Stand-off over NYC finances

Last week I found myself, as the odd saying has it, in Atlanta, Georgia. Like some other old cities, it's today a rude shock to romantics. You might just as well expect to find ancient Romans in togas strutting around the streets of their northern capital Manchester as find Scarlett O'Hara and her Mammy swishing down Peachtree Street.

Atlanta, for quite a time now, has been known as the Chicago of the South. It's the American bottling centre of the first and most renowned cola drink and downtown Atlanta, to a stranger, might just as well be downtown Detroit or Indianapolis or Seattle except that it has a few beautiful modern buildings which could be in Dallas or Houston. That is a high compliment because those are the two capitals of a modern architecture that has achieved a daring felicity of design a whole civilisation away from those slabs of concrete terraces and prison peepholes, those examples of King Lear modern that deface some of the cities of this continent and, more than anywhere, I regret to say, the City of London. 

There are in Atlanta a couple of buildings – there are dozens in Texas – which are soaring monoliths of opaque glass, they look opaque on the outside though I imagine they are transparent from inside, which reflect the colour of the sky, so that, at dawn, they're a pearl grey, in mid afternoon a heavenly blue and at sunset a pillar of fire. The suburbs crowd in close on the city and since Atlanta is built on rolling country, there is a sense of being very soon in nowhere but the South, with glossy magnolia bushes bursting everywhere and platoons of 100-foot pines and lawns falling down to the widening streets, with no hedges to enclose them, in what we used to think of as the friendly American way, though now such openness is an invitation to burglars and prowlers who go 'bang' in the night. 

Well, we were being driven home by our host and he felt called on to apologise for a broken row of very rude-looking objects on the edge of the lawns that certainly detracted from the camellias and the general boskiness. They were dustbins, some closed, some spilling over with such interesting flora as orange rinds, tea leaves and hunks of lettuce. 'I see,' I said, 'that you have a strike.' 'No, no,' my host said, 'no strike. This is known as phase two of what they choose to call a city service.' Phase two means that now people get their garbage collected promptly once a week provided they haul it down to the street. The city makes a special provision on application of the halt and the lame and the very aged and, in such compassionate cases, they actually allow the dustmen to go up to the house and into the yard or back garden or whatever and themselves lift the bins down to the waiting trucks. For this luxury, there is, of course, a special charge. 

Atlanta has made the headlines frequently in the past few years, what with its black mayor and strikes and other examples of what we've come to look on as routine city turmoil. Phase two, need I say, does not rate any headlines. It's just one more sign of the decay of the cities. But the reason for it is the same as New York's, though it's not afflicting Atlanta as acutely as our town. There is simply not enough money in the cities' coffers to afford any longer a frequent collection of garbage from house to house. The same thing is happening with postal delivery. We live in New York in an apartment building that still receives a pile of mail once a day, five days a week, at the entrance. It is then sorted downstairs and deposited in separate bundles at the back door of each apartment. But this is an indulgence that is bound to end. 

The cuts in employment that Mayor Beame is frantically announcing every day go far beyond restricting new employment or trimming special services; it's the very body of normal service that is being shaved down to a skeleton. There may soon be not enough postmen to go out on the streets. We could come to do what country people in remote towns on the prairie do – go downtown every day and pick up their mail from the post office. 

The parks are no longer going to have an army of tree pruners and we may expect by the spring to see some pretty shaggy and wilting foliage and meadows sprouting weeds. The museums are getting ready to close on two or three days a week instead of one. The New York Public Library which has been – is still, I guess – one of the great libraries of the world is in such a state that it now closes for long weekends and, in the evenings, only the research rooms are open for an hour or two. The art galleries are cutting down on their guards and are, naturally, afraid of increasing vandalism. The streets will soon be visibly short of policemen as they are now visibly, in some poor districts, littered with garbage. 'Fun City', former Mayor Lindsay called it. 

The truth is that no one knows what the city will look like or feel like or act like if it is compelled to file a petition for bankruptcy. There is now a stand-off between the city and the President of the United States. He has spoken once for all, he says, but Congress is developing a bellyache and in spite of the widely advertised views of belligerent senators and congressmen who are prepared to see New York City freeze over, a public opinion poll of the whole country, this week, showed a remarkable – and to New Yorkers a heartening – percentage of Americans who think the federal government must come to the rescue. Over the whole country, it is 50 per cent and roughly one American in two, of whatever age, sex, education or race, believes there is no other way out. 

The only striking army of resistance is that of the farmers. A whopping 73 per cent of them see the issue as a simple excuse for robbing the honest countryman to pay the city slicker. This has been a predictable reaction. Any time in the past 200 years, the farmer, especially the farmer of the Midwest, the great bread basket, retain their ancient distrust of the eastern cities and their detestation of Wall Street as a rialto of money lenders and fat cats. 

On the plane of public discussion there are two main arguments and they fall, understandably, between conservatives and liberals. The conservative view is not unlike that of the Midwestern farmers, though expressed in more sophisticated prose. Thus, the most articulate of conservative columnists, Mr William Buckley, 'Assuming that $5 billion could be decocted from the air over our heads, it would still be open to question whether $5 billion rained down upon New York City would hurt or help the city strategically.' 

Obviously it would help in the short run, but it's not the short run that aid is supposed to be concerned with, barring flood or famine. If New York really needs to do something about its finances, then it is going to have to wrestle with economic reality rather than promenade happily through the pastures of Utopia. As it happens, the money proposed for New York City is money taken from the pockets of a lot of Americans who don't live in New York City – policemen and firemen and teachers and cab drivers and nurses and pensioners. 

A Southern senator who has threatened to filibuster any federal assistance bill put it more pithily still. 'It would be like,' he said, 'delivering a case of whisky to an alcoholic on his promise never to drink again.' 

The liberal view is normally most fervently stated by Mr Anthony Lewis of the New York Times and, on the desperate need for salvation via Washington, he has not let us down. 'Fifty years ago,' he writes, 'the federal government had little to do with the state of the national economy. Now it is decisive. American business hangs on Washington and so do the cities. Taxes, the level of federal spending, interest rates, the decisions of federal officials shape the business cycle and the economy of the cities. Pontius Pilate would have had a hard time in the circumstances washing his hands of federal responsibility for the trouble of American cities. In any event, in a federal system, the centre must be prepared to help the constituent parts in emergencies. That is why the very first Congress of a still weak United States passed legislation in 1790 to assume the states' revolutionary war debts. Statesmen thought the country's economic health was more important than politics.' 

The last remark is a glancing blow at President Ford. And it's the growing conviction of all liberals, and of many Republicans of the centre, that Mr Ford's downright scolding stand on New York City is dictated not by careful reasoning or moral conviction, but by his fear of the rising prestige on the right wing of our old Western B-film hero and former governor of California, Ronald Reagan. 

Mr Reagan, it's pretty certain, is going to enter the Republican primaries in the first test of national sentiment about who should be the next president; that is the New Hampshire primary next March. Now New Hampshire is a small state but it has buried many a famous hopeful and it's safe to say that if Reagan thrashed the president in that first primary, Mr Ford could see his party's nomination going out the White House window. Mr Reagan evidently has been seeing the polls of the last year or so which say that Americans are, more and more, turning conservative but that doesn't mean that they're moving in larger numbers to the Republican Party. The Republicans still have only one registered voter to every two Democrats and a lot of Democrats may be turning conservative too. But that only means that they want their party to stay closer to the centre. They certainly want no part of Mr Reagan. 

Mr Reagan has started barnstorming around the country inciting New York's plea for help as a typical example of liberal whining to have Big Daddy always on hand. Mr Ford feels that he cannot afford to lose the right wing of his party so he's aping Reagan and taking his stand, too, with Farmer Giles. In California, the president praised San Franciscans for rebuilding on their own the ravages of their 1906 earthquake and fire, though in fact the city got $2 million of federal help and the rest from national banks. 

But Mr Ford has stood four-square before and the wind has blown and he's adjusted his stance. When the results are in of last Tuesday's city and state elections, he might well be seen standing on the White House lawn, wetting his finger and raising it on high and deciding that Reagan is right or wrong – or really doesn't count at all. We shall see.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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