(Once again, I beg your indulgence . . . for just this one last week. I have now finished editing, but find myself utterly exhausted. Hence, I'm posting yet another article from my upcoming book "The Jews of Capitol Hill." This one is on Fiorello H. LaGuardia -- the best big-city mayor in American history, and an even better member of Congress. I look forward to writing new articles beginning again next week . . .)
It used to be that every schoolchild in America knew who first said, “The only two certainties in this world are death and taxes:” (Benjamin Franklin.) Or, that whenever one heard the words “The King,” the reference was unquestionably to Clark Gable. Those coming of age in Depression-era New York City were aware of precisely three eternal verities: that Franklin D. Roosevelt was always President; that Joe McCarthy's Yankees were always in the World Series; that Fiorello H. LaGuardia was always mayor. Today, the name LaGuardia summons, at best, a vague recollection of a fellow reading the Sunday funnies on the radio during a newspaper strike. Perhaps one has the mental image of a swarthy little man in with “an outsized Stetson hat and old-world clothes” conducting an orchestra in Central Park. Fiorello H. LaGuardia was both of these – and far, far more. As good a mayor as he was (“he ran the best reform government in American municipal history”), LaGuardia was an even better member of Congress. Indeed, during his dozen years in the House of Representatives, LaGuardia was lionized by no less an observer than Heywood Broun as “the most powerful and persuasive member of the lower house.” To biographer Lawrence Elliott, “he knew more about pending legislation than most House members, and affected more bills than any of them.”
Through the haze of memory, LaGuardia seems to be the consummate New Yorker, the ultimate cosmopolite of that most cosmopolitan city. In truth, the “Little Flower” – the literal translation of “Fiorello” – was far more than a mere New Yorker. Although born in New York City, LaGuardia was a “Western‑bred, Balkan-plated Episcopalian of Italian‑Jewish descent with the advantage of being a balanced ticket unto himself.” And despite the fact that he spoke a more than passable Yiddish (in addition to Italian, French, Croatian, German, and Spanish), LaGuardia rarely mentioned his Jewish background, for he did not want to be accused of using his lineage as a political prop. Despite all this, he was roundly jeered and pilloried by Nazi Germany, which labeled him “a dirty Talmud Jew . . . a shameless Jewish lout” with a “thieves‑den mentality . . . a whoremonger.” In response to these kinds of slurs, LaGuardia would often launch his own verbal assault: “The only authority in New York competent to deal with German press accusations (is) the deputy sanitation commissioner in charge of sewage disposal.”
LaGuardia's father, Achille Luigi Carlo LaGuardia, was born in the southern Italian city of Foggia in 1851. Historically, the LaGuardias were civil servants – solid middle‑class cittadinos. Achille, a lapsed Catholic, was far more interested in music than municipality; by the time he came to America in 1880 as accompanist to the legendary singer Adelina Patti, he was an accomplished musician and linguist – and a married man. In June 1880, shortly before his departure from Italy, Achille married Irene Luzzato Coen, the scion of a Jewish family from Trieste, then a part of Austria. Achille was twenty-nine, Irene twenty‑three. Though raised in a religious home, Irene was “thoroughly Italian in speech and culture,” the prevailing tendency among Jews in cosmopolitan Trieste. On their marriage certificate, Irene recorded her religion as Israelita; Achille, “carrying the memory of indignities heaped on him by his teachers, all priests,” jotted nessuna: “nothing.”
Shortly after their marriage, the LaGuardias immigrated to America, settling in the then-Italian enclave of Greenwich Village. Within a year of their arrival, their first child – a daughter they named Gemma – was born. Not quite two years later, on December 11, 1882, their first son entered the world. They named him Fiorello Enrico. A third child, whom they would give the much more Americanized name Richard Dodge, was born in 1887.
Unable to find steady employment as a musician, Achille enlisted in the United States Army, which made him a bandmaster. Beginning in 1885, the army sent the LaGuardia family out West: first to Fort Sully, South Dakota, then to Whipple Barracks near Prescott, Arizona. It was in Prescott that Fiorello LaGuardia “attended school, learned to make spaghetti sauce in his mother's kitchen, to play the cornet, (and) to love Italian opera.” With the coming of the Spanish‑American War in 1898, Achille received orders for Cuba, and the LaGuardias left Prescott. Traveling across country, the family stopped in St. Louis, where Fiorello, imbued with patriotic fervor, talked his way into an unpaid position on Joseph Pulitzer's Post‑Dispatch. The cub reporter's first piece ran under the “slightly mangled” byline “F. LaGuardi.”
Before Achille could ship out for Cuba however, he became gravely ill – a casualty of the “embalmed beef” that corrupt contractors had sold to the army. Discharged from the service, Achille moved his family back to Trieste, where they lived for a while with Irene's widowed mother Fiorina, for whom Fiorello had been named. His energy sapped, Achille eventually leased “a neglected seaside hotel at nearby Capodistria.” Before too long, the hotel began to prosper. In 1900, Fiorello, not quite eighteen years old, accepted a post as clerk at the American consulate in Budapest. He would spend the next six years of his life working at diplomatic posts in Budapest, Trieste, and finally Fiume (modern-day Croatia), where he served as United States consular agent.
LaGuardia’s official consular duties consisted mainly of “processing visa and passport applications and gathering information for the consul's periodic reports.” LaGuardia, who stood five feet two inches and barely looked his age, “reveled in the most tangled consular cases and wound up with the practical equivalent of advanced degrees in sociology, politics, and applied economics, and at least conversational command of seven languages.” During his three years in Fiume (1903-06), he caused a stir by demanding that emigrants receive medical checkups before they sailed, rather than upon their arrival at Ellis Island. In this way, the young consular agent reasoned, fewer of the dispossessed would face the trauma of rejection. On more than one occasion, LaGuardia used the implied powers of his post to hold ships in port until medical checks had been completed. His strategy worked: “During his three years as consular agent, Fiume had far fewer health rejections at Ellis Island than any other port embarking emigrants for the United States, a total of only forty‑five for trachoma, for example, against an average of twenty‑five on every ship docking in New York.”
In 1904, Achille LaGuardia died, never having gotten over the effects of the tainted beef. Despite a lengthy battle with the American government, Fiorello LaGuardia would never get the War Department to admit that his father's death had been service‑related. To add insult to injury, his mother was denied a military widow's pension. As a result, LaGuardia began harboring that intense aversion to bureaucratic corruption that would carry over to his political career. As a freshman member of the 65th Congress, his first piece of legislation was a bill providing the death penalty for “the scavengers of history who (supply) tainted food or defective supplies and equipment in wartime.” Not surprisingly, it died in committee. It also put the political world on notice that LaGuardia was a man motivated not by ideology, but by moral indignation.
LaGuardia's superior in Fiume was a Boston Brahmin named Frank Dyer Chester. Although Chester (1870-1938), who had a Harvard PhD in Philology, “admired Fiorello's fire and ambition,” he nonetheless felt constrained to tell the young agent that he would never advance too far in the consular corps. To Chester's way of thinking, LaGuardia's ethnicity – and lack of a Harvard degree – stood in the way of future success. Fed up, LaGuardia left the consular corps and made his way back to the United States. He arrived in New York in 1906, far more a Westerner or a European than a New Yorker.
Once in New York, LaGuardia found temporary employment with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. His job was to “translate the juvenile sections of the French penal code into English.” In 1907, convinced that his future lay in politics, LaGuardia was admitted to the New York University School of Law. While taking classes at night, he spent his days working as an interpreter for the Immigration Service. His salary was $1,200 (roughly $27,000 in 2008 dollars). LaGuardia was assigned to the “White Slave Division.” Receiving his LL.B. in 1910, he joined the firm of Weil, LaGuardia & Espen. As an attorney, LaGuardia specialized in issues concerning the garment industry, especially protecting the rights of immigrant workers. For LaGuardia, “the practice of law was never meant to be an end in itself. . . . It was a tool, like his knowledge of languages, a stepping‑stone toward what he really wanted; a career in public service.”
While practicing law, LaGuardia became politically active in the Twenty-fifth Assembly District, “a mile‑square tangle of neighborhoods in the center of Manhattan.” It was also the home base of Tammany leader Charlie Murphy. Before too long, LaGuardia, for reasons unknown, threw in his lot with the Republicans. He began making a name for himself as a rebel with a following. Through his impoverished law practice, LaGuardia made friends “among the housewives, workingmen, poor immigrants” – precisely the people who would become his most rabid constituents within a matter of a few years. With the election of Charles S. Whitman (1868-1947) as New York governor in 1914, local Republican leaders, wishing “to do something for their young rebel,” managed to secure LaGuardia a position as a New York State deputy attorney general.
LaGuardia took his work in the A.G.'s office seriously, but kept his eye on a congressional race in New York's Fourteenth District. His chance came in 1916. Declaring his candidacy for the seat held by Tammany stalwart (and local bartender) Mike Farley, LaGuardia was the clear underdog. Having “neither jobs nor buckets of free coal” at his disposal, LaGuardia decided that the one thing he could hand out was free legal advice. Soon it became known throughout the district that “any poor man or woman who needed advice or a lawyer to take his case to court could come to LaGuardia.” As one admirer said at the time, “. . . the greatest favor you can do this man is to come to him with a tale of injustice and ask him to fight your battle for nothing.”
LaGuardia campaigned on two fronts. First, he went to the East Side, campaigning in Italian, Yiddish, and Serbo‑Croatian, “dismember(ing) the Hapsburg Empire and liberat(ing) all the subjugated countries almost every night.” Second, he took every chance at his disposal to ridicule and belittle Farley. On one occasion, LaGuardia parked his Model T in front of Farley's saloon, daring the saloon keeper-cum-congressman to step outside for a debate. When nothing happened, LaGuardia cattily told the gathering crowd that the reason for Farley’s demurral was obvious: he did not know anything about the issues. Finally goaded into doing something, the hapless Farley issued a ten‑point platform. LaGuardia “fell on it with glee.” “Eight of the ten proposals,” he gleefully told the street corner crowd, “have already been dealt with in one legislature or another. When the other two were brought in Congress, Farley was back home tending bar.” On Election Day, LaGuardia won by a mere 357 votes, thereby becoming the first Italian-American ever elected to Congress. Moreover, voters from the Lower East Side had not elected a Republican to Congress since the Civil War.
LaGuardia was a uniquely positioned member of the Sixty‑fifth Congress. He found himself being assiduously courted by both the Republicans and the Democrats, for each parties had precisely 215 members. The matter of which party would organize the House rested with five independents, of whom LaGuardia was one. LaGuardia, “in one of his infrequent spasms of party loyalty,” voted with the Republicans. The Democrats won, thereby placing him in the minority – a position he would occupy throughout his entire Congressional career.
As war clouds began darkening the horizon, LaGuardia introduced an amendment to Representative Julius Kahn’s proposed draft law that would nullify all exemptions; “conscientious objectors were to be given non‑combat duties, and the physically unfit less strenuous work.” His measure was easily defeated. When it came time to vote on the Selective Service Act bill LaGuardia was one of but five voting in opposition. Fearing that the pending war would make the rich richer, LaGuardia “urged government controls on the price and distribution of food, clothing and shelter.” His plan was buried in committee. When war came, along with soaring prices and alarming shortages, LaGuardia began looking like a prophet – and not for the last time.
The day after war was declared, LaGuardia enlisted. Already a skilled pilot, LaGuardia was assigned to the Italian Royal Flying School near Foggia. In January 1918, he became a member of the Joint Army‑Navy Aircraft Committee. Following the disastrous Battle of Caporetto, which resulted in the loss of 300,000 men, a third of Italy’s war materiel, and the almost total dismemberment of the Italian army, rumors began flying that the government would seek a separate peace. Horrified by this prospect, Ambassador Thomas Page Nelson (1853-1922) summoned LaGuardia to Rome. Nelson assigned LaGuardia the task of “reassuring the Italians that they had America’s support, and would have American troops as soon as possible.” Nelson believed that LaGuardia was “the only man capable of delivering the proper propaganda” to the disheartened citizens of Italy. So, in addition to his almost daily bombing missions, “the flying Congressman” was sent the length and breadth of Italy as spokesman for America. Addressing crowds of up to 300,000, LaGuardia, speaking in “colloquial Italian,” told the throngs “the Americans were here, and he was one of them!” By all accounts, wherever LaGuardia spoke, the results were spectacular. LaGuardia was promoted to Major.
While he was off fighting the war, an alliance of pacifists and suffragettes in his New York district petitioned Congress to vacate his seat, so that they could be “properly represented.” Suddenly, the Little Flower was a national hero, receiving support from all over the country. The editorial writers of the Philadelphia Record noted that “Congressman LaGuardia, absent to fight for his country, is absent little more than some congressmen during the baseball season. Why raise a fuss over him?” When informed by a reporter of what was going on at home, LaGuardia told him: “You might say that if any signers of the petition will take my seat in a Caproni bi‑plane, I shall be glad to resume my upholstered seat in the House.” In truth, LaGuardia need not have worried. As noted by LaGuardia biographer Alyn Brodsky, “Precedent militated against a man holding a Congressional seat and an army commission simultaneously.” With the support of Speaker Champ Clark, a bill was introduced granting LaGuardia a leave of absence and letting him retain his Congressional seat “so long as he was in uniform.” While away fighting the war in Europe, LaGuardia remained in constant contact with his East Harlem colleague, Representative Isaac Siegel, who cast his votes on any issues before the House. Although he could vote, he could not continue receiving his $5,500 Congressional salary. As a first lieutenant, LaGuardia was paid $2,200. The petition for removal was “filed away” by Speaker Clark.
Following his much‑heralded return from the war, LaGuardia introduced an amendment to an appropriations bill providing that “federal civil‑service employees who had been drafted or enlisted be reinstated in their former jobs.” The measure was sidetracked by parliamentary maneuver and died. On the surface, it would seem that LaGuardia lost the lion’s share of his legislative battles. This was not the case – if only because of the law of averages. One of LaGuardia's first legislative victories came when Congress approved his measure to feed postwar Europe.
In 1920, Fiorello LaGuardia voluntarily gave up his seat in Congress in order to run for president of the New York City Board of Aldermen. The board's previous president, Alfred E. Smith, had just been elected Governor. LaGuardia won the election by appealing to the city's Democratic minority voters – many of whom were outraged by President Wilson's Versailles Treaty. After serving less than a year as president, LaGuardia ran for mayor in the Republican primary against Manhattan Borough President Henry Curran. LaGuardia, vilified as a “red,” a “dago,” and “radical,” got only 37,000 votes to Curran's 103,000. He failed to carry a single borough. When LaGuardia was attacked for being outside the “Republican mainstream,” he caustically replied, “Some men who claim to be exponents of Republican principles know as much about the teachings of Abraham Lincoln as Henry Ford knows about the Talmud.”
Life had hit rock bottom for Fiorello LaGuardia. In addition to losing the primary, both his wife – the former Thea Almerigotti, whom he had married in 1917 – and his baby daughter – also named Thea – had died one right after the other. He was now
without family, job, or prospects. In June 1922, a new law firm, LaGuardia, Sapinsky & Amster was formed so that the Little Flower might have an income. Throughout his life, LaGuardia was always on the verge of bankruptcy. When he became mayor in 1933, he owned “neither an automobile nor an overcoat.” When he died, all he had to his name was a small house in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and $8,000 in U.S. War Bonds.
LaGuardia wasn't down for long. Suddenly, in the spring of 1922, William Randolph Hearst was booming “the Major” (as he was called by everyone but relatives and strangers) for New York Governor. On June 29 of that year, LaGuardia issued a forty‑two-point platform calling for such basic social reforms as “equal rights for women, old‑age pensions, workmen's compensation, a minimum wage, an eight‑hour day, and the abolition of child labor.” The Republicans were aghast. In exchange for his dropping out of the gubernatorial race, the party offered him the nomination for Congress from the Twentieth District – East Harlem. Next to Manhattan's Lower East Side, the Twentieth was “the most congested slum in the United States,” a perfect constituency for the Major.
LaGuardia's race for this seat is the basis for one of the truly unforgettable stories in American political history.
Having easily secured the Republican nomination, he faced two strong opponents: William Karlin, “a Socialist endorsed by important trade unions and running on a something‑for‑everybody platform,” and Democrat Henry Frank, “a pedestrian and politically untested lawyer (who) had the advantage of Tammany Hall's very considerable support.” LaGuardia campaigned from early morning until late at night, running on his typically progressive platform.
As Election Day neared, the Democrats were becoming increasingly concerned. Party strategists concluded that the only way for Frank (who was Jewish) to win the race was to go all out for the Jewish vote. A few days before the election, Tammany distributed tens of thousands of leaflets with the following message:
The most important office in this country for Judaism is the Congressman. Our flesh and blood are . . . on the other side of the ocean. Only through your Congressman can we go to their rescue.
There are three candidates who are seeking your vote: One is Karlin, the atheist. The second is the Italian LaGuardia, who is a pronounced anti-Semite and a Jew‑hater.
Be careful how you vote.
Our candidate is Henry Frank, who is a Jew with a Jewish heart, and who does good for us. Therefore, it is up to you and your friends to vote for our friend and beloved one, Henry Frank, for Congressman.
LaGuardia was livid. One of his aides advised him to make a speech about his Jewish mother. LaGuardia refused. He had always considered himself Italian, “and to imply otherwise now would be too transparently self‑serving.” Instead, LaGuardia delivered a brilliant coup de grâce. He issued “an open letter to Henry Frank” that read in part:
At the beginning of the campaign, I announced that I would not indulge in personalities nor in abuse of my opponents. I have kept this pledge. . .
You have seen fit, however, to resort to the kind of campaigning which was discredited in American politics over 25 years ago. You . . . are making a radical‑religious appeal for sympathy votes (and) I regret exceedingly that this has happened. However, I always met a fight on any issue openly. . . .
Very well, then . . . I hereby challenge you to publicly and openly debate the issues of the campaign, the debate to be conducted by you and me entirely in the Yiddish language. We will suit your convenience in every respect.
LaGuardia then proceeded to translate his “open letter” into Yiddish and released it to all the Jewish dailies. Frank (whom LaGuardia discovered did not speak a word of Yiddish) was made to look ridiculous. The next day, LaGuardia was endorsed by the Yiddish-language Forward, which touted him as “one who speaks Yiddish like a true Jew and who over the years has been a good friend to the Jewish people.”
LaGuardia managed to pull off a razor‑thin 168-vote victory. The Major was back as a member of the Sixty‑eighth Congress. LaGuardia's second congressional “tour of duty” continued until the Roosevelt landslide of 1932.
Although reelected several times, his margins of victory were never outstanding. In 1924, his best year, he bested his opponent by a mere 3,500 votes. By comparison, in 1926, he won by just 55 votes. Nonetheless, during the years between 1923 and 1933, LaGuardia became a focal point in the House – a lightning rod for innumerable issues. Although he would never chair a congressional committee, he was perhaps the nearest thing to a Congressman‑at‑large” the United States had ever had.
LaGuardia relished his role as a congressional goad or gadfly. “The function of a progressive,” he once said, “is to keep on protesting until things get so bad that a reactionary demands reform.” And protest he did: against Prohibition, the “money class,” the “interests,” and the inequities of the tax code, and on behalf of the poor, the disenfranchised – even the Eskimos of the frozen north. During the 1920s, LaGuardia pushed such “radical” ideas as a minimum wage, old‑age pensions, child‑labor laws, social security, government regulation of utilities and the stock market – every one of which would eventually became the law of the land.
Despite the fact that LaGuardia was a teetotaler, he proved to be a forceful and bitter opponent against Prohibition:
“I disagree with those who say that if this law (the Volstead Act) is enforced, we shall have trouble because of its enforcement! I maintain that this law will be almost impossible of enforcement. And if this law fails to be enforced – as it certainly will be, as it is drawn – it will create contempt and disregard for law all over the country.
Strangely, LaGuardia counted among his closest friends Minnesota Representative Ole J. Kvale (1869-1929), the man who had billed himself as “Drier than Volstead.” To LaGuardia, the Volstead Act was a case of “them against us,” the “them” being the “money‑class.” The rich, LaGuardia reasoned, could still buy the best liquor and drink it undisturbed. He set himself to do something for “the little guy.”
In June 1926, he did just that. He announced that “in the very precincts of the torpid House Committee on Alcoholic Liquor Traffic,” of which he was the only “wet” member, he was going to brew beer right before their eyes! The next day, he entered the committee chamber accompanied by a former brewer. Most of the committee members ran off in alarm. LaGuardia was left with an “audience” of fifty reporters. He then proceeded to show the reporters how to “brew” beer, ale, and pilsner. Then he dared anyone to arrest him. His little demonstration brought national headlines.
On February 28, 1929, LaGuardia married for a second time. His bride, Marie Fischer, had been his secretary for more than fifteen years. “I lost a great secretary,” LaGuardia quipped, “and gained a lousy cook.” The marriage ceremony was performed by Congressman Kvale, who was also a Lutheran minister.
In 1929, LaGuardia challenged Democrat Jimmy Walker for mayor of New York City. LaGuardia vainly tried to get the voters to understand that Walker (1881-1946) was running a miserably corrupt administration; that the bosses of Tammany Hall were deeply involved with elements of organized crime. Again, LaGuardia was a man before his time. The mayoral race of 1929 took place during an “endless summer of paper prosperity.” People were simply having too good a time to listen to the voice of doom and gloom. Even the collapse of the stock market one week before the election could not help LaGuardia. Dapper Jimmy Walker crushed the Little Flower by nearly a half‑million votes, even carrying East Harlem. LaGuardia's defeat was the worst any major‑party candidate had suffered in the history of Greater New York.
With the onset of the Depression, LaGuardia was back in Congress, playing his accustomed role of moral absolutist. Early in 1932, faced with the prospect of an unbalanced budget, President Hoover proposed a national sales tax of 2.25 percent on manufactured goods. It was meant to raise $600 million. Hoover's ill‑conceived proposal “set the stage for the most spectacular victory of LaGuardia's legislative career.” In response to Hoover's tax increase, the Major proposed taxes on safe‑deposit boxes and stock transfers, and a surtax on incomes over $100,000. The battle lines had been drawn.
In the beginning, LaGuardia was almost alone in his opposition to the tax hike. Hoover's bill made it out of the House Ways and Means Committee by a vote of twenty-four to one. An irate LaGuardia asked his House colleagues, “What is this – a kissing bee?” The Major wound up turning what was supposed to be a two‑day debate into a two‑week “carnival.” Moments before one colloquy, a LaGuardia aide asked: “What are you going to do, Major?” to which he uttered the immortal words “Soak the rich!”
LaGuardia's “soak the rich” speech caused a sensation: “As the second week (of the debate) opened, the leaders could no longer hold their people in line. There was turbulence on the floor . . . members shouting, jeering, (and) coming close to fistfights. Then the lines broke all together.” In the end, almost single‑handedly, LaGuardia turned the tide. When the House finally got around to voting on the Hoover surtax on March 24, 1932, it was rejected by a vote of 211 to 178.
That same week, President Hoover signed the Norris‑LaGuardia Anti‑Injunction Act into law. This landmark legislation outlawed the yellow‑dog contract, under which workers, as a condition of employment, had to agree not to join a union. It also forbade the federal courts from issuing an injunction against legal strikes unless they turned violent or caused “irreparable harm.”
In 1932, Fiorello LaGuardia was voted out of office by the people of the Twentieth District. He had originally wanted to run on both the Republican and the Democratic ticket, but the effort “foundered on the refusal of West Side Tammany boss James J. Hines.” It proved to be a costly error on Hines's part: had LaGuardia been given the Democratic nomination, he likely would have remained in Congress. As things turned out, once the Major was out of Washington, he ran for mayor, thus setting in motion the process that would eventually put men like Hines out of business and behind bars. Had Hines not been so obtuse, the history of the era might have turned out differently.
Editorializing on LaGuardia’s behalf, the New York Daily Mirror noted, “It will be a tragic thing for the people of New York if Mr. LaGuardia is defeated. He is the only real liberal in the delegation . . . one of the few in the whole House . . . . He is incorruptible . . . . Citizens, do not let this worthy public servant be destroyed!”
Positive editorials not withstanding, LaGuardia lost his seat by some 1,200 votes to James J. Lanzetta, a young Tammany alderman. There was plenty of evidence of voter fraud: “In some precincts there were more votes than residents. Men claiming to be election inspectors later disappeared and were found to have given fake addresses – but the votes they had certified were already counted.”
Newly-elected President Franklin Roosevelt offered LaGuardia the post of Assistant Secretary of Labor. LaGuardia respectfully turned him down, saying he was “too old to start taking orders from anyone.” Down again, but not out, LaGuardia approached the 67th Congress’ lame-duck session with a renewed sense of purpose. Between the time of his defeat and the end of his term, LaGuardia played a pivotal role in formulating what was to become FDR's Hundred Days. LaGuardia drafted two critical pieces of legislation. One, aimed at “stanching the flood of foreclosures,” would have provided some $200 million in government capital for a federal credit bank. Bottled up in committee, it eventually passed during the Hundred Days. The second bill, an amendment to the National Bankruptcy Act of 1898, empowered courts to give “credit extensions to farmers and individuals, staving off forced liquidations by their creditors.” This bill became law on the last day of the Hoover administration.
During this frenzy of activity, a reporter for the Washington Daily News, watching LaGuardia at work on the House floor, reported, “In debate . . . he suggests a fighting cock more than a flower. He talks rapidly, his right arm working like a piston to emphasize every statement.”
Upon LaGuardia's return to New York City, the Seabury Commission hearings were in full swing. Under the leadership of Judge Samuel Seabury (1873-1958), a descendant of John and Priscilla Alden, the commission investigated all of Tammany Hall's nefarious dealings. LaGuardia's charges from 1929 proved to be true; Tammany was rife with corruption. The commission “sifted a mountain of evidence and eventually questioned four thousand witnesses, producing enough transcribed testimony to fill ninety‑five thousand pages.” The final report showed what one writer termed “the insolence of office.” It thoroughly exposed a spoils system that reached all the way to Mayor Walker himself. Shortly after Seabury's findings were made public, Walker resigned and took the first boat to Europe.
In the next mayoral election, Fiorello LaGuardia ran as the candidate of the newly created Fusion Party. At first, the Fusionists did not want the Major; they were looking for a “respectable” candidate. When virtually everyone else turned them down, LaGuardia became their man. He swept to victory, running with a slate of minority candidates. His swearing‑in took place in the library of Judge Seabury's home. His task complete, the old aristocrat spoke precisely seven words: “At last, New York has a mayor.”
The next morning, January 1, 1934, Fiorello LaGuardia went down to his new office. Upon entering for the first time, he was met by a group of reporters. As he was going through the door, he “threw a one‑sentence, all‑purpose answer at them over his shoulder: finita la cuccagna‑‑‑“the party's over.”
As history records, LaGuardia was twice reelected as mayor of New York. During his twelve‑year tenure, he became perhaps the second‑best-known American in the world. LaGuardia was by no means perfect; he had a wide puritanical streak and could be cynical, churlish, hot‑headed, petty, and just plain wrong. To his enemies, he suffered from sacro egoismo – “consecrated selfishness.” One detractor called him “egotistical, strutting and power hungry, a demagogue and a rascal.” To his many admirers, the Little Flower was “colorful, dynamic, contagiously self‑confident, progressive and the deadliest Tammany‑killer of his day.”
LaGuardia involved himself in virtually every facet of the city. When the Democrat‑controlled Board of Aldermen complained about his harsh tactics, he replied, “I am the majority in this city, and don't you forget it.” From the creation of parks and bridges to meat rationing and American foreign policy, LaGuardia was a whirlwind of activity. The people loved him.
LaGuardia was one of the first major American politicians to speak out openly against the Nazi menace. According to David M. and Jackie R. Esposito, “his implacable hostility toward the Nazis was based on his belief that they were the international equivalent of his domestic enemies.” As early as June 1933, LaGuardia was making statements like “Hitler is a perverted maniac.” While giving the keynote address before the National Conference Against Racial Persecution in Germany, he made the “terrifyingly prophetic” statement that “Part of his (Hitler's) program is the complete annihilation of the Jews in Germany. When the internal affairs of one country affect the peace of the world, then it is time to protest.”
In March, 1937, speaking to the Women's Division of the American Jewish Congress, LaGuardia suggested that the upcoming New York World's Fair should include a “chamber of horrors” just for “that brown‑shirted fanatic.” The comment brought an official protest on the part of the German government. Secretary of State Cordell Hull made a formal apology to the Nazis: “I very earnestly deprecate the utterances which have thus given offense to the German government.” LaGuardia's statements were page‑one news. Time Magazine cynically speculated that LaGuardia's attack on Hitler was his “opening gun” in the 1937 mayoral race. “In New York City, as any political nose‑counter knows, the hooked far outnumber the Aryan noses.”
Many believed that LaGuardia would be called on the carpet by President Roosevelt, whose Secretary of State, Hull, had gone “beyond the bounds of diplomatic courtesy by giving the Nazis expert advice on how to handle their American critics.” When LaGuardia finally went to Washington and entered the Oval Office, he was greeted by a smiling FDR, arm outstretched in a mock Nazi salute. “Heil, Fiorello!” he said with a grin. LaGuardia immediately snapped to attention and thrust out his own arm. “Heil Franklin!” he responded. The two men burst out laughing. Later, when LaGuardia left, Roosevelt reportedly told Secretary Hull “he wished he could pin a gold medal on LaGuardia for saying what everyone in the administration was thinking.”
With the coming of World War II, LaGuardia thought he might be named Secretary of War. Instead, the post went to another Republican, Henry Stimson. FDR did appoint the Major to head up the nation's civilian defense. LaGuardia was not happy in the post, and applied for an army general's commission. His application was rejected.
LaGuardia decided against running for a fourth term in 1944. By this point, he and Marie had adopted Thea's sister's two children. Life at home was good, and LaGuardia was just plain worn out. At the conclusion of his dozen years as mayor, LaGuardia had a brief radio program, and then fell victim to pancreatic cancer. He died on September 20, 1947, and was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.
As a member of Congress, LaGuardia was a “vital link” between the Progressive and New Deal eras. In the words of historian Howard Zinn, “He entered Congress as the Bull Moose uproar was quieting down and left with the arrival of the New Deal; in the intervening years, no man in national office waged the Progressive battle so long, so consistently, or so vigorously. In a decade marked by lusterless leadership, he generated an inexhaustible supply of excitement.”
LaGuardia was perhaps best summed up by the New Deal “braintruster” Adolf Berle, who called him, quite simply “a pint of liquid dynamite.”
With his passing, it was indeed the end of an era. Roosevelt was no longer President. LaGuardia was no longer mayor. All that remained were the New York Yankees.
©2010 Kurt F. Stone
What a terrific piece of work!! We only knew him as "The Mayor".
An omission to consider: One of the first things Laguardia did as Mayor was to clean up the Times Square area. He closed the burlesque houses. Minsky's, the most famous of them all moved to New Jersey.
Posted by: Stan | October 28, 2010 at 09:58 AM
Can't wait to read the book. When I was a kid, the memory of FL was fresh. Everyone spoke of him with love and affection.
Posted by: Alan Weiss | October 23, 2010 at 06:47 AM