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Political Incorporation and the Extrusion of the Left: Party Politics and Social Forces in New York City

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Martin Shefter
Martin Shefter
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Extract

The movement of new social forces into the political system is one of the central themes in the study of American political development on both the national and local levels. For example, Samuel P. Huntington has characterized the realignment of 1800 as marking “the ascendancy of the agrarian Republicans over the mercantile Federalists, 1860 the ascendancy of the industrializing North over the plantation South, and 1932 the ascendancy of the urban working class over the previously dominant business groups.” And the process of ethnic succession—the coming to power of Irish and German immigrants, followed by the Italians and Jews, and then by blacks and Hispanics—is a major focus of most analyses of the development of American urban politics.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in American Political Development , Volume 1 , Spring 1986 , pp. 50 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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References

I would like to thank the Jonathan Meigs Fund and Project Ezra of Cornell University, which provided financial support for this project. Timothy Byrnes, Michael Peck, Frank Rusciano, Helene Silverberg, and Lynne Wozniak were able research assistants. Karen Orren's and Stephen Skowronek's extensive comments on a draft of this article were in-valuable.

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6. Each of the five counties comprising Greater New York has a separate Democratic party organization. For most of the period 1900–32, the leader of the Manhattan Democratic organization (Tammany Hall) was recognized as primus inter pares among Democratic machine politicians in the city. See, for example, New York Times, October 7, 1932, p. 4.

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13. Table 1 compares the mayoral elections of 1925 and 1933 because both were held independently of presidential elections, and in 1925 the Republican mayoral candidate was a conservative, WASP businessman. Logit analysis was used to derive the estimates of ethnic voting behavior reported in this table. The following equation was estimated:

In (p/(l−p)) = Bo + B1X1 + B2X2 + B3X3 + B4X4 + B5X5 + B6X6 + U,

where In is the natural logarithm, p is the proportion of each district's vote cast for the Republican mayoral candidate, X1 is the proportion of the district's population that was native-born of foreign parentage, X2 is the proportion born in Italy, X3 is foreign-born Jewish, X4 is foreign-born Irish, X5 is foreign-born German, X6 is all other foreign-born, and U is an error term. With the equation specified in this way, the intercept provides an estimate of the voting behavior of a hypothetical district with no foreign-stock voters—that is, a district inhabited entirely by the native-born of native parentage. The equation was estimated by generalized least-squares (GLS). For a lucid exposition of the statistical methods employed in this article, see Kousser, J. Morgan, “Making Separate Equal: Integration of Black and White School Funds in Kentucky,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10 (Winter 1980): 399–428CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In compiling ethnicity data, I equated the foreign-born Jewish population with persons born in Russia, Poland, Austria, and Rumania. On the preponderance of Yiddish-speakers among New Yorkers born in these countries, see Laidlaw, Walter, ed., Statistical Sources for Demographic Studies of New York, 1920 (New York: New York City 1920 Census Committee, Inc., 1922), xxiv—xxvGoogle Scholar.

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19. It is true that during the period 1934—42 the state government and City Hall nominally had been under the control of different parties: Governor Herbert Lehman was a Democrat and Mayor La Guardia was a Republican. La Guardia, however, had at most an arms-length relationship with the Republican party, and hence the GOP was not able to take advantage of his presence in City Hall to enter into a bargaining relationship with the Democrats.

20. To be sure, external developments also contributed to the ALP's demise. The electorate's growing hostility to the Soviet Union during the late 1940s and early 1950s could not but take its toll on a party that regularly defended Soviet foreign policy. However, changes in voter sentiment were not sufficient to destroy the ALP in all districts in the city, and therefore Democratic and Republican leaders implemented the extraordinary measures discussed in this section to ensure its destruction.

21. Though committed and hardworking, the ALP's leaders and cadres were doctrinaire, and this made it difficult for them to respond effectively to the efforts of the Democrats and Republicans to destroy their party. For example, when confronted with the charge of being subservient to Moscow, the ALP accused its opponents of red-baiting, while staunchly continuing to defend Soviet foreign policy. (A more institution-serving response would probably have been to ignore foreign policy and focus the party's attention on domestic issues.) The ALP's behavior reflected the increasingly influential role that members of the Communist party came to play in the ALP during the 1940s, as well as the principled stance of the party's noncommunist members, who evidently attached a higher priority to proclaiming their programmatic commitments than to the party's survival. For a general analysis of the maintenance problems of ideological parties, see Wilson, james Q., Political Organizations (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 101–10Google Scholar.

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37. Van Devander, Charles, The Big Bosses (n.p.: Howell, Soskin, 1944)Google Scholar, chap. 1.

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39. The smaller figure was given in public testimony by Costello himself; the larger figure is given by Warren Moscow, citing as his source Bert Stand, who at the time was secretary of Tammany Hall. See New York Times, October 26, 1943, p. 1; Moscow, Last of the Big Time Bosses, 56.

40. Moscow, Last of the Big Time Bosses, 58.

41. New York Times, October 30, 1950, p. 1.

42. New York Times, November 26, 1950, sect. IV, p. 2.

43. New York Times, May 6, 1951, sect. IV, p. 2; New York State Crime Commission, Report to the Governor, the Attorney General, and the Legislature of the State of New York, 1953, p. 5.

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54. Wilson, Cf. James Q., Negro Politics: The Search for Leadership (New York: The Free Press, 1960)Google Scholar.

55. See, e.g., Ginsberg, Benjamin, The Consequences of Consent (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1982)Google Scholar; Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, chap. 7; Przeworski, Adam, “Institutionalization of Voting Patterns, or Is Mobilization the Source of Decay?” American Political Science Review 69 (03 1975): 49–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shefter, Martin, “Regional Receptivity to Reform: The Legacy of the Progressive Era,” Political Science Quarterly 98 (Fall 1983): 459–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.