Red New York

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Nation, July 24/31, 2000

A City That Worked

by ROBERT W. SNYDER

The New York of 1945 was the victorious city of the New Deal and World War
II, one that can barely be glimpsed today beneath postmodern towers and
billboards for dot-com enterprises. New York was a metropolis with a strong
manufacturing base that gave it economic muscle and a seaport that gave it
a gritty yet cosmopolitan air. Its people were largely immigrants and the
children of immigrants. Their sensibility, "savvy, opinionated,
democratic," in the words of historian Joshua B. Freeman, "helped set the
tone of the nation in the postwar years" through labor leaders such as
Michael Quill of the Transport Workers' Union and David Dubinsky of the
International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

In a lucid, detailed and imaginative analysis, "Working-Class New York:
Life and Labor Since World War II", Freeman shows how the city's working
class, in alliance with leftists, built an urban social democracy that
enriched many lives before it fell to the forces of global economics and
domestic politics. Anyone who wants to understand the changing fortunes of
working people and the left in the nation's largest city should read this
book. In Freeman's view the mortal blow to this city on a hill was not
McCarthyism but the fiscal crisis of the seventies, which undermined New
York's miniature welfare state.

The fiscal crisis and the new politics that followed ravaged the public
institutions that working people depended on, enshrining a lean and mean
city government instead of one that helped cushion the inequalities of the
market. "Public institutions once attractive to all sorts of New Yorkers,"
Freeman writes, "became subnormal institutions of last resort." As a
result, all New Yorkers--but, most important, working people--live in a
metropolis defined by stark inequalities.

The New York of 1945, Freeman argues, was fortified by a red subculture.
The Communist Party, legitimated by the Popular Front and wartime
antifascism, and represented everywhere from unions to the city council,
held substantial power. In the late forties and fifties, this alignment
shuddered under the blows of the cold war and McCarthyism. Classroom by
classroom, block by block, union by union, Communists were driven to the
margins of public life in New York City.

Full review at: http://www.thenation.com/


Louis Proyect

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