Quote of the Day (Ogden Nash, on the Echoing ‘Footsteps’ of Fiorello La Guardia)

“When the valid votes are counted,
Will his future be feast or faminy?
Will he eat his lunch in a one-arm joint,
Or in a swell estaminet?
For Fiorello’s footsteps
Still echo in the corridor;
Reform is a horrid word enough,
But Fusion is even horrider.” —American light-verse poet Ogden Nash (1902-1971), “Don’t Bite the Hand That Puts the Foot in Your Mouth” in Everyone But Thee And Me (1962)

Seventy-five years ago today, Fiorello La Guardia—the “Little Flower” of New York City—died of pancreatic cancer. Having guided New York through the Great Depression and World War II, he had stepped down as mayor after three terms less than two years before, utterly exhausted—and, after so much time in the public eye and more than a little irascibility, the city had grown tired of him, too, according to public opinion polls.

By the time Ogden Nash recalled his legacy 15 years after his death, La Guardia had recovered his popularity. The musical Fiorello! won the Tony and Pulitzer Prizes in 1959, and the mayor was posthumously hailed for his attempts to root out corruption. And in 1961, Mayor Robert Wagner Jr. had turned decisively against the Tammany Hall political machine that had sustained his own rise—and that had been the object of La Guardia’s tireless (and noisy) anti-corruption efforts.

La Guardia had won his first campaign for mayor by campaigning on the “Fusion” ticket (primarily GOP-backed, with additional support by breakaway Democrats and independents). By the time Wagner ran for a third term, the “Reform” movement, which had sprung up among Manhattan insurgents three years before, was now spelling a threat to the power that Tammany Hall had enjoyed again after La Guardia’s departure.

Wagner’s defeat—and the fall from power of Tammany boss Carmine deSapio—proved in the end that Reform was, Nash’s contention to the contrary, “horrider” than Fusion to the old political machine.

Photo of the Day: Fiorello La Guardia Statue, NYC

One of my favorite pastimes, when going to some cultural event in New York City, is walking through the surrounding neighborhood and stumbling across something of historic interest. That was the case again a week ago, when, after watching a film downtown, I ambled around Greenwich Village and stumbled across La Guardia Place and the statue of the politician it commemorates.

As longtime readers of this blog have probably guessed, I pulled out my camera to record my discovery and whet my curiosity.

Highly unusual in his own time, Fiorello H. LaGuardia (1882–1947) is simply impossible to imagine in the current political environment of New York or the nation. I can’t think of another Gotham mayor likely to be posthumously celebrated in a Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, like the one created by Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock back in 1959. 

While certainly, at only 5 feet, 2 inches tall, “The Little Flower” was short, the exuberance of his personality and the record of his achievement have rendered him larger than life in the annals of Gracie Mansion.

La Guardia looks especially impressive compared with the current occupant of the office. Bill de Blasio (or, as I’ve come to think of him, de Bumsio). A progressive poseur, de Blasio talks a great game about reducing income inequality while doing little to achieve it. La Guardia managed to do so by embarking on a massive infrastructure program that employed thousands of New Yorkers in building roads and bridges and repairing dilapidated parks.

While de Blasio has engaged in a pattern of conduct that has raised concerns that he engaging in “pay-for-play” practices, La Guardia worked diligently to stamp out corruption that had been given free rein by Tammany Hall hacks.

De Blasio has traipsed around Iowa in a maddening Presidential campaign supported only by aides eager to curry favor with their boss. La Guardia was all over city bureaucrats in an attempt to make government more responsive to its citizens.

Fresh from his exertions at gym (often requiring the services of city employees who transported him to these facilities), de Blasio looks in the mirror each morning and sees a big, buff President. La Guardia, for all his ambition, had no such personal vanity.

De Blasio, though facing significant problems, encountered nothing like the situation encountered by La Guardia dealt with the crisis posed by the Great Depression when he came to office.

La Guardia contrasts dramatically not just with current Democrats, but with the Republican holding the White House. Probably the mayor’s most famous utterance was, “When I make a mistake, it’s a beaut!” Can you imagine Donald Trump saying anything similar today?

 

A word about the statue in this photo. Unveiled in 1994, it was created by Neil Estern (1926-2019), who also created the statue of John F. Kennedy in Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, as well as a sculpture of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, and their dog Fala, at the FDR Memorial in Washington, D. C.