My Review of Mike Wallace's Gotham at War: A History of New York City, 1933-1945

 Big Apple History Through a Socialist Lens

 

Self-professed leftist historian and John Jay College professor, Mike Wallace has written a history of New York City through the New Deal years and World War II. In reading this long book (976 pages in the print edition), it seemed that it took the full thirteen years of his history. Needless to say, the book is way too long and covers way too much minutia.

 

Wallace discusses at length how the city’s various ethnic groups approached the coming of World War II. His view of New York’s ethnic groups is through the lens of cultural pluralism. Although that view has some merit, he ignores the fact that New York was becoming more homogenized and, on its way, to being a melting pot. He ignores two facets causing this. This first is that the public schools were inculcating Americanism into the minds of its students. Second, he ignores the roll of baseball which put sometimes antagonistic ethnic groups in rooting for their respective teams. Indeed, the Yankee-Dodger subway World Series was a classic and no matter which team they were rooting for, fans marveled at Joe Di Maggio's 56 game hitting streak.

 

With Hitler’s coming to power in 1933 New York’s Jews, the largest Jewish community in the world, stood as one against him. They had to face off against local Nazi’s in the German American Bund and plea with Roosevelt, to no avail, to open immigration for Jews fleeing Europe. Here Wallace ignores the role of the New York mob which stood foursquare behind the Jews in breaking up Nazi rallies. ( Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Michael Benson's "Gangsters vs. Nazis" ) Wallace rightly notes the perfidy of New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger in his downplaying of the Holocaust.

 

Wallace is all-in on the New Deal and LaGuardia’s social democratic vision for New York. What he ignores is that LaGuardia’s vision was funded by a hugely disproportionate amount of dollars flowing from Washington D.C.  Those who followed him did not have the largess of Washington behind and that put the city on an unsustainable fiscal path. Simply put, to him business was bad and government was good.

 

True to his beliefs Wallace spends an inordinate amount of time on the three-way split between, the communists, the socialists, and the New Deal liberals. This would play out in the dumping of Henry Wallace as Roosevelt’s VP in 1944. He also ignores the real gravity of the Rosenberg spy ring which went well beyond atomic spying.  

 

Wallace is particularly good at discussing the policy differences between the Fighting Liberals and the Wall Street Warriors in their focus on bringing the U.S. into the war. Both groups had decidedly different war aims. The Fighting Liberals wanted to globalize the New Deal while the Wall Street Warriors following Henry Luce's "Amercian Century,"  wanted to establish U.S. hegemony.  Incidentally, both supported free trade. Many of the architects of the Cold War who came out of Wall Street banks and law firms are here. They include Dean Acheson, James Forrestal, Paul Nitze, and John Foster Dulles, who by the way was too cozy with Nazi Germany in the 1930’s.

 

We also have a whole bunch of folks who featured in childhood growing up in New York City in the 1950’s. The include future U.S. Congresswoman Bella Abzug, feminist Betty Friedan, governors Dewey, Harriman, and Rockefeller, expert builder Robert Moses, Congressman Adam Clayton Power, Mayor Robert Wagner Jr., Attorney General Herbert Brownell, civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, and builder Bill Zeckendorf.  All-in-all, quite a cast of characters.

 

The book ends with a discussion on planning for the postwar world. There were many plans drawn up under the belief that the New Deal was still alive. It wasn’t and it pretty much died after the 1938 election. To my mind the planners failed to understand that what New Yorkers wanted were automobiles, houses, and babies. They did not want to be cooped up in apartments the planners imagined. Those desires set off the race to the suburbs of Long Island, Westchester, and New Jersey and if you really think about it represented a continuation of the trend that was established in the 1920’s that was interrupted by the depression and the war.