AMERICA
Superhero Falls to Earth
From MUR RAY KEMPTON
NEW YORK PHE moles have beaten the Superhero. We I have our subways back; and the newspapers have generally cast over our new Mayor Lindsay that aura of splendid, lonely victory they colour on their comic strip heroes; but, in the real world, Mr. Lindsay has given the Transit Workers' Union more than its chiefs expected and enough to convert a sticky financial problem into a desperate one.
He remains immensely popular, more so than when he was inaugurated, a fortunate condition indicative of the immense command which rhetoric can hold over reality in American life. He is the focus of whatever hope there is that the Republican party can be renewed and become a serious force again in politics. His experience indicates that a Republican can not only be elected mayor of a great American city but would be re-elected far more impressively after only two weeks in office. But there remains, more than ever, the question of whether the American city, if it can be managed at all, can be governed by the innocence and abstraction which young Republicans, just from lack of prior exposure to reality, bring to the administrative function.
The Mayor, after all, was defeated the day after he sent the leaders of the subway strike to jail, and he awoke to find the strike continuing as effective as ever. He had the option of pressing more stringent measures—as urged upon him by the editorial writers—or of capitulating, as sug- gested to him by such eminently practical Demo- crats as Secretary of Labour Wirtz and Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
For the next six days, the Mayor, in everything that was essential, sat frozen between the fight and the surrender. That posture could not dam- age him as politician, because no politician can really be damaged in his first two weeks in office. We have in our history a striking parallel to the boon his enemies had handed John Lindsay in this crisis. The Democrats did for him what the Republicans had done for Franklin D. Roose- velt when they allowed him to be inaugurated with all the banks closed down in panic : they had taken a dismal situation and allowed it to improve into one of those apparently hopeless ones where the new incumbent must look like a saviour no matter what he does.
Still, one noticed a long while afterwards that, in his special crisis, President Roosevelt recog- nised that the bankers owned the banks and must be dealt with to get them to open again. He dealt with elaborate courtesy; his attacks on economic royalists came well after their rule had been restored. But poor Mayor Lindsay, as his crisis went on, could only, in its tenth day, cry out again that he would not capitulate to an unlaw- ful strike 'which defies the dignity and usurps the freedom of every New Yorker.'
This promise was, of course, wildly popular with the Mayor's fellow-victims; commanders who continue, immobilised, to send ultimatums after the enemy has crossed their borders are usually quite popular up to the day the city falls. But it was peculiarly the speech of a candidate, not of a governor.
Mr. Lindsay's main prior experience was as a member of the House of Representatives of the United States, a body with two sorts of members, the grubs who busy themselves with committees on appropriations and moths of wider wing- spread, who are revered for their facility at general comment. Congressmen like Lindsay are perpetual candidates; they are the sort who rise in Congress to say, most of the time, that Com- munism must be resisted at all costs or, in his bright exceptional case, that peace must be estab- lished if the price of honour is not too high but who in neither posture have the special problem of real life, which is find out how.
Most of the time, the business of the American politician is to act as though mere nuisances were final disasters; he does not often need to understand that militant utterance is not always the best style for people who have to fight the bull; and Mayor Lindsay was giving way to a very old habit when he chose to deliver the sort of comment you make sitting in the boxes when he happened to be standing, sword- less, in the bullring.
And, after that, he could do nothing but urge that the three mediators who had sat for nearly a month attempting to ameliorate the dispute present him with their conception of what would be a fair and equitable settlement. In his innocence, he seems to have expected that their terms would be pleasant for him and offensive
for the union to read. He had not understood, of course, that the mediation of labour disputes in the United States has developed a law, not of equity, but of power. Before a strike begins, it is the business of our mediators to convince the union to see the employer's side; once the strike has `begun and is obviously successful, every sensible mediator starts trying to convince the employer of the union's case. A mediator would think it a betrayal of reason to function other- wise. Mr. Lindsay's panel quite naturally told him what every governor of man learns after a while: the devil must be given his due.
The due must have been dreadful. The union accepted the mediators' recomendation with an alacrity that quite abandoned all ceremony, while the Mayor sat all night in desperate struggle before he finally agreed to pay the price.
The next day, he put the best face possible on it, and was generally as appreciated as ever, President Johnson came on in the afternoon to say that the Republicans in New York had shamefully capitulated to the special interests, and that he did not know how the line could be held against the inflation attendant upon the excesses of the newly-rich subway workers. The accepted view was that the President ought to be ashamed of himself for saying such things about a splendid young man who had fought the union bosses to their knees. We still believed in the Superhero. But it was sad to think that, just two weeks on, he would have to struggle to begin again to believe in himself.
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