La Guardia, Fiorello

Born in lower Manhattan to immigrant parents, Fiorello La Guardia (1882–1947) was raised on the open plains of the American West, becoming in 1916 the first Republican since the Civil War to represent New York's 14th congressional district. When the United States entered World War I, Congressman La Guardia enlisted in the army, ultimately earning the rank of major.

Following the war, La Guardia returned to Congress, only to suffer the tragic death of his baby daughter and then his wife from the disease of the tenements, tuberculosis. He poured his energies into a progressive urban agenda, demanding attention for the poor, the exploited, and the unemployed, lashing out at monopolies, racist immigration laws, and Prohibition while campaigning for a wide array of social assistance legislation. His program finally won wide attention with the coming of the 1930s Depression, but he was swept from office with the Roosevelt landslide in 1932. As a lame duck, he helped lay the legislative groundwork for the New Deal.

La Guardia is considered by many to be the father of modern New York City. He won the 1933 mayoral election, and when he took office on January 1, 1934, for the first of his three terms, La Guardia took over a bankrupt and corrupt city that lacked a coherent municipal vision. Before La Guardia, the metropolis was a congeries of antiquated boroughs, divided into political fiefdoms, a city haphazardly administered, with parsimonious social and health services, no public housing, decaying parks, and rusting bridges. It was a city mired in graft. La Guardia brought into office outstanding experts, appointed for their skills rather than their political affiliation, and with them built a new New York, throwing new bridges over the waters and digging tunnels under them, erecting new reservoirs, sewer systems, parks, highways, schools, hospitals, health centers, swimming pools, and air terminals.

For the first time, New York offered its poor public housing, its workers a unified transit system, and its artists and musicians special training and subsidies. Relief was placed on the stable foundation of a sales tax, and government, too, was modernized. The outdated 1898 city charter was replaced by a fresh new compact that centralized municipal powers, consolidated departments, eliminated unnecessary borough and county offices, and streamlined municipal operations.

La Guardia declared unrelenting war on gamblers, closed the burlesques, and cleared racy magazines from the newsstands (under his powers of “garbage collection”). Beginning in 1942, New Yorkers could tune in every Sunday on the radio to hear the mayor tell them what to buy, how to raise their children, what to wear, how to save money, what to do in case of a German attack, and how to resolve family disputes—all in a tone that was strikingly intimate and fatherly. In what became the best remembered act of his mayoralty, La Guardia one Sunday asked his audience to bring the kiddies around and then proceeded to give a dramatic reading of the Dick Tracy comic strip.

Fiorello La Guardia redefined the role of the modern mayoralty, extending the reach of government, infusing it with integrity, and upgrading its capacity to deliver municipal services. He worked closely with the New Deal to carve out a national urban policy. Taking full advantage of his access to President [Page 422]Roosevelt and New Deal largesse, he rebuilt his aging city into a modern metropolis.

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