I Scribe, Marcantonio (II) Battling Bureaucrats

Marc speaks at a "Wallace for President Rally," Yankee Stadium 1948

Friends is Friends.

Vito Marcantonio was a hands-on people's representative not above stepping into the small-life affairs of his constituents in a personal way. He had a biting, city-boy sense of humor and a lawyer's tendency to block each argument presented him and with these tools did he wage verbal battle on behalf of the poor.  

His streetwise approach to administrative and official matters, his unequivocal advocacy on behalf of constituents, and his familiarity with the conditions under which they lived, are all on exhibit in an exchange archived with the Marcantonio Papers at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street. 

The written salvos took place between Marcantonio and Arthur McDermott, director, Selective Service for the City of New York. 

A Marcantonio collaborator, Tony Ribaudo, had been drafted into World War II and apparently requested the congressman's assistance in getting off the hook, given that he was the sole provider for his ex-wife, their child and his mother. 

Marcantonio's opening request is not available in the file, but McDermott's caustic response of Nov. 12, 1942, is. 

Paid Communist

The conscription chief notes that Ribaudo has been, “a paid organizer for the Communist Party since Jan. 5. 1942.” He further observes how Ribaudo,“became separated from his wife and four children on Jan. 7, 1942” [perhaps hinting at a link between joining the party and unjoining his marriage].

The draft chief points out that at the time of his filing, [Ribaudo] and his family were on home relief, and had been so for five years previously.

McDermott notes that Ribaudo claimed to live with his daughter by a first, deceased wife and his mother, and accuses him of trying to, “bring himself within the rule that provides that a registrant who lives in a bona fide family relationship with his child, is entitled to a dependency deferment.”

Anthony Ribaudo does not seem to rank as someone “important” in the congressman's constellation. He appears more akin to the neighborhood “characters” Marc prided himself on not forgetting as he rose to prominence.

Men such as Anthony “Kid” Lagana, a secretary of Marc's who was fished out of the East River, or prize fighter Dominick Petrone, an American Labor Party district captain and alleged “gibbone” body guard. 

They served him as ward-heelers, spotters, messengers, organizers and he gave them the respectability that came when one worked with a member of Congress. 

FBI File

Ribaudo makes a few appearances in the file the Federal Bureau of Investigation kept on Marc...the Marcantonio File.

An Aug. 2, 1946 “teletype” U.S. Department of Justice memo has Ribaudo working as a go-between Marcantonio and U.S. Communist Party secretary general Eugene Dennis. It refers to Ribaudo as a “campaign manager” for the congressman. 

“Dennis was advised that Marcantonio is in Washington D.C., and returns to NY each evening about Nine O-Clock,” the memo informs. [He did this on Fridays, not every day].

An Aug. 9, 1946 FBI office memo details two communications, “which reflect on how the Communist Party reaches Congressman Vito Marcantonio."

Once again Ribaudo's name pops up as someone “describing himself as being with Marcantonio calling Communist Party headquarters trying to reach Dennis with a message that the congressman wanted to talk with him about the “Brooklyn situation” on the afternoon of July 16, 1946.  

The Brooklyn situation was unknown to the Feds, according to the memo's author, J.C. Strickland, “although it possibly pertains to the support publicly offered by Marcantonio to Congressman O'Toole, which was a surprise to Communists in the New York City area since their favored candidate from the same area had to withdraw. This was Douglas McMahon, reported Communist who is an official of the Transport Workers Union – CIO.”  

“It might be noted,” Strickland wrote, “that the Bureau has conducted an investigation of Ribaudo who in the past served as section organizer for the East Harlem Section of the Communist Party in the New York City Area.”

The second interoffice FBI communication appears to refer to the same facts as contained in the first. 

Get Thee to a War Theater 

In any case, McDermott imparts to Marcantonio that Ribaudo's induction into the wartime army shall proceed apace; that communists are good as anybody else when it comes to canon fodder. Given that the above memos discussing his role as a Marc go-between are dated from 1946, we can assume Ribaudo survived and made it home hale and hardy.

Hostos Community College professor Gerald Meyer notes that the Communist Party encouraged its members to enlist. "It's support for  Tony Ribaudo's exemption indicates that they valued his work very highly." 

Italian street life (Helen Levitt).

Marcantonio returned fire on Nov. 4. In his letter, the congressman does not evade the Red charge or even dispute it. The tactic was old news to him, what he called, “the red herring that hid the fact there was no pork chop.”  

Marc challenged inaccuracies in McDermott's letter as to Ribaudo's support payments to his wife [they were larger].  

Furthermore, Marcantonio noted, “There is nothing strange or unusual for one that becomes separated from his wife to want to live with his mother and his child.”

But Marc was forced to relent, saying he expected no satisfaction from McDermott, thanks to his political prejudices. “I am certain that if [Ribaudo] were not a communist, the decision would be otherwise. The contents of your letter proves it.”  

Marcantonio's street-speak sparring skills translated well to his written output, his scripted word as sharp as the spoken barbs he launched at congressional colleagues.

“Ordinarily,” wrote McDermott, “I would have been amazed that a public official had attempted to intercede on behalf of a registrant whose case obviously had so little merit, were it not for the fact that you were the Congressman.”  

To which Marc responded, “I would ordinarily resent the attack contained in your letter if it were not for the fact you had made it.”

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

I Scribe, Marcantonio (III) Letters to the Editor

It was the worst of times or, perhaps, worst of "The Times."

In “Vito Marcantonio: Radical Politician,” professor Gerald Meyer notes that, “Marcantonio's Radical positions and affiliations engendered extraordinary opposition. He was subject to campaigns of vilification in the press.”

Meyer noted that, among these, was a series of editorials published by “The New York Times,” in the heat of Marcantonio's 1948 re-election campaign. The congressman promptly launched the written counterattack under consideration here.

It was a difficult campaign. Two years prior, opponents had latched onto the beating death of Republican district captain, Joe Scottoriggio, and mercilessly tarred Marcantonio with responsibility for the fatal dumping and with mafiosi collusion to get it done.

Neither the mafiosi nor Marcantonio were ever found guilty of anything and numerous investigations into Scottoriggio's death were inconclusive. East Harlem was effectively occupied by police forces and street sweeps were deployed for weeks after the murder in Marc's district.

There was blood in the water and the sharks were circling. Marcantonio put paper to pen and addressed, in the required stately terms, “The New York Times'” charges against him.

E Tu N.Y. Times?

“The Times” had, he wrote, “seen fit to devote three editorial columns in the issues of Oct. 12,14 and 15 – to urging my defeat...”

The newspaper daily, he continued, “has told its readers that my record in Congress is one of having consistently, 'accepted, spoken for and voted for the Communist line during the last decade.' 'The Times,' says the issue facing the voters of my district is 'whether they are going to vote Russian or vote American'.”

Marcantonio admitted that he had indeed been consistent, “yes, consistent in the fight against reckless profiteers and their marches to war; consistent in battling for fair wages, price controls, decent housing, national health, freedom for labor, an end to religious discrimination, Jim Crow and the like; and for the civil rights of all Americans.”

Having put his campaign platform in Gotham's most important daily, Marc next wrote that he, “bowed to the felicitous phrasing of 'The New York Times' editorial, however cynically the phrase may have been meant.”

Marcantonio spends a good amount of ink explaining his shift in position regarding U.S. entry into the European theater. At the war's outset he would tell crowds “The Yanks are not comin'!”, but once German Chancellor Adolf Hitler violated his nonaggression pact with Russian Premier Joseph Stalin, he saw reason enough for entering the conflict.

A Majority of "Marcs"

“It is not hindsight for me to say now,” he asserts, “that if there had been a majority of Marcantonios in the days of the appeasement of fascism and Hitlerism, in the days of the sabotage of collective security by the capitalist democracies, in the days of the massacre of democratic Spain by the Hitler-Mussolini axis – if there had been a majority of Marcantonios in those years to call a halt to the fascist march on the world, there would have been no World War II and millions and millions of lives would have been saved to enjoy a world at peace.”

His change of heart occurred, he explains, “when it became a war for the defense and security of the American people, did indeed become a true anti-fascist and anti-imperialist war.”

Yet the war the U.S. started out with was not the one it ended. Stewardship of the war mattered, he intones, for with President Franklin Roosevelt's passing, “Wall Street and the imperialist forces of Britain took over the war, perverted the objective of the peace.”

His complaint to the editors brings into full relief the effort of international capital at the time to settle the territories of a flattened European continent and quell revolutionary situations flashing from the embers of war.

“The bipartisan policymakers seek to rebuild the Germany which has made war on this world twice within twenty-five years,” he continues his condemnation of the post-war policy consensus. “They exculpate and pardon the gas-chamber assassins of nazism and restore them to power. They favor the 'return of colonies' to Italy and protest is heard faintly over the din of war-making from the self-same Ethiopia which was the first victim of fascism's last march. They provide arms and money for Greek to kill Greek, for the thieving and fratricidal Chang Kai-shek to suppress his peasant people.

“And in this very month, the bipartisan policy which 'The Times' defends is now seeking to maneuver the admission of the Spain of Franco – the Fascist, Falangist, anti-semite butcher – into the United Nations.”

In Defense of the Italian

It is election season, and Marcantonio does not let pass an opportunity to defend and identify fully with his constituency and ethnic cohort:

“I am taxed by 'The Times' for demanding the world relief be administered through the United Nations rather than as the spearhead of a new policy of economic imperialism by American big business. 'The Times' calls the attention of my 'Italian constituents' to this.

“Waste no more words on this matter: my constituents of proud Italian birth or descent know well and applaud my consistent opposition to the use of American taxpayers' money to interfere in the Italian elections, as well as my genuine concern for the restoration of a democratic and self-sustaining Italy.”

Marc then switches from responding to charges, to further elucidation of his own political program. The following paragraph has the feeling of a controlled rant. It is delivered with an anger-harnessed rhythm and matches descriptions of his staccato style of public speaking:

“I have consistently fought for price controls and the rationing of scarce commodities. I have supported every decent housing measure and introduced some, hoping to give not only the veterans, but all our people decent homes to live in (without racial discrimination, incidentally). I have consistently fought against Wall Street and the monopolies. This has included my opposition to their entrenchment in the government as ordained by Mr. Truman and promised for the future by Mr. Dewey, whom 'The Times' supports.

“I have fought against the tax measures that 'rob the needy to help the greedy,' as FDR so aptly said.”

Marc's Vision

From there his politics become more a specific vision for the country, a nuts-and-bolts enumeration of what America might be.

“I am against universal military training and peacetime conscription,” he wrote. “No veteran need have this explained, nor any son, wife, or sweetheart, and yet 'The Times' attacks me back for adhering to this historically American position. I oppose the regimentation of Americans and the entire American economy for the purpose of badgering any country which may resist the economic aggression planned by the 'bipartisan' Wall Street gang that now controls the Government.”

War and profits are continually linked throughout the congressman's screed.

And of course, there was his role as the last and final bulwark of trade union rights, something that movement has too easily forgotten where Marcantonio is concerned. Moreover, although Marc was not always the most accurate prophet – there was no great move towards a third party in the U.S. as he predicted – his words about the fate of organized labor ring only too true. 

“I am against the Taft-Hartley Act, 'The Times,' supports the act. The act is a deliberate and proven instrument of destruction of labor organizations, according to Mr. Green, Mr. Murray. Mr. Lewis and all other leaders of the working people of America. Is it 'Russian' to be against Taft-Hartley and union-busting? Is it patriotic to be for it?”

Witch Hunt Warning

He continued his painting of a hopeful and progressive portrait, ever vigilant of the civil rights that empower his beleaguered constituencies, and mindful of McCarthyism.

“I am against turning my country into a police state. I adhere to the constitutional principle that an accused man must have an opportunity to hear his accusers and cross-examine them. Do Mr. Truman's 'loyalty' purges include this procedure? Is it 'blindness' to demand justice and fairness for all alike?”

Here he adopts and almost plaintive tone. Marcantonio does not come to the politics of poverty through a fashion, or academia. He lives it with those around him in East Harlem and when he makes his case here, he's making their case. Yes, he's writing in election season in defense of his good name, but he employs the occasion to take another at bat for his constituents, his people.

“However much the views and actions of mine may resemble the 'communist line' in the opinion of 'The New York Times,' I nevertheless, stand by them. I am confident that history and the final judgment of the people will support me in the future as they had so consistently in the past.”

Marcantonio would win that year, yet again, despite the specter of Scottoriggio and a nationwide Republican sweep.

If Marc's response had an impact at The Gray Lady, it was not enduring. In 1950, 'The Times' again targeted him in an editorial tuned to the same key: “We shall limit our advice in the congressional elections this year to the special case of Vito Marcantonio...his views seem to be so remarkably compatible wit the view of Moscow...It has long been obvious that Mr. Marcantonio's views did not represent American thinking.”

We can be certain they knew well his views, because they knew well his concise and cutting style of writing. 'The Times,' simply chose to ignore the contents of its own publicatio

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

"Beloved Comrades," Annette Rubinstein, Marc and the Great Tradition in English Literature

Annette T. Rubinstein was a titan who excelled as an author, educator and activist known to very few.

That was by design. Rubinstein was an uncompromising leftist, a member of the Communist Party for 15 years, but even McCarthyism and the blacklist could not silence or still her completely.

As with Vito Marcantonio, with whom she ran on the American Labor Party ticket once, her extensive labors ceaselessly expended over most of her 97 years, have been erased from this country's recent historical memory.

The Vito Marcantonio Forum (VMF) will take a first step in the remembering of Rubinstein on March 4, with a program entitled, “Beloved Comrades,” featuring Dr. Gerald Meyer, author of “Vito Marcantonio: Radical Politician,” VMF co-chair, and a friend of Rubinstein's, who will discuss the nature of her relationship to East Harlem's congressman.

Meyer has written of Rubinstein and her ability, “to influence countless numbers from every generation and to continue her work under all circumstances, including political repression and advanced age, in combination with her decent and caring approach to individuals, stands as a model for those who themselves have questioned what it can mean to live a good and productive life within the often vilified and marginalized American left.”

Her political and life choices, he has written, were motivated by her progressive secular Jewish identity.

Rubinstein was accepted to Barnard College at the age of 15, but was turned away on orientation day, because the quota for Jews had been calculated incorrectly. She went to New York University instead, and by the age of 24, had earned her doctorate.

Bryn Mawr offered her a professorship at the height of the Great Depression, if she would anglicize her name, and Rubinstein refused.

George Gordon - Lord Byron

That led to a job in the Depression-era Home Relief Bureau where she encountered the difficulties of Italian and East European Jewish families coping with America. Characteristic of most everything to come, Rubinstein joined efforts organize her fellow caseworkers into a union.

In 1939, she joined the American Labor Party (ALP) and ran for assembly on Manhattan's upper West Side in 1942 and 1947. In 1949, she returned to the hustings at Marcantonio's urging, unsuccessfully contesting a congressional seat against Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr.

She became an educator, through her purchase of the Robert Louis Stevenson School, which eventually started accepting GI education benefits from World War Two Puerto Ricans veterans. The school absorbed 600 of the vets, whom nobody seemed willing to take on.

Rather than lauding Rubinstein, the federal Veterans Administration initiated a process that ended with her blacklisting and that of 12 other teachers at the school, including her 67-year old mother.

Of course, Marcantonio is gone by now. How many lost a protector with his untimely passing?

Writes Meyer, “[I]t was really from the moment of her blacklisting that her work as an important left intellectual began.” More than half of Rubinstein's output was concerned with literature, according to Meyer.

John Keats

Her signature work is the 900-plus page volume, “The Great Tradition in English Literature From Shakespeare to Shaw.”

As part of the “Beloved Comrades” program, author Stephen Siciliano will discuss Rubinstein's analysis of the 18^th century Romantics.

Rubinstein was influenced by Hungarian social and literary theorist Georg Lukacs. In his 1937 book, “The Historical Novel,” Lukacs developed a new Marxist aesthetic intent on humanizing the way history is recounted by breaking down broad based political and social movements to the interaction of its particular agents, the people.

Rubinstein's reading of English literature at the dawn of the great bourgeois epoch focuses on the writers' public lives, political activities and the social component to their work.

She penned a second review following "The Great Tradition..." entitled, “American Literature Root and Flower: Significant Poets, Novelists and Dramatists, 1775-1955.” Rubinstein was the driving force and editor behind the publishing of “I Vote My Conscience,” a collection of Vito Marcantonio's speeches, debates and writings in the years immediately after his death in the 1950s.

She wrote some 200 articles and reviews for outlets diverse as “Mainstream,” “Monthly Review,” “Jewish Currents,” “Science and Society,” and the “National Guardian.” There were countless pamphlets, essays and letters, almost all of it, Meyer writes, “organically connected” to Rubinstein's political activism.

In the communist world, her reception was distinct from that in her own country. “Root and Flower,” was published in China where schools used it as a text. She traveled the Soviet Union and Eastern block, where her works were celebrated and she got to see socialism in practice.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

She continued an activist's life, was called to testify before Congress a few times and was questioned by Tailgunner Joe McCarthy himself. Lecturing was yet another activity which she engaged at a heroic pace, covering the length and breadth of the country.

Professor Meyer has written that Rubinstein explained how her lectures on Shakespeare, “were motivated by an encounter during the thirties with a Communist who scoffed at her suggestion that he attend a production of 'Macbeth.' He responded, 'Why would a leftist want to see a play about kings and queens?'”

Answering that question became, “a type of life-long mission for her,” wrote Meyer. 

Rubinstein died in 2007 and achieved too much, worked too hard, affected too many lives for the good, to be erased from memory by a collective insanity that impacted she and so many others.

Please join the Vito Marcantonio Forum for a revival of Annette T. Rubinstein's politics and literature and life.  

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

The Miseries of Mrs. Marcantonio

An Internet search cannot produce a single photograph of her. The traces of Miriam Sanders Marcantonio across the digital landscape are faint and lead only to her death.

Such was the fate of a woman whose husband's ample legacy was systematically erased from the country's historical memory.

Although images of Vito Marcantonio's wife are hard to come by, we can begin to form one through her presence in the public record, the same place her husband still looms large, through research and memoir.

Scholastic works on Mrs. Marcantonio characterize her as a New England blue blood.

She was from Ossippee, in central New Hampshire, close to the Maine state line. The Ossippee Indians were one of the twelve Algonquin tribes. The town has history as an “Indian stockade fort” that evolved into the most prominent of its kind regionally. It is settled on rocky terrain, suitable for farming the hardier stuffs, and a regional source of gravel and sand.

Ossippee has been the birthplace of John Lovewell, a famous Indian killer; Republican Rep. Earl Merrow; and Dale Bozzio, lead singer of the 1980s new wave band, Missing Persons.

A ship bearing the town's name participated in the federal subjugation of confederate Mobile, Alabama during the Civil War.

Miriam Marcantonio, nee Sanders, was actually born in Sommerville, Mass., on March 3, 1891 to Charles and Clara Sanders. The Sanders name appears in the list of “early Ossippee families” maintained by the city.

In “Vito Marcantonio: Radical Politician,” author Gerald Meyer wrote that, for Sanders, Marcantonio “was the apotheosis of what she hoped could emerge, with assistance from Haarlem House and herself, from the immigrant community.”

For the East Harlem Italian, Meyer continued, “Sanders represented an unknown America, almost another country, but a country he truly loved and wanted to be a part of... More than anyone else, Sanders introduced Marcantonio to the manners and ways of the world outside East Harlem, knowledge without which he might never have achieved national prominence.”

Alan Schaffer, author of “Vito Marcantonio: Radical in Congress,” wrote of Sanders: “Devoid of luxurious tastes, thrifty in both person and speech, a devout believer in the social responsibility of her Protestant faith, Miss Sanders had been educated at New Hampshire University and had studied social work at the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy. She did social work in Boston for a short period; then her work brought her to New York City, Haarlem House, and Vito Marcantonio.”

Marc worked in the adult education department at the venerable settlement house.

In “East Harlem Remembered,” author Christopher Bell recounts how, “It was a case of opposites attracting, for Sanders, eleven years his senior and five inches taller, was a Protestant who fell in love with the short, wiry Catholic Vito Marcantonio. They married in 1925, the same year he earned his law degree.”

In Salvatore LaGumina's “Vito Marcantonio: The Peoples' Politician,” Sanders is described as, “A social worker in the truest sense of word... a product of classic New England Puritan background, she continued to remain a staid, hermetically sealed woman, outwardly cold in appearance, but inwardly possessing a warmth impressive to close friends.”

LaGumina observed that Marc's single-minded dedication to his district meant that family life suffered.

Sanders, he said, accompanied her husband to Washington in the first few years of his congressional run, but eventually stayed home, “reconciled with her role; at least her friends never heard her complain which was in keeping with her traditional New England modesty.”

In his essay, “When Frank Sinatra Came to Italian Harlem,” Meyer noted that Sanders was among 17 “well-chosen people,” community prominenti, convened when violence between African-American and Italian students threatened the very existence of the community's emblematic Benjamin Franklin High School.

In the same piece, Meyer noted that Miriam Sanders was the “head worker” of Harlem House, and one of the local community directors of the East Harlem League for Unity, an organization formed in 1943 for the purpose of developing, “better understanding among nationality and racial groups.”

In “Spanish Harlem: Anatomy of Poverty,” Patrica Cayo Sexton described a moral invasion of local streets by Anglo-Protestant reformers such as Sanders.

“The white Protestant hegemony,” Cayo Sexton wrote in 1965, “has added, among other things, a certain sanitariness to the political and social life of East Harlem. Their presence may help familiarize the poor with this essential middle-class virtue, for the middle class is nothing if not clean and tidy.”

The sarcasm appears intended, but the virtue or lack thereon of Anglo-Protestant reformers in East Harlem is raised here merely to demonstrate how Sanders was not an odd duck out of water, but part of something integral to the neighborhood.

These are all helpful historical data pinning the personality of Miriam Sanders Marcantonio in space, time, class, work and love.

But an interview with civil rights activist Virginia Durr adds pathos to her story and reminds us that, as we work to recall and revel in Marcantonio's exploits, he is ultimately a tragic figure, his “flaw” being that he represented his constituents too well.

“His wife was a perfectly lovely woman,” Durr told the Oral Histories of the American South Project, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“[S]he and I got to be great friends and I used to stay with them up in New York. We'd have such a good time because I'd go up to beg money you know for the poll tax or something. We would go out... and we would eat in these little Italian restaurants where the clothes were hanging overhead – the laundry was out – marvelous food, really delicious Italian food. But everybody knew him and he was very popular and everybody would come and speak to him. And they liked her very much. And then they would have the most marvelous breakfast in the mornings – of Italian sausages and they were a very happy couple... They loved each other and seemed to have a great respect for each other.”

There is no shortage of observers who believe the persistent and ruthless efforts to oust Marcantonio from his congressional seat killed him in the process.

When Marc died a few years after his electoral defeat, he left a yawning gap in the lives of thousands who depended upon him for practical help, legal or political advice, and inspiration.

We might expect his wife's subsequent sufferings to be great and they were, for simply too much was lost with this one man.

There was no money. “Oh, no, he just gave it away,” said Durr. “Well you see they [congressmen] didn't make but about $10,000. And he was very generous; he gave money away and helped people out.”

Durr noted that Miriam ended up living with both Marcantonio's mother Angiola, and his brother who was mentally disabled, but had been kept in the comfort of family surroundings. With Vito's death his sibling was institutionalized.

Durr accompanied Sanders to visit Marc's grave and deemed the outing, “the most painful morning I ever spent, because his old mother went with us and oh my Lord, she just went into hysterics and tore her hair and screamed and cried and threw herself on the grave. It was awful.

“Finally she had to send her to a Catholic home,” Durr recalled, “because she cried all the time, just wept, wept, wept, and wailed and when she wasn't crying she was praying – both for the son that had been sent to the retarded institution and the son that had died and not been buried in consecrated ground or hadn't been given the last rites. She was either crying all the time or praying all the time.”

Durr refers above to the fact the Catholic Church barred their cemeteries to Marcantonio's body.

“Oh and what a hell of a time did she have after he died, because she couldn't get a job, you see, that was when McCarthyism was in full flight,” Durr remembered. “Miriam didn't live very long after that. She had an awful rough time. She worked in the Bellevue Hospital, some job under a false name.”

Sanders' “New York Times” obituary, under the lean headline, “Mrs. Marcantonio, Legislator's Wife,” informs that she died on April 9, 1965 at Sanger's Home for Chronic Patients Inc., 500 W. 57^th Street. She was 74 years old and listed her residence as 196 ½ Westville Avenue, Danbury, Conn.

The uncredited clip said she was “a professional social worker” and director of Haarlem House until her retirement in 1953 [the year Marcantonio died].

On Sept. 15, 1954, in the wake of her husband's sudden departure, Sanders Marcantonio wrote a letter to W.E.B. DuBois.

It is probably one of many she penned with the same goal in mind, and we reproduce it here as a rare example of her own discrete voice in expression:

Dear Friend,

I know that as a friend and co-worker of Marc's, you must be giving earnest thought to what we can most fittingly do now, so that the great meaning of his life lives on.

I want to talk over with you and among Marc's other colleagues some tentative ideas and proposals towards this end.

Will you kindly be at the Vito Marcantonio Political Association. 247 East 116^th Street, New York City, on Wednesday September 22 at 8 p.m.?

I look forward to seeing you there.

Sincerely yours,

Miriam S. Marcantonio

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Book Report: "This Coffin Has No Handles" by Thomas McGrath

Thomas McGrath.

With a title like "This Coffin Has No Handles: A Novel" you can't help but know what you're in for.

Thomas McGrath's depiction of working class, west side Manhattan in the days immediately after World War II is told in a noir style not uncommon to mid-century American literature.

Its tone is tense and grim, the prose dense, the plot thin.

There is a labor action going on -- the 1945 longshoreman's strike -- but the real conflict takes place inside McGrath's scattershot collection of characters. None of whom are particularly happy, settled, or comfortable in their own skins.

It is a rare book that understands or properly depicts the crosscurrents of lethargy and hyperactivity that characterize an industrial strike (one provokes authority and then takes a metaphorical seat on their ass).

McGrath's tome is passport to a time when American cities were home to factory workers and wharf rats. Where people lived stacked atop one another in crowded warrens shot-through with the smell of someone else's cooking and a soundtrack of babies crying and married couples fighting.

McGrath's characters are desperate, caught in dead-end alleyways with thugs, "metal gleaming in their hands," blocking the escape route.

Blackie Carmody must choose between joining the rackets in order to pay for his mother's cancer treatment, or take the work-a-day job he knows will make the woman happy while sealing her fate.

McGrath's cast is led by one Joe Hunter, a card-carrying Communist Party member just back from a turn in the European theater with the U.S. Army.

The other characters revolve around him in greater and lesser arcs, although sometimes the author follows a different tortured soul on their individual rounds for a bit.

There is a crooked union leader. There are rank-and-file strikers, each standing in for the various degrees of commitment typically found in such industrial battles. There is misbegotten hitman and a teenage girl growing up too quick.

Tremendous, if petty, violence and racketeering abound. There is a grim, philosophical striving from some of the players in this tale and directionless ennui from others.

The Communists are the good guys, incorruptible, committed, diligent as an army of ants in their well-organized and underfunded effort to secure worldwide justice for the working stiff through countless shop-floor scuffles.

The positive portrayal landed McGrath before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, where an unhelpful turn as witness cost him his job as professor at Los Angeles State University.

The point being, you have to understand where the poet was coming from.

In "Manhattan '45,"Janet Morris opens with ebullient soldiers returning triumphant from World War II to a New York City at the height of its power and prestige.

Her New York shimmers with possibility and prosperity, McGrath's "iron city" is a decidedly darker place:

"Black cliffs rising into the dark sky to the south were expensive hotels. They were hung with ladders of light and were crowned with the aureole of luminous mist. To Hunter they looked as if they were enormous chunks of black ice, rotted loose from the bottom of some great ice island, rising slowly from the depths of a cold midnight sea hung with chains of freezing phosphorescent light."

McGrath, who died in 1990, was a fine writer and the book maintains a nice tension that succeeds in pulling one through the thicket of ruminations that, at times, veer off into authorial exposition.

This is especially true at the end where this poet's sharp and complex mind draws a portfolio's-worth of conclusions from the strike's outcome.

For the Big Apple buff, students of unionism, and scholars of the American city, this "political noir" serves of plenty of good "Red" meat.

"The Goodfather (A Novel): The Rising Fall of the Marvelous Marcantonio," can be purchased at: MARC LIVES!