O’Dwyer to Obama, Case Still Economic; Getting Past Racial Issues
October 31st, 2008 by Larry Hanley
The road was dark as we came within miles of Paul O’Dwyer’s home in Goshen after midnight. It was a Friday night in April 1989 and Paul had just spent a couple of hours with about 100 bus drivers and mechanics, helping them sort out the issues of economics and race, though race never came up.
They were white and residents of New York’s whitest borough, Staten Island. Ninety-five percent of the people working at the New York City Transit Authority who were members of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 726 in Staten Island in those days were white. The borough was more than 80 percent white and about to become the centerpiece of New York mayoral politics for the next two decades.
A Key to Dinkins’s Election
The vote in the 1989 election results would closely reflect the ethnic breakdown of the borough, with Rudy Giuliani scoring 90,000 votes to David Dinkins’s 23,000. But with the help of Paul O’Dwyer and Shirley Quill that night, Staten Island’s transit workers would defy their fears, split with their neighbors, and vote to endorse the long-shot Manhattan Borough President to become the first black Mayor of New York.
The union had been confronted with an attack on its members’ jobs. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, under Governors Carey and Cuomo, had found it convenient in its efforts to re-build the crumbling subway system through a serious program of capital funding to ignore the transit needs of the fastest-growing county in New York State. It was the only place in the city with no subway.
The building boom of the 1970s and ’80s had created many new population centers on the Island not served by the MTA. Then, with the bus deregulation of 1982, bus companies were allowed to flood into Staten Island and run not only in underserved areas but everywhere a profit was to be made.
Bus companies large and small created their own schedules and ran where they liked. The larger ones decided it was time to get political. They were working the Koch administration, and several Staten Island elected officials found their contributions of both cash and free buses during election season a good reason to start giving them routes and public subsidies.
The lines were drawn as Koch’s Director of Franchises began to move through the land-use review process the first of several proposals for bus franchises for private, non-union companies.
Staten Island Borough President Ralph Lamberti was siding with the private bus companies, because the TA would not service the Island. He had little choice, he said.
I was president of ATU Local 726 in those days and was charged with figuring out how on earth to push this back and preserve public transit in a politically hostile climate. Along with Jim Callaghan, then an ATU staff member and one of the keenest political minds in the city, I started talking with other union leaders and members of the Board of Estimate.
A Natural Alliance
The board, which decided franchises, was composed of the Mayor, the Comptroller, the City Council President and the five Borough Presidents. Among them, Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins, who was by nature very pro-worker and pro-union, was the first to embrace the interests of our members and, in our view, the interests of the people of Staten Island.
It was then that I decided that our local union needed to get behind him and help make him Mayor. There was just this problem: I had to convince a union comprised of white working-class men to not only endorse the move, but roll up their sleeves and work harder than ever before to make it happen. We could not lose. The stakes were too high.
A week before the endorsement meeting, I was sweating blood. Would the effort fall on its face? I knew there was a backlash in my union, but I also knew that my members were tired of watching their jobs being eroded by low-wage but connected private bus companies.
Jim Callaghan was a friend and former employee of Paul O’Dwyer. He called Paul, and Paul called Shirley Quill, a lifelong labor activist who was also the widow of and former assistant to a labor saint, Mike Quill, the founder of the Transport Workers Union.
They joined us at the union meeting that night in Staten Island to close the deal. They both spoke from memory of the history of transit workers’ struggles in New York City. They outlined the differences between Giuliani and Dinkins on labor policy.
Four decades after Pee Wee Reese put his arm around Jackie Robinson on a Cincinnati ballfield to settle the race question in baseball, Paul O’Dwyer and Shirley Quill were working to settle it in New York politics.
In their presence, David Dinkins promised my members one thing: a fair deal. He told them they would have a voice in their future and he would be their ally when they were right. The members listened. Unanimously, they voted to endorse David Dinkins.
We left the meeting and Paul and I bonded as we drove for about two hours to Goshen. Paul was curious about my background. He said he found the meeting and the result exhilarating. He told me a small bit of his own history, and then he was quiet for a few minutes.
A Working-Class Hero
Born on a farm in Ireland, Paul O’Dwyer had worked on the docks in Brooklyn and put himself though law school. He had defended the working class his whole life, working for their unions and representing workers in court. He had run for office several times himself, even winning the City Council Presidency in 1973. But at his center, he believed in the American dream, the cornerstone of which to him was civil rights for all.
Not one to forget where he came from, he knew the sting of anti-Catholic bias in British-controlled Ireland and anti-Irish bigotry in New York. He knew there was no difference between what he felt and the discrimination against African-Americans. He had gone to the South in the ’60s with Charlie Rangel and Percy Sutton to fight for real voting rights. He was the epitome of a working-class white ethnic who knew no prejudice.
At 82, an icon in New York and Irish national politics, Paul had lots of people he could have been with that night. Staten Island was quite a hike. I wondered what he was thinking as we drove silently off the highway near his home. I felt him touch my arm. He said, “I’m just glad I will live to see it. New York will have a black Mayor.” As light flickered into the car, I could see tears running down Paul’s left cheek.
That summer and fall, hundreds of white working men — transit bus drivers — proudly wore their Dinkins buttons throughout Staten Island and spent our off hours handing out flyers along with our kids. In the process, we learned a thing or two about ourselves, and yes, our neighbors.
Working on primary and Election Day to help elect their candidate, they couldn’t change the outcome in Staten Island, but they sure had an impact on the vote totals. Then a writer for the Village Voice, Maria Laurino came to our headquarters on election day to cover the story. She wrote:
A First for Many
“The energy in the headquarters and the men’s belief that only David Dinkins had their interests at heart felt like a throwback to the blushy enthusiasm of the ’60s youth, certain that the political process could work. Yet the drivers could fit a political scientist’s profile of Giuliani supporters. With cigarette packs tucked in T-shirt pockets, baseball capped heads, and beer bellied middles, many of these conservative Italian and Irish men admit they’ve never supported a black candidate.”
I was never more proud of my members, or my union, than I was then, and that campaign was a life-changing event for me in many ways. Since then we have had our racial ups and downs as a city and a country. Staten Island has changed and so has New York. In a few days we will find out if the white working class has figured out, with the guidance of this economy, that economics are what matter, not skin color, or scare tactics.
I’m betting on them. I only wish Paul O’Dwyer had lived to see it.
Mr. Hanley is an international vice president of the Amalgamated Transit Union.
Originally published in The Chief
Tags: barack obama, David Dinkins, Larry Hanley, Paul O'Dwyer
