Vito Anthony Marcantonio

• Vito Marcantonio
• Born: December 10, 1902
• Died: August 9, 1954

Radical politician and member of Congress, was the son of an Italian-born mother, Angelina (deDobitis) Marcantonio, and Samuel Marcantonio, a carpenter and a second-generation immigrant. “Marc,” as Vito Marcantonio was known from his adolescence, was born in a poverty-stricken area of New York City’s East Harlem, a district then peopled by a mixed population of Italians, Irish, Jews, and blacks. He attended public grammar schools and then DeWitt Clinton High School, where he came to the attention of Alderman (later member of Congress and Mayor) Fiorello H. La Guardia by giving a fiery speech on old-age pensions at a school assembly.

La Guardia quickly became the young man’s political mentor, and after his graduation from New York University Law School in June 1925, Marcantonio became a clerk in La Guardia’s law office. He had already managed La Guardia’s 1924 congressional campaign in his East Harlem home district, and he was also named head of the independent Fiorello La Guardia Political Club. In 1925 Marcantonio married Miriam A. Sanders, a social worker originally from New Hampshire; they had no children.

The political and personal relationship between La Guardia and Marcantonio taught the younger man a flamboyant political style. One onlooker described his typical platform manner: “On the campaign rostrum he becomes a shrieking rabble-rouser, his voice shrills to a soprano pitch agonizing to the ear, and the ‘dese, dem and dose’s’ flood forth as his hands flail the air and his right foot stomps the floor. Sometimes he gets so carried away with his gesticulating and shrieking that his sentences lose all pretense of logic, and finally even his voice loses coherence; this is when his political audiences go wildest.” The friendship with Mayor La Guardia also gave Marcantonio special access to City Hall, with its political plums and patronage. La Guardia’s sponsorship cooled only in the late 1940s after a decade of Marcantonio’s flirtation with the American Communist party.

In 1930 Marcantonio was appointed assistant United States attorney for the southern district of New York. In 1934, after La Guardia had surrendered his congressional seat to become mayor of New York City, Marcantonio ran for Congress from the East Harlem district, ending his campaign as had his mentor before him by speaking at La Guardia’s “lucky corner” of 116th Street and Lexington Avenue. With the exception of one term—from 1936 to 1938, when he was defeated in the Democratic landslide produced by the New Deal—Marcantonio held the seat until 1951; he became a power to be reckoned with—the “Little Napoleon of Harlem.”

From 1937 on Marcantonio generally adopted the political positions of the American Communist party, but he always denied being a Communist. After abruptly changing his position on American entry into World War II following the German attack on the Soviet Union, he asserted: “I believe in the capitalistic system, but not in Red-baiting. And just because I often agree with the Russians, that does not mean I’m a Communist. If the Communists advocate wearing clothes, I’m not going to start a nudist colony just to be different.” He never owed his office to the Communists, however. Like La Guardia he built a personal political machine based on the loyalty of his constituents, whose personal problems he often solved and whose political interests he served.

The charge that he was a demagogue rested on the fact that Marcantonio always had a foot in all camps, as well as on his inflammatory rhetoric. He once claimed to have the endorsement of the black evangelist Father Divine—although Divine denied it from his pulpit; he marched in Catholic processions on saints’ days; and he was once called Puerto Rico’s only congressman. At times he was able to capture the nominations of all three political parties in his district—the Democratic party, the Republican party, and the American Labor party. In Congress he pursued the interests of his constituency, no matter how hopeless the cause.

During the New Deal years Marcantonio pumped for civil rights legislation and an-tilynching laws; later he introduced a bill for Puerto Rican independence, including a promise of unlimited indemnities to compensate for “American imperialism.” He also shocked the respectable by flying to Puerto Rico to visit Pedro Albizu Campos, imprisoned for conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States, and promising to get him legal aid.

Marcantonio was the only member of the House of Representatives to vote against American intervention in the Korean war in 1950, and the Democratic, Republican, and Liberal parties joined to defeat him for reelection by backing a single candidate in the 1952 campaign. He still received more than forty-one percent of the vote, losing by a margin of 14,000 ballots.

Returning to private law practice, Marcantonio defended W. E. B. DuBois, the black intellectual and one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, against charges that he was an agent for a foreign power, and represented the American Communist party in hearings before the Subversive Activities Control Board.

Marcantonio was planning to run for Congress again as an independent candidate in 1954, when he died suddenly of a heart attack one morning on his way to work in the City Hall district of lower Manhattan. He was fifty-one. He was given the last rites of the Catholic church by a neighborhood priest, but the church refused him burial in sacred Catholic ground, and he was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, near the grave of La Guardia.

At Marcantonio’s death, The New York Post lamented the man he might have been, if he had not given his allegiance to the left. He was, however, a maverick by temperament, and it is doubtful that he would have made the compromises necessary to rise to a position of influence in either of the two major parties. Even his enemies respected his integrity and his loyalty to the people of his district. As a truly radical voice in Congress he established a tradition that did not survive the rigors of the Cold War.

Marcantonio’s papers are in the collection of the New York Public Library. Columbia University’s Oral History Collection contains memoirs of one of his campaigns. A campaign film, narrated by Paul Robeson, has recently been added to the film collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. For his speeches, see A. T. Rubinstein, ed., / Vote My Conscience: Debates, Speeches, and Writings of Vito Marcantonio, 1935-1950 (1956). Two biographies are available: S. J. LaGumina, Vito Marcantonio, the People’s Politician (1969), and A. Schaffer, Vito Marcantonio, Radical in Congress (1966). See also H. Goldberg, ed., American Radicals: Some Problems and Personalities (1957); R. Luthin, American Demagogues: Twentieth Century (1959); S. Shalett, “They Couldn’t Purge Vito,” The Saturday Evening Post, January 11, 1947; The Dictionary of American Biography; and Current Biography, 1949. Obituaries appeared in The New York Times and The New York Herald Tribune, August 10, 1954.