Fred Siegel, Urban Historian and a Former Liberal, Is Lifeless at 78
Fred Siegel, a passionate city historian whose rejection of the liberal establishment’s reaction to crime, poverty and public civility remodeled him from a spokesman for the Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern in 1972 to a voter for Donald J. Trump in 2020, died on Sunday at his dwelling in Brooklyn. He was 78.
The cause was issues of a series of infections that experienced left him hospitalized on a vacation to California, his son, Harry, explained.
Mr. Siegel was a professor emeritus at the Cooper Union for the Progression of Science and Art in Manhattan, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Exploration, a conservative feel tank, and an author.
His ideological evolution was evidenced in the titles of his books: “The Upcoming As soon as Transpired Right here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Huge Cities” (1997) “The Prince of the Metropolis: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life” (2005), which he wrote with Harry Siegel and “The Revolt Towards the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class” (2014).
Mr. Siegel experienced been an adviser to Rudolph W. Giuliani when he was elected mayor of New York Town in 1993 and came to regard him as the city’s best leader to occupy that business due to the fact Fiorello La Guardia, who presided throughout the Good Depression. He argued that the Giuliani administration had significantly decreased criminal offense and debunked the conventional view that the town was ungovernable.
Mr. Giuliani “revived the republic with more than a contact of Machiavelli’s corrupt wisdom,” Mr. Siegel wrote.
As a historian, he would establish the roots of liberalism in the writings of Herbert Croly and H.G. Wells, who had envisioned school graduates as a new elite class that would lead an enlightened democratic governing administration where the European aristocracy experienced failed.
Even as a disillusioned liberal, Mr. Siegel taken care of a adore affair with his Ditmas Park community in Brooklyn, which he in no way left even with his disillusionment with what he considered as New York City’s wayward progressive authorities. He defended the rights of immigrants and mocked Newt Gingrich, the Ga Republican who was speaker of the Household in the late 1990s, for asserting that New York was dependent on Washington when in point Mr. Gingrich’s personal district benefited from great federal governing administration subsidies.
And, perhaps much more in sorrow than in anger, he quoted previous Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York as saying that his fellow Democrats experienced “rewarded the articulation of ethical function more than the achievement of realistic excellent.”
Mr. Siegel mentioned in an interview with City Journal in 2020 that John V. Lindsay, who was mayor from 1966 to 1973, “was a vintage liberal in that intentions counted for a lot more than results, and the trade-offs that we often have to make in buy to make policy operate, have been alien to him.”
In the same magazine in 1991, Mr. Siegel argued: “Middle-class citizens, rightly or wrongly, have turn into convinced that fashionable liberal city government is mostly about permitting the very poor misbehave at the expense of the center course, and paying out public staff members very very well to deliver providers pretty badly.”
He was a protégé of the literary critic Irving Howe and additional or a lot less followed his ideology before veering ideal.
Mr. Siegel’s metamorphosis — from a member of the Democratic Socialists of The united states, a fellow of the Progressive Plan Institute and a voter for the independent John Anderson in 1980 and the Democrat Walter F. Mondale in 1984 (each and every time voting towards the Republican Ronald Reagan) — attained its apogee (depending on one’s political point of view) in 2020.
After a life time of sitting out presidential elections or primarily voting for losers, he cast his ballot for Mr. Trump.
He shown his causes for performing so in 2020 in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, lauding Mr. Trump for “crushing ISIS, pulling us out of the Iran nuclear deal, relocating our embassy to Jerusalem and building fools of those people folks who insist that the Palestinian problem is at the coronary heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict.” He also favored Mr. Trump, he said, for displaying an “ability to endure a extended coup attempt by the Democrats and the media” and for championing “bourgeois values.”
In an on the net tribute this week, Brian C. Anderson, the editor of City Journal, wrote that Mr. Siegel experienced determined what he called a “riot ideology” that took maintain of community officers in key towns, “making them unwilling to confront community ailment and crime for fear of violent opposition.”
“His operate was central to the renewal of American towns beginning in the 1990s, particularly New York,” Mr. Anderson wrote.
Lawrence J. Mone, the previous president of the Manhattan Institute, claimed that by turning out to be a fellow at the study group, Mr. Siegel “opened it up to disenchanted individuals from the Democratic remaining who experienced a eyesight of the way the entire world worked and realized that it did not function.”
“He was developing a safe haven to get these individuals in from the chilly,” Mr. Mone mentioned.
Amid all those progressives whom Mr. Siegel did not convert was Ester R. Fuchs, a political scientist at Columbia College and Mr. Siegel’s someday debate adversary.
“Fred was a lovable, gifted, intellectual puzzle who under no circumstances stopped thinking or caring about New York Metropolis,” Professor Fuchs explained. “His judgment was clouded by his disappointment with the liberal establishment (who ended up also erroneous!). Whilst he comprehended the white ethnic performing course, he did not realize the Black and Hispanic weak and working class.”
Frederick Fein Siegel was born on March 27, 1945, in the Bronx to Albert and Selma (Fein) Siegel. His dad and mom ran an work agency right until it shut all through the 88-day newspaper strike in New York in 1978.
Fred Siegel attended Rutgers College, where by he was an errant university student. He went on the highway to make his fortune but was let down when hustling pool proved to be a dead stop. He later on acquired a doctorate from the College of Pittsburgh.
In 1976, he married Jan Rosenberg, a sociologist. In addition to his son Harry, she survives him alongside with yet another son, Jacob, and 4 grandchildren.
Mr. Siegel taught on campuses of the Condition College of New York from 1973 to 1980 at the Sorbonne in Paris from 1980 to 1981 and as a professor of historical past and the humanities at the Cooper Union from 1982 to 2010. He was a member of the Institute for Innovative Examine in Princeton, N.J., from 1989 to 1990 the editor of Town Journal from 1990 to 1993 a columnist for The New York Post from 1994 to 1997 and a scholar in residence at St. Francis College in Brooklyn from 2011 to 2018.
Harry Siegel reported that his father’s liberalism was largely formed by discussions with his maternal grandfather, a garment worker and labor organizer, and that his political conversion as an adult was gradual.
The essayist Irving Kristol famously defined a neoconservative, a breed Mr. Kristol epitomized and popularized, as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” But Mr. Siegel’s conversion wasn’t the result of a single personalized encounter, his son said — even however a thief the moment grabbed a bag of $100 worth of kosher meat from him on the subway and several of the family’s cars and trucks had been stolen.
If Mr. Siegel approached a philosophical epiphany, although, it was in the course of the blackout of 1977, when looters raged as a result of components of Brooklyn, stripping outlets of goods and environment them ablaze in a evening of rioting.
Mr. Siegel, whose favourite cafe, Jack’s Pastrami King, was amid the destinations wrecked, reflected in 2017: “The city by itself had been mugged, I realized. I’m nonetheless haunted by that instant from 40 many years back, when my political re-training commenced.”
Fred Siegel, a passionate city historian whose rejection of the liberal establishment’s reaction to crime, poverty and public civility remodeled him from a spokesman for the Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern in 1972 to a voter for Donald J. Trump in 2020, died on Sunday at his dwelling in Brooklyn. He was 78.
The cause was issues of a series of infections that experienced left him hospitalized on a vacation to California, his son, Harry, explained.
Mr. Siegel was a professor emeritus at the Cooper Union for the Progression of Science and Art in Manhattan, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Exploration, a conservative feel tank, and an author.
His ideological evolution was evidenced in the titles of his books: “The Upcoming As soon as Transpired Right here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Huge Cities” (1997) “The Prince of the Metropolis: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life” (2005), which he wrote with Harry Siegel and “The Revolt Towards the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class” (2014).
Mr. Siegel experienced been an adviser to Rudolph W. Giuliani when he was elected mayor of New York Town in 1993 and came to regard him as the city’s best leader to occupy that business due to the fact Fiorello La Guardia, who presided throughout the Good Depression. He argued that the Giuliani administration had significantly decreased criminal offense and debunked the conventional view that the town was ungovernable.
Mr. Giuliani “revived the republic with more than a contact of Machiavelli’s corrupt wisdom,” Mr. Siegel wrote.
As a historian, he would establish the roots of liberalism in the writings of Herbert Croly and H.G. Wells, who had envisioned school graduates as a new elite class that would lead an enlightened democratic governing administration where the European aristocracy experienced failed.
Even as a disillusioned liberal, Mr. Siegel taken care of a adore affair with his Ditmas Park community in Brooklyn, which he in no way left even with his disillusionment with what he considered as New York City’s wayward progressive authorities. He defended the rights of immigrants and mocked Newt Gingrich, the Ga Republican who was speaker of the Household in the late 1990s, for asserting that New York was dependent on Washington when in point Mr. Gingrich’s personal district benefited from great federal governing administration subsidies.
And, perhaps much more in sorrow than in anger, he quoted previous Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York as saying that his fellow Democrats experienced “rewarded the articulation of ethical function more than the achievement of realistic excellent.”
Mr. Siegel mentioned in an interview with City Journal in 2020 that John V. Lindsay, who was mayor from 1966 to 1973, “was a vintage liberal in that intentions counted for a lot more than results, and the trade-offs that we often have to make in buy to make policy operate, have been alien to him.”
In the same magazine in 1991, Mr. Siegel argued: “Middle-class citizens, rightly or wrongly, have turn into convinced that fashionable liberal city government is mostly about permitting the very poor misbehave at the expense of the center course, and paying out public staff members very very well to deliver providers pretty badly.”
He was a protégé of the literary critic Irving Howe and additional or a lot less followed his ideology before veering ideal.
Mr. Siegel’s metamorphosis — from a member of the Democratic Socialists of The united states, a fellow of the Progressive Plan Institute and a voter for the independent John Anderson in 1980 and the Democrat Walter F. Mondale in 1984 (each and every time voting towards the Republican Ronald Reagan) — attained its apogee (depending on one’s political point of view) in 2020.
After a life time of sitting out presidential elections or primarily voting for losers, he cast his ballot for Mr. Trump.
He shown his causes for performing so in 2020 in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, lauding Mr. Trump for “crushing ISIS, pulling us out of the Iran nuclear deal, relocating our embassy to Jerusalem and building fools of those people folks who insist that the Palestinian problem is at the coronary heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict.” He also favored Mr. Trump, he said, for displaying an “ability to endure a extended coup attempt by the Democrats and the media” and for championing “bourgeois values.”
In an on the net tribute this week, Brian C. Anderson, the editor of City Journal, wrote that Mr. Siegel experienced determined what he called a “riot ideology” that took maintain of community officers in key towns, “making them unwilling to confront community ailment and crime for fear of violent opposition.”
“His operate was central to the renewal of American towns beginning in the 1990s, particularly New York,” Mr. Anderson wrote.
Lawrence J. Mone, the previous president of the Manhattan Institute, claimed that by turning out to be a fellow at the study group, Mr. Siegel “opened it up to disenchanted individuals from the Democratic remaining who experienced a eyesight of the way the entire world worked and realized that it did not function.”
“He was developing a safe haven to get these individuals in from the chilly,” Mr. Mone mentioned.
Amid all those progressives whom Mr. Siegel did not convert was Ester R. Fuchs, a political scientist at Columbia College and Mr. Siegel’s someday debate adversary.
“Fred was a lovable, gifted, intellectual puzzle who under no circumstances stopped thinking or caring about New York Metropolis,” Professor Fuchs explained. “His judgment was clouded by his disappointment with the liberal establishment (who ended up also erroneous!). Whilst he comprehended the white ethnic performing course, he did not realize the Black and Hispanic weak and working class.”
Frederick Fein Siegel was born on March 27, 1945, in the Bronx to Albert and Selma (Fein) Siegel. His dad and mom ran an work agency right until it shut all through the 88-day newspaper strike in New York in 1978.
Fred Siegel attended Rutgers College, where by he was an errant university student. He went on the highway to make his fortune but was let down when hustling pool proved to be a dead stop. He later on acquired a doctorate from the College of Pittsburgh.
In 1976, he married Jan Rosenberg, a sociologist. In addition to his son Harry, she survives him alongside with yet another son, Jacob, and 4 grandchildren.
Mr. Siegel taught on campuses of the Condition College of New York from 1973 to 1980 at the Sorbonne in Paris from 1980 to 1981 and as a professor of historical past and the humanities at the Cooper Union from 1982 to 2010. He was a member of the Institute for Innovative Examine in Princeton, N.J., from 1989 to 1990 the editor of Town Journal from 1990 to 1993 a columnist for The New York Post from 1994 to 1997 and a scholar in residence at St. Francis College in Brooklyn from 2011 to 2018.
Harry Siegel reported that his father’s liberalism was largely formed by discussions with his maternal grandfather, a garment worker and labor organizer, and that his political conversion as an adult was gradual.
The essayist Irving Kristol famously defined a neoconservative, a breed Mr. Kristol epitomized and popularized, as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” But Mr. Siegel’s conversion wasn’t the result of a single personalized encounter, his son said — even however a thief the moment grabbed a bag of $100 worth of kosher meat from him on the subway and several of the family’s cars and trucks had been stolen.
If Mr. Siegel approached a philosophical epiphany, although, it was in the course of the blackout of 1977, when looters raged as a result of components of Brooklyn, stripping outlets of goods and environment them ablaze in a evening of rioting.
Mr. Siegel, whose favourite cafe, Jack’s Pastrami King, was amid the destinations wrecked, reflected in 2017: “The city by itself had been mugged, I realized. I’m nonetheless haunted by that instant from 40 many years back, when my political re-training commenced.”