Fighting the Good Fight A History of the New York Conservative Party 1962-2002 by George J. Marlin St. Augustine’s, 434 pp., $28 THE BATTLEFIELD of American politics is littered with the corpses of defeated third parties. Occasionally, such parties might sway the outcome of a presidential race, but mostly they live their all-too-short political lives in vain. It’s true that our electoral system makes it difficult for these minor parties, but they are often their own worst enemies. The roster of third parties is filled with kooks, demagogues, extremists, egomaniacs, and naive dreamers. And their shelf life is depressingly short. All this makes the history of the New York Conservative party seem all the more exceptional. Arguably one of the most influential third parties of the twentieth century, it has never fielded a candidate on the national level. But by concentrating on one state, it found itself on the cutting edge of American politics, a precursor to great changes that would sweep the entire country. Now, for the fortieth anniversary of the party’s founding, George J. Marlin has written a sympathetic history, “Fighting the Good Fight.” Marlin grew up with the Conservative party. As a Brooklyn teenager, he campaigned for Bill Buckley during his 1965 mayoral campaign. Almost thirty years later, Marlin himself was the Conservative candidate for mayor of New York and he still remains active in the party. To Marlin, the rise of the Conservative party is as much a story of ethnicity and class as it is of political ideology. The New Yorkers Marlin writes about are mostly working-class and middle-class Irish, Italian, and German Catholics; their opponents largely upper-class and upper-middle-class Protestants–the dreaded “goo-goos” and “blue bloods.” Variously called Reagan Democrats, blue-collar Catholics, or white ethnics, these conservative New Yorkers had grown angry and disillusioned with liberalism by the 1960s. But the revolt of the white ethnics goes back to the mid-nineteenth century, when Irish immigrants clashed with native-born Protestants on the streets of New York and Thomas Nast’s infamous cartoons portrayed the Irish as apes. By the turn of the century, Southern and Eastern European immigrants coming through Ellis Island took their place beside the Irish on the list of undesirables. Many Americans from the “responsible classes” feared that these immigrant hordes–“beaten men from beaten races,” according to the then-president of MIT–would overrun Anglo-Saxon society. Eugenics became fashionable. Protestant elites supported Margaret Sanger’s birth control movement, fearing “race suicide” if large immigrant families continued to grow unchecked. The battle continued as Al Smith, the great Democratic hero-martyr of 1928, grew disillusioned with Franklin Roosevelt and his liberal New Dealers. Long dismissed as the rantings of a bitter old politician, Smith’s criticisms were actually a precursor of the complaints of the Reagan Democrats years later. By the 1950s, many Catholic Democrats no longer felt comfortable in a Democratic party increasingly run by liberal, college-educated, upper-middle-class reformers who worshipped Adlai Stevenson and ridiculed machine politicians. They also found liberal elites insufficiently tough on communism. The trouble was that the Republican party in the northeastern states, run by people like the Rockefellers and the Lodges, was little better. So a pair of Irish Catholic lawyers in their thirties, Dan Mahoney and Kieran O’Doherty, decided to shake up New York politics and create the Conservative party in 1962. The party served as a voice for staunch anti-communism and for opposition to the big-government welfare state, which were being ignored by both major parties. The party’s appeal was largely to those “street-corner conservatives” of the old ethnic neighborhoods. The founding of the New York Conservative party was thus the culmination of more than a century of battles between progressive elites and working-class, traditionally minded Catholics. In Marlin’s words, “the heirs of Al Smith’s common man and F.D.R.’s forgotten man became members of Richard Nixon’s silent majority and Ronald Reagan’s moral majority.” Still, the party attracted an unusually diverse array of candidates and supporters over the years. One of the earliest party members was Charles Edison, a former New Dealer, Democratic governor of New Jersey, and son of the inventor Thomas A. Edison. Another was a suburban housewife named Barbara Keating who had lost her husband in Vietnam and was outraged by the antiwar attitudes of her children’s public-school teachers. (Keating won 16 percent of the vote against Jacob Javits in the 1974 Senate race.) Then there was the 1977 New York mayoral candidate Barry Farber, a Jewish conservative talk radio host who spoke with a southern accent and was proficient in a dozen languages. But by far the most prominent Conservative politicians were the Buckley brothers. William F. Buckley put the Conservative party on the map when he ran for mayor of New York in 1965. With characteristic style and wit, he made the case for what was then considered an exotic political philosophy. He argued for a restoration of law and order, welfare reform, lower taxes, less government spending, and an end to school busing. He won 13 percent of the vote running against an unimpressive machine Democrat named Abe Beame and the golden boy of liberal Republican politics, John Lindsay. The deeper the divisions in the country, the more successful the Conservative party became. Enrollment increased tenfold during the 1960s. Conservative party leaders gained influence by offering their party’s line on the ballot to favored candidates and withholding it from Republicans deemed too liberal–with the consequence that those liberal Republicans sometimes found themselves on the losing end of a three-way race. Soon, a new breed of politician began popping up in New York with the letters “RC” following their names. (There was even the occasional “DC.”) Some wags joked that the letters stood as much for the politicians’ religion (Roman Catholic) as for their political affiliation (Republican-Conservative). Although the party’s most famous candidate was William F. Buckley, its most successful candidate was his quieter brother, James. Taking time out from running the family oil business, Jim Buckley stood as the Conservative party candidate for Senate in 1970. It was the year of Kent State and the hardhats riots on Wall Street, as well as the year that New York passed the nation’s most liberal abortion law. Getting not-so-secret support from the Nixon administration and public endorsements from many New York Republicans, Jim Buckley rode the anger of the “street-corner conservatives” to victory by winning 40 percent of the vote in a three-way race. Buckley lost his reelection bid in 1976, but the man who beat him–Daniel Patrick Moynihan–was himself an Irish Catholic from a working-class background who made a name for himself as one of the first voices warning about the dangers of out-of-wedlock births in the black community. More political success came in 1980, when a scrappy local politician from Nassau County named Al D’Amato defeated liberal Republican stalwart Senator Jacob Javits in the Republican primary. He then went on to defeat Javits (running on the Liberal party line) and Democrat Liz Holtzman in the general election. D’Amato’s margin of victory came from the Conservative and Right-to-Life party lines. BY THE 1980S, Ronald Reagan was setting the national agenda, and anti-communism, tax cuts, welfare reform, and traditional values were now a respectable part of the political debate. In New York, the Conservative party had amassed a decent political track record. It had helped elect two senators, a handful of congressmen (including Jack Kemp, Gerald Solomon, and Guy Molinari), and scores of state legislators and local officials. It even managed to get a conservative Democrat elected mayor of Buffalo. YET ONE GOAL remained elusive: New York’s governorship. The Conservative party’s archenemy Nelson Rockefeller dominated state politics in the 1960s and early 1970s. The 1980s brought another villain: Mario Cuomo. Though he began his career as a pro-life Queens lawyer who ran for mayor in 1977 on the “Neighborhood Preservation party” line, Cuomo soon became the darling of liberal Democrats and a vocal critic of Reaganism. At home, he repeatedly stymied Republicans and Conservatives at the ballot box and in the state legislature. But his luck finally ran out in 1994 when a little-known state senator named George Pataki, whose sudden rise to power was aided by New York Conservatives, ousted him. The margin of victory, as with so many other political races in New York, came from the Conservative party line. D’Amato and Pataki now had complete control of the state Republican party and they offered the Conservatives a seat at the table. Conservatives were involved in Pataki’s transition team, and some received political jobs. (Kieran Mahoney, the son and nephew of the Conservative party’s founders, became a top Pataki adviser.) Marlin himself became head of the Port Authority. Success, though, has turned out to be a problem for the Conservative party. Marlin writes that for conservatives, “the most difficult realization is that many in government have little interest in implementing sound reform policies, preferring instead to hold on to power for its own sake.” He soon became frustrated by the “tyranny of the status quo” at the Port Authority, unable to move its lethargic bureaucracy toward much-needed reforms. Looking back on his experience, he writes: “Sometimes being in the winner’s circle is not all it is cracked up to be.” Those may be fitting words for the Conservative party as a whole. Today, the Conservative party finds itself faced with a Republican party that takes conservatives for granted. First D’Amato and then Pataki trimmed their conservative political sails in order to survive in an increasingly liberal New York. Pataki has pandered to Puerto Rican voters on the issue of the Navy base at Vieques and cozied up to left-wing labor leader Dennis Rivera. He has also jettisoned his pro-life views. In his days in the state senate, Pataki made a name as the lone Republican vote against the Cuomo budget deals, but he now produces budgets that would make even Nelson Rockefeller blush. Because of their close alliance with Pataki, though, Conservatives have had difficulty criticizing Republican excesses. Rudy Giuliani, however, is another story. As many conservatives across the country cheer the New York City success story, New York Conservatives are silent at best. Giuliani’s views on abortion and gay rights made him anathema to the Conservative party. His endorsement of Mario Cuomo in 1994 sealed his fate. Giuliani did push ideas that had been dear to the political right: reducing crime, reforming welfare, and rolling back some taxes. The result was a city on the road to recovery after forty troubled years. Yet the Conservatives still have not forgiven Giuliani’s apostasy. Marlin, for instance, lashes out at him as a liberal McGovern Democrat and a fake street-corner conservative because the Giuliani family left Brooklyn for the “high-rent” district of Garden City, Long Island, in the 1950s. THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY’S troubles with Giuliani and its acceptance of the D’Amato-Pataki Republican party have led to an identity crisis. Reasonable observers can ask whether there is a future for the party. The city’s white ethnic neighborhoods, long a backbone of the party, are graying and shrinking. New York is now home to scores of new immigrants–Koreans, Chinese, Dominicans, Russians, Pakistanis–whose beliefs and needs are very different from those of older ethnics. The old villains–Nelson Rockefeller, John Lindsay, Jacob Javits, Mario Cuomo–are gone. New York’s suburbs are becoming more liberal and the state as a whole is trending even more Democratic. The Nassau County Republican machine that nurtured politicians such as D’Amato is in tatters. Marlin acknowledges these problems, but is still bullish about the party’s future. Maybe he’s right. As his “Fighting the Good Fight” shows, it has always been a little too easy to count the Conservatives out. For forty years they have shown an uncanny knack for proving their critics wrong. In 1962, Jacob Javits called the Conservative party “freakish,” “crackpot,” and “wholly out of step with the twentieth-century.” Forty years later, despite the ups and downs of political life, those Conservatives have the last laugh. Vincent J. Cannato is the author of “The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York.”
