SUMMER 2013 BROOKLYN COLLEGE HISTORY 3480: HISTORY OF NYC BRENDAN O’MALLEY, INSTRUCTOR [email protected] CHAPTER EIGHT The LaGuardia Era

SUMMER 2013BROOKLYN COLLEGE

HISTORY 3480: HISTORY OF NYC

BRENDAN O’MALLEY, [email protected]

CHAPTER EIGHT

The LaGuardia Era

CHAPTER EIGHTThe LaGuardia Era

Fiorello LaGuardia (1882-1947)• Born on Dec. 11, 1882, in Greenwich Village.• Father was Achille La Guardia (1849-1904), a musician who had born in Foggia, Italy. He was raised Catholic but renounced religion as an adult. • Mother was Irene Luzzato-Coen, born in the city of Trieste, an Italian-speaking possession of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She was Jewish. • The couple married in 1880 and emigrated to the U.S. in 1881, settling in Greenwich Village.• Achille decided to raise his children as Protestants and forbade the speaking of Italian at home, forcing Fiorello and his older sister, Gemma, to perfect their English. • Achille enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1885 and was assigned to South Dakota, taking his family with him. He was then briefly assigned to northern New York state, and then to Arizona from 1889 to 1898, where Fiorello attended high school but did not finish.

CHAPTER EIGHTThe LaGuardia EraFiorello LaGuardia (1882-1947)

• Achille was discharged from the Army in 1898 due to intestinal problems and moved his family back to NYC, but he could not find steady work, so he decided to move back to Trieste, his wife’s native city.• In 1900, eighteen-year-old Fiorello found work in the U.S. consulate in Budapest in what is now Hungary; he was soon transferred to work at the consulate in Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia), Austria-Hungary’s main port city, where he dealt with many immigration issues.• Fiorello’s brusque manner, lack of even a high-school diploma, and refusal to acknowledge the special privileges of the European nobility made it clear that he did not have a future in the state department.• He resigned his post and left his family and job behind to travel to New York in 1906, where he took multiple jobs, obtained a high-school diploma equivalency, learned stenography, applied to law school, and took a federal civil service exam.• Fiorello got into New York University Law School and also got a job as an interpreter at Ellis Island in 1907.

CHAPTER EIGHTThe LaGuardia EraFrom 1907 to 1910, LaGuardia worked as an interpreter at the federal immigration station on Ellis Island while attending New York University Law School at night. He was certified to interpret Italian, German, Yiddish, and Croatian. In February 1910, Ellis Island's Commissioner William Williams wrote:

Mr. LaGuardia is energetic, intelligent and familiar with a number of foreign languages. Against him there may be said that he is inclined to be peppery; that with some of the Board [of Special Inquiry] Members, he is inclined to the argumentative, but . . . it is not a defect of the first order. . . . I think that his abilities place him in the higher grade of interpreters, . . . . I, therefore, suggest his regular promotion to the $1,380 grade.

Source: http://www.nps.gov/elis/historyculture/people_interpreter.htm

LaGuardia at his desk at Ellis Island


TRANSITION TO POLITICS• Joined the Republican Club in law school and became active in the party’s local activities as a progressive reformer. • Graduated from law school in spring 1910, was admitted to the bar, and left the Immigration Service to work as a lawyer in Manhattan, setting up his own office. Many of his clients were immigrants facing deportation. • Ran as a Republican candidate for the House of Representatives for the Fourteenth District of Lower Manhattan in 1914, from which no Republican had ever been elected. He lost to Tammany man Michael Farley, but made the race far tighter than anyone expected. • LaGuardia beat Farley in the 1916 election. He voted for the declaration of war in spring 1917, but voted against the repressive Espionage Act.• Received a commission as an officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps in the summer of 1917 and trained in Italy while still holding on to his seat. He managed to be re-elected in the 1918 election, but resigned it in 1919. He flew multiple combat missions.• Marries Thea Almerigotti, who had been born in Trieste, in 1919. She tragically dies of spinal meningitis in 1921. They had one daughter in 1920.

LaGuardia at his lawschool graduation


LAGUARDIA’S PRE-MAYORAL POLITICAL CAREER• In 1919, LaGuardia ran for President of the Board of Aldermen, a position that had been held by Al Smith before he was elected as governor, and beats his Democratic opponent. • LaGuardia returns to Congress after being elected in 1922 for the 20th District of the largely Italian and Jewish neighborhood of East Harlem.• Becomes a noted progressive reformer in Congress, sponsoring an important pro-union law and arguing for the expansion of the progressive income tax, loosening immigration restrictions, greater regulation of Wall Street, and speaking against Prohibition. • Loses the 1929 mayoral election against incumbent Jimmy Walker, but retains his congressional seat until he is defeated in 1932 by Democrat James Lanzetta, in part due to the neighborhood’s increasing Puerto Rican demographic.


SETTING THE STAGE• The Stock Market Crash of October 1929 marks the beginning of an economic downward spiral that results in the Great Depression and the end of the “Roaring Twenties”; Walker beats LaGuardia in November, but things go sour for him quickly in his new term.• U.S. Attorney General Charles Tuttle found evidence of massive incompetence, corruption, and extortion in the city’s magistrate court system, leading to the creation of an investigative committee by Governor Franklin Roosevelt that was led by Judge Samuel Seabury beginning in September 1930.• Walker is forced to resign under pressure from the Seabury Commission and Tammany loyalist Joseph V. McKee takes his place until a special election can be had on Sept. 1, 1932.• A third of the city’s manufacturing plants had shuttered in 1932 and 1.6 million people were on relief; the city’s relief funds were exhausted and it teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. • In the special election, Tammany man John Patrick O’Brien is elected to serve out the rest of Walker’s term, beating out both write-in candidate McKee and an incompetent Republican candidate. Lankevich calls O’Brien “a hack given to malapropisms”: he told an African American audience that he had “a heart as black as yours,” referred to Albert Einstein as “Albert Weinstein,” and when asked by the press who was going to be the next police commissioner, he said “I don’t know—they haven’t told me yet.” O’Brien’s 1933 term was at the height of the Depression, with NYC reaching 25 percent unemployment.

CHAPTER EIGHTThe LaGuardia EraMAYOR LAGUARDIA

• For the 1933 mayoral election, the Republicans and Fusion independents’ first choice for a candidate was Judge Seabury, but he refused since he wanted to run for governor. Seabury disapproved of Robert Moses, leading the coalition at last settled on their 1929 candidate, Fiorello LaGuardia. • 1933 LAGUARDIA CAMPAIGN FILM SHOWN IN NYC MOVIE THEATERShttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mfi4yY3Tag• LaGuardia wins a complicated election in which the Democratic vote was split between the incumbent O’Brien favored by Tammany leader John Curry, and “Recovery Party” ticket led by McKee, favored by Bronx boss Edward Flynn. LaGuardia's win was based on a complex coalition of regular Republicans (middle-class Germans in the boroughs outside Manhattan); a small group of reform Democrats; a few Socialists; a large percentage of middle-class Jews; and the great majority of Italians, who had previously been loyal to Tammany and who were on their way to becoming the city’s largest ethnic group.


LAGUARDIA’S GOALSLaGuardia had five main goals when he entered office in January 1934: • Restore the city’s fiscal health (deal with the $30 million deficit) and break free from the bankers’ control of city finances• Expand the federally funded work-relief program for the unemployed• End corruption in government and racketeering in key sectors of the economy• Replace patronage with a merit-based civil service• Modernize the city’s infrastructure, especially transportation and parks


EARLY MAYORALTY• LaGuardia’s greatest achievement in his first year was balancing the city’s budget through a 2 percent sales tax, a 3 percent utilities tax, a tax on gross profits, and terminating hundreds of city employees (many who had been Irish American Tammany appointments). • With the budget balanced by fall 1934, federal money for construction and welfare programs started to pour in; LaGuardia cultivated an excellent relationship with FDR.• LaGuardia appointed Louis Valentine as police inspector, who routed out police corruption.• Also appointed Robert Moses and parks commissioner, who created sixty new parks by the end of 1934 (although only one in Harlem).


HARLEM RIOT OF 1935• LaGuardia makes several symbolic gestures toward the city’s African American community, but does little of substance that actually improves its economic condition.• Creates the New York Housing Authority in 1934 and appoints a few African Americans to high-level city positions.• On March 19, 1935, Harlemites begin to riot on the basis of a rumor that Lino Rivera, a Puerto Rican twelve-year-old, was brutally beaten and killed for shoplifting at a five-and-dime store on 125th Street. Three people are killed, hundreds hurt, and $2 million worth of property was destroyed.• Mayor LaGuardia ordered a multi-racial Mayor's Commission on Conditions in Harlem headed by African-American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier to investigate the causes of the riot. It identified “injustices of discrimination in employment, the aggressions of the police, and the racial segregation” as conditions which led to rioting.


INFRASTRUCTURAL IMPROVMENTSMayor LaGuardia was able to make vast infrastructural changes to the city with the federal money flowing through New Deal programs: • Three major bridges completed: the Triborough (now RFK), the Whitestone, and the Henry Hudson. • West Side Highway opens in 1937. • The Brooklyn-Queens, Gowanus, and Bruckner Expressways were all planned in the 1930s (although completed later).• Parks Commissioner Robert Moses builds 255 playgrounds and a dozen swimming pools.• LaGuardia Airport opens in 1939.• The World’s Fair of 1939 is constructed and held in the newly built Flushing-Corona Park, which had formerly been the site of the “Corona Ash Dump.” Robert Moses played a critical role in getting the Fair off the ground. • Queens-Midtown Tunnel opens in November 1940.• Private subway and elevated lines are consolidated into one municipally- owned system in 1940; the city-owned IND line founded in 1932 and expanded throughout the decade. • Thirteen housing projects opened by 1941.


1939-40 WORLD’S FAIR


1939-40 WORLD’S FAIR

From the World’s Fair officials pamphlet:“The eyes of the Fair are on the future — not in the sense of peering toward the unknown nor attempting to foretell the events of tomorrow and the shape of things to come, but in the sense of presenting a new and clearer view of today in preparation for tomorrow; a view of the forces and ideas that prevail as well as the machines.”• Its signature structures included the Trylon and Perisphere; the latter contained a diorama called “Democracity,” a future city of 2039.• The GM exhibit, “Futurama,” was the most popular of the Fair, which was an 18-minute ride via an aerial conveyor over a diorama depicting the year 1960, with an automated highway system with a network of linked expressways.• RCA demonstrated the first television set; GE the first fluorescent light, and Westinghouse debuted a robot named “Elektro.”• Forty-four million visited the Fair in its two years.• Its “Amusement Zone” included shows with scantily clad women, the parachute drop that now stands at Coney Island, and a town of midgets.


LATER MAYORAL CAREER• In spring 1937, the LaGuardia administration famously cracked down on burlesque shows in the city, especially the chain of theaters owned by the Minsky brothers.• LaGuardia is re-elected in 1937 with 60 percent of the vote, with Tammany barely keeping control of the City Council.• In 1938, LaGuardia pushes for the passage of a new city charter, which creates a new Board of Estimates to balance the power of the Tammany-controlled City Council. • LaGuardia’s civil service reforms make municipal government a career path for highly qualified individuals.• His 1941 re-election is much closer—only a victory of 132,000 votes—because of his intemperate behavior and remarks that alienated Democratic allies, especially those aimed at popular Democratic governor, Herbert Lehman.• By 1944, LaGuardia was struggling to pay the city’s bills with its infrastructure expenses and high wages for municipal workers. He chose not to run for a fourth term in 1945. The former mayor died of pancreatic cancer on Sept. 20, 1947.

Documents

SUMMER 2013 BROOKLYN COLLEGE HISTORY 3480: HISTORY OF NYC BRENDAN O’MALLEY, INSTRUCTOR [email protected] CHAPTER EIGHT The LaGuardia Era