Vito Marcantonio was born on this day in 1902 and died in August 9 of 1954. Marc was a leading progressive politician in his day and his influence is still being felt.
Marc’s career demonstrates how people can move across a political spectrum and grow and affect others. He started as a Republican in Fiorello LaGuardia’s wing of the Republican Party. With a change in the times, which is to say a change in the balance of social forces, he moved further to the left. Marc ably represented East Harlem, which then had large Italian, Jewish, Puerto Rican, and Cuban neighborhoods. His movement brought those enclaves together into an all-peoples’ political machine and sent him to Washington as a people’s representative repeatedly.
Vito Marcantonio worked his way up from the poor and tough Italian neighborhoods and became an attorney in the mid-1920s. He moved to the left and to Marxism as he matured. The people gathering around the liberal or progressive Fiorello La Guardia and Robert M. La Follette recognized Marc’s special abilities. He was able to build on this and win a seat in the House of Representatives in 1934 as a Republican. His loss in the political race of 1936 was likely more due to splits in the New Deal administration and corruption at the city level than it was to any failures by Marc and the interracial and militant movement he was building.
Marc gave us everything that he could. He was immigrant-friendly, one of labor’s strongest allies, a heavy-handed and militant defender of civil rights, and some people have credited him with being a founding father of the modern Puerto Rican and Cuban independence movements. A former member of the Young Lords in New York once told me that she saw the Young Lords building in part on Marc’s legacy, and she said that had Marc lived longer the Young Lords would been a different organization than they were. His outstanding failure at the time was his support for the wartime internment of the Japanese in the United States, a failure he shared with many others. This was a terrible and serious error and contradicted everything else he did in his life’s work.
For some context, there were also Italians and Italian-Americans interned and deported in those years. The difference between these people and the Japanese who were interned was that among the Italians were many fascists who had been involved in building a violent fascist movement in the United States. They did indeed threaten national security and the war effort, and they threatened the safety and lives of Italian-American anti-fascists in their communities. The Italians were interned for political reasons, the Japanese for racial and racist reasons. At the time it may have been difficult for sincere anti-fascists to tell the difference. And for what it's worth, the very able Communist leader Gus Hall wrote personally to every Japanese family who he could reach who had been interned in order to apologize and do self-criticism on behalf of the Communist Party. I am not aware of any other party or leader having done that.
Marc’s steady move to the left took him into the American Labor Party, and back into the House in 1938 on the American Labor Party line. He served in the House from 1939 to 1951. For a period of time he could run in multiple primaries and did so, usually winning on the Labor, Democratic, and Republican lines. His popularity was so strong that the establishment changed the law on ballot access in New York in order to block him. He lost the 1949 mayoral election, again due to corruption and to the onset of the Cold War. His principled stands for civil rights and against war brought down the wrath of the right wing. He was a strong backer of Henry Wallace’s 1948 campaign for the presidency, and it is impossible for me to conceive of Wallace’s campaign without Marc as a guiding influence. Wallace lost, but he was not defeated---the civil rights work that his campaign built on and encouraged, his antiwar stand, and his pro-labor stands were all vindicated in the 1950s and 1960s. Marc and Wallace were both victims of Cold War hysteria and McCarthyite smear tactics, and sometimes racist and vigilante violence. Marc sponsored bills to prohibit the poll tax and to make lynching a federal crime. He also helped lead the great International Workers Order, a cultural and mutual aid and benefits organization which provided insurance to working-class people without discrimination. The IWO was a special target of the McCarthy-led forces.
Marc held office and was active in Depression-era America and during the toughest times of the Second World War. He was opposed to war and then joined the war effort with others when the Soviet Union was attacked. It is now fashionable to criticize those who changed positions in these years, particularly Communists and their progressive allies at the time, but the status quo of the day could not hold, the allies’ half-hearted peace with armed security doctrine had its limits and was untenable, the British government was not anti-fascist when it most needed to be, and the speed of the fascist advance left the liberals and social democrats lost and isolated. Defending the Soviet Union meant defending world progress. Vito Marcantonio thought clearly about the situation, as did all principled people, and strongly supported the opening of a second anti-facist front. Many liberals and socialists could not adjust to changing times and turned instead to pacifism, which was indensible under the circumstances, or so wed themselves to Washington that they surrendered their critical thinking skills and joined in the postwar red scare.
Marc was always denied committee chair positions in Washington. At the time of his death, he was working as an attorney in a private practice and was running for Congress on the Good Neighbor Party. He died from a heart attack. He was denied a Church funeral; his red politics had angered the Catholic hierarchy. At a time when McCarthyism and the Cold War were in nearly full swing and when Italian-Americans were expected to reconfigure our identities Vito Marcantonio was pointing in another direction.
Great politicians came up in the ranks of Marc’s movement. Pete Cacchione and Ben Davis were associated with Marc. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.’s progressive period overlapped with Marc’s movement. Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan were influenced by Marc’s movement. Stanley Novak, the great radical political leader in Michigan, mirrored Marc’s approach to politics and cross-racial working-class unity alongside Coleman Young in the late 1940s and 1950s. And let’s not forget Frank Barbaro. What, you don’t know these names? Study! Their approach to politics is fully relevant today. Great community and labor activists also came forward through Marc’s movement. His political popularity rested on his ability to get things done in the neighborhood, translate important left-wing concepts into everyday practice, hold mass street corner meetings, build coalitions between unions and people of color, take on landlords and corporations and the political establishment and win, and stay just a step ahead of the rest of us.
I have a photo of Vito Marcantonio and some longshoremen on my desk. Only Marc looks fully at ease, but everyone looks fully determined, and maybe worried a bit about something. Marc is well-dressed and the others are in their work clothes, but Marc is not putting himself out there and apart from the group. Nothing about his style or bearing says “Hey, look at me! I’m in the center!” This was our radical practice in the past: be one with the workers and the people and don’t be the attention-getter.
When I worked in the factories the men who were my father’s age still talked about Vito Marcantonio and still loved him. It was hard to talk radical or union politics with them sometimes because they would cut me off with something like, “Hey, kid, Vito Marcantonio said it all before you, and even better!” They would then tell some story about Marc saving a family from eviction or honoring a union picketline or speaking at a May Day rally.
When I think of Italian-American pride I think first of Vito Marcantonio. From a Marxist point of view, whatever pride we take in our race or ethnicity should derive from an understanding of these as accidents of birth and as something to transcend through work and integration into the world beyond ourselves. That is to say that there are indeed real Italian-American characteristics, as there are characteristics of any racial or ethnic group, and these characteristics have a basis in history and in existing material and social conditions. But they do not remain static or spiritual or abstract. They find their meaning, emerge, and change through our necessary and life-giving encounters with others. The path to being a good Italian-American runs through being a good human being first, as an old Italian radical once told me. Vito Marcantonio lived it.
Vito Marcantonio's collection of speeches, I Vote My Conscience, edited by Annette Rubenstein, was first published in the mid-1950s and was reissued in 2002. Put it on your necessary reading list for 2018.
Vito Marcantonio worked his way up from the poor and tough Italian neighborhoods and became an attorney in the mid-1920s. He moved to the left and to Marxism as he matured. The people gathering around the liberal or progressive Fiorello La Guardia and Robert M. La Follette recognized Marc’s special abilities. He was able to build on this and win a seat in the House of Representatives in 1934 as a Republican. His loss in the political race of 1936 was likely more due to splits in the New Deal administration and corruption at the city level than it was to any failures by Marc and the interracial and militant movement he was building.
Marc gave us everything that he could. He was immigrant-friendly, one of labor’s strongest allies, a heavy-handed and militant defender of civil rights, and some people have credited him with being a founding father of the modern Puerto Rican and Cuban independence movements. A former member of the Young Lords in New York once told me that she saw the Young Lords building in part on Marc’s legacy, and she said that had Marc lived longer the Young Lords would been a different organization than they were. His outstanding failure at the time was his support for the wartime internment of the Japanese in the United States, a failure he shared with many others. This was a terrible and serious error and contradicted everything else he did in his life’s work.
For some context, there were also Italians and Italian-Americans interned and deported in those years. The difference between these people and the Japanese who were interned was that among the Italians were many fascists who had been involved in building a violent fascist movement in the United States. They did indeed threaten national security and the war effort, and they threatened the safety and lives of Italian-American anti-fascists in their communities. The Italians were interned for political reasons, the Japanese for racial and racist reasons. At the time it may have been difficult for sincere anti-fascists to tell the difference. And for what it's worth, the very able Communist leader Gus Hall wrote personally to every Japanese family who he could reach who had been interned in order to apologize and do self-criticism on behalf of the Communist Party. I am not aware of any other party or leader having done that.
Marc’s steady move to the left took him into the American Labor Party, and back into the House in 1938 on the American Labor Party line. He served in the House from 1939 to 1951. For a period of time he could run in multiple primaries and did so, usually winning on the Labor, Democratic, and Republican lines. His popularity was so strong that the establishment changed the law on ballot access in New York in order to block him. He lost the 1949 mayoral election, again due to corruption and to the onset of the Cold War. His principled stands for civil rights and against war brought down the wrath of the right wing. He was a strong backer of Henry Wallace’s 1948 campaign for the presidency, and it is impossible for me to conceive of Wallace’s campaign without Marc as a guiding influence. Wallace lost, but he was not defeated---the civil rights work that his campaign built on and encouraged, his antiwar stand, and his pro-labor stands were all vindicated in the 1950s and 1960s. Marc and Wallace were both victims of Cold War hysteria and McCarthyite smear tactics, and sometimes racist and vigilante violence. Marc sponsored bills to prohibit the poll tax and to make lynching a federal crime. He also helped lead the great International Workers Order, a cultural and mutual aid and benefits organization which provided insurance to working-class people without discrimination. The IWO was a special target of the McCarthy-led forces.
Marc held office and was active in Depression-era America and during the toughest times of the Second World War. He was opposed to war and then joined the war effort with others when the Soviet Union was attacked. It is now fashionable to criticize those who changed positions in these years, particularly Communists and their progressive allies at the time, but the status quo of the day could not hold, the allies’ half-hearted peace with armed security doctrine had its limits and was untenable, the British government was not anti-fascist when it most needed to be, and the speed of the fascist advance left the liberals and social democrats lost and isolated. Defending the Soviet Union meant defending world progress. Vito Marcantonio thought clearly about the situation, as did all principled people, and strongly supported the opening of a second anti-facist front. Many liberals and socialists could not adjust to changing times and turned instead to pacifism, which was indensible under the circumstances, or so wed themselves to Washington that they surrendered their critical thinking skills and joined in the postwar red scare.
Marc was always denied committee chair positions in Washington. At the time of his death, he was working as an attorney in a private practice and was running for Congress on the Good Neighbor Party. He died from a heart attack. He was denied a Church funeral; his red politics had angered the Catholic hierarchy. At a time when McCarthyism and the Cold War were in nearly full swing and when Italian-Americans were expected to reconfigure our identities Vito Marcantonio was pointing in another direction.
Great politicians came up in the ranks of Marc’s movement. Pete Cacchione and Ben Davis were associated with Marc. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.’s progressive period overlapped with Marc’s movement. Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan were influenced by Marc’s movement. Stanley Novak, the great radical political leader in Michigan, mirrored Marc’s approach to politics and cross-racial working-class unity alongside Coleman Young in the late 1940s and 1950s. And let’s not forget Frank Barbaro. What, you don’t know these names? Study! Their approach to politics is fully relevant today. Great community and labor activists also came forward through Marc’s movement. His political popularity rested on his ability to get things done in the neighborhood, translate important left-wing concepts into everyday practice, hold mass street corner meetings, build coalitions between unions and people of color, take on landlords and corporations and the political establishment and win, and stay just a step ahead of the rest of us.
I have a photo of Vito Marcantonio and some longshoremen on my desk. Only Marc looks fully at ease, but everyone looks fully determined, and maybe worried a bit about something. Marc is well-dressed and the others are in their work clothes, but Marc is not putting himself out there and apart from the group. Nothing about his style or bearing says “Hey, look at me! I’m in the center!” This was our radical practice in the past: be one with the workers and the people and don’t be the attention-getter.
When I worked in the factories the men who were my father’s age still talked about Vito Marcantonio and still loved him. It was hard to talk radical or union politics with them sometimes because they would cut me off with something like, “Hey, kid, Vito Marcantonio said it all before you, and even better!” They would then tell some story about Marc saving a family from eviction or honoring a union picketline or speaking at a May Day rally.
When I think of Italian-American pride I think first of Vito Marcantonio. From a Marxist point of view, whatever pride we take in our race or ethnicity should derive from an understanding of these as accidents of birth and as something to transcend through work and integration into the world beyond ourselves. That is to say that there are indeed real Italian-American characteristics, as there are characteristics of any racial or ethnic group, and these characteristics have a basis in history and in existing material and social conditions. But they do not remain static or spiritual or abstract. They find their meaning, emerge, and change through our necessary and life-giving encounters with others. The path to being a good Italian-American runs through being a good human being first, as an old Italian radical once told me. Vito Marcantonio lived it.
Vito Marcantonio's collection of speeches, I Vote My Conscience, edited by Annette Rubenstein, was first published in the mid-1950s and was reissued in 2002. Put it on your necessary reading list for 2018.
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