Author's Response

I am tremendously honored by Lane Windham's, Bill Fletcher's, Suleiman Osman's and Michael Kazin's generous, thoughtful responses to my book, as well as by Joseph McCartin's introduction to this forum. These are five intellectuals and scholars from whom I have learned much, and whose scholarship and activism alike has been a model for me. I deeply appreciate the time they took to think about Fear City, and I am grateful to the Kalmanowitz Initiative, Labor, Joseph McCartin, and Leon Fink for bringing us together.

I am especially pleased that the editors of the journal thought Fear City might have something distinctive to offer labor historians. One of my long-standing interests has been finding ways to write about the history of working-class people and working-class organizations in a way that captures their agency alongside the real constraints and differences of power under which they must operate. In Fear City, one of my goals was to find a way to describe how people in different social positions and different classes understood the same events and problems in radically different ways—to tell the story of the fiscal crisis from above and below at the same time. So Lane Windham's suggestion that Fear City represents a "history of capitalism" that manages to be at once about finance and labor is very meaningful to me.

Sometimes, I imagine, an author will find themselves finished with a topic after completing a book—tired of it, exhausted by it, ready to think about something else. But that has not been the case for me with Fear City; I have not felt entirely done with New York's fiscal crisis, or perhaps it has not been done with me. This may have something to do with the subject matter of the book: it is a book about the city that I was born in and grew up in, and in which I still live, despite the ways that it has changed so profoundly from the city of my childhood. And the political moment whose emergence it chronicles is that which I have lived my entire life within. It would be challenging to put the topic aside, to see it as completely settled. So I appreciate the many questions raised by the respondents, which echo some of those I've been asking myself since the book's publication.

I chose to write Fear City in the framework of a narrative history that would highlight its drama for reasons that were intellectual as well as aesthetic. To understand why the fiscal crisis had the impact it did, it seemed to me essential to recognize how much suspense and uncertainty it generated, and the sense of panic that engulfed the leaders of the city as bankruptcy neared. Over the course of 1975—as perhaps during fiscal and financial crises generally—a single-minded logic of desperation took over, focusing energy and attention on the narrow question of how to balance the budget.

Any broader view of the structural problems facing the city—the ways that the federal government helped to subsidize and facilitate the loss of people and jobs to the suburbs; the trade policies that Windham mentions that made it possible for industries such as garment to depart the city and move production to low-wage regions in the South and overseas; the racial inequalities that still governed the distribution of resources in the city, even at the height of postwar liberalism—disappeared under the immediate pressure of cutting the city's expenses, especially spending on social programs that in the context of the need to find some way to balance the budget could only be seen as a drain on resources.

I continue to believe that the narrative is an important part of the argument of Fear City, and that one of the book's insights has to do with the political effect of the crisis sensibility. However, one of my own concerns about the book is whether it inadvertently replicates this logic too closely. By focusing so closely on the crisis, did I myself make it difficult to...