La Guardia masterfully detected hypocrisy and shone best decrying it. He fought against the Volstead Act and continually made fun of it by mixing two “legal” substances at a drugstore—malt extract (with an alcoholic content of 3.5 percent) and near-beer—drinking his homemade concoction, and waiting for the cops to arrest him. Such theatrics, which he mastered throughout his career, illustrated the deeply troubling aspects of a law he found ridiculous. La Guardia understood that the rich and the middle class never lost access to alcoholic drinks—that Prohibition, as was intended, punished the immigrant masses and the working class. And he saw how young immigrants found bootlegging an easy way into illicit activity—a path that would haunt Italian Americans for decades.
After the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent bank run, the country entered the Great Depression and the economic promise of America vanished as if a vague dream. By 1932, the majority of the nation would come to agree with La Guardia’s views, favoring the kind of legislation that he supported but had been vetoed by Herbert Hoover. Ironically, with the public furious at the phlegmatic Hoover, a Democratic majority swept the country, ushering in Franklin Delano Roosevelt as president and his New Deal as policy—and voting a Republican congressman named Fiorello La Guardia out of office.
The despondent La Guardia returned to New York with his devoted secretary (now his second wife), Marie Fischer, upon the completion of the 1933 lame duck session of Congress. Within weeks he began talking about running for mayor. The first time La Guardia ran for mayor, in 1921, he was told, “The town isn’t ready for an Italian mayor.” Eight years later, trying again, he was called a “crazy little wop,” and the dashing and refined Jimmy Walker soundly defeated him.
Walker may have been elegant, but he was also a crook. Forced to resign in 1932 on charges of graft, he fled the country with his mistress. Now it was La Guardia’s turn to defeat the corrupt Democratic Tammany Hall. Once again he would have to solicit Republican backing, which meant the endorsement of a WASP gentry that had repeatedly rejected him. Or as one party leader said, “If it’s La Guardia or bust, I prefer bust!”
But through a combination of skillful maneuvering and a little luck, La Guardia became their reluctant choice. His political club in East Harlem served as the base to organize Italian Americans throughout the city. Vito Marcantonio ran the club, nicknamed the Gibboni (it took on this name after a baseball victory—someone called the group campioni, “champions,” and a member quipped that they looked more like gibboni—that is, gibbon apes).
Marcantonio, elected to the East Harlem congressional seat the same year that La Guardia became mayor, was, like his mentor, smart, progressive, and extremely hardworking. In their district office they listened to the problems of thousands of immigrants who marched each year through its doors seeking relief from their woes. Marcantonio, along with Leonard Covello and another East Harlemite, named Edward Corsi, was in charge of rallying the Italian-American base.
La Guardia (left) and his smart and liberal protégé, Vito Marcantonio.
Not that they had to do much convincing. The jubilant Italian-American population embraced Fiorello La Guardia and his message of social justice. Who better to clean up the slums than the man who had lost his wife and child to diseases contracted from tenement living?
La Guardia campaigned to convince the rest of the citywide electorate, who had grown used to an annual free turkey from Tammany Hall, that this cheap vote-buying trick meant little to their daily life. What they needed was good government and a benevolent welfare state—a city with balanced finances, which would make it eligible for federal money and the massive jobs program that President Roosevelt was creating. With Tammany in charge, the city would forfeit these funds because the federal government knew of its deep and pervasive corruption. The people needed a city in which tenements would be cleared for decent housing and parks built to rid the streets of their relentless urban blight.
On Election Day it became clear that Tammany wouldn’t give up without a violent fight. They sent out criminals and thugs wearing brass knuckles to intimidate and in some cases beat up the slum dwellers to support the Democratic candidate. Still, La Guardia won by over 250,000 votes. The overwhelming support of more than 300,000 Italian Americans enabled La Guardia to end the twenty-year reign of Tammany Hall.
La Guardia’s victory was a transformational moment in the history of New York and the identity of Italian Americans who, up until this time, held the least wealth, status, and power compared to other immigrant groups of equivalent size. Now they played a significant part in the political process. Tammany leaders, using taxpayer money for their personal trough, had nearly bankrupted the city’s finances. After La Guardia cleaned house and brought in top-notch commissioners, he restored the city’s credit rating, clearing the way for Washington to give New York badly needed New Deal money. The popular La Guardia became head of the United States Conference of Mayors, and his close connection to Washington brought billions of dollars to New York.
The money was desperately needed to repair a city still deep in Depression woes. Tens of thousands of people remained unemployed, and thousands more were starving and homeless. In 1935, Congress allocated $4.8 billion for President Roosevelt’s massive jobs creation program, the Works Progress Administration. La Guardia immediately began drawing up plans for $300 million in new projects, and New York became the first city to be awarded two hundred thousand WPA job slots.
The WPA gave employment to thousands of Italian Americans and placed them in jobs doing what they knew best: digging tunnels, drilling concrete, and laying bricks. These jobs in construction and other artisan trades gave Italian Americans a significant lift, and the means to enter a middle-class life. Because of the WPA programs, Italian Americans continued to contribute their talents to defining, in bricks and mortar, the visual texture of the city. Italian Americans already had sculpted some of the city’s most memorable landmarks, such as the stone lions guarding the New York Public Library, which La Guardia nicknamed “Patience” and “Fortitude,” created by the talented Piccirilli Brothers, whose workshop was located in the Bronx.
Plasterer’s union card and WPA assignment slip.
East Harlem artist Daniel Celentano, hired by the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), the precursor to the WPA, painted Festival in 1934, depicting the neighborhood’s annual festa.
With federal money pouring in through the WPA and other programs, the creation of New York as a modern, well-run cosmopolitan city began. La Guardia built the nation’s first public housing, along with bridges, tunnels, and the city’s first commercial airport, which would be named after him (La Guardia fondly called the project “the airport of the New World”). He established health clinics and created parks to give weary residents space to relax and breathe. He purchased privately owned subway lines to unify the city’s piecemeal mass transit system. He promoted symphony music, once even conducting the New York Philharmonic as its renowned leader Arturo Toscanini stood beside him. He created the City Center, which offered opera, theater, and the symphony at prices that ranged from twenty-five cents to a dollar, enabling the working-class to patronize the arts.
The famously hands-on La Guardia ran to fires with his own fireman’s helmet and read the comics over the radio to the kids during the newspaper strike. He created a legitimate police force, throwing out Tammany’s gang of bribed cops and significantly reducing crime. He took on organized crime, ordering the arrest of any known gangster who appeared in public, and he made a showy display of smashing slot machines and tossing them into the ocean. La Guardia understood that these rigged machines preyed on the poor, creating false dreams and draining them of the few dollars they had. He also continued his practice of taking political action to absolve private hurt. He was merciless toward Italian-American organ-grinders, removing them from the streets to rid the city of a stinging stereotype from his childhood.
Fiorello La Guardia served for three terms and, with his ex
haustive list of accomplishments, remains the most effective mayor the city has ever had. His hiring policies, based on merit not political friendship, opened the doors for Italian and Jewish Americans to enter government, and eliminated barriers for the promotion of African Americans to supervisory positions. Fundamentally changing the perception of government from an excuse for graft to a force of good, he set a model for the nation. When he died of pancreatic cancer in 1947 at the age of sixty-four, New York experienced for the first time in over thirty years the shock of his silence, unable to imagine that their beloved Little Flower would no longer voice his passion for the city and its people.
La Guardia took on organized crime and made a showy display of smashing slot machines.
DOCUMENTI
ART RENEWS A PEOPLE
Italian Americans chiseled and sculpted many of the nation's leading landmarks (e.g. the figure of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial, carved by the Piccirilli brothers). Union workers celebrated their pride in craftsmanship, an Italian virtue they feared was threatened to become obsolete in America.
A Fascist gathering in New Jersey. Marginalized Italians felt that Mussolini could lessen their humiliations.
Columbus Day, the fall celebration that contemporary Italian Americans either gently note or easily forget, first became a federal holiday under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on October 12, 1934. The Italian-American bloc had become formidable—ushering in La Guardia as mayor the previous November—and Roosevelt, the consummate politician, understood the importance of recognizing the ethnic group’s emerging political and civic voice. The presidential proclamation represented a moment of great pride and growing confidence, yet coinciding with this new patriotism, a troubling nationalism was brewing in the Italian-American community. For over a decade, nonstop propaganda from a Fascist Italy had been saturating Italian-American newspapers, community centers, and after-school programs.
Columbus Day became a focal point that revealed clashes within the Italian-American community. In 1925, the dictator Benito Mussolini had made Columbus Day a national holiday in Italy, using the celebration to reaffirm the special nature of its people, descendants of the great Roman Empire. In the United States, throughout the thirties, Columbus Day brought with it bloody and violent confrontations between Italian-American Fascist sympathizers and a much smaller but belligerent coalition of anti-Fascist protestors. Governor Herbert Lehman presided over a ceremony at New York’s Columbus Circle in 1937, where more than five thousand people had gathered. Generoso Pope, the publisher of Il Progresso, the largest Italian-American newspaper in the country, and a fervent supporter of Mussolini, chaired the Columbus Citizens Committee. Many who gathered shouted “Fascisti!” and when Italy’s Fascist anthem, the “Giovinezza” (meaning “youth”), played, the massive crowd raised arms in the famous salute to the dictator.
Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, also on stage, gave a perfunctory and platitudinous speech praising Columbus and the contributions Italian Americans had made to the country. Later that day, La Guardia returned to the same platform to speak at a much smaller anti-Fascist event organized by his protégé, Vito Marcantonio. The second gathering, Marcantonio explained, was to support “the preservation and extension of democratic rights and civil liberties.”
Fascist sympathizers, like Pope, saw Columbus Day as a way to reaffirm the message of Mussolini. Anti-Fascist leaders, such as Luigi Antonini of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, saw Columbus Day as an opportunity to better recognize Italian Americans as part of mainstream American society, a group worthy of its own day. By 1938, Pope’s Columbus Day events were attracting upwards of thirty-five thousand people and routinely received the imprimatur of political leaders and the media. Many Americans viewed Fascism as the antidote to Communism, and as the New York Times reminded its readers, anti-Fascist gatherings included “Communists.”
La Guardia was caught in a political predicament: he despised the Italian dictator but didn’t want to offend the Italian-American masses supporting Mussolini. By the late 1930s, President Roosevelt found himself in a similar spot, afraid of offending the powerful publisher Generoso Pope and the votes his paper could deliver, but growing increasingly concerned about the situation in Europe. This fraught relationship between Pope and Roosevelt had international repercussions, thwarting the president’s initial attempts to stop the growing Fascist aggression in Europe.
It would be impossible to understand the adulation of the Italian-American masses for Mussolini throughout the 1930s without recognizing America’s initial enthusiasm for the dictator. After the “March on Rome” in October of 1922, in which hundreds of his followers demanded a Fascist government and the weak King Victor Emmanuel III relented, America was quick to celebrate Mussolini as a winner. Politicians, journalists, and businessmen believed that Mussolini’s new political program, with its brutal intolerance of strikes taking place throughout the country, would restore order and stem the tide of the growing Bolshevist threat.
Americans lapped up Mussolini’s rhetoric about restoring the greatness of the Roman Empire. Even the name of his party—the fasces, a bundle of wheat bound to an ax—symbolized Roman authority. Finally someone would impose structure on an undisciplined nation and make the trains run on time.
The magazine of Middle America, the Saturday Evening Post, praised Mussolini and serialized the dictator’s autobiography in 1928. The Chicago Tribune declared that Fascism represented “the most striking and successful attempt of the middle classes to meet the tide of revolutionary socialism.” Reporters like New York Times correspondent Anne O’Hare McCormick worked themselves up to a high pitch of adulation: “It is easy enough for Americans to comprehend the Fascisti. Direct action is intelligible in any language. A nation that thrilled to the Vigilantes and the Rough Riders rises to Mussolini and his Black Shirt army. They have done more to make Italy understood in the United States than three million Italians coming over to dig ditches.”
“A land of mothers is a land of sons, and the mothers of Italy have great power over their sons,” continued McCormick. “Mussolini himself is the son of a strong peasant mother, to whose devotion and self-sacrifice he is said to owe much. Women understand the old-fashioned, masterful sort of government which he re-establishes. They rally to the old-fashioned hierarchies, of religion, authority, obedience which he restores.”
The most nefarious aspects of Mussolini’s regime were still a decade away, but each of these journalists in the twenties turned their backs on the loss of Italy’s free press, its wrathful nationalism, the extreme violence of the Blackshirts who beat their opponents to death (or at a minimum beat and force-fed large doses of castor oil to any who showed disobedience), and the placing of faith in a man who radically and opportunistically changed his political positions.
Mussolini had been a fervent socialist and atheist journalist who denounced capitalists like John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan in his articles about America. The young Mussolini wrote about the millworkers strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, sympathizing with the workers and condemning the “crimes of capitalism.” Once in power, however, he abandoned these positions, brutally suppressing strikes and embracing and winning the support of American capitalists and the Vatican. Eventually, the head of J. P. Morgan bank would become one of his most influential backers. The humorist Will Rogers, after interviewing Mussolini for the Saturday Evening Post, affectionately explained, “Dictator form of government is the greatest form of government; that is, if you have the right Dictator.”
America’s nativist prejudices played into this adoration. Elite Americans had always admired the beauty and artistic achievements of northern Italy, even if they found the people less diligent and hardworking than Anglo-Saxon stock. Now the moment emerged in which they believed Mussolini could mold an Italy that combined these achievements with their own more rigorous standards of work. It would take a dictator, so this thinking went, to accomplish such a herculean task.
Italian-American immigrants, typecast as stolid manual laborers or radicals (either “three million . . . coming over to dig ditches” or troublemakers like Sacco and Vanzetti), found solace in America’s embrace of the new Italian leader. Here was a man who could lessen their humiliation, illustrate their devotion to religion and country, and restore pride and glory to the Italy of their imagination. Nothing helps the confidence of a marginalized and maligned ethnic group more than recognizing that a new American idol is one of your own.
Mussolini was greatly preoccupied with how America saw him. The American press, for the most part, accepted the fact that the Italian government controlled the news and printed its own favorable versions of Italy’s progress and growth. But Mussolini found a way to spread his propaganda even more deeply through the Italian-American press.
Kansas City’s La Stampa, Philadelphia’s L’Opinione, Stockton, California’s Sole, Boston’s Gazzetta del Massachusetts, Chicago’s L’Italia, and Detroit’s La Tribuna d’America—all proudly served as propaganda machines, printing dispatches from the Italian news service controlled by Mussolini’s government. Pro-Fascist newspapers also promoted the creation of Italian language classes, which essentially became propaganda centers instituted under Mussolini’s orders to indoctrinate Italian-American youth. Parents, increasingly concerned that their children were losing ties to their homeland by not knowing Italian, enthusiastically signed up their children for these classes.
Meanwhile, the small anti-Fascist opposition, composed mostly of Italian-American labor groups, tried to get its word out under increasingly difficult circumstances. The Italian embassy alerted the US State Department about “the notorious Italian labor agitators Carlo Tresca, Arturo Giovannitti . . . and other social-communist elements in New York.” After Giovannitti’s imprisonment during the Lawrence strike, he continued to write political poetry and eloquently spoke out against Fascism, but his words, revered by the Italian-American left, never reached the masses.
The Italian Americans Page 13
