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| Marcantonio, La Guardia, FDR and Henry Wallace. |
Vito Marcantonio in film and live voice are commodities difficult to come by for those seeking the living
breathing man, his movements, the tone of his voice, inflections,
pauses, pieces of the politician as cultural artifact.
Thanks to research by David Giglio,
(among other things) videographer and documentarian for the Vito
Marcantonio Forum (VMF), two interesting voice clips of Marcantonio have
been uncovered.
One is Marcantonio's policy statement
on American involvement in Korea.
The clip is described by professor
Gerald Meyer as “a brief peroration of Marc's keynote address to an
overflow audience at a rally in Madison Square Garden, sponsored by
the Progressive Party, in October 1950, expressing his opposition to
United States intervention into what he saw was a civil war. It
provides some sense of Marc's rhetorical style, which for a
generation made him the most sought-after orator of the American
left. It also gives a chance to hear the New York accent, which by
now is almost extinct.”
Meyer, VMF co-chair, describes the
second address as:
“[A]n extended speech, made in 1940,
that was broadcast nation-wide, in opposition to the Hobbs Bill,
which would have stripped noncitizens of almost all rights and
threatened them with incarceration without legal recourse... It is
worthy of close listening on the merits of his arguments as well as
its relevance to contemporary American political discourse and
practice. This speech was sponsored by the American committee for the
Foreign Born, which advocated for the foreign-born as well as
provided them with legal services. This invaluable organization, of
which Marcantonio was vice president, fell victim of McCarthyism."
The Hobbs bill (H.R. 5643) allowed that
“aliens” ordered deported by the Secretary of Labor could be held
in detention centers if they were not shipped out within 90 days of
notice.
Marcantonio found a flaw: “The
language of the act gives the Secretary of Labor not only the power
to confine such aliens for the rest of the their natural lives, but
gives her discretionary power as to the choice of the place of
detention.”
Nowhere in the bill, he noted, was
there any mention of due process.
“The issue is not that of protecting
criminal aliens,” he said, striking at the primary chord of an
issue again before us today.
The text can be found under a May 23,
1939 entry in “I Vote My Conscience,” a collection of Marc's
speeches edited by his colleague, Annette Rubinstein.
The better part of Giglio's videolog on behalf of the VMF can be found here.
The better part of Giglio's videolog on behalf of the VMF can be found here.
"The Goodfather (A Novel): The Rising Fall of the Marvelous Marcantonio," can be purchased here: MARC LIVES!
