Weekend, March 9-10, 2024 – NEVER A DULL MOMENT WITH LA GUARDIA

By admin

WEEKEND


MARCH 9-10, 2024

ISSUE # 1200

La Guardia’s Stunts:

Prohibition, His Airport,

and the

Sunday Funnies

BRUCE DEARSLYNE

NEW YORK ALMANACK

La Guardia’s Stunts: Prohibition, His Airport, and the Sunday Funnies

March 6, 2024 by Bruce Dearstyne 

New York State history is full of exciting characters who made a real difference in our historical development.

One of the most colorful is Fiorello La Guardia (1882-1947) who served in the Army air corps in the First World War, and later as a member of Congress (1923-1933) and Mayor of New York City (1933-1946).

LaGuardia transformed that city, sidestepping or overcoming political opposition and using city resources and federal assistance to tear down slums and replace them with good housing.

Terry Golway’s excellent new biography, “I Never Did Like Politics”; How Fiorello LaGuardia Became America’s Mayor and Why He Still Matters captures the policy accomplishments but also the personality characteristics that made La Guardia great.

Golway’s narrative is flowing and lively, engaging readers while putting La Guardia into the historical context of his times. The book presents a good deal of history in a very interesting way but also a good deal about a key history-maker.

The book includes three little-known episodes in La Guardia’s career that capture the spirit of the man in the context of the tenor of the times.

Congressman La Guardia opposed Prohibition on the grounds that it cut into personal liberties and that the Volsted Act, passed to implement it, was practically impossible to enforce in a city like New York. He sometimes resorted to drama and grandstanding to get his point across.

In Golway’s masterful narrative, La Guardia, in 1926, invited reporters to his Capitol Hill office to witness an act of defiance. He produced bottles of malt liquor (considered medicinal and legal under the Volsted Act) and “near-beer” (a beverage with an alcohol content just below the legal level), skillfully combined the two, and produced something approaching pre-Prohibition beer.

He offered the reporters glasses; they loved it. And it was all legal, the congressman explained, just blending legal substances, and an illustration of how people were skirting the law.

A few days later, he repeated the stunt on a sidewalk in front of a drug store in New York City. A local police officer witnessed the show and just shrugged his shoulders and walked away. La Guardia continued to mock Prohibition until it was repealed in 1933.

A pilot himself, La Guardia was determined to build a major airport in his city. In 1934, returning from a conference in Chicago, the plane he was on landed at Newark Municipal Airport, which then served as a de facto commercial airport for the city. The aircraft’s pilot announced they had landed in New York.

All the passengers deplaned except the mayor. He refused to leave, saying his ticket read “Chicago to New York” and Newark was not New York.

The mayor stayed seated and demanded to be flown to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, a small airport that commercial airliners shunned. The pilot finally gave in. Tipped off, reporters were present in Brooklyn when the mayor landed.

As Golway notes, “it was an amusing stunt, all right, but there was a larger purpose at work.” It was part of La Guardia’s campaign for an airport suited to his city. He achieved that goal in 1939 when the new airport, named in his honor, opened for the first time.

Later, he unveiled plans for an even larger airport, Idlewild (now John F. Kennedy International Airport) which opened in 1948.

Golway also includes another (slightly better known) episode, in July 1945, as La Guardia’s time as mayor was drawing to a close. Delivery workers for the city’s newspapers went on strike.

La Guardia, who regularly read the “funnies” (as the comics were called in those days) as well as the news, found a copy of the Sunday, July 1 issue of the New York Daily News.

Announcing that the city’s children needed their Sunday funnies, he went on the city’s radio station, WNYC, and read the installments of Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie and other comics and also vividly described the action in the strips.

He repeated the performance for two additional Sundays. He also urged that the workers should go back to work and the union should return to the bargaining table. Golway describes the mayor’s gestures and enthusiasm as he read the comics (this book is extensively researched, and here the author uses the New York Public Radio Archives, among other sources).

The strike soon ended. It was another memorable La Guardia performance.

As Golway notes at the end of the book, “this remarkable, irascible, and tireless man made it his life’s mission to replace despair with patience, hopelessness with fortitude.”

Editor’s Note: Bob Cudmore’s The Historians Podcast recently featured an interview about La Guardia. You can listen to that here.

Photo: Mayor La Guardia reads the comics to New York’s children over WNYC during the newspaper delivermen’s strike of July 1945 (New York Public Radio Archives).

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WEEKEND PHOTO OF THE DAY

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FRIDAY  PHOTO OF THE DAY

JOINING THE QUEENSBORO BRIDGE 1908

ANDY SPARBERG, NINA LUBLIN , GUY LUDWIG AND GLORIA HERMAN  GOT IT RIGHT

Text by Judith Berdy

NEW YORK ALMANACK

BRUCE DEARSLYNE

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