also offers a relatively overlooked explanation for Dinkins’ often tortuously deliberate approaches to these and other challenges. Obscured by the prevailing view of Dinkins as an urban liberal, labor advocate, and civil rights pioneer is another important identity: Tammany Hall machine politician. As McNickle observes, a “machine” culture entails more than rewarding friends and punishing enemies. It encourages an aversion to hasty judgments and a reluctance to make decisions until absolutely necessary. The Tammany tradition that formed Dinkins’ political sensibilities was one of closed-mouthed men who kept their own counsel and moved slowly and carefully. This style suited leaders like “Silent Charlie” Murphy, perhaps the most powerful of the Tammany bosses, during his reign in the early decades of the 20th century. But Charlie Murphy was never mayor of New York. He never had to unite a city or speak for all of its citizens. “Tammany leaders could be emotionless,” McNickle writes. “But the mayor of New York is the human point where the collective consciousness of the city’s millions of people comes together in a single person. He must read the public mood and respond to it to give expression to citywide emotions” (xvi).
This Dinkins seemed unable to do. A man whose manners and reserve were “read” by many New Yorkers as lack of passion, Dinkins could not forge the crucial emotional connections with the men and women of the city that characterized successful mayors. When in the wake of a particularly unsettling murder of a tourist during a crime wave in September 1990 the New York Post headlined, “Dave, Do Something!,” it was expressing this desire for a mayor who appeared to share the anguish of the people he led. Unquestionably, the decent and compassionate Dinkins did. But his machine-instilled qualities of forbearance and caution served him poorly when faced with circumstances that demanded fast and decisive action. When protestors in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn blocked the entrance to the Family Red Apple Market, harassed patrons, and defied a court order, Dinkins deliberated. When mobs rampaged through Crown Heights after the death of a seven year-old boy at the hands of a negligent motorist, Dinkins deliberated. When he had the opportunity to show support for a policeman who shot an armed, attacking drug gang member in Washington Heights, Dinkins deliberated.
Yusuf Hawkins's parents, three days after his murder. He was shot to death after being chased by a mob of white youths in a racially motivated killing
Bensonhurst residents shout racial slurs and taunt marchers as they walk toward the 62nd Precinct to protest the murder
The mayor’s hesitations during these incidents reflected more than his machine politics-derived culture, of course. All three involved race. Here Dinkins faced the great contradiction of his mayoralty. His 1989 victories over Edward Koch and Rudolph Giuliani, two candidates closely associated with “white” New York, had been hailed as acts of racial expiation in a city rent by the murder of black youth Yusuf Hawkins in August of that year. Dinkins had attracted significant levels of support in the white community, especially among Jews. He was virtually the only African American politician in New York who reached out to white ethnics, supporting the State of Israel, attending Italian street festivals, and marching in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
But David Dinkins was also New York’s first African American mayor, with a deep and longstanding commitment to the struggle for equal rights in the city and nation. During the Korean grocery boycott and the Crown Heights and Washington Heights disturbances, there existed opposed “white” and “non-white” positions. Dinkins attempted to mediate the two. Eight months after the grocery protest began, he traveled to the store and made a symbolic purchase. But he also allowed the demonstrators to violate a court order keeping them a reasonable distance from the store and appointed a commission to investigate the incident that largely supported the boycotters. At Crown Heights Dinkins visited the deathbed of Yankel Rosenbaum, the Orthodox Jew stabbed by a rioter amid shouts of “Get the Jew!” But Dinkins would not order a full-on police crackdown against the violence in the area until its fourth night. While he had the police act more expeditiously during the Washington Heights disturbance, Dinkins also met with the family of the slain drug offender and had the city pay for his body to be flown to his funeral in the Dominican Republic.
Through these responses, Dinkins sought a center that could not hold. In the racially fraught New York of the early 1990s, it was impossible to simultaneously address the concerns of rival ethnic/racial coalitions that McNickle labels “conservative” (Catholics, less liberal Jews, and culturally traditional Latinos) and “liberal” (African Americans, most Latinos, and left-of-center Jews). It was Dinkins’ misfortune to be mayor during a period when these coalitions were of almost equal strength and the middle ground between them virtually nonexistent.
Yankel Rosenbaum's casket is carried in a public funeral through Crown Heights
Black New Yorkers demonstrate in front of two Korean grocery stores in Brooklyn as part of a continuing boycott
Dinkins’ own political psyche was deeply divided. On one hand he was a coalition builder, assuring white New Yorkers that a vote for him was one for racial peace and implying that this peace could be achieved at little or no cost to them. On the other he was a self-conscious symbol of racial change and of redistribution of social, political, and economic resources that would indeed exact a price from whites in the city. Dinkins’ refusal to immediately cross the Korean grocery boycott picket line, his delay in ordering a crackdown on the Crown Heights violence, and his courtesies to the family of a violent criminal in Washington Heights all sent unwelcome messages to whites. Enough of them defected to Rudolph Giuliani –- a “white” candidate if there ever was one -– to swing the 1993 election to him. Dinkins, then, may have been less a “failure” than a racial truth-teller whose message was ahead of its time.
Even this may not give Dinkins enough credit. The long shadow cast by Rudolph Giuliani on New York City mayoral politics makes his victory in 1993 appear almost foreordained. It was not. The 1993 election was extremely close. As McNickle shows, relatively small drop-offs in support among Jewish and Latino voters from Dinkins’ 1989 totals, combined with an especially heavy turnout on Staten Island (a secession referendum for the borough was on the ballot that year) combined to convert a narrow Dinkins victory in 1989 into a narrow defeat in 1993. Dinkins won 50.4% of the city’s votes for mayor in 1989, and 48% in 1993. His “failure” may have amounted to losing a closely contested reelection bid whose outcome was in doubt until its final hours.
Had Dinkins won in 1993, the work of his administration would likely have been cast in a different historical light. Dinkins brought in four consecutive balanced municipal budgets and never suffered the humiliation of losing authority over the city’s finances to the New York State Financial Control Board. He began to get a grip on violent crime, which dropped each of the last three years of his administration. Dinkins’ “Safe Streets, Safe City” initiative was not fully implemented until late in his term due to budget constraints, but it proved greatly beneficial to the Giuliani administration in its own highly publicized and much lauded anticrime program. Dinkins began the process of eliminating the infamous “squeegee men” from city intersections and exit ramps, another “quality of life” reform usually credited to Giuliani. Dinkins’ police commissioner even brought in George Kelling, the Harvard professor who helped formulate the “broken windows” approach to crime prevention that is also closely linked to the Giuliani years, to perform a study for his department.
Dinkins also began to change the cultural landscape of the city. His view of New York as a “gorgeous mosaic,” derided and parodied by his political opponents at the time, proved prescient and anticipated the diverse city of the 21st century. Dinkins may have done more to realize the vision of a broadly inclusive New York than any mayor since Fiorello La Guardia. The politics and culture of the contemporary city bear the stamp of his years in office.
But while David Dinkins may not have failed as mayor, neither did he succeed. The straitened economic times in which he governed made it impossible to be what he was at heart: a liberal who wished to expand government services and advance the fortunes of organized labor. Whipsawed between budget hawks and doves within his own administration, he was hamstrung in his efforts on both fronts. As McNickle notes, Dinkins did not govern the New York of Fiorello La Guardia, Robert Wagner, or even John Lindsay, in which a workable consensus existed in support of public spending and union rights. In the wake of the city’s mid-1970s fiscal crisis a neoliberal impulse emerged that challenged older verities. Dinkins had to deal with its implications in the 1990s and could muster at best about half the electorate in support of his more expansive goals. He was forced to govern as a reluctant budget-balancer and fiscal realist. Dinkins had spent over three decades climbing the greasy pole of New York City politics, no doubt dreaming of the generous, egalitarian city he would govern when he reached the top. But when he finally arrived, his moment was gone, a casualty of the harsh truths of municipal economics and the costs of good intentions. Even the power of the mayor would not be enough. It is indeed better to be lucky than good.
Jerald Podair is Professor of History at Lawrence University, and the author of The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis.