Nadine FriedmanRoberts Giuliani State of the City, 1995
1. Giuliani is an unapologetic, righteous classist playing the role of stern but loving dad and Crusader for the People. His speech works in ugly binaries: private good, public bad, while daring anyone with nuanced understanding of social infrastructure to challenge him. He steers the mantra of his inaugural “it should be so and it will be,” into the direction he intended: not a vision of an inclusive, safe, urban idyll but a strongarming of many constituent groups into what he thinks the city “should” be. That is, playground for the rich (a hackneyed but accurate phrase), one where striking working class employees who try anything funny would be swiftly replaced (in the United Seafood Workers Union dispute down at the Fulton Market, “’Anyone who walks off the job again will not be welcomed back," said his chief of staff1), and one where the poor or disenfranchised would be marketed under nefarious mantles of drug dealers, union freeloaders or welfare queens. He’s responsible for sanitizing the city, and while there’s been great outcomes, this speech encapsulates his talent for making it sound like his values are ours. Giuliani codes throughout, with elegant, obscuring language. “Welfare” means “lazy,” and reaffirms his allegiance to his old boss Reagan’s school of thought villainizing the poor. “Prevailing” over the BOE means “bullying” and his “workfare” program was laughable in its shortterm, undignified nature. The plan to give people “dignity” and “hope” actually provided street sweeping jobs, didn’t allow for training and education programs, nor did it track participants entirely.2 Dignity doesn’t mean the same thing to him that it did to many New Yorkers. He’s demeaning under the guise of toughlove empathy, while championing growth of the private sector and Wall Street (those who plunged us into nationwide crisis are actually those “seeking to defraud the system” not public assistance recipients, Rudy). He valorizes big business while others—be they BOE employee or drug dealer— drained our proud city. His disregard within “Some of that loss is irrevocable” in regards to childhood education is clear; he views them as direct corollary to the people making NYC less palatable for tourists and the private sector. He quantifies the value of children without reflecting on why we spend the way we do. He aims to close the gap between what the system spends on special education (almost $24,000 per student) and what it spends on the rest of its students (less than $5,000 per student), but why is so much spent on special ed? How did the city get to a point where we have so many children in special needs classes? Don’t we deserve to know these things when it impacts us far more than his vaunted hotel occupancy tax? Again, the gulf between what he believes we want and what we actually want is clear. He quantifies when supporting his priorities (a great strategy for a speaker) but uses vague data on policies and nouns he detests: “Surveys indicate that roughly 80 percent of all those over the age of 15 who are arrested test positive for drug use.” The “community in Brooklyn” statement is particularly vague while plans for Manhattan are specific. He purports to be profamilies and a better NYC, but he’s pushing the usual “CompassionateConservative
1 Raab, Selwyn. "Loaders Are New Front In Fulton Market Conflict." The New York Times. The New York Times, 6 Jan. 1996. We b. 28 Jul 2015.
2. NYMag’s Michael Tomansky remembers “how often people talked in 1992 and 1993 about giving up on the place. Within one short year, or even less, people weren’t saying that very much anymore.” Although he’d only won by a tiny margin, he’d quickly capitalize on citizen fatigue, bring high crime down, have beef with Sharpton, terrorize union workers, decimate the vicious culture of, uh, squeegee men, and create his legacy of the Broken Windows theory which can partially be blamed for police violence under, and after, his watch. “He was not someone who came up through the local Democratic clubs, amassing and owing favors and adjusting himself to the status quo.” notes Tomansky. “He was an outsider, a prosecutor, and a hardass.” These were favorable traits to only some: “His main legacy may always be saving the city, but his secondary legacy will also, always, be that he divided it.”3 In the early days of his hardass regime it was admittedly, partly necessary. NYC was the cinematic mecca of high crime, seedy promiscuity and urban despair: a good time for someone who advanced terms like “should” and “will.” According to Tomansky, the years preceding his tenure saw “about 1,700 privatesector jobs lost every week on average, homicides surpassing 2,000 per year, more than 1 million residents on welfare.” However, he only won by around 50,000 votes and “just about half the city was reluctant to give up on its first black mayor, and the voters in November 1993 ratified change only grudgingly.”4 His win was an circular finale to his plea to Staten Island not to secede: the borough saved him.5 As US Attorney, he cultivated a loquacious persona tough on crime, forceful on personal responsibility and happy with publicity. He took on insider trading, the Mafia, drug dealers, anyone who he could make an example of.6 Color the speech with this experience as well as his fondness for the perp walk. He didn’t invent it, but, according to Leigh Jones, he “elevated both the term and practice in the public eye. Giuliani...knew the public relations value, for prosecutors anyway, of making defendants appear in handcuffs before the media on the way to arraignment. ‘Rudy Giuliani made an art form out of it.’"7 Giuliani has an almost medieval view on morality, righteousness and the value of hard work, and this speech reflects it. Drug addicts and union workers are as bad as corrupt insider traders.
3. He did it at City Hall and I don’t see anything significant, besides this speech reflecting on the past year’s speech. 1995’s begins by comparing 1994’s, and how he stood in the same spot to deliver a speech people were doubtful he could follow through on. A powerful “told you so” overtone at the beginning.
3 Tomasky, Michael. "The Day Everything Changed." NYMag.com. NY Mag, 28 Sep. 2008. Web. 28 Jul 2015.
5. According to the Times, Ron Maiorana was his speechwriter in January 1995 and had been for a few months. He’d served as press secretary for Governor Rockefeller and worked on Republican campaigns, and his role with Giuliani focused on “helping him shape his message and tone.” His quote, “‘He trusts me to take his thinking and frame it for him,’" is of interest as it eliminates the need for partisanship in the role.8 One doesn’t need to be Republican to write Republican, and that takeaway can be debated as good or bad.
6. The nature of this speech is one that requires research, in general. It’s not just about historical details, but his codes.
We are developing a deliberate strategy that will achieve permanent change. We call our effort a strategy, not a war, because wars suggest unconditional victory or defeat.
Weirdly, he rushes to clarify this in a way that he doesn’t with anything else in this speech. Any young person today should review this in light of the harsh penalties imposed on drug users, addicts and petty dealers. High incarceration rates (nationally and within NYS) for drug arrests (especially for young men of color) would imply “strategy” is dishonest phrasing. And it would behoove any young historian to look at Giuliani’s past career to know that he considers the possibility that an addict can be a victim laughable. The war on drugs has been a worthless, racist, societycrippling one.
Most people derive much of their sense of self worth from the work they do. Workfare offers assistance, dignity and hope, all of which can be found in a job, the very best social program there is. Our workfare program recognizes that welfare is supposed to be a temporary helping hand, not a way of life. And our program recognizes that the current home relief program includes recipients who need and deserve assistance, and those who don't.
Again, data and retroactive thinking tells us that this concept isn’t a purely noble one. The assertion we derive selfworth from work is absolutely true. However, the program ended up being impermanent and only partially effective, as well as demeaning, punishing, unsafe and didn’t provide meaningful skills. Fordham’s Dean Quaranta was politely incensed: '’There is compelling research that welfare recipients who go to college, even if they don't finish, tend to be more likely to get a job and keep a job than their counterparts without that education,'' she said. ''These jobs sweeping streets are dead-end jobs, not stimulating, not interesting and with no upward mobility or security. And they're certainly not good role models for kids.’'' 9 Giuliani’s sanctimonious “idle hands are the Devil’s playground” rhetoric took him into his successful 1997
8 Mitchell, Alison. "Reporter's Notebook; It's Official: Giuliani Names RightHand Man First Deputy Mayor." The New York Times. The New York Times, 3 Jan. 1995. Web. 29 Jul 2015.
Many people feared that tensions in Crown Heights would again arise, when the first day of the Jewish New Year coincided with the Caribbean Day Parade. It sounds culturally tonedeaf (what does the Parade have to do with the Jewish New Year, and why are they made to sound so opposite?). But he’s referring to the Crown Heights riots between Hasidic Jews and the Caribbean community upon the revenge murder of a Jewish man, after a different man struck two Guyanese children with his car.
Our program has begun in one community in Brooklyn, and we will expand it to other areas of the city. This quote is in the business revitalization section of the speech. It obviously needs more research because I was intrigued as to what he was referring to and can’t find anything.
As 1994 came to a close, New York City's crime rates were falling even faster than at the beginning of the year, indicating that our efforts are paying off. Another example of Giuliani lauding himself for impact, but how did it actually work? Why did crime go so low and so fast (and it really did a freefall)? It requires some research on what these arrests looked like, what they were for, who was arrested, etc. Undoubtedly, violent crime went down but knowing the Broken Windows policy came out of this administration, one would like to understand what this actually looked like.
Conventional wisdom said that New York City was ungovernable… He’s referring to the crime, poverty, homelessness, seedy Warriorsera society people thought of then. If someone was reading this today, with no history outside the Bloomberg administration or the prolific nature of Applebee’s in Manhattan, they might not believe it.
Surveys indicate that roughly 80 percent of all those over the age of 15 who are arrested test positive for drug use. What surveys? What kind of drugs?
7. Commissioner Bill Bratton is the person of most consequence here. As a new hire, nobody could guess the conflict his tenure would be surrounded by (conflict which continues today). Commissioner Fred Cerullo and Business Services and Commissioner Rudy Washington are mentioned in regards to the friction over the restriction of Midtown street vendors. President Clinton and endowments for Harlem, Washington Heights and South Bronx are credited. As a mayor who wants more autonomy and to reduce government sprawl, there’s a passive aggressive dig at Governor Pataki about how the mayors of Buffalo, Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, and Yonkers get dominion over their cities’ school budgets. Mary Glass is cited as reforming welfare. From the remote corners of the internet in which she’s mentioned, she comes off a bit like The Wolf in Pulp Fiction. Very mysterious person.
8. Two quotes I haven’t mentioned:
“It's true that we have a disproportionate share of the state's poor. But New York City doesn't generate poverty, it generates wealth, which attracts poor people seeking to ascend into the middle class.” It makes you laugh, this is either so disingenuous or so stupid. And he’s definitely not stupid.
“By enforcing the laws against aggressive panhandlers, squeegee operators and graffiti vandals, we've made our city more liveable, improving the quality of life.” Huh.
9. I don’t want to be redundant, but these are hallmark: Welfare to Workfare, the criminality of drug use, Albany as exerting too much control, Wall Street being heralded.
10. Style Wars: preGiuliani, but it backs up how flawed Broken Windows policy would be. A documentary about the thriving community of NYC graffiti artists in the early 1980’s, it speaks to how much power and creativity came out of the crises facing the city and how disproportionate the response by NYC mayors and the NYPD is/was to the transgression. http://www.stylewars.com/site/
Michael Tomasky’s "The Day Everything Changed" in NYMag: Long piece links Bloomberg to Giuliani’s reign. Thoughtful analysis of the mid90’s. Honestly, it’s all I can recommend because I hate him, his tenure as Mayor and his Presidential run attempt, in which he walked back some of his more respectable views in order to become part of the Conservative clan.