The Vito Marcantonio Lucky Corner

Marc's Lucky Corner Legions. 

New York City now has its long-overdue “Vito Marcantonio Lucky Corner” and Professor Gerald Meyer has a new job to do.

In his biography of Marc, Meyer concluded with a strong lament: “No plaque commemorates the place of his birth, his political headquarters, his adult residence, or the spot where he fell dead.

“Nevertheless, his story deserves to be known, because it contradicts so many of the platitudes which pass for American history and therefore suggests new ways of thinking about the present.”

Offended by the forgetfulness, driven by his belief in the need for Marc's revival, Meyer convened the Vito Marcantonio Forum (VMF)in October of 2011.

Among those present on that night, as the Occupy movement took root in downtown Manhattan, were current members: Rita (Pura) Barakos; Charles Bayor; Gil Fagiani; Dave Giglio; Maria Lisella; Meyer; Roberto Ragone and Stephen Siciliano.

Among the goals set at the founding meeting was the naming of a street after the radical congressman.

On Dec. 17, the milestone was realized. The VMF's persistence in making Marcantonio part of the intellectual and cultural conversation, coupled with the commitment of city council president Melissa Mark-Viverito, made it happen.

The outgoing councilwoman's district overlaps much of what was Marc's old 18^th, and then 20^th, congressional districts. Throughout her term Mark-Viverito's office kept the ends out for ties that bound it to the VMF.

In March of 2017, the group honored her with the Vito Marcantonio Award. 

The fruitful relationship finally resulted in a most-poignant day for Marc and those who have endeavored to keep his flame burning.

“I have remembered,” Mark-Viverito told those gathered on a chilly Sunday afternoon at the corner of Lexington and E. 116^th Street, “those who came before me and guided me as I moved forward representing East Harlem and the South Bronx: Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Evelina López Antonetty and Vito Marcantonio – all champions of the working class.”

Artwork by Adam Milat-Meyer.

“The naming of the street could not come at a more appropriate time in the country's history,” said VMF co-chair Lisella in a joint press release with the New York City Council. “As the rights of the immigrants, the poor, and social services are being challenged, we hope the reminder of Congressman Vito Marcantonio will inspire people and politicians to model themselves on his example.”

The event was attended by Manhattan Borough President Gayle Brewer. Chris Bell recited the late Gil Fagiani's “Litany of San Vito” in English, Lisella did so in Italian, and community activist Gloria Quiñones performed the Spanish rendering.

VMF Co-chair Ragone reenacted a speech given by Marcantonio on the hallowed spot during his 1949 campaign, as well as passages from others on Puerto Rican independence and the discrimination of Italian immigrants. 

Meyer spoke on the significance of the Lucky Corner and pledged the group's continued effort to erect memorials at other sites of importance to the East Harlemite's career.

"The Lucky Corner," one of Ralph
Fasanella's masterworks.

In “La Guardia: A Fighter Against His Times,” author Arthur Mann traces the landmark to “The Little Flower's” 1924 congressional run:

“Fiorello closed his campaign on the night before election with a parade featuring fireworks, torches, and music, which wound up on 116^th Street and Lexington Avenue – to be known thereafter as the Lucky Corner. Once again the streets rang to the tune of 'On the Road to Mandalay' as The Major's tenors, sopranos, and bassos sang out: 'Fi-or-el-lo H. La Guar-di-a; Harlem needs a man like you in Congress.'”

Marcantonio assumed La Guardia's mantle in Congress – and at the Lucky Corner – when The Major became The Mayor.

There were adjustments. The song became “The Hymn of Garibaldi,” but the party still ended with an appearance by the man-of-the-hour, Marc.

L-to-R: Frank Marcantonio, Gale Brewer, Melissa Mark-Viverito,

Christopher Bell, LuLu Lolo Pascale, Gerald Meyer, Gloria

Quiñones and Roberto Ragone.

In “Vito Marcantonio: Radical Politician,” Meyer writes, “The Lucky Corner, by its very name, evoked the huge reservoir of folk beliefs equality prevalent in Italian Harlem and El Barrio. It also created the sense of the festa/fiesta, which, organized around an icon, celebrates a community and its deepest, often unarticulated beliefs and longings. Like the festa/fiesta, this pre-election rally had a major ritualistic, ceremonial function, which among other things stated that the streets and the public places belonged to the community residents, that their narrow, often dead-end lives had a wider meaning.”

Miriam Sanders may have fallen in love with her future husband after being “electrified by his incisive and compelling oratory” during a 1924 speech at the Lucky Corner, according to Meyer. Ralph Fasanella turned a Marcantonio rally at the locale into one of his masterworks. 

The story of the new sign at the Lucky Corner is as much about the marker as it is about the Vito Marcantonio Forum.

A long time in coming: Gerald Meyer. 

“The VMF,” says Meyer, “is a cross-generational, multi-racial/ethnic, gay-straight group of folks from varying political proclivities united in our conviction that the life and times of Vito Marcantonio must be written into all the phases of American history to repair the damage of the Cold War and McCarthyism which still haunt our national consciousness and behavior.”

Since its founding, the VMF has elaborated a rigorous program of interventions intellectual, literary, musical, and theatrical, thrusting forth from obscurity the name and work of Vito Marcantonio to those who come to be reminded and those who come to learn.

These have been auto-generated events, symposia in collaboration with like-minded groups, and forums convened by other organizations.

Reenactment, recital, poetry, musical spoken word, street corner speeches, film screenings, videos, guest speakers are all part of the VMF's toolbox.

The group has participated in, or mounted, 40 events since 2011, reviving the name of a man about whom very little was written or uttered.

An assembly of writer-, actor-, poet-, historian-, lawyer- retiree-activists, and such, with no official charge, but persistent and skilled at messaging through text, stage and screen, established a metric for success and pursued the matter to its fruition.

Roberto Ragone and Frank Marcantonio. 

The Lucky Corner's dedication represents Marcantonio's legacy redounding upon itself, his example of a citizen-based, collective activism being put to use in a way that could not have failed to please him. 

The event was written up in “AM/NY,” the Italian-language “i-Italy,” “People's World,” “24 New York,” and what appears to be a German language publication.


Renato Cantore wrote up the event in his Italian-language website as well as in "La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno." 

A member of the VMF, Cantore has visited Avigiano and Potenza, the respective hometowns of the Leonard Covello and Marcantonio families. The city fathers of both locales take pride and seek to make known the connections. 

Frank Marcantonio, a descendant of the East Harlem congressman, wrote VMF members saying, "It was a wonderfully exciting day highlighted by the unveiling of the 'Lucky Corner,' a lasting tribute to the life and legacy of Vito Marcantonio and also a legacy to all those who have persevered over the years to keep his name and accomplishments alive.”

Leading up to the sign ceremony was a Dec. 10 reading of Clifford Odet's “Waiting for Lefty” in conjunction with Work of Art Productions. 

It is Odet's first important play written in "The Red Decade," and stands as a textbook example of a successful, socialist-realist production. 

Four members of the VMF participated in the production. Ragone played the character "Joe," whose wages are insufficient to meet his needs. Bell played "The Villain." Meyer presented a talk on the aesthetics of the politicized theater. Adam Milat-Meyer handled the lighting and sound. 

Following the sign event the VMF held its ninth and final session of a reading circle done in conjunction with the neighborhood activist group Chelsea Rising at Penn South.

The cycle, which featured writings and speeches from “I Vote My Conscience,” ended with a special session focusing on Puerto Rico.

Artwork by Adam Milat-Meyer.

In attendance was Alma Concepción who, aside from the blessing of being Marc's godchild, was the only daughter of Gilberto Concepción
de Gracia, described by Meyer as “a major figure in Puerto Rican history.”

Concepción was, among other things, co-attorney with Marc in defense of Pedro Albizu Campos and other Nationalist Party leaders against sedition charges, and founder of the still-vital Puerto Rican Independence Party.

The hoisting of that green sign over the emblematic East Harlem street corner strengthens the bond between those who dreamed, and then lived, the process of memorializing the Lucky Corner and primes the VMF as it moves beyond its most active year in existence.

"The Goodfather: A Novel" by Stephen Siciliano

VMF, IAWA Present Screening of "Pane Amaro (Bitter Bread)"

On Saturday Aug. 12, the Vito Marcantonio Forum and Italian American Writers Association(IAWA) will cosponsor a screening of “Pane Amaro (Bitter Bread)” followed by a discussion with director Gianfranco Norelli and co-producer Suma Kurien.

The screening will take place at the Mulberry Street Public Library, 10 Jersey Street in lower Manhattan.

A review by University of Missouri professor Linda Reeder explains that the film, “traces how American racial ideology fell hard on the first generation of immigrants, placing all Italians below American whites in the racial order that defined status, rights and opportunities.” 

In her review, Reeder highlights the film's focus on the immigrant experience through “the lens of American racial hierarchies,” as a scholarly addition to the study of Italian immigration. “Historians have only recently explored the ways in which race shaped the meanings of ethnicity among European migrants, and very few students of U.S. migration know the racial history of Italians.” 

Also, the VMF and Chelsea Rising will convene a fifth reading circle around the speeches and writings found in “I Vote My Conscience: Vito Marcantonio: Debates, Speeches and Writings of Vito Marcantonio,” edited by Annette Rubinstein. 

The August session will focus on speeches and debates from Marcantonio's fourth term in Congress, pages 171 to 189 in “I Vote My Conscience.” 

The date is Aug. 16, the time 6 p.m., and location the “community room” in Penn South at 339 W. 24^th St., between 8^th and 9^th avenues.  

Copies of “I Vote My Conscience” will be on sale for $10, or can be purchased in advance by sending a $13 check to Gerald Meyer, 381 2^nd Street, Broooklyn 11215.

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!

Unburied Treasure

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

"I Vote My Conscience" : A Primer of Primary Importance

Scholarship on Rep. Vito Marcantonio starts, and probably ends, with I Vote My Conscience.

In her introduction to the book, editor Annette T. Rubinstein wrote that Marcantonio, "set himself the job of interpreting the unrealized possibilities of democracy for his neighbors, and of helping them to achieve the dignity in security they deserved and needed."

Rubinstein set for herself the task of assembling the congressman's work in a way that would demonstrate his achievements in pursuit of that goal.  

Although organized in a reference style, Rubinstein successfully wove series of speeches like strands throughout the text, tracing Marc's advocacy of a broad, yet consistent, set of issues over his 14 years in the House of Representatives.

From the 74^th Congress to the 81^st session – Marcantonio's last – matters of unemployment, Puerto Rico, Italy and Italian Americans, civil and voting rights, the Fair Employment Practices Committee, anti-racism, anti-Fascism, pro-slum clearance, the Works Progress Administration all made annual appearances in his speeches. 

Most prominent was the radical's staunch advocacy of labor, and by labor, we are talking about union labor.

His proclamation against Taft-Hartley, the bill that removed the labor movement's incisors, is typical of his pronouncements on strikes, workplace safety, factory floor rights, and collective bargaining.

"What is your justification for this legislation?" he challenged his House colleagues on April 15, 1947. "Oh, you say you are going to give certain rights, a new bill of rights to the American worker. What are you giving him? You are giving him the right to be free, freeing him from unionization, freeing him from his hard-earned protection, freeing him from his union, his only defense against exploitation. You are making him free to be exploited."

Over the years Marcantonio's primarily Italian constituency was joined in his coalition with a new wave of Puerto Rican immigrants.

Unable to separate the problems of these Spanish-speaking immigrants in New York City from the conditions that drove them off their tropical isle, Marcantonio became Puerto Rico's spokesman in Congress.

And so, I Vote My Conscience contains a special section apart, “Puerto Rico and It's People.”

Having discussed the island's plight with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Marcantonio was dismayed at the president's ignorance of Puerto Rican affairs. He had every reason to suspect the affliction was national in scope.

The Puerto Rican speeches in "I Vote My Conscience" see Marcantonio in professorial form, delivering didactic addresses, primers on the island's history under the yoke of what the good congressman considered U.S. imperialism. 

Early in his first term, Marcantonio introduced a bill calling for Puerto Rico's independence from the U.S., an oft-repeated act in years to come. During the Depression, he fought for unemployment relief on the island, a minimum wage. He gave a speech, "Five Years of Tyranny," that led to the recall of the island's federally-appointed governor, Blanton Winship.

Editor, Editor

Dr. Rubinstein's choices can't help but give a foundational shape to Marcantonio's work and influence the direction of future scholarship. 

She spent a year on I Vote My Conscience, and considered it a “partial political autobiography,” for in her compilation Marcantonio tells his story, not in hindsight, but as an actor in the moment. 

Here is Marcantonio on different stages, all stages really: in the nation's historical crucibles, and in the final grinding hours of the legislative mill, ennobling the cynical sausage-making with democratic sentiment. 
I Vote My Conscience is live drama, a political script. 

The 500-page volume boasts more than 150 excerpts of the radical congressman's speeches – mostly to the House – radio addresses and courtroom arguments defending communists during the Red Scare.

Its disparate store of speeches, letters, magazine articles, radio addresses and passionate rants from the House Well ultimately piece together the whole story of a remarkable political career without engaging in traditional narrative.

“In the most general terms possible, this book documents what one brilliant and determined leftist could accomplish,” wrote Gerald Meyer, author of Vito Marcantonio: Radical Politician.

The speeches are organized into chapters corresponding with Marcantonio's seven terms in Congress from 1935-1950.

Lionel Berman, who worked with Marcantonio on his last political project, the Good Neighbor Party, wrote descriptions for the index of speeches fronting each congressional session: “Protest against a 'charity wage scale' for the unemployed;” “Against a bill to remove rent controls;” “A radio address setting the record straight on hours, wages and profits in wartime.”

With the discourses organized chronologically rather than by topic, these thumbnail sketches guide the reader/researcher through the broad spectrum of issues Marcantonio addressed as representative of a small but irrepressible corner of Manhattan.

Sorting Through a Sea

I Vote My Conscience brings to light Marc's bright moments and begins the unearthing of a buried legend; moments Rubinstein fished from a sea of information the congressman crammed into the public record, depicting his radical rhetoric as action.

Meyer recounts that Dr. Rubinstein got her inspiration for the book title upon identifying like phrases from speeches in Marcantonio's first and last terms.

The first came on May 14, 1936, in support of his vote for a bill to prevent family-farm foreclosures, he affirmed that although, “I have no farmers in my district...I shall vote my conscience on this bill.”

The second came in 1950, before casting the sole vote in opposition to the country's entering the Korean War, Marcantonio told his colleagues:

“It is best to live one's life with one's conscience than to temporize or accept with silence those things which one believes to be against the interests of one's people and one's nation.”

Both speeches are found in I Vote My Conscience.

The book was launched by the now-gone Vito Marcantonio Memorial on July 4, 1956, less than two years after the congressman's untimely death.

Marcantonio' wife, Miriam Sanders, served as the memorial's honorary chair and Arthur Schutzer, long-time executive secretary of the American Labor Party, was secretary.

Others members included: Educator Leo Covello; David Freedman, a legal associate of Marc's; a New York Daily News photographer by the name of Bill Price; Louise Berman, a campaign supporter; and her husband, the aforementioned Lionel.

The team was rounded out by Virginia Rosen, a researcher of the congressman's; Robert Rusch, a friend and political associate; and the aforementioned Rubinstein who was, perhaps, the best candidate from Marc's inner circle to edit I Vote My Conscience. 

A Friend In Deed

Rubinstein worked with Marcantonio for years. A member of the Communist Party, the better portion of her political work came, nonetheless, as officeholder, activist and candidate for the American Labor Party (ALP) during his Marc's reign as state chairman.

She was ALP chairwoman for the fifth assembly district south and ran on the party ticket for both the State House and U.S. Congress.

Rubinstein was eventually blacklisted, her career as a high school principal destroyed. She began anew, eventually writing a storehouse-worth of literary criticism from a Marxist perspective for "Jewish Currents," "Science & Society," "Monthly Review," "New Masses," and "Mainstream." 

She wrote, too, books of criticism, the crowning achievement of which is, The Great Tradition in English Literature from Shakespeare to Shaw.

This background informed the shape she gave to I Vote My Conscience.  

It was Rubinstein's choice to include Marcantonio's April 27, 1944, exchange with the Texan Hatton Sumners (D) over the southern practice of poll taxing.

Marc wanted onto Sumner's Judiciary Committee. Sumner told him no poll tax bill to the House floor. Marc took it to the floor. Sumner accused him of inflaming insurrection in the South:

Said Marc:

“I think we all have a very good idea of the poll tax,” he told the House. “[A]nd we all have knowledge of the white primary law, which deprives people of their democratic rights. That condition certainly does not make for better racial relations.” 

In selecting Marc's October 24, 1945, “Objection to Congressman Rankin's reference to Congressman [Emanuel] Cellar as a 'Jewish Gentleman,'” Rubinstein honors him not just as a principled man, but as stalwart friend:


With Paul Robeson at the Lucky Corner (from "I Vote My Conscience.")

“When you single out a person by his race, color, or creed, particularly when you are engaged on the opposite side of a debate from him, you are not doing that for the purpose of merely pointing out that the gentleman's race happens to be Jewish or that the gentleman happens to be a Negro. You are baiting that gentleman. You are baiting him because of his race or because of his color or because of his creed. You are seeking to subject him either to discrimination or hate.”

A Soaring Saxaphone

Through "I Vote My Conscience," we know that Marcantonio, in the twilight of his congressional career [May 10, 1950] still found his desk on the House floor a sufficient bullhorn to give the voiceless their say:

“I know a lot of people are annoyed and disgusted that Marcantonio should be repeatedly offering these civil-rights amendments, but I am going to keep on offering them as long as I am here and until we win this fight; because I conscientiously believe, and it has been my guiding political philosophy, that no white man is free in America as long as the Negro is subjected to discrimination and Jim Crow and segregation.”

And so on.

Five thousand copies of I Vote My Conscience were printed: 2,000 cloth, 250 “deluxe editions (slip-cased); and 2,750 of a “union edition,” that is, paperbacks.

The book was, at first, ignored and later, like its subject, forgotten. Its publication was the Vito Marcantonio Memorial's most significant and lasting accomplishment.

Before finally folding its tent, the promotion and distribution of I Vote My Conscience became the sole remaining purpose of the Marcantonio Memorial, and its major source of income.

In 1973, An effort by Francesco Cordasco, a professor at Montclair State College led to a republishing of I Vote My Conscience under a different title, Vito Marcantonio: Debates, Speeches, and Writings 1935-1950, published by August M. Kelley Publishers, Clifton N.J. 1973. 

The Pirate Edition

Although Cordasco and his publisher credit the original title and claim the new edition was produced “By Arrangement with The Vito Marcantonio Memorial,” Professor Meyer asserts that it was actually “pirated” and printed without the permission of Ms. Rubenstein, “something she would have gladly given.”

In any case, it's an attractive cloth-covered, hardbound book with a separately copyrighted foreword by Mr. Cordasco, which Meyer conceded “has a few interesting and insightful sentences about Marc...”

In 2002, the second printing of I Vote My Conscience was done under the auspices of the Calandra Institute at Queens College. The printing job went awry, limiting circulation prospects. 

The photo reproductions are poor, but the text maintains the same value no matter the paper's rag content. Copies of the misbegotten, but sole surviving, edition are available from the Vito Marcantonio Forum book shop for a trifle at $10.  

This last edition of I Vote My Conscience contains an updated introduction and biography of Ms. Rubinstein by Gerald Meyer, a letter from Marc to Senator Bilbo, sharp exchanges between the Italian and the southern gents who ran the House, and still other extras that make this sample selection a “complete works” of a unique and nontraditional kind.

Amazon.com: The Goodfather: The Rising Fall of the Marvelous Marcantonio