page_title: New York City: the 51st State
section_title: History of the campaign
hierarchical_section_title: New York City: the 51st State / History of the campaign
context_page_description: New York City: the 51st State was the platform of the Norman Mailer–Jimmy Breslin candidacy in the 1969 New York City Democratic Mayoral Primary election. Mailer, a novelist, journalist, and filmmaker, and Breslin, an author and at the time a New York City newspaper columnist, proposed that the five New York City boroughs should secede from New York State, and become the 51st state of the U.S.
  Mailer topped the ticket as candidate for Mayor; his running mate, Breslin, sought the office of City Council President. Their platform featured placing city governmental control in the hands of the neighborhoods, and offered unique and creative – if impractical and even logistically impossible – solutions to air pollution, traffic congestion, school overcrowding, and crime.
  After a strong grassroots campaign, the ticket entered the primary on June 17, 1969 as decided underdogs. They finished second to last, garnering a citywide total of 41,288 votes, 5% of the total votes cast.
context_section_description: In the 1960s, New York City suffered from economic problems and rising crime rates, which continued a steep uphill climb through the decade. The old manufacturing jobs that supported generations of uneducated immigrants were disappearing by deindustrialization, millions of middle class residents were fleeing to the suburbs, and public sector workers had won the right to unionize.  Many of the candidates in the 1969 Democratic mayoralty primary race – three-time mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr., long-time party worker and City Comptroller Mario Procaccino, Bronx Borough President Herman Badillo, and Congressman James H. Scheuer – were familiar, uninspiring mainstream politicians who offered few new or novel ideas on how to solve the city's problems.
  Mailer’s vociferous candidacy ("New York Gets an Imagination – or It Dies!") convinced opinionated Queens newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin to abandon his own mayoral quest and join the higher profile Mailer as his City Council President running mate.  In a Time interview published four days before the primary, Mailer called himself a "left conservative" – left because he believed the city's problems demanded radical answers, conservative because he had little faith in centralized government. Mailer said that, if he were to win the primary and be elected in November, "a small miracle would have happened. At that moment the city would have declared that it had lost faith in the old ways of solving political problems and that it wished to embark on a new conception of politics."
  Giving authority to local residents united by history, interests, or ethnicity, would create "some real power to the neighborhoods ... such as power with their local boards of education, power to decide about the style and quality and number of the police force they want and are willing to pay for, power over the Department of Sanitation, power over their parks."
  More dramatically, Mailer wanted to restore the sense of small-town identity that had become lost in the anonymity of city life. "The energies of the people of New York at present have no purchase on their own natural wit and intelligence," he said. "They have no purpose other than to watch with a certain gallows humor the progressive deterioration of their city." Under Mailer's plan for independent neighborhoods, however, "those energies could begin to work for their deepest and most private and most passionate ideas about the nature of government, the nature of man's relation to his own immediate society."
caption: Mailer–Breslin campaign buttons, 1969
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