Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,097

This is the grave of Abe Beame.

Born in 1906 in London, Abraham Birnbaum grew up a Jewish immigrant family from Poland which changed its name to Beame at some point. It wasn’t quite so common for fleeing Jewish families to find political and economic safety in the UK as it was in the Americas, but it definitely happened. But just a few months after the boy was born, the family moved to New York and into the tightly packed Jewish quarters of the Lower East Side, at that time the most densely populated neighborhood in the world. Beame was a good student and his parents pushed education. So he graduated from the local schools and then was onto City College in the Business and Civic Administration school, graduating in 1928.

By the late 20s, opportunities for New York Jews were a lot more than what their parents had when they came over and Beame became an exemplar of this. He already started an accounting firm in college and he kept that going while also teaching accounting at a Queens high school. He did that from 1929 until 1946, while also teaching some classes at Rutgers during World War II. So this was a guy that was doing quite well for himself but wasn’t too remarkable as he approached his 40th birthday. Just a good American success story.

But Beame was also interested in Democratic Party politics and was a guy in the local machine. So were lots of guys so this isn’t that revelatory either. Despite teaching in Queens, he lived in Brooklyn and was part of that Democratic machine of that borough. But he was super capable. He had his firm, he had a good patronage network of his own just from teaching for so long, and so the machine started hiring him to do bigger tasks. In 1946, he was named the city’s assistant director of the budget, which was a huge job. He got promoted to the actual director in 1952 and held that position until 1961. Then he became city comptroller from 1962-65 and again from 1970-73.

Of course these were tough times for New York. The city was changing rapidly. Industry was fleeing. The nation’s housing policy strongly urged ethnic whites to flee the city for the suburbs and provided very real incentives to do so, such as home loans that were available at much lower costs in all-white areas through the redlining policies of the Federal Housing Administration, not to mention the freeway building mania after the Highway Act of 1956 provided speedy roads to get them back into the city to work. This all meant that the city’s tax base was dropping while larger parts of the city were turning into ghettos. Crime was on the rise and city finances were sketchy. So yeah, no easy task for Beame to manage this stuff! Beame had one good way to handle matters–work with the unions. For years, Mike Quill would rant and rave about bringing his transit workers out of strike but it never happened because he and Beame understood each other quite well. They would cut a deal and it would be good for the workers. Same with the garbage workers and other municipal workers.

Beame was such an effective player in the New York Democratic machine that people started talking about him as a mayoral possibility. He got the nomination in 1965. But that year, the city’s voters chose the elite rich liberal Republican John Lindsay instead. Lindsay was a good man in a lot of ways. But he was totally and completely out of touch with the working class. The strike that Quill had ranted about for years finally happened when Lindsay. who like any Republican did not like unions, tried to crack down on Quill’s TUWA and the subway workers brought the city to its knees. The garbage workers did the same thing. When Lindsay backed student protestors, the Hard Hat Riots led by revanchist building trades leader Peter Brennan not only beat up hippies, but rioted on City Hall for the flag being at half staff over the killing of the kids at Kent State. Basically, Lindsay was massively in over his head.

So in 1973, Democrats were in good shape to win the mayor again. It was a highly contested primary, as New York politics often are, and Beame won 34% of the vote, which was enough for him to win the nomination. He then won the general, making him the first Jewish mayor in the city’s history. But the conditions that New York had faced for decades were culminating in the 1975 fiscal crisis, when Gerald Ford refused to bail out the city. Beame did what he could. He knew things had to change. He cut the budget and laid off workers, attempting to balance the budget and make Washington happy. But it was just too much for him to deal with. Probably the city’s finances were too much for anyone to deal with in 1975. Then in 1977 came the legendary blackout, which shut down the city’s power structure for a full day in the middle of the summer. This was also the Bronx in Burning era, where slumlords were burning buildings for the insurance.

Beame later was seen as a bad mayor by many, but I think that’s a bit unfair because the conditions were so, so rough for anyone. He did balance the budget though. Whether that’s really that laudable, I don’t know. But who was going to handle this any better?

Now, not really being an expert on Beame, I decided to consult the archives of a true expert, our friend, the late great Steven Attewell. One of the last things he wrote for us was his ranking of recent NYC mayors. Here’s what he said about Beame:

Abe Beame (1974-1977):

The first (observant) Jewish mayor of NYC, Beame was a man tortured by the contradictions between his desire to maintain NYC’s social democratic traditions and the awful economic situation he inherited. Beame became mayor during the 1973-1975 recession, which was at the time the worst since the Great Depression, and pretty much immediately had to deal with the NYC Fiscal Crisis, and was also mayor during the 1977 Blackout because clearly the Fates just fucking hated this guy.

If Lindsay was hated by white people for being too friendly with black people, Beame brought white people and black people together in their hatred of him for his public sector layoffs, his wage freezes, and his cuts to public spending. And while it’s true that Beame absolutely adopted the logic of austerity and should be criticized for that, it should also be remembered that he was dealing with a well-organized and highly politicized capital strike that was backed up at the Federal level by the Ford Administration.

Verdict: kind of an asshole, but largely because he got mugged by Wall Street and the White House.

Seems about right to me.

Beame lived forever and basically spent his later life as a lobbyist and doing investment banking. He died in 2001, at the age of 94.

Abe Beame is buried in New Montefiore Cemetery, West Babylon, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other American mayors, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Carl Stokes is in Cleveland and Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones is in Toledo, Ohio, Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.