Christopher Bell's East Harlem

 

A recent article on the website “Harlem Focus” details how the “real” Little Italy was not actually on the lower East Side, but uptown in East Harlem.

An interesting report, it contains nothing that can’t be found in Christopher Bell’s “East Harlem Remembered,” which is not to criticize, rather to illustrate the need for the retelling of stories to keep them alive. 

As such, we reconsider Bell’s work, which was published in 2013 ...to retell it, and review it in light of the time which has passed since and, perhaps, to mine it for further value. 

Marc on Tap

Of particular interest to this website is Bell’s inclusion of a stand-alone, chapter-length, mini-bio of Vito Marcantonio, establishing him as the emblematic East Harlemite “non pareil” in spite of a local constellation that includes folks like Burt Lancaster, Langston Hughes, or the most-contemporary Marc Antony. 

While addressed directly in said chapter, Marcantonio’s imprint upon East Harlem’s neighborhoods can be perceived throughout the book in passages where he is not mentioned by name.  

Resident Felipe Luciano noted how in the 1960s and ‘70s the Young Lords Party had a group that, “simply advocated for people who need help to pay a ConEd Bill, or if they needed translation with the Welfare Departments or if you needed help with the homework.”

Such were the needs of Marcantonio’s constituents and the way in which he handled them became the blueprint for those who took up the tasks in the wake of his sudden departure. 

Bell noted that, after World War II, the city’s housing and planning entities failed to engage neighborhood agents, “unlike before when Leonard Covello and the East Harlem community worked with Vito Marcantonio and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to bring the East River Houses to the neighborhood.” 

Which is a reminder that a locale doesn’t necessarily recycle good leaders in succeeding generations and that their presence is a matter of good fortune, their death, the opposite. 

A noteworthy achievement is the voice, the bullhorn even, “Remembered” gives to the residents of East Harlem.  

The Written Words

A cursory review of East Harlem literature brings to mind Patricia Cayo Sexton’s “Spanish Harlem: Anatomy of Poverty,” which contains testimonials from the neighborhood, but is an academic document that provides the uninitiated with an institutional and demographic topography of the area, moreso than the soul of a people. 

Poet Gil Fagiani’s “A Blanquito In El Barrio,” is rich in local idioms both visual and verbal, but the work is primarily in one voice, the poet’s -- with its shadow of the suburban Connecticut youth -- observing East Harlem as much as living it. Though Fagiani’s life was linked to the place in fateful ways, “Blanquito” is the voice of an eternal visitor delighting in exotic urban fauna.  

Piri Thomas’s “Down These Mean Streets,” harnesses the power of literature to enmesh readers in a gritty personal drama with East Harlem as the backdrop, but it is a largely personal journey and, as with Cayo Sexton’s work, features portraits drawn primarily from the Puerto Rican community.

Michael Parenti’s “Waiting for Yesterday:Pages from a Street Kid’s Life” is a remembrance of the old haunts and characters via a singular voice--Parenti’s. 

Bell’s book is, still more, a lively pastiche of vox populi, the purest presentation of East Harlem in its own words. Rife with colorful, colloquial recollections presented “as-is,” and homemade snapshots, “Remembered” hums with authenticity. 

These people were there and Bell was able to land some big fish such as author Thomas, and Raoul Abdul, a confidante of the poet Hughes, but these have nothing over the rank and file residents he rounded up for recollection. 

Here is Piri Thomas describing Marcantonio: “I thought he was Puerto Rican because he helped everybody, all nationalities. The Puerto Ricans and Italians were always fighting and he was helping everybody out.”

Joe Monserrat remembered how Marcantonio’s mentor Leonard Covello, “believed Italians should have rights, and African Americans and Puerto Ricans should have rights too. Despite the tension and fights between the groups, Pop Covello was one of the first to recognize Puerto Ricans in the school [ Benjamin Franklin High School] and in the community. The school was a community center and it was a very nice place.” 

The Grassroots Perspective

These are examples of how East Harlemites actually viewed such community leaders; not through a prism of left and right, or career arcs to be analyzed, but through neighborhood, political interaction and personal contact.  

With statements such as these we learn as much about Marcantonio as we do from an analysis of his legislative record or adherence to a particular party line. 

In the following statement from Hortencio Morales, we learn of unique skills the city kid picked up during an apprenticeship on the streets:

“You had the fire hydrant, or the water pump, which we called la pumpa. The water pump was always open on every block in East Harlem. Someone in the neighborhood would get this big wrench to turn the water on. Next you found an empty can and scraped both sides of the can until both lids came off. With the water coming out of the hydrant at full blast, you placed the can in front of the nozzle and you had a powerful force of water gushing out.

Now that’s an East Harlem story. 

Parenti’s remembrance marveled at the adaptability of street kids to their environment. Willie Lopez fills in the details, brings that spontaneous creativity to life. 

Lopez recalled how stickball was: “...played on every block….You pitched or bounced the ball once on the street and you have one swing. The batter runs into the ball and, hopefully, you hit a hard line drive down the street. If you hit it on the roof, that’s an out, but when you played on the block, you always had fire escapes. Your goal was to hit the fire escapes or the wall because, if it bounced down off the wall, that’s how you could get an extra run.”

A Disappeared World

The assembled oral accounts, a few of which harken back to the late 19th century, recall forgotten features of quotidian life, provide a description of James Bryants’ iceman [maybe it was Michael Parenti’s father], the icebox and its operation, an explanation of the prevalent use of dumbwaiters in tenement buildings. 

Bell gets into the weeds with the formation and history of local institutions, but this detail aids in spinning the web of relationships that make neighborhood a community; the wispy thread tying LuLu’s Candy Store to Joe Cuba’s vibraphone player. No group is slighted where their history and contributions are concerned. Bell even dug out a member of the small Greek community nestled among all the Italians, Jews, Puerto Ricans and African Americans. 

None of the accounts deny the area’s poverty, but neither do they dwell on it. For all its poverty and crime, people looked back fondly upon pre-redevelopment East Harlem as a collection of neighborhoods with what Robert Stern, another of Bell’s subjects, called a “dense network of associations.” 

Said Morton Ross: “When I was a kid we threw away the key because we didn’t lock our doors in East Harlem. It was a “whose a dare?” system and anyone came in the building there was a superintendent or a janitor. And if someone came by your building that didn’t belong there, or if a person banged on the door, our Italian janitor said “whose a dare” and that trespasser ran like hell.”

Carlos De Jesus recalled an “open community” of fluid exchange and relation between residents. 

Bell, for his part, provides naught but the unvarnished truths where East Harlem’s afflictions are concerned, but even in an accounting of street-gang presence, something of an ebullient urban lexicon surfaces:

“There were gangs all over the place. On 102nd Street the gang was called the Demons; 103rd Street gangs were the Dragons, and also the Copian (Copasetics) patrolled that area. No gangs existed on 104th Street until we started our gang, the Condemners. The Viceroys’ turf was on 110th Street and sometimes they came to 103rd Street to fight the Dragons on 105th Street was the Corsicans territory and on 106th the Colts ran that area.” [Manny Segarra]

The Public Housing Phantom

Bell tarries long on the identity imposed upon East Harlem via public housing policies decided beyond its confines; the immutable reality that transformed the area and erased its past save for voices like those archived here. 

“Remembered” is a guided tour through both the time and space that has been, and is, East Harlem, an excursion through successive East Harlems. Bell even applies a tour guide’s language, opening up one chapter: “Here we will read how one man’s vision...” 

 

The author, while constructing a fair balance sheet on redevelopment’s record in East Harlem, is not afraid to render judgement, calling it, “The tenement carnage and relocation.”

Arnie Segarra, resident of the Johnson Houses on Lexington Avenue, put things within the context of the times: “Housing projects were luxury housing back then and it was the first time anyone rode in an elevator and had a maintenance crew.”  

Manny Segarra summoned the scars redevelopment left behind both on the landscape and individual psyches. ”Scores of tenements were destroyed, which left empty lots and this practice was commonplace throughout the city. I was ten years old and I kept thinking that everything would be OK. But I went downstairs and saw the empty buildings."

Bell maintains a loose, progressively tinted narrative history of the United States throughout the arc of East Harlem’s tale, always tying what was happening in the neighborhoods to larger societal trends, while highlighting a community asserting its own relevance beyond the East River. 

"The Goodfather (A Novel): The Rising Fall of the Marvelous Marcantonio" can be found here: Marc Lives

Vito Marcantonio Forum Kicks Off Rebel Girl Series with "Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: Why Now?"

 

Professor Mary Anne Trasciatti gave a March 7, talk launching the second edition of civil rights activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s “My Life as a Political Prisoner.” 

The zoom event represented a first collaboration between the Vito Marcantonio Forum and Claudia Jones School for Political Education; “two educational and cultural political organizations sharing a vision that history matters,” said moderator Maria Lisella. 

Reissued by International Publishers', “My Life as a Political Prisoner. The Rebel Girl Becomes No.11710,” was first published as “The Alderson Story.” 

Trasciatti, who is a professor of writing studies and rhetoric at Hofstra University, and president of Remember the Triangle Coalition,is currently writing a book on Flynn for Rutgers University Press. 

She also contributed the forward to the new edition of Flynn’s prison memoir, which came out in 1963, one year before its author died. “Her experiences at the penitentiary for women is what the book is about,” Trasciatti told the online audience. 

The professor began with a discussion of Flynn's life and work. Born in 1890, her parents were socialists and fighters for Irish freedom who moved in a radical milieu, which led to her youthful entry into the world of political activism.

“The material conditions of her poverty and struggle, as well as the ideological education she received from her family and her friends,” Trasciatti observed, “were the foundations for Flynn’s deep understanding of the inequalities that pervaded U.S. society and politics and of her broad international vision.” 

The professor spoke of a life divided in two parts; the first being “The Rebel Girl,” when Flynn adhered to syndicalist principles and direct action, rather than electoral politics. 

At 16, Flynn signed on with the Industrial Workers of the World union -- the Wobblies -- described by Trasciatti as, “an exciting and audacious group at the heart of some of the most important industrial labor actions of the early 20th century.” 

Flynn led free speech fights that shaped the IWW’s future campaigns on the issue. She played important roles in the Lawrence, Mass., “Bread and Roses” strike, the Patterson, N.J. silk strike, New York hotel workers job action, and the iron workers walkout on Minnesota’s Mesabi Range. 

She was arrested for being a member of the Wobblies when she had left the union and escaped imprisonment by petitioning President Woodrow Wilson; an experience which spurred her founding of the Workers Defense Union to help in similar cases, and which often represented the only legal representation such defendants could find. 

The Rebel Girl’s unique talent was bringing a fractious left to the table with the liberal establishment. “She was instrumental in forging the liberal-radical alliance historians note was at the heart of the post-war civil liberties movement in the United States,” Trasciatti asserted. 

Flynn fought deportations and called, throughout her life, for political prisoner status in the U.S., where it does not exist. “Hence the title of her book, ‘My Life as a Political Prisoner,’” Trasciatti explained. 

In 1920, Flynn helped found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) with which she worked for 20 years, before the association came to an end over her membership in the Communist Party of the U.S.A. (CP). 

In 1926, she suffered a breakdown when upon learning that her lover, the anarchist Carlo Tresca, had been romancing her younger sister and produced a child in the process. It was the last straw for a spirit exhausted from incessant advocating, agitating and traveling, according to Trasciatti.  

This precipitated a move to Portland, Oregon, where she lived quietly for 10 years with a friend before entering the second half of her career as a member of the Communist Party from 1947 to 1964. 

“These are the years when Flynn is no longer a girl, but still a rebel,” said Trasciatti. 

In 1961, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was elected to a three-year term as the CP’s first female chair. The fit between Flynn and the party was a natural one. In 1937, the CP was the most active, inclusive and exciting organization on the left, according to Trasciatti, who added, “She wanted to be in the fray.”

It helped that Flynn’s joining coincided with the Popular Front period during which coalition-building skills were at a premium. An anti-fascist going back to the 1920s, Flynn liked the CP’s dedication to that fight. 

Professor Trasciatti

Trasciatti explained how the late 1930s witnessed a “little red scare”; a period of rising anti-communism between the first big red scare at the end of World War I and McCarthyism. 

During the turbulence, anti-communists in the ACLU sought to dissociate the group from the Communist Party; to shed its radical past and embrace a politically neutral version of free speech, which many have applauded, but which Trasciatti characterized as “a problematic moment in the history" of the outfit.

In Feb. 1940, the organization passed a “Commu-Nazi” resolution, asserting the two ideologies represented one side of the same seditious coin. Neither political animal could sit on the ACLU board, because these credos undermined their commitment to civil liberties.

Flynn, the only communist on the ACLU governing body, was asked to step down, but refused; instead challenging the directors to both try and purge her, which they obliged in May 1940. 

“Ponder the irony,” Trasciatti observed. “Elizabeth Gurley Flynn had been an anti-fascist since 1923, before anybody else on the ACLU executive committee, and now the ACLU was telling her that her political ideas were as dangerous as fascism. That cut deep.”

Her ouster, Trasciatti said, gave a liberal seal of approval to anti-communism and set the stage for everything that followed in its name. 

In 1976, the ACLU expressed its organizational regrets over the move.  

Also in 1940, Congress passed the Alien Registration Act; the first peace-time, anti-sedition law enacted since the Alien and Sedition Act of 1789. 

Known as the Smith Act, the bill made it a crime to undermine the morale of the U.S. military or advocate overthrow of the government by violence, and required the registration and fingerprinting of all adults, noncitizen residents. 

“The path towards internment,” observed Trasciatti. 

The CP opposed the law throughout its enactment as anti-immigrant, antithetical to civil liberties, and unAmerican. The party urged President Franklin Roosevelt not to sign it. 

“The law proved a potent weapon against the left,” said Trasciatti.   

The first significant indictments came in 1941, against 39 members of the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party. Some defendants were Teamsters and Trasciatti cited literature suggesting the union colluded with the government to remove them from the syndicate. 

The trial, “a travesty,” according to Trasciatti, was one of political ideas that set a very low bar for seditious speech and resulted in 18 defendants being sentenced to a year, or more, in prison. 

The Communist Party did not work on behalf of the defendants, as they were Trotskyists, but not long after World War II, it too became a target of Smith Act prosecutions. 

In 1949, 11 CP leaders were arrested, tried and convicted. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn chaired the party’s Smith Act Defense Fund to raise money and generate sympathy, but “it was a really tough sell in that political environment,” Trasciatti remarked. 

In 1951, a second group was arrested, including Flynn, Jones, Betty Gannett and Marianne Baccarat. 

At trial, Flynn acted as her own counsel. “She had an interest in legal affairs, but more importantly, her book makes clear how nobody wanted to defend these people,” said Trasciatti. 

Flynn’s speeches in court, she continued, “offer a stirring indictment of capitalist justice and defense of the right of Americans to their own political beliefs and opinions.” 

Memoirs

Nevertheless, in 1953, all of the defendants were found guilty. Flynn’s sentence was 28 months in the Alderson Penitentiary for Women, and these months yielded the book under consideration. 

The title, Trasciatti noted, reflects Flynn’s longstanding commitment to civil liberties. 

“She acknowledges that there are political prisoners in the U.S., that we incarcerate people for their ideas, and for the things they say, not the things they do. That recognition is part of what sustained her through imprisonment,” said Trasciatti. 

Flynn acknowledged her fellow political prisoners, the professor asserted, not to call attention to the plight of communists, or other imprisoned political activists, rather to highlight the inhumanity of what passed for justice in the U.S.,as experienced by the ordinary women she found herself surrounded by, and to call for change. 

“Many of the topics she addressed in the book make it feel like it could have been written yesterday,” Trasciatti observed. 

These included the dehumanizing effects of incarceration, the creep of militarization into the prison system, the class composition of the jailed population, and the understanding of incarceration as a racist institution. 

She railed against the exploitation of prison labor, and took the position that “addiction is a disease not a moral failure. A very forward thinking approach,” said Trasciatti. 

“My Life As…" she added, presents a rare personal account of what it’s like to be a woman behind bars. 

Trasciatti quoted Angela Davis who wrote in “Women Race, and Class,”  “[The book] reveals a new political maturity and a more profound consciousness of racism. As a leader of the Communist Party, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn had developed a deep commitment to the black liberation struggle, and had come to realize that black peoples’ resistance is not always consciously political. At Alderson, she made friends more easily among the black women in prison than she did among the white inmates. And the black women, in turn, were more receptive to Elizabeth. Perhaps they sensed in this white woman communist an instinctive kinship in the struggle.”

Although 28 months in prison were undoubtedly hard on an older woman, Flynn left unbowed, “formidable,” said Trasciatti.  

Flynn died in Moscow in 1964. 

The presentation can be viewed in its entirety at https://youtu.be/3BhN9Nvh3RQ

"The Goodfather (A Novel): The Rising Fall of the Marvelous Marcantonio" can be found here: MARC LIVES

Marc on the Smith Act

Rep. Vito Marcantonio had no use for the Smith Act.

Marc told the House, in debate over the bill: “In a period as trying as this period, the test of democracy lies in the ability of that democracy to maintain its liberties, to preserve those liberties, and to have more freedom rather than less freedom.” 

Rep. Joseph Gavagan (D-N.Y.) asked Marcantonio if a democracy didn’t have a right to defend itself, which was something like a fastball down the middle that wasn’t so fast.  

“A democracy has a perfect right to protect itself,” said Marcantonio, “but remember this: you are not protecting democracy by this legislation. Spies and saboteurs will not register nor submit to fingerprinting… I believe spies and saboteurs and anybody who engages in illegal activity should be immediately apprehended and severely punished. You do not accomplish that end by this bill. You only undermine American freedom.” 

Law already existed to root out spies and prevent sabotage, Marcantonio noted.

In “Vito Marcantonio: Radical in Congress,” Alan Schaffer wrote that to the East Harlemite, the Smith Act was nothing more than an attempt at legislative intimidation of the politically unpopular, especially that běte noire of the Congress, the radical left.” 

The imprisonment of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, among others, under the act confirmed Marcantonio’s suspicions. 

Marc was one of four congressmen who voted against the bill.

“Nothing illustrates the temper of the times more than that overwhelming defeat,” Schaffer concluded.  

"The Goodfather (A Novel): The Rising Fall of the Marvelous Marcantonio," can be found here: MARC LIVES

Fiorello La Guardia and the Social Democratic City

 

The exclusion of Fiorello La Guardia’s leftist brand from his biography represents a gross distortion to the image of America’s greatest mayor, according to professor Gerald Meyer. 

New York City’s La Guardia is a beloved figure, Meyer stated, “But what’s left out his story is his leftism.” 

Meyer, a professor at Hostos Community College in The Bronx, N.Y., is co-editor of “The Lost World of Italian Radicalism,” and author of “Vito Marcantonio: Radical Politician."So he has some experience with cases like La Guardia’s. 

The educator spoke March 18 at the New Haven Free Public Library’s “Books Sandwiched In:Virtual Author Talks,” on the subject, “Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and the Left.” 

The Little Flower’s leftism, Meyer asserted, was his motivating force, but in the retelling of his political career, across many biographies, is unfailingly cast aside. 

“It is also very belittling to La Guardia,” said Meyer. “It’s as if he didn’t have ideas when he was actually a brilliant man. He was an ideologue. His demands in Congress presaged the entire New Deal.”

The omission leaves an incomplete picture of the man as thinker, as visionary, and as an effective politician, Meyer stated.  

The talk tracked La Guardia’s life chronologically, and was divided into phases; the first being from his birth in 1882 until 1910, when he traveled to Europe and landed a job in Trieste. 

Youth as Key to Understanding 

Meyer contended that, more so than other larger-than-life historical figures, the keys to La Guardia’s formation are found in his youth. 

His father was an anti-clerical Jacobin and his mother an Italian jew with roots in Sephardic Spain. Upon arriving in America, the family Americanized; joining the Presbyterian Church and moving to Prescott, Ariz., where father played music in a U.S. Army ensemble. 

There, Meyer noted, La Guardia saw discrimination against Native Americans and immigrant laborers alike. His own indignities suffered as the lone Italian at school made him aware of what it meant to be an outsider, and to the fact he himself was an outsider. 

When the Spanish-American War ignited, La Guardia’s father, Achilles, was stationed in Tampa, Fla., where he contracted food poisoning from military rations that ultimately killed him. 

“La Guardia comes to view the system as responsible for his father’s death,” Meyer explained. 

The remaining family returned to Europe. La Guardia signed on at the U.S. Consul in Trieste and morphed into a linguist who could speak Croatian, Italian, and Yiddish. 

“It’s all going to make him a great man and a radical,” said Meyer. 

Against the Grain

Highlighted was one little-known incident that would foreshadow La Guardia-in-the-making. 

Trieste was an embarkation port for New York-bound immigrant passage. Those who trekked to the Adriatic coast had often broken themselves economically to get on the boat to America. Many times, Meyer noted, they were unceremoniously shipped home for not having been cleared medically, ruined. 

“Without permission, La Guardia wouldn’t let anyone on the boat who hadn’t had a physical, to prevent them from making the journey only to impoverish themselves,” Meyer recounted. 

The anecdote illustrates La Guardia’s ability to work against the grain, to do right, to find ways to benefit ordinary people, said Meyer.  

Upon his stateside return, La Guardia took a law degree and fell in with the radical literati who populated his Greenwich Village neighborhood. He ran for Congress and won, though he was not yet La Guardia fully formed. 

His primary influences, Meyer stated, were from the southwest: “Populism is ingrained in him. It was pro-people, not class-oriented, and didn’t seek the abolition of private property.”

After serving two terms in Congress, La Guardia enlisted to fight in World War I. He reentered politics upon his return as a New York City Alderman before launching a second run at Congress, this time from a district in East Harlem. 

With the Democratic Party city machines being the natural enemy of populists, and the Irish pols that ran them hostile to Italians, La Guardia signed on with the Republican Party and campaigned to victory. 

But the needs of his working-class district pushed La Guardia leftward, toward socialism. “And he took to it like a fish to water,” said Meyer. 

La Guardia’s hybrid ideology of urban populism focused on the regulation of corporate activity. “There really isn’t another like him,” Mayer stated. “His uniqueness was very valuable, but also hurt him, because he was, again, an outsider.”

That status meant La Guardia was starved of meaningful committee work. “So he took to the floor of the House and became a great orator, speaking on every imaginable issue, including agriculture. And there are no farms in East Harlem,” emphasized Meyer. 

“His radical voice becomes stronger and stronger,” he continued. “It’s about protecting. He talks about happiness and how people have a right to happiness. It’s not just materialistic. It’s humanistic in a very deep way.” 

Effectively ceding his seat to Vito Marcantonio, La Guardia ran for mayor of New York City on a Republican-Fusion-Progressive ticket, and won. 

Left Turn

“His actions are quite remarkable,” said Meyer. “His arrival as mayor coincides with the Great Depression and his marvelous collaboration with Franklin Roosevelt. His vision is breathtaking. He creates a social democratic metropolis, piece by piece.”

The great patrician, Roosevelt, "was crazy about La Guardia," Meyer noted. 

The mayor could see the value in New York’s surplus of very talented, unemployed persons, which made it a perfect recipient for the Works Progress Administration money. 

“New York was a demonstration project which showed that government can work, that the money is not wasted,” said Meyer, who highlighted achievements in public housing, subway extensions, playgrounds, swimming pools, an opera house, sanitation strategies, and sewage infrastructure. 

“Nothing was left untouched and New York was transformed into the magnificent city we still have,” said Meyer. 

The year 1936 saw the formation of the American Labor Party as a way of capturing socialist votes that would not otherwise go to the Democrat Roosevelt. 

Meyer suggested the American Labor Party (ALP) was the most important third party in American history. Until it’s demise in 1950, with Marcantonio’s defeat, the ALP garnered about 15 percent of the vote, which gave it tremendous leverage on Gotham’s political playing field. 

“In East Harlem it was a majority party and the second largest in the Bronx,” according to Meyer. “La Guardia immediately joins up, along with Marcantonio: A fact so unknown, it is just shocking. Why wouldn’t the history books and biographies mention this?” 

Professor Meyer’s talk can be viewed in its entirety by clicking on the link below

Gerald Meyer Discusses Mayor Fiorello La Guardia | Books Sandwiched In - YouTube

"The Goodfather(A Novel): The Rising Fall of the Marvelous Marcantonio," can be found here: MARC LIVES