City of Ambition by Mason B. Williams

Author:Mason B. Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Citizens Budget Commission, Fiscal Facts Concerning the City of New York: Vols. 1–2 (New York, 1940, 1947).

II

Shortly after his reelection, La Guardia, in Washington for the annual meeting of the Conference of Mayors, joined Harold Ickes for lunch at Harvey’s Restaurant. After chatting about the New York campaign (in which Ickes, during a visit to the city, had all but endorsed La Guardia), the two men turned to the presidential election of 1940, discussing at length the scenarios that might elevate another progressive to the White House. La Guardia believed Roosevelt would not be able to control the Democratic Convention, and he expected the Democrats to nominate a conservative; he took seriously the possibility that liberals might capture the Republican Party, though Harold Ickes’s war stories from the 1912 convention now gave him second thoughts. Perhaps, he suggested, it would be necessary for progressives to organize a third party. The people were liberal, La Guardia remarked; they needed a “crusader” to bear the standard. “[N]aturally,” Ickes wrote, “the thought occurred to me that La Guardia regarded himself as the possible crusader that would be required.”21

Roosevelt, surveying La Guardia’s prospects after the 1937 election, believed the Little Flower would be undone by his ethnicity. Berle recorded the president’s thoughts in his diary: “As a practical matter . . . although he [La Guardia] had been brought up in the west and was a Mason and a Protestant, the country was not ready to elect an Italian whose mother was partly Jewish as President of the United States, and his language and accent were those of New York.” In the following years, as his dreams of the national office slipped away, La Guardia would reach the same conclusion. “[The] son of a wop who lives in a tenement,” he said, “doesn’t get nominated for vice-president.” But 1938 was a season of hope; and for a while it even looked as though La Guardia might succeed at bridging the cultural divide between the immigrant cities and the small-town interior. In January 1938, the Little Flower traveled to downstate Illinois to berate the middlemen in the food industry and introduce the broad strokes of his own “farm plan.” In April, he made a national radio broadcast over NBC’s Blue Network, calling for a subsidized government export monopoly to recapture South American consumer markets from Germany and Japan. (He forwarded a copy of the speech to FDR with a note to White House secretary Missy LeHand: “Here is my bed-time story for the President.”) Later that month he journeyed to Oklahoma and Texas. In September, he undertook a second, more extensive western trip, stopping in Little Rock, Shreveport, northern Texas, and Prescott, Arizona, en route to the annual American Legion convention in Los Angeles, then returning through St. Louis and Indianapolis, adding Detroit to the itinerary when Michigan governor Frank Murphy beseeched him to make a campaign appearance to aid him in a close election. He was received with great enthusiasm across the South and Southwest.

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