In November 1936, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded to a resolution of Congress and invited nations of the world to participate in the New York World’s Fair. Soon after, Fair President Grover Whalen began traveling across the world gathering commitments from an unprecedented number of foreign governments.
The negotiation with Germany proved particularly difficult, especially after Mayor of New York Fiorello La Guardia “tilted a lance at Hitler” in 1937 by suggesting in front of 1000 people that the Fair should have a “Chamber of Horrors” in which Adolf Hitler would be the principle exhibit.
Defeated for re-election in the Roosevelt landslide of 1932, LaGuardia successfully ran for mayor of the City of New York in 1933. Once in office, he became an implacable foe of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime.
Before taking office, LaGuardia called Hitler a “perverted maniac.” In a public address in 1934, LaGuardia warned, “Part of [Hitler’s] program is the complete annihilation of the Jews in Germany.” In 1937, speaking before the Women’s Division of the American Jewish Congress, LaGuardia called for the creation of a special pavilion at the upcoming New York World’s Fair: “a chamber of horrors” for “that brown-shirted fanatic.”
Speakers included John L. Lewis, head of the CIO, New York’s Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise. He also encouraged the boycotting of German goods, led anti-Nazi rallies, and promoted legislation to facilitate the U.S. rescue of the Jewish refugees.
It was not the first time. Previously in 1929, there was the Depression . . . Regardless, in the midst of all this, in December 1931, LaGuardia brought Germany to the attention of the House.
Put simply, “he strongly urged that a moratorium” on debts “be extended to all European countries” and especially Germany (Zinn, 1958, p. 239). For, he said, “‘there is a political party in Germany right now that is hoping this Congress turns down this moratorium.
Why? Because the Hitlerites will move in and take control of the government’” (Qtd. in Zinn, 1958, p. 239). Indeed, LaGuardia would be “one of the first to warn Americans about Hitler” (Kessner, 1989, p. 400).
He would continue doing this even when what he was saying was unpopular. Americans felt they had been fooled into participating in World War I and were not about to make the same mistake. When it came to reports of atrocities, Americans remembered, too, the fallacious reports of the past war and refused to believe! For a very long time America would insist on its neutrality.
What LaGuardia said about Jewish suffering didn’t strike a general chord. Too, much of what LaGuardia would say regarding Hitler and Germany, no matter how dramatically he “framed” it did not end up on the front page of newspapers (Folger, Poole, and Stutman, 2009, p. 55). And if something did, it wasn’t for long!
For that matter, even when reporters began sending back information on the horrors visited upon the Jews in Europe, people didn’t believe, and that, too, wasn’t usually on the front page of any newspaper (Lipstadt, 1986, p. 139). As to those who did believe what was happening to the Jews, they only sympathized— and Roosevelt knew it (Morse, 1967, p. 261).
Moreover, when Roosevelt even hinted that isolation and neutrality on America’s part was not the answer when dealing with aggressive nations in the world and that America should take a stronger stand—“there was an outpouring of protest that saddened and sobered him.” The President would say: “‘It’s a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead—and to find no one there’” (Qtd. in Kessner, 1989, p. 469).
Nonetheless, in May, 1933, at a mass protest meeting at the Battery in New York City, LaGuardia vehemently spoke out against the anti-Semitic activities of the Nazis come to power, and underlined “that the peace of the world was being threatened by” them. He “declared that ‘America must not permit this to happen.’
He passionately urged that America “‘refuse to associate’” with “‘the disturbers of world peace’” (Qtd. in “100,000 march here in 6-hour protest over Nazi policies. (1933, May 11). New York Times, pp. 1, 10
In a public address in 1934, La Guardia warned that “part of Hitler’s program is the complete annihilation of the Jews in Germany”.
In response, the government-controlled press in Germany called LaGuardia a several racial slurs and a whoremonger.” When the German ambassador protested LaGuardia’s remarks to Cordell Hull, the U.S. Secretary of State, Hull explained to the ambassador that, personally, he “very earnestly deprecate[d] the utterances which have thus given offense to the German government.” Hull had to explain, however, that in America the mayor of New York was free to speak his mind. Hull complained privately to President Roosevelt that LaGuardia was poisoning German-American relations, but Roosevelt asked Hull, “What would you say if I should say that I agreed completely with LaGuardia?”
Several months later, LaGuardia visited Roosevelt and recorded the following scene:
The president smiled as I entered his office. Then he extended his right arm and said, “Heil, Fiorello!” I snapped to attention, extended my right arm and replied, “Heil, Franklin!” And that’s all that was ever said about it.
In May of 1937, news broke of a scandal in six Brooklyn public high schools in which bootleg contraceptives were being sold to students. The German press immediately blamed “the LaGuardia” for this episode of “hair-raising immorality.” LaGuardia fired back he had no response to the charge: the only city official competent to deal with the German press allegations was the deputy sanitation commissioner in charge of sewage disposal!
In 1938, after the division of Czechoslovakia and Kristallnacht, LaGuardia stepped up his attacks on the Hitler regime. At a rally of 20,000 anti-Fascists in Madison Square Garden, LaGuardia proclaimed himself unable “adequately to describe the brutality of [Hitler] and his government” and called the Nazi regime a great threat to world peace. Historians David and Jackie Esposito have written, “In the face of large scale indifference to human rights violations abroad and growing isolationism at home . . . LaGuardia reasserted a Progressive’s faith in the rule of reason and the power of enlightened public opinion to face up to the Nazis and confront Hitler.” When the U.S. entered the war in 1941, LaGuardia’s principled position was vindicated.
It Get’s Personal
(Clockwise, from left) Achille La Guardia, Fiorello La Guardia’s father, circa 1895; Irene Coen La Guardia, his mother, circa 1885; and his sister, Gemma La Guardia, circa 1900.
La Guardia’s sister, Gemma La Guardia Gluck and brother-in-law, Herman Gluck (a Jew whom she met while teaching English in Europe), were living in Hungary and were arrested by the Gestapo on June 7, 1944, when the Nazis took control of Budapest. Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler knew that Gemma was La Guardia’s sister and as retalitation to Laguardia’s policies , ordered her to be held as a political prisoner. She and Herman Gluck were deported to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where he died, as Gemma learned from reading a newspaper account a year after her own release.
She was transferred from Mauthausen to the notorious women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück, located some 50 miles from Berlin, where unbeknownst to Gemma at the time, her daughter Yolanda (whose husband also died in the camps) and baby grandson were also held for a year in a separate barracks.
Gemma Gluck, who was held in Block II of the camp and assigned prisoner #44139,was one of the few survivors of this camp and wrote about her time at Ravensbrück.
She also wrote that the Soviets were “violating girls and women of all ages”, and about her, her daughter’s and grandson’s suffering as displaced persons in postwar Berlin, where the Germans abandoned them for a possible hostage exchange in April 1945, as the Russians were advancing.
Gemma and her family did not speak German, and had no identity papers, money, or means of documenting where they had been. Gemma finally managed to get word to the Americans who contacted La Guardia, who had no idea where they were. He worked to get them on the immigration lists, but asserted in a letter, included in the appendix of Gemma’s memoir, that her “case was the same as that of hundreds of thousands of displaced people” and “no exceptions can be made”.
Thus, despite Gemma’s intimate connection with a powerful American politician, who was then director of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), it took two years for her to be cleared and sent to the United States.
She returned to New York in May 1947, where she was reunited with her brother only four months before he died. As he had made no provision for her, she lived in very reduced circumstances, in a public housing project in Queens, New York, until her death in 1962. Gluck is one of the few American-born women interned by the Nazis. (Another was Virginia d’Albert-Lake.)
In 1941 during the run-up to American involvement in World War II, President Roosevelt appointed La Guardia first director of the new Office of Civilian Defense (OCD). Roosevelt was an admirer of La Guardia; after meeting Winston Churchill for the first time he described him as “an English Mayor La Guardia”.
The OCD was the national agency responsible for preparing for blackouts, air raid wardens, sirens, and shelters in case of German air raids. The government knew that such air raids were impossible but the goal was to psychologically mobilize many thousands of middle class volunteers to make them feel part of the war effort.
La Guardia remained Mayor of New York, shuttling back and forth with three days in Washington and four in the city in an effort to do justice to two herculean jobs. On top of this, he still performed other gestures, such as arranging police protection with his personal assurances for local artists Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, when they were threatened by Nazi supporters for their new patriotic comic book superhero, Captain America.
All this was very serious business, though. For it was also during this period that LaGuardia received a .22 caliber cartridge in the mail, with a note saying, “‘You will get this if you continue to attack the German Nazi party’” (Qtd. in “Letter and Cartridge,” 1938, p. 16). “The signature was a crayoned Nazi swastika” (“Letter and Cartridge, 1938, p. 16).After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, his role was turned over to full-time director of OCD, James M. Landis.
Moving On
Fiorello Laguardia was close to family and cared for children’s causes immensely.
La Guardia married twice. His first wife was Thea Almerigotti, an Istrian immigrant, whom he married on March 8, 1919. In June 1920 they had a daughter, Fioretta Thea, who died May 9, 1921, of spinal meningitis. His first wife died of tuberculosis on November 29, 1921, at the age of 26.
After the war, LaGuardia became the director general of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) from March 29, 1946 to January 1, 1947, where he joined in the efforts to feed the millions of displaced persons in the aftermath of World War II. In his role as director general, LaGuardia visited several DP camps in Europe.
It was recently discovered that among the millions of Jews who were detained at concentration camps during WWII, it is little known that Gemma LaGuardia Gluck, the sister of New York’s illustrious Mayor Fiorello LaGaurdia, was among them.
In 1929 he married Marie Fisher (1895–1984) who had been his secretary while in Congress; they adopted two children, Eric Henry (born 1930) and Jean Marie (1928–62), the biological daughter of Thea’s sister.
After the war, many things changed :unemployment ended, and the city was a gateway for military supplies and soldiers sent to Europe, with the Brooklyn Navy Yard providing many of the warships and the garment trade providing uniforms.
The city’s great financiers, however, were less important in decision making than the policy makers in Washington, and very high wartime taxes were not offset by heavy war spending. New York was not a center of heavy industry and did not see a wartime boom, as defense plants were built elsewhere. FDR refused to make La Guardia a general and was unable to provide fresh money for the city.
By 1944 the city was short of funds to pay for La Guardia’s new programs. La Guardia’s popularity slipped away and he ran so poorly in straw polls in 1945 that he did not run for a fourth term.
He carried out his obligation of chairman of the United States section of the Permanent Joint Board on Defense (United States and Canada) 1940-1946; special United States Ambassador to Brazil in 1946; director general of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in 1946; died in New York City September 20, 1947; interment in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.
