Фиорелло Ла Гуардия: Политик и мэр Нью-Йорка

American politician (1882–1947)

Fiorello Henry LaGuardia (/f//iː//ə/'/r//ɛ//l//oʊ// //l//ə/'/ɡ//w//ɑːr//d//i//ə/; born Fiorello Raffaele Enrico LaGuardia, ; December 11, 1882September 20, 1947) was an American attorney and politician who represented New York in the House of Representatives and served as the 99th Mayor of New York City from 1934 to 1946. He was known for his irascible, energetic, and charismatic personality and diminutive, rotund stature. A socialist member of the Republican Party, La Guardia was frequently cross endorsed by parties other than his own, especially parties on the left under New York's electoral fusion laws. A panel of 69 scholars in 1993 ranked him first among the ten best mayors in American history. He was born to Italian immigrants in New York City. Before serving as mayor, La Guardia represented Manhattan in Congress and on the New York City Board of Aldermen. As mayor, during the Great Depression and World War II, La Guardia unified the city's transit system; expanded construction of public housing, playgrounds, parks, and airports; reorganized the New York Police Department; and implemented federal New Deal programs within the city. He pursued a long series of political reforms, curbing the power of the powerful Irish controlled Tammany Hall political machine that controlled the Democratic Party in Manhattan. He also re established merit based employment and promotion within city administration. La Guardia was also a highly visible national political figure. His support for the New Deal and relationship with President Franklin D. Roosevelt crossed party lines, brought federal funds to New York City, and cut off patronage to La Guardia's Tammany enemies. La Guardia's WNYC radio program "Talk to the People", which aired from December 1941 until December 1945, expanded his public influence beyond the borders of the city.

Fiorello Raffaele Enrico La Guardia, with Raffaele later removed and Enrico Americanized as Henry, was born in Greenwich Village, New York City, on December 11, 1882, to Achille Luigi Carlo La Guardia and Irene Luzzatto Coen. He was named in honor of his maternal grandmother, paternal grandfather, and uncle. Achille was born in Foggia, Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, on March 26, 1849, and his father, Don Raffaele La Guardia, was a municipal official. Achille visited the United States in 1878, while on tour with Adelina Patti. Irene, a member of the Sephardic Jewish Luzzatto family, was born in Trieste, Austria, on July 18, 1859. They married on June 3, 1880, after having known each other for half a year. Achille, a former Catholic, was an atheist and Irene was a nonpracticing Jew. Achille prohibited his children from speaking Italian and Fiorello would not become proficient in Italian until his time as a consular agent. Achille enlisted in the United States Army in 1885, and served in the 11th Infantry Regiment as a warrant officer and chief musician. His family lived in the Dakota Territory, New York, and the Arizona Territory during his time at Fort Sully, Madison Barracks, Fort Huachuca, and Whipple Barracks. The onset of the Spanish–American War led to their transfer to St. Louis, Missouri, and then Achille was sent to Mobile, Alabama. Fiorello attempted to join the army, but was rejected. He was accepted as a war correspondent for the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Achille and Fiorello did not reach Cuba because Achille contracted hepatitis and malaria after consuming embalmed beef. He was discharged from the military on account of his illness and given a pension of $8 per month (8.0 in 1898 is equivalent to about <calculated amount> in recent years). The La Guardia family moved to Trieste, and Achille died in Capodistria on October 21, 1904.

Fiorello became a clerk at the US consulate in Budapest and worked there from 1901 to 1904. He then served as the agent in charge of the US consulate in Fiume from 1904 to 1906. He left Europe after failing to gain a promotion to consul general in Fiume or an appointment as consul general in Belgrade. He worked as an interpreter for the immigration services at Ellis Island from November 6, 1907, to 1910. He was a Croatian, Italian, and German interpreter and Felix Frankfurter, who met La Guardia during his time at Ellis Island, described him as "a gifted interpreter". Upon returning to the U. S., he worked as a fireproof brick manufacturer in Portsmouth, Ohio. He returned to New York City and worked a series of odd jobs such as a translator for the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, a steamship company clerk, stenographer at Pratt Institute, and a clerk for Abercrombie & Fitch. In 1912, around 60,000 garment workers went on strike and La Guardia, who was friends with August Bellanca, gave speeches in Italian and Yiddish in support of the strike. La Guardia graduated from the Dwight School, a private school on the Upper West Side of New York City. He graduated from the New York University School of Law and was admitted to the bar in 1910.

La Guardia ran for a seat in the U. S. House of Representatives from New York's 14th congressional district during the 1914 election. He chose to run as he noticed during a 25th Assembly district Republican club meeting that nobody was nominated for it as Frederick Marshall unexpectedly withdrew. The district was a strongly Democratic and Tammany Hall. He lost to Democratic nominee Michael F. Farley, whom he accused of being illiterate. Clarence Fay, the Republican district leader in the 25th Assembly district, sought to have Hamilton Fish III nominated for the seat in the 1916 election. Tanner unsuccessfully attempted to convince La Guardia to not run. Fish withdrew before the primary and La Guardia won the Republican nomination. He appealed to the different ethnic groups in the district and was endorsed by New Yorker Staats Zeitung which traditionally supported Democratic candidates. He defeated Farley by 357 votes. Tammany Hall and the Democrats supported La Guardia in the 1918 election in order to prevent an anti war Socialist victory. He defeated Socialist nominee Scott Nearing in the election. La Guardia resigned from the United States House of Representatives on December 31, 1919. He was given the Republican nomination for New York's 20th congressional district to succeed retiring Representative Isaac Siegel in the 1922 election. He defeated Democratic nominee Henry Frank and Socialist nominee William Karlin. La Guardia attended the Conference for Progressive Political Action in 1922. Koenig told La Guardia that his renomination was dependent on him supporting the Republicans in the 1924 presidential election. La Guardia considered supporting the Democrats, but declined to do so after the nomination of John W. Davis. He gave his support to Robert M. La Follette and the Progressive Party. La Guardia announced his departure from the Republican Party on the front page of The New York Times. He and Gilbert Roe managed La Follette's presidential campaign in the eastern United States. La Guardia, running with the Socialist nomination, raised $3,764.25 (3764.25 in 1924 is equivalent to about <calculated amount> in recent years) and defeated Frank and Siegel in the election. La Guardia's partisan affiliation in Congress was labeled as Socialist and Victor L. Berger, the only other Socialist in Congress, described him as "my whip". La Guardia returned to the Republican Party in the 1926 election and won by 55 votes against Democratic nominee H. Warren Hubbard and Socialist nominee George Dobsevage. He was the only Republican elected to the U. S. House from New York City. He defeated Democratic nominee Saul J. Dickheiser in the 1928 election. He defeated Democratic nominee Vincent H. Auleta in the 1930 election. La Guardia considered running for reelection to Congress as a Democrat in the 1932 election and the option received support from William Green, John L. Lewis, and Robert F. Wagner. Political boss John H. McCooey supported him running as a Democrat, but Tammany Hall leader James Joseph Hines opposed him and had the nomination given to James J. Lanzetta. Lanzetta defeated La Guardia in the election due to the coattail effect of Franklin D. Roosevelt's victory in the presidential election. Robert M. La Follette Jr. stated that "the people have temporarily lost one of their most faithful servants".

La Guardia was interested in airplanes and served as a director and attorney for Giuseppe Mario Bellanca's company. He enlisted to fight in World War I and was promoted to captain by October 1917. He and Major General William Ord Ryan trained Italian pilots in Foggia. La Guardia became certified to fly on December 12, 1917. King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy gave him the Flying Cross. He rose to the rank of major in command of a unit of Caproni Ca.44 bombers on the Italian Austrian front. While he was away at war his office was managed by Harry Andrews and Marie Fisher while constituent services were handled by Representative Isaac Siegel. A petition with over 3,000 signatures was given to Speaker Champ Clark on January 8, 1918, asking for La Guardia's seat to be vacated, but Clark refused to allow a motion to vacate La Guardia's seat. During La Guardia's tenure in the U. S. House he served on the Judiciary committee. Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of The Nation, stated that he was "the most valuable member of Congress today". La Guardia supported impeaching Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon on the grounds of him serving as a director of a private company, the Aluminum Company of America, while serving in the presidential cabinet. La Guardia requested the pardon of Thomas Mooney. In 1931, James Smith, a black railroad porter, was put on trial for assault, but was unable to pay for a lawyer. La Guardia took the case pro bono after being requested by A. Philip Randolph and Smith was acquitted on September 26.

La Guardia's supporters wanted him to run for mayor in the 1925 election, but he declined as he would be unlikely to defeat Jimmy Walker. He received the Republican nomination on August 1,1929. In 1929, La Guardia ran for Mayor once again. This time, he received the Republican nomination, once again defeating William Bennett. However, he lost the general election to Walker in a landslide.

Mayor Jimmy Walker and his Irish run Tammany Hall were forced out of office by scandal and La Guardia was determined to replace him. La Guardia ran on the Fusion Party platform, which was supported by Republicans, reform minded Democrats, and independents. La Guardia had enormous determination, high visibility, the support of reformer Samuel Seabury and a divisive primary contest. He also represented previously underrepresented communities, appealed to a wide range of cultural backgrounds with his lineage.

In 1935 a riot took place in Harlem. Termed the Harlem riot of 1935, it has been described as the first "modern" race riot, because it was committed primarily against property rather than persons. During the riots, La Guardia and Hubert Delany walked through the streets in an effort to calm the situation.

La Guardia governed in an uneasy alliance with New York's Jews and liberal WASPs, together with ethnic Italians and Germans. An unorthodox Republican, he also ran as the nominee of the American Labor Party, a union dominated anti Tammany left wing group that supported Roosevelt for president beginning in 1936. La Guardia supported Roosevelt, chairing the Committee of Independent Voters for Roosevelt and his running mate, Henry A. Wallace, with Senator George Norris during the 1940 presidential election. La Guardia was the city's first Italian American mayor, but was not a typical Italian New Yorker. He was a Republican Episcopalian who had grown up in Arizona and had a Triestine Jewish mother and a lapsed Catholic father. He spoke several languages; when working at Ellis Island, he was certified as an interpreter for Italian, German, Yiddish, and Croatian. It served him well during a contentious congressional campaign in 1922. When Henry Frank, a Jewish opponent, accused him of anti Semitism, La Guardia rejected the suggestion that he publicly disclose that his mother was Jewish as "self serving". Instead, La Guardia dictated an open letter in Yiddish that was also printed in Yiddish. In it, he challenged Frank to publicly and openly debate the issues of the campaign entirely in the Yiddish language. Frank, although he was Jewish, could not speak the language and was forced to decline—and lost the election. La Guardia's 1933 campaign coincided with the rise of racial and religious hostilities in Germany, and he supported a more anti Nazi response while in office.

La Guardia criticized the gangsters who brought a negative stereotype and shame to the Italian community. His first action as mayor was to order the chief of police to arrest mob boss Lucky Luciano on whatever charges could be found. La Guardia then went after the gangsters with a vengeance, stating in a radio address to the people of New York in his distinct voice, "Let's drive the bums out of town." In 1934 he went on a search and destroy mission looking for mob boss Frank Costello's slot machines, rounding up thousands of the "one armed bandits," swinging a sledgehammer and dumping them off a barge into the water for the newspapers and media. In 1935 La Guardia appeared at the Bronx Terminal Market to institute a citywide ban on the sale, display, and possession of artichokes, whose prices were inflated by mobsters. When prices went down, the ban was lifted. In 1936, La Guardia had special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, a future Republican presidential candidate, single out Lucky Luciano for prosecution. Dewey led a successful investigation into Luciano's lucrative prostitution operation, eventually sending Luciano to jail with a 30–50 year sentence. The case was made into the 1937 movie Marked Woman, starring Bette Davis. La Guardia proved successful in shutting down the burlesque theaters, whose shows offended his sensibilities. However, he also came to the assistance of comic book creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, when they were openly threatened by sympathizers of Nazi Germany with their new superhero character, Captain America, when he arranged police protection. As part of his campaign against organized crime in the early 1940s, La Guardia banned pinball games, calling them gambling machines. The ban held until 1976, when avid player Roger Sharpe proved the actual skill involved in the game. La Guardia spearheaded major raids throughout the city, collecting thousands of machines. The mayor participated with police in destroying machines with sledgehammers before dumping the remnants into the city's rivers. To obtain large scale federal money the mayor became a close ally of Roosevelt and New Deal agencies such as the CWA, PWA, and WPA, which poured $1.1 billion into the city from 1934 to 1939. In turn he gave FDR a showcase for New Deal achievement, helped defeat FDR's political enemies in Tammany Hall (the Democratic party machine in Manhattan). He and Moses built highways, bridges and tunnels, transforming the physical landscape of New York City. The West Side Highway, East River Drive, Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, Triborough Bridge, and two airports (LaGuardia Airport, and, later, Idlewild, now JFK Airport) were built during his mayoralty. In 1943, La Guardia saved the Mecca Temple on 55th Street from demolition. Together with New York City Council President Newbold Morris, La Guardia converted the building to the New York City Center of Music and Dance. On December 11, 1943, City Center opened its doors with a concert from the New York Philharmonic—La Guardia even conducted a rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner."

1939 was a busy year, as he opened the 1939 New York World's Fair at Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, Queens, opened New York Municipal Airport No. 2 in Queens (later renamed Fiorello H. La Guardia Field), and had the city buy out the Interborough Rapid Transit Company and the Brooklyn–Manhattan Transit Corporation, thus completing the public takeover of the New York City Subway system. The U. S. arrival of Georg and Maria Von Trapp and their children from Austria that fall at Ellis Island who would eventually become the Trapp Family Singers was another significant decade ending event that year in La Guardia's mayoralty.

Responding to popular disdain for the sometimes corrupt City Council, La Guardia successfully proposed a reformed 1938 City Charter that created a powerful new New York City Board of Estimate, similar to a corporate board of directors. La Guardia was also a supporter of the Ives Quinn Act, "a law that would ban discrimination in employment on the bases of 'race, creed, color or national origin' and task a new agency, the New York State Commission Against Discrimination (SCAD), with education and enforcement." The OCD was the national agency responsible for preparing for blackouts, air raid wardens, sirens, and shelters in case of German air raids. The goal was to psychologically mobilize many thousands of middle class volunteers to make them feel part of the war effort. At the urging of aviation advocate Gill Robb Wilson, La Guardia, in his capacity as Director of the OCD, created the Civil Air Patrol with Administrative Order 9, signed by him on December 1, 1941, and published December 8, 1941. La Guardia remained Mayor of New York, shuttling back and forth with three days in Washington and four in the city in an effort to do justice to two herculean jobs. La Guardia focused on setting up air raid systems and training volunteer wardens. However, Roosevelt appointed his wife Eleanor Roosevelt as his assistant. She issued calls for actors to lead a volunteer talent program, and dancers to start a physical fitness program. That led to widespread ridicule and the president replaced both of them in December 1941 with a full time director James M. Landis. The war ended the Great Depression in the city. Unemployment ended, and the city was a gateway for military supplies and soldiers sent to Europe, with the Brooklyn Navy Yard providing many of the warships and the garment trade providing uniforms. The city's great financiers, however, were less important in decision making than the policy makers in Washington, and very high wartime taxes were not offset by heavy war spending. New York was not a center of heavy industry and did not see a wartime boom, as defense plants were built elsewhere. FDR refused to make La Guardia a general and was unable to provide fresh money for the city. By 1944 the city was short of funds to pay for La Guardia's new programs. La Guardia was frustrated and his popularity slipped away and he ran so poorly in straw polls in 1945 that he did not run for a fourth term. In July 1945, when the city's newspapers were closed by a strike, La Guardia famously read the comics on the radio.

La Guardia opposed the Espionage Act of 1917 and stated that "if you pass this bill and if it is enacted into law you change all that our flag ever stood for and stands for". He supported the League of Women Voters in the 1920s. He voted in favor of the Child Labor Amendment. He proposed legislation to create a holiday in honor of Christopher Columbus. As a congressman, La Guardia was a tireless and vocal champion of progressive causes, including relaxed restriction on immigration, removal of U. S. troops from Nicaragua to speaking up for the rights and livelihoods of striking miners, impoverished farmers, oppressed minorities, and struggling families. He supported progressive income taxes, greater government oversight of Wall Street, and national employment insurance for workers idled by the Great Depression. He supported allowing the direct election of the Governor of Puerto Rico. In domestic policies he tended toward socialism and wanted to nationalize and regulate; however he was never close to the Socialist Party and never bothered to read Karl Marx. When Mussolini's Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia on October 3, 1935, a Black protest of Italian vendors at the King Julius General Market on Lenox and 118th Street turned into a riot and 1,200 extra NYC policemen were deployed on "war duty" to quell the riot. In December 1935, at an Italian American rally, attended by 20,000, in Madison Square Garden, La Guardia presented a $100,000 check to the Italian Consul General, part of a total $700,000 raised from Italian Americans to help fund the invasion.

La Guardia sponsored labor legislation and railed against immigration quotas. His major legislation was the Norris–La Guardia Act, cosponsored with Nebraska senator George Norris in 1932. It circumvented Supreme Court limitations on the activities of labor unions, especially as those limitations were imposed between the enactment of the Clayton Antitrust Act in 1914 and the end of the 1920s. Based on the theory that the lower courts are creations not of the Constitution but of Congress, and that Congress therefore has wide power in defining and restricting their jurisdiction, the act forbids issuance of injunctions to sustain anti union contracts of employment, to prevent ceasing or refusing to perform any work or remain in any relation of employment, or to restrain acts generally constituting component parts of strikes, boycotts, and picketing. It also said courts could no longer enforce yellow dog contracts, which are labor contracts prohibiting a worker from joining a union. La Guardia opposed an attempt to raise the sales tax during the Great Depression and instead supported taxes on luxury items and a graduated income tax for people earning more than $100,000.

La Guardia supported the League of Nations. He called for Fiume to be given to Italy despite it being promised to Yugoslavia by the Treaty of London. He supported the Russian Revolution, but criticized Ambassador David R. Francis for supporting Alexander Kerensky rather than Lavr Kornilov. Never an isolationist, he supported using American influence abroad on behalf of democracy or for national independence or against autocracy. Thus he supported the Irish independence movement and the anti czarist Russian Revolution of 1917, but did not approve of Vladimir Lenin. By 1946 he was praising Moscow. Unlike most progressive colleagues who were isolationist, La Guardia consistently backed internationalism, speaking in favor of the League of Nations and the Inter Parliamentary Union as well as peace and disarmament conferences. In 1946 President Harry Truman sent the ex mayor as an envoy to Brazil, but diplomacy was not his forte. Truman then gave him as major job as head of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), with responsibility for helping millions of desperate refugees in Europe. La Guardia was exhausted and after seeing the horrors of war in Europe called for a massive aid program. Critics ridiculed that as worldwide WPA and the biggest boondoggle ever. He sided with Henry A. Wallace in calling for friendship with the Soviet Union, and attacked the new breed of Cold Warriors. He provided UNRRA funds to the Soviets despite warnings that the Kremlin used the money to rebuild its army. UNRRA shut down at the end of 1946. Despite his declining health La Guardia attacked the emerging "Truman Doctrine" that promised American financial help to stop the spread of Communism.

La Guardia opposed prohibition. He was one of the first Republicans in Congress to voice their opinions against prohibition. He testified to that effect before the first session of Congress in 1926. On June 19, 1926, La Guardia mixed near beer and malt extract, which were legal, to create 2% beer in order to protest prohibition. He was immune from prosecution as a member of Congress.

La Guardia's sister, the writer Gemma La Guardia Gluck and brother in law, Herman Gluck were living in Hungary and were arrested by the Gestapo on June 7, 1944, when the Nazis took control of Budapest. Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler knew that Gemma was La Guardia's sister and ordered her to be held as a political prisoner. She and Herman were deported to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Gemma did not learn until her release that Herman had died at Mauthausen. Gemma Gluck, who was held in Block II of the camp and assigned prisoner #44139, and wrote about her time there. The Germans abandoned Gluck, her daughter, and her grandson for a possible hostage exchange in April 1945 as the Soviets advanced on Berlin. After the liberation of the camps, Gemma later wrote, the Soviets were "violating girls and women of all ages," and the three struggled as displaced persons in postwar Berlin, because they did not speak German and had no identity papers, money, or means of documenting where they had been. Gemma finally managed to get word to the Americans, who contacted Fiorello, who was then director of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and had been unable to locate his sister and brother in law since their disappearance. He worked to get them on the immigration lists, but asserted in a letter, included in the appendix of Gemma's memoir, that her "case was the same as that of hundreds of thousands of displaced people" and "no exceptions can be made." It took two years for her to be cleared and sent to the United States. She returned to New York in May 1947, where she was reunited with her brother only four months before his death. As he had made no provision for her, she lived the remainder of her life in very reduced circumstances in a public housing project in Queens until her death in 1962. La Guardia died of pancreatic cancer in his home at 5020 Goodridge Avenue, in the Fieldston neighborhood of Riverdale, Bronx, on September 20, 1947, aged 64. La Guardia is interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

A 1993 survey of historians, political scientists, and urban experts conducted by Melvin G. Holli of the University of Illinois at Chicago ranked La Guardia as the best American big city mayor to serve between the years 1820 and 1993. According to a biographer, Mason B. Williams, his close collaboration with Roosevelt's New Deal proved a striking success in linking national money and local needs. La Guardia enabled the political recognition of new groups that had been largely excluded from the political system, such as Jews and Italians. His administration (in cooperation with Robert Moses) gave New York its modern infrastructure. In 1972, the United States Postal Service honored La Guardia with a 14 cent postage stamp. La Guardia was a strong supporter of Zionism, and LaGuardia Street and LaGuardia interchange, both in Tel Aviv, Israel, were named in his honor. A street in Rijeka, Croatia, is named after Fiorello La Guardia. La Guardia worked in Rijeka as a U. S. Consular Agent from 1903 to 1906, when the city was known as Fiume and was under Hungarian administration. It was during this time that Rijeka's port played a vital role in connecting the Austro Hungarian Empire to the United States, featuring direct passenger service between Rijeka and New York.

La Guardia, Fiorello H. (1948). The Making of an Insurgent: An Autobiography. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott.

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