Should New York City Be the 51st State?

The political connection between the people of the city and the state has been used by the latter to our injury. Our burdens have been increased, our substance eaten out and our municipal liberty destroyed. Why may not New York disrupt the bonds that bind her to a corrupt and venal master?

THAT bitter justification for demanding that New York City seek statehood carries the contemporary flavor of Mayor John Lindsay's continuing crusade for municipal independence. Yet it was offered more than a century ago by a Lindsay predecessor, Mayor Fernando Wood, in 1861. More recent mayors, including Jimmy Walker and Robert Wagner, have sought similar escape from the political shackles imposed by a state that the city dominates in almost every other way. In 1959 the New York City council approved creation of a committee to study secession, and a bill calling for a referendum on the establishing of a city-state was introduced in the New York legislature about the same time. Both efforts died from lack of interest. Mayoralty Candidate Norman Mailer revived the idea in 1969 when he made the 51st state his key campaign issue.

The idea is still something of a pipedream. But as New York City's problems multiply, its residents increasingly resent the spectacle of their elected officials pleading with smalltown legislators for permission to change the shift schedules of city patrolmen, retain rent control or decentralize schools. Albany's death grip over how the city raises and spends its own money is an even more serious matter. Thus the merits of independence cannot be airily dismissed. Lindsay's appointment of a commission to study statehood is not really as "childish" as Governor Nelson Rockefeller suggests.

No one is certain how statehood could be achieved. New York City's impetuous Congresswoman Bella Abzug has opened a drive to ask the city's voters in November to approve a resolution petitioning Congress to admit the city to the Union as a state. The New York legislature would also have to give its approval, a most improbable happening since the state would lose roughly half of its annual revenue. On the other hand, Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton contends that the rest of the state would say "good riddance" to the city and its troubles. Sutton suggests that the November referendum should also authorize the election of delegates to a City-State Constitutional Convention. They would submit a constitution at the next city election; if it is approved, statehood bills would then be introduced in the legislature and Congress. But there is no certainty that city residents would buy the concept, much less the constitutional details. Staten Island President Robert T. Connor has already said that his borough would not go along and recalled that borough officials recently studied "how to get the hell out of New York City."

Lindsay suggests that this kind of objection could be met by making each of the five boroughs a city in the new state. A Lindsay staff memorandum insists that "statehood is not an unrealistic possibility. Indeed, it may well be the only sensible approach to governing New York City." Statehood supporters contend that the city's residents and corporations last year paid $2.8 billion in taxes to the state and got back only about 600 in local aid for each dollar (they paid almost $12 billion to the Federal Government, as well, and got back less than 13-c- on the dollar). The staff memo places the city's gain in revenue at about $1 billion a year, even after the city assumes the state's share of running such services as courts and subways. As a state, it would also presumably qualify for a bigger share of the many federal aid programs. Yet the whole structure of existing fiscal ties between the city and state is so confusingly interwoven that no one knows just how much better off--if at all--the city would be after the arrangement is unraveled.

There is considerable validity to New York City's arguments for greater freedom to handle its own affairs. In an urban age, the nation's destiny and the well-being of most of its citizens depend upon the quality of life and economic health of its large cities. Most academic experts agree that states have not only shortchanged and hamstrung their cities but are themselves the least creative and effective of the three levels of government. But the general weakness of state government and its dwindling usefulness makes the experts also question the utility of solving anything by creating another state. New York City's conversion would be particularly unworkable without incorporating its populous suburbs; but they are thriving precisely because their residents wanted to escape the city's many plagues. No one in Lindsay's office believes that neighboring Westchester and Nassau counties would want to join the new state.

Basic changes in government relationships, however, are sorely needed, not only to aid New York City but to ease the agonies of many large cities. Says Harvard Sociologist Daniel Bell: "The whole system is out of whack now. Almost nothing meshes. Services that should be performed by the Federal Government are now saddled on local governments, and others that could be handled much better at a local level are exclusively Washington's." Rexford Tugwell, the New Deal brain-truster who has headed a six-year production of an imaginary new U.S. Constitution at Santa Barbara's Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, points out that cities are not even mentioned in the Constitution. "The concept of a governmental entity the size of the city of New York or Chicago or Los Angeles did not even exist at the time the Constitution was written." He considers state domination of the large cities "preposterous."

The academics find much more merit in Lindsay's latest --and far more realistic--proposal to create "national cities" that would be free of most ties to their states and would deal directly with Washington on those issues that most affect them, such as welfare, health and trade. Another scholar at the Santa Barbara Center, Political Scientist Harvey Wheeler, claims that Americans have been conditioned to look at government structure only in geographical terms and that this is "a clearly obsolete system." Below the federal level government should be based "on principles of association and common interest." The large cities and their surrounding population concentrations have much more in common with each other than with the intervening rural areas, he argues.

Creating national cities has some distinct political advantages over the city-state concept. It could conceivably be accomplished by getting Congress to issue special charters to the selected cities, much as it has created other units to handle specific problems, including TVA and Amtrak (to run beleaguered railroads). This might bypass the need for reluctant state legislatures to approve the independence of the cities. Moreover, the cities could exert political pressure at the federal level. Even the advocates of New York as the 51st state concede that the new state would have little clout in Congress. Admits New York City Budget Director Edward Hamilton: "Taking the problem-ridden, overburdened metropolitan area and making it a separate entity with interests substantially different from those of its fellow states, we'd find ourselves very naked and alone in congressional debates."

The new consideration of national cities and city-states is a refreshing move to examine the rationale of the nation's long-accepted governmental divisions. One of the most important national problems throughout the next 20 years, predicts Bell, will be to decide the most effective social unit to handle each social problem. "What is best left to the neighborhoods?" he asks. "What to townships? What to municipalities? What to metropolitan areas? What to regions and what to the Federal Government?" The questions are simple, the answers elusive--but an imaginative quest for them is essential to the future of the nation.

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