Mike Wallace, Gotham’s Chronicler

I worked as Mike’s researcher for almost fifteen years, from the fall of 2011, the season of Occupy Wall Street (when Mike would look the other way if we’d skip a seminar or two to march on the banks) to the fall of 2025, just before the general strike in Minnesota’s Twin Cities began last winter. One generation gave way again to the next. We were drawn together by a shared commitment to finding a usable past and a shared conviction that the only way to do this was to write the whole city down.

While I assembled two of Wallace’s 2,500-source bibliographies — and as I wrote thousands of comments on drafts of and  — the months became years, then a decade and a half. What began as an apprenticeship became a search for the whole of human experience in the city. Only Mike’s droll, cheerful, and humanistic Marxism could really capture it all, that unique Wallace vision of history.Greater GothamGotham at War

in one, many.” Here also was the Gotham project’s research design and historical method from the very beginning, the necessary result of synthesizing all the new history from below — as Wallace and Edwin G. Burrows set out to do nearly fifty years ago, when they began to write the city’s history anew “from the Beginning of the World,” as its first biographer Washington Irving had envisioned in 1809. Gotham would be a new coming together of women’s history, working-class history, black and native history, immigration history, the history of sexuality, the history of mass culture, and the collision of a million different folkways transformed by the tenements — arraying all that new history from below against the new history from above: the history of capitalism.In uno plures:“

This was not your old man’s “synthesis” — not the simple additive method Wallace learned from his teacher Richard Hofstadter. But perhaps Wallace turned Hofstadter on his head. “Social Darwinism” was, of course, a Richard Hofstadter coinage: one of several enduring ideas that he has passed down to us. Hofstadter’s classic wartime dissertation charted the origins and trajectory of a homegrown American fascist ideology with roots deep in the American experience: “A people long familiar with Indian warfare on the frontier and the pro-slavery arguments of Southern politicians and publicists had been thoroughly grounded in notions of racial superiority.”Social Darwinism

Summing up the origins and trajectory of this ideology, Hofstadter quoted a particularly bloodthirsty 1845 American expansionist: “The Mexican race now see in the fate of the aborigines of the north, their own inevitable destiny. They must amalgamate or be lost in the superior vigor of the Anglo-Saxon race, or they must utterly perish.” Wallace, for his part, did not fail to trace the origins of a “Manifest Destiny” ideology of American conquest to New York boosters, but followed his teacher’s 1944 aside: “Yet it is possible to take another view. . . . ” Mike also showed us that Gotham and its people fought back, in how some New Yorkers have always demanded an end to imperialism, pulling for the victory of the oppressed in homelands all over the hemisphere and in every corner of the world.

records that ever “since Francisco de Miranda’s 1806 expedition sailed from the East River in its doomed attempt to liberate South America from Spanish rule, New York had been the premier base of operations for rebel Latin Americans. Once the Wars of Independence triumphed in the 1820s, leaving Cuba and Puerto Rico as Spain’s only hemispheric possessions, an array of exiles, from Félix Varela to José Martí” made Gotham not just the seat of American expansionism and settler colonialism, but also held out the promise that New York could be the tomb of imperialism.Gotham at War

Certainly, in the city from a very early date, visions of racial conquest and extermination were anathema to a creed emerging from the streets. As Mary Louise Booth wrote in her 1859 , Gotham was already “blended with all the races of the earth; and if it be true, as one of our most eminent philosophers asserts, that a mixture of many materials makes the best mortar, there is no reason to regret it.”History of the City of New York

This was decidedly the consensus in many layers of New York society in the middle of the nineteenth century. As Wallace and Hofstadter argued together in 1970 in , the brutal downtown nativism of Bill the Butcher — who cracked heads and stole ballots at the polling places of immigrant workers on Park Row and the Bowery in the early 1850s — was just muscle for the millionaires uptown. “A high proportion of our violent actions,” Hofstadter wrote in his introduction to the sources Wallace excavated and arranged, “has thus come from the top dogs or the middle dogs. Such has been the character of most mob and vigilante movements. This may help explain why so little of it has been used against state authority, and why in turn it has been so easily and indulgently forgotten.”notAmerican Violence

Overlaid by the capitalist ethos of domination by the strong, premised on natural hierarchies and scientific racism, this peculiar American vision was crystalized in the Gilded Age maxim attributed to (but never actually uttered by) the New York robber baron Jay Gould: “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”

As the nineteenth century gave way to the crisis of imperialism and World War I, this elitist current in America came to espouse a politics of panic over “threatened Anglo-Saxon power throughout the world.” In a United States “submerged by a flood of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants,” the white men of America could assert “fitness only through a national reawakening.”

In some ways, Hofstadter suggests, American social-Darwinist ideology and practice was a model for European fascism. Picking this thread up where his teacher left off, Wallace shows us in that Jim Crow segregation and American race law (the one-drop rule and otherwise) directly inspired Adolf Hitler. The Führer taunts us from the pages of that the United States was “the first to draw practical political consequences from the differentiation of races.. . . .  Through its immigration law, America has inhibited the unwelcome influence of such races as it has been unable to tolerate within its midst.”Gotham at WarGotham at War

The children of the new immigrants roared back from City College, where the young radicals of the 1930s wore pins that said: “I am a guttersnipe. I fight fascism.”

Among the most famous false prophets of this early American fascism was the Upper East Side’s own Madison Grant. The pseudoscientist, professional racist, and prominent advocate of immigration restriction lived in a mansion at 960 Fifth Avenue between 77th and 78th Streets, overlooking Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In these sumptuous digs in 1934, Grant gratefully received a letter from Hitler hailing as “my Bible.”The Passing of the Great Race

Where Hofstadter was often (and with age, increasingly) preoccupied by the dark currents in American life — social Darwinism, the paranoid style, anti-intellectualism — it took Wallace and the revolution in history from below to find what his teacher had shown only glimmers of: solidarity and pluralism as the working class’s antidote and answer.

In 1943 and 1944, as the war shuddered into its nightmare end, and as the question of the postwar order hung in the air, the young Hofstadter looked back a generation, to the Progressive historian Herbert Croly’s injunction: We must overcome the “traditional American ‘mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism’ in favor of a more positive attempt to realize the national potential.” Sneaking in his own youthful Marxism the best he could, the twenty-seven-year-old Hofstadter quoted a dissident scholar’s 1906 anti-eugenic salute to “the proletariat, the working class, the hewers of wood and drawers of water” — and concluded “that the physical well-being of men is a result of their social organization and not vice versa.”

As Angela Davis — who lived on the corner of St Marks and Kingston in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, as a teenager, having fled Alabama in the middle of the 1950s to attend high school in Gotham — would put it years later: “One cannot be free alone. Freedom is collective.”

Mike made a point never to preach, often even avoiding arguments about the meaning of events in the sweep of history. The pointillist, humanistic method would show the truth.

But Mike a radical, active in the movement to remake American history from below in a struggle with the city’s ruling class. As Hofstadter’s research assistant, Wallace had the keys to several buildings on the Columbia University campus — and while his teacher veered from a wry and erudite consensus liberalism into bitter attacks on the “book burners” and ruffians of the New Left, it was Mike who quietly opened the doors to these buildings so that his comrades in the black and antiwar student movements could occupy them in April and May of 1968, in solidarity with the people of Harlem and the people of Vietnam.was

Wallace maintained these commitments throughout his life. As a junior scholar at the City University of New York’s John Jay College, he coauthored the Newt Davidson Collective’s 1974 , immediately recognizing in the “fiscal crisis” an attack on the social democratic victories of generations of working-class youth movements in the city’s public university system. The bankers’ abolition of CUNY’s free tuition — a policy that had stood since City College’s inception in 1847 — was realized by 1976, as were the first limitations on the open admissions policy that guaranteed every graduate of a New York City high school a spot in a CUNY college: a victory secured by black and Puerto Rican student radicals in the City College sit-ins of 1969 and only completely eliminated by Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral administration in 1999.Crisis at CUNY

Mike’s instant recognition of the rise of neoliberalism in Gotham helped shape his colleague David Harvey’s view that the first salvos of a coordinated attack on working-class power and social democracy were waged simultaneously in Abraham Beame’s New York and Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. In 1973 — the last time the Knicks won the NBA championship — CUNY was free and open to every New Yorker. The Knicks have won again, and it is high time to retake that higher-education victory too.

As a professor, Wallace reveled in the atmosphere of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, teaching working-class kids and first-year cops in rough-and-tumble night school sessions. He told me he usually got along with the rookie cops and the kids because, unlike the ivory-tower liberals, they often shared a materialist understanding of the city and the world (“follow the money”) and most also shared the streets of New York as a first teacher.

Mike was born in Brooklyn in 1942 and came up in Fresh Meadows, Queens; he spent a spell as a child in San Francisco (where his uncle Al was a Latin jazz and swing bandleader); and he graduated from high school in Great Neck, Long Island. Wallace’s standard assignment for a final paper was to interview the oldest New Yorker you knew about their life coming up in the big city — showing students that we are all a part of history, and that we can all write it too.

A generation of City University and Wallace-trained scholars continue the work in his wake: Emily Brooks (); Michelle Chen (among many other works, “Radical Defense: The American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born and the Movement for Deportation Resistance and Immigrants’ Rights,” in ); Andy Battle (“New York 2140: Climate Change and Gentrification in Tomorrow’s Ruined New Yorks,” in ; “On the Auction Block: The Garment Industry and the Deindustrialization of New York City,” in ); and Katie Uva (“1964 and the State of the City,” in ), among many others.Gotham’s War Within a War: Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World War II–Era New York CityJournal of Migration HistoryCapitalism Nature SocialismInternational Labor and Working-Class HistoryWorld’s Fairs in the Cold War

New York will never have another teacher or partisan like Mike. Everyone who has ever lived here, or traveled here, or dreams of this place inherits the life work of the city’s singer and the keeper of its memory. Mike Wallace died on July 5, 2026. Whenever someone speaks a word or takes a step anywhere in the five boroughs, we weave a new thread in the story he wrote down, for all of us to keep forever.

On the East Side, where Le Corbusier’s United Nations complex was built over the ruins of slaughterhouses on land long owned by the Astors, New York became the headquarters of the world (if not ever truly the capital of the world).

This was one of the many ways that Wallace thought he’d conclude . Seeing parallels in the postwar corporate economy — the skyscraper headquarters of multinational capital towering over Midtown, the canyons of brick and concrete rippling out from Wall Street — the sleek glass and steel tower of the General Assembly of the United Nations (at 405 East 42nd Street and First Avenue) reflected a world order orbiting New York City, in the city’s image, and in its model of consolidated corporate capital. Gotham presumed only to be the central and highest node in the organizational chart of a worldwide network of offices. And like the corporate boardrooms atop the multinationals’ skyscrapers, the world powers convened a security council, where the real power from above was.Gotham at War

Here then are the architectonics of the whole Gotham trilogy, the big argument now assuming full form. The city came into being as a colonial periphery, then it was a model and metonym for the nation, now it was the headquarters of the postwar world made in its image: pluralistic, multilateralist, free trade, linked to the center by Wall Street finance, the city itself governed as a social democracy with a restive and powerful working class but an even more powerful ruling class: they’re about to be the masters of the universe.

For all of the explanatory power of Mike’s (usually) unstated argument, Gotham as the song of the city is at most revealing when it is on the ground, with the people, in the city. Wallace’s prelapsarian image of the Bronx — before the development wave at the turn of the twentieth century that turned it into an instant garden city — is gorgeous social history, a landscape of “Romani tinkers, scissor grinders, fishermen with shad from the North River,” when Morrisania

Meanwhile:

Wallace had an eye for old, deep histories that would generally go unremarked, little jetties of liberation in the larger streams of municipal history. Like the Union American Methodist Episcopal Church of Staten Island, founded by free black workers as early as 1801, anchor of a black community in Stapleton for the last 225 years.

The welter of working-class life in Gotham produced solidarity and pluralism — not out of neighborly love or multicultural idealism but out of sheer necessity. Wallace, in rare argumentative interludes in , makes it plain. For workers in the twentieth-century city:Greater Gotham

Confronted with these obstacles, workers in New York sought to

This is to say: the United Nations on the streets of Gotham — and in that and other ways, New York was a model for, metonym of, and capital of the emerging postwar order.already existed

and Melrose were chiefly German. Villagers worked in the local breweries.. . . .  They worshiped at local Lutheran and Catholic churches and shopped and amused themselves along Courtlandt Avenue — known as ‘Dutch [Deutsch] Broadway’ for its German saloons, beer halls, and gymnastic and singing societies.

Highbridgeville, an Irish settlement since the building of the Croton Aqueduct, afforded work for railroad section hands, stevedores along the Harlem River docks, and gardeners.

Forging alliances with other ethnic groups was a practical necessity if they were to build a collective base of resistance to exploitation. . . . there had always been strenuous inter-ethnic competition over jobs, housing, and access to public resources, a jostling exacerbated by economic crisis, ethno-racial-religious tensions, and repercussions from overseas conflicts.

overcome them, by learning each other’s languages, celebrating together on birthdays, at baby showers, and at weddings, and organizing the labor movement side by side. Picket lines and Labor Day parades were routinely multi-ethnic affairs, marchers hoisting signs and banners in multiple languages. Industrial unionists were particularly determined to bridge ethnic fault lines: there were, as Big Bill Haywood put it, “no foreigners in the working class.”

Mike’s last story is the madcap tale of the real estate deal that brought the United Nations to town in 1946. This evokes nothing so much as Washington Irving’s original Gotham — a city of ridiculous “bulbous-bottomed burghers” spreading “forth over the land until they covered the actual site of this venerable city.”

In literal landownership and in spirit, Wallace’s last tale about the Astors and the slaughterhouses and the land that became the United Nations harkens all the way back to old John Jacob Astor himself: “If I could live all over again, I would buy every square inch of Manhattan.”

There’s an important question here about the “capital of the world” argument that Mike leaves to us. What about New York as the center of the postwar world was historical necessity amid the longue durée?

What about the big architectonics — class struggle ; what Samuel Stein has called New York’s “real estate state;” the city’s place in the military-industrial complex; Wall Street; the diasporic links New York already had to the rest of the world — made the contingent possible, sealed the deal? How then can we account for the very contingent, uncertain, touch-and-go way it came about?in uno plures

There’s something to be said here on New York and the “real estate state” — its longue durée in Gotham. All I know is, as O. Henry once said, “It’ll be a great place if they ever finish it.”

As Mike once wrote, at the end of : So far, so good.Greater Gotham