Father Robert Drinan, SJ, the contentious priest and congressman, once wrote an article explaining to astonished mothers and fathers around the country that it was perfectly OK…indeed even important….to bring your children (including infants) onto the picket lines of the civil rights and peace movements. I remember reading a mimeographed copy of the article in the National CORE office and thinking how the tactics of non-violent protest sometimes require us to do things that cut directly against the grain of our deepest feelings and beliefs.
Forty four years later I was at a dinner party when I got into a argument with my hostess …..a fierce and distinguished woman…..along a similar line. This time the subject was vandalism and its uses, both civil and criminal.
What had happened was this. A mutual friend of ours, a young black entrepreneur, had been driving along a street in nearby town when he spotted a lawn jockey, a black-faced lawn jockey on the lawn of a very handsome house with a pillared porch. He screeched to a stop, jumped out of his car, lifted the little statue into his car trunk and took it to the nearest river where he dumped it in four feet of water. I was telling my hostess this story and applauding the jockey-dunking when she sang out,
“Vandalism!”
I must quickly explain that my hostess got the best of me in the ensuing argument….she always does…I have long since lost my debating skills and when I began to explain the virtues of what we called “non violent direct action” and how I had myself committed a variety of deliberate misdemeanors back in the CORE days, she countered with a withering case for domestic law and order pointing out that lawn jockeys guard the entrance of the “21” Club in New York City.
“Why,” she said, “Vernon Jordan walks right past them all the time!”
Well I hope you can sympathize with my behavior at the time….I didn’t laugh….I was dumbfounded….I went blank. The subject changed. Of course, ten minutes later I was on my way home marshalling the arguments that she would never hear (unless she reads this) including a defense of brother Jordan who, when he lunches at “21,” passes thirty three white-faced lawn jockeys. I know Vernon Jordan slightly…he is a remarkable and honorable man, he was instrumental in getting my friend James Farmer the Medal of Freedom….a once-singular honor that the current administration seems to pass out like political popcorn.
But I stray.
Lawn jockeys, as you probably know, are particularly onerous leftovers of the ante-bellum south, usually short plaster statuettes of a black jockey dressed in the plantation colors and holding his hand with a hitching ring humbly in front of his chest. They were stationed on the lawn in front of the main house to accommodate Missee Ann’s guests as they arrived at the party.
The black lawn jockeys have pretty much disappeared (I did see one at a suburban antique store the other day) but they hold forth in memory as despicable symbols of our slave-stunted past.
So…here’s my unsung argument:
I wish I’d told my hostess that many similar acts of protest-by-vandalism have brightened our American past….it is even possible that some of her direct ancestors were among the Sons of Liberty that tossed 342 chests of tea off three ships in Boston harbor on the night of December 16, 1773.
And then, of course, there were all the “Whites Only” and “Colored” signs that we dismantled in the Sixties.
I would have admitted that tea-dumping, jockey-dunking and sign-breaking push the envelope of “non violence” but I also would have argued that we didn’t hurt anybody and that the folks I knew in the civil rights movement were prepared to take the legal consequences of breaking the peace. Many did.
Some even took the ultimate consequence.
I think, and I think Father Drinan would have agreed, that we should strike our own little local Medal of Freedom for my friend the lawn jockey dunker.
ol val
-----------------------------
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Christmas Grammar
I decided yesterday (Christmas) that Christmas is a punctuation point. You go along, live a regular life, pay bills, deal with urges, go to sleep with an Ambien pill, wake up with Foggy the cat next to your ear…..you do all that stuff and then suddenly, everything changes…..like Noah’s flood…..your house, your life, your phone, your email machine is under water, under Christmas water.
No, this is not the usual disquisition about the commercialization of a holy holiday. As long as we’re a capitalist country I figure commercialization is what we do. And I’m not as upset at people who say “Xmas” as my mother was, because I’m not my mother but I agree that “Xmas” sounds wrong and short. My mother said “sacrilegious!” with an exclamation point.
When Christmas shows up all bets are on. We all summon up our best and worst instincts. Greed, promiscuity, generosity, love, fond memories, despair, depression, good taste, bad taste, jealousy…..all come romping in with the reindeer. But the most important thing we do is look across the room at someone other than ourselves. You have to, it’s the rule. You’ve got to make a list. Rich or poor, you’ve got to make a list. Just making a list reminds you that you’ve got a kid, an aunt, an ex-wife, a mother, a lawyer, a guy who mows your lawn, a guy who plows your driveway, an old pal who’s fading….a whole universe of folks that buzz around, making you possible.
And evil guys usually sit down all day.
So, everything considered and put together on Christmas afternoon with a bunch of little people running around with hopeful eyes…it’s OK.
No, this is not the usual disquisition about the commercialization of a holy holiday. As long as we’re a capitalist country I figure commercialization is what we do. And I’m not as upset at people who say “Xmas” as my mother was, because I’m not my mother but I agree that “Xmas” sounds wrong and short. My mother said “sacrilegious!” with an exclamation point.
When Christmas shows up all bets are on. We all summon up our best and worst instincts. Greed, promiscuity, generosity, love, fond memories, despair, depression, good taste, bad taste, jealousy…..all come romping in with the reindeer. But the most important thing we do is look across the room at someone other than ourselves. You have to, it’s the rule. You’ve got to make a list. Rich or poor, you’ve got to make a list. Just making a list reminds you that you’ve got a kid, an aunt, an ex-wife, a mother, a lawyer, a guy who mows your lawn, a guy who plows your driveway, an old pal who’s fading….a whole universe of folks that buzz around, making you possible.
And evil guys usually sit down all day.
So, everything considered and put together on Christmas afternoon with a bunch of little people running around with hopeful eyes…it’s OK.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Potemkin
Just finished “Red Mutiny” a well-written (if sometimes creaky) history of the battleship Potemkin’s eleven day rebellion in the Black Sea in 1905. What marks it for me is the purity of its motives, a rebellion of men who took the ancient despair of the naval ratings throughout the world and attached it to the unspeakable class contempt that was igniting Russia (and soon all of Europe). There was no intellectual, theoretical oversight (Lenin sent a man, but he got lost)…..there was little or no factionalism….just a very few, very passionate, unschooled leaders who saw a direct line from rotten food through tyrannical officers and a heartless Tsar to a new and decent society. It damn near worked….at one point they had two battleships and a couple of gunboats under the control of their "sailor committee” which, believe it or not, made sane, sanitary, tactical decisions. Their leader, one Matyushenko, was incredibly brave, a sound tactician and, most important (despite his soaring rage at his oppressors) a humane man who spared lives and in the end, facing defeat (running out of coal and water) surrendered to the Romanians so that his men would not be executed. They buried their dead, tried not to murder all their enemies.
Interestingly, Matyushenko escaped for awhile to England, France, Switzerland, and even
the United States where he was lionized by but unimpressed by the Trotskys, Lenins, Mensheviks, Bolsheviks and SRs who, to him, complicated the mission. He ended up going back to Russia , was almost immediately captured and hung. He was 28. At the end he called himself an anarchist. He brushed aside the priest at the gallows and said, “I am proud to die for the truth.”
There’s something raw and clean about this story,
Interestingly, Matyushenko escaped for awhile to England, France, Switzerland, and even
the United States where he was lionized by but unimpressed by the Trotskys, Lenins, Mensheviks, Bolsheviks and SRs who, to him, complicated the mission. He ended up going back to Russia , was almost immediately captured and hung. He was 28. At the end he called himself an anarchist. He brushed aside the priest at the gallows and said, “I am proud to die for the truth.”
There’s something raw and clean about this story,
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Robert Brookins Gore
Day before yesterday I got a call that my friend Bob Gore had died. According to his friend Vernell Lillie of Pittsburgh, Bob probably died of malaria in The Gambia, a little republic inside the elbow of Africa. He told me once that he wanted to go home.
Bob Gore lit up the horizon of the civil rights movement, he was part preacher, part pistol, part organizer….. all brave and all eloquent. When it was over I lost track of him….it was the middle 70s…we were both broken refugees from the action….floundering, drinking too much. He married, unmarried and finally settled in Pittsburgh where he told stories to buses full of black children on their way to school.
I don’t believe there is enough English to properly compose a toast to this wonderful man.
On his way to Africa in 2002 he came through western Massachusetts and we had dinner.
During dinner, I gave him an old button I’d saved…the one that is half black and half white and said “Freedom Now, CORE.” He cried.
Bob Gore lit up the horizon of the civil rights movement, he was part preacher, part pistol, part organizer….. all brave and all eloquent. When it was over I lost track of him….it was the middle 70s…we were both broken refugees from the action….floundering, drinking too much. He married, unmarried and finally settled in Pittsburgh where he told stories to buses full of black children on their way to school.
I don’t believe there is enough English to properly compose a toast to this wonderful man.
On his way to Africa in 2002 he came through western Massachusetts and we had dinner.
During dinner, I gave him an old button I’d saved…the one that is half black and half white and said “Freedom Now, CORE.” He cried.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
immigration
I was reading Trevor Royle’s tome about the Crimean War (I have a character weakness for military history) when I stumbled on the American “Know Nothing” movement of l854-1856. My Lou Dobbs bell rang. The Know Nothings were a bunch of American “nativists” ….. people who thought the country was being overrun by immigrants, in this case Roman Catholic immigrants who, on orders from the Pope, were stealing our breath.
It was all very confusing……the Know Nothings were for a while, formidable……taking over the state of Massachusetts in 1854, electing Mayors in several cities including San Fancisco and Washington D. C. The two-party system was collapsing in a poisonous brew of jingoism, religious hatred and slavery….. The country was barely 78 years old and already we were in the business of excluding disagreeable newcomers. But the republic survived…..and the Know Nothings disappeared into the larger soup of this democracy.
This immigration stuff isn’t easy and not given to easy solutions. Lou Dobbs whines each evening…..avenging embattled border guards and dusting off the old Know Nothing rhetoric. One does worry about the illegals swarming across the southern border today, often taking entry level jobs. Is there room? But wait a minute….who’s really out of a job? They say unemployment is at a all-time low. My question is…..how do these desperate folks really differ from those Irish and German immigrants in the middle of the 19th Century who cleaned our homes and built our railroads?
Just a thought.
It was all very confusing……the Know Nothings were for a while, formidable……taking over the state of Massachusetts in 1854, electing Mayors in several cities including San Fancisco and Washington D. C. The two-party system was collapsing in a poisonous brew of jingoism, religious hatred and slavery….. The country was barely 78 years old and already we were in the business of excluding disagreeable newcomers. But the republic survived…..and the Know Nothings disappeared into the larger soup of this democracy.
This immigration stuff isn’t easy and not given to easy solutions. Lou Dobbs whines each evening…..avenging embattled border guards and dusting off the old Know Nothing rhetoric. One does worry about the illegals swarming across the southern border today, often taking entry level jobs. Is there room? But wait a minute….who’s really out of a job? They say unemployment is at a all-time low. My question is…..how do these desperate folks really differ from those Irish and German immigrants in the middle of the 19th Century who cleaned our homes and built our railroads?
Just a thought.
Friday, December 7, 2007
Christmas, 1917
My name is Charles Fogarty Jr. and I am 77 years old . I live happily alone in a log house in the town of Sandisfield in western Massachsetts and I am pretty sure this is going to be my last Christmas. Under the circumstances, I have taken a look at my long life, played back a string of Christmases and I've decided to make this one a sentimental holiday that would sound and look like the Christmas Eve sixty years ago when I played the bugle in an American Legion Drum and Bugle Corps Memorial Jamboree on a wintry confield in middle Illinois. I remember most everything about that night....our '46 Mercury automobile with a Christmas tree tied on top, the blue uniforms of the band, the grand out-of-tune music, my father's blue overseas cap with the little curved prism of the Rainbow Division of World War I, the frost on his mustache, my mother's arms around my sister with her pigtail down the middle, the foot-high broken stalks of corn and most of all the Mayor, resplendent in a blue and yellow conductor suit flailing away with a gold baton in the midst of an awful noise. We were all so enthusiastic about wars and flags and courage.
But now I know that memory is a souffle, whipped and sweet above the truth.
You see, recently, I found some very old special papers in my father's files. Some were typed and others were written in pencil...the batch of them had burnt edges as if he had tried to get rid of them beforfe he died.....but.....humbled by his Parkinsons, he couldn't destroy them. I found them in a ratty folder, jammed flat above other files that were neatly organized. In the bottom of the file was small flat box with an official paper wrapped around it. The paper was an order for Charles Fogarty appear at a courts martial and inside the box was the Medale Militaire, a
French medal for valor.
Written on the outside of the folder in his shaky hand was "CHF in World War I".
Of all the wars we have fought, indeed of all the wars anyone anywhere has fought, th "Great War", the one that sucked up the world between 1914 and 1918 was the dumbest, most idiotic human folly of them all. Wars, over time, become myths....even the "good " war sixty years ago,
although it had to be fought, has picked up a certain empty celebrity. But the so-called "great"
war, World War I....was nothing more than a bloody human carnivore that ate up generations of young men to no purpose at all.
My father, Charles Hubert Fogarty Sr. was born in New York City in February of 1900 and almost missed the whole war. He was a patriot at birth and when he was 15 tried to join the Candadian army.....but he got sent back.
He succeeeded in becoming a soldier on his 17th birthday, when America had declared war on Germany. The army would talke him as an infantryman because he was too nearsighted but he talked them into letting him become a medic. And it was as a medic that he served in England and France.
On the night of December 24, 1917. Corporal Fogarty, the medic, lay in a little hole he had dug in the back of a trench near the French town of Passchendaele....it was, for awhile, unimaginably silent. There had been three Christmas Eves already in this endless war....men sat in their trenches, sometimes less than a hundred yards from their enemies and thought about their childhood Christmases with plum pudding and sticky fruit cakes, laughter and...most of all.... carols, achingly familiar carols. They silently mouthed the simple, traditional lyrics.
Now my father had had one hell of a time leading up to that Christmas Eve. After an Atlantic crossing that required his standing up most of the way because of the crowded troop ship, he walked into the teeth of the influenza pandemic that swept through Europe in 1917 like the 14th Century plague. It wasn't what we call "the flu" at all, it was the "flu" gone mad...a viral upper
respiratory infection that became a mortal form of encephalitis, killing almost everyone who got it. My father caught it right aawy but survived, depveloping an immunity that made it possible for him to minister to the flu patients that arrived in England to die. A lot of soldiers ended up in
Charlie Fogarty's wheelbarrow as he lugged their bodies to an incredible "morgue" on a fancy
estate near Dover...a warehouse that became an abbatoir...were doctors cut up the corpses in a desperate effort to find the cause of the disease.
In August of 1917 Charlie Fogarty was shipped across the channel, assigned as a medic to a British battalion to fight the Germans at the Third Battle of Ypres...a brutal four month bloodbath known to history as the Battle of Passchendaele.
The war had come down to a hopeless standoff. The genocides of the Somme and Verdun were behind them, but the soldiers huddled in a line of trenches that stretched from Belgium to Switzerland, knew that it all was going to happen again. A whistle would sound and they would climb the side of the trench and walk across the grim playground of the dead once again.
Within hours of his arrival outside Passchendaele, that whistle blew and Charlie was staggering forward through the harvest of bodies that had been scythed by German machine guns. Charlie, the medic,was trying to separate the wounded from the dead, wrapping the ripped flesh with his packet of four inch bandages and passing on to the next soldier lying in the summer mud.
In the end, nothing had been accomplished, the lines remained exactly the same and Charlie went back to the same trench and sat in his little hole where he had left his pouch of tobacco.
He sat there for four months.
In the fall and winter of 1917, the rules, the proprieties of warfare were being challenged. Millions of men had reached the limits of human endurance...and actual mutinies and anti-war strikes had broken out... especially among the French regiments. "Shell shock" entered the language and the insanity of it all...the endless inhumanity was everywhere.
On that Christmas Eve, 1917, Charlie was especially sad as he sat with his English comrades in his hole in his trench because he was 17 years old and Christmas for him was supposed to be a time of gifts and surprises. The temperature had dropped below freezing all along the front and it was gently snowing on the shell holes and unrecovered bodies in no-mans land.
Quite suddenly....as if it were some sort of divine intervention....Charlie heard a beautiful tenor voice singing "Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht". Around the music it was completely quiet....the men were swept into a great pause....Charlie realized that the singing was coming from 100 yards away, from the German trenches.
As the song ended, lights began to appear on the horizon, Charlie and his comrades reached for their rifles until someone whispered loudly,
"My God in heaven! Look at that, they're lifting Christmas trees!"
Small balsam trees adorned with candles were being placed on the upper edges of the enemy trench...and a voice called out in German-tinted English,
"Where are your Christmas trees?"
The men began to move out of their holes, Charlie Fogarty climbed up the side of his trench, this time without his rifle. A dozen soldiers joined him walking across the battlefield towards the Christmas candles. Someone started singing "Adeste Fideles" and pretty soon everyone was lustily singing in the common Latin tongue.
They came from all sides and gathered inthe center of the cratered field. At first they were awkward, barely able to speak...but soon the voices were sprinkled with laughter and handshakes turned into embraces. Corporal Fogarty spotted a German medic wearing a red cross and they stood together for a few minutes without a word.
But is was the lifting of the Christmas trees that Charlie remembered most vividly. And it was the bobbing trees just above the trench line that alerted the officers.....who were appalled by the spectacle of fraternizing soldiers. Sharp orders to stand down were barked from both sides and the men retreated to their respectived ditches.
It was a great scandal. Forty men, including Charlie Fogarty, were called to courts martial to answer for their behavior. But the touching story appeared in the London Illustrated News and the charges were dropped.
Thirty years later, in 1947, I was playing my bugle at the American Legion Memorial Christmas Jamboree.
At the end of the concert...my father....my wonderful, sane father, Corporal Charlie Fogarty, walked over to our car, unstrapped the Christmas tree on the top and mysteriously lifted it high in the air.
December 7, 2007
But now I know that memory is a souffle, whipped and sweet above the truth.
You see, recently, I found some very old special papers in my father's files. Some were typed and others were written in pencil...the batch of them had burnt edges as if he had tried to get rid of them beforfe he died.....but.....humbled by his Parkinsons, he couldn't destroy them. I found them in a ratty folder, jammed flat above other files that were neatly organized. In the bottom of the file was small flat box with an official paper wrapped around it. The paper was an order for Charles Fogarty appear at a courts martial and inside the box was the Medale Militaire, a
French medal for valor.
Written on the outside of the folder in his shaky hand was "CHF in World War I".
Of all the wars we have fought, indeed of all the wars anyone anywhere has fought, th "Great War", the one that sucked up the world between 1914 and 1918 was the dumbest, most idiotic human folly of them all. Wars, over time, become myths....even the "good " war sixty years ago,
although it had to be fought, has picked up a certain empty celebrity. But the so-called "great"
war, World War I....was nothing more than a bloody human carnivore that ate up generations of young men to no purpose at all.
My father, Charles Hubert Fogarty Sr. was born in New York City in February of 1900 and almost missed the whole war. He was a patriot at birth and when he was 15 tried to join the Candadian army.....but he got sent back.
He succeeeded in becoming a soldier on his 17th birthday, when America had declared war on Germany. The army would talke him as an infantryman because he was too nearsighted but he talked them into letting him become a medic. And it was as a medic that he served in England and France.
On the night of December 24, 1917. Corporal Fogarty, the medic, lay in a little hole he had dug in the back of a trench near the French town of Passchendaele....it was, for awhile, unimaginably silent. There had been three Christmas Eves already in this endless war....men sat in their trenches, sometimes less than a hundred yards from their enemies and thought about their childhood Christmases with plum pudding and sticky fruit cakes, laughter and...most of all.... carols, achingly familiar carols. They silently mouthed the simple, traditional lyrics.
Now my father had had one hell of a time leading up to that Christmas Eve. After an Atlantic crossing that required his standing up most of the way because of the crowded troop ship, he walked into the teeth of the influenza pandemic that swept through Europe in 1917 like the 14th Century plague. It wasn't what we call "the flu" at all, it was the "flu" gone mad...a viral upper
respiratory infection that became a mortal form of encephalitis, killing almost everyone who got it. My father caught it right aawy but survived, depveloping an immunity that made it possible for him to minister to the flu patients that arrived in England to die. A lot of soldiers ended up in
Charlie Fogarty's wheelbarrow as he lugged their bodies to an incredible "morgue" on a fancy
estate near Dover...a warehouse that became an abbatoir...were doctors cut up the corpses in a desperate effort to find the cause of the disease.
In August of 1917 Charlie Fogarty was shipped across the channel, assigned as a medic to a British battalion to fight the Germans at the Third Battle of Ypres...a brutal four month bloodbath known to history as the Battle of Passchendaele.
The war had come down to a hopeless standoff. The genocides of the Somme and Verdun were behind them, but the soldiers huddled in a line of trenches that stretched from Belgium to Switzerland, knew that it all was going to happen again. A whistle would sound and they would climb the side of the trench and walk across the grim playground of the dead once again.
Within hours of his arrival outside Passchendaele, that whistle blew and Charlie was staggering forward through the harvest of bodies that had been scythed by German machine guns. Charlie, the medic,was trying to separate the wounded from the dead, wrapping the ripped flesh with his packet of four inch bandages and passing on to the next soldier lying in the summer mud.
In the end, nothing had been accomplished, the lines remained exactly the same and Charlie went back to the same trench and sat in his little hole where he had left his pouch of tobacco.
He sat there for four months.
In the fall and winter of 1917, the rules, the proprieties of warfare were being challenged. Millions of men had reached the limits of human endurance...and actual mutinies and anti-war strikes had broken out... especially among the French regiments. "Shell shock" entered the language and the insanity of it all...the endless inhumanity was everywhere.
On that Christmas Eve, 1917, Charlie was especially sad as he sat with his English comrades in his hole in his trench because he was 17 years old and Christmas for him was supposed to be a time of gifts and surprises. The temperature had dropped below freezing all along the front and it was gently snowing on the shell holes and unrecovered bodies in no-mans land.
Quite suddenly....as if it were some sort of divine intervention....Charlie heard a beautiful tenor voice singing "Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht". Around the music it was completely quiet....the men were swept into a great pause....Charlie realized that the singing was coming from 100 yards away, from the German trenches.
As the song ended, lights began to appear on the horizon, Charlie and his comrades reached for their rifles until someone whispered loudly,
"My God in heaven! Look at that, they're lifting Christmas trees!"
Small balsam trees adorned with candles were being placed on the upper edges of the enemy trench...and a voice called out in German-tinted English,
"Where are your Christmas trees?"
The men began to move out of their holes, Charlie Fogarty climbed up the side of his trench, this time without his rifle. A dozen soldiers joined him walking across the battlefield towards the Christmas candles. Someone started singing "Adeste Fideles" and pretty soon everyone was lustily singing in the common Latin tongue.
They came from all sides and gathered inthe center of the cratered field. At first they were awkward, barely able to speak...but soon the voices were sprinkled with laughter and handshakes turned into embraces. Corporal Fogarty spotted a German medic wearing a red cross and they stood together for a few minutes without a word.
But is was the lifting of the Christmas trees that Charlie remembered most vividly. And it was the bobbing trees just above the trench line that alerted the officers.....who were appalled by the spectacle of fraternizing soldiers. Sharp orders to stand down were barked from both sides and the men retreated to their respectived ditches.
It was a great scandal. Forty men, including Charlie Fogarty, were called to courts martial to answer for their behavior. But the touching story appeared in the London Illustrated News and the charges were dropped.
Thirty years later, in 1947, I was playing my bugle at the American Legion Memorial Christmas Jamboree.
At the end of the concert...my father....my wonderful, sane father, Corporal Charlie Fogarty, walked over to our car, unstrapped the Christmas tree on the top and mysteriously lifted it high in the air.
December 7, 2007
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
giuliani's howlers
There are several aspects of the Giuliani "crime and statistics" dustup that haven't been mentioned yet. Crime did in fact decrease during his term as New York City Mayor but the reasons for the decrease are complex and generally not the result of Giuliani's actions. The number of NYPD cops was dramatically increased by Giuliani by 12,000....but, as reported in the Nov. 11, 2007 Times, 7000 of those "new" police officers were actually fully trained and operational cops from the Housing Authority and Transit Police who were merged into the NYPD. The wisdom of this move has been challenged by those who inisist that NYPD lost it's "neighborhood cops" strategy both in the projects and the subways. Further (and as far as I know this isn't out there yet)....the remaining 5000 increase is largely the result of Mayor David Dinkin's "Safte Streets, Safe City" program....the new classes of these cops (put in place by Dinkin's initiative) graduated and were deployed after Dinkins lost the election to Giuliani. Also, and this noone talks about, the number of crime-age juveniles in America decreased dramatically in the Giulinani Mayoral years. The baby boomer's kids grew past their 20's with the concomitant decrease in crime. Finally (and here Giuliani can be applauded and then booed) William J. Bratton took over the police force early on Giuliani's watch and according to veterans of the department,"got the old stuck battleship moving." Bratton was too successful (Time cover etc.) and the upstaged Giuliani eased him out of his job.
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