Below I have linked a you tube clip from the Vito Marcantonio Forum, which struggles to educate people everywhere on the life and work of Vito Marcantonio, perhaps the greatest peoples progressive congressman of the 20th century, and that is not hyperbole.
Vito Marcantonio was born into a poor Italian immigrant family in East Harlem in 1902. He went to Dewitt Clinton High School in the community and distinguished himself as a student and debater, particularly in defense of labor and civil liberties.
He caught the attention of the districts progressive Republican congressman Fiorello La Guardia after he spoke on behalf of old age at a high school assembly .
La Guardia became Marcantonio’s political mentor as he involved himself in grassroots community struggles, worked his way through New York University Law School. In Congress LaGuardia, who was elected Mayor on New York in 1933, was one of small group of congressman, later called by scholars urban liberals, who influenced through their fight for legislation the later New Deal. Marcantonio , was elected to the House as a Republican, and he would soon go far beyond what came to be called liberalism in U.S. politics.
For those interested in learning much more about La Guardia, there is an excellent study by an old and good friend of mine, Gerald Meyer, Vito Marcantonio: Radical Politician(1989) which deals especially with his close relationship to the people of his district. But here are a few valuable highlights from his work in Congress.
When Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935, the first year that Marcantonio, called Marc affectionately by his supporters, was in the House, he was the only major elected Italian-American politician who condemned Mussolini’s brutal invasion of Ethiopia. Defeated in the Roosevelt landslide of 1936, Marcantonio was re-elected from his district in 1938 as a candidate of the American Labor Party, a party established by militant trade unionists and urban liberals to both support the national New Deal government and build an alternative to the local Democratic party machine, for whom politics was both a business and a corrupt one.
In Congress for the next twelve years, Marc for anti-lynching and anti-poll tax legislation, opposed all expressions of colonialism and imperialism, and during WWII fought for both long-term Soviet-American cooperation, the end of Jim Crow in the U.S. And a second front as soon as possible to save the lives of millions of people murdered at the hands of European fascists and Japanese imperialists. He was endlessly libeled by the press, attacked by business leaders and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, but he answered every attack and gave much better than he got. And he survived for a dozen years, never turning his coat. He also was the leading defender in the U.S. Congress of the Puerto Rican people, who were an important part of the East Harlem community.
After the war Marcantonio literally crusaded against the international and domestic cold wars. In 1947, he opposed and voted against the formation of the Central Intelligence Agency. When the National leadership of the Communist Party, with whom he had specific differences but with whom he was generally allied(CPUSA activists had played a leading role in the grassroots struggle that enabled him to stay in the House for six terms) he not only condemned the arrests but worked for their legal defense against the Smith Act, which Marcantonio as a Congressman had voted against in 1940.
A good friend of Dr. WEB Dubois(they were running mates in 1949 on the American Labor Party ticket, Dubois for U.S. Senator, Marc for Mayor) Marcantonio came to Dubois side when he was arrested in 1951 for his opposition to the Korean War, once more on anti-civil liberties legislation that Marcantonio had opposed. By then though, Marcantonio was no longer in Congress and cold war demagoguery in 1950 had produced a political Frankenstein, Joe McCarthy, who would eventually turn on his creators. Marc spoke and voted against the Korean War, but in 1950, a “coalition” of the Democratic, Republican, and Liberal Parties ran a single candidate to defeat him and they were successful, even though he still garnered over forty percent of the vote.
Marc had hopes to run again in his district when he died suddenly sixty years ago. Whether he could have been successful remains debatable, but what is not debatable is what he was and what he accomplished. He lives not only in history but in the future of American politics, a politician who was neither an opportunist nor a sectarian and served his constituents rather than bartering them to those with money and power
