New York taxi drivers - 20 October 1995

Getting in a cab the other day and noticing something of a traffic jam down 5th Avenue, I suggested to the driver that we might go over to Park Avenue, which is theoretically and often is, barred to commercial traffic. He promptly moved over to the right lane and I realised he was going to turn into Central Park. "No, no please," I said. "Over to Park Avenue." He had trouble with the word "over", but he got the idea when I made great sweeping gestures indicating that a left turn over to Park Avenue was essential.

He was a young, I'd say well set up, rather muscular, typical young American some people would have said, his trouble was with the language. I asked him if this was his first job. Total blank, despair on his face. Then I remembered what a local politician had told me fairly recently, taxi driving is an entry profession. I quickly improvised, "Profesión your entrada?" With a rising inflection it was close enough anyway for him to get it. "Your first job?" was double Dutch.

Well about 40 years ago, chances were that your cab driver would be an old Irishman, Italian, German – they're long gone. The first break in the shall we say, ethnic identity of cab drivers, came when the Puerto Ricans, the first big wave of immigrants after the Second War poured in. They came in very much on the basis of the immigration into Britain of Jamaicans or for that matter of Indians. Puerto Rican was an American possession – still is – it was swiped from or ceded by Spain almost a century ago at the end of the Spanish American War.

In the early 1950s, the Mayor of New York invited the Puerto Ricans in very much in the manner of Queen Victoria saying in a fateful phrase in the middle of the last century: "Always remember you are children of this great empire, Britain is your homeland." Similarly, the Mayor of New York said: "You are American citizens, why not think of New York as your home," without guessing how many would take him up on it. He assumed a few hundred. The city was swamped with many thousands who moved into and around Harlem, and thus prolonged. Earlier poor immigrants had initiated the struggle with the resident blacks for housing and schools and playgrounds, so by the mid 50s the new faces in the New York taxi business were Puerto Rican. By now they also are long gone.

I don't know when taxi driving became an entry profession, when the onward and upward idea developed into an immigrant movement, but it's undoubtedly true today that most Manhattan cab drivers have been in the job a year or two at most. From their mastery of the language, English, you'd assumed they'd been here about a week. It's become a problem for, problem for other drivers. A black driver said to me a month or two ago: "The Mayor says we ought to have a second language, I don't know what he has in mind. Sure as you're born it ain't English." Well, now the profession is made up of Russians Israelis, Haitian, French, Rumanians, some Sikhs, Vietnamese, a scatter of South and Central Americans, Columbians, Peruvians and soon no doubt Croats and Bosnians.

This little episode made me think back to a television director the BBC hired to direct one or two of the episodes in my television history of America, which grey beards may remember was exposed to public view, my goodness 23 years ago. The director, an apple cheeked brown eyed young fellow, a good deal shrewder and older than his appearance, arrived in New York ready to direct an episode called: The Huddled Masses, which was an hour long documentary on the great immigrant tidal wave at the turn of this century. He was troubled the very evening he arrived. How so? "Do you think," he asked me "We'll be able to find enough broken accents?" – that was always the phrase Englishmen used to use about people whose accent didn't break their way. I told him not to worry for a second. And once we went way downtown to some of the famous tenement streets, there were lots of people, man and women, with sure enough, broken accents. They were all by the way, I should say in their 30s and older. In other words something that didn't strike me, except in recollection, years later, the young ones talked straightforward New York street American. Today, that would not necessarily be so.

If my young director, now well along in his 40s came back here today, he would have no trouble finding broken accents, but he would, I'm sure, feel just as much bewilderment with American politics as he did when we filmed the wretched alleys and dumps of many of the slums that in the 1900s the immigrants moved into. We concentrated on the one politician who considered their plight and did something about it and he's a political hero worth recalling. He was a Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt of the old Hudson Valley Anglo Dutch family. At a time when politics, especially city politics, were being taken over by tough political machines, Theodore 'Teddy' Roosevelt was a throwback to an earlier time, to the early 19th century when the educated upper crust from long settled American families of means, assumed that government, first local and then national, was the proper, indeed the dutiful place for people who had been born, as the saying went, too privileged.

Teddy Roosevelt, a squat substantial figure with a moustache and lots of chuckling teeth, had once been a puny child and he was put on an anxious regiment of muscle building exercises. To the alarm of his colleagues and the astonishment of his parents he turned into an explorer thrashing through the Brazilian jungles, barking across the plains of Africa and returning with more pelts, torsos, horns, antlers, heads and skins of more animals than later on the White House could accommodate without bruising the heads and elbows of the passing guests.

Roosevelt began as a police commissioner of New York and at once went after the Ellis Island inspectors: he made them able and courteous. Then he moved in on the grafters of various kinds who swindled the immigrants they brought under their wing. He moved on and became governor of New York and went without any mercy after the sweatshop owners and the tenement landlords. Put it another way, he became a nuisance and an embarrassment to the party bosses and to what they then called the "interests", and we should call the establishment, so the bosses decided the best thing to do was to get him out of state, New York State politics and contrive to get him nominated as vice president of the United States. And that's what he became upon the election of President McKinley. Nobody of course had counted on the assassination of Mr McKinley after only a few months in office. To the delight of the New York progressives and the disgust of the party bosses Teddy Roosevelt became the youngest president in American history at 41. He still is. He at once took off again on his reforming rampage, at first after the slaughter houses and the unhealthy packaging of food, then the bankers, and in his finest hour, the vastly new rich robber barons: the Rockefellers, the Harrimans, the Vanderbilts, the Fisks who through their control of the railroads of coke and coal and iron and steel were really running the country. Malefactors, Roosevelt called them, of great wealth. The conglomerates or trusts they fashioned, he called an octopus whose tentacles bind the immigrants as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house.

Well, when we began filming this lively story and I launched into my piece of Teddy Roosevelt, the young director was pleased with the performance, but I noticed afterwards he was very troubled. What could the matter be? "But you see Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican," he said. "That's right." "But I thought Republicans were the reactionaries and the Democrats were the great progressives?" "Not," I said "back then. From the Civil War for about 50 years all the reforming zeal was with the Republicans. Remember, they were founded in 1856 in the main as the party to abolish slavery." He was aghast. He would be almost as aghast today if he arrived in Washington, in the knowledge that since the other Roosevelt, Franklin, the Democrats have been the great reformers champion of the people, and the Republicans have reluctantly aped their reforms becoming known as "Me-too" Democrats.

Well what a transformation has happened since the Republicans took over the control of the Congress. For good or ill it is the Speaker of the House Mr Gingrich who is the feared revolutionary, and his army has spent the last few weeks deregulating everything in sight: slicing the fat from many bureaucracies, drastically trimming welfare benefits, cutting the benefits the old may expect from Medicare, giving tax breaks to small business – the Democrats old buddies – but here's the puzzle, more or less forgetting big business, foreign trade, the banks.

On the other hand, Mr Clinton, looking at economics beyond the range of small business, has fought labour to secure the North American Free Trade Agreement, promoted other free trade pacts in Asia and Latin America, used the presidency to get contracts for American business around the world. President Clinton the New York Times declared the other day, ever since he came to office has done more for the 500 biggest corporations in the country than virtually any other president this century. He has been responsible, the paper says, for a political earthquake a seismic shift in the party's view of business.

Now many corporation presidents find themselves in a uniquely uncomfortable position: they are lifelong Republicans, they've always deplored the Democrats obsession with small business, but now Clinton has done more for them than any of the nine Republicans running for the presidency. What to do? Vote for Clinton? Preposterous. Just now anyway it all adds up to a bewilderment in the ideology of American politics that puzzles more people than my baffled young director. It could so confuse the voters and split the Republicans several ways, that who do you suppose might be most likely to succeed Bill Clinton as President? Why, Bill Clinton of course!

Edited LFA 1995-10-20.txt

Getting in a cab the other day and noticing something of a traffic jam down 5th Avenue, I suggested to the driver that we might go over to Park Avenue, which is theoretically and often is, barred to commercial traffic. He promptly moved over to the right lane and I realised he was going to turn into Central Park. "No, no please," I said. "Over to Park Avenue." He had trouble with the word "over", but he got the idea when I made great sweeping gestures indicating that a left turn over to Park Avenue was essential.

He was a young, I'd say well set up, rather muscular, typical young American some people would have said, his trouble was with the language. I asked him if this was his first job. Total blank, despair on his face. Then I remembered what a local politician had told me fairly recently, taxi driving is an entry profession. I quickly improvised, "Profesión your entrada?" With a rising inflection it was close enough anyway for him to get it. "Your first job?" was double Dutch.

Well about 40 years ago, chances were that your cab driver would be an old Irishman, Italian, German – they're long gone. The first break in the shall we say, ethnic identity of cab drivers, came when the Puerto Ricans, the first big wave of immigrants after the Second War poured in. They came in very much on the basis of the immigration into Britain of Jamaicans or for that matter of Indians. Puerto Rican was an American possession – still is – it was swiped from or ceded by Spain almost a century ago at the end of the Spanish American War.

In the early 1950s, the Mayor of New York invited the Puerto Ricans in very much in the manner of Queen Victoria saying in a fateful phrase in the middle of the last century: "Always remember you are children of this great empire, Britain is your homeland." Similarly, the Mayor of New York said: "You are American citizens, why not think of New York as your home," without guessing how many would take him up on it. He assumed a few hundred. The city was swamped with many thousands who moved into and around Harlem, and thus prolonged. Earlier poor immigrants had initiated the struggle with the resident blacks for housing and schools and playgrounds, so by the mid 50s the new faces in the New York taxi business were Puerto Rican. By now they also are long gone.

I don't know when taxi driving became an entry profession, when the onward and upward idea developed into an immigrant movement, but it's undoubtedly true today that most Manhattan cab drivers have been in the job a year or two at most. From their mastery of the language, English, you'd assumed they'd been here about a week. It's become a problem for, problem for other drivers. A black driver said to me a month or two ago: "The Mayor says we ought to have a second language, I don't know what he has in mind. Sure as you're born it ain't English." Well, now the profession is made up of Russians Israelis, Haitian, French, Rumanians, some Sikhs, Vietnamese, a scatter of South and Central Americans, Columbians, Peruvians and soon no doubt Croats and Bosnians.

This little episode made me think back to a television director the BBC hired to direct one or two of the episodes in my television history of America, which grey beards may remember was exposed to public view, my goodness 23 years ago. The director, an apple cheeked brown eyed young fellow, a good deal shrewder and older than his appearance, arrived in New York ready to direct an episode called: The Huddled Masses, which was an hour long documentary on the great immigrant tidal wave at the turn of this century. He was troubled the very evening he arrived. How so? "Do you think," he asked me "We'll be able to find enough broken accents?" – that was always the phrase Englishmen used to use about people whose accent didn't break their way. I told him not to worry for a second. And once we went way downtown to some of the famous tenement streets, there were lots of people, man and women, with sure enough, broken accents. They were all by the way, I should say in their 30s and older. In other words something that didn't strike me, except in recollection, years later, the young ones talked straightforward New York street American. Today, that would not necessarily be so.

If my young director, now well along in his 40s came back here today, he would have no trouble finding broken accents, but he would, I'm sure, feel just as much bewilderment with American politics as he did when we filmed the wretched alleys and dumps of many of the slums that in the 1900s the immigrants moved into. We concentrated on the one politician who considered their plight and did something about it and he's a political hero worth recalling. He was a Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt of the old Hudson Valley Anglo Dutch family. At a time when politics, especially city politics, were being taken over by tough political machines, Theodore 'Teddy' Roosevelt was a throwback to an earlier time, to the early 19th century when the educated upper crust from long settled American families of means, assumed that government, first local and then national, was the proper, indeed the dutiful place for people who had been born, as the saying went, too privileged.

Teddy Roosevelt, a squat substantial figure with a moustache and lots of chuckling teeth, had once been a puny child and he was put on an anxious regiment of muscle building exercises. To the alarm of his colleagues and the astonishment of his parents he turned into an explorer thrashing through the Brazilian jungles, barking across the plains of Africa and returning with more pelts, torsos, horns, antlers, heads and skins of more animals than later on the White House could accommodate without bruising the heads and elbows of the passing guests.

Roosevelt began as a police commissioner of New York and at once went after the Ellis Island inspectors: he made them able and courteous. Then he moved in on the grafters of various kinds who swindled the immigrants they brought under their wing. He moved on and became governor of New York and went without any mercy after the sweatshop owners and the tenement landlords. Put it another way, he became a nuisance and an embarrassment to the party bosses and to what they then called the "interests", and we should call the establishment, so the bosses decided the best thing to do was to get him out of state, New York State politics and contrive to get him nominated as vice president of the United States. And that's what he became upon the election of President McKinley. Nobody of course had counted on the assassination of Mr McKinley after only a few months in office. To the delight of the New York progressives and the disgust of the party bosses Teddy Roosevelt became the youngest president in American history at 41. He still is. He at once took off again on his reforming rampage, at first after the slaughter houses and the unhealthy packaging of food, then the bankers, and in his finest hour, the vastly new rich robber barons: the Rockefellers, the Harrimans, the Vanderbilts, the Fisks who through their control of the railroads of coke and coal and iron and steel were really running the country. Malefactors, Roosevelt called them, of great wealth. The conglomerates or trusts they fashioned, he called an octopus whose tentacles bind the immigrants as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house.

Well, when we began filming this lively story and I launched into my piece of Teddy Roosevelt, the young director was pleased with the performance, but I noticed afterwards he was very troubled. What could the matter be? "But you see Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican," he said. "That's right." "But I thought Republicans were the reactionaries and the Democrats were the great progressives?" "Not," I said "back then. From the Civil War for about 50 years all the reforming zeal was with the Republicans. Remember, they were founded in 1856 in the main as the party to abolish slavery." He was aghast. He would be almost as aghast today if he arrived in Washington, in the knowledge that since the other Roosevelt, Franklin, the Democrats have been the great reformers champion of the people, and the Republicans have reluctantly aped their reforms becoming known as "Me-too" Democrats.

Well what a transformation has happened since the Republicans took over the control of the Congress. For good or ill it is the Speaker of the House Mr Gingrich who is the feared revolutionary, and his army has spent the last few weeks deregulating everything in sight: slicing the fat from many bureaucracies, drastically trimming welfare benefits, cutting the benefits the old may expect from Medicare, giving tax breaks to small business – the Democrats old buddies – but here's the puzzle, more or less forgetting big business, foreign trade, the banks.

On the other hand, Mr Clinton, looking at economics beyond the range of small business, has fought labour to secure the North American Free Trade Agreement, promoted other free trade pacts in Asia and Latin America, used the presidency to get contracts for American business around the world. President Clinton the New York Times declared the other day, ever since he came to office has done more for the 500 biggest corporations in the country than virtually any other president this century. He has been responsible, the paper says, for a political earthquake a seismic shift in the party's view of business.

Now many corporation presidents find themselves in a uniquely uncomfortable position: they are lifelong Republicans, they've always deplored the Democrats obsession with small business, but now Clinton has done more for them than any of the nine Republicans running for the presidency. What to do? Vote for Clinton? Preposterous. Just now anyway it all adds up to a bewilderment in the ideology of American politics that puzzles more people than my baffled young director. It could so confuse the voters and split the Republicans several ways, that who do you suppose might be most likely to succeed Bill Clinton as President? Why, Bill Clinton of course!

Edited LFA 1995-10-20.txt

Getting in a cab the other day and noticing something of a traffic jam down 5th Avenue, I suggested to the driver that we might go over to Park Avenue, which is theoretically and often is, barred to commercial traffic. He promptly moved over to the right lane and I realised he was going to turn into Central Park. "No, no please," I said. "Over to Park Avenue." He had trouble with the word "over", but he got the idea when I made great sweeping gestures indicating that a left turn over to Park Avenue was essential.

He was a young, I'd say well set up, rather muscular, typical young American some people would have said, his trouble was with the language. I asked him if this was his first job. Total blank, despair on his face. Then I remembered what a local politician had told me fairly recently, taxi driving is an entry profession. I quickly improvised, "Profesión your entrada?" With a rising inflection it was close enough anyway for him to get it. "Your first job?" was double Dutch.

Well about 40 years ago, chances were that your cab driver would be an old Irishman, Italian, German – they're long gone. The first break in the shall we say, ethnic identity of cab drivers, came when the Puerto Ricans, the first big wave of immigrants after the Second War poured in. They came in very much on the basis of the immigration into Britain of Jamaicans or for that matter of Indians. Puerto Rican was an American possession – still is – it was swiped from or ceded by Spain almost a century ago at the end of the Spanish American War.

In the early 1950s, the Mayor of New York invited the Puerto Ricans in very much in the manner of Queen Victoria saying in a fateful phrase in the middle of the last century: "Always remember you are children of this great empire, Britain is your homeland." Similarly, the Mayor of New York said: "You are American citizens, why not think of New York as your home," without guessing how many would take him up on it. He assumed a few hundred. The city was swamped with many thousands who moved into and around Harlem, and thus prolonged. Earlier poor immigrants had initiated the struggle with the resident blacks for housing and schools and playgrounds, so by the mid 50s the new faces in the New York taxi business were Puerto Rican. By now they also are long gone.

I don't know when taxi driving became an entry profession, when the onward and upward idea developed into an immigrant movement, but it's undoubtedly true today that most Manhattan cab drivers have been in the job a year or two at most. From their mastery of the language, English, you'd assumed they'd been here about a week. It's become a problem for, problem for other drivers. A black driver said to me a month or two ago: "The Mayor says we ought to have a second language, I don't know what he has in mind. Sure as you're born it ain't English." Well, now the profession is made up of Russians Israelis, Haitian, French, Rumanians, some Sikhs, Vietnamese, a scatter of South and Central Americans, Columbians, Peruvians and soon no doubt Croats and Bosnians.

This little episode made me think back to a television director the BBC hired to direct one or two of the episodes in my television history of America, which grey beards may remember was exposed to public view, my goodness 23 years ago. The director, an apple cheeked brown eyed young fellow, a good deal shrewder and older than his appearance, arrived in New York ready to direct an episode called: The Huddled Masses, which was an hour long documentary on the great immigrant tidal wave at the turn of this century. He was troubled the very evening he arrived. How so? "Do you think," he asked me "We'll be able to find enough broken accents?" – that was always the phrase Englishmen used to use about people whose accent didn't break their way. I told him not to worry for a second. And once we went way downtown to some of the famous tenement streets, there were lots of people, man and women, with sure enough, broken accents. They were all by the way, I should say in their 30s and older. In other words something that didn't strike me, except in recollection, years later, the young ones talked straightforward New York street American. Today, that would not necessarily be so.

If my young director, now well along in his 40s came back here today, he would have no trouble finding broken accents, but he would, I'm sure, feel just as much bewilderment with American politics as he did when we filmed the wretched alleys and dumps of many of the slums that in the 1900s the immigrants moved into. We concentrated on the one politician who considered their plight and did something about it and he's a political hero worth recalling. He was a Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt of the old Hudson Valley Anglo Dutch family. At a time when politics, especially city politics, were being taken over by tough political machines, Theodore 'Teddy' Roosevelt was a throwback to an earlier time, to the early 19th century when the educated upper crust from long settled American families of means, assumed that government, first local and then national, was the proper, indeed the dutiful place for people who had been born, as the saying went, too privileged.

Teddy Roosevelt, a squat substantial figure with a moustache and lots of chuckling teeth, had once been a puny child and he was put on an anxious regiment of muscle building exercises. To the alarm of his colleagues and the astonishment of his parents he turned into an explorer thrashing through the Brazilian jungles, barking across the plains of Africa and returning with more pelts, torsos, horns, antlers, heads and skins of more animals than later on the White House could accommodate without bruising the heads and elbows of the passing guests.

Roosevelt began as a police commissioner of New York and at once went after the Ellis Island inspectors: he made them able and courteous. Then he moved in on the grafters of various kinds who swindled the immigrants they brought under their wing. He moved on and became governor of New York and went without any mercy after the sweatshop owners and the tenement landlords. Put it another way, he became a nuisance and an embarrassment to the party bosses and to what they then called the "interests", and we should call the establishment, so the bosses decided the best thing to do was to get him out of state, New York State politics and contrive to get him nominated as vice president of the United States. And that's what he became upon the election of President McKinley. Nobody of course had counted on the assassination of Mr McKinley after only a few months in office. To the delight of the New York progressives and the disgust of the party bosses Teddy Roosevelt became the youngest president in American history at 41. He still is. He at once took off again on his reforming rampage, at first after the slaughter houses and the unhealthy packaging of food, then the bankers, and in his finest hour, the vastly new rich robber barons: the Rockefellers, the Harrimans, the Vanderbilts, the Fisks who through their control of the railroads of coke and coal and iron and steel were really running the country. Malefactors, Roosevelt called them, of great wealth. The conglomerates or trusts they fashioned, he called an octopus whose tentacles bind the immigrants as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house.

Well, when we began filming this lively story and I launched into my piece of Teddy Roosevelt, the young director was pleased with the performance, but I noticed afterwards he was very troubled. What could the matter be? "But you see Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican," he said. "That's right." "But I thought Republicans were the reactionaries and the Democrats were the great progressives?" "Not," I said "back then. From the Civil War for about 50 years all the reforming zeal was with the Republicans. Remember, they were founded in 1856 in the main as the party to abolish slavery." He was aghast. He would be almost as aghast today if he arrived in Washington, in the knowledge that since the other Roosevelt, Franklin, the Democrats have been the great reformers champion of the people, and the Republicans have reluctantly aped their reforms becoming known as "Me-too" Democrats.

Well what a transformation has happened since the Republicans took over the control of the Congress. For good or ill it is the Speaker of the House Mr Gingrich who is the feared revolutionary, and his army has spent the last few weeks deregulating everything in sight: slicing the fat from many bureaucracies, drastically trimming welfare benefits, cutting the benefits the old may expect from Medicare, giving tax breaks to small business – the Democrats old buddies – but here's the puzzle, more or less forgetting big business, foreign trade, the banks.

On the other hand, Mr Clinton, looking at economics beyond the range of small business, has fought labour to secure the North American Free Trade Agreement, promoted other free trade pacts in Asia and Latin America, used the presidency to get contracts for American business around the world. President Clinton the New York Times declared the other day, ever since he came to office has done more for the 500 biggest corporations in the country than virtually any other president this century. He has been responsible, the paper says, for a political earthquake a seismic shift in the party's view of business.

Now many corporation presidents find themselves in a uniquely uncomfortable position: they are lifelong Republicans, they've always deplored the Democrats obsession with small business, but now Clinton has done more for them than any of the nine Republicans running for the presidency. What to do? Vote for Clinton? Preposterous. Just now anyway it all adds up to a bewilderment in the ideology of American politics that puzzles more people than my baffled young director. It could so confuse the voters and split the Republicans several ways, that who do you suppose might be most likely to succeed Bill Clinton as President? Why, Bill Clinton of course!

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