Вито Маркантонио: Политик и защитник интересов рабочего класса Гарлема

Italian American lawyer and politician (1902–1954)

Vito Anthony Marcantonio (December 10, 1902 – August 9, 1954) was an American lawyer and politician who served as the socialist leader of East Harlem for seven terms in the United States House of Representatives. For most of his political career, he was a member of the American Labor Party, believing that neither major American political party supported the interests of the working class. For two years prior to his party switching to Labor, he was a New Deal coalition member of the progressive branch of the Republican Party as a supporter of Fiorello LaGuardia (the progressive, pro New Deal Republican mayor of New York at the time). Marcantonio was a socialist and avid supporter of political causes and positions which he deemed in the interests of the working class, poor, immigrants, labor unions, and African American civil rights. Marcantonio represented the neighborhood of East Harlem in New York City (containing the smaller neighborhoods of Italian Harlem and Spanish Harlem), which was home to many ethnic Italians, Jews, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans. He spoke Spanish, Italian, and English. Marcantonio advocated fiercely for the rights of African Americans, Italian American immigrants, and Puerto Rican immigrants in Harlem, as well as for unions and workers in general.

Marcantonio was the son of an American born father and Italian born mother, both with origins in Picerno, in the Basilicata region of Southern Italy. He was born on December 10, 1902, in the impoverished Italian Harlem ghetto of East Harlem, New York City. From 1926 to 1932, Marcantonio ran La Guardia's campaigns every two years. In 1939, Marcantonio criticized the 1936 prosecution and conviction of Puerto Rican Nationalist Party president Pedro Albizu Campos on charges of sedition and other crimes against the United States. In addition to defending the Puerto Rican and Italian communities and common workers, Marcantonio was a strong advocate of Harlem's African American communities and fought vehemently for black civil rights decades before the civil rights movement of the 1950s–1960s. In either 1937 or 1938, Marcantonio became a member of the American Labor Party (ALP). He was elected to the House again from New York in 1938, and served this time for six terms, from 1939 to 1951, being reelected in the elections of 1940, 1942, 1944, 1946, and 1948. He was so popular in that district that he cross filed in the cross filing primaries between Democratic and Republican primaries, and won the nominations of both parties, and he also gained the endorsement of the ALP, an example of electoral fusion. New York City mobster Mike Coppola is believed to have been responsible. On November 25, 1947, the day after the House voted for indictment of the Hollywood Ten for contempt of Congress, Representative Walter Judd attacked Marcantonio by likening the ALP to the China Democratic League in China at that time. He said: "The history of the Democratic League is astonishingly like that of the American Labor Party to which the gentleman belongs. It was originally a coalition of labor groups, liberals and Communists. Then the genuine liberals discovered that it and they were being used as fronts or tools of the Communists, and, as the gentleman from New York is well aware, they broke off and established the Liberal Party." In 1948, Marcantonio was an avid supporter of former Vice President Henry A. Wallace, who ran for President on the Progressive Party ticket. A campaign film by Carl Marzani shows Marcantonio's district and his efforts on its behalf. Marcantonio was reelected. In 1949, Marcantonio ran for Mayor of New York City on the ALP ticket but was defeated. Marcantonio was able to win reelection in 1948 due to the Democrats and Republicans splitting the vote. Republican Thomas J. Curran and Democratic Ferdinand Pecora worked together to find a compromise candidate. Jonathan Brewster Bingham, John Ellis, James J. Lanzetta, Thomas Francis Murphy, and Wendell Willkie's wife Edith Willkie were considered. James G. Donovan was selected. Marcantonio attacked Donovan as a "Sutton Place Dixiecrat". He was defeated by Donovan in the 1950 election. The Liberals opposed Donovan in later elections. The passage of the Wilson Pakula Act in 1947 also played some part in Marcantonio's defeat. The law prevented candidates from running in the primaries of parties with which they were not affiliated. It was widely perceived as being directed against Marcantonio. Marcantonio, who was arguably one of the most left wing members of Congress, said that party loyalty was less important than voting with his conscience. He was sympathetic to the Socialist and Communist parties, and to labor unions. He was investigated by the FBI in the 1940s and 1950s because of his extensive affiliation with members of the Communist Party and known Communist front groups.

In 2010, historian Thaddeus Russell described Marcantonio as "one of the greatest champions of black civil rights during the 1930s and 1940s." He sponsored bills to prohibit the poll tax, used by the Southern United States to disenfranchise poor voters, and to make lynching a federal crime. In 1947, when the U. S. Congress passed legislation to provide financial aid to fight communism in Turkey and Greece, such as during the Greek Civil War, Marcantonio was the only congressman to not applaud the action, symbolizing his disagreement with the Truman Doctrine. In 1950, Marcantonio opposed American involvement in the Korean War. He argued that North Korea had been the victim of an unprovoked attack by South Korea. He cited articles by I. F. Stone, a radical journalist.

In 1941, Marcantonio represented Dale Zysman, a high school coach and board member of the New York City Teachers Union also known as Jack Hardy, a communist writer for International Publishers, in a New York Board of Education hearing. Marcantonio asked for a ten day stay because the Board had failed to present "an itemized bill of particulars", which stay the Board denied. Zysman walked out.

In 1946, Marcantonio introduced legislation to restore Spanish as the language of instruction in Puerto Rico's schools asking President Harry S. Truman to sign the bill "in the name of the children of Puerto Rico who are being tortured by the prevailing system to fight cultural chauvinism and to correct past errors." President Truman signed the bill. He died on August 9, 1954, from a heart attack after coming up the subway stairs on Broadway by City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan. As a devout Catholic, he was given conditional absolution and extreme unction, the last sacrament of the Church.

Tony Kushner's play The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures has a main character who is a fictional cousin of Marcantonio, whose collection of speeches, I Vote My Conscience (1956), edited by Annette Rubinstein, influenced the next generation of young radicals.