CREDIT: Associated Press
FIORELLO LA GUARDIA’S father was a non-practicing Catholic from Italy, his mother a religious Jew. They raised their son as an Episcopalian. The five-foot-two La Guardia drew on his unusual background and extraordinary talents to become the greatest mayor in American history, transforming New York City into a modern metropolis.
During his three terms (1933–1945) as mayor, during the Depression and World War II, La Guardia ran an honest, efficient, and progressive administration that helped lift the spirit and improve the conditions of New York’s polyglot working class. As mayor, La Guardia earned a national reputation as a nonpartisan reformer dedicated to civic improvement. He once said, “There is no Republican, no Democratic, no socialist way to clean a street or build a sewer, but merely a right way and a wrong way.”
As the leader of the nation’s largest city, he also became the voice for America’s cities, insisting that the media, business, and the federal government pay attention to the distinct needs and dreams of workers and immigrants in American metropolises. From 1935 to 1945 he led the US Conference of Mayors, using his celebrity to change forever the relationship between the federal and municipal governments.
While La Guardia was still an infant, his father became an army bandmaster and the family moved west. After finishing high school in Arizona, he joined the US Consular Service in 1901, serving five years in consulates in Budapest, Hungary; Trieste, Italy; and Fiume (Rijeka), Croatia. La Guardia returned to the United States as a translator, from 1907–1910, for the US Immigration Service at Ellis Island, while studying at night at New York University law school. (He was fluent in Yiddish, German, French, Croatian, and Italian as well as English.) Watching how immigrants were mistreated by the authorities, employers, and landlords, La Guardia recalled, “I suffered a great deal because I could not help these people.”
After earning his law degree, La Guardia established a kind of one-man legal-aid bureau, often offering advice and appearing in court without fee on behalf of those too poor to pay. He soon developed a reputation as an advocate for the disenfranchised. In 1916 he defeated the incumbent and was elected to Congress as a progressive Republican from the Lower East Side.
When World War I broke out, La Guardia was desperate to serve in combat. Rejected as too short, he got a friend to teach him to fly and used his political connections to get a commission in the Army Air Service with the rank of lieutenant. He served with distinction as a bomber pilot over Italy.
Returning to New York a war hero, he was elected president of the city’s Board of Aldermen (city council) in 1920, then was elected to Congress in 1922 from East Harlem, and was reelected four more times. In Congress, he opposed Prohibition, advocated for child labor laws, fought for greater government oversight of Wall Street, and supported national employment insurance for jobless workers. His most important accomplishment was the 1932 Norris–La Guardia Act, which restricted the courts’ power to ban or restrain strikes, boycotts, or picketing by union members.
Never a loyal Republican, in 1924 he was denied the party’s nod for renomination, but he was selected instead as the nominee of the Socialist and Progressive Parties, while supporting Progressive Robert M. La Follette over Republican Calvin Coolidge for president. At the Progressive convention in Cleveland, Ohio, La Guardia said, “I rise to let you know that there are other streets and other attitudes in New York besides Wall Street. I speak for Avenue A and 116th Street, instead of Broad and Wall.”
In 1933 La Guardia ran successfully for New York City mayor on a “Fusion” (a Liberal and Republican Party coalition) reform ticket dedicated to unseating the corrupt Tammany Hall Democratic machine. He inherited a corrupt city in chaos that was plagued by widespread joblessness and on the brink of fiscal collapse. He understood that New York City could not pay for the investment and subsidies needed to provide relief, jobs, services, and infrastructure. He took office just as the New Deal was taking hold and immediately went to Washington, DC, to seek federal help. He worked closely with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration to make New York City a laboratory of New Deal funding for large public works projects. FDR said of La Guardia, “Our Mayor is the most appealing man I know. He comes to Washington and tells me a sad story. The tears run down my cheeks and tear[s] run down his cheeks and the first thing I know he has wangled another $50 million.”
Within weeks, New York received 20 percent of the entire federal Civil Works Administration funding, enough to add 200,000 jobs. During La Guardia’s first five years in office, federal investments enabled New York to upgrade its decaying infrastructure and build parks, beaches, low-income housing, bridges, schools, sewers, tunnels, reservoirs, hospitals, and municipal swimming pools. He presided over massive bridge and tunnel construction projects. He transformed a dump site in Queens into the location of a grand World’s Fair; the area, renamed “Flushing Meadows,” is today the home of the New York Mets and the US Tennis Open. La Guardia unified the city’s fragmented rapid transit system, a goal that had long eluded his predecessors; it remains the nation’s most heavily used subway system.
He was an able administrator who demanded excellence from civil servants and rooted out corruption from municipal agencies. He established merit employment in place of patronage jobs and quickly fired employees who took bribes, fixed traffic tickets, or gave contracts to political cronies. He ended Tammany’s long-standing practice of selling judgeships. He improved the operations of the police and fire departments. He was not above grandstanding to demonstrate his efforts to fight organized crime, such as in the newsreel footage of La Guardia smashing illegal gambling machines with a sledgehammer.
He expanded the city’s social welfare services, especially for children, creating, for example, a network of well-baby clinics. He intervened and helped settle strikes, typically on the side of unions. He warned his police department not to use clubs or pistols in dispersing groups of unemployed or striking workers. During the 1934 strike by taxi drivers, for example, he criticized the taxi owners and refused to let the police ban picketing or demonstrations.
La Guardia, observed one historian, had the skills of both an accountant and a preacher. As a result, he restored faith in city government, as FDR did for the national government. He reached out to the city’s many ethnic, racial, and religious groups to give them a voice in government and a sense of being part of a great municipal mosaic. In 1937 he created an international incident when, in a speech to the American Jewish Congress, he characterized Adolf Hitler as a fanatic and suggested that he be made a central figure in the upcoming World’s Fair Chamber of Horrors. The German embassy made formal complaints to Washington, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull twice apologized. When the US State Department told La Guardia that the German government was concerned about the safety of German nationals and property, La Guardia appointed an all-Jewish police detail, under Captain Max Finkelstein, to protect the German consul.
La Guardia was also the first New York mayor to seriously address issues of racial discrimination in housing and employment. He forced the city’s hospitals to employ black doctors and nurses. In 1945 he formed the Mayor’s Committee on Baseball to pressure local teams—the Dodgers, Yankees, and Giants—to hire black players.
A colorful figure with a flair for the dramatic, known as the “Little Flower” (in honor of his first name), La Guardia seemed to be everywhere. He often appeared at fires and natural disasters. He sometimes dropped in on city departments unannounced. He occasionally conducted the municipal orchestra. In 1942 he began a series of Sunday “talks to the people” on WNYC, the municipal radio station, where he offered his views on politics and other topics. For example, during World War II when landlords announced a large rent increase, La Guardia cited statistics showing that there were practically no apartment vacancies, resulting in huge profits for the real estate industry. More than 2 million listeners tuned in to the mayor’s talks—the highest ratings of any radio program in the city.
On June 30, 1945, New York’s newspaper delivery drivers began a strike that would last seventeen days, refusing to distribute any paper in the city except for the prolabor paper PM. The next day, La Guardia used his Sunday radio program to urge listeners to gather their children around the radio. He then read the popular Dick Tracy comic strip from the Daily News, creating different voices for the various characters and, at the end, explaining the moral of that week’s adventure to his young listeners. He also promised to read the Sunday comics on the air every Sunday as long as the strike continued and promised that someone from WNYC would read the daily comics every day. The next Sunday, camera crews were in the studio to film La Guardia’s broadcast, assuring that the story would make the national news.
Deciding not to run for a fourth term as mayor, La Guardia left office at the start of 1946 and served briefly as director general of the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.
New York had a long tradition of politicians getting rich off bribes and influence peddling. La Guardia was the opposite. After his death in 1947, his estate included a mortgaged home and $8,000 in war bonds. La Guardia’s colorful life was the subject of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Broadway musical Fiorello!, which flourished on Broadway from 1959 to 1961.