Lindsay's Compassion Did Not Help
January 17, 2001

By Tamar Jacoby; Tamar Jacoby, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author of "Someone Else's House: America's Unfinished Struggle for Integration;"

EVEN New Yorkers who don't know anything else about the late John Lindsay know about the walks—the famous walks in Harlem and other poor parts of the city.

We've all seen the photographs: tall, tousle-haired, movie-star handsome Lindsay, usually in shirt-sleeves, strolling somewhere in black Brooklyn or on 125th Street, surrounded by a pack of curious neighborhood kids.

Like much of what Lindsay did, the walks were brilliant political theater. But they were also more than that. They were the perfect emblem of his mayoralty—both for better and for worse. They revealed the best side of the young, patrician mayor: hopeful, idealistic, inspiring; for many previously apathetic whites, a stirring wake-up call about the problems of the inner city.

But the walks were also, ultimately, hollowly symbolic—a showy substitute for more effective policy—and, in some cases (when the neighborhood youth were followers of thuggish grassroots demagogues), downright harmful for the city, black and white.

Lindsay's death last month, nearly 30 years after he left City Hall, offers a chance to look clear-sightedly at his legacy, and, unlike in the case of many, more forgettable elected officials, that legacy is both very bright and very bitter-far more bitter than some rose-tinted post-mortems have recognized.

The bright side isn't hard to see. Like John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, the appealing, engaged Lindsay galvanized the country to begin to grapple with urban poverty even as he signaled to blacks and other have-nots that someone in power cared about their problems. As a congressman, he was an important force behind the civil rights legislation of the late '50s and early '60s. The winds of hope generated by the black protest movement helped to blow him into office in City Hall, and once there, he spared no effort in trumpeting an infectious concern for the "least among us."

Anyone alive in New York at the time remembers how exciting and inspiring his leadership was, and it seems all the more important now in an era when many well-intentioned people believe that Democrats have a monopoly on virtue—that when it comes to race and poverty, Democrats are always right, while Republicans can only be mean-spirited and hypocritical. John Lindsay would never have called himself a conservative, but long before George W. Bush made an issue of the less privileged, Lindsay was a proudly compassionate Republican. He proved that there could be such a thing. His noble, deeply felt concern set an example for others, and the reverent way in which he is being remembered today—by Democrats and Republicans alike—proves just how successful he was in sparking a sense of empathy. Today's lackluster candidates for mayor of New York would be lucky to have an ounce of his persuasive power.

The problem was that Lindsay couldn't deliver on the hope he engendered. By the time he was inaugurated in 1966, the civil rights movement was already spiraling sourly into anger and alienation. Irate, color-coded rhetoric filled the air in the inner city, and the riots in Watts and then other places made amply clear what it could lead to. Not just Lindsay but most of the leaders of the day, both black and white, were at a loss for what to do about black disadvantage. But driven by the looming threat of violence, they were determined to push ahead with change—and well-intentioned as New York's mayor was, almost all the choices he made were poor ones.

He knew that the best answer to black poverty would be jobs, but he didn't have a clue how to create them. In keeping with the grand delusion of his day—the delusion that drove the Great Society—he thought that government by itself could solve the problem. Instead of creating a climate in which job-creating businesses could flourish, he taxed and borrowed—and then taxed and borrowed some more—to pay for programs that did little to help and only drove the middle class out of the city. Instead of drawing blacks into the economic mainstream—instead of helping them help themselves—his patronizing, top-down approach led to a doubling of the welfare rolls, encouraging helplessness and dependence and all the pathologies that come with it. No wonder, when the long, hot summers rolled in and riots threatened, Lindsay was reduced to publicity gimmicks: traffic-blocked "play streets" in black neighborhoods, a couple score of open fire hydrants, a touring "jazzmobile" intended to distract people from their poverty and bitterness.

Finally, with federal funds drying up and the threat of riots growing ever more alarming, Lindsay settled on a strategy of cultivating local black leaders. The hope was that they could keep the peace on a hot summer's night. If all went well, they would eventually be allowed some real power—the authority, say, to run a local school district. And over time this would give blacks a sense that they were part of the city. It wasn't a bad idea—and might even have worked if executed differently—but what it meant in practice in New York was cultivating thugs and shakedown artists: men like Sonny Carson, a neighborhood tough from Bedford-Stuyvesant who would poison race relations in New York for decades to come, even as recently as the 1990s when he led bigoted boycotts of Korean groceries in Brooklyn.

Lindsay met repeatedly with Carson and others like him, eventually giving him and a group of his allies control over the schools in rundown Ocean Hill-Brownsville. All of this enhanced the separatists' standing in the black community, but few of them ever delivered—for either their followers or the city. Despite repeated promises, Carson never once walked the streets to keep things calm and, if anything, had a knack for encouraging "protest," the more unruly, the better. The experiment in Ocean Hill-Brownsville all but destroyed the schools there, as lessons in the three R's gave way to Black Power indoctrination. Then, when the teachers' union reacted with a citywide strike, Carson and others took to threatening teachers and staff in public and organizing violent rampages in school buildings.

Nor was that the end of the damage. Carson and fellow militants thrilled black New York by proving they could "stand up" to the white man, and by the end of the decade, they had inspired a younger generation to follow in their steps. Rev. Al Sharpton, a teenager at the time, recalls how he looked up to Carson and other demagogues aggrandized by Lindsay's attention.

"What I learned from them," Sharpton once told me, "was that confrontation works." And that, as much as anything, is Lindsay's legacy in poor, black New York.

If all this weren't enough, near the end of the decade Lindsay, ever impassioned and self-righteous, went national with his crusade for racial justice, joining the LBJ-appointed panel known as the Kerner Commission and taking a lead in writing its historic report. The Kerner text was brimming with trademark Lindsay intensity, and it articulated his vision—a vision shared with other liberals of his day—with succinct clarity. "White society is deeply implicated in the ghetto," the document's famous mea culpa read. "White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it." In other words, the black man's problems are the white man's fault, and the white man—perhaps only the white man—can ultimately fix them.

Looking back, it is hard imagine a more patronizing or destructive message, one that has ensnared blacks for decades since in dependence and the flailing anger it produces. Lindsay and colleagues weren't wrong to feel ashamed of the past. They weren't mistaken to want to right old wrongs or to prod the mainstream to help in whatever ways it could, both large and small. But by encouraging blacks to see America as inherently and irredeemably racist—telling them, falsely, that the odds would always be rigged against them and encouraging them to look to others for answers to their problems—the commission ultimately did far more harm than good, a harm that continues to cripple black America today.

"History will judge him favorably," one New York commentator said last month—and judging by the outpouring of adulatory obituaries, it probably will. Wrong as that judgment is, it's testimony to the hope and idealism that Lindsay inspired in others. Still, it would be a terrible shame if we didn't also learn from his mistakes. Good intentions poorly implemented can be as destructive—sometimes more so—than ill will. And compassion, whether on the right or the left, is no substitute for effective policies.

Copyright 2001 Newsday, Inc.

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