A handful of dust
AMERICA MURRAY KEMP TON
New York—Mayor John Lindsay of New York seems to be the only one of our poli-
ticians whose reputation improves with the years. It is hard to say how he does it. He has done nothing to prove that the city is manage- able; he has recruited few startlingly competent men and has been able to retain even fewer. When the year began, he had to drop a key assistant who had been indicted for collusion with the Mafia.
Our garbage strike ended as perhaps the most signal triumph of his tenure, but it began as
just another among .his blunders. As our public
services get more deplorable, the unions which neglect them get more powerful: and none more so than the Uniformed Sanitationmen's Association, which is more a political party than a trade union.
The garbagemen's union was a force in electing Mayor Lindsay's two immediate pre- decessors and was in the vanguard of Governor Rockefeller's rescue party in 1966. At election time, ,ffie garbagemen can be counted on to create more litter with campaign literature than they would ever condescend to pick up on an average workday. Their presi- dent, John DeLury, is thus an object of such veneration to politicians that he would never think of himself as needing to strike. In February he made the tactical mistake df assembling the garbagemen in public meeting; they demanded a strike and, when DeLury be- sought them to consider awhile before taking the plunge, they threw eggs at him; after which he judiciously decided that, being their leader, he would• follow them.
The Mayor moved at once to punish DeLury with Governor Rockefeller's new labour law, which provides jail terms for leaders of public employee unions that go on strike. DeLury went off to prison for fifteen days; by assiduous effort, the Mayor had managed to seal away from the affairs of the union the only leader who was desperate to get the men back to work.
Then the Mayor settled back to wait; he had the advantage that normal city services are so atrocious that it would take some time for anyone to know that one of them had been withdrawn. After six days, he announced that 'at some time, some place,' all citizens of New York reach a point beyond which they refused to be pushed.' He had, he said, exhausted every remedy in his power; Governor Rocke- feller would have to send in the state militia.
The Governor's response was to insist that Lindsay let DeLury out of jail for further dis- cussions and thereafter to appoint a panel of experts to determine a fair settlement. Their determination was to give the strikers twenty- five dollars a year more than the city had offered them. The Mayor refused, saying that he would not pay even a little blackmail. The Governor moved at once to seize the city de- partment of sanitation and put the strikers back to work on his own terms. He •would, he said, call upon the state legislature to ratify his decision.
At this point the Mayor withdrew, surfacing only once that weekend to proclaim that the issue was the rule of law. The results were curious. The Mayor cannot plan—he can only
occasionally inspire—but when he sulks he. is more terrible than an army with banners. Sud- denly those conservative Republicans who had waited forty years for President Coolidge to come back to earth were surprised to have him reappear as, of all people, John V. Lindsay. Mr Nixon hailed him for his resistance. The Re- publicans in the legislature refused to give Governor Rockefeller the votes he needed to settle the garbage strike. One liberal Demo- cratic assemblyman said that, for two years, he had gone off to the State Capitol every Monday without being afflicted by his wife's opinion on a public question. This time, she had said quite coldly, 'If you vote for Rockefeller's bill, what- ever it says, don't bother to come back here.'
The Mayor had managed to unite those per- sons who cheered Senator Goldwater with those persons who cheer the Women's Strike for Peace. The Governor surrendered, and returned the ball to the Mayor's court. Last weekend the strike .was settled; the terms will be announced in two weeks. They will probably be a good deal like the Governor's terms, but no matter.
How much •the experience hurt the Governor it is impossible yet to say. His chance for the Republican presidential nomination was even smaller for the moment than it had been for a year. His willingness to compromise had, to . be sure, made him more popular than ever with official labour; but official labour, a mercenary troop already sold to__President Johnson, is no factor in a Republican convention.
The public sympathy for Lindsay, which seemed so universal as to embrace persons who fervently disagree on most issues, suggests that we are entering a bad season for realism in American politics. Americans feel like failures these days; and now, when they could barely remember their pride, they were being dictated to by garbage men. The Mayor rescued. them t a moment when all dignity seemed lost. We feel cheated and helpless; the candidate who can stumble into echoing that feeling as the Mayor did last week is the next president of the United States.
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