When powerful incumbents are forced to face off
Exactly 50 years ago, Manhattan Democrats’ worst redistricting nightmare became a reality. Two of its most progressive congressional representatives, longtime West Side reformer William Fitts Ryan and first-term sensation Bella Abzug of Greenwich Village were forced into the same, redrawn district.
Ryan, onetime ally of Eleanor Roosevelt, had become a revered liberal lion — gentlemanly and widely respected at age 50. Abzug, 52, a force of nature who had made the cover of Life magazine in her first year in Washington, had impactfully pushed an anti-war, women’s rights agenda.
Abzug vs. Ryan? It seemed as unthinkable as… Jerry Nadler vs. Carolyn Maloney, Manhattan Democratic House members with 60 years of Hill experience between them, few issues separating them, and now finding themselves squeezed into the same new district by the lines a judge’s special master just drew to undo a so-called gerrymander. Hopefully, it will not end the same way as it did in ’72.
Back then, some Democrats, eager to preserve the careers of both Abzug and Ryan, suggested that Abzug run in a downtown district that included portions of Brooklyn and Staten Island. Bella on the ferry? Unthinkable. She said no. In turn, her supporters pointed out that Ryan had just come through major surgery and seemed weakened. Should he not bow out gracefully and yield to Bella? No, he insisted: He was back in good health and would fight to keep his seat — to the death, as it tragically turned out.
What happened over the next few months has morphed into the stuff of legend. The brutal ensuing campaign pitted like-minded liberals and their fiercely devoted admirers against each other, poisoning local politics for years.
Full disclosure: As editor of a West Side-Harlem weekly newspaper at the time, I strongly supported Abzug — the choice “between a good man and a great woman,” I recall writing in one column. And I later served as Bella’s press secretary when she ran for senator and mayor.
By the end of the 1972 race, I was barely speaking to my publisher, who’d endorsed Ryan. The campaign proved operatic — Shakespearean — and so divisive, the wounds festered for decades. Bella campaigned tirelessly up and down the district, courageously introducing herself even in newly included neighborhoods in Riverdale, where her devoted spouse Martin would knock on doors, announce “I’m Bella Abzug’s husband,” and often have them slammed in his face.
Ryan tried to open doors of his own in the Village, where Bella was strongest — only to be dismissed as an un-hip relic. Barbra Streisand campaigned up and down Broadway for Bella on a flatbed truck. But most newspapers backed Ryan, insisting he did not deserve a rebuke. Local leaders turned against each other, birthing grudges that long remained unhealed. (Young Jerry Nadler, for the record, stumped for Abzug.)
Undergirding everything was Ryan’s obviously poor health — evident in his painfully hoarse speaking voice — though the issue was seldom discussed openly. Instead, he benefited from an outpouring of sympathy even from those who thought he should have retired. After all, should not a “lady” have daintily yielded? Many so believed, even in one of the most liberal districts in the nation.
On primary night, Ryan won by almost two-to-one. But within weeks, he was dead of cancer. Choosing his replacement for the general election fell to the county committee. At a tense meeting at the Hotel Manhattan, healing was not the order of the day. By rights, Abzug should have been nominated by acclamation. Instead, egged on by Ryan’s still resentful supporters, Ryan’s widow, Priscilla, entered the balloting, determined to thwart the woman who had made her husband’s last days so challenging.
Undaunted, Bella demanded the respect owed a sitting congresswoman. Bringing together enough leaders who had supported Ryan — most of them women — she won the nomination that night, but not by much. And in the fall campaign, what should have been a runaway general election victory in an overwhelmingly Democratic district instead became a tight contest with Priscilla Ryan still in the race on the Liberal Party line.
When Abzug ran for the Senate four years later in 1976, many of her constituents were still angry. Bella lost the West Side in that race — and thus, the entire primary, to Pat Moynihan. At least Bella’s young cousin Scott Stringer had by then reconciled with his politician-mom, Arlene, a Ryan supporter — after splitting over that contest so bitterly that Scott famously told Arlene at one point, “I have no mother.”
The lesson for Democrats is obvious: Please convince Jerry Nadler and Carolyn Maloney they should do anything rather than face each other. These two veteran committee chairs have done too much for too long, for too many, to engage in the kind of epic, internecine fight that our kids will remember with regret and distaste for another 50 years.