The Museum of the City of New York's current exhibition, "Catholics in New York 1808-1946," features an interesting photo, amongst many, of a nationally known politician who has been forgotten a half century after his death. It depicts him speaking at a patriotic rally in East Harlem in Manhattan during World War II.
Forgotten, too, is the fact that Joseph Cardinal Spellman denied the seven-term congressman a Catholic funeral Mass.
His name was Vito Marcantonio, a protégé of Fiorella LaGuardia and a stalwart of the American Labor Party. He lived his entire life in tenement apartments in Italian America's largest and most famous neighborhood. People crowded into his district office seven days a week to discuss with him their problems, small and large.
Actually you could say that Marcantonio, though adored in his home patch of East Harlem, was infamous nationally, and none other than Richard Nixon helped make him so. Tricky Dick, it's believed, got his nickname from his opponent in the 1950 California Senate race, Helen Douglas, a fellow member of the House of Representatives.
The future president alleged that Douglas if not quite Red, i.e. a communist, was certainly pink, "right down to her underwear." He sought to prove it by linking her to Marcantonio, who was considered close to the Communist Party.
Nixon issued a leaflet entitled "Douglas-Marcantonio Voting Record." This ingenious distortion - printed on pink paper - propelled him to the Senate and the GOP presidential ticket just two years later.
Marcantonio lost his seat that year, but continued to be a champion for the underdog, which increasingly meant the city's Puerto Rican and African-American residents. On Aug. 9, 1954, he had a fatal heart attack outside the subway station at City Hall. He was 51. The priest who gave him the last rites found a rosary on his person. Despite Spellman's ban, tens of thousands turned out for what is still East Harlem's biggest funeral on record.
"He never had a dollar in pocket," Rose Pascale told me when I visited the neighborhood several years ago. While other politicians made money, Marcantonio gave it away to his needy constituents.
Pascale, who has lived all of her 92 years in East Harlem, remembered the election eve rallies at Lucky Corner (116th Street and Lexington Avenue). "Mostly Italians," she said of the crowds that would swell to 25-30,000 people. "Marcantonio, LaGuardia and the others spoke in Italian," she said.
In 1960, 2.3 million native New Yorkers could speak the language of their Italian immigrant parents, whereas only 147,000 of the third generation could do so.
That has been the trend in the cities through the 20th century. The children are raised in the language and the grandchildren lose it. Only a minority of 3rd-generation Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, for example, are proficient in Spanish.
This is rather different from the situation in more rural areas. German was spoken over several generations in some American communities, and still persists in certain pockets.
Don't tell any of this to Philadelphia restaurant-owner Joey Vento who in October 2005 put up a bumper sticker saying: "This is America -- when ordering please speak English."
Vento and Gino's Steaks became a cause célèbre for Rush Limbaugh and several other conservative talk-radio hosts (though, of course, they wouldn't use that French term). The ACLU, meanwhile, backed Vento's right to free speech.
The Philadelphia Commission on Human Rights began an investigation. Earlier this year, however, it ruled that Vento had broken no ordinance and was not discriminating against anybody.
Yet there's something not quite right here. Think about it. Gino's Steaks is usually described as a "landmark" restaurant, so it's obviously operating in the hospitality trade. And through the ages, people have managed to communicate in hotels and restaurants in a civil manner, despite language barriers. In that context, the reminder that "This is America" is dripping with sarcastic hostility. And as suggested above, it doesn't quite show much knowledge of the history of this country.
Vento said: "I don't go around telling people I'm an Italian American. I always say I'm American Italian. If you are a true American, then put America first."
Either way, he was born into a group that suffered some appalling discrimination in this country. They were people who were despised because their ways were different and who were accused of not assimilating quickly enough.
At its height in the 1920s, when it was packed with 200,000 people – Italian immigrants and their children and grandchildren – East Harlem was very much outside of the American mainstream. This was still the case, if to a lesser degree, two decades later. In 1946, a feature in Life magazine referred to it as Marcantonio's "dinghy little realm," which, it said, was home to muggers, sluggers, white slavers and truck hijackers.
But the great majority of its residents were decent working people, not much different from those of our neighbors today who speak Spanish – a sister of Italian in the Romance language family.
