Vito Marcantonio
Vito Anthony Marcantonio was an American lawyer and politician who represented East Harlem in New York City 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 had been a New Deal coalition member of the progressive branch of the Republican Party, like his mentor and ally Fiorello La Guardia. Marcantonio was ideologically a socialist, and a supporter of political causes and positions which he deemed in the interests of the working class, poor, immigrants, labor unions, and civil rights.
Marcantonio's constituency in Congress included the smaller neighborhoods of Italian Harlem and Spanish Harlem and 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.
Early life and education
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. He attended New York City public schools, becoming the only member of his class from East Harlem to graduate from De Witt Clinton High School in Hell's Kitchen, and eventually received his LL.B. from the New York University School of Law in 1925.Early career
In the 1920 United States presidential election, Marcantonio campaigned for Parley P. Christensen, the candidate of the Farmer-Labor Party. In 1924, he became campaign manager for the congressional campaign of Fiorello La Guardia, then a Progressive–Socialist. Together, LaGuardia and Marcantonio also campaigned for U.S. Senator Robert M. La Follette for president in that year's presidential election. Marcantonio also became secretary of the Tenants League, which fought high rents and evictions.After passing the New York bar examination in 1925, Marcantonio began practicing law, first for Foster, La Guardia, and Cutler. He clerked at the law firm of Swinburne Hale, Walter Nelles, and Isaac Shorr, known for its representation of politically radical individuals and organizations. There, he worked with labor lawyer Joseph R. Brodsky, who "significantly contributed to his left orientation" toward Marxism. Marcantonio managed La Guardia's successful congressional re-election campaigns in 1926 to 1932. He worked as an assistant United States attorney from 1930 to 1931. He was an important figure in the La Guardia's successful campaign for mayor of New York City in 1933, and was regarded to be La Guardia's political heir apparent.
U.S. House of Representatives
Marcantonio was first elected to the United States House of Representatives from New York in 1934 as a Republican. He received a warm write-up in the New Masses in the November 1936 issue. He served in the House from 1935 until 1937 but was defeated in 1936 for re-election. Marcantonio's district was centered in his native East Harlem, New York City, which had many residents and immigrants of Italian and Puerto Rican origin. Fluent in Spanish as well as Italian, he was considered an ally of the Puerto Rican and Italian-American communities, and an advocate for the rights of the workers, immigrants, and the poor.Marcantonio was arguably one of the most left-wing members of Congress, He was investigated by the FBI in the 1940s and 1950s because of his extensive affiliation with members of the Communist Party USA and known Communist front groups. He strongly supported the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat.
In 1936, Marcantonio lost re-election. However, he won his seat back in the 1938 election while running under the American Labor Party nomination. He was subsequently re-elected to six further terms, with his second stint in the House lasting from 1939 to 1951. 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. He also gained the endorsement of the ALP, in an example of electoral fusion. Aside from Marcantonio, the only other ALP congressman was Leo Isacson, who served in Congress from 1948 to 1949, after winning a special election, but was defeated in the next general election.
Marcantonio stood as an ally to causes important to Puerto Rican and Italian communities and common workers, and was also 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. He perennially supported civil rights legislation.
Marcantonio strongly opposed Congressman Martin Dies Jr. and his House Un-American Activities Committee, which was created in 1937 to investigate activities considered un-American and subversive as part of the Red Scare.
Image:Make Marc Mayor Salvaged.jpg|thumb|left|upright=1.2|Henry Wallace and Paul Robeson flank Marcantonio just before an American Labor Party rally at Madison Square Garden, 1949
In the early years of World War II, Marcantonio viewed the war as being fueled by competing imperialist desires by the Allies of World War II and Axis powers, and opposed a United States entry into the conflict. In 1940, he helped form the American Peace Mobilization, a group whose aim was to keep the U.S. from participating in the war. Before the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in Moscow August 23, 1939, the APM's precursor organization, the Comintern-directed American League for Peace and Democracy, had been anti-Nazi. Marcantonio served as the APM's vice-chair. He appeared in a newsreel in 1940 denouncing "the imperialist war", a line taken by Joseph Stalin and his supporters in the Soviet Union until Operation Barbarossa. The Pact lasted until the Germans broke it by invading the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. In 1942, Marcantonio worked to expand the U.S. military commitment to a second front in Europe against the Nazi German expansion, which became Operation Torch. The USSR ordered Communist parties throughout the world to promote the idea to help it defeat Nazism. Marcantonio was also a vice president of the International Workers Order, a fraternal benefit society unofficially affiliated with the Communist Party.
There was a strong effort to unseat Marcantonio from Congress in 1946, including a smear campaign by media outlets. However, Marcantonio won re-election by a margin of 5,500. On election day, a Republican election captain named Joseph Scottoriggio, who was supporting Marcantonio's opponent, was severely beaten and died days later. New York City mobster Mike Coppola is believed to have been responsible.
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.
Marcantonio opposed the 1947 creation of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, arguing that the agency would "under the guise of research and study" conduct espionage trade unions and businesses in order to assert the will of the military upon them.
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."
File:United States American Labor Party undated Slide 9 Marcantonio Fights For You.png|thumb|left|American Labor Party campaign poster featuring Marcantonio as a candidate for reelection to Congress, 1948. Above him the faces of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Fiorello La Guardia, and Henry A. Wallace look on.
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 became state chairman of the ALP in January, and was re-elected in November. His re-election that year came despite an intense opposition.
In 1949, Marcantonio ran for Mayor of New York City on the ALP ticket but was defeated.
In his last term in Congress, Marcantonio opposed U.S. involvement in the Korean War.
In 1950, the Democratic, Republican, and Liberal parties backed a single candidate against Marcantonio, who was in turn endorsed by all of the city's major newspapers. Since Marcantonio had been able to win reelection in 1948 due to the Democrats and Republicans splitting the vote, Republican leader Thomas J. Curran and Democratic leader 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, but James G. Donovan was ultimately selected.
During the campaign, Marcantonio attacked Donovan as a "Sutton Place Dixiecrat". He was defeated by Donovan in the 1950 election, receiving only 40% of the vote. 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. As the sole representative of his party for most of his years in Congress, Marcantonio never held a committee chairmanship. After his defeat in 1950 and the withdrawal of the Communist Party support for the ALP, the party soon fell apart.