Mario Cuomo’s 1984 DNC Address Put Western New York on the Map

No remembrance of Mario Cuomo can be complete without considerable attention paid to his famous 1984 keynote address to the Democratic National Convention. Riffing on President Ronald Reagan’s speech a week earlier, in which the president described America as a “shining city on a hill,” New York’s new governor catalogued the country’s miseries that Reagan seemed so oblivious to. “There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces you don’t see, in the places you don’t visit in your shining city,” he said.

Cuomo proceeded to list some of the cities that he claimed were crying out for help and getting none: Chicago, Little Rock, Duluth, Boston. But one part of the country so embodied American desperation for Cuomo that he singled it out not once, but twice: Buffalo and its industrial suburbs.

Why did Cuomo call so much attention to Buffalo in a national speech? It may have had something to do with the fact that his top political aide and Buffalo native son Tim Russert helped write the speech. But according to Democrat Len Lenihan, who served in the Erie County Legislature from 1976 to 1996, Cuomo’s first major crisis as governor occurred just south of Buffalo, and it hit with blinding speed.

Cuomo was first elected to the governor’s office on Nov. 2, 1982; he was due to give his inaugural address on New Year’s Day. Between those two dates—and before he could even catch his breath—Bethlehem Steel's plant in Lackawanna shut down, throwing 7,300 people out of work.

“Lackawanna was indelibly marked by the Bethlehem Steel announcement,” Lenihan said. “So he was here immediately; I think even before he took office. And he met with hundreds of people here who were asking, ‘What are we going to do? How are we going to eat?’ It was a tremendous blow and a tremendous wake up call.”

The mass layoffs alarmed Cuomo so much that he singled out Buffalo’s crisis in his first State of the State address a few days later. Over the next months and years he would have to cope with both short-term and long-term problems: how to extend unemployment insurance for former Bethlehem employees; how to identify new economic opportunities; how to retrain workers who had done nothing but labor in the foundries all their lives; and how to convince them that the steel industry was not coming back.

More bad news would hit Buffalo in the years between the Lackawanna plant's collapse and Cuomo's convention speech: Republic Steel slowly laid off its workers until finally closing for good in 1984. Meanwhile, businesses were fleeing downtown Buffalo for the suburbs, turning what was once a center of commerce into a hollowed out, depressing shell. According to Tony Masiello, who served as a Democratic state senator from 1978 to 1994, this was particularly painful for Cuomo, who looked around Buffalo and saw so much of the Queens neighborhood where he was born and raised.

“We’re a city of neighborhoods working hard, just like Brooklyn and Queens where he grew up,” Masiello said. “So he could relate to the city’s anxiety too.”

When Cuomo walked up to the podium in San Francisco in 1984, Masiello thought it was only natural for the governor not to let an opportunity like this pass by.

“If everyone was talking about what we had, he would talk about what we didn’t have,” Masiello said.

Of course, Cuomo’s policies never lived up to his rhetoric: his unprecedented construction of new prisons as cover for his opposition to the death penalty looks particularly tragic today. But according to Lenihan, sometimes you just want to hear your worries spoken out loud.

“Lackawanna and Bethlehem were indelibly ingrained in his conscience,” Lenihan said. “We were all very touched and proud that he brought us to national attention. The governor certainly showed where his heart was when he mentioned us in his famous speech.”