Abraham Beame

Abraham David Beame ( born March 20, 1906 in London, † February 10, 2001 in New York City ) was an American politician and 1974-1977 mayor of New York City.

Background and education

Beame was born in 1906 in London, the son of Polish-Jewish parents who had fled the pogroms of the then Russian Warsaw. His father Philip Birnbaum, a socialist revolutionary who emigrated directly to the United States, while his mother Esther Goldfarb Birnbaum in London, the birth of the child waited and followed until three months later. In New York, the name was changed to Beame. Beame was the first practicing Jewish mayor of New York.

Beame gained his degree in 1928 as an accountant at City College and went then independently. He also taught from 1929 to 1944 Accounting at Richmond Hill High School in Queens and in 1944 and 1945 at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Occurred in 1930 he and his wife of the Democratic Party in Crown Heights ( Brooklyn ), where he lived with his family.

Political career

In 1946 he became deputy budget director of New York City under Mayor William O'Dwyer and 1952 budget director under the Mayors Vincent R. Impellitteri, and Robert F. Wagner. 1961, at the age of 55 years, Beame ran for the first time for a political office and became the City Comptroller, the Auditor General, was elected.

Following the resignation of Mayor Wagner, he applied for his successor, but was defeated his Republican challenger John Lindsay. 1969 Beame ran again as Comptroller and won by a large margin. Lindsay's second term was overshadowed by increasing social spending, race riots, around border crime and budget difficulties. In this situation, Beame be seen as an intelligent, responsible accountant against Lindsay, and was elected as his successor in late 1973 and inaugurated on 1 January 1974.

Tenure as mayor

Beame inherited from his predecessor a desolate budgetary situation and was forced to painful austerity measures. He reduced the number of municipal employees by 65,000, the number of hospital beds by 3000 and for the City University tuition fees were introduced. In the years 1975 and 1976, New York was on the verge of bankruptcy after the Federal Government had refused under President Gerald Ford initially to act as guarantors for the city. The absolute low point for the city came in 1977 with the blackout and severe unrest in the Bronx. Meanwhile extremely unpopular because of his austerity measures in a city that stumbled on the precipice, he was defeated in 1977 in the Democratic primaries his intra-party challenger Ed Koch, who succeeded him as mayor.

Beame died in 2001 at the age of 94 years from complications following heart surgery in New York.