The American Enterprise, June 2002
"Live with TAE"
A lifelong New Yorker, student of urban life, servant of Presidents from Kennedy to Ford, and recently retired U.S. Senator talks about Manhattan, immigration, and the Irish, Jews, and Democrats.
Pat Moynihan
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the most prominent politician-professor since Woodrow Wilson, grew up in the working-class neighborhoods of New York City. (His myth-makers liked to say he came of age in Hell's Kitchen, but Ed Koch suggests it was more like "Hell's Condominium.") From the start, he was a curious blend of scholar and Democratic Party loyalist.
Professor Moynihan wrote (with Nathan Glazer) Beyond the Melting Pot, a seminal 1963 work on race and ethnicity in America. Politico Moynihan ran for New York City Council president in 1965 (the only race he ever lost). Policy advisor Moynihan served in the cabinet or sub-cabinet of the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford administrations. His expertise included both domestic and foreign affairs: He is surely the only U.S. representative to the United Nations who also wrote a major welfare initiative (Nixon's Family Assistance Program), instigated the redesign of Pennsylvania Avenue, and helped modernize Social Security (among other tasks).
In 1976, Moynihan was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York. His singular personality--part Harvard, part barroom, with a rococo style and a diction that begs mimicry--made him the most popular New York politician in generations. Senator Moynihan turned out to be unbeatable in the voting booth.
In his four Senate terms, Moynihan voted with the liberals and provided talking points to the conservatives. In the words of his good friend James Q. Wilson, Moynihan is "a Democrat who greatly worries other Democrats." His scorn for Great Society platitudes and his early concern over rising illegitimacy rates marked him as a skeptic of government social engineering. Yet he remained a partisan Democrat, and spent much of his time in the Senate pursuing side interests like public architecture (he favors "magnificence") and secrecy in government (which he dislikes).
Senator Moynihan retired in 2000; Hillary Clinton assumed his seat. Moynihan brushed aside questions about Senator Clinton but was otherwise engagingly discursive as he chatted in a Syracuse restaurant with TAE editor in chief Karl Zinsmeister and associate editor Bill Kauffman, both former Moynihan staffers.
TAE: Three of the last six New York City mayors have been Republicans. Is this a fluke or something more?
MOYNIHAN: It is a phenomenon: The disappearance of the political organizations.
My first vote was in 1948. I’m living over on 11th Avenue and our polling place is the basement of St. Raphael's. You had church and state together. It's a springtime primary, and I've just turned 21. I put on a shirt and tie, I walk into the basement, and someone I've never seen in my life says, "Hi Pat." I say, "Sir, I'm not sure that I'm eligible to vote." "Everybody votes," he answers, and as I went into the booth he gave me a little ticket that told me who everybody is going to vote for.
Today you become mayor using television, not party regulars like this pollworker.
TAE: What were New York City's glory days?
MOYNIHAN: World War II and the period that led up to it: the Broadway musicals were incomparable, the Yankees, the Giants. There was no city like it on earth. Los Angeles was a small town. Atlanta was a place which we had burnt. The city was dominant and vibrant. It was a place to be happy!
TAE: Was it an easy place to live?
MOYNIHAN: Effortless. I never had any encounter with crime. There was no crime. We lived on the fourth floor of what were called railroad flats. We had an icebox, and a wonderful fellow would bring up a big lump of ice and by the end of the day his pockets were bulging with quarters, nickels, and dimes. He lived out in Brooklyn, and on his way home he would pile up the coins and wrap them in the subway. In those days, why would younot do that on the subway?
If you got lost, you went up to a cop and he would give you a nickel for the subway and tell you how to get home. That's what we knew about cops.
TAE: You attended Benjamin Franklin High School in Harlem. Any idea what's happened to it?
MOYNIHAN: It died, along with other parts of that neighborhood. In that part of the city there were still little bits of the German city. Beer, restaurants, bratwurst. Something we have missed is the way the First World War drove German culture out of our country. The American population is heavily German, and there was once a great German culture here. But at the time of World War I that all became disreputable.
TAE: Sauerkraut renamed "Liberty Cabbage."
MOYNIHAN: And Theodore Roosevelt talking about "the Hun within."
TAE: Given the social and cultural gulfs between Upstate and Downstate, should New York be two separate states?
MOYNIHAN: No! We're New York! I don't know why we ever gave up Vermont. The Erie Canal integrated New York into one whole.
TAE: You've suggested that New York's historic support for federal spending has been a mistake: we never got back what we paid in, so perhaps the money ought to have stayed home.
MOYNIHAN: That's a matter of timing. We got into this pattern in the 1930s when much of the rest of the country was in terrible shape. It's bad enough to have a Depression, but do you have to have a Dust Bowl, too? We got into a paradigm: New York is wealthy and has the capacity and compassion to build a Tennessee Valley Authority, to send money to stricken places. That was 70 years ago. We have never been able to break out of the paradigm. New York City, in particular, has never been able to get back anything approaching its share of the revenues it sends to Washington. What is notable is that nobody in New York City much cares. You do this for two, three generations, and you have real consequences.
TAE: What are some fundamental principles that New York City should keep in mind as it rebuilds at Ground Zero?
MOYNIHAN: The first thing, and I'm happy that Mayor Bloomberg spotted it right away, is that we have to recreate Pennsylvania Station. That's not the first thought that comes to anybody looking at that Stygian horror, but transportation is our life. We begin with the harbor: The best harbor in the eastern coast of the United States. Then the canals. The Erie and New York Central railroads. The subway.
How did we ever allow the destruction of Pennsylvania Station? Oh, if you'd ever seen the original building. As Vincent Scully says, "You once entered New York City like an emperor; now you slither in like a rat." Fortunately, across the street from where the old Penn Station stood the same architects built another building of similar quality. That needs to become our new transportation hub.
New York was always singular for the dynamism with which the Brooklyn Bridge went up and skyscrapers went up and roads were built. Then, in the 1970s, civic reputation began to be acquired by people who prevented things from happening. There are some things you shouldn't do, but many things get stopped for no reason.
The first week I was in Washington as a senator, Bill Coleman, Secretary of Transportation, asked Senator Javits and me to come see a model of the Westway [a major Manhattan highway project]. Ah! Ooh! Wow! This would be our century's Central Park! We'd get those piers back. We could get the river back. He as much as gave us a check for it. Did it happen? No. Why? A bunch of overeducated lawyers, pro bono, convinced a federal judge that if you removed those piers you would destroy the spawning grounds of the striped bass. There are plenty of striped bass. One of the things we could have in the aftermath of 9/11 is a rediscovery of New York City’s waterfront.
TAE: Would Brooklyn have been better off remaining an independent city?
MOYNIHAN: Yes. Like Minnneapolis-St. Paul.
TAE: Are the days of the skyscraper come and gone?
MOYNIHAN: They haven't come and gone in Hong Kong, Bangkok, Shanghai. But in New York, I think the city will move over to Queens. There's just too much available real estate there to ignore.
TAE: You first became famous for expounding on race, in the report “The Negro Family,” and were later hounded for your frankness on this topic. Is the effect immigration is having on the racial composition of the U.S. a legitimate subject for debate today?
MOYNIHAN: Well, it’s becoming unignorable in New York City. My goodness, the most important fact about our city is that it has more first-generation New Yorkers than at any time since 1910. Welcome back to the Five Points.
About forty years ago, Nat Glazer and I published Beyond the Melting Pot. I wrote part of it here in Syracuse. That book, sir, is still in print; I got a royalty check a month ago for $103! I wrote the opening sentence, which said, "This is a beginning book." Forty years later, I'm not sure there has been a successor, and the reason is that these subjects have become so sensitive. How do we say, "Don't be so sensitive!" to authors and readers?
TAE: Compared to when you were growing up, how well does New York assimilate immigrants at present?
MOYNIHAN: When I was growing up, we had all assimilated. The blacks from the South were still coming up, but they were not a new ethnic group; they were an ethnic group that had been in town and was just becoming larger. There was Chinatown, but no visible Japanese, Mexicans, Dominicans...where's that? Assimilation had occured, and the city was at peace with itself.
TAE: Would you agree that 150 years ago New York City really did have an "Irish problem," as the terrified WASPs of the day claimed? If we hadn't had as many unassimilated rural Irish peasants pouring in, might we have avoided the Civil War draft riots, some of the Tammany Hall corruption, and other serious problems?
MOYNIHAN: Of course. There was a flood of immigrants from Ireland. Probably a third of them did not speak English. They couldn't do anything but laboring work, pick and shovel.
The draft riots were the worst violence in the city ever. Burning a Negro orphanage! Mostly Irish instigated. I don't think the Irish created Tammany Hall. The Society of St. Tammany was an 18th-century society. But something did come together, and the Irish took control through politics.
TAE: A century and a half later, those Irish arrivals almost universally look like good American citizens. But it was a very rough hundred years until they entered the middle class. Would a more temperate immigration policy have been a good idea?
MOYNIHAN: There aren't many places from which people came to New York City that were as primitive as the west of Ireland. The Irish assimilated in at least two generations; then they were no longer country folk. Of course they had the support of almost a state-within-a-state, which was the Catholic church.
TAE: Is there a place today for pro-life Irish Catholics in the Democratic Party?
MOYNIHAN: I have not gotten over the denial of Governor Casey to speak before the Democratic Convention in 1992. I thought that was shameless. It almost made me start voting differently.
TAE: New York City's famously left-wing Jewish population has recently gotten into the habit of pulling the lever for Republican mayoral candidates. Do you think this could eventually transfer to political races other than mayor?
MOYNIHAN: The Jewish immigrants to our country were originally socialists. But over time any group will begin to vote its class interests.
TAE: Except Jews have always been the famous exception to that rule: they have incomes like Episcopalians yet vote like Puerto Ricans.
MOYNIHAN: Well, isn't a century enough?
TAE: You gathered a remarkable group of people in your Senate office over the years: Tim Russert, Mike McCurry, Checker Finn, Dick Eaton, Eliot Abrams, Rob Shapiro, Les Lenkowsky. You're almost a Washington alma mater for many people who went on to become very influential. How did that happen?
MOYNIHAN: It was Liz, my wife, who often spotted the talent.
TAE: Throughout your career, it has seemed that your head was with the reformers but your heart was with the party regulars.
MOYNIHAN: I have been respectful of the party organizations, which were indigenous. Ed Flynn, the Bronx Democratic chairman, went down and saw FDR in '44 and said "we need somebody other than Henry Wallace as Roosevelt's running mate." So New York ethnic Democrats gave us Harry Truman. Not bad.
You know where the last Tammany Hall is? Northeast corner of Union Square, big brick building. In the center of the cornice is the Tammany symbol. When I campaigned for president of the New York City Council back in 1965, Raymond Jones, the Tammany leader, took me up to see the office. At one point he opened the door to the supply room, and there was a big ornate canvas. I said, "What's that?" He leaned the portrait back and said, "That's Mr. Charles Murphy, the legendary Tammany chief. I said, "Why don't you have him out?" He answered, as an old-style ethnic Democrat, "I will not have Mr. Murphy seeing us in these reduced circumstances."
"Live with TAE"
A lifelong New Yorker, student of urban life, servant of Presidents from Kennedy to Ford, and recently retired U.S. Senator talks about Manhattan, immigration, and the Irish, Jews, and Democrats.
Pat Moynihan
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the most prominent politician-professor since Woodrow Wilson, grew up in the working-class neighborhoods of New York City. (His myth-makers liked to say he came of age in Hell's Kitchen, but Ed Koch suggests it was more like "Hell's Condominium.") From the start, he was a curious blend of scholar and Democratic Party loyalist.
Professor Moynihan wrote (with Nathan Glazer) Beyond the Melting Pot, a seminal 1963 work on race and ethnicity in America. Politico Moynihan ran for New York City Council president in 1965 (the only race he ever lost). Policy advisor Moynihan served in the cabinet or sub-cabinet of the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford administrations. His expertise included both domestic and foreign affairs: He is surely the only U.S. representative to the United Nations who also wrote a major welfare initiative (Nixon's Family Assistance Program), instigated the redesign of Pennsylvania Avenue, and helped modernize Social Security (among other tasks).
In 1976, Moynihan was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York. His singular personality--part Harvard, part barroom, with a rococo style and a diction that begs mimicry--made him the most popular New York politician in generations. Senator Moynihan turned out to be unbeatable in the voting booth.
In his four Senate terms, Moynihan voted with the liberals and provided talking points to the conservatives. In the words of his good friend James Q. Wilson, Moynihan is "a Democrat who greatly worries other Democrats." His scorn for Great Society platitudes and his early concern over rising illegitimacy rates marked him as a skeptic of government social engineering. Yet he remained a partisan Democrat, and spent much of his time in the Senate pursuing side interests like public architecture (he favors "magnificence") and secrecy in government (which he dislikes).
Senator Moynihan retired in 2000; Hillary Clinton assumed his seat. Moynihan brushed aside questions about Senator Clinton but was otherwise engagingly discursive as he chatted in a Syracuse restaurant with TAE editor in chief Karl Zinsmeister and associate editor Bill Kauffman, both former Moynihan staffers.
TAE: Three of the last six New York City mayors have been Republicans. Is this a fluke or something more?
MOYNIHAN: It is a phenomenon: The disappearance of the political organizations.
My first vote was in 1948. I’m living over on 11th Avenue and our polling place is the basement of St. Raphael's. You had church and state together. It's a springtime primary, and I've just turned 21. I put on a shirt and tie, I walk into the basement, and someone I've never seen in my life says, "Hi Pat." I say, "Sir, I'm not sure that I'm eligible to vote." "Everybody votes," he answers, and as I went into the booth he gave me a little ticket that told me who everybody is going to vote for.
Today you become mayor using television, not party regulars like this pollworker.
TAE: What were New York City's glory days?
MOYNIHAN: World War II and the period that led up to it: the Broadway musicals were incomparable, the Yankees, the Giants. There was no city like it on earth. Los Angeles was a small town. Atlanta was a place which we had burnt. The city was dominant and vibrant. It was a place to be happy!
TAE: Was it an easy place to live?
MOYNIHAN: Effortless. I never had any encounter with crime. There was no crime. We lived on the fourth floor of what were called railroad flats. We had an icebox, and a wonderful fellow would bring up a big lump of ice and by the end of the day his pockets were bulging with quarters, nickels, and dimes. He lived out in Brooklyn, and on his way home he would pile up the coins and wrap them in the subway. In those days, why would younot do that on the subway?
If you got lost, you went up to a cop and he would give you a nickel for the subway and tell you how to get home. That's what we knew about cops.
TAE: You attended Benjamin Franklin High School in Harlem. Any idea what's happened to it?
MOYNIHAN: It died, along with other parts of that neighborhood. In that part of the city there were still little bits of the German city. Beer, restaurants, bratwurst. Something we have missed is the way the First World War drove German culture out of our country. The American population is heavily German, and there was once a great German culture here. But at the time of World War I that all became disreputable.
TAE: Sauerkraut renamed "Liberty Cabbage."
MOYNIHAN: And Theodore Roosevelt talking about "the Hun within."
TAE: Given the social and cultural gulfs between Upstate and Downstate, should New York be two separate states?
MOYNIHAN: No! We're New York! I don't know why we ever gave up Vermont. The Erie Canal integrated New York into one whole.
TAE: You've suggested that New York's historic support for federal spending has been a mistake: we never got back what we paid in, so perhaps the money ought to have stayed home.
MOYNIHAN: That's a matter of timing. We got into this pattern in the 1930s when much of the rest of the country was in terrible shape. It's bad enough to have a Depression, but do you have to have a Dust Bowl, too? We got into a paradigm: New York is wealthy and has the capacity and compassion to build a Tennessee Valley Authority, to send money to stricken places. That was 70 years ago. We have never been able to break out of the paradigm. New York City, in particular, has never been able to get back anything approaching its share of the revenues it sends to Washington. What is notable is that nobody in New York City much cares. You do this for two, three generations, and you have real consequences.
TAE: What are some fundamental principles that New York City should keep in mind as it rebuilds at Ground Zero?
MOYNIHAN: The first thing, and I'm happy that Mayor Bloomberg spotted it right away, is that we have to recreate Pennsylvania Station. That's not the first thought that comes to anybody looking at that Stygian horror, but transportation is our life. We begin with the harbor: The best harbor in the eastern coast of the United States. Then the canals. The Erie and New York Central railroads. The subway.
How did we ever allow the destruction of Pennsylvania Station? Oh, if you'd ever seen the original building. As Vincent Scully says, "You once entered New York City like an emperor; now you slither in like a rat." Fortunately, across the street from where the old Penn Station stood the same architects built another building of similar quality. That needs to become our new transportation hub.
New York was always singular for the dynamism with which the Brooklyn Bridge went up and skyscrapers went up and roads were built. Then, in the 1970s, civic reputation began to be acquired by people who prevented things from happening. There are some things you shouldn't do, but many things get stopped for no reason.
The first week I was in Washington as a senator, Bill Coleman, Secretary of Transportation, asked Senator Javits and me to come see a model of the Westway [a major Manhattan highway project]. Ah! Ooh! Wow! This would be our century's Central Park! We'd get those piers back. We could get the river back. He as much as gave us a check for it. Did it happen? No. Why? A bunch of overeducated lawyers, pro bono, convinced a federal judge that if you removed those piers you would destroy the spawning grounds of the striped bass. There are plenty of striped bass. One of the things we could have in the aftermath of 9/11 is a rediscovery of New York City’s waterfront.
TAE: Would Brooklyn have been better off remaining an independent city?
MOYNIHAN: Yes. Like Minnneapolis-St. Paul.
TAE: Are the days of the skyscraper come and gone?
MOYNIHAN: They haven't come and gone in Hong Kong, Bangkok, Shanghai. But in New York, I think the city will move over to Queens. There's just too much available real estate there to ignore.
TAE: You first became famous for expounding on race, in the report “The Negro Family,” and were later hounded for your frankness on this topic. Is the effect immigration is having on the racial composition of the U.S. a legitimate subject for debate today?
MOYNIHAN: Well, it’s becoming unignorable in New York City. My goodness, the most important fact about our city is that it has more first-generation New Yorkers than at any time since 1910. Welcome back to the Five Points.
About forty years ago, Nat Glazer and I published Beyond the Melting Pot. I wrote part of it here in Syracuse. That book, sir, is still in print; I got a royalty check a month ago for $103! I wrote the opening sentence, which said, "This is a beginning book." Forty years later, I'm not sure there has been a successor, and the reason is that these subjects have become so sensitive. How do we say, "Don't be so sensitive!" to authors and readers?
TAE: Compared to when you were growing up, how well does New York assimilate immigrants at present?
MOYNIHAN: When I was growing up, we had all assimilated. The blacks from the South were still coming up, but they were not a new ethnic group; they were an ethnic group that had been in town and was just becoming larger. There was Chinatown, but no visible Japanese, Mexicans, Dominicans...where's that? Assimilation had occured, and the city was at peace with itself.
TAE: Would you agree that 150 years ago New York City really did have an "Irish problem," as the terrified WASPs of the day claimed? If we hadn't had as many unassimilated rural Irish peasants pouring in, might we have avoided the Civil War draft riots, some of the Tammany Hall corruption, and other serious problems?
MOYNIHAN: Of course. There was a flood of immigrants from Ireland. Probably a third of them did not speak English. They couldn't do anything but laboring work, pick and shovel.
The draft riots were the worst violence in the city ever. Burning a Negro orphanage! Mostly Irish instigated. I don't think the Irish created Tammany Hall. The Society of St. Tammany was an 18th-century society. But something did come together, and the Irish took control through politics.
TAE: A century and a half later, those Irish arrivals almost universally look like good American citizens. But it was a very rough hundred years until they entered the middle class. Would a more temperate immigration policy have been a good idea?
MOYNIHAN: There aren't many places from which people came to New York City that were as primitive as the west of Ireland. The Irish assimilated in at least two generations; then they were no longer country folk. Of course they had the support of almost a state-within-a-state, which was the Catholic church.
TAE: Is there a place today for pro-life Irish Catholics in the Democratic Party?
MOYNIHAN: I have not gotten over the denial of Governor Casey to speak before the Democratic Convention in 1992. I thought that was shameless. It almost made me start voting differently.
TAE: New York City's famously left-wing Jewish population has recently gotten into the habit of pulling the lever for Republican mayoral candidates. Do you think this could eventually transfer to political races other than mayor?
MOYNIHAN: The Jewish immigrants to our country were originally socialists. But over time any group will begin to vote its class interests.
TAE: Except Jews have always been the famous exception to that rule: they have incomes like Episcopalians yet vote like Puerto Ricans.
MOYNIHAN: Well, isn't a century enough?
TAE: You gathered a remarkable group of people in your Senate office over the years: Tim Russert, Mike McCurry, Checker Finn, Dick Eaton, Eliot Abrams, Rob Shapiro, Les Lenkowsky. You're almost a Washington alma mater for many people who went on to become very influential. How did that happen?
MOYNIHAN: It was Liz, my wife, who often spotted the talent.
TAE: Throughout your career, it has seemed that your head was with the reformers but your heart was with the party regulars.
MOYNIHAN: I have been respectful of the party organizations, which were indigenous. Ed Flynn, the Bronx Democratic chairman, went down and saw FDR in '44 and said "we need somebody other than Henry Wallace as Roosevelt's running mate." So New York ethnic Democrats gave us Harry Truman. Not bad.
You know where the last Tammany Hall is? Northeast corner of Union Square, big brick building. In the center of the cornice is the Tammany symbol. When I campaigned for president of the New York City Council back in 1965, Raymond Jones, the Tammany leader, took me up to see the office. At one point he opened the door to the supply room, and there was a big ornate canvas. I said, "What's that?" He leaned the portrait back and said, "That's Mr. Charles Murphy, the legendary Tammany chief. I said, "Why don't you have him out?" He answered, as an old-style ethnic Democrat, "I will not have Mr. Murphy seeing us in these reduced circumstances."