With Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani leading in the polls, some New Yorkers are already wondering if Governor Kathy Hochul and other Albany lawmakers will be a bulwark against the Marxist mayoral aspirant if he accedes to Gracie Mansion. It’s not the first time doubts have risen over the fitness of New York City’s leaders. Feature the proposal in 1869 to run the city “through the agency of the State Legislature,” as a New York Sun editorial reported.

There’s an echo of that thinking in the reminder by the former lieutenant governor, Betsy McCaughey, that with chaos likely to ensue under Mr. Mamdani, Mrs. Hochul by law “has virtually unlimited power to curb the mayor’s authority or remove him.” New York Focus, too, notes that many of Mr. Mamdani’s proposals “would require action from the governor and state legislature,” which could serve as a check on the would-be mayor.

The concern 156 years ago, the Sun wrote in its editorial, headlined “Who Ought to Rule this City?”, had been mooted by a rival paper, the Tribune, then run by Horace Greeley. The Tribune, as the Sun put it, reckoned that most “local politicians are thieves and rascals,” while “our citizens are one half fools and the other half villains.” So, as the Sun described the Tribune’s view, there was “only possible way of preserving us from the doom of Sodom and Gomorrah.” 

The Tribune’s solution, the Sun related, was “to take our affairs out of our hands and place them in charge of the lawmakers who are annually sent to Albany from the purer portions of the State.” The Sun griped that Albany had already set up “commissions” to run the city’s fire, police, and education departments, along with “everything else of that sort that they could lay hold of.” The state lawmakers even eyed supervising the whole city, the Sun fretted.

“We could stand this sort of thing relatively well,” the Sun editorial added, “if we could be sure that our Albany rulers were as superior to the native article as the Tribune all along has been in the habit of representing them to be.” Yet the Sun had “considerable doubt on this point.” So, the editorial averred: “If we are to be robbed and plundered any way, why not keep the stealings to be divided here, instead of scattering them abroad to corrupt the rural districts?” 

The sang-froid of the Sun’s position reminds that New York City has endured its share of poor management, not least in the days of Tammany Hall, when William “Boss” Tweed and his camarilla bilked the taxpayers in the name of “honest graft.” Mayor Jimmy Walker resigned rather than be removed by FDR. Mayor William O’Dwyer resigned in 1950 amid corruption allegations. Mayor Abe Beame sat by haplessly as the city slid toward insolvency.

New York’s problems would not be solved by Albany, the Sun argued in 1869, but would have to arise from the residents of the city — guided by principled and competent leaders, the absence of which marred this year’s mayoral race. The Sun concluded: “the sooner we restore to our citizens the control of their own affairs, the sooner we shall be able to put some kind of check upon the extravagance and mismanagement under which we now groan.”