“There are eight million stories in the naked city,” a voice-over concludes at the end of the 1948 film The Naked City. Taking its title from a book of Weegee photographs, The Naked City is not, however, just a noirish police procedural but a love letter to an ineffable place alternatively known as the modern Babylon, the city that never sleeps, and Baghdad-on-the-Subway. It’s the place where Henry David Thoreau found the pigs wandering in the streets the most respectable part of the population, where the novelist Ann Petry heard a “cacophony of pneumatic brakes,” and it bestowed on you, wrote the essayist E.B. White, two gifts: one of privacy, the other of loneliness.
For more than twenty-five years the historian Mike Wallace has set himself the seemingly impossible task of capturing this hydra-headed city in all its glory, tawdriness, poverty, narcissism, beauty, and grime. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (1998), written with the late Edwin G. Burrows, and in his solo follow-up, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 (2017), Wallace supplied a sweeping yet intimate history of America’s largest city—in a total of around 2,500 pages.
His remarkable new volume, Gotham at War, slim by comparison at about nine hundred pages, fluently chronicles the years before and during World War II as they affected and shaped the city, the nation, and ultimately the world. As in his earlier volumes, Wallace is not peddling a single, synthetic theory. But since you can’t talk about “Gotham at war” without appreciating how New York is a tangle of competing—or sometimes warring—vested interests, factions, perceptions, and of course people whose disagreements and alliances have very real consequences, the book is not without a point of view. More ironist than polemicist, though he wields his irony lightly, Wallace makes plain that the internecine contests fought at home during a barbarous war were complex, heroic, and just as often downright tragic.
Unsurprisingly, Gotham at War opens with Adolf Hitler’s swearing in as chancellor of Germany in 1933. He was granted full dictatorial powers two months later, and when he began to persecute Jewish intellectuals, professionals, and merchants, several New York Jewish groups called for a national boycott of all German goods; for it to be successful, they needed the support of major Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Committee (AJC), which was headquartered in the city. But it was reluctant to join. Composed chiefly of wealthy, assimilated German Jews, many with relatives still in Germany, the AJC feared that any militant response to antisemitism could lead to reprisals against them. Another group, the American Jewish Congress, composed chiefly of Eastern European Jews, did support a nationwide boycott, which it put into widespread effect after the Nazis burned thousands of supposedly subversive books in the spring of 1933. After six hundred delegates from 288 Jewish and Gentile organizations joined the boycott, as did the AJC, it was largely successful, briefly at least. Prominent New York retailers stopped dealing in German merchandise, imports from Germany fell precipitously, the board of directors and the chairman of the Hamburg-American shipping line resigned, and Goebbels was livid.
Wallace next considers the city’s Italian, Irish, and Asian communities. Despite differences in race or religion or country of origin, the various ethnic groups that lived cheek by jowl remained relatively harmonious, in part, he contends,
because New York had had such extensive experience with immigration since the days of the Dutch. Indeed, over the course of its repeated remakings, Gotham had evolved into an urban organism superbly adapted for accommodating newcomers.
For instance, the educator Rachel DuBois, the founding director of the Service Bureau for Intercultural Education, created a series of programs for the New Deal’s Federal Radio Project. Since it had been established to showcase the “rich heritages that have come to us through the many races and nationalities which make up our population,” DuBois concocted twenty-six half-hour episodes. Initially called Immigrants All, Americans All, the program was soon renamed Americans All, Immigrants All. As Wallace points out, though, reframing DuBois’s project as “unity in diversity” couldn’t overcome differences that persisted, for it ignored the fact that privileged groups benefited in very material ways from prejudice and discrimination; that racism and chauvinism were deeply embedded in social, political, and economic structures and sustained by the exercise of power; and that divisions were, accordingly, not as easily transcended as liberals imagined.
Wallace scrupulously shows how racism, prejudice, and discrimination were kept alive: through Congressman Martin Dies’s House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities (a forerunner of HUAC), which was formed to combat fascist subversion and then directed its animus against alleged Communists; through the passage of the 1940 Smith (Alien Registration) Act, which mandated that all “aliens” over the age of fourteen be fingerprinted; and through the committee formed by the New York state legislators Herbert Rapp and Fritz Coudert, who intended to flush out Communists and their associates in the universities with a series of closed-door hearings. More than five hundred public college faculty and staff, as well as students, were subpoenaed and asked to name names. About fifty faculty and staff lost their jobs.
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It’s well known that some public figures were opposed to America’s entering the European war, such as the antisemitic priest Charles E. Coughlin and the aviator Charles Lindbergh, who claimed that white people had to defend themselves against “the infiltration of inferior blood.” But in the 1930s the Communist Party as well as liberals and pacifists in Gotham also wanted the US to stay out of the war. The anthropologist Franz Boas, certainly not a member of the Communist Party, believed that the country would lose its commitment to civil liberties, and pacifists like Reverend John Haynes Holmes said that America’s entrance into the war would mean the end of democracy. The Socialist Norman Thomas vehemently argued that the European war was a battle of “rival imperialisms.” Many of the men and women opposing America’s involvement, including the liberal publisher Oswald Garrison Villard and the disaffected New Dealer and economics columnist John Thomas Flynn, came together under the flag of America First, though that flag began to fray soon after Lindbergh delivered one of his most virulent speeches, which managed to offend Protestants, Catholics, liberals, and even the conservative Ohio senator Robert Taft.
While these disparate groups and people hoped to keep America out of Europe’s wars, Wallace wryly notes that New York was “performing its ancient and quintessential function of linking Europe and the US.” Since the 1920s German companies had been receiving capital from Wall Street, and even after Hitler assumed power American investors remained bullish on Germany. Standard Oil of New Jersey, located in Rockefeller Center, helped the Germans develop synthetic fuel and provided patents for synthetic rubber. General Electric rationalized its continued business dealings with the Third Reich, as did IBM, whose head, Thomas Watson, had been awarded the Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star. On the new IBM building on Madison Avenue appeared the sign “WORLD PEACE THROUGH WORLD TRADE”—“a proposition,” Wallace notes, “that served to legitimate a kind of moral blindness about deal-making with unsavory partners.”
Large corporations weren’t the only collaborators. To justify his business with the Third Reich, John Foster Dulles, a partner in the New York law firm Sullivan and Cromwell (and later President Eisenhower’s secretary of state), embraced the idea of dynamic change, a concept he adapted from the philosopher Henri Bergson. Countries like the US were static and insular, he reasoned, while Germany and Italy and Japan were robust internationalists. Dulles thus promoted a “pan-nationalist ethic—happily in sync with the credo of international businessmen,” Wallace writes with unconcealed contempt.
In September 1940 the Luftwaffe began to pummel London almost every night, and Americans could listen to Edward R. Murrow report directly from the British capital and hear the bombs exploding in the background. The passage of the Nuremberg Laws, Kristallnacht, the Anschluss, and even the invasion of Poland had failed to galvanize a thoroughgoing response to Hitler, but the German blitzkrieg in Western Europe decidedly mobilized what Wallace calls “New York’s fighting liberals,” who joined with “Wall Street’s like-minded Warriors” to press for intervention. Henry Stimson, the bankers Robert A. Lovett and James Forrestal, and the industrialist Edward Stettinius assumed strategic positions in the Roosevelt administration to oversee civilian war planning, the Lend-Lease program, and the emergent military-industrial complex, and surmising that the country would soon be at war, they helped redirect funds from social programs to preparedness.
Often Roosevelt’s liberal allies balked. “Just how chummy can the New Deal be with Wall Street,” The New Republic asked, “and continue to be the New Deal?” As if in reply, Stimson, the newly appointed secretary of war, said, “If you are going to try to go to war, or to prepare for war, in a capitalist country, you have got to let business make money out of the process or business won’t work.”
After Pearl Harbor, the antiwar movement basically disintegrated. Though the founding editors of the literary and cultural magazine Partisan Review had been anti-interventionist, by 1942 they were reluctantly backing the war effort, arguing that in the event of a Hitler victory, democratic socialism didn’t stand a chance. By contrast the future civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, a young gay Black Quaker who’d arrived in New York in 1937, was a determined pacifist. He was classified as a conscientious objector, and when his draft board assigned him to a Civilian Public Service camp, he refused to show up. Before being shipped off to the Ashland, Kentucky, penitentiary, he was incarcerated in New York City’s West Street Jail, where another war resister, the poet Robert Lowell, had been held. Wallace notes, as if with a gleam in his eye, that the notorious crime boss Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, who had been convicted of murder, “found hilarious…that people could be jailed for not killing.”
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The mobster Lucky Luciano also takes his place in Wallace’s Gotham. When the war began the luxurious French liner SS Normandie was docked in New York. It was seized by the US government, renamed the USS Lafayette, and in 1942, while being converted to a transport ship, caught fire and eventually sank. New Yorkers feared sabotage, though actually a spark from one of the workers’ welding torches had ignited a pile of flammable life jackets. Luciano, from his jail cell, figured he could convince the authorities that he’d had a hand in the Normandie fire, but not to worry: he could make sure nothing like that would happen again, for a pardon, of course.
Luciano was full of baloney. Still, a naval intelligence officer soon met with Joseph “Socks” Lanza, head of the local seafood workers’ union. The navy figured that Socks could provide intelligence about spies lurking around the port, but to do that, he needed Luciano to get the International Longshoremen’s Association to cooperate. Although no intelligence ever came out of the deal, Luciano received a pardon for his pains.
The Italian American community had been divided, as were other ethnic and religious communities, about the US entering the war. The antifascist and anticommunist Carlo Tresca despised Mussolini, which may be the reason he was gunned down on Fifth Avenue near the office of his radical newspaper, Il Martello. (It may very well have been the Communists, not the fascists, who orchestrated the murder.) The newspaper mogul Generoso Pope, the publisher of Il Progresso Italo-Americano (circulation 95,000), was an anti-interventionist sympathetic to Mussolini. But under increasing pressure, he was soon raising money for war bonds, and by 1943 he was chairing the War Savings Committee of Americans of Italian Extraction, securing two million dollars in pledges. Still, both Italian Americans and German Americans rightly feared being targeted as enemy aliens, much as Japanese Americans had been after Pearl Harbor. (Secretary of War Stimson declared that with “their racial characteristics,” Japanese citizens couldn’t really be trusted.)
Ethnic New York, racial New York, religious New York, maritime New York, manufacturing New York, corporate New York, wealthy New York, impoverished New York, unionized New York, and isolationist or internationalist New York: it’s a teeming, heterogenous place—Wallace’s “urban organism”—largely because of the boisterous assortment of characters inhabiting it. Among those he profiles are the politically astute archbishop Francis Spellman, the art collector Peggy Guggenheim, the Puerto Rican politician Luis Muñoz Marín, the journalist Ralph Ingersoll, the writers Pearl Buck and Ayn Rand, the Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the Indian American activist Sirdar Jagjit Singh, and Rex Stout, the creator of the popular (and stout) detective Nero Wolfe. Stout joined the mainly white Fight for Freedom Committee to help with its propaganda initiatives, which included a series of pageants, musical revues, and variety shows featuring comics, singers, and even the manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers. After Pearl Harbor he was asked to put together a writers’ organization, which became the reasonably independent Writers’ War Board, partially affiliated with the Office of War Information. It operated on a shoestring budget in Midtown Manhattan, and Stout set up a subsidiary Committee to Combat Race Hatred. But he wasn’t above berating women who failed to join the labor force, calling them slackers.
For women were now being hired in the blue-collar jobs typically filled by men: they ran bench lathes, operated cranes, drove trucks, and in one case served as a dive-bomber test pilot. And there was also a shortage of men available for white-collar jobs. Hunter College began offering women courses in bacteriology, meteorology, and navigation. One third of the musicians in the New York Symphony Orchestra were women. Black women benefited to a certain extent from higher wages and better working conditions, though if employed as domestics, they were not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act. Predictably there was backlash. Working women were accused of neglecting their children, leaving them unsupervised, and contributing to the rise of juvenile delinquency.
During the early days of the war, when New York was still suffering high unemployment and its residents were fleeing to the Midwest or West in search of jobs, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and New York governor Herbert Lehman successfully lobbied to make sure that the city received its fair share, or more than its fair share, of defense spending. Soon New York manufacturers were granted government contracts to produce everything from machine-gun mountings to pea jackets, electronic devices, and dog biscuits for the K-9 Corps.
But the prosperity that the war brought to New York didn’t rain on everyone, and in the summer of 1943 a rumor that a white man had killed Robert Bandy, a Black soldier on leave from his all-Black MP unit, sparked a riot in Harlem. Stores were looted and their windows smashed. The damage was calculated at between three and five million dollars. Six Blacks were killed, about seven hundred injured, and five hundred arrested. Some wanted to dismiss the riot as the work of “hoodlums,” but the root causes were job discrimination, unemployment, and ridiculously high rents for substandard and overcrowded housing. Still, as Wallace observes, “the riot would prove a turning point in galvanizing Black and white New Yorkers”—particularly Jewish American New Yorkers—“under the banners of antifascism and anti-(British) imperialism.”
That was well and good, though of course there was the “genocidal elephant” in the room. At the age of forty-five, Arthur Zygielbojm, a labor organizer and leader of the Bund—a Jewish socialist workers’ party in Poland—had arrived in New York after having organized resistance to the Nazis in Warsaw. Intent on publicizing Nazi atrocities in Eastern Europe, he toured the US and wrote articles for The Jewish Daily Forward and the labor press. In June 1942 came news from Poland and Lithuania that 700,000 Jews had been slaughtered and that there was an extermination center in the village of Chełmno, where they were being murdered in mobile gas chambers. Zygielbojm, now in London, notified the British press. The Americans didn’t pick up the story for almost a month.
“BELIEVE THE UNBELIEVABLE,” Ignacy Schwarzbart of the Polish National Council frantically cabled the New York World Jewish Congress, recounting massacres in Poland. Rabbi Stephen Wise urged the State Department to act, to no avail, and the Manhattan congressman Samuel Dickstein begged his colleagues to relax immigration quotas for those fleeing extermination. Nothing happened. When State received the verification it said it needed to release news of the extermination camps, The New York Times ran the report on page 10. Then came the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and Zygielbojm learned that his wife and son had been killed. In London, he turned on the gas. In his suicide note he condemned “the passivity with which the world looks on and permits the extermination of the Jewish people.”
This is a New York story, according to Wallace, because New York is never New York alone. And it’s in this setting of willful ignorance, mass murder, immigration restrictions, apathy, and outrage that Wallace limns the many mixed motives of institutions as well as people. The New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger is a case in point. As Wallace astutely notes, Sulzberger, who sincerely hoped to “transcend racial thinking,” objected to any references to a “Jewish race,” which, he said, played into Hitler’s hands. At the same time he wished to discourage readers from seeing the Times as a “Jewish paper” that had lost its vaunted “objectivity.” Just as sincerely the publisher believed that “calling attention to the presence of Jews in the media would aggravate American anti-Semitism,” which in hindsight sounds rather disingenuous. Regardless, Wallace observes that the Times did cover the mass murders, though generally in the back pages—“a decision that arguably constituted a lapse of journalistic—and moral—judgment.”
Wallace also highlights the chance meetings that “spawned a network of friendships and associations that would gel into something more than the sum of its parts.” With its war-driven influx of European intellectuals and artists, Gotham was a place of creative cross-fertilization. Claude Lévi-Strauss—a rabbi’s grandson—lost his teaching position in France in 1940 but landed at the New School after meeting André Breton on board the ship that took them across the Atlantic. Breton introduced him to Max Ernst in New York, and they would all poke around in the small antique shops along Third Avenue or drop into the gallery of Julius Carlebach farther uptown to see the items deaccessioned by George Heye, the founder of the Museum of the American Indian. Through Franz Boas, Lévi-Strauss met Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict; soon he was joined in New York by the linguist Roman Jakobson.
What Lévi-Strauss discovered in New York was an “aggregation of villages”—“an immense horizontal and vertical disorder attributable to some spontaneous upheaval of the urban crust rather than to the deliberate plans of builders.” And while Wallace’s book is mostly free of New York chest-thumping, he exuberantly finds in these men and women what he calls “New Yorkers in the forefront of the conversation.”
This sense of exuberance buoys his chapters on Abstract Expressionism, physics, fashion, publishing, and the recording industry. The chapter on drama, “The Theater at the Center of the World,” is less an obvious boast than a nod to Mayor La Guardia’s dream of creating a center for the arts that could offer classical music and theater and dance at affordable prices. Nor does Wallace neglect popular music, from bop to Frank Sinatra, whose huge success owed everything to the power of teenage girls, now employed in factories (which often violated child labor laws). These young women had money to spend, and “their purchasing power was itself an artifact of war,” Wallace claims. There was the hit show On the Town, the 1944 collaboration of Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green based on Jerome Robbins’s ballet Fancy Free and set in New York—“one helluva town”—which represents to Wallace “an astonishing mixture of individuals and influences.”
Side by side with that exuberance are contending forces that extend into the planning of the postwar era. Economists, bankers, developers, journalists, and legislators who opposed New Deal liberalism lined up against those who wanted to provide health care benefits, low-cost loans, unemployment insurance, and government-sponsored education, first for veterans and their families and later for all Americans. To Wallace, the two camps weren’t as opposed as it might sound. There was ample overlap in debates over free trade, imperialism, and the dismantling of European empires—albeit for commercial as well as humanitarian reasons.
The struggle of the peoples of the world for sovereignty and against colonialism is a leitmotif in Wallace’s book, which fans out to the Middle East, China, India, and Puerto Rico when he sensitively discusses the various ethnic populations in the city. In the 1941 Atlantic Charter, he observes more than once, Roosevelt endorsed “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.” Of course, the bond between colonialism and racism could not be so easily severed, which Black leaders well understood. The poet Langston Hughes put it this way:
Pearl Harbor put Jim Crow on the run.
That Crow can’t fight for Democracy
And be the same old crow he used to be—
Although right now, even yet today,
He tries to act in the same old way.
But India and China and Harlem, too.
Have made up their minds Jim Crow is through.
Wallace poignantly concludes with the launch of the United Nations, an international organization designed to maintain world peace and protect human rights, whose success at the outset depended on the full cooperation of the United States. The UN Charter needed ratification in the US Senate, but southern Democrats, who were more committed to preserving Jim Crow laws at home than to supporting racial equality abroad, would recoil at language suggesting any interference with their status quo. The result, then, was a charter conceived in idealism and hope that affirmed the rights and dignity and equality of all persons but refused to provide the means of enforcing them.
If the UN Charter symbolized resolution and the dream of a brighter future, it also represented compromise and cowardice. No less fraught, or symbolic, was the debate over whether the UN should be headquartered in Europe or the US; once the US was chosen, many cities put themselves forward. New York was at first ruled out: “The UN desired a vast multi-acre site, at least forty square miles wide, in a rural or suburban setting, within which it could build an international city.” But in the end, through the offices of a New York real estate developer, a Rockefeller, and the city government, the United Nations soon sat on the shores of the East River in the motley Midtown section of the Naked City, that raggedy, spectacular, buoyant, and ruthless place ready to front the future.
