Before Ocasio-Cortez, the Elizabeth Holtzman effect

Celler had arrived in Congress with the backing of Tammany Hall, during the presidency of Warren Harding — in 1923 — and he now, half a century later, had the support of the powerful Brooklyn party boss Meade Esposito, whose celebrity in the borough was such that a veal dish bearing his name appeared on the menu of a popular restaurant on Montague Street near the Brooklyn courthouses, which were filled with the judges he had essentially placed.

This omnipotence was to have insulated Celler from his own irrelevance. He kept such a distance from his constituents that he did not even maintain an office in the district, which encompassed largely white middle-class Flatbush, Midwood and Marine Park as well as parts of poor African-American neighborhoods in central Brooklyn. Celler was 84 years old, and he was cranky.

Of his two opponents, he concerned himself with only one, a 30-year-old Harvard Law School graduate, Elizabeth Holtzman, a reform candidate, who had been active in the civil rights movement and served as mayoral aide to John V. Lindsay. “Her fulminations are as useless, as we say, as a wine cellar without a corkscrew,” Celler told The Times, proceeding to call her campaign statements “irrational'’ and her persona, more generally, “as irritating as a hangnail.”

Like Joseph Crowley, the longtime incumbent who lost New York’s 14th Congressional District seat last month, blind to the force of a young, female challenger, Celler did not see what was coming. He analogized Holtzman’s victory to the likelihood of a toothpick “toppling the Washington Monument,” proving he could consistently deliver on benighted speech patterns.

“I wasn’t just running against Mr. Celler and his indifference to the community,” Holtzman recounted one morning recently. “I was running against the machine.” She was seated in a conference room at the midtown offices of Herrick, Feinstein, the law firm where she has served as a co-chair of the government relations group for many years, and recalled one of the most bizarre incidents of her campaign — her office, which was near Brooklyn College, had been trespassed and vandalized on the day of the Watergate break-in. Whether or not this was a random crime or a parry from local Esposito apparatchiks, she would never determine.

Holtzman’s chief campaign adviser was a friend who was a poet and graduate student in literature. With $32,000 that she had raised and $4,000 that she had borrowed — she had been told that she would need $100,000 to mount a serious campaign — there was no money for television ads or proper polling. The free attention that might have come from the press was absent as well, landing instead on the famous activist candidates, Bella Abzug and Allard Lowenstein, who were also running for Congress in New York that year.

Holtzman campaigned deeply, extensively, all the time. She took advantage of the popularity of “The Godfather” to work long lines at movie theaters. She appeared at every subway station in her district. She rode around East New York in an open convertible with Edolphus Towns, later elected to Congress himself, and she handled the matter of Celler’s age with an effort at sensitivity. “We didn’t say he was old,” she told me. “We said he was tired.”

On the day of the primary, the first poll results showed her losing a Hasidic neighborhood, “something like 200-to-1,'’ she said. “It was not an auspicious beginning.” But by the time the polls closed, the early returns indicated that she had a lead. Campaign workers suggested she settle in at a restaurant called Cookies to wait for results and she headed off, as she remarks in her memoir, “Who Said It Would Be Easy?,” content in the notion that she had tried hard and fairly resigned to losing.

Ultimately, she would win by 635 votes. The Brooklyn machine contested her victory and sued, arguing that there had been voting irregularities. The machine lost, and Holtzman became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress — a status about to be held by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “I connected with her campaign — a young woman out on the streets, taking on an icon. She didn’t have the money Crowley had. She had the gumption.”

Holtzman’s time in Congress, which was followed by a long tenure as Brooklyn district attorney and then a short one as New York City’s comptroller, was distinguished by her role in helping found what would become the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues, for the lawsuit she brought against the Nixon administration for the bombing of Cambodia and for her membership in the House Judiciary Committee that voted to impeach Nixon. With Sen. Ted Kennedy, she wrote the Refugee Act of 1980, in response to the exodus of Vietnamese after the war, which raised the annual ceiling for refugees coming into the country, significantly, to 50,000 and created a formal process for reviewing and adjusting the numbers to accommodate emergencies.

The bill passed unanimously in the Senate late in 1979. “No one said Vietnam is sending their rapists and killers and not their best,” Holtzman elaborated. “The fact that we are in hysteria over admitting 2,000 children to this country is something I cannot fathom. It is totally astonishing.”

I asked Holtzman what biases and obstacles she confronted when she arrived in Washington. “A Southerner in the House approached me and said, ‘Just because you’re Jewish and a woman, don’t you worry,'” she answered, leaving her with the impression that there was plenty to worry about.

Holtzman left Ocasio-Cortez a message of congratulations right away. She has so much to tell her.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.