Big-City Mayors, ‘90s Style, Are Those Who Lay Down the Law

CHICAGO —  The stern father is back.

No more turning the other cheek. No more resigned acceptance of the annoying chaos of urban street life. No more squeegee men, school truants, steam-grate dwellers and mall rats scurrying after dark. The stern father in City Hall has had it up to here.

After nearly three decades of throwing up their hands, big-city mayors and political leaders have begun throwing their weight around. The 1990s transformation of the American downtown from vacant blight to urban playground has brought with it the dawning realization that annoyances once accepted as inevitable are no longer tolerable.

New edicts seem to keep coming. The Chicago Transit Authority recently told panhandlers that elevated trains and platforms are off limits. Over six days last month, 55 beggars were arrested on misdemeanor charges and 97 were ejected. CTA President David Mosena bluntly described panhandlers as “annoying, unsettling, harassing, aggressive . . . in your face.”

Striking back, city officials are now in other people’s faces. New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani has launched crackdowns on street vagrants and on transients who “squeegee” car windows to cadge tips. Aides to Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley have ordered a return to remedial classes and nightly homework in public schools. Councils in Atlanta, Miami and scores of other cities are trying to enforce strict curfews to keep teens off the streets.

There is an often-unstated message in much of this urban muscle-flexing: The stern father in City Hall requires stern fathers at home. “Parents have to do their part,” Daley said in an interview this summer. His insistence that Chicago’s schoolchildren buckle down to old standards of “values and responsibility” is an intriguing appeal.

Are civic leaders influential enough to be role models for urban parents? Roger Conner, executive director of the American Alliance for Rights and Responsibilities, a public interest group providing legal research for tough new urban-life laws, says the changes are already affecting family life.

“These public laws are primarily hortatory,” Conner says. “They’re telling people about fulfilling their responsibilities in a community. In the best democratic sense, they represent mechanisms through which new expectations are being transmitted to society.”

Sullen teenagers in Dallas are whining about a city curfew, Conner says, even though few police officers patrol for violators. The reason, he says, is that the prospect of being ordered to undergo counseling has led parents to do the curfew’s real enforcing.

“What the curfew has done is trigger a conversation between parents and children,” Conner says. “The parents are saying, ‘I don’t want to have to go up in front of a judge,’ so they end up taking responsibility for their kids.”

But Maris Vinovskis, a University of Michigan professor who specializes in the history of the American family, warns that the influence of American civic leaders over parental behavior is limited--and has rarely been a major factor over the last 200 years.

“In the 17th and 18th centuries, mayors and city leaders had a stronger impact, but primarily because most Americans lived in small towns,” Vinovskis says. “There was more likelihood that parents knew the leaders and vice versa. Since then, as more Americans have moved to big cities, that connection has been lost.”

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And although their moral voice is magnified by media coverage, civic leaders have to compete with many more role models--not only traditional religious and business leaders, but sports figures, rock musicians, situation comedy stars, Vinovskis says. What results is a dizzying assault of role models--a chaotic babble that many parents simply “tune out.”

“In most American families, parents just don’t listen that closely to people who portray themselves as role models,” Vinovskis says. “If the pronouncements match the parenting methods they already believe in, fine. If there’s conflict there, they’ll usually just ignore them.”

Even stern fathers can shout themselves hoarse.