New York: Incitement to Excellence

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Cruel Parody. If the Democratic proconsuls dismissed him, New York voters did not. In the last two weeks of the campaign, it became obvious that they were listening to John Lindsay. They were moved and impressed. And long after midnight on election night, John Vliet Lindsay wearily mounted a platform in the grand ballroom of Manhattan's Hotel Roosevelt to thank the people of New York City for electing him mayor.

It was a stunning victory. Not since Fiorello La Guardia's last election in 1941 had a Republican captured city hall. Lindsay defeated Beame 1,166,815 to 1,030,711 votes in a balloting pattern that crisscrossed party lines, ethnic prejudices and religious blocs all over town.

The upset was a monumental personal achievement for Lindsay and a triumph for Republican Party moderates throughout the U.S.—particularly in the cities that have long been unchallenged Democratic fiefdoms. Said G.O.P. National Chairman Ray Bliss: "His victory is phenomenal."

Inevitably his critics said of Lindsay, as La Guardia's foes had said of the Little Flower, that he was a bigmouthed opportunist. Yet on the littered sidewalks and traffic-blocked streets where he campaigned, his words rang only too true. New York in 1965 seemed a cruel parody of its legend. Compared with the sparkling, sophisticated city hymned by Cole Porter and Scott Fitzgerald, the world-admired paradigm of urbanity and elegance, New York seemed a shiftless slattern, mired in problems that had been allowed to proliferate for decades.

Its air was foul, and so were its surrounding waters—and there was barely enough water to drink. Its slums rotted away undisturbed, its new apartment buildings and public housing were as shoddy as rapacity and bureaucracy could make them. The city was deep in hock and going deeper; interest on its debt alone was $1.4 million daily—more than the cost of police, fire and sanitation services combined. More and more, it was a place where only the very rich and the welfare-dependent poor could afford to live. Its crime rate was rising as inexorably as its traffic slowed down. East Side, West Side, male and female prostitutes seemed like shades of prewar Berlin. Even the fabled skyline had lost much of its old majesty. As Architect Edward Durell Stone lamented: "If you look around you and you give a damn, it makes you want to commit suicide."