Cry Subsidy

The plight of the U.S.'s big cities, said Big City Boy John Fitzgerald Kennedy of Boston last week in Denver, "deserves to be the most decisive issue of the 1960 presidential campaign." Democratic Presidential Hopeful Jack Kennedy was saying just what the 1,500 mayors and urban experts of the American Municipal Association wanted to hear. "Only the last thin dime of the tax dollar goes to our municipalities," he declared, because tax sources are pre-empted by rural-ruled state legislatures. So cities must turn to the Federal Government for help, said Kennedy, but the Eisenhower Administration responds with an "attitude of veto and cutback which has held back grants for urban renewal, water pollution, airports and other municipal problems that are actually national in scope."

Kennedy was not the only politico with an eye on the rising needs of 160 big urban areas, which by 1980 will hold 80% of the total U.S. population. Philadelphia's newly re-elected (second term) Mayor Richardson Dilworth, 61, who built his political career on slum clearance and urban renewal, dominated the Denver convention. "The real frontiers of America today are inside the big cities," he said. "But the Administration in Washington is still living in a 100-year-old dream world of wide Kansas prairies." Dilworth arid his spring-legged staff of ten nursed through 23 resolutions, largely demanding bigger U.S. grants for public housing, depressed areas, civil defense, air-pollution control, hospitals.

In his biggest coup, Dilworth won backing for an entirely new kind of subsidy: federal aid to commuter railroads. Despite a year-long campaign to line up support, he had difficulty because Western railway bosses rejected the idea of Government handouts even for themselves. Dilworth eased their consciences by making the subsidy indirect: the U.S. would extend longterm, low-interest loans to city governments, which in turn would buy new cars and equipment needed by depressed commuter lines.

Dilworth's strongest support came from the commuter-troubled Eastern railroaders. "Railroad presidents and politicians have got to be realistic about this," said the New York Central's President Alfred Perlman. "I'd rather see a subsidy than to see our major cities strangled in the face of dwindling fares and high taxes."

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