Rep. Marcantonio, in front of his office at 1484 First Ave. NY" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1948. By Sandhya Shukla
Seventy years ago today, Vito Marcantonio, the most left-wing congressman in US history, suffered a fatal heart attack. He had by then left office disappointed by McCarthyism and the failure of pro-worker and anti-racist legislative efforts. Yet just months earlier, Brown vs Board of Education had been decided in favor of racial integration, a goal Marcantonio had long pursued.
If there is tragedy in Marcantonio dying before he could witness the consequences of that landmark court case, there is hope to be found in the astonishing example of a politician who crossed all kinds of ethnic and racial boundaries. Here is an Italian American who struggled for the rights of Black Americans and Puerto Ricans, and others, an authentic member of “the community” who found it unnecessary to choose any one group over another. Moreover, Marcantonio was intensely local and global at the same time; his working-class cosmopolitanism was formed in East Harlem and underlay his anti-fascism and support for anticolonial independence movements around the world. This vision might seem utopian, but it is one that was put into practice for many years with striking effectiveness.
Today’s anniversary offers an opportunity to think deeply about Vito Marcantonio and the progressive politics that he embodied, with an eye to possibilities in our own divisive moment. Certainly, he is an antecedent for congresspeople like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Greg Casar, as well as Bernie Sanders, who are all currently working on projects for social and economic justice. But Marcantonio’s embeddedness in political formations of the 1930s and 1940s, like the Popular Front and the Communist Party, was critical to his success. No less importantly, his rise in the 1930s when organized labor was waxing, not waning (as it has over the last decades), raises the question of what obstacles exist for social democratic or even liberal figures who cannot dependably draw on those sources of support. In this vein, Marcantonio’s defeat in 1950, when anti-communism had become influential in the very unions that had once supported him but did not that year, provides some important lessons for political activists who struggle against the apparent populism of the right and its capture of a significant portion of working-class discontent and disaffection.
Born in 1902, Vito Marcantonio lived and worked within the neighborhood blocks of Italian Harlem. His immediate family contained both immigrants and second-generation Americans, as did his circle of intimate friends. But Italian Harlem, like any ethnic enclave, was situated within an always and already changing racial landscape, and its boundaries were porous. It was a section of East Harlem, the historic destination of waves of migrants from southern and eastern Europe, the Caribbean, and Asia, as well as the US South. In name and designation, too, East Harlem was always of Harlem writ large, symbolically and materially, the capital of the global Black diaspora.
Racial and ethnic differences proliferated in the district that Marcantonio represented in Congress from 1934-1950. But there were shared experiences in struggles for economic resources and social justice. Working-class Italians, Jews, Puerto Ricans, Black Americans, and West Indians were the referents for the bread-and-butter issues of Marcantonio’s agenda: jobs, housing, services, and civil rights. In the 1930s and 1940s, anti-fascist socialists and communists organized on behalf of immiserated peoples, and Marcantonio related closely to those and other left-wing efforts while never being fully defined by them. He did not respect party lines – he ran for office with Republican, Democratic, and American Labor Party affiliations as those groups changed – but also never compromised fundamental beliefs.
In addition to English, Marcantonio spoke Italian, Yiddish, and Spanish. One cannot overestimate the importance of this linguistic connection with people who still felt like outsiders. Even if the speech or writing were not perfect – Marcantonio’s Spanish carried a heavy Italian accent and some grammatical errors – the fact of and appreciation for understanding were acknowledged by so many constituents.
No doubt it would be easy to read Marcantonio’s multilingualism and support for non-Italians in terms of pragmatic electoral politics. And while that concern could never be entirely irrelevant, it does not fully account for positions based more in ethics and principles.
Take, for example, Marcantonio’s commitment to Puerto Rican independence. The only time Marcantonio traveled outside of the continental United States was to Puerto Rico, an indication of how intensely he felt about the issue. Yet there were racial-spatial tensions in Marcantonio’s district and throughout Harlem, with many incidents of violence among Black, Puerto Rican, Jewish, and Italian youth and a good deal of informal and formal policing of boundaries. The Puerto Rican-Cuban writer Piri Thomas, who had grown up in the area, recalled the anxieties of turf-control at the time, “sometimes you don’t fit in, like if you’re a Puerto Rican on an Italian block.” But Thomas held Marcantonio above this racialized geography when he said about him, “the Puerto Ricans and Italians were always fighting, and he was helping everybody out.”
We might imagine that it would have been hard for Congressman Marcantonio to argue on behalf of an island that was, on the one hand, liminal to the US imaginary and, on the other, central to the nation’s self-presentation as the dominant power in the region. Not surprisingly, Puerto Rican independence struggles were continually repressed by the US state. Of course, Puerto Rico was also the origin of those who were non-white and perceived by some in Marcantonio’s own Italian Harlem community to be pushing them out. His eloquent response to all these potential objections, in a 1939 speech, laid out a different logic: “My interest in Puerto Rico is due not only to the fact that I represent the largest Puerto Rican constituency…but also to my desire as a progressive to defend the most exploited victims of a most devastating imperialism.” There is no question that this use of “progressive” was a nod to anti-colonial (and anti-imperial) formations of the US left, socialist and communist politics especially.
Such an internationalist orientation, which not so implicitly critiqued narrow Americanism, shaped Marcantonio’s work on behalf of Filipino naturalization before the 1946 Luce-Celler Act removed restrictions. Given the absence of a substantial Filipino population in his congressional district, such support cannot be explained by the need to be reelected. Instead, Marcantonio pointed out how the strange situation of Filipinos coming from a US “territory” yet unable to become citizens contradicted national ideals of inclusion with which he himself identified.
Marcantonio waded into the fraught sphere of civil rights and racial integration with similar conviction. Back at home, he carefully helped to mitigate tensions in an East Harlem high school between Black and Italian students, those that the press had represented as a “race riot” in alarmist terms. He joined Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in efforts to desegregate Washington DC schools and public facilities. And with Powell Jr and other colleagues, Marcantonio argued vociferously against the poll tax, a notorious strategy for intimidating Black voters in the South. He was undeterred by some of the most vitriolic letters he ever received from those inside and outside his district in response to his public criticism of racism in baseball (which helped to pave the way for Jackie Robinson’s entry into the MLB in 1947).
After Marcantonio left Congress in 1950, he continued to take on a variety of legal projects for Harlem residents concerning access to services and broader issues as well. One court case that brought together his commitments was the successful defense of civil rights leader W.E.B. DuBois, who had been accused of being a foreign agent while circulating the Stockholm Peace Appeal for nuclear disarmament.
When Marcantonio died in 1954, thousands from across the spectrum poured onto the streets to mourn him. His barber Luigi Albarelli and political comrade W.E.B. DuBois spoke at the funeral. Paul Robeson wrote about Black people losing “a tried and true friend,” and the Puerto Rican activist Gilberto Gerena Valentín said his community had “been orphaned.”
To be sure, not everyone loved Marcantonio. The Archdiocese of New York refused Marcantonio a Catholic burial, citing the absence of an active religious practice but betraying the ambient anti-Communism of the time. Still, for Dorothy Day, social reformer and Catholic activist, Marcantonio was just the right kind of religious person; at his death, she quoted the Psalmist, “Blessed is he who understands concerning the needy and the poor.”
A longtime Italian American priest from the area told me, years later, when the Italian population had dwindled, that Marcantonio had been “a traitor,” presumably because he supported Puerto Ricans. Of course, his abiding goal was to challenge the very sort of thinking, which underlay xenophobia, racism, and ethnic competition. And what of Marcantonio’s whiteness that he did not accentuate but also never denied through any overreach of identification? It behooves us to remain aware that not all “white ethnicity” is non-solidaristic, even when some of its proponents, like the priest, might proclaim it as such. To that latter tendency, we can reply by recalling the words on the masthead of the famous 1990s/2000s publication Race Traitor: “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” Marcantonio indeed prioritized loyalty to humanity in opposition to any attempt to contain groups and their interests in separated boxes. His politics were less about identity than they were about the deeper value of cross-cultural exchange. Relatedly, Marcantonio’s dedication to social welfare and equality at home and support for independence movements and economic betterment around the world espoused a cosmopolitan vision for America that still challenges those invested in nationalism.
Whether the Democratic Party, in its current formation, can organize with energies similar to those that enabled Marcantonio’s remarkable political career remains a difficult question to answer, not least because of vast differences in historical context. Still, the abiding appeal of “progressive” politics cannot but tempt us to compare. Reflecting on Marcantonio may help us to be more ambitious, more connected to others, and more compassionate about differences. At this crucial political moment, might we not ponder something more utopian, that this US congressman from East Harlem modeled?
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Sandhya Shukla is an associate professor of English and American Studies at the University of Virginia. She has recently published Cross-Cultural Harlem: Reimagining Race and Place (Columbia University Press, 2024). She is also the author of India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England (Princeton University Press, 2003), and a co-editor of Imagining Our Americas: Toward a Transnational Frame (Duke University Press, 2007). Her work has appeared in publications such as American Quarterly, symploke, and Annual Review of Anthropology. She is a longtime member of the editorial collective of Radical History Review.