Toward a new intolerance - social problems facing New York, New York - Comment

IT WILL BE fifty years ago this June that I graduated from Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem, in the company of State Senator Joe Galiber, and any number of prominent New Yorkers. I find myself at this half-century mark thinking: "How much more difficult a city we have now." And wondering where so much went wrong. We were a city of the same size, about 150,000 more persons then than now. And the city was wonderfully able to respond to opportunity when it came.

We had had half a million people on relief in 1935. By 1943, this was down to 73,000 persons, of which the city reported only 93 were employable. (We have one million on welfare today, more than attend public schools in the city.) Mayor LaGuardia got FDR to get the Brooklyn Navy Yard going. In an instant we were building Iowa-class battleships and thousands of people were at work. In time, the city began that ascent to the incomparable heights that followed just after the war. We were a city that had a social structure, an infrastructure, the best subway system in the world, the finest housing stock in the world, the best urban school system in the world, and in many ways the best behaved citizens.

Over on the West Side, we made a thing about living in Hell's Kitchen and belonging to a kind of street warrior caste, but in truth the neighborhood was a peaceable kingdom. Monsignor McCaffrey maintained said peace. In 1943, there were exactly forty-four homicides by gunshot in all of the City of New York. Forty-four. Last year there were 1,499.

Mayor LaGuardia was concerned about the condition of youth. He visited us. I interviewed him for the school paper. His message was simple: "You must take your lessons seriously, but never forget how to have fun." I suppose he told that to every school newspaper reporter he ever saw, but he also told it to me. Mind, he didn't mean too much fun. On January 4, 1943, in one of his weekly radio talks, he told of a police officer, a patrolman he described as "a fellow-worker of mine," who had called in from the Yorkville section of the city and told him about young people who were hanging out in "cider stubes," drinking soft drinks. The Mayor thought that we had had enough of that. He directed that they be closed down.

There were problems. The number of abandoned children seemed to have sharply increased. A headline in the New York Times reported: "Abandoned Babies Increasing In City--74 Brought Into Foundling Hospital This Year." Seventy-four. (Visit the maternity ward of any city hospital today. See the boarder babies. Not just abandoned, but often deathly ill.)

The decline in our social institutions is really without equivalent. Most importantly, and absolutely essential is the decline of family. The small platoons without which a society this large just cannot function. In 1943, the illegitimacy rate in New York City was 3 percent. Last year, it was 45 percent. (Former School Chancellor Joseph Fernandez estimates that two school children in three come from single-parent households. As did I in my days at Franklin. It's not fatal, but it's no help.) There are parts of the city today which are overwhelmed by the social chaos that comes in the aftermath of the inability to socialize young males. It grows worse by the year.

I have been having a correspondence with Justice Edwin Torres, who is a Justice of the Supreme Court in New York State, Twelfth Judicial District. He was raised in the barrio, the neighborhood where Benjamin Franklin was first located, on 108th Street. We have reason to believe we might have crossed paths in a pool room called Los Muchachos. I was struck by his account of the court system. Here are his words: "The slaughter of the innocent marches unabated: subway riders, bodega owners, cab drivers, babies; in laundromats, at cash machines, on elevators, in hallways." He decries a civic acceptance of this, of persons in his courtroom, victims who will say something to the effect that: "I suppose I shouldn't have been out at that hour of the night."

Here is a sentence from a letter he sent me a while back:

This numbness, this near narcoleptic state can diminish the human condition to the level of combat infantrymen, who, in protracted campaigns, can eat their battlefield rations seated on the bodies of the fallen, friend and foe alike. A society that loses its sense of outrage is doomed to extinction.

That letter is from a Supreme Court Justice. "A society that loses its sense of outrage...."

Last winter in the American Scholar, I published an article entitled "Defining Deviancy Down." It seems there is always a certain amount of crime in a society. You need to know what is deviant in order to know what is not. But when you get too much, you can always start to say that that's not really so bad. Pretty soon, you are getting used to behavior that's not good for you at all.

This subject came to me the morning after the Democratic National Convention. We were driving upstate; my wife Liz was driving and I was reading. We were up around Morningside Heights and I was at about page B14 of the Times. We learned there had been another drug execution. This was not noteworthy in itself--there's an execution every night. But in this case--the male and the female and the teenager laid down, shot in the back of the head--the woman had a baby that she had shoved under a bed. And when in the course of events the stink of human flesh began to make its way into the hallway and the police arrived, they found the little child dehydrated but alive. A new twist.

I settled down to work on the American Scholar article. I remembered the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. I have a World Book Encyclopedia, a wonderful thing. I looked it up. The St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929 in Chicago has two entries in the World Book Encyclopedia. Two. Along with the Battle of Thermopylae and things like that. The country was outraged. Al Capone had sent four of his men dressed as police. They rubbed out seven of Bugs Moran's men. All adults; they knew what they were up to and in for. But it shocked the country. We changed the Constitution. We said this was not acceptable behavior.

This last St. Valentine's Day in our city we too had a St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Six persons were laid down on a floor and shot in the back of the head. But that was only six, not enough to meet the quota, as if we were in a competition. And so the following day, a seventh, a possible witness, was murdered in the Bronx County Courthouse. That is civilization slipping away. George Will recently observed (not, of course, just about New York): "We are experiencing in America today something without precedent in urban history: broad-scale social regression in the midst of rising prosperity."

OURS WAS a much poorer city fifty years ago, but a much more stable one. One that prepared you for the uses of prosperity when it came. I learned about Pearl Harbor from a man whose shoes I was shining on Central Park West, next to the Planetarium. On Sundays, you shined uptown, around the Museum of Natural History where people were. Saturdays were downtown. Five years later, I was an officer in the United States Navy. Benjamin Franklin High School did that for me. (With an assist from a year in City College.) They thought it was routine. And it was. Joe Galiber went on to become what he is today. And others. Is that all behind us?

We had the finest urban housing stock in the world. Look what has happened. We could do things in no time at all. We could build the George Washington Bridge in four years and one month. And think far enough ahead to make it structurally capable of carrying a second deck when the traffic grew, with a capacity for yet a third. Things happened quickly, easily.

One day Mayor LaGuardia was flying in from Chicago, where the mayors' headquarters were, and expecting to land at Floyd Bennett Field. It was fogged in so he landed in Newark. He took out his ticket and said: "Mine says Floyd Bennett Field; what am I doing in a place called New Jersey?" Whereupon what we now know as LaGuardia Airport was built. In two years and one month. Today we are the only major city in the world that does not have a rail link to its major airport. Just can't seem to get it done.

But we can still steady ourselves. I was hugely encouraged by an address Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly gave to the Second Annual F.B.I. National Symposium on Addressing Violent Crime through Community Involvement. He called it: "Toward A New Intolerance." An intolerance of violence, an intolerance to the acceptance of violence. An intolerance of what Justice Torres describes as a "narcoleptic state" of acceptance. I'll just quote Commissioner Kelly and this will be the end of my task:

There is an expectation of crime in our lives. We are in danger of becoming captive to that expectation, and to the new tolerance to criminal behavior, not only in regard to violent crime. A number of years ago there began to appear in the windows of automobiles parked on the streets of American cities signs which read: "No Radio." Rather than express outrage, or even annoyance at the possibility of a car break-in, people tried to communicate with the potential thief in conciliatory terms. The translation of "No Radio" is: "Please break into someone else's car, there's nothing in mine." These "No Radio" signs are flags of urban surrender. They are handwritten capitulations. Instead of "No Radio," we need new signs that say "No Surrender."

COPYRIGHT 1993 The National Affairs, Inc.
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