The Nation: Should New York City Be the 51st State?

The political connection between the people of the city and the state has been used by the latter to our injury. Our burdens have been increased, our substance eaten out and our municipal liberty destroyed. Why may not New York disrupt the bonds that bind her to a corrupt and venal master?

THAT bitter justification for demanding that New York City seek statehood carries the contemporary flavor of Mayor John Lindsay's continuing crusade for municipal independence. Yet it was offered more than a century ago by a Lindsay predecessor, Mayor Fernando Wood, in...

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