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Vito Marcantonio (Suny Series in American Labor History)

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Congressman Vito Marcantonio was once one of the most famous and most infamous political figures in America. Richard Nixon won a Senate seat in 1950 by linking his Democratic opponent's record to that of Marcantonio, and Marcantonio was harassed by fellow members of Congress and the media alike. He is likely the only member of Congress who ever served as a lawyer for the Communist Party, and the only member of Congress who relied on the Communist Party as a key component of his political machine.

Yet the Communist Party was only one element of his electoral coalition. The Republican Party was the party that got him started (he was a protege of Republican Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who set an example for Marcantonio by once winning election to Congress on the
Socialist Party ticket when the Republicans would not back him), and the Republican Party nominated Marcantonio in 1934, 1936, 1938, 1940, 1942, and 1944.

Marcantonio only lost the Republican Party nomination narrowly in 1946 at the beginning of the Cold War when he was elected to Congress on the Democratic and American Labor Party tickets. By 1948, the law had been changed to make it impossible for him to seek the Republican and Democratic nominations while serving as the leader of the American Labor Party, but he won a plurality on the American Labor Party ticket standing alone. In 1950, the Democratic, Republican, and Liberal parties all nominated the same candidate, James Donovan, who defeated Marcantonio by a 4 to 3 margin, 49,448 to 36,095.

As the statewide leader of the American Labor Party from 1941 on, and as an active leader of the American Labor Party from 1937 on, Marcantonio gained the power to cross-endorse Democratic and Republican candidates. He used this power to get Republicans elected in otherwise unfriendly districts, giving the Republican Party extra state legislative power in return for giving his own American Labor Party--and the Communists who somewhat influenced it--a national spokesman.

The author presents exhaustive evidence of Marcantonio's deep passion for the welfare of his poverty stricken Italian-American, Puerto Rican, and African American constituents, a concern which made his office a model of constituent service and advocacy for the poor and discriminated against. Income from Marcantonio's law practice went to both supplementing his constituent service and his political campaigns. He died at age 52 in 1954 with less than $10,000 in assets.

The author discusses at length the symbiotic relationship between Marcantonio and the Republican Party--and to a lesser degree, Marcantonio and the Democratic Party--but does not fully investigate the full implications of that alliance. We do not learn for instance how American Labor Party Republicans elected to the New York legislature used their power to advance or to thwart the public policy goals that Marcantonio pushed in Washington.

This is a book that should be read for historical perspective by anyone pondering the past and potential future role of the Green Party in American politics, or third party politics in general. This book also sheds valuable light on the generally underreported story of the rise of Americans of Italian descent from poverty to solid middle class status, the early and since abandoned efforts to classify them as a racial minority analagous to African Americans, the development of bilingual education and other educational innovations of Marcantonio's friend, neighbor, and mentor Leonard Covello, the struggles for civil rights before Martin Luther King, Jr. led the Montgomery Bus Boycott a year and a few months after Marcantonio's death, and the role and limitations of political machines as social and political forces in New York City history.

At a time in which Joe Lieberman has won election to the Senate as a third-party Republican-backed candidate, when former New York Mayor Rudolph Giulani--Marcantonio's polar opposite in many ways-- appears appears poised to be the first major American Presidential candidate of Italian descent, when the Green Party struggles against constant allegations that it's operational goals are to elect Republicans, the story of Vito Marcantonio and his long-dead allies and opponents has a surprising and growing continuing relevance.

Vito Marcantonio (1902-1954) had two political careers. The first, amply documented in Meyer's well-researched biography, was as an East Harlem patriot who championed his largely Italian/Puerto Rican constituency in the U.S. House of Representatives. A lifelong resident of his New York City neighborhood, Marcantonio worked his butt off to listen to his neighbors and serve their needs, apparently spending much of his congressional salary and his law practice earnings on staffing his offices. One can argue that his principal efforts during his seven terms in the House (1935-37, 1939-51) were centered on currying enough voter favor to gain re-election, but the desire to better the lives of his constituents seems to have been sincere.

Marcantonio had a second career, concurrent with the first. He was arguably the most extremely "leftist" congressman of his era, and at a time when the terms "socialist" and "communist" still had some traction with voters in certain areas of the country, Marcantonio -- though never acknowledging himself to be a Socialist or Communist -- was the principal exponent in the federal government of the values espoused by the Communist Party of the United States. In return, his name became a buzzword for vociferous anti-Communists in the late 1940s, as the Cold War got underway, in much the same way that today's so-called "conservatives" love to pillory Nancy Pelosi or Barney Frank. Richard Nixon famously tried using Marcantonio's voting record in 1950 to discredit Helen Gahagan Douglas, his opponent in the California Senate election. (Less well-known is the fact that Douglas also used the same tactic on Nixon, trying to tie his voting record to Marcantiono's. See Stephen Ambrose's Nixon biography.)

Meyer maintains that Marcantonio was never formally a communist, or a member of the American communist party, though he had close ties to that organization and many of its "fronts," and was happy to receive electoral and financial assistance from the CPUSA. He was quick to denounce efforts to abridge the civil liberties of American communists, and his positions on certain foreign policy issues -- U.S. entry into World War II, support for the Marshall Plan, U.S. participation in the Korean War -- often parroted the CPUSA/Soviet line. Certainly, according to Meyer, Marcantonio's success with East Harlem voters was far more based on New York's ethnic politics and his strong sense of constituent service than on any leftist ideology he stated. There is no credible evidence that Marcantonio had anything to do with the espionage activities of the CPUSA or any of its members. He believed, as the communists espoused, that working men and women deserved a better break from the capitalist economy and that government should take more actions to provide that break. One doesn't have to be an orthodox Marxist to agree with that (nor does disagreeing with it necessarily make one a "fascist," a term Marcantonio found it convenient to fling at any number of opponents and adversaries in that conflicted era).

Meyer obviously is much more interested in the first aspect of Marcantonio's career -- his service to his East Harlem constituents -- than in Marcantonio's role as a national exponent of leftist ideas. That's the strength, and the major failing, of this book. Unless you are vitally interested in the history of electoral politics in New York City, much of the content of this book is going to bore you. Meyer seems to dismiss the vociferous and often unfair anti-Communist attacks on Marcantonio as irrelevant to his success as an advocate for his constituency. But omitting the controversy that made Marcantonio a national political figure misses much of what made this man such a remarkable politician.

If you are unfamiliar with Vito Marcantonio, Meyer's biography is a good introduction. But I missed a real sense of the man -- as opposed to the public figure -- and I would like to know more about the ideology that propelled him into a national figure, and how the attacks on him affected his life and career. This book feels incomplete, and Meyer or someone needs to write a more rounded and extensive biography of this man.

Emerson said an institution is the shadow of single man, a lesson Gerald Meyer learned during research on the history of the American Labor Party (ALP).

In his "Acknowledgements" to the book under consideration here, Meyer confesses, "In the process of accomplishing this formidable task, I fell in love with Vito Marcantonio. The ALP was an important institution, but Marcantonio loomed over it."

"Vito Marcantonio: Radical Politician," represents the skillful and thorough response to a series of questions posed by Herbert Gutman, the sponsor of Meyer's proposed doctoral dissertation: "Who voted for him? Why did they vote for him? What was East Harlem like? What did people do for a living? Who owned the stores?"

Meyer's work succeeded two earlier efforts, "Vito Marcantonio: Radical in Congress," by Alan Schaffer and "Vito Marcantonio, The People's Politician," by Salvatore John LaGumina.

Schaffer's effort placed Marcantonio in the national firmament of the times, 1902 to 1952, and LaGumina added some anecdotal history and a slightly different angle than that of his predecessor.

But it is Meyer's book that places Marcantonio in the New York of his day and, specifically, the East Harlem neighborhood that produced him.

Here is Marcantonio diving off a truck into the street mob during a speech, arms flailing. There the Congressman confessing unconditional trust in his grandmother who attends rallies with an umbrella under her coat in the event of fisticuffs.

And here is the "retail" congressman delivering coal and Christmas baskets to troubled neighbors, a guy who empties his pockets to the hard luck cases that pock his district.

Meyer's work goes where the other two did not in regards to the Marcantonio Papers archived at the New York Public Library on 42 St. and Fifth Avenue.

In these 85 boxes can be found dusty, flaky records of "Marc's" public life and work, but more importantly, the voices of his constituency, which Meyer has culled for insightful passages from letters both handwritten and typed.

Yes, Meyer meticulously details the complicated nature of New York City's "fusion" politics and the skill with which Marcantonio navigated them to unique projection as a national leader of far left-wing forces.

But the author also renders the radical politician's story an organic whole.

Rather than the narrative of some anomalous oddity out of time, we have in this book a man fleshed out and brought to life by the environment that produced him and to which he gave so much form, through his leadership.

In his conclusion, Meyer laments Marcantonio's slow fade into anonymity and argues that, "his story deserves to be known, because it contradicts so many of the platitudes which pass for American history and therefore suggests new ways of thinking about the present."

"Radical Politician" takes the first, bold steps in this effort, loyally transcribing the voices of desperate constituents seeking assistance of every kind and often beyond the natural purview of the congressional representative.

Meyer began his project just in time to provide his work with an important layer of oral history extracted from residents of East Harlem, now mostly departed.

Through these voices we gain the story of progressive and communist movements during the 1920s, '30s, and '40s and begin affixing them to real faces; faces worn with lines wrought by terrible struggles.

And through these same voices, we hear Marcantonio's, because they were one and the same.

Thanks to Meyer's rendering of the fighting congressman and his world, we realize that, beneath the Jazz Age's glamorous narration, people were being crushed by the inequities in American life.

We witness how the annihilation accelerated with the next decade's economic miseries so that these movements appear not so much as insidious viruses inexplicably invading the body politic, rather as natural responses to a clamor for redemption.

And through Marcantonio's story, we can see how the ensuing repression was not the result of some lightning-strike catharsis which brought Americans to their senses, but the product of a brutal rollback to darkness fueled by American capital's resurgence after the healthy profit-making venture that was World War II.

"Radical Politician" renders a multifaceted talent: a lawyer, political street fighter, parliamentarian, neighborhood Don, leftist commissar. A man who had affairs, yet was sainted by those who knew and were affected by his labors, a man who switched tacks to accommodate the shifting sands of mid-century politics, and committed enough mistakes to make him more human and beautiful than so many that populate our historical memory.