Viva Il Nostro Fiorello LaGuardia!
Politics as a career ladder in the American immigrant experience
Congressman LaGuardia making a speech at a rally of the sons of Italy, June 20, 1925.
Source: LaGuardia and Wagner archives
Julia Cornelissen 10615849
MA Thesis in American Studies
Universiteit van Amsterdam, Faculty of Humanities Thesis advisor: Eduard van de Bilt
Introduction 3
Chapter 1. The Life of the Immigrant 7
Chapter 2. The Life of the Politician 15
1. The Tammany Way 16
2. The LaGuardia Way 21
3. American or Italian? 24
4. (Republican) Politics 28
5. Insider or Outsider? 35
Conclusion 43
Introduction
“No one was white before [they] came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country.”
James Baldwin (1984)1
What do you think of, when you think about America? You might think in
contrapositions: The Old World versus The New World. You might simply think of fifty large states. Many will think of the American Dream, inextricably connected to America being a nation of immigrants. Because what is a ‘true American’? Everyone except the Native Americans came to the land somewhere in or after the sixteenth century. The country’s traditional motto ‘E pluribus unum’ – ‘out of many, one’ – refers to this fact. The mass immigration to the new continent has led the United States to be one of the most ethnically diverse nations in the world. Still, many people will have no difficulty coming up with an image of the average American. Even more remarkable, this image will be uniform in many cases, contradictory to the country’s diverse population.
Which is the American? – Henry James already wondered at the beginning of the twentieth century. “Who and what is an alien (…) in a country peopled from the first under the jealous eye of history? – Peopled, that is, by migrations at once extremely recent, perfectly traceable and urgently required.”2 Part of the essential image of The United States as a nation of immigrants who can make it in this new land according to the American Dream can be illustrated by the story of an
immigrant’s son who became an American politician. In this story, that will be Fiorello LaGuardia, the Italian-American 99th mayor of New York City, who continually fought for immigrant’s rights and against ethnic prejudice. Italian-Americans occupying important spots in New York City politics have become somewhat of a tradition, lasting up until this day with the current mayor, Bill de Blasio.
The “long early twentieth century” is partly defined by the mass arrival of immigrants in the United States. During this time, New York City became the 1 James Baldwin, “On Being White… And Other Lies”, Essence, April (1984).
“quintessential immigrant city” that it still is today.3 Between 1880 and 1920, close to a million and a half immigrants arrived and settled in the city. As a consequence, by 1910 forty-one percent of all New Yorkers were foreign born.4 Henry James has perfectly illustrated this change at the beginning of the twentieth century in his work
The American Scene. He had skipped twenty crucial years of his nation’s life. Leaving
New York in 1883 and returning in 1904, he found a city almost new and completely different from the one he left behind: rapidly expanding and the gates of immigration wide open.
The mass arrival of immigrants brings with it their victories and defeats in struggling for political, cultural, and economic citizenship.5 The process of the cultural assimilation of immigrants remains a difficult one to describe. James already wondered in his time how soon Old World habits could be transformed, how quickly ethnic change could be brought about, and whether this would be to the good. He did believe that the children of the immigrants would “fully profit, rise to the occasion and enter into the privilege.”6 One group that is especially interesting when examining the transition from immigrant outsider to insider is the group of “new immigrants”. This group of newcomers in America came from southern and eastern Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. They mostly came to New York City. The term “new immigrant” is racially inflected, as it categorizes the newcomers from southern and eastern European descent as different from the white and established immigrants from northern and western Europe.7
By 1920, close to a million Italians had found a new home in New York City. The Italian immigration was mainly a peasant migration from the agricultural regions of southern Italy.8 From the start of the second wave of immigration, many Americans feared that the new immigrants from eastern and southern Europe would not
assimilate as well as earlier immigrants from northern and western Europe. As the term “new immigrant” already indicates, the new immigrants were clearly placed
3 Nancy Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 5.
4 Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK, 1.
5 David Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants became White (New York:
Basic Books, 2006), 9.
6 Leon Edel in Henry James, The American Scene (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968), xvii. 7 Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness, 5.
below northern and western immigrants in terms of desirability.9 Italian immigrants were subject to discrimination based on their being viewed as racially inferior and undesirable.
The “race” of these new immigrants often came under discussion when their suitableness for certain jobs was questioned.10 This brings to the surface ideas about a connection between an American identity and climbing a job ladder. Technically, in a democracy, everyone should be able to make a success of themselves. The American Dream is built around the idea of prosperity and success being within reach for everyone. The knowledge that children will have a better life than their parents did, is an important aspect. For the new immigrant, becoming an American was also a stake in becoming successful. A high status is often seen to overshadow origin and
ethnicity.
New York, however, has a tradition of successful Italian-Americans being employed in the city’s local political structure. The most well known of these politicians is Fiorello LaGuardia, who left his mark on the city during his ten-year term as mayor. Many historians refer to LaGuardia’s appeal: somehow or other he was able to transcend both ethnic and party lines. The son of Italian immigrants, his ethnicity makes it an interesting question whether he became politically successful thanks to or in spite of his Italian ancestry. Also, Dominic Capeci for example characterized LaGuardia as “a marginal man, torn between cultural identities and assimilationist desires.11 This makes him an interesting case in investigating how an ethnic outsider could become a political insider at the beginning of the twentieth century in the United States.
The question of how an ethnic outsider could become a political insider in New York City when the major second wave of immigration occurred will be answered on the basis of both primary and secondary source material. This thesis is divided into two chapters. In the first part, the life of the new immigrants in New York will be addressed. Several contemporary novels and descriptions of the life of (Italian) immigrants in New York serve to sketch the “Italian scene” and raise important questions surrounding immigrants and “whiteness”. In the second part, 9 Cybelle Fox, Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration and American Welfare State from the
Progressive Era to the New Deal (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012), 32.
10 Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness, 12.
11 Dominic Capeci Jr., “Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the American Dream: A Document” Italian
Fiorello LaGuardia will serve as an example of a second-generation immigrant who became a successful American career-wise. LaGuardia was American enough to be chosen, but also enough an immigrant to appeal to the immigrant electorate in New York. Moreover, LaGuardia’s political career is interesting in terms of party alliance, because his loyalty to the immigrant cause poses a tension with his Republican (anti-immigration) affiliation and his family history of full-fledged assimilation.
On the basis of the Fiorello H. LaGuardia Papers 1917-1945 at the Roosevelt Study Center in Middelburg, LaGuardia’s relations to (Italian) immigrants and his position within the political spectrum will be sketched. This collection proved to be quite an arbitrary assemblage of personal letters, Congressional and mayoral
correspondence and bills, and notes on all kinds of subjects, however. Thus, to fully explain the context of his upbringing, and his advancement in American politics, secondary sources will be used. Newspaper articles and political speeches are also useful sources.
Chapter 1. The Life of the Immigrant
“Nowhere now is growth still so certainly and confidently going on as here [in America].”
H.G. Wells (1907)12
When Henry James returned to New York City at the beginning of the “long early twentieth century” he found many things novel, “in common with so many other terrible things in America.”13 Although the passing of time always brings change, the difference between the latter half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth was extremely vivid. Characterized by a mass of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island and Angel Island, the United States at the beginning of this new century were no longer the country the Founding Fathers had established. In the eyes of the inhabitants of the United States, these people were alien.
The question that is relevant here, is not only that people are characterized as “alien”, but also the interest that underlies this relatively arbitrary distinction between outsider and insider, alien and American. As Audre Lorde beautifully put it:
“institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as a surplus people.”14 The United States, rapidly
industrializing and becoming the materialistic society in flux that many still see today, definitely needed its outsiders. “The immigrants come into an American city from another society which has developed in them habits and attitudes which may differ widely from those of the established members of the community to which they come; frequently, the rest of the community asserts its superior status.”15
While the first influx of immigrants coming to America was certainly not welcomed with open arms, the “new immigrants” were in their own time described as an unwelcome addition to the American people. “Fifty years ago”, H.G. Wells argued 12 H.G. Wells, The Future in America (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1907), 60.
13 James, The American Scene, 76.
14 Audre Lorde, "Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference", delivered at the
Copeland Colloquium, Amherst College, April 1980.
15 Irvin Child, Italian or American? The Second Generation in Conflict (New Haven: Yale University
about the first wave of immigrants coming to America, “more than half of the torrent was English speaking (…) an influx of people closely akin to the native Americans in temperament and social tradition.”16 Moreover, while the earlier immigrants came according to their own free will, putting themselves in considerable exertion to get to America, the new immigrants came for labor, according to many contemporaries as “the result of energetic canvassing by the steamship companies.”17 Thus, in addition to being culturally different from the American people, they were not economically independent.
The Italian immigrant group was often described by its contemporaries as generally lacking a spirit of initiative and education.18 Prescott Hall, the secretary of the Immigration Restriction League, represented the thoughts of immigration restrictionists when he argued, “(…) the bulk of recent Italian immigration is undesirable. Eighty-six percent have no occupation, sixty-eight percent are illiterate (…).”19 James described the Italians as the most unwanted inhabitants of the United States after what he called “the Negro” and “the Chinaman”, having shed the
“element of the agreeable address in them which has, from far back, so enhanced for the stranger the interest and pleasure of a visit to their beautiful country” completely on their advent in America.20 According to Wells, “[t]he home of the immigrant in America looks to me worse than the home he came from in Italy. It is just as dirty, it is far less simple and beautiful, the food is no more wholesome, the moral atmosphere far less wholesome; and, as a consequence, the child of the immigrant is a worse man than his father.”21 The Italians in New York are explicitly differentiated from Italians in Italy here, something that often happens with an ethnic group in a new country. Irvin Child described the differences between American culture and Italian culture in several different categories, such as language and communication, eating and
drinking, recreation, family structure, the handling of sex, the handling of aggression, economic life, and religion and superstitions.22 From these differences he concludes 16 Wells, The Future in America, 153.
17 Ibid., 154.
18 John Walker Briggs, An Italian Passage: Immigrants to three American Cities (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1978), 15.
19 Prescott F. Hall, “Italian Immigration”, The North American Review, Vol. 163, No. 477, August
(1896): 252-254, 254.
20 James, The American Scene, 128. 21 Wells, The Future in America, 157. 22 Child, Italian or American?, 18 – 35.
that the Italian immigrants were of relatively low status, only able to look down on the “Negroes”. They fell in disproportionate numbers into the lower social classes, were regarded by the Americans in the same social class as nonetheless somewhat inferior, and any individual of Italian descent was likely to be treated as of a lower status than that for which his characteristics would qualify him, due to association. The low status of the Italians could be seen in their occupational distribution.23 Thus, the status of the immigrants was at least partially defined by their job and career. Moreover, of the immigrants arriving in the United States during the second wave of immigration, the Italian American group became the most obvious target of extralegal violence.24
Despite the discrimination they suffered, in New York City, the Italian immigrants became predominant in the local construction sector. Novels such as Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete perfectly describe how these hopefuls eked out an existence in the dangerous construction sites of the city, coming home to the small tenements of Little Italy. Buying a home in the New World they helped so ardently to mold was often a crowning moment in the lives of these immigrants. “Indeed the home often stood at the very center of mental maps defining (…) Little Italy”.25 The immigrants’ homes were the sites of culture and language preservation, but also for learning as well as the decision to adopt English.26
What they wanted, of course, was for their children – the second-generation immigrants – to live under better circumstances and to adapt to the New World. “Our children will dance for us… in the American style someday”, one of the characters in the novel remarks.27 In the course of the years, immigrants naturally change in status and customs. “[I]n time they may become an integral part of American society with virtually nothing to mark them off from others.”28 A rising in status was also often mentioned with reference to occupational distribution. However, the concentration of ethnic groups in certain neighborhoods certainly strengthened and maintained the attachment to and commitments within that group. It created for immigrants a “city within the city”.29 To change your neighborhood would mean to abandon your people 23 Child, Italian or American?, 36.
24 Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness, 106. 25 Ibid., 166.
26 Ibid.
27 Pietro di Donato, Christ in Concrete (New York: Signet Classic, 1993), 7. 28 Child, Italian or American?, 1.
and also to sooner become a victim of discrimination. Also, the second-generation immigrants encountered widespread prejudice caused by their being of Italian descent.
Discrimination on the job site was always a part of their existence, however. When the main character’s father, Geremio, dies in Christ in Concrete, and he goes to look for the body, he hears: “What? – oh yeah – the wop is under the wrappin’ paper out in the courtyard!”30 The juxtaposition between the immigrants’ desire to assimilate into the American lifestyle and their work environment emphasizing their foreignness is what the novel emphasizes. Henry James observed any exchange between
Americans and southern Italian workers to be unthinkable. “It was as if contact were out of the question and the sterility of the passage between us recorded, with due dryness, in our staring silence.”31 For the immigrants, situations such as ever-looming discrimination and exclusion by many Americans made it essential to know the American tongue, “for without it we are dumb and blind.”32 The question arises whether LaGuardia, as a successful American politician, fully learned to “speak” this American tongue.
It seems that second-generation immigrants, born in the United States, had a conscious decision to make in whether and how to assimilate and Americanize – “to weigh whether to hold on to neighborhood and parish ties, language, the customs of their parents, and even their names.”33 They had to do this in a duality of social traditions and in an environment that saw problems and dangers concerning immigrants as the catalyst of all that was wrong in America. Moreover, for many Americans “there is no claim to brotherhood with aliens in the first grossness of their alienism”, Henry James ascertained.34
Already in the early twentieth century, the nation was sharply divided into two classes of rich and poor. In New York City, as H.G. Wells described strikingly, “into the lower levels of the American community there pours perpetually a vast torrent of strangers, speaking alien tongues, inspired by alien traditions, for the most part illiterate peasants and working people. They come in at the bottom: that must be
30 Di Donato, Christ in Concrete, 26. 31 James, The American Scene, 119. 32 Di Donato, Christ in Concrete, 133. 33 Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness, 177. 34 James, The American Scene, 120.
insisted upon.”35 He notes what was often a fact with the new immigrants: the first generation did not assimilate well, at least when you look at it in terms of career advancement. The taking in of millions of immigrants was perceived as an unwilling favor: for the American “it is his American fate to share the sanctity of his American consciousness, the intimacy of his American patriotism, with the inconceivable alien.”36 According to Wells, the American population that had been there longer could float up on top of this influx, “a sterile aristocracy above a racially different and astonishingly fecund proletariat.”37
Every new immigrant group had to deal with the discrimination of being the latest intruder, speaking the least of the language, and understanding the least of the customs. According to Henry James, “[o]ne’s supreme relation (…) was one’s relation to one’s country – a conception made up so largely of one’s countrymen and countrywomen.”38 This clarifies the feeling many Americans had about their country, and it presumably comes forth from the country being so new. The people living in the United States were extremely conscious of the country’s borders, its inhabitants, and it being theirs, the memory of having fought for every piece of it not too far off. The country was obsessed with growth, the industrial revolution causing factories to spring up like weed: the so rapidly changing façade of New York City was a paragon of this. However, instinctively, this growth was combined with the urge to keep the country safe, simple and continuous. The immigrants weakened this and represented an assault upon this notion of safety. James even goes as far as to declare that “to recover confidence and regain lost ground, we, not they, must make the surrender and accept the orientation.”39 It is clear that many Americans felt that they were making a large sacrifice.
Cultural differences between the American culture and the Italian culture were perceived as very great. “[The Italian] is known as the fellow who ‘maka da moosic’ but ‘no speaka da Eng’.”40 They were considered to be temperamental and
troublesome. Their language was peculiar, including gestures as an important form of communication. The (southern) Italians were slightly less white, and thus perceived as 35 Wells, The Future in America, 146.
36 James, The American Scene, 85. 37 Wells, The Future in America, 146. 38 James, The American Scene, 85. 39 Ibid., 86.
a little dirty: as “sunburned country folk”.41 Their style of cooking differed from the American eating habits, and remarks about the Italians always bringing the smell of garlic with them are numerous. Generalizations were also never far off, as this remark by Irvin Child for example indicates: “[t]he children are commonly expected to become full-time workers at a very early age.”42 This was certainly not what Achille LaGuardia expected of his son Fiorello, as we will come to see. Italians went to work in the construction sector and were thus perceived as not ambitious or intelligent. Race suicide, Chinese peril; “[the American] sees huge danger in the development and organization of the new finance and no clear promise of a remedy”.43 Wells himself poses an example of the way many middle class people thought of the immigrants, speaking of “bold-eyed women”, “half-clad brats”, “ambiguous washing”, and being spoken to in an “incomprehensible tongue”, a “rude form of Italian.”44
Growth was perceived as a threat, and while European cities seemed built, populated, and complete, the cities in America were only just emerging and flooding. As H.G. Wells formulated from the ninth floor of a skyscraper hotel in New York: “(…) Paris illuminated under the tall stem of the Eiffel Tower looked completed and defined. But New York’s achievement is a threatening promise, growth going on under a pressure that increases, and amidst a hungry uproar of effort.”45 People did not know how many newcomers the shores would bring – “What in a century will it all amount to?”46 Both Wells and James provide an insight in how many middle- or upper-class Americans perceived the immigrants annually knocking at America’s official door, and the immigrants and their children living in the country. Growth and change in this form are almost always initially accompanied by fear.
Fear motivated legislation and in the 1920s, immigration restriction tightened. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act set the basis of immigration law for decades to come.47 This federal law limited the number of immigrants that could annually enter the country to two percent of the number of immigrants already living in the United 41 Wells, The Future in America, 147.
42 Child, Italian or American?, 27. 43 Wells, The Future in America, 29. 44 Ibid., 43.
45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 53.
States according to the census of 1890. This thus meant that only two percent of immigrants from the countries where the “new immigrants” had come from could now enter the country. The law aimed to minimize immigration from southern and eastern Europe; quotas for immigrants from these countries were slashed with almost ninety percent.48 Also, immigrants had to obtain a visa from an American consul in their country of origin, which often already led to problems in the country itself, as letters from Italians to LaGuardia illustrate. The law furthermore contained an Asian Exclusion Act, excluding immigration from Asia. As LaGuardia was in Congress at the time of the passing of this law, he began concentrating on amendments to alleviate some of the hardships caused by the bill.49 However, it proved hard for him to achieve anything in the nativist milieu of the twenties. He was reduced to pointing out
inconsistencies in the American immigration policy.50 Yet, LaGuardia kept the hopes of the immigrants up. He gave a voice to their demands for a more liberal America. As he told an interviewer: “the function of a progressive is not to get things done by himself, it is to keep on protesting until things get so bad that a reactionary demands reform.”51 Also, as immigration restriction tightened, new immigrant communities gained potential political power due to their right to vote after being naturalized. Ethnic Americans emerged form the nativist twenties “with a stronger sense of their own right to political power.”52 This created great opportunities for an ethnic
politician at the time.
Besides fear, Henry James also noted that activity in the political and social spheres could make aliens into Americans, however. Where he first described a brotherhood with aliens as improbable if not impossible, he did see opportunities for later generations. “The machinery is colossal – nothing is more characteristic of the country than the development of this machinery, in the form of the political and social habit, the common school and the newspapers; so that there are always millions of little transformed strangers growing up (….)”.53 Irvin Child also noted that in the 48 Author Unknown, "An act to limit the migration of aliens into the United States..." (Approved May
26, 1924). The Statutes at Large of the United States of America, December 1923 - March 1925. Vol. XLII, Part 1, pp. 153-169 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1925.)
49 Howard Zinn, LaGuardia in Congress (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1969), 92. 50 Thomas Kessner, Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the Making of Modern New York City (New York:
McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, 1989), 123.
51 Arthur Mann, LaGuardia: A Fighter Against His Times 1882 – 1933 (New York: J.B. Lippincott
Company, 1959), 199.
52 Kessner, Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the Making of Modern New York City, 124. 53 James, The American Scene, 120.
course of years newcomers would change in status and customs.54 How soon can an immigrant assimilate, however? And is this process visible, clear, easy to describe? It is not as if at a certain point a “huge white-washing brush”55 comes along to make an immigrant into a white American. The number of generations it takes for an
immigrant family to become fully assimilated differs greatly. Moreover, is neutral and colorless that what one needed to be in order to become an insider? Perhaps the success of Fiorello LaGuardia can be explained through him being all but those things.
54 Child, Italian or American?, 1. 55 James, The American Scene, 127.
Chapter 2. The Life of the Politician
“Viva Il Nostro Fiorello LaGuardia!”
Il Progresso Italo-Americano (1933)56
Fiorello Henry LaGuardia’s election as New York’s ninety-ninth and first Italian mayor in 1933 touched off an immense transformation for the city.57 For a long period before the 1930’s, the Italian-Americans in New York were virtually left out of the political power structure of the city. Due to the absence of political organization within the group, the Italians were missing from politics at the beginning of the twentieth century.58 Also, as Italian immigration was mainly a peasant migration from agricultural regions of the south of Italy, the Italian immigrants in New York were mainly unskilled farm workers. Only 0.5 percent of the Italian immigrants were professionals.59 Where the Jewish immigrants advanced quickly up the status ladder, they were commonly proletarians for only one generation, within the Italian group this advancement did not happen so quickly.60 We have seen how the majority of Italian immigrants in New York went to work in the construction of the city.
LaGuardia’s career within the Republican Party was quite remarkable, as Thomas Kessner has described it: “[h]is coming to office and power represents [an] important theme: the coming of age of immigrant America, an America that spoke with accents and concerns of working-class Americans. In their hands the nation was remade. How much of their hearts, their loyalties, and their ambitions this young land claimed is amply demonstrated by LaGuardia’s life and hopes.”61 The New York
Times reported about the nomination of an Italian-American for mayor of America’s
metropolis: “[i]t signifies the fuller emergence of the citizens of that blood into the communal life of the city and the nation. American opportunity is being utilized by 56 Arthur Mann, LaGuardia Comes To Power: 1933 (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1981), 135. 57 Kessner, Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the Making of Modern New York City, 7.
58 Ronald Bayor, Neighbors in Conflict: The Irish, Germans, Jews, and Italians of New York City,
1929-1941 (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 32.
59 Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK, 15.
60 Kessner, Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the Making of Modern New York City, 135. 61 Kessner, Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the Making of Modern New York City, xvi.
the sons of immigrants who labored with pick and shovel to create opportunity for their children.”62 The article furthermore states how it is only appropriate that an Italian name would become prominent in New York politics, since so many Italians had been prominent in the construction trade of the city.63 Irvin Child noted that participation in politics in the city or state was laid very largely in a framework of American culture traits.64 This indicates that the individual success of a (second-generation) Italian political leader was conditional upon Americanization, and
relations with non-Italian political leaders. However, it could also swing another way: where an Italian political leader emphasized his Italian traits and did not explicitly adjust individually to the American culture and political life. By doing this, the politician appealed directly to fellow Italian voters. In LaGuardia, both features can be found, merged into one extremely successful American politician. The real political awakening of the Italian-Americans is tied closely to the career of one man: Fiorello LaGuardia.65
The Tammany Way
The story of LaGuardia is special, because he seems to have become a political insider in ways that differ from the ones usually available to immigrant politicians at the time. The best known political institution for immigrant involvement in local New York affairs was the Tammany Hall machine. In the political discourse, the word machine describes a type of political organization that has a tight, hierarchical organization, includes party agents at the grassroots level, and systematically distributes patronage among its members.66 Inherent to the machine system is a problem. The machine seeks to gain power in a competitive democracy; it thus relies on broad public support. At the same time, however, the machine operates in direct conflict with the institutionalized values of society as it is organized around the material interests of its members.67 On whom can a machine thus depend for its success? The answer to that question lies in the patronage aspect of the organization. 62 Author Unknown, “Italian-Americans”, The New York Times, Aug 6, 1929, 18.
63 Ibid.
64 Child, Italian or American?, 40. 65 Bayor, Neighbors in Conflict, 33.
66 Thomas Guterbock, Machine Politics in Transition: Party and Community in Chicago (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980), 3.
A successful patronage party must be able to distribute material incentives to its members, such as money and jobs. Voters of the machine must be able to gain immediate incentives.
One group of which the circumstances are likely to compel them towards machine politics is the urban immigrant group. Immigrants may for a large part fill in the broad public that the machine needs to appeal to, surmounting the contradiction that is inherent in machine politics. They may pose the answer to the question of how the machine secures electoral support. Immigrants are “without linkage to sources of authority and without roots in a network of primary relationships”.68 Not yet socially organized in a new city, they are amenable to manipulation by the mass media and agents of the political machine. Moved by both a lack of financial resources and a lack of security, the immigrant moves towards the machine. However, an element of “friendship” between the immigrant and the machine can also be present, for example in the form of a personal relationship between a captain and his voters in a certain city district.
Immigrants have proven to be vital for political candidates and organizations at several instances in the past. For Tammany Hall, the immigrant community of New York City was certainly crucial to its power. The relation between Tammany Hall and the immigrants of New York City emanates from a critical political decision. In the 1780s and early 1790s, the political system in the United States was based upon the close ties between members of small political elites.69 By the 1840s, Tammany Hall had made the decision to cater to the most populous group in the city, the immigrants. Instead of gearing their machine to the powerful but narrow elite of New York, its leaders decided to gear to the masses.70 The organization started from this time forward to be ruled by representatives from the bottom of the social stratum, instead of the top.71
In the 1820s, Tammany Hall had started appealing to foreigners to support the organization. In 1840, the machine opened a bureau, which was later to become a department. In this office, immigrants could come and learn about the advantages of joining Tammany and received assistance in the naturalization process, all free of 68 Guterbock, Machine Politics in Transition, 6.
69 Seymour Mandelbaum, Boss Tweed’s New York (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1965), 3. 70 Jerome Mushkat, Tammany: The Evolution of a Political Machine 1789-1865 (Michigan: Syracuse
University Press, 1971), 3.
charge. Tammany took in the country’s newest immigrants, cared for them, made them feel like human beings with distinct political rights, and converted them into citizens.72 The allegiance of immigrants was further secured by meetings in the Tammany Hall building where each nationality was addressed in its own language. Parades were organized to which people of every background were invited. Also, jobs were secured for the new residents of the city. In hindsight, this was indeed the best choice, as between 1880 and 1920 a second wave of needy immigrants numbering almost a million arrived and settled in the city. Also, the days of gentleman politics began to make way for the days of the commoner. By 1910, 41 percent of all New Yorkers were foreign born.73 Tammany had found a way to dominate the local urban scene for the years to come. In 1886, The New York Times reported on the methods used during Tammany primary elections: it referred to the elections as “perhaps the first time in the history of American politics that immigrants were utilized at an election (…)”.74 This newspaper for the first time explicitly acknowledged the use of immigrants to win an election. The article also points out that the methods used to bring immigrants to the election violated election laws. However, evidence for such an offense was hard to find.
As the city’s population exploded suddenly under the weight of newcomers, both the facilities of New York and the arrivals were unprepared for the
consequences. Immigrants were forced to live crowded together in tenement
neighborhoods. Tenements were buildings that were specifically built to house large numbers of poor families in the same structure and with very little amenities. In these tenements, immigrant families lived crowded together, often in one, windowless, room, sharing a floor with tens of other families. The rents for tenements in New York were higher than those in any other city or village in the world.75 The city lacked adequate sewage facilities and street cleaning was unknown. Many of the tenements did not have access to running water, and their toilets were often cabins in the
backstreet of the building. Also, the city was frequently in a state of turmoil with riots, violent crimes and gangs being the order of the day. The ruling city system seemed unable or unwilling to respond adequately to these problems.
72 Myers, The History of Tammany Hall, 129.
73 Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration, 1.
74 Author Unknown, “Immigrants at Primaries”, New York Times (1857-1922); Dec 30, 1886;
ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851-2010) with Index (1851-1993), 3.
In the mid-1850s, machine politics reached maturity.76 Tammany Hall started to use the organization as a conduit to improve the city, giving citizens ready access to a power structure. Reacting to events instead of mastering them through the system, Tammany improved living conditions for immigrants in return for their votes.77 The machine appealed to this vote in several ways. Essentially, the paternalism and partisanship of the organization caused immigrants to rally behind the machine as it served as the employment agency and naturalization and housing facilitator for the city’s immigrants and working class. As Tammany Hall boss George W. Plunkitt himself acknowledged: “(…) you can’t keep an organization together without patronage. Men ain’t in politics for nothing. They want something out of it.”78 It bound together a social group that had felt rejected and ignored by city legislators before, and directly improved their conditions. Responding to the needs of several groups of immigrants, Tammany enlarged its power. Besides recruitment,
organization, persuasion and manipulation, Tammany practiced a political philosophy that the majority of New York City’s voters found congenial.79 It offered services and satisfied needs that the city and state governments did not offer.80
Because the political bosses in New York generally came from Irish backgrounds, contact men or intermediaries were installed between the Irish
leadership of the machine and the immigrant masses with other ethnic backgrounds: the so-called ward heelers. In Italian wards, for example, men who spoke the Italian language and knew about customs, prejudices, and the best ways of winning Italian votes were appointed. They organized the Italian immigrants and made sure they showed up during Election Day.81 “Every district leader is fitted to the district he runs and he wouldn’t exactly fit any other district. That’s the reason Tammany never makes the mistake the Fusion outfit always makes of sendin’ men into the districts who don’t know the people (…).”82
76 Mushkat, Tammany, 6. 77 Ibid., 7.
78 William Riordon, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of very Plain Talks on very Practical Politics
(New York: Signet Classics, 1995, 36.
79 Humbert Nelli, From Immigrants to Ethnics: The Italian Americans (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1983), 370.
80 Alexander Callow in Myers, The History of Tammany Hall, ix.
81 Humbert Nelli, From Immigrants to Ethnics: The Italian Americans (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1983), 100.
Thus, the Democratic Party was in these years the Party most aligned with immigrant needs. During the time of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, the GOP
perceived it as the highest duty of every American citizen to maintain against all their enemies the integrity of the Union, laying aside all differences and protecting all citizens, both native and naturalized, both home and abroad. The Republican party platform of 1864 even read, “foreign immigration, which in the past has added so much to the wealth, development of resources and increase of power to the nation, the asylum of the oppressed of all nations, should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy.”83 In the 1880s, this position changed. In the context of mainly
Chinese immigrants posing a threat to the position of the American worker, The Republican Party took on a more critical stance towards immigration. In the Party Platform of 1900 it was expressed how “in the further interest of American workmen we favor a more effective restriction of the immigration of cheap labor from foreign lands.”84 In the early 1900s, the Republican Party passed multiple restrictive
immigration quota acts and became the Party affiliated with the restriction of immigration. Ethnic voters defected towards the Democratic Party and its political machines.
While influential Italian immigrants, such as Generoso Pope, were often associated with the Tammany Machine, LaGuardia was not; he found a way to rise politically outside of, or even against machine politics. Remarkably regarding the Republican Party’s stance on immigration, LaGuardia was a Republican politician, but with Democratic traits. During the economic Depression, besides proposing his very own New Deal, LaGuardia proposed direct relief aid to staunch misery. He suggested that the government take over some of the benign functions of the local ward bosses of New York by distributing clothing, shoes and coal.85 Vincent Impellitteri, the 101st mayor of New York City, also serves as an example of a politician with the same career path as LaGuardia, who chose the other option. Born in Sicily and immigrated to Manhattan’s Little Italy at age one, Impellitteri eagerly affiliated with Tammany Hall. He did this consciously, “because of the realization that the organization would inevitably accede to the granting of recognition to the 83 John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, “Republican Party Platform of 1864”, accessed via:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29621.
84 John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, “Republican Party Platform of 1900”, accessed via:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29630.
more recently arrived immigrants” and because “he regarded Republicans as of a different economic strata; namely the province of big business and the old, sturdy, native stock Americans.”86 Impellitteri can serve as an example that strengthens the assertion that LaGuardia was a very special politician. He, as a second-generation immigrant, climbed the American political career ladder in a completely novel way. However, this does not mean that his political methods were all that different from Tammany Hall at all times.
The LaGuardia Way
At the time of his election as mayor of New York, Fiorello LaGuardia was already an experienced politician. Throughout the 1920s, he had served in Congress, the first Italian to be elected into Congress.87 Here, he continually mastered two jobs: he handled United States legislation, but he also serviced the needs of his own district, directly standing up for his constituents. One explosive ethnic issue that was relevant in LaGuardia’s mayoral campaign and had great significance for the outcome on Election Day was pro-Italianism.88
Fiorello’s father, Achille LaGuardia, was born in 1849 in Foggia, southwest Italy. By the middle of the nineteenth century, together with his wife, he joined the waves of Italian immigrants bound for the New World. Here, the LaGuardia’s did not settle in the tenements of New York City, neither did they settle for Little Italy. From his very first moments in the United States, Fiorello LaGuardia was set apart from thousands of other Italian immigrants. Achille felt that he had little in common with the unskilled laborers around Mulberry Street and instead inhabited an apartment in Greenwich Village.89 He intended to lead an American life. Fiorello got an
Americanized name, Henry, and Achille insisted that he be raised as a full-fledged American. He forbade the use of Italian at home.90 While some new immigrants were hesitant to embrace a white identity91, this was not the case in the LaGuardia family. The family later moved from New York to the open west: to Prescott, Arizona. 86 Salvatore J. LaGumina, New York at Mid-Century: The Impellitteri Years (Westport: Greenwood,
1992), 40.
87 Kessner, Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the Making of Modern New York City, 8. 88 Mann, LaGuardia Comes To Power, 152.
89 Kessner, Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the Making of Modern New York City, 5. 90 Ibid., 7.
Despite their own insistence that they were Americans, the LaGuardia family was thought of as an Italian family and thus as racially inferior.92 Deciding to become American insiders did not mean the outside world would so readily see that as well. Embarrassment about teasing experiences LaGuardia had as a child with peers is reflected in his political life. Early in his first administration as mayor, he would ban organ grinders from the streets of New York, for example, as these reminded him of his days of ridicule in Prescott, where he was likened to an Italian organ grinder. On the other hand, his identification with immigrants groups caused him to be sensitive towards the exploitation of low-paid immigrant labor in his political days. In his college days LaGuardia started to learn Italian, while admitting that he knew virtually nothing about his father’s background.
In 1900, Fiorello left home for Budapest, where he became a clerk at the United States consulate. In 1904, he moved to Fiume to do this job there. Journalist Willis Abbot had a friend who knew LaGuardia, and who passionately described him as “a young man of a distinctively Italian type (…) What impressed me about him was his tremendous enthusiasm about his job, something I regret to state I did not always find in American consular agents abroad. (…) In a flood of enthusiastic talk he spoke of the things he was going to do: the immigrant situation, the trade situation, the dignity of the United States (…).”93 In his first job in the direction of American politics, he already showed many of the characteristics that would come to define his later politics in Congress and as mayor of New York. Immigration was already an important issue for LaGuardia.
In 1907, LaGuardia got a job as an interpreter of Italian, Croatian and German at Ellis Island. In this year, 1.3 million immigrants entered the country.94 His
encounters with immigrants here made him even more responsive to immigration reform issues. Also, during his time in Congress, he handed in bills providing for a higher payment of immigrant inspectors and the payment of extra compensation to immigrant inspectors and other immigrant employees for overtime work.95 While working towards his political career, LaGuardia edited speeches for ethnic 92 Kessner, Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the Making of Modern New York City, 12.
93 The Fiorello H. LaGuardia Papers 1917-1945, Series II: Mayoral Correspondence (1933-1945), No.
16.
94 Kessner, Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the Making of Modern New York City, 24.
95 The Fiorello H. LaGuardia Papers 1917-1945, Series I: Congressional Correspondence (1919-1933),
newspapers, spoke before meetings, did community legal work and became an honorary member of the society of immigrants from his ancestral hometown Foggia.96
During World War I, the United States depended on congressman and Captain LaGuardia to keep Italy in the war. Illustrative of his sense of patriotic duty and loyalty to America, he went to the Italian-Austrian front where he became major in command. It was the perfect opportunity for LaGuardia to prove that he was a true American and to shake off the mantle of being an ethnic outsider. Fellow Congress members suddenly took him seriously due to this heroic act. The Italian community also lionized him as their genuine American hero, however.97 In Italy, he was one of the few Americans left with credibility. LaGuardia addressed audiences in Rome, Turin, Fiume, Florence and Bari in insistent, though slightly broken, Italian phrases. He also became a commander of the American Combat Division in Italy.98 The war really was a great opportunity for LaGuardia to ascertain himself and everyone who was interested that he fought for America, while his relationship with Italy also provided great opportunities for him politically with regards to the Italian voters. He took a real interest in Italy’s needs during wartime, both in the country and on the front, showing the presence of his Italian heritage.
Moreover, World War I strengthened ethnic consciousness amongst immigrants in New York as various groups perceived their vulnerable place in American life. “If the Germans could be so easily attacked, what protection did the newer ethnics really have?”99 Hostility towards Italians could directly be seen in the Sacco-Vanzetti lawsuit, where two Italian immigrants were convicted of murder, not because they were eligible suspects per se, but because they were Italians, and associated with the anarchist movement. New York’s ethnic groups brought with them into the 1930s an increased insecurity: they were unsure about their place in American life. An ethnic politician could serve as protection in these insecure nativist times.
Right after the First World War ended, the United States took credit for the victory, as well as setting out ambitions to shape the peace. President Woodrow Wilson proposed a League of Nations to secure civility amongst different countries and peaceful democracy. The Allies in Europe, however, were preoccupied with 96 Kessner, Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the Making of Modern New York City, 29.
97 Ibid., 48. 98 Ibid., 55.
revenge and reparations. Thus, “Europe denied him everything but the League, and the U.S. Senate denied him that too.”100 LaGuardia’s stance on the League of Nations is exemplary for his attitude towards international relations. Never an isolationist, LaGuardia refused to join opposition to the League, even though he had steadily become a part of “the Republican tide that swept into Washington following the 1918 elections.”101 He urged his colleagues to stand behind the president, and more
involvement in foreign affairs was a proper price to pay for guarding the peace, according to LaGuardia. In 1919, LaGuardia accompanied a House Military Affairs Committee group investigating army camps to Paris, to demand that Fiume be granted to Italy despite the 1915 Treaty of London (which Italy had also signed) that promised the territory to Yugoslavia.102 In his wartime speeches, he had promised the return of disputed territories, and now he wanted to hold his promise. His pleas persuaded no one, but do serve to illustrate LaGuardia’s practice of personal politics and attachment to foreign places he had a certain special relation with.
American or Italian?
The New York Times once described LaGuardia as “an American by birth, but an
Italian by origin and heart (…)”.103 What did LaGuardia himself think about his heritage? From personal correspondence with his constituents, a strong connection to Italy comes to the fore. He personally answered many letters from Italian immigrants regarding their relatives, taking their personal cases to the proper authorities, such as the Italian embassy in Washington, and reporting back to them. Moreover, he wrote repeatedly to the Italian authorities when the Italian government made it impossible for an Italian to come to the United States and join his family. “Humanize the present cruel and discriminatory law on the ground that it is inhuman because it separates families, we will be immediately confronted with this ruling on the part of the Italian government”, he wrote to the Italian journalist Luigi Barzini about Italy’s immigration policy.104 He actually collected letters from Italians in America who had difficulties in 100 Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties (New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1931), 23.
101 Kessner, Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the Making of Modern New York City, 61. 102 Ibid., 61.
103 Ibid., 59.
104 The Fiorello H. LaGuardia Papers 1917-1945, Series I: Congressional Correspondence
bringing their relatives to the country, planning to use them to demonstrate that the Italian government did not act fairly with the United States in the issuance of passports. Following the immigration laws of 1924, the United States did amend its laws to make it easier for parents in foreign countries to join their children in America.
In Congress, LaGuardia represented the United States government, and therefore a sense of Americanness is more present in his correspondence from his time as a Congressman than a sense of LaGuardia identifying as an Italian. He was accused during this time, however, of “[looking] at American affairs through Italian-tinted glasses (…) Until several more generations have been born in this country, the thoughts and utterances of men and women concerning the country’s welfare and international business must be judged in the light of their ancestry”.105 Thus, while LaGuardia fought for immigrants’ rights and endeavored to amend the 1924
immigration laws from a powerful ‘American’ seat in Congress, he was perceived to behave as an Italian.
By heart, it does seem that LaGuardia was an Italian, because he was so invested in the fates of the Italian immigrants, communicating with them, fighting immigration restriction in Congress and even negotiating with the Italian authorities. However, he also defended the rights of immigrant groups besides the Italian one, even attending meetings such as a convention of the American Association for the Recognition of the Irish Republic, or the Irish Race Convention.106 Another example is him standing up for the Puerto Rican community in New York, a group of “seventy five thousands who are living in anguish, who are being overlooked, belittled,
minimized (….)”107 In 1929, he fought for the popular election of the governor of Puerto Rico. Such actions did not go unnoticed within these ethnic groups, leading to publications such as the following.
105 Zinn, LaGuardia in Congress, 92.
106 The Fiorello H. LaGuardia Papers 1917-1945, Series I: Congressional Correspondence
(1919-1933), No. 7.
107 The Fiorello H. LaGuardia Papers 1917-1945, Series II: Mayoral Correspondence (1933-1945), No.
Source:The Fiorello H. LaGuardia Papers 1917-1945, Series II: Mayoral Correspondence (1933-1945), No. 16.
Some scholars say this exhibited LaGuardia’s paternalist stance, indicating the distance between LaGuardia and the immigrants when he spoke about them as “poor people”.108 This would signify that he did not perceive himself as one of them, which is hardly plausible given his sensitivity about his origin and his ever-present
sensitivity towards the immigrant cause in politics.
He also defended religious groups when they were discriminated against, such as members of Jewish congregations who were harassed and forbidden to distribute sacramental wine. “This latest outburst of this irrational official is in keeping with my previous complaint about of his prejudice and persecution against a certain religion. The execution of such an order will put a large number of innocent law-abiding, peaceful citizens at the mercy of all sorts of exploitation and torment.”109 From this, it can be concluded that LaGuardia was very sensitive towards minority groups,
defending the rights of those incorrectly treated or cornered.
When LaGuardia was asked about it, he often directly called America his country. When a member of Congress asked him “[h]as it not been a question whether Christopher Columbus came from your country or not?”, he replied: “[m]y country?
108 Capeci Jr., “Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the American Dream: A Document”, 2.
109 The Fiorello H. LaGuardia Papers 1917-1945, Series II: Mayoral Correspondence (1933-1945), No.
My country is the United States.”110 Anyone who dared to question his Americanism would do so “at his peril”.111
The Italian community saw LaGuardia as an Italian, one of them. In a piece written in a Pittsburg newspaper titled “Our Italian Americans”, LaGuardia was named as the prime example of a son of Italian immigrants “distinguishing himself in the political life of our country.” In a subsequent letter to the mayor, the editor of the Pittsburg Sentinel expressed how he and “the publishers of this newspaper are ardent admirers of your outstanding Americanism, and notable public service.”112 A second-generation Italian immigrant occupying an important post in American politics was, according to these Italian admirers, a great act of Americanism, thus blending in was really welcomed in this instance. Another Italian, from the Italo-American Center of Dongan Hills, expressed how he was “very proud of the honor and distinction of having as mayor of the greatest and richest city in the world, one whose ancestors came from those sun-kissed shores of Italy, the land that has given to the world a history second to none in art, music, and science.”113 Letters from other Italians spoke about “a momentous event not only for New York, but for the nation”, “your
Napoleonic style to defeat that corrupt machine”, “the Napoleon of our times”, and “our victory”.114
LaGuardia himself showed discontent over the Italian immigrant community getting stuck in keeping a narrow outlook on their careers. He urged Italians to learn the English language, and learn about American culture and customs. In a letter he wrote: “[y]et, today, if one bearing an Italian name commits a crime, our citizens of Italian blood want to see him punished and do not enter protest that the race is being defamed.”115 He emphasized the importance of cooperating with the authorities to provide help for families that had difficulty integrating into American society,
encouraging better attendance in school and punishing those who brought disgrace to the “overwhelming majority of hard-working, honest people.”116 He even founded an 110 Mann, A Fighter Against His Times, 188.
111 Ibid.
112 The Fiorello H. LaGuardia Papers 1917-1945, Series II: Mayoral Correspondence (1933-1945), No.
16.
113 The Fiorello H. LaGuardia Papers 1917-1945, Series II: Mayoral Correspondence (1933-1945), No.
16.
114 The Fiorello H. LaGuardia Papers 1917-1945, Series II: Mayoral Correspondence (1933-1945), No.
16.
115 Capeci Jr., “Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the American Dream: A Document”, 11. 116 Ibid.
Italian-language magazine for the middle-class, L’Americolo.117 The failure of this journal to become a success illustrates where the Italian immigrant group stood. They read Generoso Pope’s pro-Tammany and pro-Fascist Il Progresso Italo-Americano, or they did not read at all. It also illustrates LaGuardia’s stance on immigrant
assimilation, as he showed his aspiration for the Italian immigrants to advance on the status and career ladder and become Americans. This follows logically from the way he was raised and as a result thereof became an insider in the field of American politics himself.
Besides the division between American and Italian in terms of ethnicity, there was also the chasm between catering to the poor (immigrant) class and belonging to the political elite. New York was a city with two faces: “the sparkling mecca of the polished rich and the slum town of the struggling poor.”118
(Republican) Politics
Considering LaGuardia’s sympathies for the lower classes and immigrants, his sensitivity to mistreatment of the vulnerable, his quest for equal treatment, hatred against favoritism on the basis of origin, and his understanding that in a modern society the individual citizen wasn’t always able to solve his own problems, it is surprising that LaGuardia was a Republican politician. His connection to the GOP is more the result of an anti-Tammany sentiment than of a true connection to all the Republican Party’s values.
Dramatic reform for New York seemed possible at the time when LaGuardia became politically active in the city, and since Tammany had for the most part been ruling the city since the late eighteenth century, reform meant going up against the Tammany machine. Tammany meant that the Democratic Party stood for patronage, which made true reform impossible. Any upgrading in the status of the unskilled working-class and immigrants upon which the machine relied would deprive the bosses of their patronage power. This artificial exchange system made for a condition against true reform of the city. “Organization, and not education, success, and not improvement, victorious war, and not glorious peace are presented as the supreme
117 Kessner, Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the Making of Modern New York City, 135. 118 Ibid., 155.
aims of Tammany.”119 Also, LaGuardia strongly disproved of the corrupt character of the machine that often served to enrich its primary leaders first and foremost. As described before, the Democratic party was the party for the immigrants during this time, and the Republican party was even anti-immigration. This makes LaGuardia’s affiliation with the latter party even more remarkable. However, when one looks at his family history, a desire to belong to the establishment was present in his family from the day Fiorello was born in the United States. Achille LaGuardia instilled in his son traditional ideas about the American Dream, especially equality of opportunity. Behaving as a victim or an outsider would not pay off. This idea of adapting to the American culture and trying to fit in with the establishment led LaGuardia to consider himself an American of Italian descent and to seek identity as an assimilated
American citizen.120 Minorities could overcome discrimination through self-help, hard work, and lawful efforts.121
Thus, LaGuardia joined the Madison Republican Club in his neighborhood at the beginning of the twentieth century.122 During his rise within the party, he already stood continually for values that were unconventional in the GOP. The 1920s knew a conservative political climate, which made it hard for LaGuardia to stay within the bounds of the party. An example of this is that he was, as we have seen, always an advocate for diversity, and a spokesperson for the immigrants of New York, insisting they had to be treated with dignity and respect. Thus, LaGuardia did deal with
fighting the reactionaries within his own party.123 Gabriel Kolko argues that that Progressive Era was actually an era of conservatism. “Conservative solutions to the emerging problems of an industrial society were almost uniformly applied”, he argues.124 One emerging problem of the industrial American society was the great influx of immigrants. Kolko’s argument applies to the case of immigration, because from the 1880s onwards, immigration restriction started to really get a foothold in the United States with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. This seems like a time when LaGuardia would have trouble in conforming to conservative ideals, such as
119 Dorman Eaton, “The Degeneration of Tammany”, The North American Review, Vol. 154 No. 424
(1892): 301.
120 Capeci Jr., “Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the American Dream: A Document”, 2. 121 Ibid., 6.
122 Kessner, Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the Making of Modern New York City, 30. 123 Ibid., 74.
124 Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916
immigration restriction and business groups exploiting the reformist zeal of the Progressive era. When he respected a conservative for holding on to traditional, liberal views, he had no problem working with him. When the conservative climate shaped ideals that opposed his, however, he could not cooperate.
LaGuardia was an unlikely Republican, and certainly few Republicans had ever campaigned as he did. The fact that he became the first Republican since the Civil War to be elected from the Lower East Side shows to what extent he differed from ‘traditional’ Republicans. Within the GOP he drew attention to himself for the first time when he campaigned for the nomination for Congress in the Fourteenth District of New York, a District that was Tammany territory. During this campaign, he appealed separately to Italians, Jews, and even the Irish, exploiting issues such as the ill treatment of workers and the hard life of the rent payer.125 Thus, like Tammany, LaGuardia used the discontent of the immigrants and working class of the city and directly approached people in their neighborhoods. As Tammany boss George W. Plunkitt described it: “[l]ive like your neighbors even if you have the means to live better. Make the poorest man in your district feel that he is your equal, or even a bit superior to you.”126 LaGuardia did so. He even ensured the “drunk” vote by visiting the boarders and offering them coffee and doughnuts while encouraging them to vote.127
He won this election, and it got him to Congress in 1917. In the early 1920s, he had already started to organize Italians into Republican clubs. In 1924, his very own political machine, the F.H. LaGuardia Political Club came into existence.128 As LaGuardia was launching his own political career, this club was made into a very effective political machine of its own in the city. Mostly consisting of
Italo-Americans, the people of the F.H. LaGuardia Political Club helped LaGuardia move up in politics, distributing leaflets, ringing doorbells and cheering on LaGuardia when he spoke.129
In Congress, he did not follow Republican regard for tradition, as he opposed restrictions Congress added to the immigration laws and demanded equal treatment for immigrants. There was someone representing the Italians in Washington now. 125 Kessner, Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the Making of Modern New York City, 35.
126 Riordon, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, 40.
127 Kessner, Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the Making of Modern New York City, 39. 128 Mann, A Fighter Against his Times, 241.
During election times, LaGuardia would continue to appeal directly to immigrant voters (not solely Italians, but also other New York immigrant groups).
Italo-Americans rallied to LaGuardia, who made them proud to be Italian.130 During these times, he called on his ancestry to ascertain success in politics. In the coming years, LaGuardia perfected his campaign tactics, which consisted of an extreme drive and inexhaustibility, studying the city borough by borough, meeting its people, directly attacking his component, addressing controversial issues, making carefully targeted promises to special groups, and appealing for ethnic support. He reportedly
announced in the Italian sections of New York “[a]ny Italo-American who votes the Democratic ticket this year, is an Austrian bastard.”131 Somehow, through the use of these Tammany-like methods, he grew in the Republican Party. When he went to serve in the First World War, the Party feted him, and when LaGuardia moved from Congress to local politics in New York, the Republican machine stood solidly behind him.
However, as we have seen before, LaGuardia did have trouble adjusting to some of the Republican values. Mostly, these troubles stemmed from his Italian background and his sensitivity towards the lower classes of the city. Thus, in 1920, he fell from Republican grace.132 A very vocal LaGuardia kept voicing criticism against his own party, mainly on social fairness, and it did not take the GOP long to tire of this. “This is 1924. The world is progressing. Times are changing. Parties only demand regularity when they want an individual to do something that he knows is wrong. I would rather be right than regular.”133 During the Depression, his position within the party became even less steady. As was mentioned before, LaGuardia proposed his own New Deal to soften economic malaise, and this was not received too positively within the Republican Party. Moreover, his plans opposed the president of his own party, Herbert Hoover. Republican newspapers targeted him, and he had created serious opponents within the party. The Evening Journal wrote, “Rep. LaGuardia it is a shame you are classed as a Republican.” Another correspondent suggested, “next time you should run as a Red.”134
130 Mann, LaGuardia Comes To Power, 155.
131 Kessner, Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the Making of Modern New York City, 69. 132 Ibid., 75.
133 Mann, A Fighter Against his Times, 169.
