"Thieves in the Family," Maria Lisella

Maria Lisella, vice president of the Vito Marcantonio Forum, was recently named Poet Laureate for the Borough of Queens, New York City.

Shortly thereafter, Lisella was interviewed by Anthony Julian Tamburri, dean, Calandra Institute, Queens College, City University of New York.

Tamburri noted that Lisella is the first Italian-American and only the second woman named to the Queens poet laureate's post. It is worth noting the author of Thieves in the Family, was not appointed, rather won a competition.

In the interview, Lisella tells Tamburri she, “always had a fascination for language, of which poetry is a more natural expression based on breath, talking and sound.”

She says much the same, verse-wise in, “How ever did you know” from Thieves:

(excerpt)

“My lips form words
my ears hear whispers
of phonetic harmony,
accents, my favorite vowels
while riding trains past
the Postojna caves in the snow,
lacy edges of the Adriatic.”

This predilection as practice is found in “Bats,” eight pages later:

“Pipistrello,
Italian word for bat that sounds
like the sounds they make when they fly
in black formations over our heads
almost invisible, always audible.”

“Comfort Zone” represents a “how-to” find those sounds:

(excerpt)

“She shadows people's sounds
in bars, restaurants,
charts their courses
across crowded rooms.

Peopled subway cars, a mine
of foreign bodies violating
the eighteen-inch comfort zone,
flesh pressed against flesh,
against steel, poles protect.
Conversations spoken nose to nose
erupt and simmer.

She sneaks up behind them
a Mata Hari of the spoken word.
Non-sequiturs seep into her pen,
appear on her pages,
compel her to scribble,
stealing strangers' whispers.”

Lisella told Tamburri that the study of African-American poets such as Langston Hughes gave her a sense of the outsider's voice, a voice she could relate to: “I was not totally American, not really Italian, but I had this otherness, and that poetry really spoke to me.”

Her verse confronts her otherness – or some other little Italian girl's otherness – in “No Earrings for Tina”:

(excerpt)

“I was seven when I realized
none of the girls in school wore pierced earrings.

My mother, insisted,

said it was buona fortuna for girls to start off life with a piece
                 of gold in their ears.

She didn't understand this was America,

where only the zingare wore gold in their ears and told
            fortunes.
American girls never put holes in their ears.”

Later, Tina throws her earrings out the window of the elevated train, breaking with a piece of her rootedness, anxious to become an American girl.

Thieves in the Family looks outward, considers the otherness of others than the storyteller. Understands.

Of “Las Andeanas en Astoria,” the poet laureate writes:

(excerpt)

“Built low to the ground
like squat mountain climbers,
their bodies are silent.
Cartwheels squeak,
high-pitched notes rattle.
Gray squirrels scatter
in black branches above.
If these women were back home
trudging wheelbarrows
across the Mita del Mundo at noon,
they would not cast a shadow.”

Tamburri observed how Lisella's work is shot-through with depictions of class, expressions of gender and ethnic remembrance.

“I learned from the feminist movement,” she said, “not to be ashamed of where you came from. Understand that the private skills you learned from your grandmother and mother – negotiating – could be used publicly; that these skills were transferable. That helped me learn how to write about it in poetry.”

“Empty Chairs”

(excerpt)

“In the name of the father
and of the son, but what of
the daughters, sisters, and mothers?

It's an Italian woman's trick
to look just so, ears sealed.

Like a bitter clerk
you tally your inventory of grievances.

Your discontent starts
with the women of this house.”

“I Listen” strikes more optimistic notes, blends food-making, the affect of industrial apparel sewing upon a certain class of woman, and the hierarchy that reigns in the New World echo of the southern Italian cortile.

(excerpt)

“I see them in a heaven steaming with kitchen vapors.
Zi' Catuzza rolling her napkin into cigarillos
repeating her mantra, 'No man is good enough for any woman.'
She had a bad husband I tell myself.
Zia Raffaela presses vanilla pizzelle
Cugina Lisabetta beats an octopus into submission,
cooks it pink, sprinkled with olive oil, lemon, oregano.

I hear laughter among them, I am
on the other side of the curtains one of them sewed--
it matches the tableclothes, the aprons made
of remnants gathered from the sweatshop floor.
Forbidden to banter, I am invisible, but I see them.”

Maria Lisella

Maria's work in the recuperation of Vito Marcantonio's legacy, she said, “is an expression of my progressive politics and my consciousness about community. Italians are often seen as just taking care of home just being centered around the self and family.”

“Wakes”

(excerpt)

“Uncle Joe is flanked
by garish fans of gladiolas
in Neopolitan reds, Sicilian magenta
My non-Italian sister-in-law
calls them 'Italian flowers.'

My mother's Manhattan cousins
a sub-tribe of the larger tribe –
huddle, live together, eat together,
never leave W. 4^th St., never marry.
One sneezes and they all catch cold.”

Said Lisella: “I didn't grow up with parents like that. My parents were very active.”

One of her parents may have been like the humble chevalier depicted in “Romance.”

“I stand beneath
the Eiffel Tower's black steel netting
knowing my father's French past

kept him one step beyond
the surly brood of Italian men
filing into the parlor on Sundays.

A WWII vet, he taught the Senegalese, Algerians,

tutored me in an ethical landscape
of honor, loyalty – old fashioned words.

He and his friends Yves, Viggo, Rolanda
never belied their resistance days,
ordinary heroics in a living room in Queens.”

Introverted and personal, Thieves in the Family simultaneously covers a geography wide as the world tracked by Lisella as a travel journalist, poetry pad in tow.

Havana, makes an appearance as do Venice, Palermo, Dubrovnic, the Algarve, The Bronx, and Rome where the “Lovestruck” Bernini sculptures:

(excerpt)

“assuming their positions
on pedestals
in time to gape
at us studying them.
They've returned breathless
from a Bacchanalian feast,
careful not to stain
their marble bodies with blood rich wine.”

To wander the world is to walk with the Gods.

Wherever she has gone, and even when she has been home, Lisella has made it her particular craft to seek out and listen to exotic voices, “stealing strangers' whispers” for the benefit of her readers.

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

The American Labor Party Considered at the Mulberry Street Public Library

Was the American Labor Party the most consequential third party in U.S. politics during the 1930s and '40s, or perhaps the entire 20^th century?

Gerald Meyer, author of “Vito Marcantonio: Radical Politician,” took to the Mulberry Street Library podium May 9, and gave airing to these issues while mapping out the American Labor Party's (ALP) history and trajectory.

Meyer said that without the American Labor Party, New York City would have been denied the unique social-democratic configuration it acquired under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and the left, a true national spokesperson during the 1930s and 1940s in Marcantonio.

With La Guardia and Marcantonio both having run on the Republican ticket, their leftward lurch in the late 1930s meant they needed a place to hang their ideological hats, The ALP provided the rack.

In 1937, La Guardia had to run for a second term. “And this becomes critical,” noted Meyer, “because there had been reform mayors before in New York City, but they never would win the second time. They would become mayors and start to clean up New York City, the corruption and the cheating at the ballot, and forget to take care of the poor.

“In the next election... back would come Tammany Hall, over and over again.”

In his first winning campaign for mayor, La Guardia ran as a Republican, but did so with the backing of the Fusion Party, which between 1933 and 1937 had been hollowed out.

“So how is he going to win an election running as a Republican in 1937 in New York City? Well, it's the American Labor Party,” said Meyer.

La Guardia prevailed. The ALP's participation in the election, said Meyer, was “priceless,” representing 36 percent of The Major's total vote haul. When he ran for a third term as mayor in1941, the Little Flower got exactly the same percentage of votes from the American Labor Party as four years earlier.

Meyer asserted that the votes enabling La Guardia to win handily came from the ALP.

“Here we are talking about something big,” Meyer stated. “This is a big deal. What you have now is the mayor of New York City – keeping in mind the importance of New York – creating a social-democratic metropolis. That's what occurred in New York. A city orchestra. Who ever heard of such a thing? I mean who needs socialism when you have La Guardia?

“Everything was happening. All kinds of housing projects, wonderfully designed, with a thoughtfulness about how they would be situated to maximize the amount of light coming in. La Guardia said, 'I want to make people happy.' A lot of us didn't even have parents that wanted to make us happy.”



Gerald Meyer at Mulberry Street Library

Stated Meyer: “There is no other American mayor in any city, at any time, that has the record and background of La Guardia. He was a treasure and great hero.” The American Labor Party's triumph with La Guardia in '37 meant Marcantonio no longer had to campaign as a Republican, or just as a Republican. He ran on the ALP line and garnered a resounding return to Congress in 1939. To the mass organizations of the left, Marcantonio became a hero who spoke at their conventions and gave voice to their concerns in the House of Representatives.
“And they would become enrolled members in the American Labor Party,” said Meyer. “What a good beginning.”

The ALP arose, in 1936, around a very specific goal: the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Meyer suggested that, upon his ascendance to the presidency, it was not suspected that FDR would enact such a radical, leftist program.

Roosevelt, Meyer said, knew he needed New York to be reelected and, consequently, showered the Depression-era city with federal largesse, making it the 49^th entity for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in addition to those established for each of the 48 states.

New York City, said Meyer, received something like one-fourth of all WPA monies allocated nationwide.

“Hundreds of playgrounds were built, all the swimming pools still being used, the public libraries, public schools, Brooklyn College campus, Queens College campus, the Triboro Bridge, the IND (Independent Subway System) subway, the list is just endless,” said Meyer.

“By 1936, progressives of all sorts really understood that the need for reelecting Roosevelt was overwhelming. New York was critical, because at the time, it had 47 electoral votes (today it has 26).”

Standing in Roosevelt's way was the socialist vote in New York City. Meyer said there was a large base of Jewish working-class people for whom socialism was a kind of secular religion that had replaced the old one they left behind in Eastern Europe.

In New York, the Socialist Party had achieved vote tallies as high as 300,000 and this had the Roosevelt coalition worried.

“So the ALP, in a very specific way, was intended to win over this voting block for Roosevelt. It was just that specific,” Meyer emphasized. “But as soon as the ALP began, as soon as a word was spoken, there was an absolute flood of interest.”
Professor Meyer suggested the party's name had something to do with its early success.

“Names are very important,” he said. “American Labor Party. To have the word 'Labor,' in the name and to suggest there is a party that is now going to exist, explicitly representing the working class, is a tremendous phenomenon.”

The ALP had the support of a union movement in ascendance, access to a constituency and the means of activating them, means to educate them through union newspapers, and the resources to provide staff and money in a consistent way, not just for three months, but for 20 years, said Meyer.

“So the party was really based on top of this tremendous infrastructure of union and labor organizations,” he observed

The American Labor Party was able to provide the organization and ideological outlook, with a connection to unions, which ensured the Roosevelt would win the nomination and the election.

The key to the ALP's political power was its base in New York, said Meyer. “This is not happenstance really, the tremendous number of electoral votes, New York being the media capital, the intellectual center of the U.S., the response to the ALP was just enormous.”

The American Labor Party mobilized all its resources to reelect its congressman from New York, Marcantonio. It was the top priority and established the East Harlemite as a national spokesperson for the American left through the 1930s and 1940s.

Said Meyer: “Marcantonio, in seven terms as congressman between 1934 and 1950, in no uncertain terms, gave us what we never had again, a national spokesperson. He articulated brilliantly, eloquently and consistently over the entire spectrum of issues... agricultural policy; there are no farms in East Harlem, none.

“I don't know that if he had come from Minneapolis it would have occurred and this makes the ALP incredibly important,” said Meyer.

But the legal mechanics of voting and sharp organizational skills both played significant roles in the American Labor Party's rise.

The ALP is a state party, he explained. The U.S. Constitution designates the organization of elections to the states, which means different laws in different states.

The oddity of “fusion,” or cross-endorsements of the same candidate by different parties, makes it easier to field third party candidates in New York State than it is elsewhere.

“This is what we have to think about with the ALP,” said the Hostos Community College Professor Emeritus. “It is allowed to appear in New York in ways that it would be very difficult to do anywhere else.”

The Democratic Party's declining status among certain groups voters helped, too. In New York, the reality was one of a political machine run by Irish-American politicians, much the same as the Catholic Church in the Empire State.

The Democratic Party was in favor of the New Deal social program, unions, social security and redistribution, but simultaneously, Meyer noted, it was extremely anti-communist, which very often turned into anti-semitism.

“This has repercussions,” Meyer said, “because the other groups that are left out become resentful.”

“And this meant the Democratic Party was not viable in relation to what was happening with the New Deal, because the program was moving further left and appeared to be, and I believe was, highly socialistic. And that was not convenient for anyone in the New Deal to say, nor anybody on the left to say.”

The ALP exploited this breach, and leveraged the power it drew from it “brilliantly,” according to Meyer. The party saw who the underrepresented groups were: African-Americans; Puerto Ricans; Italian Americans, and then fielded candidates to meet those constituencies where they lived.

All of this was done through the new city charter, Meyer observed, a document crucial to the American Labor Party in the boroughs because of its proportional representation provisions in city council elections.

“Proportional representation in New York City is something you need to know about and study and see why we have to integrate electoral reform into our own political work. Without it we are not going to go very far,” said Meyer.

Winner-take-all-elections put the electorate in an impossible quandary, because in voting for the candidate a person likes best, one often contributes to getting the candidate they like least.

“People will do it once, they might do it twice, but that's it,” said Meyer. “And so the two major parties have hegemony indefinitely.”

With proportional representation, the representation in an elected body is based on the proportion of votes for a party so that a vote for the party of your choice therefore doesn't contribute or detract from the part you like next best.

In the first city council election the American Labor Party contested, it received approximately seven seats. With 30 percent of vote in Bronx, it got 30 percent of the council seats from there.

In the city council elections of 1943, one-in-four voters in New York City went either for the ALP or Communist Party, he said.

“The reason we don't have a left is that we are strangled by a system that makes a left impossible,” said Meyer. “We go around doing pageantry, but can't have any consequence.”

It was just how consequential the ALP was that garners Meyer's enthusiasm: “Getting La Guardia elected, allowing Marcantonio to get reelected and then to six more terms. Without the ALP it would not have been possible. We wouldn't have had a national spokesperson. We wouldn't have had a social-democratic metropolis.”

This kind of success within the context of a third party in American politics requires some seasoning, Meyer asserted.

“You don't roll out of bed and know this stuff. There has to be strategy and somebody with a wider view that coordinates matters, so things wind up. It's very hard to win anything, because the right controls the economy, and they control the media, and they're vicious on top of it.”

He recounted how Adam Clayton-Powell received the ALP's designation for a city council seat from Harlem. “This meant either the Democrats gave him the endorsement or there would have been an American Labor Party city councilperson,” Meyer noted.

The same thing happened when Clayton-Powell ran for Congress. “In both cases, the first African-American city councilperson in New York City and the first African-American congressman in New York State, are the doing of the ALP," said Meyer. 

“The American Labor Party did that by knowing the system. It's one of the reasons Marcantonio was so effective. He knew parliamentary procedure,” he noted. 

The American Labor Party was never repeated anywhere else, Meyer noted. Its history indicates that it is possible to resist the assault on all progressive gains that have been made.

“Based on what we know is actual reality we can create a vision where we can produce entities that would be repositories of power for the people,” Meyer concluded, “and be able to move things forward so that we can start winning very big.”

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

Vito Marcantonio Forum Founders at the Cornelia Street Cafe

"Politics, Poetry and Unsung Heroes," at the Cornelia Street Café May 9 featured three founding members of the Vito Marcantonio Forum (VMF).

The event was convened by the Italian American Writers Association who were gracious in allowing their evening to become a piece of Marcantoniana. Cameraman Sam Moree recorded the proceedings reproduced here.

The performances corresponding to the snapshots at top are, from left to right, LuLu LoLo who was followed by Gil Fagiani, and finally, the scribe behind this blog, Stephen Siciliano reading from his manuscript novel of Marcantonio's life, "The Goodfather."

Earlier in May, Professor Gerald Meyer, co-chair of the VMF, gave a talk on the American Labor Party at the Mulberry Street Library. Roberto Ragone rendered Marc's eulogy of Fiorello La Guardia.  

The VMF will finish up a month of activity with a panel presentation at the New Left Forum entitled, "Vito Marcantonio: Champion For Civil Rights." The panel will feature Professor Meyer, Roberto Ragone and Gil Fagiani.

Saturday May 30, 12 p.m. - 01:50 p.m. at John Jay College, 524 W. 9th St.(10th Ave.), New York City, Room 1.105. Register at leftforum@leftforum.org

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

Vito Marcantonio and the Art of Spaghetti Making

Virginia Foster Durr was born to southern aristocracy and grew up in Alabama without even knowing her confederate ways were confederate ways.

Marc.

She attended Wellesley College and that exposure to the larger world awakened her dissenting nature.

She married an attorney named Clifford Durr.

According to a 1985 “New York Times” review of her autobiography “Outside the Magic Circle,” the pair became “the locally vilified champions in long battles from the New Deal through the arrival of the Freedom Riders.”

The choice to remain outside the magic circle of southern life led to their eventual insolvency and reduction to shabby gentility.

Along her heroic way, Durr made the acquaintance of Vito Marcantonio and, after a rough start, became the kind of friend, to he and his wife Miriam, that came to stay at their place on 116^th Street in East Harlem.

Durr granted interviews to the Oral Histories of the American South Project at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and these possess gem-like anecdotes for Marcantonio fans and scholars alike.

The rough start came at a meeting requested by Durr and allies in the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax who were trying, well, to get the poll tax abolished. They said they were backing a bill introduced by Rep. Joseph Clark Baldwin, a Republican from Manhattan's Silk Stocking District, in an effort to get conservative support. They asked Marc to withdraw his.

[From “Outside the Magic Circle”] 

“Oh my Lord, Vesuvius erupted! Whew! He sprang up and you never heard such a tirade in your life. 'I withdraw my bill and let that Park Avenue fancy pants...' He just raved on and on. He would not withdraw his bill. His bill was going to be the bill that got through and was going to be the bill that the House backed and, as far as we were concerned, we could just go and drown ourselves. He didn't care whether we supported him or not. Oh, he was mad, just furious."


She remembered that Marc, who successfully ran in the primaries of the Republican, Democratic and American Labor parties a few times, prevailed upon the Republican House leadership to go with his measure. 

“He even got Baldwin to withdraw his bill,” Durr recalled. “We were forced with the choice of supporting Marcantonio's bill or having no bill. We either had to eat crow or we had to get out of the business.

“We went to see Marcantonio again. He had won, so he was very nice to us this time. Any help that we could give him, he would be very glad to have. He was very pleasant. He had licked us good, too.”

She remembered how Marc legislated with joy. “He was one of the funniest people you've ever known in your life.”

It was typical of Marcantonio, Durr reminisced, to have Rep. Martin Dies, or some other reactionary rival, paged from the floor, mid-anticommunist rant, and come to the phone. Whoever was on the line would ask Dies if he knew where Vito was.

“He was a super politician,” she said. “The people in the House liked Marcantonio. They may have called him a Red, you know, and a Wop and all that, but they liked him.”

Her account of Miriam Marcantonio's life with the congressman's mother after he died is nothing short of harrowing for anyone with a heart, but at the opposite end of the emotional register, one of Durr's most charming stories involves the Italian-American passion for food:

Spaghetti.

“And you'd have him [over for] dinner,” she recounted. “I remember I had spaghetti. I thought since I was having Vito Marcantonio and his wife, who was this tall New England girl, that I would have spaghetti, you know, like somebody having me and having fried chicken. 

“Well, he was so funny, because I thought it was pretty good spaghetti. He ate it and he said, 'Now Virginia, that was fairly good spaghetti' – well I had a lot of other things too – 'it was a really good dinner on the whole,' he said, 'but that spaghetti was not as good as it should be.' He said, 'Now come out here and I will tell you how to cook spaghetti.'

Durr with Rosa Parks


“And, you know, he took an hour to tell me how to cook spaghetti: You boil a huge pot of water. It would have to be like a washtub practically, and you don't put a whole lot of spaghetti in it because it can't stick; it has to be all separate, and then you dip it out and then you immediately put butter on it or something to keep it from sticking.  

“And then the sauce, instead of being cooked as I had from four o'clock to six o'clock, had to be cooked two days to be real good Italian sauce. And he explained to me in detail exactly, putting the little bit of sugar with it...

“But he was such a human man, you know, and he really wanted me to learn how to make spaghetti since I was going to have spaghetti and he thought it was lousy.”

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

"Living the Revolution" by Jennifer Guglielmo

Oh, the ever-changing face of America!

Who among us can even envision a northern New Jersey clutching tight to New York via the tendrils of the garment and other departed industries, pocked with recently arrived anarchists from places like Avellino?

Jennifer Guglielmo's "Living the Revolution," assembles the research and words necessary to conjure that distant and disappeared time.

Some of this reviewer's antecedent's hailed from Avellino and the revelation in Guglielmo's book goes a long way toward explaining his own anarcho-syndicalist tendencies.

And explanation is necessary, because the Italian-American milieu in which he grew up was far from revolutionary. Uncles and aunts in Brooklyn and Queens loathed John Lindsay in favor of a hack named Mario Procaccino. When a black family moved into the neighborhood, a call of alarm went out.

To be Italian-American in mid-century New York was to be conservative, closed-minded and to wont for a liberal, higher education (generally speaking).

"Living the Revolution," goes a long way toward explaining how that happened: Italian-Americans desperately clinging to their classification as "white" by federal authorities; their frantic efforts to establish "American-ness" while the U.S. made war on Mussolini's Italy; the devastating impact of the Palmer Raids on the anarchist culture that took root in the tri-state area among Italian immigrant women.

Later on, according to this book, Italian and Italian-American women became active in the the union movement, although their efforts to gain power were often thwarted and their contributions to the Ladies Garment Workers and other syndicates undervalued.

Guglielmo's book recuperates the ladies' names and actions, making great strides in combating the widely-held notion that they were somehow not militant. This appears to be the primary task she set out for herself in penning this text.

"Living the Revolution," sets the record straight. It's a work of historical scholarship and, from time-to-time, bogs down in minutiae, however necessary. Sometimes, the task at hand causes the author to wander far from the focus of her discussion and into the 19th-century uprisings in southern Italy or the writings of Antonio Gramsci.

In the end, it all ties together and Guglielmo's passion for the subject ultimately drives the narrative and should win over those who come to her story with a healthy curiosity.

"Living" is a feminist tract. It pulls from the rich filigree of events that make up the first half of the 20th century, the prevailing policies, traditions and mores of patriarchy and white supremacy.

It dramatizes how these things weighed upon the activist women and illuminated the creativity they employed in combating them.

"Living the Revolution," not only rescues the names and profiles of some worthwhile people otherwise condemned to anonymity, it helps explain how we got where we are as a nation today, the good and the bad alike.

Sixty Years Later, Marc Remembered.

"Be it known the Council of the City of New York is proud to honor the inspiring life and indelible legacy of the Honorable Vito Marcantonio for his outstanding service and enduring contributions to our city and nation upon the 60^th Anniversary of his death on this the 9^th day of August in the year 2014."


And with this recitation did New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito rescue Rep. Vito Marcantonio (ALP) from an anonymity that has blanketed the six decades since he burned across the political firmament.

On the 60^th anniversary of his death, Marc did not lay alone beneath the grass and leafy trees at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, an ungrateful and indifferent metropolis clanking around him.

Instead, some 60 people organized, poked and prodded by the Vito Marcantonio Forum, gathered to pay homage and renew recent efforts to revive a reputation that was grand even in Gotham.

The crowd was peppered with public officials courageous enough to break the long-standing silence about Marcantonio's contribution to the well-being of New York's poorest, face the public and acclaim America's most successful radical congressman.

New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito

Said Vito Marcantonio Forum member David Giglio, “It's like we've opened up the dam of silence.”

Speaker Mark-Viverito promised to get a street in East Harlem named after Marcantonio.

Said Madame Speaker: “We all know that, too often, it is the brave and those who stand up for their ideals that are overlooked in the history books.”

The speaker recalled how her mentor, East Harlem housing attorney Gloria Quiñones, “sat me down and really wanted me to know about Marcantonio and the progressive legacy he embodied.”

Mark-Viverito discussed the crucial cover Marc gave those in the movement for Puerto Rican independence, “at a time when it was difficult to do that. He was our congressman. He was our ally. He was our voice.”

She said the life-long East Harlemite was the embodiment of a true New Yorker who, “grew up in a progressive community of Italians, Irish, Jewish, Black, Puerto Rican, and Caribbean immigrants who made East Harlem their home. It is no mistake he became a leader of his times and his community, which continues to be a microcosm of New York, as well as the rest of the nation.” 

New York State Assemblyman Robert Rodriguez (D)reflected, “I would not have had the opportunity to serve the community I love, in this way, were it not for Vito Marcantonio.”

Assemblyman Robert Rodriguez.

The congressman was beloved in his community, said Rodriguez, for the way he put its people first, regardless of race, class or ethnicity.

“At that time,” the assemblyman stated, “it was revolutionary, the concept that he could be a civil rights leader for African-Americans in the '30s and '40s - an Italian-American from Harlem - that is impressive.”

Rodriguez closed his remarks by presenting a proclamation “commemorating Marcantonio's accomplishments, life and legacy."

Actor and writer Roberto Ragone read from Marcantonio's speeches against militarism and the arms race, including this passage from June 1950, when he stood up to cast the sole vote against American intervention in the Korean War:  



Roberto Ragone.

“After all, Mr. Chairman, you live only once; and it is best to live one's life with one's conscience rather than to temporize or accept with silence those things which one believes to be against the interests of one's people and one nation."

Lulu Lolo read Gil Fagiani's “Litany of San Vito.”



LuLu LoLo

Actor Troy Hodges revived singer Paul Robeson's parting words to Marcantonio. Frank Marcantonio suggested that perhaps there's something in the family blood, for he had followed the path blazed by Marc without knowing much about him.

Professor Gerald Meyer of Hostos Community College also spoke of the man whose light he has carried through the dark years.


Professor Gerald Meyer

"The Bronx Chronicle" dedicated ink to the happening in its bailiwick. Reporter Kathleen Canzoniero wrote, “Marcantonio defended Italian-Americans against discrimination during World War II and advocated for African-Americans civil rights, especially in making lynching a federal crime. During his political career in the House of Representatives, he sponsored five bills calling for Puerto Rico's independence. A staunch and vocal activist, Marcantonio was against both the Cold War and Korean War. He tragically died from a heart attack in 1954 at the age of 51.”

Inspired by the event and others resuscitating Marcantonio's work “Bronx River Sancofa” blogger Morgan Powell took his readers on a walk of Marcantonio's East Harlem, pointing out the brick-and-mortar structures through which the congressman's presence asserts itself still.

Noting that Marc's childhood birthplace at 325 East 112^th Street was razed, so that room might be made for the Thomas Jefferson Houses, Powell wrote, “Perhaps it's fitting that low-cost modern housing for the masses – which he and La Guardia advocated – would succeed his own former address."

The event was also covered in New York's Italian-language daily, “Oggi,” which observed, and we quote:

"Marcantonio è stato senza ombra di dubbio uno de piú combattivi sostenitori dell classe operaia del XX secolo durante i suoi 14 anni di Congresso e uno dei politici piú radicali di sinistra, continuamente rieletto per sei mandati.”

Marc's graveside memorial was given a boost prior to Aug. 9, with an interview of Powell and Ragone on "BronxNet."

Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz declared the anniversary “Vito Marcantonio Day,” and so on.

All of which is to say that the Vito Marcantonio Forum, with its multi-media campaign to put flesh and bones on a decimated reputation through events combining political discussion, theatrical play and poetry has piqued the interest of local thinkers and doers, while launching a process for restoring Marcantonio's work and thought to their rightful place in New York politics, past and present.

Book Report: "Christ in Concrete" by Pietro di Donato

"Christ in Concrete" is both paean and prayer to the old immigrant Italian industrial worker.

Like the laborers it depicts, "Concrete" lurches towards moments of joy without ever breaking through the unrelenting misery that is very much author Pietro di Donato's message.

This is working class literature of the 1930s where the great unwashed are brought into finer relief, their desperate situations the fodder for heart-wrenching plot.

In vogue during its Depression heyday, this kind of literature, even done as well as it is here, faced structural barriers to mass acceptance later. The disadvantaged are always the disadvantaged and their most uplifting stories still register as grim.

In "Concrete," the tenement dwellers of New York's lower East Side are not necessarily unhappy. Di Donato portrays them as stout of heart, quick to aid their fellows, and adept at grabbing a rare laugh when presented with the chance.

But they are maimed or ground to dust and the novel's pessimistic conclusion is that the game is rigged against them poor WOPS. And it is. They are "Christ in Concrete," dependent on work that literally kills them.

There is not a lot of workerist rhetoric to this book. It is less Marx, more Biblical justice and Christian plea. Merely an adept portrayal of the construction worker's life in the great Gotham of skyscrapers and cold bitter bluster.

Stories of work itself.

Di Donato, a bricklayer by trade, mined prosaic music from the mundane task:

"He reached the trowel down into the mortar. Slice down toward him, edgewise twist in quick short circle and scoop up away from him. The trowel came up half-covered with mortar - but how heavy! He dropped it back into the tub and worked the trowel back and forth in the mortar just as he had seen the bricklayers do. The feel of flexible steel trowel in pliant warm plush soon-to-be-stone. The wet rub of mortar on tender skin, the fleshy sense of Job."

He explained its soul-deadening effects:

"These men were the hardness that bruise Paul many times. They were the bodies to whom he would be joined in bondage to Job. Job would be a brick labyrinth that would suck him in deeper and deeper, and there would be no going back. Life would never be a dear music, a festival, a gift of Nature. Life would be the torque of Wall's battle that distorted straight limbs beneath weight in heat and rain and cold."

This is turn-of-the-20th century immigrant milieu. It is life in the tenement, its Italians, Swedes, Jews, and blacks heaped upon one another with their only commonality a severe lack of resources.

"Christ in Concrete" provides a global view that concentrates as much on the women and children at home as it does the men at the construction site.

In "Living the Revolution," an academic study of radical Italian women in the same New York "Concrete" mixes, Jennifer Guglielmo notes that southern Italian women responded to patriarchal dominance in society by "crafting their own cultural expression," including magic, sorcery, divination, or dancing the "tarantella."

These pre-feminist strategies are dramatized in storytelling by di Donato through the tarantella-dancing Annunziata, or when she and Paul visit "The Cripple," a tenement-bound medium to the netherworld.

Di Donato wrote the heck out of this story. The translation is a kind of direct transposing of the words as ordered in Italian which successfully marks the book with a distinctive prose style.

The now-departed author (1911-1992) committed one falsity in wrapping up his heartfelt condemnation of capital exploitation:

"No poet would be there to intone meter of soul's sentence to stone, no artist upon scaffold to paint the vinegary sweat of Christian in correspondence with red brick and gray mortar, no composer attuned to the screaming movement of Job and voiceless cry in overalls."

Not true, for with each additional word he wrote, di Donato did a little more to erase the veracity of that sentence.