Marcantonio, Vito

MARCANTONIO, VITO (1902-1954). A US congressional representative serving East Harlem for fourteen years (1934–1936, 1938–1950), Vito Marcantonio joined the American Labor Party (ALP), a Left-leaning political third party, in 1936, soon after its founding. Within two years he became the leader of its left wing and by 1942 its de facto and by 1948 its elected leader. In the House of Representatives, he led legislative struggles on behalf of African Americans, the foreign-born, and the working class as a whole. Working through the ALP and other progressive organizations, he helped move the city and state’s political life leftward. Marcantonio was arguably the most electorally successful radical American politician of the twentieth century.

Ideologically and organizationally, Marcantonio was closely allied with the Communist Party. While presenting domestic issues from a class perspective, he did not attack the capitalist system as a whole or advocate socialism. Instead, he excoriated “Wall Street.” However, he approached foreign policy within a Leninist framework and sought the redistribution of wealth through expanding the public sector of the economy and society.

Marcantonio was the only major American political figure to consistently insist on the Communist Party’s legitimate place in the nation’s political life. In 1943, on the floor of the House, for example, he declared: “The war against the Communists, who, as an integral part of 130 million Americans, are fighting and working like all other Americans for victory against the enemy.” In 1952, at the height of McCarthyism, he described the Communist Party as an, “American party operating in what it considered to be the best interests of the American working class and people.” Marcantonio held office in and otherwise promoted a score of organizations, unions, and publications associated with the Party. These included, the International Labor Defense, the Committee for the Protection of the Foreign-Born, the Furriers Union, as well as the New Masses, and L’Unità del Popolo, its Italian-language newsweekly.

Marcantonio, however, was not a Communist. He had occasional disagreements with the Party, including in 1953 an acrimonious, semipublic clash over its decision to withdraw support from the ALP. While accepting the Party’s ideological lead and its central place in the politics he avowed, Marcantonio represented an independent force based on his charisma and the fiercely loyal East Harlem constituency. They had a symbiotic relationship: for the Party, Marcantonio became the national spokesman for its general program; for Marcantonio, the Party provided the financial and human resources needed to fuel his organization. And it was Marcantonio’s political machine that, through its legendary delivery of services and tireless electioneering, converted East Harlem’s adulation for its native son into votes.

Marcantonio was born in Italian Harlem and resided his entire life within a four-block radius near its center. In ways small and large he was organically a part of what in the 1930s was the largest and the most Italian community in the United States. Marcantonio lived an Italian-American lifestyle: typical for its time, he lived in the same house with his grandmother and mother, marched in church processions, wore religious amulets, and socialized with “the boys,” whom “outsiders” called the Mafia.

As the son of a foreign-born mother and the grandson of a foreign-born grandmother, he upheld, with an unrivaled persistence and ferocity, the rights of the foreign-born and specifically the Italians. In 1944, when a representative from Alabama disparaged Marcantonio’s nationality, he reminded the House, “While my people did not come over on the Mayflower, [they] have always fought for liberty.... We are an integral part of the living flesh and blood of our country.” Italian Harlem’s residents gave an ever-increasing majority of its votes to Marcantonio in the ten elections he contested.

By 1936 he had created a second, equally loyal electoral base, East Harlem’s El Barrio, the largest Puerto Rican community in the continental United States and the center of Puerto Rican life in New York City. Reflecting the strong Left currents in Puerto Rico, this community hosted a wide array of Left organizations. It became the only district where the American Labor Party was the first party. Marcantonio adopted the Puerto Rican cause as his own. With Gilberto Concepción de Gracia, the future leader of the Puerto Rican Independence Party, he served as co-counsel for Pedro Albizu Campos, the leader of the Nationalist Party. In Congress, Marcantonio submitted five bills for Puerto Rico’s independence, all of which sought to indemnify the island as a means of repairing the ravages inflicted on the Island by “Wall Street imperialism.” On a day-to-day basis, he acted as de facto congressman for Puerto Rico. Through his actions, he succeeded in having the island included in the Wage and Hours legislation and equally share in appropriations of all sorts. Constantly attacked in the commercial press for “bringing the Puerto Ricans to New York City,” in 1949, on Election Day Eve in the center of Italian Harlem before fifteen-thousand people, he shouted: “Yes, I do defend the Puerto Ricans as our most recently arrived, as against the kind of discrimination that was practiced against the Irish, the Jews, and the Italians in the past.”

The African American residents in East Harlem, though somewhat fewer in numbers, added a third force to Marcantonio’s coalition. In the House of Representatives, he was the major proponent of civil rights legislation. He served as sponsor and floor leader for legislation intended for the abolition of the poll tax, making lynching a federal crime, and codifying the Fair Employment Practices Bills Commission. Countless times he attached antidiscrimination amendments onto appropriation bills, and then forced roll-call votes, thereby maximizing political pressure to ensure their passage.

Marcantonio’s radicalism engendered an increasingly virulent and determined opposition. In 1944 his district was enlarged to include Yorkville, an area whose majority German- and Irish American communities of largely successful working- and middle-class residents proved inhospitable to his candidacy. Nonetheless, his huge majorities in East Harlem still returned him to Congress. In 1947 the New York State legislature passed the Wilson-Pakula Act (which Marcantonio said had everything but his picture on it) that abolished New York State’s open-primary system. Previously, a candidate registered in one party could enter primaries of other parties. Henceforth, this cross-over could occur only if a candidate secured the permission of their party’s county committee.

By running as a maverick Republican, Marcantonio (who had served as Fiorello La Guardia’s aide-de-camp in the district while he represented East Harlem in the House from 1922 to 1931), followed in his mentor’s footsteps. From 1938 to 1948, despite his ALP affiliation, he contested both major party primaries, winning one (1938, 1940, 1946) or both (1942 and 1944). In 1948, amid a growing press campaign identifying him with Communism and organized crime, he was compelled to seek reelection solely under the banner of the ALP, which was described in the commercial press as Communist influenced, controlled, or dominated. In 1948, as part of a three-way contest, he narrowly won. In 1949, in part to keep alive his only political vehicle, Marcantonio ran as the ALP candidate for mayor. In a three-way race, he received a majority in East Harlem and substantial votes in African- and Italian American districts, but only 13.8 percent of the citywide vote. Finally, in 1950, shortly after casting the sole vote in opposition to the Korean War, Marcantonio faced George Donovan, a “regular” Democrat, who ran as a coalition candidate of the Democratic, Republican, and Liberal parties. Despite an increase in his vote from 1948 (from 36 to 43 percent) and East Harlem’s 60-percent majority, Marcantonio could not overcome what he called the “gang up.”

After his defeat, Marcantonio became co-attorney along with John Abt, for the Communist Party before the Subversive Activities Control Board and successfully represented individuals (including W. E. B. Du Bois), whose political views placed them in legal jeopardy.

On 9 August, while returning from a printer with nominating petitions for an attempted comeback, just outside City Hall Park, Vito Marcantonio, at fifty-one years of age, fell dead of a massive heart attack. The Roman Catholic Church refused him a Catholic burial. Amid a massive outpouring of people, he was buried near La Guardia in the nondenominational Woodlawn Cemetery, where his epitaph reads: “Vito Marcantonio: Defender of Human Rights.”

Shortly after Marcantonio’s death, Paul Robeson eulogized him as, “The Thaddeus Stevens of the first half of the twentieth century… the foremost spokesman for the rights of man the Congress has produced in the twentieth century.”

LaGumina, John Salvatore. Vito Marcantonio: The People’s Politician. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1969.

Meyer, Gerald. Vito Marcantonio: Radical Politician. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

Rubinstein, Annette, ed. I Vote My Conscience: Debates, Speeches, and Writings of Vito Marcantonio, 1935–1950. New York: Vito Marcantonio Memorial, 1956. Reprinted in 2002 by the John D. Calandra Italian-American Institute (Queens College/CUNY)

Schaffer, Alan. Vito Marcantonio: Radical in Congress. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1966.

Vito Marcantonio Papers, 1935-1953. Overview, New York Public Library Archives and Manuscripts. http://archives.nypl.org/mss/1871