CREDIT: Associated Press/John Lent
VITO MARCANTONIO lived his entire life within a densely populated four-block area of New York City’s East Harlem neighborhood. He represented the area in Congress, serving seven terms (1934–1950), proud to be its most radical member. Always controversial, he earned a national reputation as a powerful orator, brilliant parliamentarian, and defender of the disadvantaged. He led fights for major civil rights and prounion legislation and against the Cold War. During his last term, he cast the only votes against the Korean War and the witch-hunting of the House Un-American Activities Committee. His constituents—mostly Italian Americans and Puerto Ricans—stood by him despite an onslaught of negative press condemning his left-wing sympathies.
Marcantonio’s father, who died in a streetcar accident when Marcantonio was in high school, was a skilled carpenter, a social step above most of the poor, rural Italian immigrants who were flocking to New York. Although nearly all children in his neighborhood dropped out of school by the eighth grade, Marcantonio and one other classmate walked four miles (to save the nickel trolley fare) to attend the closest high school, De Witt Clinton.
In high school, Marcantonio was influenced by his history teacher, a Socialist, but he was even more inspired by another teacher, Leonard Covello, who would be Marcantonio’s lifelong friend and mentor. Covello, an immigrant who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University, was dedicated to making sure that young Italians got a good education. In addition to teaching Italian, he established Casa del Popolo, an Italian settlement house in an abandoned church, and founded Circoli Italiani, a network of Italian student clubs. Covello encouraged his students to remain in their community and provide leadership.
After high school, Marcantonio enrolled at New York University. While studying law, he also helped prepare immigrants for citizenship at the Casa del Popolo settlement house. As a student with growing radical political awareness, he organized mass rent strikes, sponsored by the Harlem Tenants Association. Over the next decade he worked as naturalization director, education director, and head of men’s activity at a settlement house.
During law school, he clerked in a prestigious progressive law firm where he met Joseph Brodsky, who had gained fame codefending the Scottsboro Boys. Harlem, especially its Jewish section, was already a bastion of Socialist Party voters, and Marcantonio absorbed the radical ideas circulating in the community.
Meanwhile, in 1922, Fiorello La Guardia was elected to Congress, and he asked Marcantonio to organize the Fiorello La Guardia Political Association. Under Marcantonio’s leadership, it grew to a powerful and effective machine known for constituent service.
After graduating with a law degree in 1925, Marcantonio joined La Guardia’s law practice as a clerk. He went on to become assistant US district attorney in 1930–1931.
When La Guardia was elected mayor of New York in 1933, Marcantonio ran for his vacant congressional seat. Like La Guardia, Marcantonio maintained a fluid relationship with political parties and was adept at working in coalition with multiple parties to win elections. Initially, he ran as a Republican in opposition to the Tammany Hall–controlled Democratic Party. During his congressional career, he was the candidate of the Republican, Democratic, City Fusion, All People’s, and the American Labor Parties.
In 1935 The Nation magazine named Marcantonio to its Honor Roll for being a congressman “in the forefront of the struggle against social injustice.” Major newspapers gave him a huge amount of coverage, generally incensed over his leftist politics.
Marcantonio took strong radical positions, calling for the nationalization of industry, commerce, transportation, banking, and utilities. He railed against “an economic system which permits want in a land of plenty” and proposed that the government seize factories boarded up during the Depression and reopen them for unemployed people to produce goods “for use instead of profit.” (Upton Sinclair echoed this idea in his 1934 run for governor of California.)
In 1935, when Congress debated the pros and cons of public ownership of utilities, Marcantonio gave a fiery speech on the House floor:
If it be radicalism to believe that when God said, “Let there be light,” that that light should be used for the benefit of all of the American people and not for the sole benefit of a few exploiters; if it be radicalism to believe that our national resources should be used for the benefit of all of the American people and not for the purpose of enriching just a few; if it be radicalism to smash, to abolish, and to surgically eradicate these companies which have been throttling the life of America and siphoning out the lifeblood of American consumers, then, ladies and gentlemen of this House, I accept the charge. I plead guilty to the charge; I am a radical, and I am willing to fight it out on this issue until hell freezes over.
He lost his bid for reelection in 1936 but came roaring back for the next six terms. According to his biographer Gerald Meyer, “He possessed a wide range of oratorical skills that could rivet the attention of street corner crowds, whip into a frenzy the faithful, impress his colleagues of the House, and even convince judges and juries to decide in favor of indicted leftists.”
After his defeat as a nominal Republican in 1936, he became active in the newly formed American Labor Party (ALP), leading its left wing in New York State until 1941. The ALP had been formed as a way to woo garment workers away from the Socialist Party to vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt. The ALP gave Marcantonio the margin of victory in his 1938, 1940, and 1946 congressional races. He became president of the International Labor Defense (closely linked to the Communist Party) and led efforts to free labor activist Tom Mooney from prison and to defend West Coast labor leader Harry Bridges, a native of Australia, from deportation.
Marcantonio was a tireless and eloquent advocate for the foreign-born. In 1940, arguing against a proposal to exclude aliens from working on federally funded projects, he recalled that immigrants had been “induced to come here to be used as cheap labor—industrial cannon fodder of the labor exploiters,” and he went on to say, “These people helped build America. Now we persecute them under the name of America.” He served as vice chair and was an active supporter of the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born.
Marcantonio retained the loyalty of his Italian constituency by delivering speeches in Italian—once referring to his Democratic opponent as a testa di cappuccio (cabbage head).
As the demographics of his district changed to include more Puerto Ricans, he embraced the cause of Puerto Rican independence, introducing five supportive bills in Congress. He learned to speak Spanish and constantly looked out for the interests of Puerto Rico as well as of his own Puerto Rican constituents. He consistently won 60 percent or more of the Puerto Rican vote.
A strong antiracist, he was a master of parliamentary maneuvering to get civil rights bills debated on the floor of Congress. In 1941 he fought for funding for the federal Fair Employment Practices Committee, proposed by Roosevelt to investigate discrimination. In 1942 he led the legislative battle to end the hated poll tax, which disenfranchised African Americans (and some poor whites) in the South. The bill passed the House but was defeated in the Senate. Each year he introduced antilynching legislation. During the war, he insisted on a federally supervised absentee ballot for soldiers (to ensure that black GIs would be able to vote in the 1944 presidential election). Mississippi congressman John Rankin led the opposition, observing that “the Gentleman from New York is harassing the white people of the Southern States.”
In 1945 Marcantonio called for Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace to investigate discriminatory practices of professional baseball, and in 1947 he supported Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s amendment to desegregate public facilities in the District of Columbia.
He petitioned to overturn the antilabor Taft Hartley Act and strongly supported collective bargaining rights for all workers.
Throughout his congressional career, Marcantonio’s service to his constituents was legendary. People knew they could come to the Vito Marcantonio Political Association clubhouses to request assistance with jobs, immigration, public housing, legal aid, and medical care. He even gave his own money to those in need, who frequently contacted him when they were in dire straits.
Marcantonio was constantly accused of being a secret supporter of the Communist Party. He clearly took positions that paralleled the party’s views and worked with party members in various community, labor, and political organizations. But he insisted, “I disagree with the Communists. I emphatically do not agree with them, but they have a perfect right to speak out and to advocate communism. I maintain that the moment we deprive those with whom we extremely disagree of their right to freedom of speech, the next thing that will happen is that our own right of freedom of speech will be taken away from us.”
But the Red Scare finally brought an end to his political career, when the Democratic, Republican, and Liberal Parties banded together in 1950 to unseat him. The New York Times ran a series of editorials on three successive days urging his defeat. Although he won the majority of his longtime constituents in Italian Harlem, the Republican-led state legislature had redrawn his district to include Yorkville, a higher-income area made up predominantly of German American and Irish American voters, a move that contributed to Marcantonio’s defeat.
After his electoral defeat, he threw his energy into his law practice. In 1951 he defended W. E. B. Du Bois, then in his eighties, who was charged with leading a pro-Soviet peace organization.
Marcantonio had planned to run again in 1954, but he died suddenly that year of a heart attack. He was fifty-one years old.
New York’s conservative Cardinal Francis Spellman denied him a Catholic burial. But Italian Harlem gave Marcantonio an enormous send-off, with 20,000 people coming to view his body. Du Bois was among his pallbearers, and he was eulogized by Dorothy Day.