<div class="header">
<div class="left">
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/"><img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo153x23.gif" alt="The New York Times" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0"></a>
</div>
<div class="right">
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/adx/bin/adx_click.html?type=goto&opzn&page=www.nytimes.com/printer-friendly&pos=Position1&sn2=336c557e/4f3dd5d2&sn1=86f11b28/f31e8b54&camp=FSL2012_ArticleTools_120x60_1787511c_nyt5&ad=BOSW_120x60_June13_NoText_Secure&goto=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Efoxsearchlight%2Ecom%2Fbeastsofthesouthernwild" target="_blank">
<br></a>
</div>
</div>
<br clear="all"><hr align="left" size="1">
<div class="timestamp">October 6, 2012</div>
<h1>How the G.O.P. Became the Anti-Urban Party</h1>
<h6 class="byline">By
<span><span>KEVIN BAKER</span></span></h6>
<div id="articleBody">
<p>
A LEADING Republican columnist, trying to re-stoke her candidate’s
faltering campaign before the first presidential debate, felt so
desperate that she advised him to turn to cities. </p>
<p>
“Wade into the crowd, wade into the fray, hold a hell of a rally in an American city — don’t they count anymore?” Peggy Noonan <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/2012/09/18/time-for-an-intervention/">lamented</a>
in The Wall Street Journal. “A big, dense city with skyscrapers like
canyons, crowds and placards, and yelling. All of our campaigning now is
in bland suburbs and tired hustings.” </p>
<p>
But the fact is that cities don’t count anymore — at least not in national Republican politics. </p>
<p>
The very word “city” went all but unheard at the Republican convention, held in the rudimentary city of Tampa, Fla. The <a href="http://www.gop.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/2012GOPPlatform.pdf">party platform</a>
ratified there is over 31,000 words long. It includes subsections on
myriad pressing topics, like “Restructuring the U.S. Postal Service for
the Twenty-First Century” and “American Sovereignty in U.S. Courts,”
which features a full-throated denunciation of the “unreasonable
extension” of the Lacey Act of 1900 (please don’t ask). There are also
passages specifying what our national policy should be all over the
world — but not in one American city. </p>
<p>
Actually, that’s not quite true. Right after “Honoring Our Relationship
With American Indians” and shortly before “Honoring and Supporting
Americans in the Territories,” the Republican platform addresses another
enclave of benighted quasi-citizens: the District of Columbia. Most of
what it has to say is about forcing the district to accept school
vouchers, lax gun laws and the fact that it will never be a state. It
also scolds the district for corruption and “decades of inept one-party
rule.” Only a city would get yelled at. </p>
<p>
The very few sections that address urban concerns contain similar
complaints about cities’ current priorities — not to mention the very
idea of city life. The Republican platform bitterly denounces the
Democrats for diverting some highway fund money to Amtrak and harrumphs
that it is “long past time for the federal government to get out of the
way and allow private ventures to provide passenger service to the
Northeast corridor. The same holds true with regard to high-speed and
intercity rail across the country.” </p>
<p>
The Obama administration, the Republicans conclude damningly, is
“replacing civil engineering with social engineering as it pursues an
exclusively urban vision of dense housing and government transit.”
</p>
<p>
Unsurprisingly, the chairman of the Republican platform committee, Gov.
Bob McDonnell of Virginia, is from a state that has no city with a
population of 500,000 or more. One of his two “co-chairmen” was Senator
John Hoeven of North Dakota, which ranks 47th among the states in
population density. The other was Marsha Blackburn, who represents a
largely suburban district of Tennessee. </p>
<p>
IT could hardly be otherwise. The Republican Party is, more than ever
before in its history, an anti-urban party, its support gleaned
overwhelmingly from suburban and rural districts — especially in
presidential elections. </p>
<p>
This wasn’t always the case. During the heyday of the urban political
machines, from the Civil War to the Great Depression, Republicans used
to hold their own in our nation’s great cities. Philadelphia was
dominated for decades by a Republican machine. In Chicago — naturally —
both parties had highly competitive, wildly corrupt machines, with a
buffoonish Republican mayor, “Big Bill” Thompson, presiding over the
city during the ascent of Al Capone. In the 1928 presidential election,
the Republican Herbert Hoover swept to victory while carrying cities all
across the country: Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Chicago; Detroit;
Atlanta; Birmingham, Ala.; Houston; Dallas; Omaha and Los Angeles.
</p>
<p>
With the possible exception of Houston or maybe Omaha, it’s all but
inconceivable that Mr. Romney will carry any of those cities. And that’s
due in good part to the man Hoover defeated, more than 80 years ago.
</p>
<p>
The rise of Alfred E. Smith to the top of the Democratic Party confirmed
a sea change in American life. Smith was not simply the first Catholic
to lead a major-party ticket. He was also a quintessentially urban
candidate, like no one who has ever seriously contended for the
presidency before or since. </p>
<p>
Born in 1873 on Oliver Street, on the edge of Manhattan’s Chinatown, he
was forced to leave school after the death of his father. He never went
back, toiling at the Fulton Fish Market for $12 a week. Elected to the
New York State Assembly by Tammany Hall’s political machine, he worked
his way up to speaker, then governor. </p>
<p>
In Albany, Smith pushed through some of the most important social
legislation in our history. Yet everything about him remained
unacceptably “ghetto” to much of America: the way he dressed; the
stogies he smoked in public; his heavy New York accent; and the way he
enjoyed singing old Bowery tunes while enjoying a beer with the boys.
</p>
<p>
It was almost as if today a candidate from the projects — a high-school
dropout who still dressed in hip-hop fashion and liked to occasionally
drop in to a club to D.J. for a couple of hours — were to become a
serious presidential candidate. </p>
<p>
“To hundreds of thousands of old-stock Americans, Smith might just as
well have been Jewish or black,” the historian Lawrence H. Fuchs wrote.
New York “meant night life, short skirts, prostitution, Jewish
intellectuals and the Union Theological Seminary.” </p>
<p>
In an openly bigoted campaign, <a href="http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/10/when-a-catholic-terrified-the-heartland/">Smith was assailed</a>
in millions of coarse, anti-Catholic pamphlets and handbills; even a
Methodist bishop viciously attacked his “Romanism.” He walked away from
the race a bitter man and the cities went with him. By 1930, over 56
percent of all Americans already lived in urban areas. </p>
<p>
The Great Depression secured their loyalty to the Democratic Party.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the cities showcases for the New Deal —
especially New York, under the liberal Republican reformer, Fiorello H.
La Guardia. Federal money poured in, but in the end the New Deal was
about more than building new bridges or getting people off the bread
lines. Contrary to Mr. Romney’s contention that government aid
automatically turns people into “victims” and “dependents,” Washington’s
intervention turned urban Americans from subjects into citizens who
could claim the necessities of life as a right, not a favor. </p>
<p>
In so doing, it began to shrivel the urban political machines, though it
would take decades before they disappeared completely. The cities,
which had been places of horrible suffering during the early years of
the Great Depression, became alluring again, attracting a dynamic if
volatile new mix of the rural poor, black, white and Hispanic. By 1950,
almost two-thirds of all Americans lived in urban areas. </p>
<p>
Save for mavericks like La Guardia, Republicans had little to add to
this battle for the soul of the city. Increasingly, a Republican mayor
of a major city became a curiosity. In presidential elections, big
cities went Republican only during landslides. </p>
<p>
This didn’t seem to matter in the postwar years, as demographic trends
began to shift sharply away from the city. Newly prosperous whites and
eventually blacks pursued the American dream out to the suburbs. The
urban industrial base left too. </p>
<p>
FOR Republicans, cities now became object lessons on the shortcomings of
activist government and the welfare state — sinkholes of crime and
social dysfunction, where Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” cavorted in
their Cadillacs. The very idea of the city seemed to be a thing of the
past, an archaic concept — so much so that Gerald R. Ford seriously
considered letting New York go bankrupt in 1975. </p>
<p>
This probably cost Ford the 1976 election — much as Mr. Romney’s
opposition to “saving Detroit” may yet cost him this one, thanks to all
the votes of auto-parts workers he stands to sacrifice in Ohio.
Tragically, once-great cities like St. Louis or Newark never fully
recovered from postwar deindustrialization. But urban living was far
from dead. Instead, the American economy began to reinvent itself in
cities, as they became cleaner, greener, safer, more prosperous, more
fun. As the demographic wheel turned again, both new immigrants and a
generation of Americans born and raised in the ’burbs moved back in.
</p>
<p>
Today, four-fifths of the population lives in an urban area — the
highest percentage in our history. Although the country remains largely
suburban, one in 12 Americans lives in a city of over a million people.
More than ever, they are stakeholders, owning where previous generations
rented, creating their own jobs and opportunities. Traditional liberal
bastions like the Upper West Side of Manhattan are now filled with the
owners of co-ops and condominiums worth hundreds of thousands, even
millions of dollars. Over 140,000 New Yorkers in all — or nearly 4
percent of the labor force — work out of their homes. The percentages
are even higher in Los Angeles and Chicago. Most of these individuals
are skilled, highly educated “job creators” for themselves and others —
the very demographic that Republicans claim to want to attract. </p>
<p>
Some have managed it. The Upper West Side voted for the re-election of
both the businessman Michael R. Bloomberg and the former prosecutor
Rudolph W. Giuliani. Over the past 25 years, cities like Indianapolis,
San Diego and even Los Angeles have elected — and re-elected —
Republican mayors. </p>
<p>
Yet the national Republican Party still can’t get seem to get past its
animus toward the very idea of urban life. The only place that Amtrak
turns a profit is the Northeast corridor — yet all Republicans can think
to do is privatize it, along with the local rail lines on which
millions of Americans have been commuting into cities to work for as
long as a century and a half. Republicans promise to ban same-sex
marriage, make it easier for anyone to get a gun, delegitimize and
destroy what they mockingly call “public employees’ unions,” and deport
the immigrant workers performing so many thankless but vital tasks.
</p>
<p>
In short, they promise to rip and tear at the immensely complex fabric
of city life while sneering at the entire “urban vision of dense housing
and government transit.” There is a terrible arrogance here that has
ramifications well beyond the Republicans’ electoral prospects. </p>
<p>
There wasn’t so much as a mention of cities in the debate on domestic
issues the presidential candidates had last week. Nor did the Democrats
have much to say about cities at their convention in Charlotte, N.C.
They didn’t have to. Politically, Democrats don’t have to say anything
about the urban experience; they embody it. But in too many cities this
allows them to keep running corrupt and mediocre candidates. </p>
<p>
Mr. Giuliani and Mayor Bloomberg — both Democrats turned Republicans —
saw their opportunity in displacing these tired party satraps. Between
them, they embraced exactly the sort of “Chinese menu” variety of policy
choices that Americans say they prefer. Between them, they backed tough
law-enforcement tactics and strict gun laws, supported gay rights and
major real-estate developments, opposed smoking in bars and a “living
wage.” </p>
<p>
Other Republican mayors have scored similar successes around the
country. Susan Golding, the second woman and first Jewish mayor of San
Diego, was a pro-gay-rights, pro-affirmative-action executive who also
built that city’s first homeless shelter — and cracked down on crime
while creating “one-stop shopping” for new businesses seeking permits.
</p>
<p>
The dynasty of Republican mayors begun by Richard G. Lugar in
Indianapolis had a prophetic champion in the Buffalo congressman Jack F.
Kemp, who tried hard to provide Republicans with a potential urban
agenda when he was secretary of housing and urban development under the
first President Bush. Mr. Kemp insisted that the party denounce racism
and pioneered urban “enterprise zones” — there are over 800 of them
today — and even tried to extend the idea of the urban stakeholder
movement to the residents of public housing projects by allowing them to
buy their own homes. </p>
<p>
“This is my way of redeeming my existence on earth,” Mr. Kemp once told a
group of reporters. “I wasn’t there with Rosa Parks or Dr. King or John
Lewis, but I am here now, and I am going to yell from the rooftops
about what we need to do.” </p>
<p>
THE potential for change, should Republicans start shouting from the
rooftops about cities, is enormous. Constituencies change parties — and
in America, parties change constituents, opening them up to the concerns
of others, because of the need to form broad, national coalitions. A
Republican Party seeking to actively win cities, not just vilify them or
suppress their vote, could open the party up to all sorts of new
immigrant voters, like Asian and Latino Americans — and maybe even bring
back part of an old voting bloc: black people. </p>
<p>
At a moment when Republican Party’s “dog whistles” are more racially
pitched than ever, this may sound crazy. Yet one got the impression this
election season, for instance, that Cory A. Booker, the mayor of
Newark, would like some new place to turn. Mayor Booker has battled
valiantly against the sclerotic, black political establishment in his
own city as well as outside white indifference. A Mayor Booker who had
someplace to go besides the Democratic Party with his city’s votes would
be immediately empowered as never before. </p>
<p>
Republicans in turn could show on a very human level that they are more
than the mere radio ranters who constitute so much of what urban voters
get to hear of the right wing. They would have to vie for votes in a
manner that reflects urban realities instead of fantastical theories.
Imagine a serious, practical discussion of educational reform or mass
transit, instead of more heavy-handed attempts to demonize teachers’
unions or privatize the rails. </p>
<p>
The prospects for any such change don’t seem high right now. But that
may change, too, out of necessity. The Republican refusal to contest the
cities has left them in a permanently defensive stance in national
campaigns. This can’t continue. The courts have already struck down many
voter suppression laws, and the party’s 2008 presidential results read
like an actuarial table, with Republicans increasing their percentage of
the vote mainly in aging districts that are losing population. In the
meantime, as urban areas continue to grow, they become more and more
intertwined with what were once distant suburbs, making “urban” issues
all the more pertinent to everyone. </p>
<p>
The old antagonisms between cities and suburbs will give way to
cooperation over everything from where to build the next airport to how
to combine municipal services to how to spread the wealth cities
generate. And for that matter, over half of all minorities in
metropolitan areas — including African-Americans — do not live in the
inner city but in surrounding suburbs. </p>
<p>
Republicans may not want to go to the cities. But that doesn’t much matter. The cities are coming to them. </p>
<div class="authorIdentification">
<p>Kevin Baker is the author of the “City of Fire” series of historical novels: “Dreamland,” “Paradise Alley” and “Strivers Row.”</p> </div>
<div class="articleCorrection">
</div>
</div>
<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<br><a href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com" target="_blank">art.deco.studios@gmail.com</a><br><br><img src="http://users.moscow.com/waf/WP%20Fox%2001.jpg"><br><br>