Party Profits: Political Machines as Money-Making Ventures in Gilded Age New York
Reviewed by Atiba Pertilla
The 2020 presidential campaign is coming to a close with controversies swirling over the alleged and established entanglement of the two main candidates, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, in a variety of schemes to use their political position to benefit themselves or their families. At the heart of these concerns lies a conviction that profiting from political connections is a primary driver of Americans’ loss of faith in their elected representatives. Electoral Capitalism, a new book by Jeffrey Broxmeyer, focuses on public graft and political machines in Gilded Age New York and is a timely look at how earlier voters faced similar questions.
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Parish History on New York City's Upper West Side
Reviewed by Susie Pak
Thomas J. Shelley has added to his already substantial oeuvre of New York Catholic history with the publication of Upper West Side Catholics: Liberal Catholicism in a Conservative Archdiocese: The Church of the Ascension, New York City, 1895-2020 (New York: Empire State Editions, 2020).[1] His deep and broad understanding of New York’s Catholic institutions provides the context for his study of the Church of the Ascension, which was founded in 1895 on the Upper West Side. While his history of Ascension starts from its founding, Shelley’s book offers an extended view of the neighborhood during the 1960s and 1970s, a period when demographic transition overlapped with economic decline and produced immense political conflicts that destabilized New York’s institutions, including the Catholic Church.
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Reassessing American “Ruin”
Reviewed by Pedro A. Regalado
During the 1970s and 1980s, the South Bronx was the epicenter of American “ruin.” In the popular imagination, flames engulfed acres of developed cityscape; poverty and violence mingled with the remains of abandoned buildings; and a crack epidemic degenerated entire neighborhoods.
Read MoreErich Goode’s Taming of New York’s Washington Square: A Wild Civility
Reviewed By Stephen Petrus
Even during COVID-19, New York’s Washington Square Park maintains its quirky identity. Chances are on a visit you’ll still encounter locals, tourists, buskers, sunbathers, NYU students, dog walkers, chess players, homeless people, petty drug dealers, and maybe even Fartman, Pigeon Man, and the Squirrel Whisperer.
Read MoreIsland Gospel: Pentecostal Music and Identity in Jamaica and the United States
Review by Ray Allen
Writing about musical performance during the time of COVID-19 gives me pause, as it does, no doubt, for all of us who revel in live music. Whether we choose to raise our voices in praise of the deities or to drum and dance to the most sensual rhythms, the act of communal music making is, at its core, a celebration of our deepest humanity. Michael Butler’s Island Gospel is a keen reminder of this reality, and leaves us longing for the day when we can again gather in places of worship, dance halls, clubs, concert venues, and street fetes for the simple joy of making music together.
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The Toughest Gun Control Law in the Nation: The Unfulfilled Promise of New York’s SAFE Act
Reviewed by Andrew C. McKevitt
When Governor Andrew Cuomo pushed a new gun control law, the Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement (SAFE) Act, through the New York State Assembly in January 2013, just a month after the tragic mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, critics said he acted in haste. Cuomo’s administration started drafting a bill before the New Year; it submitted the bill to the Assembly on January 13 and, utilizing a rare emergency measure, the governor signed it an incredible 18 hours later.
Read MoreThere Went New York; or What Is New York?
Reviewed by Mason B. Williams
New York is layered with ghosts. “It carries on its lapel,” E.B. White wrote, “the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings.” Holed up in the Algonquin Hotel, White compiled a brief compendium: “I am twenty-two blocks from where Rudolph Valentino lay in state, eight blocks from where Nathan Hale was executed, … thirty-four blocks from the street Willa Cather lived in when she came to New York to write books about Nebraska … (I could continue this list indefinitely); and for that matter I am probably occupying the very room that any number of exalted and somewise memorable characters sat in, some of them on hot, breathless afternoons, lonely and private and full of their own senses of emanations from without.”
Read MoreThe Enigma of Rescue: On a Recent History of the New School for Social Research
By Ben Wurgaft
The New School for Social Research holds a story of rescue dear. This is the tale of how its co-founder and first president, the economist Alvin Johnson, climbed a mountain of correspondence and paperwork to save scores of German scholars after Nazism’s rise to power in the early 1930s. Johnson saved lives and scholarly lineages. He also burnished the reputation of the institution he helped build, establishing a University in Exile (renamed the Graduate Faculty) within the New School itself. An academic institution in downtown Manhattan, equally committed to adult education and to using the social sciences to analyze all that is oppressive in social, cultural, and political life, the New School has — at certain moments in its history — embodied a set of egalitarian and progressive values. In 1918, the sociologist Thorstein Veblen published his The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men, in which he criticized academic institutions for defending the interests of the ruling class. He practically anticipated the 1919 founding of the New School in response to the actions of Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, who had fired two faculty members for protesting the U.S.’s entrance into the war in Europe. Many elite academic institutions have flattering stories they tell about themselves. Some value their historical connections to wealth and power. Some value their political histories (“the Free Speech Movement happened here”). Some their famous former professors (“That was Foucault’s favorite sandwich shop”). The New School values its two foundations: on the basis of protest, in 1919, and on the basis of rescue, in 1933. In his memoir Kafka was the Rage, the writer and critic Anatole Broyard captured the way American students at the New School, after WWII, could turn the narrative of rescue into one of personal triumph: “We admired the German professors. We had won the fight against fascism and now, with their help, we would defeat all the dark forces in the culture and the psyche.”
Read MoreBattling Bella: The Protest Politics of Bella Abzug
Reviewed by Dylan Gottlieb
“She is loud. She is good and rude,” wrote Jimmy Breslin, the redoubtable New York newspaperman. Like “a fighter in training,” he continued, Bella Abzug was “pushing, brawling, poking, striding her way toward the Congress of the United States.” In the 1970s, as New York approached its nadir, Abzug emerged onto the political scene as a pugilist for the people: a “tough broad from the Bronx” (to borrow the title of another biography), whose combative style and populist message fit the tough times.
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