La Guardia, Fiorello

La Guardia, Fiorello (1882–1947), congressman, mayor of New York City.Born in New York City, La Guardia grew up in the West and moved to Italy. Returning to New York at age twenty‐four and earning a law degree from New York University in 1910, he plunged into Republican party politics. In 1916, he became the first Italian American to be elected to Congress, serving in the House of Representatives until 1932, with interruptions for World War I service in Italy and a brief tenure as president of the New York City Board of Alderman. In 1933, running on the Republican and City Fusion tickets, La Guardia was elected mayor of normally Democratic New York with less than 40 percent of the votes, as two candidates from the scandal‐ridden Democratic party split the rest. He won reelection in 1937 and 1941 with backing from the American Labor party. After leaving office in 1946 he served as director‐general of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.

During his long political career, La Guardia emerged as one of the nation's most prominent advocates of urban liberalism. A one‐man balanced ticket (the Episcopalian son of a Jewish mother, he married a Catholic and spoke Italian, Yiddish, German, and Hungarian), the “Little Flower” projected a cosmopolitan Americanism at odds with the rampant nativism and racism of his day. In Congress, he opposed prohibition, defended labor and immigrants, and sought checks on corporate power, allying with a minority bloc of midwestern progressives. As mayor, he worked to rationalize the sprawling city government and root out corruption, using his close ties to the New Deal to fund a massive expansion of the city's infrastructure and social services. Though never as popular with voters as his Democratic predecessors and successors, La Guardia after his death came to be seen as the political embodiment of modern New York.
See also Italian Americans; New Deal Era, The; Temperance and Prohibition.

Bibliography

Arthur Mann , La Guardia: A Fighter against His Times, 1882–1933, 1959.
Thomas Kessner , Fiorello H. La Guardia and the Making of Modern New York, 1989.

Joshua B. Freeman