Swept From the Streets: Mario Procaccino and the Rise of Law-and-Order Politics in New York City

By Gabe S. Tennen

Mario Angelo Procaccino strode down Fulton Street, waving to onlookers and shaking hands. Accompanied by his running mate for city council president, Abraham Beame; his teenage daughter, Marierose; and a cabal of campaign staff, the Democratic candidate for mayor seemed at home in the working-class shopping center in Downtown Brooklyn.[1] In 1969, the appearance of Procaccino, then serving as city comptroller, at a blue-collar hub outside of Manhattan was both practical and symbolic. Attempting to assemble a coalition of voters dissatisfied with the liberal bent of incumbent Mayor John V. Lindsay, Procaccino considered outreach to white homeowners in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island his best chance to ascend to City Hall. Beginning his excursion in front of Mays Department Store, a campaign spokesman with a bullhorn declared to passers-by that “John Lindsay probably doesn’t even know where Mays Department Store is!”[2] As he had done throughout his Democratic primary campaign, the pencil-mustached, diminutive Procaccino would allude to that gulf between a Manhattan-reared, Protestant, Yale-educated mayor and a working-class Catholic and Jewish outer-borough constituency during the general election. The issue that most galvanized that effort was one gaining traction across the country: “law-and-order.”

As the phrase “law-and-order” reemerges in current political discourse, analysts have refocused their gaze on the roots and consequences of that rhetoric. Many point to Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign as the moment when tough-on-crime policies gained widespread traction, heralding an era of expanded national involvement in law enforcement and a punitive turn within the justice system. While the Nixon administration remains a popular example of how such politics were weaponized at the federal level, retributive stances on criminal justice were not only within the purview of conservative federal actors. Democratic officials in cities across the country, too, were often at the forefront of such language and legislation.[3] New York City was not immune to that trend in the late-1960s, with Procaccino becoming that party’s local standard-bearer in 1969.

Procaccino’s selection as the Democratic nominee that year was hardly a foregone conclusion. New York in the late-1960s experienced widespread transformation in its demographics and economy, while movements for Civil Rights and against U.S. involvement in Vietnam roiled the city’s social fabric. Between March and June of 1969, career politicians and liberal favorites, including Bronx Borough President Herman Badillo; former mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr.; Bronx Congressman James Scheuer; and the provocative writer and social critic, Norman Mailer, each vied for the Democratic nomination for mayor by offering their own prescriptions for Gotham’s ills. Yet it was Procaccino’s calls for expanded policing and retributive policies that struck a chord for a plurality of Democratic voters, tying law-and-order politics to wider themes of racial change, patriotism, and an opposition to the welfare state. Examining his rhetoric and positions on the campaign trail reveals that New York City’s Democratic Party was itself active in the nation’s punitive turn at the close of the 1960s. As the United States today wrestles with the deleterious effects of such politics, it is important to remember that local urban politics, evidenced by Procaccino’s 1969 campaign, were key to the rhetorical and material construction of law-and-order politics.

Procaccino, sporting his trademark mustache, in 1965.

Procaccino announced his entrance into the 1969 Democratic primary election for mayor in an emotional press conference on February 18th of that year, as “tears of pure joy” rolled down the cheeks of the Lilliputian politico.[4] Overly emotive or not, Procaccino seemed to straddle two worlds. On the one hand, because the Italian-born and Bronx-raised contender had spent a portion of his life in smoke-filled party clubhouses, many voters considered him the embodiment of an earlier era of machine politics. His Southern European immigrant roots, once ubiquitous throughout the five boroughs, constituted an ethnic identity that was itself becoming less prevalent as more and more New Yorkers were people of color. In a changing city, the candidate, to some, personified a disappearing familiarity.

While Procaccino might have called to mind the city of the 1940s, his politics represented something new. His vituperative admonishments of “limousine liberals” and no-tolerance approach to deviance signaled the beginnings of a realignment in traditional urban voting blocs.[5] By harnessing the resentment of many white New Yorkers towards changes across the city and nation, Procaccino helped to usher in a new era of public policy that would limit government’s role in treating society’s ills while expanding the carceral system.

A series run in the New York Daily News between June 9th and 13th of that year uncovered that he had chosen a potentially winning strategy. The News articulated that many New Yorkers, particularly those who traced their roots to Eastern and Southern Europe, were reassessing their political priorities. Amidst an influx of people of color into the city’s body politic, rising crime rates, widespread social protest, and a deindustrializing economy, “voters [were] rebelling against the impact of mounting civic frustrations,” and doing away with “the old knee-jerk loyalty to the commands of party leaders and organizations.”[6] The Daily News relayed that the city’s white electorate had moved away from old, liberal allegiances cemented during the New Deal. Those voters, instead, were drawn to Procaccino’s “strong stand on law and order.”[7] The author’s findings illuminated the metamorphosis taking place among New York City’s white Democratic rank-and-file.

As Procaccino sought the votes of outer-borough whites, he did so at the expense of communities of color across the five boroughs. While never employing explicitly racialized language, the candidate spoke often of “good guys and bad guys,” which was understood as commentary on the city’s changing complexion. Civil Rights organizer and activist Floyd McKissick, writing in the New York Amsterdam News, described the kind of politics trafficked in by Procaccino as a means to “appeal to the fears and racist tendencies of whites.” The candidate’s language was akin to the “us vs. them” language employed by politicians to attack black and brown people without using overtly racist terms. “‘They’ don’t have to tell ‘us’ who ‘they’ mean by ‘them,’” McKissick wrote. “More important, they don’t have to tell whites either.”[8] Procaccino’s “good guys” were white. The recipients of that message knew whom he considered the “bad guys.”

To court the white voters receptive to that racialized dichotomy, Procaccino coupled retributive policies with symbolic machismo. In one instance, he told supporters that “I wouldn't run for the handbook” or “call my lawyer” if a burglar entered his home — “I'd just blow his brains out."[9] On the campaign trail, he railed against “the do-gooders and bleeding hearts” whose “coddling [of] criminals and pampering [of] punks” helped to create lawlessness and disorder on the city’s “avenues of terror.” The crusading comptroller promised that under his administration, “lawlessness will be swept from the streets,” and New York would once again be “a safe city, a clean city and a great city.” To achieve that end, he suggested “put[ting] the police back on the beat in every neighborhood,” and making investments in mobile command units, a push-button emergency response alarm system, and walkie-talkies for officers.[10] That sort of militarization of the NYPD led primary rival Norman Mailer to label those proposals as having the potential to create “a Vietnam in New York.”[11] Demanding a war-like response to disorder and unrest, though, proved both resonant and prescient.

Procaccino’s policies went beyond retooling the NYPD’s manpower and equipment. The candidate lambasted “young hoodlums,” contending that minors should be treated “as criminals, instead of youthful offenders.”[12] He proposed both imposing fines on parents who “knowingly allow their children to commit vandalism,” and meting out more severe punishment for those arrested repeatedly. Procaccino also praised laws that “allow us to hold a heroin addict, even if against his will, in order to protect society from his criminal behavior.” [13] Even more tellingly, he recommended giving “serious consideration” to the reinstitution of the death penalty, which had not been used in New York State since 1963.[14] The Democratic candidate sought more than to deliver increased power to the city’s police. He also aimed to exact retribution.

Drawing a contrast between those he would stand for in City Hall and those represented by wealthy liberals of Mayor Lindsay’s ilk, Procaccino argued that he represented the “average man.” That average man “works hard all day, but he has to moonlight anyway to pay his bills.” Tying the notion of law and order to patriotism, he argued that the average man “wants his neighborhood to be peaceful and clean,” and “never burned his draft card or a flag.” Characterized as antithetical to those receiving government aid, the average man “tries to play the game by the rules, and for that he's getting pushed into a corner."[15] Procaccino’s message was clear. Lindsay, left-wing politicians, protestors, and communities of color were anything but “average.” Procaccino, and those that supported his charged views on the city’s changing social fabric, were.

Time magazine portrays a larger-than-life Procaccino standing triumphantly over a helpless Mayor Lindsay on its October 3, 1969 cover.

Other Democrats outside the ranks of those Procaccino considered “average” took issue with Procaccino’s framing of crime. Former mayor Robert Wagner accused the comptroller of trying “to ride a backlash into city hall” by using “code words” on the campaign trail. Congressman James Scheuer articulated that “crime is a legitimate issue in this campaign,” but “the kind of tactics that we are seeing makes a bad situation even worse.”[16] Herman Badillo was more blunt, telling the Times that Procaccino was engaged in a “whispering campaign with no platform but, ‘keep the minorities down.’”[17] Congressman William F. Ryan of Manhattan cautioned voters against Procaccino’s selection, calling his nomination “unacceptable,” as “his whole campaign appealed to fear and prejudice.”[18] Procaccino had deviated from his party’s leadership, perhaps, but its voters were receptive to his message.

“A Safe & Clean City”: A Procaccino campaign poster succinctly summarizes the candidate’s platform, 1969.

Some critics considered the wider implications of Procaccino’s ascendance to the top of the Democratic ticket. Writer Nicholas Pileggi argued that the candidate’s supporters cared less about “solv[ing] the problems of New York [than] reliev[ing] their own bitterness, frustration, and anger.”[19] Procaccino represented the “shirt-sleeve, stoop-sitting” Democratic voters of New York, who had “stepped back from the New Frontier and the Great Society” and “had enough of civil rights, of long-haired sons and mini-skirted daughters they don’t understand, of being afraid in the streets, [and] of high taxes.”[20] Street-smart journalist and nominee for city council president Jimmy Breslin was more blunt in his characterization of Procaccino’s appeal: “Mario did not campaign. He pandered.”[21] The candidate’s true appeal, then, was his bellicose enthusiasm for stymying the social transformations of the late-1960s.

Procaccino was ultimately unsuccessful in wresting City Hall from Mayor Lindsay, earning just under 34% of total votes in the general election. The longtime Democratic regular blamed his loss on a split-vote caused by John J. Marchi, the Republican nominee. Marchi’s own tough-on-crime campaign had engendered a three-way race by ousting Lindsay from the Republican ranks, forcing the eventually victorious incumbent to run on the Liberal Party ticket.[22] The coalition cobbled together by the 1969 Procaccino campaign, though, would continue to grow, its voices becoming louder and its influence more far-reaching, as law-and-order became a guiding principle across the political spectrum.[23] Urban politics, revealed by Procaccino’s hardline 1969 campaign for mayor of New York City, were central to the construction of that consensus, the calamitous repercussions of which the nation still grapples with today.

Gabe S. Tennen is a PhD student in History at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the intersections of social, cultural, and political history in 20th century New York City. 

[1] Thomas Poster, “Mario, Abe Wow Folks in B’klyn,” New York Daily News, September 18, 1969, 32; Lillian Rose, “Procaccino Campaigning,” The New Yorker, September 27, 1969, 32-34.

[2] Rose, “Procaccino Campaigning.”

[3] For an examination of the national Democratic party and its role in the construction of the War on Crime, see Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2016); for Chicago, see Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019); for early-to-mid 20th century New York City, see Carl Suddler, Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York (New York: New York University Press, 2019).

[4] Richard Reeves, “Procaccino Enters Contest for Mayor,” New York Times, February 19, 1969, 1.

[5] Lawrence Van Gelder, “Mario A. Procaccino, Who Lost to Lindsay in 1969, Dies,” New York Times, December 21, 1995, B19.

[6] Gene Spagnoli, “Old Patterns Scrambled in Primary,” New York Daily News, June 13, 1969, 2; 52.

[7] Spagnoli, “Old Patterns Scrambled in Primary.”

[8] Floyd McKissick, “’Law and Order’ Candidates,” New York Amsterdam News, July 19, 1969, 17.

[9] Van Gelder, “Mario A. Procaccino, Who Lost to Lindsay in 1969, Dies.”

[10] Paul Meskill, “Wagner & Mario Urge More Police,” New York Daily News, May 26, 1969, 20; Sidney E. Zion, “Procaccino Pledges a Safe and Sane City,” New York Times, May 13, 1969, 37.

[11] “Mayoral Candidates Debate,” in Running Against the Machine: The Mailer-Breslin Campaign, ed. Peter Manso (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969), 90.

[12] Zion, “Procaccino Pledges a Safe and Sane City.”

[13] “Mayoral Candidates Reply to 7 Questions from The Times on Governing the City,” New York Times, June 14, 1969, 14.

[14] Zion, “Procaccino Pledges a Safe and Sane City.”

[15] Van Gelder, “Mario A. Procaccino, Who Lost to Lindsay in 1969, Dies.”

[16] “Democrats Trade Bigotry Charges in Mayoral Race,” New York Times, June 15, 1969, 1.

[17] “The Primary: Procaccino Urges Democratic Candidates to Speak on the Issues,” New York Times, June 11, 1969, 50.

[18] Lester Abelman, “Serve Mixed Dish of Procaccino,” New York Daily News, June 30, 1969, 26.

[19] Nicholas Pileggi, “The First 100 Days of Mayor Procaccino,” New York Magazine, October 13, 1969, 33.

[20] Nicholas Pileggi, “The More the Mario,” New York Magazine, New York Magazine, April 14, 1969, 34.

[21] Jimmy Breslin, “Is Lindsay Too Tall to Be Mayor?,” New York Magazine, July 28, 1969, https://nymag.com/news/politics/46613/, accessed June 6, 2020.

[22] Vincent J. Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 437.

[23] In 1969, Vito Battista, a conservative Republican in the heavily Democratic 38th Assembly District in Brooklyn, won a seat in the City Assembly after running a campaign on behalf of the “oppressed taxpayer.” In Queens, a tough-on-crime city councilman in the Procaccino mold, Matthew Troy, became that party’s Democratic Borough Leader in 1971. At the same time, Governor Nelson Rockefeller turned rightward, implementing the Rockefeller Drug Laws on the state-level in 1973, which mandated harsh sentencing for those convicted of drug-related crimes. Two decades later, law-and-order politics would be vindicated citywide with the ascendance of Rudolph W. Giuliani to the mayoralty. Giuliani’s 1993 quality-of-life campaign touched on many of the same racialized anxieties that Procaccino had sought to exploit in 1969.