*** 1 ***New Americans
There was no Statue of Liberty to greet and inspire a pair of newlyweds, Achille La Guardia and Irene Coen La Guardia, as they sailed into New York Harbor in 1880. The lady who would soon become a symbol of the New World’s promise had yet to be assembled on a spit of earth called Bedloe’s Island. The words that would one day adorn her pedestal, a welcome to the poor and the tired, had yet to be written. The great city that the La Guardias would now call home was on the verge of electing an immigrant from Ireland, W. R. Grace, as mayor, even as hostile newspapers questioned whether he was a legal citizen of the United States.
Achille and Irene were in the vanguard of a new kind of immigration, exiles from Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe; Italians, Jews, and others whose lives, beliefs, customs, and traditions were very different from the Irish and Germans who had crossed the Atlantic in the preceding four decades. To twenty-first-century eyes, the change would seem to be little more than a variation on a theme, for, like the majority of native-born, most of the new immigrants were white (whether they were accepted as white is another story entirely) and most were Christians of some sort or another, with the obvious exception being the Eastern European Jews in flight from the pogroms of czarist Russia. At the time of their arrival in the late nineteenth century, however, the Italians, Hungarians, Poles, and Yiddish-speaking Russian Jews were hardly thought to share very much in common with the Irish and Germans who arrived a generation earlier, never mind the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who considered themselves true Americans. The La Guardias would have two children within three years of settling in New York; one of them, their son, Fiorello, whose first name meant “Little Flower” in Italian, would know what it was like to be referred to as a wop—and worse—not simply by cruel children but also by his colleagues in Congress and New York’s City Hall. They looked at this rumpled, small man with a vowel-enriched name and saw somebody who was not one of them, not like them—indeed, somebody who threatened them.
Migrants like Irene and Achille La Guardia posed new questions about what it meant to be an American. Irene was a Jew born in 1859 in the city of Trieste, then under control of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Achille was born a decade earlier to a Catholic family in Foggia, on Italy’s Adriatic coast, but in matters of religious faith, he identified himself as having none. They came to America because they saw no future for themselves in the old country, where a marriage between a Jew and a Catholic—especially one who rejected the faith of his parents—was uncommon and unwelcome.
They were not in steerage with the huddled masses; they were nobody’s rejected refuse. Achille was the son of a government official, a talented musician who performed in towns throughout Italy and on ships that took him to New York as a young man. Irene was reared in a cosmopolitan city of several nationalities in what is today northeast Italy, near the border with Slovenia. They met at a dance, were married after a six-month courtship, and soon were on their way to America, not because they lacked opportunity or were hungry, but simply because they wished for the freedom to be themselves without the overbearing constraints of tradition. Achille had been to New York; he knew it was a place where a Jew from Trieste and a nonbeliever from Foggia could go about their business without eliciting the scowls of neighbors and the disapproval of family.
They were among three hundred thousand Italians who passed through the nation’s first-ever official immigration center in an old military installation called Castle Garden in downtown Manhattan in the 1880s. The number of Italians coming through New York Harbor doubled in the decade after the La Guardias arrived and exploded during the first decade of the twentieth century, when two million Italians entered the United States through Castle Garden’s replacement facility on Ellis Island, where, for a few years, they might have been helped by a young Italian-speaking translator named Fiorello La Guardia.
Most Italians who settled in New York started their new lives in a neighborhood that looked, sounded, and smelled like something they left behind. A slice of downtown Manhattan centered on Mulberry Street had been transformed into what became known as Little Italy, a neighborhood filled with restaurants, bakeries, and butchers that brought a touch of Naples to New York City. But the La Guardias chose the new rather than the familiar. Achille and Irene found an apartment in Greenwich Village, a gathering place even then for intellectuals and artists, some of whom were born in the United States, others fellow migrants from a handful of European countries, and still others of African descent. This, and not the ethnic fortress of Little Italy, was where the La Guardias felt at home.
The older La Guardias surely learned something about the diversity of their adopted country from the extraordinary mosaic that lay just outside their doorstep. Their children, however, would have to absorb such lessons in a very different sort of setting. Fiorello, born in 1882, and his older sister, Gemma, born in 1881, were small children when Achille joined the U.S. Army as a musician in 1885, putting an end to their life in New York and introducing them to the high peaks of the Adirondacks, the vast expanse of the Great Plains, and the dusty grandeur of the Southwest. (A third La Guardia child, Richard, was born on an army base in South Dakota in 1887.) The man who would one day represent a portion of Manhattan in Congress and serve as mayor of the country’s largest city for a dozen years had no memories of his earliest years as a native New Yorker.
Fiorello La Guardia was no street kid, despite his love of rough-and-tumble. Rather, he was a child of the military who moved from base to base as his father’s career unfolded. That experience certainly provided the young Fiorello with an appreciation for those who, like his immigrant father, put service to country above self. And he fell in love with the freedom and the possibilities that the American West represented. “God’s country,” he called it. “Our playground was not measured in acres, or in city blocks, but in miles and miles.” On the army posts and in the small towns the posts supported, the energetic young boy came in contact with American diversity in a form very different from what his parents found in Greenwich Village. He would recall speaking with Native Americans, miners, railroad laborers from Mexico and Italy, and of course soldiers from anywhere and everywhere during his formative years in Arizona, particularly in the town of Prescott.
It was there, too, that La Guardia first encountered what he called “racial feeling born of ignorance.” A type of street musician known as an organ grinder came into Prescott, accompanied by a monkey. Organ grinders were predominately Italian, and while they were a common sight in New York City, they were exotic in Arizona. As Fiorello and his friends gathered to watch the spectacle, several children pointed to the only other person they knew with a conspicuously Italian name: ten-year-old Fiorello La Guardia. “A dago with a monkey!” one said, pointing at the musician and then at La Guardia. “Hey, Fiorello, you’re a dago, too. Where’s your monkey?”
The insult still bothered La Guardia half a century later. “It hurt,” he wrote. “Some of their families hadn’t been in the country any longer than mine. What difference was there between us?” It was to be the first of many times when La Guardia was singled out for insult because of his heritage, but hateful remarks only fortified his patriotism. If there was to be a battle over what it meant to be an American, La Guardia intuitively understood that he was on the right side of history.
*** 2 ***Army Brat
As a self-described pacifist who sometimes saw the world’s conflicts in almost Marxist terms—“for the price of a single military attack in battle all the babies in New York could be properly fed,” he said in the 1920s—Fiorello La Guardia was seemingly an unlikely champion of the nation’s veterans and the wars to which they were called. He had promised he would vote against U.S. entry into World War I while campaigning in 1916, a promise he did not keep, and when the war was over, he questioned the need for a standing army, suggesting that conflict was inevitable when generals were left to their own devices. Many of his allies in the Progressive movement passionately argued against America’s entry into World War I.
And yet La Guardia reserved a sizable portion of his boundless enthusiasm for those who wore the nation’s uniform. No flag-waving conservative could outbid him in support of veterans; his embrace of his old army rank spoke to the importance he placed on his own time in uniform and on military service in general.
What separated La Guardia from his more skeptical Progressive colleagues was his unique childhood. “Many of my experiences as an Army brat were useful to me when as a legislator I had to study bills affecting our Army and could apply this first-hand knowledge,” he once said.
That firsthand knowledge started with his father, Achille, the bandmaster of the 11th Regiment, U.S. Infantry. Achille obviously was not a hardened combat soldier, but he lived the military life, moving from base to base, socializing with other troops, and accepting the disciplined life imposed on anybody wearing the nation’s uniform. “Army life was quite different in the eighteen eighties and nineties from what it is today,” La Guardia wrote in 1947. “The pay of an enlisted man was $9 a month. The food was real, honest-to-goodness he-man Army food. Soldiers were tough. They had to be to survive existing conditions.”
Fiorello kept a careful watch over the troops as they marched and trained, especially during the family’s most memorable posting at the Whipple Barracks in Prescott, the onetime home of the African American unit known as the Buffalo Soldiers. These soldiers were gone by the time the La Guardias arrived, having fought against the Native American tribes of the Southwest. Their replacements in the 11th Infantry were mobilized in the late spring of 1894, when President Grover Cleveland called out the army during a national strike against the Pullman Company, a maker of railroad cars. The nation’s railroads were severely disrupted, leading to a crisis in mail delivery—the pretext for the federal government’s intervention. The 11th Regiment’s troops cleaned their weapons, mounted their horses, and rode to the rail yards of the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad to protect the company’s property. While the eleven-year-old Fiorello watched with admiration as the grim-faced troops left the barracks, horses kicking up the desert’s red dust, he couldn’t help but wonder why the “bayonets of United States soldiers” were taking sides in a dispute between a private company and its workers.
The most memorable soldier young Fiorello met in Prescott was actually still a civilian when he became something of a hero to the short, boisterous son of the regiment’s bandmaster. William “Buckey” O’Neill was the mayor of Prescott, a graduate of the Georgetown University law school, a journalist who may have witnessed the infamous gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, the head of a local militia, and a county sheriff who was part of a posse that captured a gang of masked train robbers after a dramatic gunfight—in other words, he was a character straight out of Rough Riders, as played by Sam Elliott.
O’Neill was a Populist, a third national party organized during the dying years of the Gilded Age on behalf of southern and western farmers and ranchers deeply suspicious of the moneyed interests of the East Coast. The Populists’ best-known cause was the free coinage of silver, which in essence was a call for a looser monetary policy to ease the debt burden of heavily mortgaged farmers. But Populists like O’Neill also called for dramatic political reforms, including the direct election of U.S. senators, a progressive national income tax, and greater regulation of railroads. According to La Guardia biographer Lawrence Elliott, the teenage Fiorello saw O’Neill as the “model of the true and faithful public servant.” His admiration for the dashing, reform-minded mayor only grew when O’Neill delivered a speech in town shortly after the USS Maine exploded and sank in Havana Harbor in 1898. The press, especially two powerful New York papers, the World and the Journal, screamed for revenge and blamed Cuba’s Spanish rulers for the sinking of the Maine. But President William McKinley seemed more inclined to wait for actual facts than to rely on the accounts of newspapers eager to increase their circulation. The war hawks became shriller by the day, and Fiorello himself wondered why the president seemed to be doing nothing. “There was a feeling in our military circles that President McKinley was hesitating too long,” he recalled in his autobiography decades later.
O’Neill shared the outrage and certainty of the New York publishers who were pushing McKinley to ask for a declaration of war. As Fiorello looked on, he told an audience in Prescott that the United States was morally obliged to eject Spain, a symbol of the Old World’s corruption, from the Americas. He repeated that theme some weeks later, after the United States did as the newspapers demanded and declared war on Spain. O’Neill visited Fiorello’s school and explained to the students why war was necessary. Fiorello at least was convinced.
With war declared, O’Neill was among two hundred local volunteers who assembled at Whipple Barracks to form what they called the Arizona Cowboy Regiment. They rode out in early May headed for Texas to join the newly established 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry, soon to be known as the Rough Riders.
The La Guardias, too, were soon on the move. The 11th Regiment was sent to St. Louis and then to Louisiana as the troops received training for combat in Cuba. Achille went to Louisiana on his own, for all families had to stay behind at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis. This simply wouldn’t do for the restless son of the regiment’s bandleader. At the age of fifteen, Fiorello informed his mother that he wished to sign up for the army and join his father and the other troops he so admired when they landed in Cuba. Irene was horrified. Bad enough that her husband would soon be in danger. She was not about to allow her Little Flower to follow in Achille’s bootsteps.
Fiorello was not deterred, naturally. He made his way to a local army recruiting station and informed the officer in charge that he wished to enlist. It’s impossible to know what exactly the officer thought when he looked down at the small teenager with an eager look on his face. But we do know what he said: No thanks.
This ought to have closed the matter. It did not. Fiorello was determined to follow his father and Buckey O’Neill to Cuba, and if he couldn’t do it as a soldier, he’d do it as a civilian. He presented himself to an editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, one of the Midwest’s leading newspapers, and announced that he wished to serve as a war correspondent. Again, it is impossible to know what the undoubtedly hard-bitten editor thought as this cocky teenager argued that he was qualified to join the more than two hundred American reporters—including some of the most famous journalists of the era—who were already assigned to cover the war. But somehow Fiorello left the Post-Dispatch’s offices with a credential—and the understanding that he wouldn’t actually be paid for his reports from the front line. It didn’t matter. He had the credential.
He was dispatched to Mobile, Alabama, where his father’s unit and others were beginning their training for deployment to Cuba. The young man got his first byline—though his name was misspelled as LaGuardi—in late May, when he reported breathlessly that the troops were in “fine spirits” and eager “to defend their country,” never mind that the Spanish did not pose any sort of strategic threat to the United States. He then moved on to Tampa, Florida, where the 11th Regiment and others made final preparations before deployment. But as the date drew near, Achille La Guardia became terribly ill after eating army-issued rations that were beyond spoiled—the meat would later be referred to as “embalmed beef” that had been loaded with spices to cover up the foul taste. The diseased food, supplied by an army contractor, nearly killed him. He didn’t make it to Cuba, and neither did Fiorello, who remained behind to look after his stricken father. Achille La Guardia was honorably discharged for medical reasons in August 1898, even as the war was coming to a glorious conclusion, at least from the American perspective. His discharge papers noted that he had been laid low by “diseases of the stomach and bowels,” along with several other ailments. Father and son returned to St. Louis as the nation celebrated a victory that planted the American flag in the Philippines and on Guam and Puerto Rico, while Cuba passed from Spanish control to become a U.S. protectorate.
It was, in the words of Secretary of State John Hay, a “splendid little war.” But that was not how Fiorello would remember it. The fresh-faced teenager who so badly wanted to play a role in the fighting would carry memories not of glorious triumphs but of his father’s wretched illness, caused, in Fiorello’s view, by greedy contractors who knowingly poisoned men in uniform. “That experience,” he later wrote, “never left my mind.”
Nor was the war particularly splendid for Fiorello’s idol from Prescott, Buckey O’Neill. He rode with Teddy Roosevelt, with whom he became friendly, against the Spanish position on San Juan Hill near Santiago. He had told his fellow Rough Riders that Spain had yet to make a bullet that would ever hit him. Legend has it that he uttered those words just before one such bullet hit him in the face and exited the back of his head. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
The reunited La Guardias returned briefly to New York City and then decided to recross the Atlantic back to Europe. Achille, still suffering from his intestinal ailments and disillusioned by life in the New World, no longer saw a future for himself and his family in the United States. They settled in Trieste, his mother’s native city, and it was there that Achille died six years later in 1904 at fifty-five. Though the cause was likely heart disease, in his son’s eyes, he was a “victim of condemned meat.”
As a freshman member of Congress in 1917, La Guardia introduced a bill that would have subjected crooked contractors to the death penalty if they were found guilty of selling rotten food or shoddy supplies to the armed services during wartime. The measure went nowhere, but he had made his patriotic point: Those who served their country in a time of war deserved their country’s support. Anything less was un-American.
*** 3 ***The Flying Congressman
American isolationism in the twentieth century is often associated with the political dynamics of the Midwest, with La Guardia’s future allies Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin and Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska voting against U.S. entry into World War I, and the Chicago Tribune (“An American Paper for Americans”) castigating Franklin Roosevelt’s pro-Allied policies before Pearl Harbor. But early in the century, many of New York’s ethnic neighborhoods were just as skeptical of American involvement overseas as the prairie towns and cities of the heartland, although for different reasons. And as a new member of Congress elected while Europe was at war, Fiorello La Guardia had to consider the isolationism of his constituents, particularly those of Irish and German descent, who shared a historical hatred of America’s future comrades, the British. But in the end, he ignored their skepticism or outright rejection of the Allied cause.
La Guardia was already a known quantity when he barged into the race for New York’s 14th congressional district in 1916. Two years earlier, he had been assigned the role of Republican sacrificial lamb in the heavily Democratic district. Rather than campaign politely and accept his defeat gently, La Guardia bitterly assailed his Tammany-backed opponent, a saloonkeeper and Irish immigrant named Michael Farley. La Guardia’s fellow Republicans were shocked that he refused to follow the unwritten rules that governed the behavior of token candidates. They all knew how he came to be nominated: He shouted, “I do,” when somebody at a Republican gathering asked who, if anybody, wanted to run for Congress in the 14th district.
When his fellow Republicans urged La Guardia to dial it down a notch, he replied that he was simply pointing out that his opponent would not be a good congressman. In fact, La Guardia added, he wasn’t even a good bartender. He did not offer any evidence to support this assertion. But he seemed pretty certain of it.
Farley won in 1914 without even campaigning (perhaps he was brushing up on his bartending skills), but La Guardia performed far better than expected, losing by just about 1,700 votes rather than the usual margins of 6,000 or so. If anyone was so foolish as to believe La Guardia was content to have done his duty, well, they clearly didn’t know him very well. He was ready for a rematch.
Circumstances were very different as La Guardia trooped from block to block, north to south, east to west, in 1916. The war that had just begun during his previous campaign was now an appalling calamity. Indeed, if there were ever a time to wonder about the sanity and humanity of the old men who sent young men into battle, 1916 was the year to raise such questions. The monthslong Battle of the Somme turned the green fields of northern France into a mass grave—nearly twenty thousand British soldiers were killed on the very first day of battle, July 1. By the time the fray was over in November, a million young men were dead or maimed. And all for naught. The battle ended in a stalemate.
Copyright © 2024 by Terry Golway