John Lindsay, the Association for a Better New York, and the privatization of New York City, 1969-1973

Focusing on the collaboration between Mayor John Lindsay and business advocacy group the Association for a Better New York (ABNY), this article illustrates the utility of public and elite anxieties over street crime in legitimizing new, privatized models of urban governance during the early 1970s. ABNY’s privatized crime-fighting initiatives signified a new direction in city law enforcement strategies, a new “common sense” regarding the efficacy and authority of private or voluntarist solutions to urban problems, and proved of lasting significance for labor relations, the regulation of urban space, and the role of the private sector in urban policy. It concludes that, despite their limitations, the visibility of ABNY’s initiatives, their ability to construct a pervasive sense of crisis, and their apparent demonstration of public and elite consent played a significant role in the transformation of New York into the “privatized” or “neoliberal” city of today

John Lindsay, the Association for a Better New York, and the privatization of New York City, 1969-1973

Focusing on the collaboration between Mayor John Lindsay and business advocacy group the Association for a Better New York (ABNY), this article illustrates the utility of public and elite anxieties over street crime in legitimizing new, privatized models of urban governance during the early 1970s. ABNY’s privatized crime-fighting initiatives signified a new direction in city law enforcement strategies, a new “common sense” regarding the efficacy and authority of private or voluntarist solutions to urban problems, and proved of lasting significance for labor relations, the regulation of urban space, and the role of the private sector in urban policy. It concludes that, despite their limitations, the visibility of ABNY’s initiatives, their ability to construct a pervasive sense of crisis, and their apparent demonstration of public and elite consent played a significant role in the transformation of New York into the “privatized” or “neoliberal” city of today

Rethinking the politics of white ethnicity in 1970s America

Historians have tended to characterize the ‘white ethnic’ identity politics of the 1970s in the United States as a significant feature of the conservative counterrevolution, especially the rise of populist racial conservatism and its splintering of the Democratic New Deal coalition. Seeking to provide a broader, more representative portrait of white ethnic mobilization, activism, and institutionalization in government, with particular focus on the work of Rev. Geno Baroni, the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs, and the Carter administration's Office of Ethnic Affairs, this article challenges that assumption. It posits that the politics of white ethnicity was a far more complex, diverse phenomenon, of appeal to liberals and conservatives in an era of considerable political flux. This reconsideration also reveals that the 1970s were not conservative in the United States, but a watershed decade of uncertainty, volatility, and experimentation, in which ethnic identities and affiliations were reshaped, political norms upended, and new forms of organization and mobilization trialled out, with great significance for today's ‘post-ethnic’ United States. White ethnic politics was of considerable importance to American political development in the late twentieth century, but not in the way usually thought

The Historical Presidency : “An Ethnic Presence in the White House?”: Ethnicity, Identity Politics, and the Presidency in the 1970s

This paper excavates the relationship between the presidency and an emergent white, European ‘ethnic’ identity politics during the 1970s. Rather than a response to cultural drift or backlash politics, presidential efforts to harness ‘ethnic’ identity politics reflected a shifting institutional context. Yet despite establishing the White House as a critical centre of the new politics and devising policy and political responses to it, the attentions of the presidency were not always propitious. Instead, the presidency’s efforts profoundly influenced the terms by which ethnic politics was received politically, with destructive consequences for this politics’ potential political incorporation, its interactions with other advocacy groups, and its long-term future. Historians seeking to explain the fate of the ‘ethnic’ moment of the 1970s should thus pay closer attention to the presidency as a contributor to both its rise and demise