Books: Urbane Renewal

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None of these statistics or arguments are startlingly new. Critics, moreover, have justly pointed out that there is more wrong with the mayor's methods and administration than lack of money. Nevertheless Lindsay is a pious pleader and a practical politician. He knows that one constituency can be defeated only by the threat of gathering a larger constituency. He is obviously fascinated by the idea of going to town, literally making political capital out of the basic issue of the cities.

More than once he cites the fact that 75% of the national population live in cities. And within these cities are what he describes as a "hidden nation" of wretched and increasingly pressured citizens, who are becoming more and more visible. Lindsay's views of dealing with this "hidden nation"—the constituency he seems to stand ready to champion, as opposed to Richard Nixon's Silent Majority of Middle America—are quite different from those of the present Republican hierarchy. Unlike an Agnew or a Mitchell, for example, he does not believe in repressive police policies and summary judicial measures: "Each new loss of liberty, as it fails to bring instant peace, will bring forth a call for the abrogation of another right, until the most brilliant document ever conceived for the protection of individuals becomes a shell—and crime and violence continue."

Lindsay offers an eloquent warning against the dangers of overreaction: "Surely some who demonstrate are thoroughly deplorable, seeking confrontation and hoping for a brutal response to win sympathy or gain an issue. That is why those who uphold the law must be wiser and calmer than those who seek to repudiate it. It was, after all, a mob that taunted, jeered, and physically provoked an armed force on our soil into what we now call the Boston Massacre —the British overreaction we now regard as an assault on ideas and freedom as much as on people."

Lindsay's civil-libertarian, anti-Viet Nam stance spreads over a base of cities almost like the old New Deal coalition. Whether it represents a danger to the Republican establishment or offers any permanent attraction to anti-establishment Democrats is hard to say. In any event, The City makes clear that Lindsay, perhaps the only powerful political figure on the national horizon who seems attractive to youth, is trying to keep his political options open while sounding a call for committed followers at the same time.