On April 4th, 1967, the statehouse in Albany was sparkling with anticipation. To honor the first state constitutional convention in almost 30 years, organizers had spruced up the Assembly chamber, where plenary sessions would take place, with flowers.
"It was a really big deal," said Henrik Dullea, a grad student at the time who went on to be an aide to New York governors and a trustee at the State University of New York. "All of the leadership, not only from the state but from around the nation, was looking to Albany and what would happen in the months ahead."
Cardinal Francis Spellman gave the invocation, Sens. Robert F. Kennedy and Jacob Javits and Gov. Nelson Rockefeller spoke. U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren gave the opening address.
Delegates from all over the state split up into committees and produced some sweeping reforms, ranging from a ban on political gerrymandering to free state university tuition to a 'Labor Bill of Rights' that enhanced unions' bargaining power.
Today, even people who praise these progressive proposals concede the convention was largely a failure — and not just because voters ended up rejecting the amendment package 70 percent to 30 percent. But students of state history disagree over what lessons to draw from that failure.
The debate is more important than ever this fall, for New Yorkers will once again decide whether to hold another such convention. Supporters of voting "Yes" on the November ballot say the pitfalls of 1967 can be avoided; those who urge a "No" vote argue the very same problems that plagued the convention then will take place again.
The big problem in 1967, according to people on both sides of the issue, was that the convention reinforced the political establishment's power, rather than challenging machine politics. Assembly Speaker Anthony Travia, a Brooklyn Democratic boss, led the proceedings with an iron fist. Despite all the liberal proposals, several crucial demands were omitted, and one toxically conservative amendment was inserted: allowing state government to spend taxpayer dollars on religious schools, which would reverse longstanding law.
To make matters worse, Travia insisted that all 65 proposals go on the ballot as a single take-it-or-leave-it referendum question. He reasoned the amendment on parochial school tuition would attract Catholic support and help offset Upstate opposition to many of the more liberal proposals.
Jerry Kremer, a freshman assemblyman from Long Island at the time, says he was so appalled by Travia's gambit that he confronted the Democratic boss in the statehouse hallway.
"I said, ‘Look, I may be relatively new to the elective process, but this in my mind is doomed to failure,’" Kremer, who attended the convention as an observer, recalled in a recent interview. "He just laughed at me and said, ‘This is just how it works.’ In those days, the machine still worked, and the machine wanted one package."
Young Ed Koch, a newly minted city councilman from Greenwich Village, was not a delegate. But he campaigned hard against the amendments. He said there were 61 proposals he supported and four he opposed: the parochial school funding proposal; one that preserved Albany's control over New York City taxes; another that continued to let party bosses choose judges; and a fourth that let state lawmakers have too much power over redistricting.
"The powers that be in this state said, ‘All right, we’ll give them a few little things that’ll make the liberals feel good,'" Koch said in a broadcast debate that summer. "But on the things that really count, selection of judges and reapportionment, they said, ‘That is where we will maintain our hold,’ and they did that."
He said those four proposals were such an "abomination" that the whole thing should be rejected.
After Koch and the opponents prevailed, the convention process left a sour taste in New Yorkers' mouths. When given an opportunity to vote for holding conventions in 1977 and 1997, they overwhelmingly voted "no" on the ballot question.
Kremer, the former assemblyman, thinks voters should again vote against holding a convention on Election Day next month. He says he cannot imagine delegates today being any less partisan and self-interested than they were 50 years ago.
"The problem is too many structural changes have to be made to make it a more open convention," he said.
Maybe if delegate selection rules are improved in the future, he added, the resulting convention would be purposeful, but not now.
"Why go through this exercise of approving a convention, when the rules of the road aren’t going to change?" he said.
But Dullea and others think that after a parade of indictments and convictions in Albany — and after the dead-in-the-water results of 1967 — there would be enough pressure and focus on ethical reform that voters really would fill a convention with delegates more divorced from the political establishment. He says it’s worth taking a chance: the governor and lawmakers have proved time and again they’re not going to reform themselves.
"If we believe that there has to be stronger methods for investigating corruption in the pay-to-play culture which dominates Albany, if people believe term limits have to be considered, one has to get that discussion going," Dullea said.