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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Fiorello La Guardia was an ambitious man who wanted great success for himself—but he also wanted to advocate on behalf of the poor and forgotten. Through hard work and perseverance he managed to achieve both. This work examines the life of the man who not only became one of New York’s greatest and most renowned mayors, but who brought about some of the most important changes in the history of the city.
This thoroughly revised second edition of Fiorello La Guardia: Ethnicity, Reform, and Urban Development looks at the many events of the popular mayor’s life—his early beginnings as a politician, the events surrounding his life and city, his multiple terms as New York City’s Mayor, his personal and professional disappointments, and his ultimate place in history. It also examines the broader subject of cities during times of stress, the ability of mayors to enhance urban life, and the origins of federal aid to cities.
- Connects the New York and urban story to that of the nation and to the subfields of Progressivism, the Depression, the New Deal, and World War II
- Contains 16 new images—of La Guardia, his contemporaries, and city shots—spaced throughout the text
- Offers a timeline of principal dates in La Guardia’s life keyed to significant events in the city’s, state’s, and nation’s history
- Includes key terms and study questions for each chapter
- Features a completely updated bibliographical essay
Comprehensive, yet highly accessible, Fiorello La Guardia: Ethnicity, Reform, and Urban Development, Second Edition makes ideal supplementary reading for survey courses in the history of New York or New York City as well as for general American History courses.
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Fiorello La Guardia was an ambitious man who wanted great success for himself – but he also wanted to advocate on behalf of the poor and forgotten. Through hard work and perseverance he managed to achieve both. This work examines the life of the man who not only became one of New York's greatest and most renowned mayors, but who brought about some of the most important changes in the history of the city.
This thoroughly revised second edition of Fiorello La Guardia: Ethnicity, Reform, and Urban Development looks at the many events of the popular mayor's life – his early beginnings as a politician, the events surrounding his life and city, his multiple terms as New York City's Mayor, his personal and professional disappointments, and his ultimate place in history. It also examines the broader subject of cities during times of stress, the ability of mayors to enhance urban life, and the origins of federal aid to cities.
Ronald H. Bayor, PhD, Emeritus Professor of History at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is a historian who specializes in urban, ethnic, and immigration history. He is founding editor of the Journal of American Ethnic History and author, editor, and co-editor of numerous books and publications. Professor Bayor has also been the recipient of numerous awards including the Immigration and Ethnic History Society's Distinguished Service Award and the Association for Asian American Studies Lifetime Service Award.
Fiorello La Guardia
Ethnicity, Reform, and Urban Development
Second Edition
Ronald H. Bayor
Emeritus Professor of History
Georgia Tech
Atlanta, USA
This edition first published 2018
© 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Edition History
1993, Harlan Davidson Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
The right of Ronald H. Bayor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bayor, Ronald H., 1944–
Title: Fiorello La Guardia : ethnicity, reform, and urban development / Ronald H Bayor, Emeritus Professor of History, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, US.
Description: 2nd edition. | Hoboken, NJ : Wiley, [2017] | “Originally published: Harlan Davidson Inc., 1993.” | Includes bibliographical references and index.|
Identifiers: LCCN 2017014339 (print) | LCCN 2017014925 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119103523 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119103530 (epub) | ISBN 9781119103493 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119103509 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: La Guardia, Fiorello H. (Fiorello Henry), 1882–1947. | Legislators--United States--Biography. | Mayors--New York (State)--New York--Biography. | United States. Congress. House--Biography. | New York (N.Y.)--Politics and government--1898–1951.
Classification: LCC E748.L23 (ebook) | LCC E748.L23 B38 2017 (print) | DDC 328.73/092 [B] --dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014339
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Images: (Background) © Jitalia17/Gettyimages; Courtesy of La Guardia and Wagner Archives
Preface and Acknowledgments
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States had many seemingly intractable problems: political corruption; large-scale poverty; labor strife; massive immigration; ethnic and racial conflict; and urban issues involving inadequate housing and infrastructure. Moreover, the nation's wealthiest citizens had enormous economic and political power to the detriment of the average citizen and worker. Into this morass stepped a few individuals intent on forging positive change. Fiorello H. La Guardia emerged as one of the most important of these people.
La Guardia appeared at the right time with the right background. As a multilingual spokesman for the newly arrived Americans, an urban reformer, a scrupulously honest politician, a dynamic congressman and mayor, and a voice for a politics aimed at eliminating corruption and reaching out to the poor, he became a symbol of his times and an illustration that honest, energized, politicians could make a difference in improving society and setting standards for the future. A shrewd politician who understood the ethnic tensions of his city, he knew how to win votes, and then use his power for the common good.
He also served as a bridge between different generations of reformers: from Progressives to New Dealers. La Guardia, therefore, allows us to better understand the essence of reform in America and the movements that still shape our lives.
Reaching his apogee of power as New York's mayor during the Great Depression, and working closely with another force for change, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal, La Guardia managed to form a close New York-federal cooperation that enhanced the city immeasurably and served as a guideline for further collaboration.
Improvements in infrastructure including highways, bridges, housing, and parks occurred. Employment improved as jobs became available due to federal largesse and city leadership. The development of these and many other facets of New York life enshrined La Guardia as the best mayor New York ever had. Elected to three terms, he oversaw the city during Depression and War and found himself in the middle of other major events of those times. La Guardia was actually involved in so many important issues that his biography is akin to a history of the first half of the twentieth century.
His life is also instructive for our own times. Cities can be run well; politicians can forge honest and useful careers; and people can be helped through government action. La Guardia, an ambitious man who wanted great success for himself, also wanted significant help for the poor and forgotten. He achieved both. Looking back, we see that under dynamic and concerned leadership even dismal events such as Depression and War can lead to improvements in American life.
I would like to thank Andrew Davidson, formerly of Wiley, for his useful critique and encouragement of this book. I doubt that this project would have started without his input. My thanks also to Denisha Sahadevan of Wiley, who read the chapters carefully, for her help. Special thanks to my wife Leslie N. Bayor for her love and support.
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
1 Bridging Different Worlds
Family Background
To the Frontier
Reform Beginnings
An Outsider
Rage and Resentment
The Impact of War
The Consular Years
“The Test Is If You Hesitate”
The Power of Tammany
A People's Attorney
Not Politics as Usual
Study Questions
Time Line
2 A Fighting Congressman
Ethnic Realities
“A Stepping-Stone for … Other Italians”
The District and the Campaign
“What Are You in Politics for, for Love?”
“We Didn't Double-Cross You”: The 1916 Campaign
Protecting America's Rights
The Great War
“Why Doesn't He Go to Russia?”: The 1918 Campaign and the Socialist Party
His Voice Was Heard: Postwar Politics
“The Town Isn't Ready for an Italian Mayor”
The Worst of Times
Study Questions
Time Line
3 “The Conscience of the Twenties”
A Hard-Hitting Campaign
A Party “Controlled by the Connivance of the Privileged Few”
A Progressive Resurgence?
An Odd Political Makeup
The Stock Market Crash, New York at the Beginning of the Great Depression, and La Guardia
A Tammany Victory
“A Pint of Liquid Dynamite”
Study Questions
Time Line
4 La Guardia as Mayor: The First Term
The Timing Was Not Right
“Kind of a Magic Box?”: The Tammany Scandals
A City in Trouble
Fusion, 1933
“Would You Say These Ideas Are Radical?” The 1933 Campaign
Ethnic Succession in “This Most Irish of Cities”
A Different Sort of Mayor: “Where's the Wastebasket!”
Economic Rebound
“Everyone Who Needs It Is Entitled to Relief”
Building a New City
A Bold Leader
An Explosion in Harlem
Responding to Hitler and Mussolini
Progressive Politics
Study Questions
Time Line
5 Reelection and Disappointment
“He Is
Our
S.O.B”: The 1937 Campaign
Stronger than Ever
Reaching for More
Going for Another Term
Ethnic Wars
The War in Europe and the 1941 Campaign
A Part-Time Mayor: The 1941 Campaign
Analyzing the Vote
A Too-Busy Mayor
On the Radio
Racial Tensions
The Second Harlem Riot
The Ethnic Politician
Still a Reformer
A Fourth Term?
The 1945 Election and the No Deal Party
A New Tammany?
The Last Years
Study Questions
Time Line
6 La Guardia: His Place in History
Study Questions
Bibliographical Essay
Index
EULA
List of Illustrations
2
Figure 2.1 Congressman La Guardia busy at his desk. He was always well prepared to discuss bills before Congress.
Source:
Courtesy of The La Guardia and Wagner Archives, La Guardia Community College/The City University of New York.
3
Figure 3.1 La Guardia pouring beer. The photograph was taken at his congressional office in June 1926 indicating how easily and legally obtained ingredients could produce illegal beer.
Source
: Courtesy of The La Guardia and Wagner Archives, La Guardia Community College/The City University of New York.
4
Figure 4.1 La Guardia used every available minute to work. Here he is working in the backseat of his car.
Source
: Courtesy of The La Guardia and Wagner Archives, La Guardia Community College/The City University of New York.
Figure 4.2 Mayor La Guardia reviewing the city budget, March 20, 1940. The city's budget problems remained complex throughout his administrations.
Source
: Courtesy of The La Guardia and Wagner Archives, La Guardia Community College/The City University of New York.
Figure 4.3 Mayor La Guardia working at his desk at City Hall, February 1940.
Source
: Courtesy of The La Guardia and Wagner Archives, La Guardia Community College/The City University of New York.
Figure 4.4 Mayor La Guardia working with Secretary of the Interior and Director of the Public Works Administration Harold Ickes on New Deal plans for New York.
Source
: Courtesy of The La Guardia and Wagner Archives, La Guardia Community College/The City University of New York.
Figure 4.5 Mayor La Guardia speaking at the dedication of Harlem River Houses in Manhattan, June 16, 1937.
Source
: Courtesy of The La Guardia and Wagner Archives, La Guardia Community College/The City University of New York.
5
Figure 5.1 A day of New York campaigning in the 1940 presidential election with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Governor Herbert H. Lehman, and Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, October 1940.
Source
: Courtesy of The La Guardia and Wagner Archives, La Guardia Community College/The City University of New York.
Figure 5.2 Mayor La Guardia addressing a gathering of Polish Americans during the celebration of Polish National Alliance Day at New York's World's Fair grounds, September 2, 1939, a day after Germany attacked Poland beginning World War II in Europe.
Source
: Courtesy of The La Guardia and Wagner Archives, La Guardia Community College/The City University of New York.
Figure 5.3 Mayor La Guardia addressing a Columbus Day rally at Columbus Circle in New York, October 12, 1943.
Source
: Courtesy of The La Guardia and Wagner Archives, La Guardia Community College/The City University of New York.
Figure 5.4 Mayor La Guardia broadcasting on NBC radio, early 1940s. The mayor made good use of the radio to keep in touch with New Yorkers.
Source
: Courtesy of The La Guardia and Wagner Archives, La Guardia Community College/The City University of New York.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
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1Bridging Different Worlds
The United States in the years from the end of the Civil War to the turn of the century was a country going through enormous changes. Industrialization spurred monopolization and concentration of wealth while providing Americans with cheaper and more plentiful products. Declining prices for farm products led farmers to form protest organizations to attempt to redress their grievances. In this age of materialism and greed, corporate influence in politics grew substantially. Union activity, some of it violent, intensified. The immigrants overwhelmed cities, particularly after 1882, when the source of immigrations shifted from northern and western to southern and Eastern Europe, and the numbers increased. By the end of the nineteenth century, New York had grown substantially in area as well with the annexation of the city of Brooklyn, the expansion of New York into Manhattan's northern sections, and the addition of the locales of Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. The city population stood at approximately 3.5 million, the nation's largest city.
New York City became the center of immigrant arrival with Ellis Island opening in New York harbor in 1892 as the main United States entry point. From 1892 to 1924, over 14 million immigrants disembarked at the Island, and although many went elsewhere in the country, New York's foreign-born population rose to 14% of its inhabitants. In addition New York experienced a substantial migration of Southern Blacks fleeing destitution and violence. Most new arrivals, whether domestic or foreign, came poverty-stricken, and desperately needing a job and housing. Adding to the ethnic mix already present, the newcomers helped create a diversity unique in the world and exacerbated a number of urban problems particularly in relation to poverty and housing. Certain neighborhoods evolved into ethnic enclaves and ghettoes, areas where a foreign language would be the main speech on the streets, stores catered to ethnic tastes, foreign-language newspapers were widely read, and politicians wooed groups with ethnically based campaigns.
These ethnic groups also competed and conflicted with each other, trying to secure limited resources, challenging cultural values, and at times tearing the city apart in race riots and ethnic conflicts. New York's housing, jobs, and political positions all became part of the competition that emerged especially between the Irish, Jews, Germans, Italians, and Blacks. Furthermore, what happened in their ancestral homes often impacted New York's politics. The eventual rise of Russian Communism, Italian Fascism, and German Nazism had strong implications for New York's immigrant populations.
As New York emerged into the twentieth century, problems abounded and opportunities appeared. The new population's poverty resulted in the growth of slum housing, sweatshop conditions in factories, and crime. Jobs became available with the building of the New York subways, opening in 1904, and with the growth of the garment industry. But these jobs did not pay much, workmen's compensation and unemployment insurance were not yet available, employers abused child labor, and they fought any union attempts to better the workers' lives.
Many Americans became concerned about this poverty in the midst of plenty, corrupt city governments, exploitation of workers, child labor, and the threat the new industrial wealth posed to democratic institutions. As the nation tried to come to terms with industrialization and urbanization, responses varied. Some, such as financier J.P. Morgan, fit well into this period and reaped enormous profit from it. Other, like Yale professor William Graham Sumner, became spokesmen for Social Darwinism, which justified the great wealth of the corporate entrepreneurs. Still others railed against the essence of the Gilded Age and offered criticisms and suggestions that would create a more equitable system and smooth away the harsh edges of nineteenth-century capitalism.
Fiorello Enrico (later Henry) La Guardia, born on December 11, 1882, in New York City in the midst of this turmoil, was to provide a unique response to the economic and social upheavals of his time. La Guardia bridged the era between the early years of protest against the industrial system and the later outburst of reform in the 1930s, and he took part in all the major issues and events of this period: immigration and ethnicity, Progressivism, the fight against the corrupt urban political machines, World War I, the 1920s conservative and nativist reaction, the 1930s economic collapse, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal reforms, World War II and its immediate aftermath. He emerged as a spokesman for good government, unions, immigrants, Blacks, the urban poor, miners, and farmers. Fiorello connected the philosophies and activism of an earlier generation of reformers – among them, housing crusader Jacob Riis, Theodore Roosevelt, and Senators George Norris, Robert La Follette, and William Borah – to the later reformers of the New Deal generation. He interacted both with the older reform generation and with his own cohort in New York. The latter group provided various alternatives for coming to terms with the industrial age. James J. (Jimmy) Walker, born in 1881 and later New York mayor, accepted and profited from the urban corruption of his times. Franklin D. Roosevelt, born in 1882, brought reform with a new and surprising influence that uplifted the nation as well as New York City. Future governor and presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith, born in 1873, Robert F. Wagner, born in 1877 and future US Senator, and Salvatore Cotillo, born in 1886 and later justice on the New York State Supreme Court, represented the Tammany political machine's approach to needed reform. (Tammany was New York County's Democratic party organization).
The bridging of a generational gap among the reformers is only part of La Guardia's story. He also connected the values of the Old and New Worlds, immigrants and the native-born, and western and eastern America. As such, La Guardia linked a New York City immigrant reform tradition represented by the socialist-oriented garment unions with the reform of middle America's farmer-labor groups. Moreover, as biographer Arthur Mann relates, La Guardia was “a marginal man who lived on the edge of many cultures.” In addition to English, he could speak Yiddish, French, Italian, Hungarian, German, and Croatian. “Half Jewish and half Italian, born in [New York's] Greenwich Village yet raised in Arizona, married first to a Catholic and then to a Lutheran but himself … an Episcopalian, Fiorello La Guardia was a Mr. Brotherhood week all by himself.” Like New York, he was a product of diverse elements, all of which explain his personality, commitment, and accomplishments.
Family Background
When Fiorello was born in 1882 in an ethnically diverse section of New York's Greenwich Village, large-scale Italian and eastern European Jewish migration was just beginning and would reach its peak in the early years of the twentieth century. His parents, Achille Luigi Carlo La Guardia and Irene Coen, had arrived in New York in 1880. Achille's music brought the La Guardias to the United States. His skill as a cornetist and arranger had led him in 1878 to tour the United States with Adelina Patti, a well-known Italian opera star. Achille, captivated by the New World, resolved during the tour to come back to live in America. After returning to Europe, he met and married Irene in 1880 in Trieste, Austria-Hungary, her birthplace, and then immigrated to the United States. Gemma, a daughter, was born in 1881, followed by Fiorello (Little Flower) in 1882, and Richard in 1887. Had the La Guardias stayed in New York City, Fiorello would have grown up in a milieu of Irish political control through the Tammany machine and of competition among often contentious and striving ethnic groups over housing, jobs, political positions, and criminal operations. This environment nurtured Jimmy Walker, Al Smith, and Robert Wagner, who moved easily up the political ladder, but reluctantly offered only a few political positions to Italians. If America faced serious issues during a period of industrial growth and heavy immigration, New York City, where every problem seemed magnified, experienced wrenching times. Crime, poverty, ethnic conflict, corruption, labor violence, worker exploitation, disease, and inadequate housing were part of New York life. All these problems grew worse during the 1890s Depression.
To the Frontier
Fiorello would work to relieve these problems as New York's mayor and as a dominant force in the city's political world. However, in 1885, Achille, experiencing difficulty in finding steady work as a musician in New York, joined the army as chief musician in the Eleventh Infantry Regiment and moved his family west. Achille took his bold step of leaving a relatively comfortable New York ethnic world to venture to the unknown western frontier in search of opportunity. Fiorello thereby grew up with a unique childhood experience and a different perspective than he would have learned in New York's overcrowded tenements. The La Guardias moved a number of times – from Fort Sully in North Dakota to Madison Barracks, Sackets Harbor, New York to Fort Huachuca, Arizona Territory; and finally, in 1892, to Whipple Barracks near Prescott, Arizona Territory. By this time, Achille had become a bandmaster. The small western frontier town of Prescott, rather than New York's multiethnic neighborhoods, became Fiorello's childhood home.
The West of the 1880s and 1890s still had elements of frontier life, although they were fast disappearing. Nonetheless, soldiers, cowboys, miners, Indians, gamblers, and outlaws inhabited Fiorello's world. The Indian Wars were in their last years but Arizona Territory contained a number of tribes – Apaches, Hopi, Pima, and Navajos. Sparsely settled but a land in which American civilization and culture expanded rapidly, Arizona Territory and the West represented the area, according to historian Frederick Jackson Turner, writing in 1893, that shaped American life. The new western territories helped form the American characteristics of individualism, nationalism, and democracy. But the West also contained railroad-labor conflicts, and corrupt government Indian agents. All of these aspects of Western life influenced the young Fiorello.
In his autobiography, Fiorello pointed to some particular events in Arizona that, he asserted, shaped his personality, thinking, and subsequent life. For example, La Guardia observed how the Indian agents, all politically appointed, cheated the Indians, “This was,” La Guardia stated, “my first contact with ‘politicians.’ ” Fiorello noted that his hatred for professional politicians and political machines began when still a child. Along with the agents in Fiorello's demonology were professional gamblers, or “tinhorns,” an epithet he would frequently hurl at New York's corrupt public officials and gangsters. These early observations coalesced for the impressionable youngster when he later began reading the Sunday edition of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, which the family received in Prescott. This newspaper's incessant attacks on New York's Tammany machine and its revelations of corruption in that city during the 1890s, particularly in the police department, gave more focus to Fiorello's anger at political dishonesty. “A resentment against Tammany was created in me at that time,” he later said, “which I admit is to this day almost an obsession.” Coupled with a general resentment of authority figures, evident early in his life, La Guardia's later challenge to the established politicians was almost predictable.
Reform Beginnings
The Progressive movement's beginning stages in the 1890s served as the historical and national context for La Guardia's early animosity toward corruption and Tammany. Responding to the myriad social, political, and economic problems Americans faced at that time, various reformers emerged to offer solutions. For example, in the 1890s and early years of the twentieth century, reform mayors sought and won election in a number of cities and challenged the political corruption and greedy utility and transportation company officials who through franchise deals and high prices robbed the public. In some cases, such as in Toledo, Ohio with Samuel (“Golden Rule”) Jones, elected in 1897, or a few years later in Cleveland with Tom Johnson (1901), dynamic and honest mayors dealt with corruption, made government more efficient, and provided a better existence for their cities' inhabitants.
Progressivism in the early twentieth century built on all of the following: the protests of the Populists (the rural-based reform movement of the 1890s), the good government supporters, the believers in the social gospel (a clerical-based advocacy for social reform), the muckraking journalists (writers who exposed avarice and corruption in American life), and the efforts to provide a better environment for the poor and a more orderly, conflict-free one for business. From these elements, Progressivism emerged with a thrust toward more democracy, an increase in government power and efficiency in order to solve the many economic and social problems of the country which had been exacerbated by the 1890s Depression, and a moral imperative to deal with the abuses of industrial society.
This period's dominating reform movement attracted many individuals from various backgrounds. Businessmen, clergy, journalists, immigrants, and even Tammany machine politicians such as Al Smith and Robert Wagner became part of this effort. La Guardia also was drawn to Progressivism as his actions showed later. In the early stages of his political career, Fiorello's Progressive philosophy was still forming, but even then his interests and concerns were the same as many of the progressives. In 1937, La Guardia, then mayor of New York City, commented on how much he had been influenced by reading Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives in 1903. This widely read and influential book, first published in 1890, revealed the terrible living conditions found in New York's slums. With his strong resentment of dishonesty and special privilege, and his moral outrage when “they” (the powerful, corrupt, greedy elements of society) cheated the poor, Fiorello at heart became a progressive long before his thinking about reform fully matured.
In addition to the plight of the Indians, La Guardia was affected by the poor treatment of workers in the late nineteenth century, a time of intense labor–management friction. During this period, workers tried to organize to secure higher wages and shorter hours, but often encountered an implacable management that could call on a sympathetic government for the means to break strikes. Workers' lives were blighted by child labor, long hours with low pay, and little compensation for injuries on the job. The railroad industry consistently ranked among the nation's most abusive. As with many newly settled western areas, Prescott saw extensive railroad construction as the western lines expanded into its territory. La Guardia, a sensitive and thoughtful boy attuned to the suffering of others, watched as the rail officials mistreated their workers building the lines near Prescott. He saw very quickly that the bosses treated the workers, often immigrants, like machines rather than people. “If a laborer was injured he lost his job,” noted La Guardia. “Even as a young boy, this struck me as all wrong, and I thought about it a great deal.” According to this future spokesman for worker's rights, the Prescott experience developed his awareness of the need to protect workers. “It was this early glimpse of the condition of working people, of their exploitation and their utter lack of protection under the law, which prompted me to take an interest on their side in society.”
In 1894, the Pullman strike shut down the nation's railroads and culminated in a violent outburst. Railroad workers in Eugene Debs' American Railway Union fought for their rights as workers and clashed first with the Pullman Company, and then with a coalition of railroad company executives called the General Managers' Association. Finally, when efforts to get the men back to work under a court injunction failed, the army entered the fray against the workers. La Guardia, who was 12, saw soldiers being used to protect railroad property and to keep laborers form congregating and airing their grievances. He later recalled that he thought at the time that the workers were being treated unjustly and that labor problems could be dealt with in a way that was fair to both workers and management.
Early on, then, La Guardia showed a budding Progressivism, a concern with workers and strikes, and a western sense of individuality and open spaces. He was therefore in perfect tune with the emerging western, and often Republican, progressives such as Robert La Follette and George Norris, whom La Guardia would support later on. As New Deal advisor and La Guardia aide Rexford Tugwell said:
It must never be forgotten that La Guardia was actually a Westerner, and typically western in his intentions and reactions … His was a breed familiar to American politics. Among his contemporaries – some actually older, some younger than he, but active at the same time – were [Senator Burton K.] Wheeler [Montana], [Senator] Norris [Nebraska], the two La Folletes [the sons of Robert La Follette: Philip and Robert Jr. of Wisconsin], [Governor] Floyd Olson [Minnesota] and numerous associates in the in the House, such as Tom Amlie [Wisconsin]; and these were the people with which he felt a close kinship, with whom he liked to be, and whose motives he understood and approved.
Fiorello viewed himself as a westerner even during his years in New York where he could easily be spotted wearing his western-style hat.
An Outsider
However, one factor made him remain very much an outsider and gave him a different perspective from the western progressives. Fiorello's father was an Italian immigrant and his mother, although born in Trieste, Austria-Hungary, came out of an Italian-Jewish background. Fiorello's identification with the hordes of southern and eastern Europeans streaming into the country in the 1890s connected him forever with these groups just as if he had been reared in New York's crowded immigrant districts. Achille wanted his children to identify with what he viewed as “American.” They attended a Protestant Sunday school in Prescott, were raised as Episcopalians, and spoke English at home. However, to his peers in Prescott, La Guardia was an Italian (his material Jewish ancestry not yet being publicly known or emphasized).
One incident reveals how Fiorello's identification affected him. When he was 10, an organ-grinder with a monkey came to Prescott. The children gathered around to watch, and they soon began to taunt La Guardia. They called out, “A dago with a monkey! Hey Fiorello, you're a dago too. Where's your monkey?” La Guardia was mortified, and more so when his father, speaking Italian, asked the organ-grinder to their house for dinner. Fiorello was teased cruelly by the other children because of this incident. The long-term impact was evident after La Guardia had become mayor. He forbade organ-grinders to use New York's streets, an action difficult to explain without knowledge of his embarrassment in Prescott. Nonetheless, the more significant factor is that regardless of his father's efforts, Fiorello was clearly aware that he was a “marginal man,” on the outside of American culture. At one point he called himself Frank in order to sound more American, but then reverted to his original name. And years later, when his thoughts turned to seeking the presidency, he often said that his name limited his chances to move up in politics. His sense of “marginality” remained a part of his makeup.
La Guardia, defensive about his ancestry, became a fervent supporter of the immigrant populations and a fighter for the respect due them. As he noted in his autobiography:
It always annoys me greatly whenever I hear thoughtless people, often raised the easy way, who have never known any of the hardships these immigrant families endured every day, hurl insults at American citizens who have in many cases contributed more to the welfare of this nation than those who look down upon them or turn their noses up to them.
Rage and Resentment
La Guardia combined his sensitivity about his ethnicity and his concern for the have-nots with belligerency that some have attributed to his small stature. As an adult, Fiorello stood at a little over 5 feet tall with a slight build. His sister claimed that Fiorello tried to stand out in other ways – by being aggressive and talkative – and was very self-conscious about his height. In one youthful incident, Fiorello was fighting a taller boy and his fists could not get near the boy's face. Rather than give up, La Guardia found a chair, jumped on top of it, and started fighting again. He never gave up. Later on, when he was mayor and an aide made a remark about a job seeker being too short, La Guardia flew into a rage and shouted, “What's the matter with a little guy? What's the matter with a little guy? What's the matter with a little guy?” And this from a man who always kept a bust of Napoleon on his desk. His belligerence was directed at all those around him, even those he loved and respected. Fiorello at times would curse at his father, and when one of his teachers graded some incorrect math answers as right, Fiorello showed her the mistakes and said, “Look here, teacher, you better learn arithmetic if you are going to teach us.” Achille had difficulty controlling his son. Like his father, Fiorello was independent-minded, mischievous, rash, and stubborn.
Rage and resentment and (also like his father) a toughness combined with sensitivity and concern made up Fiorello's character. He loved music, and had a gentle side, but also was as tough as any street-corner politician. When a child, he learned to play the banjo and cornet from his overly critical father, who screamed at him when he made a mistake. Fiorello would respond by saying, “Keep on screaming Papa, in this way I'll learn.” Yet he was also later to be touchy about criticism, mistrustful of others, and resentful toward authority. Like his father, he was a very demanding overseer, unlikely to praise his subordinates, although he was likely to worry about their welfare. The future mayor borrowed his leadership style from his father. The imperious maestro led his band as Fiorello would later lead the city – with a strong hand.
Fiorello loved the leadership role, even as a young boy, and enjoyed being the center of attention. With his short stature and high voice, however, La Guardia did not seem to be someone who would be able to take on the often vicious Tammany and bring New Yorkers into a period of reform.
The Impact of War
La Guardia graduated from grammar school in January 1898. He began his ninth grade but never finished because of the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in April 1898. The war changed Fiorello's life and added yet another resentment against “them,” “the interests” (the powerful, corrupt elements of society), a resentment which he would carry with him the rest of his life. Fiorello's father, along with the Eleventh Infantry, was transferred to Jefferson Barracks near St. Louis, in April 1898, then to Mobile, Alabama, and eventually to Cuba. The family stayed at Jefferson Barracks. Fiorello at first tried to enlist, but his age and size kept him out of the army. Determined to follow his father to Mobile and then to Cuba, Fiorello secured a job at age 15 as a war correspondent with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. When the Eleventh Infantry moved on to Tampa, Florida, en route to Cuba, Fiorello went too, but there the war ended for him and his father. Achille became sick, as did many other soldiers during the war, from rotten meat sold to the army. The federal government would eventually take action against the abusive meat-packing companies when Theodore Roosevelt assumed the presidency, but for now many suffered from an industry that cared little that consumers were fed tainted meat. Upton Sinclair's muckraking novel, The Jungle, was to expose the problems of the industry in 1906.
Achille never fully recovered. He was sent back to Jefferson Barracks, and soon after was honorably discharged from the army because of his medical problems. Fiorello went on to St. Louis with his father, and after a brief stay in New York in 1898, the family sailed back to Europe, giving up on the New World experience. Hoping to make a new start in Trieste, Achille entered into business. Although he ultimately did well with a hotel he leased, he did not live long enough to enjoy his success. In 1904, at 55, Achille died from heart problems. Fiorello was convinced the rotten meat of army days has destroyed his father's health and was also angry that his mother was denied a pension based on her claim that Achille's death was service-related. As a congressman, Fiorello, in one of his first acts of his political career, proposed a bill that required the death penalty for those who sold inferior or tainted supplies to the army in wartime and a long jail term in peacetime. Fiorello had been affected personally by the abuse and greed of the industrial age – no longer just an observer of corrupt Indian agents and unfair railroad companies, Fiorello was now a victim. His father died after an aborted career and his family was plunged into poverty. This incident became the final boyhood lesson and explains at least in part his attraction to reform later on.
The Consular Years
In need of money, Fiorello secured a job in 1900 as a clerk at the American consulate in Budapest. In 1903 he moved on to Fiume, a Hungarian port, to serve as acting and then permanent consular agent. In these positions, La Guardia showed his intelligence, ability to learn quickly, and independence. He mastered several languages – German, Croatian, French, Hungarian, Italian, and Yiddish – and therefore could understand the language of many of the immigrants going to America. La Guardia also saw the immigrants' suffering and became their champion. Ambitious, status-hungry, enjoying the power of the consular agent's position, and touched by the plight of the migrating Balkan population, La Guardia turned this relatively low-level job into a stepping-stone and educational experience. He also became a gadfly to his superiors.
Two incidents reflect La Guardia's concerns and independence. He became aware as consular agent in Fiume that the procedure for medical inspections of immigrants was faulty. Prospective immigrants would sail to America, and upon arriving at Ellis Island in New York harbor face a complete medical exam that might discover a condition that made them ineligible for entry. Families then had to face an arduous return journey to Europe with their funds exhausted or, worse, had to decide to enter America without one or more family members who had to return to the Old World. Financial ruin or family separation – neither indicated a good choice for people already going through difficult times. La Guardia suggested a solution that should have been obvious to any immigration official. Rather than a very superficial attempt at judging an immigrant's health before sailing, which had been the practice of consuls, he began providing potential immigrants with full medical examinations before they left Fiume. He refused to allow ships to sail unless the exam took place and thereby delayed the departure times and angered steamship line officials. Nonetheless, under La Guardia's procedure, fewer immigrants were refused entry when they arrived in America from Fiume than from other ports. Many years later this procedure became standard policy for all immigrants leaving for the United States.
On another occasion, Fiorello received a request for the immediate embarkation of immigrants so that Maria Josefa, archduchess of Austria, could watch the immigrants board. This meant keeping the immigrants below deck for three days until the scheduled sailing time. La Guardia, only 22 at the time, refused to accede to the archduchess's wishes because of his concern for the immigrants. After complaints from the royal family, La Guardia was transferred to Trieste. Standing up to these officials became a prelude to his standing up to powerful politicians in the US and battling for people's rights. A fiercely independent individual, La Guardia did not back down to authority, especially when he felt his cause just, and involved society's downtrodden. In addition, he enjoyed the attention his antics brought.
Because he had so antagonized influential people in the Austro-Hungarian government, and caused problems for the US State Department, La Guardia did not get promoted. Still ambitious, however, he wanted to make a name for himself in America. Fiorello therefore resigned in 1906 from the consular service and returned to New York, leaving his mother, sister, and brother behind in Budapest.
