The Nation: Should New York City Be the 51st State?

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The academics find much more merit in Lindsay's latest —and far more realistic—proposal to create "national cities" that would be free of most ties to their states and would deal directly with Washington on those issues that most affect them, such as welfare, health and trade. Another scholar at the Santa Barbara Center, Political Scientist Harvey Wheeler, claims that Americans have been conditioned to look at government structure only in geographical terms and that this is "a clearly obsolete system." Below the federal level government should be based "on principles of association and common interest." The large cities and their surrounding population concentrations have much more in common with each other than with the intervening rural areas, he argues.

Creating national cities has some distinct political advantages over the city-state concept. It could conceivably be accomplished by getting Congress to issue special charters to the selected cities, much as it has created other units to handle specific problems, including TVA and Amtrak (to run beleaguered railroads). This might bypass the need for reluctant state legislatures to approve the independence of the cities. Moreover, the cities could exert political pressure at the federal level. Even the advocates of New York as the 51st state concede that the new state would have little clout in Congress. Admits New York City Budget Director Edward Hamilton: "Taking the problem-ridden, overburdened metropolitan area and making it a separate entity with interests substantially different from those of its fellow states, we'd find ourselves very naked and alone in congressional debates."

The new consideration of national cities and city-states is a refreshing move to examine the rationale of the nation's long-accepted governmental divisions. One of the most important national problems throughout the next 20 years, predicts Bell, will be to decide the most effective social unit to handle each social problem. "What is best left to the neighborhoods?" he asks. "What to townships? What to municipalities? What to metropolitan areas? What to regions and what to the Federal Government?" The questions are simple, the answers elusive—but an imaginative quest for them is essential to the future of the nation.