Stuyvesant Hosts NYC Historian Dr. Emily Brooks for a Book Talk

On May 28, history teacher Robert Sandler hosted guest speaker Dr. Emily Brooks during his New York City History class. The event centered around Dr. Brooks sharing insights from her recently published book Gotham’s War Within a War: Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World War II–Era New York City (2023). 

The book tells the story of the New York City Police Department in the 1930s and 1940s, focusing on the changes it underwent throughout that period. It was born out of Brooks’ long-held interest in the history of policing. “I felt that, as somebody who lives in a city now and always has, you see police play a really central role in how people experience urban life. For the story that I tell in my book, the NYPD was and continues to be the largest municipal police department in the country. And so it plays a particular leadership role in policing, especially at the time period that I write about,” Brooks said.

Dr. Brooks’s argument evolved due to new research she collected while preparing to write her book about the NYPD. “The argument that I made in my dissertation was that the mobilization for World War Two injected new political and material resources into policing projects in New York City that intensified the surveillance and criminalization of marginalized communities, particularly black New Yorkers but also Puerto Rican New Yorkers and also working class women and youth. But in the process of writing that project, I was realizing that a lot of these policing trends had actually started by the policies that had been initiated in the early 1930s by [NYC governor Fiorello] La Guardia and [Police Commissioner Lewis Joseph] Valentine,” Brooks said.

Mayor Fiorello La Guardia is generally positively perceived by historians. “I think the traditional perspective of him is that he’s the guy who read the funnies to the kids during the newspaper strike, that he used a sledgehammer to break slot machines and went after gamblers and the mafia. He’s seen as this really scrappy mayor who looked out for the little guy—the people’s mayor,” Sandler said.

Dr. Brooks’s dissertation offered a new perspective on this important figure. “This more complicated history actually helps us understand why life in New York City is the way that it is today. It’s not just because we had a kind of mass increase in public funding and public goods, where city life was more democratized. But one of the shortcomings of that vision is that it was exclusively based on this idea of criminality—that people who were criminals were a sort of plague on public life. Part of this expanded government was more police—more aggressive surveillance to keep those people out of public life,” Brooks said.

Sandler invited Brooks after discovering her book through the CUNY Graduate Center. He reached out expressing his interest in her book and scheduled the event. “I always keep track of new books coming out for New York City History, because it’s one of my loves and things I love teaching about and studying,” Sandler said. 

The event was unexpected for students, both in terms of timing and content. “We came into class and we saw that we had a guest there to give a presentation. At the time, we had been doing more modern history—we were up to [1994 to 2001 NYC Mayor Rudy] Giuliani. So it was quite a change to go back 50 years and talk about La Guardia,” senior and NYC History student Elvis Lin said.

What stood out most about the event to students was how different Sandler’s and Brooks’s perspectives on La Guardia were. “As opposed to Dr. Brooks, who focused on the negative aspects [of La Guardia’s administration] about policing, Sandler was much more focused on his strong leadership during the war, all he built, all the corruption he fixed. [For instance, he discussed] how La Guardia was able to work his political magic and get a lot of New Deal money directed to New York City that Robert Moses was able to use to build all of his infrastructure,” Elvis Lin said.

During the event, Sandler actively engaged with Dr. Brooks by challenging some of her points. For instance, he argued that La Guardia may just have been enforcing laws and cracking down on the rampant crime, similar to how recent mayors have punished people who jump over subway turnstiles. Through this exchange of ideas, Sandler intended to show his students how history can be interpreted in different ways over time. “They see the history is not this thing that’s written in stone where you just remember when it happened, but it’s more of an ongoing dialogue with the meaning of past events,” Sandler said.

Dr. Brooks’s perspective helped students understand the complexities of racial profiling in urban environments. “The ‘broken windows theory’ refers to the psychological association of broken windows, graffiti, or other signs of disrepair acting as a metaphor for visible signs of disorder insinuating the disorder of a local area. Dr. Brooks actually brought up that psychologists had debunked that theory due to lack of evidence to support it, bringing to question the justifications with which profiling is conducted and its inherently biased origins,” junior and NYC History student Johnny Lin said.

The event also gave students a greater understanding of modern day policing trends. “It seems that certain issues raised back then are perhaps still issues that we deal with today. It’s certainly interesting to think about the historical parallels,” senior Elvis Lin said.

Both Sandler and Brooks found the event successful and noted the importance of exposing students to higher-level academic discussion, especially as they prepare for the transition to college. “When you take a high school history class, it’s a big, broad course—[in US history] we focus on everything from the Revolution to civil rights, from World War II to identity politics. When you take a college class, often they’ll be much more specific—like New York City from 1919 to 1931. I think it’s good for [students] just to get a flavor of that,” Sandler said.

In her discussion of the policing policies of a particular New York City mayor, Brooks provided students with a framework for how history is studied beyond a high-school level. “I always [seek to] encourage students with an interest in history to be more interested in history, and one way that I try to achieve that is through social history. It’s the idea that history was something that was made by regular people just like us, and that could have gone differently,” Sandler said.