And while such vulnerability creates all sorts of possibilities, both good and bad, its very existence is exciting. It means that no human being should be written off, no change in thinking deemed impossible.
2
LaGuardia in the Jazz Age
I had known Fiorello LaGuardia as the colorful mayor of New York during the Thirties. While looking for a subject for my doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, I was walking in downtown New York and happened to pass a rather decrepit building marked "Municipal Archives." I walked upstairs, asked what they had, and was told that LaGuardia's widow, Marie LaGuardia, had just deposited all his papers. Delving into the files of the 1920s, I discovered, to my delight, that LaGuardia, though a Republican, was the leading radical in Congress during the "Jazz Age." Indeed, once he ran on both Republican and Socialist tickets, and won. His Congressional career became the subject of my dissertation, which my adviser, Professor William Leuchtenburg of Columbia University, submitted to a committee of the American Historical Association. It was awarded a prize, which, I must confess, was named after Albert Beveridge, leading apologist in the U.S. Senate for American imperialism. It was then published by Cornell University Press as La Guardia in Congress in 1959. Out of that came this essay, which appeared first in my book The Politics of History (Beacon Press, 1970), and was reissued by Illinois University Press in 1990. The ideas for which LaGuardia fought, almost alone, in Congress in the Twenties and early Thirties—government responsibility for people in need, fundamental changes in the economic system—still remain relevant in our time.
There is an underside to every Age about which history does not often speak, because history is written from records left by the privileged. We learn about politics from the political leaders, about economics from the entrepreneurs, about slavery from the plantation owners, about the thinking of an age from its intellectual elite.
It is the victors who give names to the wars, and the satisfied who give labels to the ages. But what did the Crusades mean to the peasants who died in them, or the Renaissance to the vast majority who suffered while the Medicis financed art, or the Enlightenment to the unenlightened, or the Era of Good Feeling to the slaves in Virginia, or the Progressive Period to girls in the Lawrence textile mills, or the New Deal to blacks in Harlem?
Sometimes we search hard, and find the narratives of those in chains, or other bits and scraps of evidence showing all was not as we thought. And sometimes there are men or women on the border of their time or their class, who manage to save for us, by a great effort, the traces of what history tends to bury. Even then, we get only the faintest glimpse of what a war was to the wounded, or an epoch to the vast, silent numbers who populated it—like artifacts from a buried civilization, only hinting at what was endured.
In the United States, the twenties were the years of Prosperity, and Fiorello LaGuardia is one of its few public figures who suspected to what extent that label was a lie. The twenties were also, to later generations, a time of quiet isolation from foreign affairs. LaGuardia did not believe this. The twenties also became known as a time of national political consensus, when a general mood of well-being softened political combat. LaGuardia tried to speak for those left out of the consensus, those whose votes were tallied but whose condition was ignored.
Fiorello LaGuardia was elected to Congress in 1916, went off to fly on the Italian front for the American army, ran again successfully for Congress in 1922. From then until 1933 he viewed the national scene from his seat in the House, and through the eyes of his constituents, looking out of their tenement windows in East Harlem.
From this vantage point, the "prosperity" of the twenties seemed a bitter joke; under the raucous cries of the Jazz Age, LaGuardia, listening closely, could hear the distinct sound of the blues. For many Americans, the high living of the twenties was only a spectacle seen from the cheap seats, and when they left the theater they went home, not to Babylon, but to what Robert and Helen Lynd have called "the long arm of the job." LaGuardia was one of a handful of men in Washington who recognized this fact, and acted upon it.
He set his stocky body and rasping voice against all the dominant political currents of his day. While the Klan membership soared into the millions, and nativists wrote their prejudices into the statute books, LaGuardia demanded the end of immigration restriction. When the marines were dispatched to make the Caribbean an American lake, LaGuardia demanded their recall. Above the jubilant message of the ticker tapes, LaGuardia tried to tell the nation about striking miners in Pennsylvania. As Democrats and Republicans lumbered like rehearsed wrestlers in the center of the political ring, LaGuardia stalked the front rows and bellowed for real action. He did not get it, but we need to listen for those echoes, to see what was then and still is undone, to look beneath the fogged membrane that hides the shame of our own age.
LaGuardia was born in a modest flat in Greenwich Village, of a Jewish mother from Trieste, and an Italian father who was a gifted musician, having come to America as arranger for the famous soprano Adelina Patti. His father joined the American army as bandmaster, and during the Spanish-American War died of food poisoning, one of the thousands of victims of the "embalmed beef" sold to the Quartermaster Corps by the big packinghouses. All his life, Fiorello LaGuardia would blame "profiteers" for his father's death.
He worked in the American consulates in Budapest and Fiume, then as an interpreter for immigrants on Ellis Island. He went to law school at night, walked the picket lines with striking garment workers in Manhattan and became attracted to the Progressive wing of the Republican party, surprising the machine men by his victory in 1916. In Congress, he introduced a bill (pigeonholed, as were virtually all his bills during his career) asking the death penalty for anyone selling inferior supplies to the armed forces in wartime. He denounced the Espionage Act of 1917 which forbade "scurrilous, abusive" criticism of the government. He fought to ease the tax burden on the poor, and urged that the national government regulate the food industry in peace as well as war. He supported World War I as meaning liberation for the millions of subjects of the Hapsburg Empire, and left Congress to fly bombing raids behind Austrian lines. But when the war ended and Wilson's "self-determination" was lost in the power struggles of the peace conferences, LaGuardia became bitter about the "war to make the world safe for democracy."
The Republican party kept trying to get LaGuardia out of the way, while using him to pick up immigrant votes. They eased him in as President of the New York City Board of Aldermen in 1920-21 (there were 100,000 Italian voters in New York City), but he became a political nuisance. He denounced the Republican legislature for ejecting five duly elected Socialist members, raged at the Republican governor for not restoring the five-cent fare, and went up to Albany to tell a cheering crowd of tenants demanding rent relief that he had come to the capitol "not to praise the landlord, but to bury him."
To get LaGuardia out of the way of a possible gubernatorial campaign in 1922, the Republican machine offered him the Congressional candidacy in East Harlem—a Jewish-Italian tenement district on the upper East Side of New York. He accepted and outlined his political philosophy for the New York World: "I stand for the Republicanism of Abraham Lincoln; and let me tell you that the average Republican leader east of the Mississippi doesn't know anything more about Abraham Lincoln than Henry Ford knows about the Talmud. I am a Progressive."
LaGuardia's Democratic opponent in the 1922 race was Herman Frank, whose backers grew desperate as polling time drew near, and sent out Rosh Hashonoh cards to every Jewish voter in the district, referring to "the Italian LaGuardia, who is a pronounced anti-Semite and Jew-hater," and appealing for support of Herman Frank, "a Jew with a Jewish heart."
LaGuardia was furious. He proceeded to dictate, in Yiddish, a letter which was distributed throughout the district, challenging Frank to debate the issues of the campaign, but in the Yiddish language. When Frank ignored this (he could not speak Yiddish) LaGuardia set out on a tour of the J
ewish district, making three speeches in Yiddish. His opponent was seeking votes, LaGuardia asserted, on the ground that he was a Jew: "After all, is he looking for a job as a schamas, or does he want to be elected Congressman?" (A schamas is the caretaker of a synagogue.) LaGuardia won the election by 245 votes.
In Congress once again, LaGuardia continued to confound the Democrats, exasperate the Republicans, and confuse the Socialists. A New York Republican leader said of him: "He is no Republican at all. He is no more a Republican than the representatives of Soviet Russia are Republicans."
Aided by a small group of Congressmen from New York and Chicago, LaGuardia fought the mounting tide of nativism in the twenties. He denounced the drastic restriction of immigration, and particularly the "national origins" method of determining quotas which was designed to limit the number of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. The floor of the House was the scene of bitter exchanges between the proponents of restriction and LaGuardia. "We have too many aliens in this country...we want more of the American stock," declared Elton Watkins of Oregon, "Education and environment do not fundamentally alter racial values," Michigan's Grant Hudson said. Tincher of Kansas drew loud applause by urging his colleagues to "think, act and do real Americanism" and warning that one day, if immigration continued as in the past, Congressmen would have to address the Speaker of the House "in Italian or some other language."
The restriction bills were "unscientific," LaGuardia retorted, the "result of narrow-mindedness and bigotry" and "inspired by influences who have a fixed obsession on Anglo-Saxon superiority." Angered by a reference to the "Italian bloc" from New York made by Kentucky's Fred Vinson, LaGuardia referred to the illiteracy of the Blue Ridge mountain folk. This drew a stirring response from another Kentuckian, who rose to his full height and declared that his constituents "suckle their Americanism and their patriotism from their mother's breast...and I resent the gentleman's insolent, infamous, contemptible slander against a great, honest, industrious, law-abiding, liberty-loving God-fearing, patriotic people."
Restriction became law, but the debate continued through the Twenties. LaGuardia exchanged arguments in a national magazine with a writer who insisted: "The time to gird our loins for battle is here and now," and cried for resistance against "the inroads of the degeneracy which arises from the mixture of unassimilable and disharmonic races." LaGuardia called the national origins plan "the creation of a narrow mind, nurtured by a hating heart." But the time was not right for his views. The Klan was never more powerful. (Vice-President Charles Dawes himself, as LaGuardia put it, had "praised them with faint damn.") The American Legion, the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations, and even "Progressives" from the Midwest like Norris and Borah and Johnson were on the other side. LaGuardia swam powerfully, but with increasing futility, against the nativist tidal wave of the Twenties.
LaGuardia's mightiest verbal barrages were to be aimed, however, at the myth of universal prosperity in the twenties. The riotous New Year celebrations that ushered in 1922 could barely be heard above the general din, for it was an era identified in terms of sound—the "Roaring Twenties," the "Jazz Age." The noise was, all agreed, simply the joyful gurgle of prosperity.*
Prosperity was real for substantial numbers of Those who made more than two thousand dollars a year, 40 percent of all families, could buy a fair share, either in cash or on the installment plan, of the exciting new gadgets and machines crowding the show windows in every city and town. For the 305,000 people who received 15 percent of the total national income, there were more expensive autos, as well as jewels, furs, and endless amusements. Because spending is by its very nature a conspicuous activity, and because frolic is more newsworthy than a ten-hour day in a textile mill, the general aura of the Twenties—prosperity and wellbeing—was that given to it by its most economically active members.
Amid the general self-congratulation, however, amid the smug speeches of the business leaders, and the triumphant clatter of ticker-tape machines, millions of Americans worked all day in mines, factories, and on patches of rented or mortgaged land. In the evening they read the newspaper or listened to the not-yet-paid-for radio and looked forward to Saturday night, when they might hold their mouths under the national faucet for a few drops of the wild revelry that everyone spoke about. For the fact was that a large section of the American population was living sparely and precariously and, though not jobless and impoverished (as many would be a decade later), were shut out of the high, wild, and prosperous living that marked the upper half of the population.
* Part of it, however, was the sound of violence, which seems to scar every age of high living. F . Scott Fitzgerald wrote: "A classmate killed his wife and himself on Long Island, another tumbled 'accidentally' from a skyscraper in New York. One was killed in a speakeasy in Chicago; another was beaten to death in a speakeasy in New York and crawled home to the Princeton Club to die; still another had his skull crushed by a maniac's axe in an insane asylum where he was confined. These are not catastrophes that I went out of my way to look for—these were my friends; moreover, these things happened not during the depression but during the boom." From his article "Echoes of the Jazz Age," Scribner's, November 1931.
** Unemployment declined, 1921-27, from 4,270,000 to 2,055,000. Real wages rose. The number of prosperous farmers grew, so that by 1929, 25,000 farms had gross incomes over $20,000 a year. Recent Social Trends: Report of the President's Research Committee on Social Trends, McGraw-Hill, 1933, Vol. II, p. 820.
After a detailed study of economic conditions in the twenties, George Soule concluded that while production and profits rocketed in bursts of happy speculation, "the American people did not all enjoy the ride." From 1919-28, productivity grew 40 percent, compared to a 26 percent rise in real earnings so that "business did not fully share its productive gains with earners and consumers by a combination of wage increases and price reduction." This led to a "tremendous growth of profits for the more fortunately situated sectors of business and for the big corporations that dominated them." From 1922-29, while real wages per capita in manufacturing advanced at a rate of 1.4 percent a year, common stockholders gained 16.4 percent a year.
The classic sociological study of the Twenties, that of Muncie, Indiana, in the Lynds' Middletown, shows graphically that ordinary working people did not share the prosperity of that time and went about their mundane lives day to day never free from "the long arm of the job." In Middletown, whose thirty thousand people lived much like people in the hundreds of other industrial towns scattered across the nation, there were two clearly defined groups: "the Working Class and the Business Class."
The Lynds reported: "As one prowls Middletown streets about six o'clock of a winter morning one notes two kinds of homes: the dark ones where the people still sleep, and the ones with a light in the kitchen where the adults of the household may be seen moving about, starting the business of the day." A speaker urging parents to help children by making a breakfast a "leisurely family reunion" did not realize that for two-thirds of the city's families "the father gets up in the dark in the winter, eats hastily in the kitchen in the gray dawn, and is at work from an hour to two and a quarter hours before his children have to be at school."
When some people looked behind the facade to catch a glimpse of suffering, their voices were either shouted down or ignored.*
Merle Curti wrote:
It was, in fact, only the upper ten percent of the population that enjoyed a marked increase in real income. But the protests which such facts normally have evoked could not make themselves widely or effectively felt. This was in part the result of the grand strategy of the major political parties. In part it was the result of the fact that almost all the avenues to mass opinion were now controlled by large-scale publishing industries.
Not all voices were stilled. There were some too eloquent, too powerful, or simply too insistent to be ignored: Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, H.L. Mencken, Oswald Garrison Vil
lard, Lewis Mumford. They spoke to their generation with kindliness or with cynicism, with anger or with irony. They probed into the vitals of the social structure, sometimes crudely, sometimes delicately, but in any case deriding the cult of material wealth and the deification of orthodoxy.
And in Congress, a small group of Progressives and Socialists tried to jab at the conscience of their age. Among them the most vociferous, the most colorful, the most radical was Fiorello LaGuardia, the Congressman from East Harlem.
When the issue of extending the wartime rent controls rose, LaGuardia argued in Congress for the rights of tenants. Landlords had used college professors and legal experts to support their arguments, LaGuardia said:
...but gentlemen, with all of their experts, with all of their professors, with all of their legal talent, there is no argument that can prevail when a man with a weekly income and a family to support is compelled to pay out of his income such a large proportion that there is not sufficient left to properly care for and nourish his children. That is the condition in New York City; that is the condition in Washington, DC...
LaGuardia was aware that the farmer was getting little for his work, and the consumer was paying too much for his food. He told congress:
Some of my friends sometimes refer to me as a radical. If by that they mean that I am seeking radical changes in the very conditions which brought about the disparity between the exorbitant retail prices of food and the starvation prices paid to the farmer, I am not at all shocked by being called a radical.... Something is radically wrong when a condition exists that permits the manipulation of prices, the creation of monopolies on food to the extent of driving the farmer off his farm by foreclosures and having thousands of underfed and ill-nourished children in the public schools of our cities.