After faltering for the past years into the oblivion that aged revolutionists are heir to, the New York City Reform Democrats have returned to the front pages and to the chaos which is their natural state. For reasons best known to herself, Bella Abzug, gerrymandered out of her Congressional seat, chose to challenge the first Reform Democrat of them all, William F. Ryan, in a contest whose resonance carries far beyond the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In the Bronx, with only a shade less clatter, it would appear that Mr. Clean is fighting Mr. Wonderful: the two stalwarts of Reform in that borough stronghold of machine politics, Jonathan Bingham and James Scheuer, have gone to war against each other. On a grander scale, the veterans of the McCarthy-Kennedy battle era of 1968 are polishing the stones of old grievance for whatever new may come in Miami in the name of Humphrey or McGovern: but the names are interchangeable. The Reformers are what they have always been at heart.
Indeed, the Democratic Reformers have been with us for so long that most of us have forgotten what came before them. It is, of course, something less than precise to apply the name “Reformers” to people who have been around for thirty years. The Reform label now attaches to six Congressmen and a near majority of district leaders in Manhattan, and cuts a swath among city politicians which can only be rooted in ambition’s generosity of imagination. It is hard to remember the Reformers as they once were, those ideologues who filled the clubhouses of the West Side and the East Side with the hullabaloo of their chastity; they could not know, of course, in their triumphant days as the “outs” that one day in the not-far-off future, their political passion would summon giggles (not least from those once their own) and they themselves would be murmured over as victims of a malaise, of “chronic insurgency.” Still, there were those days; hardly a man is now alive who can bear to remember them. Nor will he, if he was part of the early Reform movement, recognize the current crew who go under the name. As likely as not, he has long ago left off attending the Reform clubs, for the less emotional life of the family, the less competitive atmosphere of business, the more productive life of movie-going. More than likely, he listens to news of the Reformers with a damp shudder. It was not always thus.
_____________
Perhaps some history: before the advent of the Reformers in the late 40’s, the traditional local political clubs were composed mostly of Irish immigrants who had become interested in local politics as an aid in getting jobs as policemen and firemen. These regulars exhibited a talent for divining that in politics one and one equals two, and a sense of organization which, when coupled with charm and piety, enabled them to produce a heavy vote from both the living and the dead on successive election days. In each neighborhood bailiwick, a process of natural selection produced that individual male capable of carrying something to its inevitable conclusion. (The Reformers would be constrained, both by the nature of their vows and their psychology, from acquiring this capacity.) That individual dealt with those on top and those on the bottom, and he distributed among his relatives and friends the largesse in jobs and contracts created by an increasingly affluent city government. If he did his job well, his friends and relatives were happy. If he did his job poorly, a quiet revolt was enough to depose him. When he died, the relatives and friends selected one of their number to carry on his good works.
The concerns of the regulars were job, family, and church. They took little note of national issues, of civil or international war, trade or monetary policies. They located their activities in the clubhouse, a choice which followed naturally from their need to congregate in an atmosphere of friendliness, and from their need to leave their women at home. (Almost to this day, many regular clubs permitted only Ladies’ Auxiliaries, and in some, no ladies were welcome.) The clubs identified themselves simply: unfettered by latter-day dogma, they selected names like the Eugene Macmanus Association because there was no point in advertising anyone but their current leader.
On such entrenched familial concerns would the Reform Democrats cut their teeth; against such an experience of politics would they conceive the new. Evolving from the Fair Deal and the Young Democrats of 1947-48 vintage, a certain few of the Young Turks of the Democratic party formed a nucleus of Reformers dedicated to vanquishing all the works of the old clubhouse. They would banish patronage, and the political corruptions that followed therefrom. They would take the party away from the machine, and they would open up the political process. Inspirited with the will of an informed citizenry, they would put an end to favors, to judge-buying; to the propensity of the old-line leaders for ignoring national issues and even Presidential candidates in favor of securing the votes for the local politician or his hand-picked candidate for the civil court.
This cavalier unconcern for the national candidate was a slight thing, compared to the other offenses the old line perpetrated. In one historic instance, nevertheless, it was galling enough to the Reformers to begin the demise of a heretofore powerfully entrenched regular district leader. Perhaps he could not know who and what Adlai Stevenson was to the segment of the population which had taken him to their hearts—that prose-hungry, yearning, and outnumbered band who had identified a voice of sensibility in national politics: but Dennis J. Mahon, regular Democratic leader of the Upper West Side, made no secret of his indifference. Before the astonished ears of Stevenson constituents (a population at that time unknown to the party clubhouse) Mahon allowed that his interest lay primarily in assuring the election of the local district leaders and the judges. Murray Kempton said, in 1952, after Stevenson’s defeat, that after losing this one he could not bring himself to shake anyone’s hand. The Stevensonites were more single-minded in their wrath. After the election, they got together and set themselves the task of removing Mahon and his regulars from the district leadership. They were relatively young, they were few, they were educated, they were members of the middle class, and they had been brought to their insurgency almost involuntarily. They were also new to the political game. Nonetheless, the candidate they ran defeated Mahon (the issues had, of course, broadened a bit by this time from the initial slight to Stevenson, but only in the hearts of some of them), and the club they founded was the celebrated FDR-Woodrow Wilson.
_____________
The FDR-Woodrow Wilson Club, the Lexington Club, the West Side Club, the Village Independent Democrats, the Ansonia Club: they were names which would invariably bring a chill to the spirits of the old-line Democratic leaders and a groan from the political press corps assigned to keep track of their adventures. From the very first, the Reformers were good copy. From their initial victories, which were aided by the militant leadership of Herbert Lehman and Eleanor Roosevelt, the Reform fight for districts grew by leaps and bounds. Aided, too, by an astonishing partiality for political insurrection which appeared to locate itself on the Upper West Side of New York and parts of the East Side, the Reformers soon began to take local leaderships. They were good campaigners in many ways, intrepid vote-pullers and tireless signature-gatherers. In what some consider a high-water mark in their achievement, the 1966 Surrogate race (the first instance, it will be remembered, in which Robert Kennedy took a hand in the internal politics of New York), the Reformers managed to gather 12,000 signatures in four days. They had had their earlier great victory in 1961, when they rode in on a citywide anti-machine wave with Robert Wagner. It was in 1961 that the Village Independent Democrats beat Carmine De Sapio finally: poor De Sapio, who in his early days had himself come into politics as an insurgent against Tammany, now found himself, in his own Village territory, surrounded by Reformers howling from motorcades which started off from VID headquarters in Sheridan Square. “Beat De Sapio!” the hot-eyed girls yelled from cars to the astonished Italians in the South Village.
Night and day, the teachers, lawyers, and bookstore clerks of Greenwich Village—with an assist from like-minded insurgents from Brooklyn and the Bronx—drove their cars around the already fun-filled streets of the Village, shouting about De Sapio. They were happy then. And it would be the remarkable destiny of the Reformers that they would be fixated at this place in their history. For even when they had beaten De Sapio and won a considerable number of other battles, they would see themselves thus, riding around, yelling in lone splendor against impossible odds.
The peculiar fate of the Reformers, it would turn out, would be their incapacity to take in the idea of winning; to incorporate their victories as a rightful consequence of the efforts they had made. On the contrary, they would seem more at home with the notion that the rightful consequence of the efforts they had made should be an unrelenting aura of frustration and bitterness which colored their attitudes, even hard upon the heels of some victory or other. Former Mayor Wagner tells of the time a group of Reform leaders came to Gracie Mansion in 1961. They met to consult with the Mayor’s friend and associate, Judge Simon Rifkind, a man of seasoned political thinking who, as Wagner reports, asked them rhetorically, “‘Look, are you interested in winning these elections?’ They said, ‘Not really.’ They said this to Rifkind. To Rifkind !” On that visit the Reformers indicated, as they had so often, that they were interested in the weightier issues of Reformist thought far more than winning practical control of the party or anything—though no one fought harder to win individual fights, and no one sulked longer after losing them. (Events have not disappointed them: there are Democratic Reformers in every aspect of New York political life except that which actually controls the party.)
It had been the Reformers’ notion to bring the New England town meeting to New York politics: they would bring participants to the democratic process to have their say. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They gathered to their clubhouses hordes of citizens whose sole interest, it soon appeared, was to have a say at considerable length. The New England town meeting never saw such fires as burned in the Reformers’ clubhouse on the issues of the day. But to be more precise, the issues of the day did not matter very much: the problem which really exercised the members had to do with the method of approaching the issues of the day. These were the justly famed “procedures” battles whose hold on journalists and other fascinated observers is, in a grim sort of way, still unrivalled. The Reformers’ clubhouses were always located on the second floor of a storefront, whether they were the headquarters of the relatively sedate East Siders or of the more proletarian and livelier West Siders. On the night of a meeting, one climbed the shabby, ill-lit stairs and opened, always with something of a shock, onto the hard fluorescent lights and the density of a Reform environment. The furnishings were austere, not to say grim. In the center of a loft-length room, hard wooden chairs were stacked in rows. On them and in corners of the room, the unused literature of past campaigns lay unpromisingly about. The only amenities were an occasional Coke machine and a seldom-used toilet: the Reformers never trusted each other long enough to go to the bathroom in the course of a meeting. On the walls, the visages and the testaments of former local candidates hung in tatters. Higher up and more permanent, the tranquil eyes of FDR looked without surprise on all they viewed. And that might be much. Few grass-roots political movements can claim the kind of coverage Reform assemblies still get from newspapers at the promise of a typical meeting. And for good reason.
_____________
From the beginning, the Reformers were avid, internecine fighters. Despite the fact that the cornerstone of the Reformist stance was political morality, they were not above worldly tactics in their own clubhouse fights. Body-packing—the method of insuring a winning number of votes on a given issue—was arranged by the simple means of buying the $5 or $6 membership dues for people who lived as far away as Connecticut, and carting them in on the night their votes were needed. This simple, old-line tactic became, in the hands of the Reform club-debaters, a subject of immense moral complexity. One club, the famed FDR-Woodrow Wilson, debated till two in the morning (an hour not at all uncommon for the Reformers; it was always still the shank of the evening as long as there were yet people who had not delivered themselves of the burden of their thought) on whether they should take a vote on the question of taking a vote. The ultimate subject was whether the club should give voting privileges to certain “bodies” who had been carted in as new members for that night’s vote. The original question for which the meeting had been called—a red-hot housing issue—would soon be a dim memory in the minds of the membership. At two, the members voted to have a vote. Then the members who voted to have a vote began their debate on the vote. The outcome belongs to the ages now. But it was on such evenings—and they were by no means rare—that the Reformist personality battened. It was always the remarkable feature of these performances that the issues which exercised them night into morning were always quite simple. The regulars, to take an instance, looked upon body-packing as the plain pragmatic knavery it was. In the hands of the Reformers, the self-same act might work upon them as a prism, turning infinitely various reflections of moral light. The same attitudes held for all voting procedures, the oft-thumbed Roberts’ Rules of Order to no avail. It was as though, in seizing on the simplest possible issues as the place to take a stand, the Reformers understood that genuinely complex matters have an intrinsic drama that overshadows all the players. Their real interest, they seemed to know, was to make great things from small, thus to give principle and commitment their fullest play; for it was on these comparatively settled questions that the majesty of their forensic and reasoning abilities stood clear.
In this, they would not always be constant. When the Reformers went for the issues, as they did in the 60’s, they went for the big ones. From the patronage-fighting, hair-splitting morality of the 50’s type of Reformer, the 60’s breed evolved. The issues of peace and urbanism had taken hold by then. Rhetoricians had begun successfully to tie the problem of civil rights and poverty to the war in Vietnam. It was confidently suggested (and not alone to the Reformers) that the end of the war in Vietnam would somehow mean an end to poverty and to the similar ills which plagued our society. But to the Reformers, this causal relationship was particularly compelling. They had spent a good long time wearing themselves out fruitlessly over purist political forms. The regulars showed they had reason to be impressed with their style (and had, in some instances, begun to imitate a good thing. When Reformers were offered deals and votes, here and there, they could stall each other and their regular compatriots before making a decision by falling back on the old point in the Reform catechism and reciting, “I have to consult my club, I can’t say anything without the approval of my membership.” No one was surprised when finally J. Raymond Jones—old-line black leader known respectfully both to his cohorts in the regulars and to the Reformers as “The Fox”—demurred at decision-making in similar circumstances, murmuring with all the rectitude of a Reformer that he could not speak without consulting the membership of his club). Now the Reformers were ready to throw themselves with the same intensity into ending the war.
Charles Kinsolving, veteran campaign strategist and a Reformer for twenty years, recalls his attempt to gather support for Eugene McCarthy with the help of the Reform constituency. “You’d tell them, ‘Look, go push doorbells where people don’t know about McCarthy, go to the other districts.’ But they didn’t want to do that,” Kinsolving says, still quizzical, “they wanted to stay with their peer groups and polemicize about how we should get out of Vietnam—with people who already felt just the way they did. It made them feel good.”
_____________
In the early 60’s, a heavy influx of SANE and other, similarly inclined membership, began to shape the new priorities of the Reformers. The same people who had waxed long into the night about the fine points of democratic procedure found, with the inspiriting aid of the SANE types, that they could turn their energies to issues worthier of their moral rigor than keeping up the fight against the local machine candidates—many of whom had begun anyway to sound all too much like the Reformers themselves. They besought each other now on a new question: How to keep the atom bomb under control? To be sure, there were some Reformers who felt that this question was somewhat outside the purview of the concerns their movement had originally set itself, but they were outnumbered. By the mid-60’s, the Reformers had taken to their ranks a large number of people from the Women Strike for Peace; and the atom bomb was supplanted by the issue which was to remain the major concern of the Reform Democratic movement unto this day: how to end the Vietnam war?
The question elicited a variety of solutions from the Reformers who examined themselves long hours in their Clubhouses, and at their public forums, on the question of amnesty for the Vietcong and on the timing of troop withdrawals, Certain Reformers, working in McCarthy’s 1968 campaign, wanted to offer up to the Democratic convention not one, but several slates. Several slates were better than one, they reasoned, and each extra slate would serve the purpose of making various Democratic factions compete for the most extreme peace position. They worked busily up to the day of the convention, guided by the principle they called “keeping dialogue open.” What it meant was, they might give support to the slate which offered amnesty to the Vietcong; on the other hand, they might wait and see who would offer a halt to the bombing—a competition whose benefits to the cause of peace must have seemed obvious to them.
Representing as they did only a sector of the advanced political thought of the Reform movement, these plans cannot be said to have won broad support. But the Vietnam question did provide an entirely new frame of reference by which the Reformers would judge themselves and their candidates. Where, a decade or less ago, the crucial issue turned on keeping one’s political head high above the squalor of machine politics and patronage deals, the question now was, “When were you for peace?” No candidate for Reform votes, whether for district leader, State Senator, or Congressman, escaped examination on the time, the very month of the year, when he had called for an end to the war. And the candidates answered in kind: “I called for a halt to the bombing as early as March 1966.” It did not matter where they called for a halt to the bombing, whether in the 72nd Street clubhouse of the Roosevelt Independent Democrats or on the floor of Congress; for in truth, it did not matter whether the candidate was running for club treasurer or for Congress; his credentials on the peace issue were of equal consequence to the Reformers.
One of the most significant casualties of the peace issues and, in a larger sense, of Reform sensibilities, was Leonard Farbstein, long a regular Congressman for the 19th Congressional District. Repeated Reform challenges failed to displace Farbstein, but did succeed in transforming him, year by year, from a nondescript old-line type into the very model of a Reform legislator. He had been at this Congressional job a great many years, and he could not undo all the habits of mind that a start from Mitch Bloom’s regular club could give a man (nor could he gainsay the power of so shrewd and successful a patron as Bloom); but he tried. He learned to look at Congressman William F. Ryan when he was not sure how his vote should go, and when Ryan’s hand went up, Farbstein put his up. In the best democratic fashion, he had been tutored by his constituents and had learned to change with them: soon, he had compiled the best legislative, the best Reform record, of any regular in the House.
He had gotten to be an old man, being such a good Reformer. He had had to try harder and be better than the Binghams and Scheuers (Mr. Clean and Mr. Wonderful) and such, who had always sported the Reform label. But however good he got, it didn’t matter to the Reformers, who had never changed in their determination that Farbstein was unworthy. For it is the peculiar feature of the Reform sensibility that a flawed man cannot be shriven: peculiar, because it is a belief deeply ingrained in the thought of men who had come together for the express purpose of fostering change; and yet not peculiar, for their interest in “opening up the democratic process” had always coexisted with an astonishing degree of totalitarian spleen, with a lasting vengeance against non-conformists, and no less against those who conformed after early falling into Error. To the arguments proposed by some few Reformers—notably those who held legislative office—that Farbstein was now an excellent Congressman, the mainstream of Reform averred that Farbstein had not, in any event, voted for a bombing halt as early as he might have, and they found the candidate who would finally depose him. After a typical, blood-chilling fight among the Reform factions, only one candidate emerged from the Byzantine designations procedures as Farbstein’s challenger. To the horror of a large number of Reformers (the legislative leaders in particular) it was Bella Abzug. The rest is history. She won, with her Women Strike for Peace army, with the large number of Reformers who united behind her against an old enemy, and with her women’s support. But above all, Farbstein lost it. He had surrendered his power base, year by year. The captains in the old-line club which was his stronghold, were no longer willing to put themselves out for this captive of Reform. Being too good a Reformer, Farbstein lost to Reform and to Bella Abzug, who was herself now onto a good thing: in the notion of loyalty to one’s own sex, she would mine a vein in politics richer than any old democratic ideal. And she did it.
_____________
It was always evident that those legislators in the Reform movement who could allow merit for such as Farbstein were in the minority. Nonetheless, their existence underscores a quality in Reformers which must be interesting to all grass-roots movement watchers. There was always a difference between the Reformers elected to office and their constituents. Once elected, Reformers would invariably grow less dogmatic than their supporters. Experience, Realpolitik, or perhaps it is the plain expansiveness that comes to those who have been rescued from the toils of anonymity by being elected to office, all help transform the Reform zealot into a man at least willing to talk to the other side. Thus, the elected Reformer soon finds himself, by virtue of his election and his subsequent maturation process, far behind his constituency in pursuit of moral fervor, at odds with them on goals and priorities in all manner of things that they once held dear in the same degree.
That the Reformers failed to touch boroughs outside of Manhattan, with the exception of a few seats in the Bronx, and consistently fail to make inroads in the real party machinery, owes not a little to their divisiveness, the incapacity to form coalitions which has been their psychic trademark from their beginnings. Assemblyman Albert Blumenthal, a singularly undogmatic Reformer—a man of reliable spontaneity who offered to punch his detractors in the mouth on at least two occasions (once on the floor of the Assembly and once on the streets of the Upper West Side)—put it recently: “You get elected to something, you find you better shake hands. I want my bills to pass.” And so they do.
Most elected Reformers, however, feel they have to pay lip service to their constituents, and so must behave with a semblance of ideological rigidity, even against their better wisdom. Thus, they could never initiate the tradeoffs with the other powers in the Democratic party, even when those tradeoffs would have been in their interests. They could not, for example, say to the regulars, “Okay, in place of the civil court judge in Harlem, which we can’t win anyway, you give us other votes we want.” This is not to say that the Reformers did not make deals or accept patronage. They do indeed make deals, but in their odd fashion. The Reformers cannot say, “If we say yes to Brown, they’ll give us a judgeship for Smith.” The regulars won’t say such things either, but in their case, that is because it is all understood. What the Reformers are forbidden to say, however, they are often ready to do. And the difference between Reform leaders and regulars is largely in degree of forthrightness, a complication which cannot but add to the involuted psychological strains in the Reform movement.
Those strains have worn the movement out, finally. Only a core of the hardy remains of the old membership, the old spirit. Some of the constituency found other outlets for their interests; most simply wearied of night-long meetings, of infighting and personality clashes which managed to dominate even so grand an issue as the Vietnam war. One of the more remarkable things about this essentially college-educated chunk of the polity was its resistance to the rules of Jeffersonian debate, and to democratic procedure. They did not appear to see any point in the will of the majority. In short, when people in Reform clubs lost on some issue or other by a vote of 80 to 45, a large number of that 45 was likely to go home mad and stay there. The regulars proved themselves much more likely to unite behind the majority will, largely because any other course was unthinkable. That the side with the most votes wins, has never seemed a matter subject to question, to the regulars. To the Reformers, it was a new idea every time.
The core of old-time Reformers who survived have had to accommodate themselves to changing times and to new orthodoxies. One or two of them, challenged in the last few years by a new breed of child Reformer, have learned to eschew some old Reform attitudes in response to the attacks the twenty-year-olds were making on certain West Side district leaderships. The “kids,” as they were called, held the old Reformers to account for all the things that the New Politics could summon to mind. In addition, they had been weaned in Reform clubs, and so lacked none of the contempt that familiarity makes possible. The kids claimed that the old Reformers lacked contact with the people, with the blacks and Puerto Ricans; they were too middle-class, they lacked substantive issues. To be sure, certain of the Reformers agreed with them. No less a kid than Manfred Ohrenstein, Reform State Senator for as long as anyone can remember, confides now that the Reform movement, in his eyes, always lacked contact with the people. Ohrenstein, whose Fu Manchu mustache and raffishly low hairline tell of a man who wears the wave of the future comfortably, is a perfect emblem of an old-breed Reformer turned contemporary. He has left off the evils of patronage and back-room governance in favor of a new Real-politik—a derivative of leftover New Leftism and old-style Populism. He is impatient now with fancy names and procedures in the democratic process; substantive issues concern him now, the poor, the blacks, the Puerto Ricans, the young. “The Reform movement—the old Reform movement was just too full of middle-class people,” he explains.
It is the new breed, but it is the old breed, with a peculiar twist. Ohrenstein has, these past years, taken to telling the Jews of the Upper West Side about their responsibilities. “See, the Jews are the haves of the city,” he explained once. His middle-aged-to-elderly Jewish constituents—social-security pensioners and SRO occupants—listen. Recently, he related to this writer in detail the premise which guided him. “Look, look, who owns the pawnshops in Harlem? Who? What kind of a person would own a pawnship? It takes a certain mentality to own a pawnshop.”
_____________
So it goes. Ohrenstein is up for re-election this year. In any other constituency, the utterance of such stuff would be enough to inspire the voters to rise up and trounce the man. On the other hand, one is never sure about a Reform bailiwick, where the voters have had so long to listen to pathology offered up as principle; one could not be surprised if habituation dulled the ear. To be sure, Ohrenstein’s case is unique. But by and large, the Reform movement has yielded an awesome variety of pathological symptoms. The tears, the wrangles, the chairs thrown at public meetings, the old friends become sworn enemies overnight—have all contributed to the complex, faintly comical position the Reform movement holds in history now. Recalling their propensity for fighting with each other, former Mayor Wagner constructs a thin smile to the memory of certain long nights. “I used to get mad too, sometimes: but then I figured, what’s the use of two people getting mad?”
It is safe to say that few members of the Reform movement ever reasoned thus. But there are deeper reasons for their chronic disturbances. They might run something like this: From the beginnings of society, politicians, like other men, arranged themselves and their activities in accordance with a psychic instinct. And it was that instinct that Freud fathomed and refined in its countless forms, that assumption which no psychological system known to man has ever disputed.
It is, simply, that people expect rewards. From the time they are infants, they learn that they will get things if they are good. The regular politicians, like everyone else in the world, operated accordingly. The Reform Democrats tried to deny a cardinal principle of the psyche. They said, “Be good and expect no rewards for your behavior.” The consequence of this mass denial is, not surprisingly, Reform Democrat schizophrenia. Battling for position, for points in moral stature for lack of any other legitimate reward, the Reformers are as confused as men and women have a right to be, in their circumstances: they were thrown into a league against nature, and nature exacted its retribution. Driven, eternally furious, and recoiled upon themselves, the Reformers are surely not the first people to offer dogma in refutation of natural law; but they may well be the first political movement to go mad in the attempt, district by district.
_____________
