Discussion Group Report

In 1861 while southern states were in the process of seceding from the union, Fernando Wood, the mayor of New York, made a proposal to his city council that, if the South severed its ties to the United States, New York should, too. That city profited from the shipping of Southern cotton, and its people weren't crazy about the idea of a civil war. The city would refashion itself into a free city called Tri-Insula, which would do business with both the North and the South, thus sidestepping carnage and substituting business sense for patriotic fervor.

Tri-Insula never happened, but Americans have always tended to treat New York as if it had, says Russell Shorto in his article with same title as this one in the October 2, 2005 New York Times. The "it feels like a foreign country" line is a standard souvenir that visitors from other parts of the nation take home with them. New York is different, both literally and metaphorically insular. New York for a generation has been far from the center of American politics.

Yet in recent polls for 2008, America's top choices include New York's junior senator, Hillary Clinton, former mayor Rudy Giuliani, and Governor George Pataki. These factors relate to New York's uniqueness: the World Trade Center was attacked because of what the city is and represents, and Hillary chose it as her base for similar reasons. New York once held sway over the national political scene, but there hasn't been a New Yorker in the White House since F.D.R.

What is it that New York had in its glory days--when it fostered political ideas and programs that transformed the nation--and does it still have it?

To approach these questions and to get at some of the political tensions roiling the country today, we need to go back to the beginning. You could think of it as springing from two sources, each of which flows back to the earliest stratum of the country's existence--the dominant one--call it American--and the subordinate one, the new York source.

The American strain, which has soared triumphant in recent years, is overtly and unashamedly moralistic. It comes straight out of the Puritans who settled New England. Their worldview was theological to the core; Europe was corrupt and despoiled; the New World was the Promised Land. Success was a sign of God's favor. They were "the new Israel," the chosen people. Succeeding generations adopted this theological template. In the 19th century the Puritans exceptionalism was reframed as manifest destiny: the notion that Americans had, as John O'Sullivan put it, the right "to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." After World War I, President Woodrow Wilson said the United States had "seen visions that other nations have not seen, and had become a determining factor in the history of mankind," and "the light of the world." President Bush hewed to the same theme while pressing to invade Iraq, "We go forward with confidence, because this call of history has come to the right country." This straight-up claim to a religious basis for the entire national project has always been a source of tremendous strength for the U.S., and for a leader who can evoke it convincingly it is even better than wrapping yourself in the flag. It rallies popular support around the holy trinity: God, America, and liberty.

"Somehow," says Shorto, "New York has never played along with this morality play. On the contrary its lowlife image hangs on in the American consciousness--corruption- and chaos-ridden, the scabby home base of all the world's hustlers and scammers--never mind the layers of gentrification and Disneyfication. The image extends to politics as well. 'Ungovernable' is the adjective that has been endlessly applied to new York City, from the Tammany Hall days to John Lindsay's wobbly Vietnam- era morality, through blackouts and riots, from Son of Sam to the squeegee guys.

"The conundrum is that New York is also, historically, the fertile soul from which some of the richest ideas and policies have been harvested," which have defined the relationship between the American people and their government. Why is it that the first American parties burst into being in the 1730's along with the idea of an organized opposition to their British rulers, and these things happened in New York? Why was the idea of a free press first articulated in 1735 by a New York printer, John Peter Zenger? Why is it that New York played a crucial role in developing the concept of the government protecting the environment (Theodore Roosevelt, New York governor) and Franklin Roosevelt took New Deal policies--the concept of the government protecting people from the darkest chasms of fate and corporate greed-- from Albany to Washington? The America Communist Party, the National Association for the advancement of Colored People and the gay rights movement all started in the city. And both liberalism and the modern conservative movement started there.

All of these disparate political forces and innovations have behind them a single theme: factions. America is a pluralistic nation, but its founding was largely an English affair. The exception is New York: or to be precise, the Dutch colony of New Netherland along the Middle Atlantic which had as its capital New Amsterdam. This colony was one of the most culturally mixed places on earth in the 17th century. Eighteen languages were being spoken in New York.