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The LaGuardia myth
Public Interest, Wntr, 2004 by Fred Siegel
HAILED as "America's greatest mayor" in a 1999 national survey, Fiorello LaGuardia is a figure of enduring appeal. According to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, LaGuardia gave Gotham the "most honest and I believe the most efficient municipal government of any city within my recollection." This oft-repeated sentiment has made LaGuardia's Depression-era mayoralty a touchstone for proponents of activist government both nationally and locally. But following his lead would be a mistake.
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LaGuardia was initially a savior of sorts. When he entered office in 1933, the city of New York was literally bankrupt. A quarter of the population was out of work. LaGuardia rescued New York from the 50-year rule of Tammany Hall, which he described as an "army of parasites fattening at the trough of the city treasury." Thanks to Roosevelt's federal subventions, he fended off the Depression's worst moments through a massive and largely successful public-works program. Historians, both popular and academic, echo Robert Moses, LaGuardia's ally and rival, when evaluating his mayoralty: "Only those who remember the cynicism of the late Twenties and early Thirties and remember how low the City's credit and civil morale had fallen can properly gauge what this man did to lift us up and to attract to New York the lost respect of the nation."
But widen the time frame and a different picture emerges. LaGuardia's administration obscured the extraordinary achievements of the earlier, self-sufficient city that made itself into the commercial hub of the United States. Success came at the price of remaking New York from a dynamic commercial city into the "New Deal City," where social-democratic ideals of government and society were institutionalized at the price of economic vitality.
TWO new LaGuardia biographies have further augmented the mayor's already formidable reputation. H. Paul Jeffers' The Napoleon of New York [dagger] paints a picture of LaGuardia's colorful personality. The mayor emerges here as a quipster and source of urban folklore but also as a highly competent statesman. The title refers to the fact that LaGuardia, prickly about his five-foot two-inch stature, kept on his desk a bust of another short man who cast a long shadow. Alyn Brodsky's The Great Mayor [dagger][dagger] is a first-rate popular biography highlighting the rage and resentment that often motivated LaGuardia. Both are testaments to his enduring appeal. Neither biography shows much interest in the mayor's long-term legacy. This is unfortunate, since LaGuardia's favorable treatment speaks worlds about New York's New Deal inheritance, and our attitude toward it.
LaGuardia, both as mayor and in memory, has been the beneficiary of an enduring case of mistaken identity. This is because he was so hard to categorize. As a half-Italian, half-Jewish Episcopalian, LaGuardia was sometimes described as a "one man balanced ticket." Usually considered the consummate New Yorker, LaGuardia did not settle there until the age of 24. He was raised in Arizona, North Dakota, and Missouri, where he developed the political sensibilities of a Western Progressive. By the time he settled in New York in 1906, his views of the world were already fully formed. He was a loner who had few friends and great difficulty forming human attachments, but he nevertheless had a gift for inspiring loyalty and devotion.
A nominal Republican, LaGuardia was the mayor most closely identified with Roosevelt and the New Deal. His crusade against the "boodlers" of Tammany and its "club-house loafers" brought him into an alliance with anti-Tammany patrician allies in the city and the anti-Tammany patrician president from upstate New York. LaGuardia fashioned a successful coalition between good-government reformers and the immigrant poor by putting government efficiency in the service of the poor. He could speak to both groups: His angry and emotional speeches appealed to the poor, while he incorporated the Brahmin reformers by hiring them to run his agencies.
LaGuardia often talked of "efficient scientific government," and his bargain with Roosevelt enabled the mayor to showcase the New Deal approach to government. In the short run, it was an enormous success. To Tammany's deep chagrin, LaGuardia dispensed city services fairly and effectively through a vastly expanded civil-service bureaucracy and an increasingly unionized work force. His goal, he said, was to make New York a "100 percent union town."
Federal grants and loans reshaped the face of the city. LaGuardia collaborators Harold Ickes of the Public Works Administration and Robert Moses built East River Drive, the Henry Hudson, Grand Central, Cross Island, Gowanus and Interborough Parkways, the Triborough Bridge, the Lincoln Tunnel, the Queens Midtown Tunnel, Marine Parkway, piers, public schools, public-housing projects, public baths, parks, prisons, paved streets, Hunter and Brooklyn Colleges, boardwalks, swimming pools and more. The face of urban employment also changed significantly for the better. Shortly after LaGuardia entered office the city had a half-million people on government relief. By 1943, the number had fallen to 73,000.
