John Lindsay - Early Life

Early Life

Lindsay was born in New York City on West End Avenue to George Nelson Lindsay and the former Florence Eleanor Vliet. He grew up in an upper-middle-class family of English and Dutch extraction. Lindsay's paternal grandfather migrated to the United States in the 1880s from the Isle of Wight, and his mother was from an upper-middle-class family that had been in New York since the 1660s. John's father was a successful lawyer and investment banker, and was able to send his son to the Buckley School, St. Paul's School and Yale, where he was admitted to the class of 1944 and joined Scroll and Key.

With the outbreak of World War II, Lindsay completed his studies early and in 1943 joined the United States Navy as a gunnery officer. He obtained the rank of lieutenant, earning five battle stars through action in the invasion of Sicily and a series of landings in the Pacific theater. After the war, he spent a few months as a ski bum and a couple of months training as a bank clerk before returning to Yale, where he received his law degree in 1948, ahead of schedule.

Back in New York, Lindsay met his future wife, Mary Anne Harrison, at the wedding of Nancy Bush (daughter of Connecticut's Senator Prescott Bush and sister of future President George H.W. Bush), where he was an usher and Harrison a bridesmaid. A resident of Greenwich, Connecticut and a graduate of Vassar College, Harrison was a distant relative of William Henry Harrison and Benjamin Harrison. They married in 1949. That same year Lindsay was admitted to the bar, and rose to become a partner in his law firm four years later.

He started gravitating toward politics, serving as one of the founders of the Youth for Eisenhower club in 1951 and as president of the New York Young Republican club in 1952. In 1958, with the backing of Herbert Brownell, Bruce Barton, John Aspinwall Roosevelt, and Mrs Wendell Wilkie, Lindsay won the Republican primary and went on to be elected to Congress as the representative of the "Silk Stocking" district, Manhattan's Upper East Side.

While in Congress, Lindsay established a liberal voting record increasingly at odds with his party. He was an early supporter of federal aid to education and Medicare; and advocated the establishment of a federal Department of Urban Affairs and a National Foundation for the Arts and Humanities. He was called a maverick, casting the lone dissenting vote for a Republican- sponsored bill extending the power of the Postmaster General to impound obscene mail and one of only two dissenting votes for a bill allowing federal interception of mail from Communist countries. Also known for his wit, when asked by his party leaders why he opposed legislation to combat communism and pornography, he replied they were the major industries of his district and if they were suppressed then "the 17th district would be a depressed area". While serving in the United State House of Representatives, John Lindsay was a strong supporter of African-American civil rights. He was a leading member of a group of liberal and moderate Republicans in the House who voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.