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.