Evolutionary science may have settled the chicken-and-egg contest (winner: egg), but urban historians still wrestle with their own versions of the dilemma: Are cities made or do they happen? Predetermined or organic? Driven by individual choices or buffeted by circumstance? Storytelling demands human protagonists — creators — while the scholarship of urban history often concentrates on more amorphous factors — geographical serendipity, demographic shifts, technological innovation, proximity to natural resources and so on. All such discussion about the origins and character of cities, however, arises in part out of a curiosity that feels surprisingly personal and pressing: Why are we here? Or, more accurately, why are we here?

City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York, Mason B. Williams’ valuable study of New York City during the New Deal, is an attempt to rejoin both halves of the made-or-happen question into a coherent and illuminating whole. He succeeds in this effort, due partly to the remarkable depth of his research and partly to his admirable focus. Great cities like New York are things in many different senses — physical, social, economic, cultural, iconographic and metaphorical — but they are also places with particular political identities created through unique political means.

It is this notion of a city — as an entity born not of founders or settlers or builders but of an ever-evolving electorate — that most concerns Williams, a postdoctoral fellow at the New-York Historical Society and the New School. By fixing his attention on New York City in the period between 1934 and 1945, when Fiorello La Guardia was the city’s mayor and Franklin Roosevelt the country’s president, Williams allows himself to fully unpack the ways “ties between the White House and City Hall … play out in the electoral arena,” and to suggest how useful those ties can be in making cities great national showplaces and engines of economic vitality.

As Williams writes in the book’s introduction, his own ambition is to “show how patterns of social organization and developments within the American political system structured the kind of political leadership Roosevelt and La Guardia exercised.” Readers looking for tales of how the city came to be shaped through buildings, bridges, streets, railways, ports and public spaces — what we might reflexively think of as things made — will find more satisfying fodder elsewhere. However, readers who desire to know how the political animal called New York City was profoundly influenced by the New Deal will find much to love in City of Ambition.

The driving force of Williams’ book is its examination of “collaborative federalism,” the role of municipal governments in meeting national objectives that, in turn, redound to the city’s lasting benefit. In this formulation, mayor and president are less prime movers than allegorical representations of government: Roosevelt stands in for the nation, while LaGuardia becomes the voice of the city. And just as the federal government and the city of New York have always made odd bedfellows, so did Roosevelt and La Guardia — so much so, in fact, that they seem to have been a couple cast for a television series: one patrician, the other populist; one above the fray, the other immersed in it; one perhaps a little too smooth for city office and the other a little too brash for national politics.

During these calamitous, crucial years, the two men were friends, did respect each other, and did revel in their obvious differences — but Williams makes a convincing case that what was so interesting to watch at a personal level had far greater political ramifications. City of Ambition gives us tantalizing hints of their many lively face-to-face meetings and encounters, but we’re rarely in the room with them, because for the book’s purposes we don’t have to be. Rather, it is the outcome of elections that matters to Williams, elections that allowed the Republican La Guardia and the Democrat Roosevelt to form new and creative alliances that would forever shape New Yorkers’ idea of what their city was and should be. (This may also explain why Robert Moses doesn’t receive as much space as one might assume he deserves in any book devoted to the “making” of New York; after all, for all of his titanic influence on the city, Moses was never elected to anything.)

An outgrowth of Williams’ doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, City of Ambition is, in fact, a book about New York City to warm the heart of Washingtonians, a wonk’s parade of bipartisan alignments, political machines, demographic constellations, backroom alliances, patronage battles, neighborhood meetings, workforce protests, reform coalitions, legislative maneuvering, campaign oratory, congressional hearings, ethnic loyalties, interest-group jockeying, media manipulation and cold electoral calculation. All this is populated by a hundred governmental acronyms and complete with extensive notes, a thorough bibliography, and many many-columned charts of federal and municipal spending, construction contracts, voter participation and the like. The book’s considerable achievement is to collect all of this data, filter it through the political careers of LaGuardia and Roosevelt (and vice versa), and somehow still make it all engaging and entirely readable.

For all of his data crunching, Williams is also a perceptive observer of the less quantifiable qualities that give cities such a purchase on our hearts and minds. He frequently quotes Roosevelt speechwriter and economic guru Adolf A. Berle, Jr., who seems to be the book’s genial presiding spirit even as he remains mostly off-stage. “We are wrong in thinking that wealth is only that sort of goods which produce other goods and result in a mercantile profit,” wrote Berle, citing Central Park as an example of “a human necessity” provided through public funds that “satisfies a human need just as much as a plate of pork and beans.” Much of New York City’s “social wealth,” Williams maintains, is the result of money spent anddecisions made by the federal government during the New Deal. This thesis deserves notice, full as it is of loud echoes of present-day debates surrounding immigration, wealth (re)distribution, health care policy, employment, social services, the safety net, the role of parks and the place of cities in the national consciousness.

These claims about the shape and nature of modern-day New York City today, though, are mostly implicit in City of Ambition. Williams is much more concerned with painting an empirical portrait of New York’s mid-century politics than he is in exploring how those politics have made their winding way down to us in the 21st century. This is a sensible choice, one that allows Williams to maintain a consistent aerial view, keep his chronology firm and clear, and deliver unequivocal conclusions. The deaths of his two title characters, coming so close together in 1945 and 1947, provides a natural close, but near the book’s conclusion Williams also writes, “New Yorkers had learned to love a kind of government that had come into creation under the extraordinary conditions of the New Deal and that had developed under the singular conditions of midcentury.”

Readers who see a line connecting then and now — and there will be many — may find themselves wanting more. Perhaps some of the space devoted to LaGuardia’s third term — a depressing if fascinating affair in which his career falls off the table, creating a great and sudden distance between himself and Roosevelt — might have been given over to a fuller discussion of how the new political landscape formed by the hurricane winds of the Depression and World War II continued to take shape during the Cold War and its aftermath.

But this is asking Williams for 1,000 pages instead of the 400 excellent ones he’s provided here. City of Ambition is a major scholarly contribution to the ever-growing pile of books outlining New York City’s history; it is also a backdrop against which future studies or narratives of New Deal-era New York must be placed. It is also, perhaps most importantly, a model for the kind of close study of electoral forces that can illuminate the way municipalities big and small have to come into their current form — for the policies and agencies created as part of the New Deal transformed American politics and the very nature of place not only in cities, but in small towns and rural areas as well. Whether the political forces that made New York City what it is today apply in the same way to, say, Peoria or Pittsburgh is only glanced at here — but in an era when many voters feel that the federal government has no business spending money on cities, except perhaps to repair the damage done by terrorism or natural disaster, City of Ambition offers a useful and timely corrective.

Scott W. Berg is the author of 38 Nooses: Lincoln, Little Crow, and the Beginning of the Frontier’s End and Grand Avenues: The Story of Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C. He teaches nonfiction writing and literature at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

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