May 17, 2006
New York City Secession Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:30 AM EST Peter Vallone, Jr., a New York City councilman, has called for the city to secede from New York State and become the 51st state on its own. He claims—quite correctly—that the state takes far more from the city in taxes than it returns in services and transfer payments. The local news programs have been duly reporting this as though it were a brand new idea. In fact, it’ s probably the hundredth time the idea of secession has been bruited about, and it will go no further than previous calls for New York City statehood, which is to say nowhere. New York politics has always been complicated. John Adams in his long retirement wrote that “Man and boy I have known New York politics for sixty years, and to me they have always been the devil’s own incomprehensible.” And that was before the Erie Canal transformed New York into the Empire State and New York City became “that tongue that is licking up the cream of commerce and finance of a continent.” By 1860 New York was the “megalopolis of the Western world,” far and way the most cosmopolitan city in the country, famous—or infamous—for its wealth, depravity, and all that is wonderful and terrible about a great city. Upstate, meanwhile, remained a major producer of agricultural products—it still is—dotted with medium-size cities, mostly located along the Erie Canal. This, not surprisingly, produced a profound political divide between the city and upstate. It was a bit as though Wisconsin and Paris were to find themselves members of the same polity. It is no coincidence that only one elected New York City mayor has ever gone on to higher office. And that was John T. Hoffman, elected governor in 1862 due to a perfect avalanche of fraudulent votes courtesy of Tammany Hall.
But while upstate was more than happy to deplore New York City and its excesses, it was equally happy to tap into its enormous capacity to generate wealth. The real cows may have been upstate, but the cash cow was in Manhattan and upstate was—and is—not about to let it go a-roaming. To this day, the city enjoys far less “home rule” than the state’s other cities.
The result has been a steady stream of calls for Gotham to break free. Probably the first time there was a serious call to do so was in 1861, when the Southern states seceded from the Union. New York had been reaping enormous profits brokering Southern cotton to British and French mills, and that trade was threatened by the breakup of the Union. Mayor Fernando Wood (“of whom no man need fear he holds too low an opinion”) called for the city to secede both from New York State and the Union itself, so that it could continue to broker Southern cotton. Nothing came of the idea, of course (and the city, while losing the Southern cotton trade to the blockade, more than made up for it by brokering federal debt to finance the Civil War).
But ever since, city politicians, hoping for a little media attention, have regularly called for New York City to secede. There is just one problem: the United States Constitution. Article IV, Section 3, reads, “New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other state . . .” So, memo to Peter Vallone, Jr., and the New York City media that is running this story for the umpteenth time: fegeddaboudit, as they say in Brooklyn.
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