La Guardia - A Republican New Dealer

A New Biography

Just read the review of “City of Ambition” by Mason B. Williams written by Fred Siegel in the Wall Street Journal dated 6/28/2013. The review is titled “The New Deal's Favorite Mayor/La Guardia and FDR shared a faith in redistributive taxation, heavy-handed regulation and public works on a grand scale.”

Mr. Fiorello La Guardia was smart, witty, anti-Nazi, folksy and he had a very impressive life, but his politics were largely statist and strongly pro big government. Probably, he was a great populist.

Not least his name is e.g. associated with the big government law “Norris-La Guardia Act of 1932” that prohibited yellow-dog contracts, barred the federal courts from issuing injunctions against nonviolent labor disputes, and created a positive right of noninterference by employers against workers joining trade unions.. “LaGuardia fought for progressive income taxes, greater government oversight of Wall Street, and national employment insurance for workers idled by the Great Depression.” (Wikipedia).

Soak The Rich

Excerpts from the review(Emphasis added plus comments):

1.       “… the Depression-era relationship between Franklin Roosevelt (first as New York governor, then as president) and Fiorello La Guardia (first as congressman, then as mayor) created what is still the political culture of New York City—a kind of civic religion that was once known as "Fiorellism." If there is a problem in Gotham, the enduring Fiorellist assumption is that there must be a government solution.”

2.       “It was an unlikely pairing. Roosevelt was a Protestant, Hudson Valley squire, a Democrat. La Guardia was a half-Italian, half-Jewish, progressive Republican who had lived in Arizona and Trieste before returning to the city of his birth. The two men came to know each other in the prosperous 1920s and became strong allies in the 1930s. (Roosevelt's presidency ran from 1933 to 1945; La Guardia's mayoralty from 1934 to 1945.) They shared a disdain for businessmen that manifested itself in a faith in government regulation and redistributive taxation—and in public-works projects on a grand scale.”
[Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini also liked public works projects on a grand scale.]

3.       "It would be almost but not quite fair," wrote New Dealer Rexford Tugwell [a close confidant of FDR], "to say that he was an instinctive dictator."

4.       “La Guardia's close alliance with FDR faded with the approaching war. The city, left to its own devices and burdened by La Guardia's hostility to business, began flirting with bankruptcy again during his third and final term. City workers, given a stake in their jobs by civil service, organized 15 years later into the public-sector unions that have come to dominate civic life and ensure that, for New York City, bankruptcy is never an altogether unlikely possibility.”
[Populism and fiscal irresponsibility often go hand in hand]

5.       “La Guardia loved to shout about how we should "soak the rich."”
[In this respect, he was a great fool like most populists.]