Big Apple History . Business and Politics . A Man of the People


	Mayor La Guardia leads a parade down 5th Avenue.

After forcing Walker out of office in 1932, reformers from both political parties looked for a mayoral candidate that would infuse New York City's government with more progressive leadership. Most reformers earmarked Long Island Parks Commissioner Robert Moses as the right man for the job. Here was a man who had helped to build many parks and parkways for the city and it's surrounding area. Furthermore, he had a grand vision of what the city required in order to grow and flourish in the twentieth century.

Moses had been working in the New York State government of Al Smith, a Tammany man. This connection to Tammany made Moses, in the eyes of Samuel Seabury, an unwelcome candidate for mayor. After his symbolic defeat of Tammany Hall, Seabury was now a kingmaker and his pick for mayor would be the final choice of reformers. Seabury backed a man with no connections to Tammany, an independent, scrappy, honest man named Fiorella La Guardia.

La Guardia was not the favored choice of most reformers because he was one of the most radical congressmen of the 1920s and had a history of passionately attacking bankers for their role in the stock market crash of 1929. In the midst of the Great Depression he even railed against Hoover, his own party's president, for not doing enough to help the unemployed. La Guardia, a short 51-year-old ex-congressman, a Republican who was also a reformer, lost a bid for mayor in a race against Jimmy Walker only four years earlier in one of the biggest landslides in the city's history. Most reformers worried that La Guardia would be perceived by voters in 1932 the way he had been in 1928: as a man too extreme in his style and views to become mayor.

Seabury had no such doubts and endorsed La Guardia in 1931. He called him absolutely honest and courageous. With Seabury's support, La Guardia received Franklin D. Roosevelt's approval as well and became the reformers' candidate for mayor of New York.

La Guardia's scrappy political style appealed to common people, making him a good campaigner in the streets. Ethnically and religiously mixed -- part Italian, part Jew, part Episcopalian -- La Guardia was more than comfortable with the realities of a multicultural New York. He not only had a strong backbone of Italian voters -- who had been kept out of political influence by the Irish-dominated Tammany machine -- he had the support of black New Yorkers, whose leaders he had championed in Congress. He was a man of and for the people, a man who would share his heart and soul with the city, a man committed to the street. He embraced the city's messy spontaneity and its warm communities.