John Lindsay biography

Synopsis

Early Life and Career

John Vliet Lindsay was born in New York City on November 24, 1921, to an upper- middle-class family. He earned his bachelor's degree from Yale University before entering the United States Navy Reserve, with which he served as a gunner in World War II. After he was discharged in 1946, Lindsay returned to Yale and earned a law degree. Back in New York City in 1949, he passed the bar and joined the law firm Webster Sheffield Fleischmann Hitchcock & Christie. He also met his wife, Mary Anne Harrison, with whom he had four children.

Congress

Lindsay had been active as a Young Republican, and founded Youth for Eisenhower during Dwight Eisenhower's presidential campaign. His dedication impressed U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr., who hired Lindsay to serve as executive assistant in Washington, D.C., in 1955. Lindsay acted as a liaison between the Justice Department and the White House, and he helped draft the Civil Rights Act of 1957. In 1958 Lindsay was elected to Congress as the representative of the Upper East Side, an affluent New York neighborhood then known as the "Silk Stocking District."

Lindsay's congressional voting record was frequently at odds with the Republican Party. He was a strong supporter of civil rights, and led a group of moderate Republicans to vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He supported Medicare and federal aid for education, as well as the creation of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Mayor

In 1965, Lindsay was elected mayor of New York City. On his first day in office, the Transport Workers Union staged a strike that shut down New York City's buses and subways for 12 days, and which was a harbinger of other labor-relations problems to come. The strike ended with a 15 percent pay increase for transit workers, along with large pension bonuses, and during the New York City fiscal crisis in the 1970s, critics pointed to the settlement as one of the decisions that nearly bankrupted the city.

Lindsay's second major labor issue came in 1968, when he attempted to decentralize the school system. Believing that communities should have more input regarding the way their schools were run, Lindsay gave three local school boards total authority over their schools. The teachers' union saw this as union busting, and after three teachers were fired in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district, the union called for strikes. It was the first of three citywide teacher strikes that lasted from May to November of that year.

In 1969 Lindsay lost the Republican primary election to John Marchi, a state senator, but he appeared on the ballot anyway as the candidate of the New York Liberal Party and won a second term.