“The Greatest New York City Mayor of All Time”

A Historical Reappraisal of Fiorello La Guardia

Keith Rosenthal

November 4, 2025

doi.org/10.63478/NXE7Z7EE

The unprecedented and electrifying success of Zohran Mamdani in the 2025 New York City mayoral race has given hope to many that “a better New York is possible.”¹ The meteoric rise of Mamdani, who is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has been fueled by an army of energized volunteers, grassroots support, and a disciplined message of economic populism. His clinching of the Democratic Party nomination has been heralded as a potential breakthrough moment for socialism in US electoral politics.

The immediate question that has been posed, from both progressive and business quarters, is this: What would it mean to administer the mayoralty of New York City, the largest financial metropolis within the world capitalist system, as a “socialist”?² In this vein, various commentators have been casting about for historical analogies. Among Mamdani supporters and surrogates, one of the most frequent parallels that has been proffered is that of the 1934–46 mayoralty of Fiorello La Guardia.

Mamdani himself has touted La Guardia as a mayoral hero, naming La Guardia the greatest New York City mayor of all time in a New York Times interview. Peter Dreier, a veteran political operative and aficionado of administrative municipal reform, has proffered La Guardia as “a model for Mamdani” of “honest, efficient, and progressive administration.” Jacobin labor doyen Eric Blanc has gone so far as to assert that La Guardia offers a “strong historical precedent for effective socialist urban governance” and that he was a “wildly successful socialist mayor.” Historian Joshua Freeman likewise writes that La Guardia is a “model” for what “a socialist [such as Mamdani] might accomplish as mayor.” Finally, Democratic Party strategist and Nation magazine editor Waleed Shahid writes that “before Zohran Mamdani, there was comrade La Guardia,” and that the latter was “perhaps the greatest mayor in American history, the archetype of bold and effective urban leadership.”³

Tweet by Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani), X, June 21, 2025, 1:54 a.m., https://x.com/ZohranKMamdani/status/1936301737020998153.

Notwithstanding the foregoing claims—be they genuine misconceptions or deliberate acts of “redwashing”—the actual history and politics of La Guardia’s mayoralty should offer a cautionary tale for socialists, working-class militants, and Black liberation activists.⁴ Moreover, the reality of this history underscores the serious problem with attempts to conflate socialism with “social liberalism” or welfare-capitalism or jettison a socialist political program altogether in favor of a narrowly construed “economic populist” mode of social-liberal governance.⁵

Indeed, La Guardia’s tenure demonstrates that even a putatively reform-minded politician will exhibit the tendency to administer the city according to not only the essentially bourgeois remit of the office itself but also the dominant and hegemonic class and social forces within a capitalist polity—the capitalist, wealthy, and upper classes. In La Guardia’s case, this meant despotically attacking public sector unions, actively breaking workers’ strikes, and overseeing the maintenance of a violently racist hierarchal order.

Insofar as La Guardia’s mayoralty did result in the promulgation of some genuinely progressive reforms—including massive public works projects, affordable housing construction, expansion of public education, and Great Depression welfare relief—the analogous lesson is of a particular class import. The simple but incontrovertible fact is that those initiatives of the La Guardia administration, no less than those of the New Deal regime generally, which redounded to the genuine benefit of the working class, were less a function of the autonomous historical agency of any towering administrative bureaucrat dispensing largess “from above” and more of independently organized, mobilized, and empowered workers and oppressed people engaging in militant forms of social and class struggle “from below.”⁶

As against the backward political approach articulated by Mamdani surrogate and Jacobin editor, Nick French, for instance (in a recent article apropos to another historical analog, Salvador Allende), it was not by patiently abiding the cautious moderation of New Deal administrators like La Guardia, as they walked a “political tightrope” between the clashing interests of the contending classes of society, that workers and oppressed people successfully clawed concessions from one of the most vile metropolitan ruling classes in the world at that time. Rather, the latter object was acquired precisely by making autonomous demands upon New Deal social liberals and indeed “racing to a direct…confrontation with the capitalist class.”⁷

I. La Guardia and Socialism

Like Mamdani, La Guardia began his political career as a sort of “outsider.” La Guardia was a Yiddish-speaking Italian-American “reformer” challenging a corrupt and exclusionary Democratic Party that had dominated City Hall for decades through its Tammany Hall political machine. Also like Mamdani, La Guardia ran for mayor as a “good government” reformer.⁸ Such politics inherently entail a cross-class populist appeal that a “fairer” reorganization and regulation of the political economy can be of universal benefit to all constituent elements of society. For La Guardia, this meant running on a promise to “fix” Tammany corruption, quality-of-life criminality, and yawning economic imbalances that rendered the local operation of a maturating industrial capitalism both inefficient and unstable.

But La Guardia was not, nor ever claimed to be, a socialist. Neither can his politics or mayoralty in any reasonable sense be considered “objectively” socialist without overburdening the term itself to the point of incoherence. “Despite the epithets aimed his way on the campaign trail,” writes historian Kim Phillips-Fein, “La Guardia never considered himself a socialist. While he did stand for working-class politics…he linked this to a vision of a modernized city that used public power to reduce disorder, municipal waste, corruption, and crime in ways that appealed to the upper-middle classes and New York business leaders.”⁹

According to Thomas Kessner, biographer of La Guardia: “He was no ideologue or even a consistent thinker, and it is easier to describe what he did not favor than what he did. He was not a Socialist; he was not persuaded that capitalism had failed irretrievably or that a centrally directed economy was either feasible or an improvement. Socialist solutions to problems that were deeply imbedded in human nature he judged simplistic and dangerous.”¹⁰ La Guardia was a middle-class child of Italian immigrants, a Republican by party affiliation, and a chameleon (“opportunist,” according to some contemporaries) by political persuasion.¹¹ He was multiply reelected as a New York representative to US Congress in the 1920s. In 1934, he won the New York City mayoralty by defeating the Democratic Party’s Tammany Hall machine, running on a platform of anticorruption; progressive reform; and generally cleaning up politics, the streets, and crime.

It is true that on one occasion, during the 1924 election for US Congress, La Guardia ran on the Socialist Party ballot line due to the Republican Party ballot line being closed to him for reasons of petty partisanship. But he returned to the Republican Party fold at the next election cycle. More importantly, the decision by the Socialist Party to offer him the ballot line was less a function of La Guardia’s embrace of socialism than it was the Socialist Party’s embrace of opportunism.¹²

Just a few years prior, in the 1918 election, La Guardia had run an utterly reactionary campaign against the antiwar Socialist Party candidate, Scott Nearing. La Guardia, a consummate nationalist-militarist, was vehemently in favor of US involvement in World War I—that is, the “great war” that Eugene Debs considered an imperialist war “for conquest and plunder.”¹³ In his own words, La Guardia ran his campaign on an “anti-yellow, anti-socialistic, anti-German and true blood American platform,” attacking war dissenters and pacifists, many of whom (including his Socialist Party rival) were then being persecuted by the US government under the repressive prowar Espionage Act.¹⁴

While Debs was touring the nation, speaking out against the war, facing imprisonment, and defending Nearing (who had been fired from his university teaching position), La Guardia was railing against his “yellow dog Socialist” opponent as a “man without a country” standing against the American flag. The Republican Party, the Tammany Hall-dominated Democratic Party, and the New York Times endorsed La Guardia in this campaign, and he won handily.¹⁵

Part of the confusion over La Guardia’s legacy on the left is the result of both the growing dominance of the right wing within the Socialist Party and the impact of Stalinism within the Communist Party during this period. In the main, during the 1920s and early 1930s, La Guardia was criticized or opposed by both the Socialist and Communist Parties for his conservatism, prowar jingoism, close relations with New York City’s wealthy elites, and equivocal support for the labor movement. However, by the mid-1930s, the Communist Party, which had approximately sixteen thousand members in New York City at this point, began its turn toward “Popular Front” cross-class collaborationism under the direction of the Stalinist ruling bureaucracy in the USSR.¹⁶

The Popular Front turn was born of a confluence of world-historic factors that tenuously aligned the interests of disparate national forces. Seeking to consolidate its domestic hegemony, the Stalinist ruling class in Russia aimed to stave off socioeconomic crisis by forging trade and diplomatic relations among the powerful Euro-American capitalist nations and reintegrating into the prevailing world order. In turn, the Euro-American ruling classes had a proximal interest in an alliance with Russia—accompanied by “ceasefire” agreements with what were then-bourgeoning Communist Parties within their respective countries—against a reemergent German imperialism, which threatened both Russian irredentism to the East and the existing global imperial hierarchy superintended by Britain, France, and an aspirational United States to the West.¹⁷ The inauguration of friendly relations between Russia and the Euro-American capitalist colossi inexorably led Euro-American Communist Parties to scuttle revolutionary opposition to their respective national ruling classes and instead adopt a disciplined posture of patriotic loyalty and class conciliation.

Rather than a model to be emulated, a close inspection of La Guardia’s actual relationship to the capitalist and working classes of New York City, alongside that of the prevailing conditions facing oppressed social groups…ought to give pause to socialists.

After having won significant support within the working class of New York City by leading mass strikes, struggles for union recognition, aid for the unemployed, and expanded welfare relief from the ravages of the Great Depression, the local Communist Party now directed its sizeable influence toward allying with and supporting (or subordinating itself to) the “progressive” elements of the middle and capitalist class. This turn, carried out by bureaucratic fiat in the Communist Parties around the world, entailed profound political self-moderation and the adoption of the rhetoric of social liberalism and reformism (as opposed to class struggle and revolution).

To be sure, dissident socialists, communists, and labor militants committed to revolutionary politics continued to exist in New York City. But the bulk of La Guardia’s multiterm mayoralty coincided with the subsumption of the Communist and Socialist Parties into the broader New Deal coalition, within which La Guardia acted as vassal to Franklin Roosevelt’s federal suzerainty.

Following Mamdani’s primary election win, Harold Meyerson wrote a piece in American Prospect celebrating precisely the foregoing legacy of the New Deal era and meditating upon its contemporary relevance. Focusing specifically on a Jewish working class that was heavily aligned with the Socialist Party, Meyerson recounts that the battery of New Deal legislation prompted key Jewish labor institutions “to switch from supporting Socialist Party candidates to supporting candidates who supported social democratic policies on more viable electoral lines. Both Roosevelt and La Guardia swept the Jewish vote in their re-elections of 1936 and 1937, respectively.” Meyerson then posits:

Just as Roosevelt and La Guardia convinced New York’s Jews to forsake the sectarianism of only supporting Socialist Party candidates in favor of electing major-party candidates who favored social democratic policies, Mamdani’s success as a socialist running as a Democrat, like that of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, might persuade some of the more sectarian DSA members that working to promote socialist candidates within the Democratic Party is no heresy. In fact, it’s the only effective way to advance socialist policies and causes.¹⁸

If Mamdani’s campaign and political agenda is modeled on that of La Guardia, or even, as historian and New Left Review editor Alexander Zevin argues, a much diminished and “quite modest” vision compared to that of La Guardia, what does this mean for Mamdani’s political program?¹⁹

II. The Structural Limitations of Administering the Capitalist Metropole

Rather than a model to be emulated, a close inspection of La Guardia’s actual relationship to the capitalist and working classes of New York City, alongside that of the prevailing conditions facing oppressed social groups (Black people in particular), ought to give pause to socialists. La Guardia’s mayoralty illustrates the extreme limitations of a strategy predicated upon the octroy of working-class reform via accession to executive office within a capitalist state (by way of a capitalist political party), which is itself predicated on a system of racial and class hierarchy.

There is simply no getting around the fact that to administer a racialized capitalist economy with anything other than a posture of implacable hostility to the fundamental relations subtending said economy, is to administer the conditions of working-class and racial exploitation, domination, and oppression. This truth is borne by the history of the La Guardia mayoralty in at least three major areas: labor, racism and policing, and nationalist-militarism.

IIA. A “Friend of Labor”?

La Guardia was an “ally” of the working class in the same sense that Roosevelt and New Deal liberal capitalists were. He was neither a working-class mayor nor a mayor for the working class, per se. Rather, he was a social liberal, welfare-capitalist reformer who, like Roosevelt, saw the incorporation of legalized (that is, domesticated) unions into a state-regulated regime of industrial-relations conflict resolution as a mechanism to avoid economic disruption caused by outbreaks of class strife—that is, strikes, mass picketing, boycotts, and so on.²⁰ (As discussed respectively by Nate Holdren and Matthew Dimick, Roosevelt’s signature piece of New Deal labor legislation, the National Labor Relations Act, was neither intended to encourage the autonomous exercise of workers’ power—that is, strikes—nor to empower the working class as an autonomously organized social force arrayed against the capitalist class and state in toto.)²¹

It’s true that La Guardia supported workers’ right to unionize in a general sense. But as the effective manager of the exploitative system of class relations that was the New York City capitalist economy, La Guardia did not fight for the working class so much as occasionally hold the worst excesses of capitalist violence at bay.

Shortly after taking office, in the spring of 1934, La Guardia stepped into the fray of an historic and militant strike of the city’s taxi drivers. Organized in the Taxi Drivers Union, approximately two thousand workers had set up street pickets and engaged in fierce battles with the police and strikebreakers hired by the taxi companies. La Guardia simultaneously offered to “mediate” the dispute and ordered the New York Police Department (NYPD) to quell the strike, which they did by driving police cars into crowds of strikers and acting as escorts to scabs.²²

Throughout 1934–37, mass protests of the unemployed and disabled demanding food aid and welfare relief amidst the privations of the Great Depression were broken up, attacked, and beaten by the NYPD. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) criticized La Guardia for allowing the police to run roughshod over demonstrators.²³

By 1937, when the “La Guardia People’s Front” had been formed, with the Communist Party and Socialist Party swinging behind the mayor as their liberal champion, Socialist Appeal (the magazine of the left wing of the Socialist Party) ran the following critical assessment:

How did La Guardia get to be Mayor of New York? Who backed his candidacy? What interests put him into office, confident that he would represent them faithfully as the city’s chief executive?

It must be realized that New York City is one of the largest “businesses” in the world.…The La Guardia Administration was conceived and born out of this background. The large real estate operators and the big banks took the leadership in the decision that Tammany had to go; that “good government” had to be introduced; that the budget had to be lowered; that an “efficient” Executive had to be put in. Within a few weeks, the Banker’s Agreement, refused to Tammany, was signed with La Guardia. The city securities went up more than ten per cent in market price.…

This is the same La Guardia who…has blocked unionization on the City-owned Independent Subway System. Who has broken a hundred strikes, from the taxicab strike in 1934 through the building strikes and the whole series of department store strikes right up to the present moment when hundreds of his police are smashing the shipyards strike.²⁴

The largest and most shameful spot on La Guardia’s labor record, however, concerns what is often recognized as one of his greatest achievements: the unification of the city’s mass transit system under public control. The city’s subway system had been divided between three separate operators, two of them privately-owned and one city-owned. In 1938, La Guardia “completed the single largest transaction in municipal history and the largest railroad merger ever,” buying out the private companies and putting “the most extensive transit network in the world,” and tens of thousands of transit workers, under city management.²⁵

If one considers socialism tantamount to mere “public ownership” within an otherwise capitalist economy—per the reductio ad absurdum of various historical social-democratic iterations, such as “municipal socialism,” “state socialism,” or even in Bernie Sanders’s wonted formulation (in which even the “fire department and police department” are “socialist institutions”)—then La Guardia was indeed the greatest “socialist” administrator outside of Moscow at that time!²⁶

However, it is a strange sort of “socialism” in which the workers are despotically stripped of their ability to organize, collectively bargain, or go on strike, and are violently attacked by the police. That is precisely how La Guardia treated public workers, with a particular tyranny directed at the transit workers. (In that regard, perhaps, there is a similarity between the “socialism” practiced by La Guardia and that practiced by Stalin in Russia.)

Like a corrupt business owner who “supports” the right of workers employed by a competitor to organize and go on strike, but recognizes no such thing for their own workforce, La Guardia supported workers’ rights in the private sector, but viciously opposed the right of public workers to collectively organize or act in any capacity that might counter the needs and dictates of the administrative-state ruling class.²⁷

Photo Credit: Transit Workers Union of America

For years, the Transport Workers Union (TWU) had perilously and patiently tried to organize at the various transit companies in the face of intense repression. Finally, amidst the unprecedented national “sit-down” strike wave of 1936–37, TWU grew dramatically, engaged in a series of sit-down strikes, and won recognition from the private transit companies, growing to forty-three thousand members.²⁸

Immediately upon taking ownership of the various transit lines, La Guardia went to war against the transit workers and TWU. La Guardia, like his would-be superior Roosevelt, refused to countenance the right of public workers to collectively bargain, form independent “closed shop” unions, or go on strike. In the face of La Guardia’s intransigence, unionization efforts stalled within the newly unified transit system, and the very existence of TWU was at risk. Meanwhile, TWU continued organizing among the workers of the privately owned municipal bus companies, conducting a strike in 1941 despite La Guardia’s attempts to crush it using police violence.²⁹

When TWU threatened a citywide strike of transit workers against La Guardia’s refusal to recognize and bargain with them, La Guardia responded with even more despotic antilabor measures. He personally sponsored a bill in the State legislature signed by then-Governor Lehman that explicitly threatened striking city subway workers with criminal prosecution and between five- and twenty-years imprisonment for “sabotaging,” “obstructing,” or even “leaving unattended” any “car, bus or other transit facility.” Additionally, La Guardia announced plans for the NYPD to act directly as strikebreakers by running the subway in the event of a strike.³⁰

Insofar as sex workers, juvenile delinquents, gamblers, disorderly persons, and beggars were posited as impediments to [an orderly city], they were targeted for elimination from the public sphere by La Guardia’s regime. The fact that such criminal categories were, in Brooks’s words, “entirely reliant on social hierarchies” and landscapes of racial, gender, and class inequality, was “overlooked” by La Guardia…

At the 1941 TWU convention, the national director of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) accused La Guardia of “the most brazen and outrageous attempts to break a labor union that I have ever witnessed in my long career as a labor leader.”³¹ In 1943, amidst stagnating wages and skyrocketing inflation, in part due to the entry of the United States into World War II, TWU once again threatened to strike against La Guardia’s intransigence. This time, La Guardia not only reiterated his view that any strike against the government would be considered a criminal act, but he called upon top CIO officials to rein in the local union; the CIO, after all, had agreed to a wartime “no strike” pledge as the condition for its inclusion in Roosevelt’s federal War Labor Board. The conflict with TWU remained essentially unresolved throughout the balance of La Guardia’s tenure.³²

In an account of La Guardia’s battle with the TWU, the socialist economist Leo Huberman, writing in 1941, wondered what had happened to the man who had been “one of labor’s most ardent champions” as a Congressmember. La Guardia, who Huberman now labeled “the ‘friend of labor’” using ironic quotation marks, had undergone a “disturbing change,” apparently as a result of acceding to the position of mayor. As Huberman offered:

One explanation is that Mr. La Guardia is now himself an employer of labor. As Mayor of the City of New York he is the employer of the largest group of transit workers in the world. His attitude has changed because he has become a boss. As boss he has adopted the open-shop, union-busting tactics of fifty years ago….The name of Fiorello H. La Guardia, which once brought cheers, now brings boos and hisses from transit workers and other labor groups in New York City.³³

IIB. The NYPD, Racial Capitalism, and Black Rebellion Under La Guardia

An additional glaringly negative aspect of La Guardia’s legacy, which has particular relevance to the Mamdani campaign for mayor, pertains to the question of the police and anti-Black racial oppression. (As I have written elsewhere, Mamdani has recently taken conspicuous pains to distance himself from past criticisms of the NYPD and to indicate his willingness to fully embrace the role of the thirty-thousand-member force within his administration.)³⁴

The historical fact of structural racial hierarchy in the United States and New York City has meant that Black people have experienced the inherent economic inequalities of capitalism in a way that is both different and more pronounced than for white people. Thus, as many including Ira Katznelson have argued, “universalist” blanket economic reform measures (such as those of the New Deal) tend to not benefit Black people (and working-class and poor Black people in particular) to the same degree that they do white people.³⁵

La Guardia was an “economic populist” who spoke of the needs and injustices of the working class. But he avoided paying any particular attention to the Black racial oppression and inequality that was rife and systematic in the 1930s and ’40s New York City. Moreover, his transformation, aggressive deployment, and enlargement of the NYPD virtually gave birth to what historian Emily Brooks has termed modern “law-and-order liberalism.”³⁶

This form of policing comprises the type of “quality-of-life” and “anti-vice” shibboleths that are characteristic of the racial profiling, harassment, criminalization, and incarceration to which Black people have been subjected—and rebelled against—over recent decades. (This includes during the De Blasio administration, whose police commissioner, Bill Bratton, pursued a “broken windows” approach that led to the police murder of Eric Garner).³⁷

La Guardia and his police commissioner, Lewis Valentine, set out to reform the police by both breaking its connection to the partisan corruption of Tammany and by “professionalizing” it as an aggressive instrument of “public order.” To La Guardia and Valentine, however, the concepts of “order” and “security” were structured by “racist ideas about the capabilities of Black people and associations between criminality and Black communities.”³⁸

La Guardia’s pursuit of an “orderly” city was primarily driven by two considerations: the safeguarding of, first, a business climate conducive to financial investment and commerce, and second, “equitable access” to public space and resources. Insofar as sex workers, juvenile delinquents, gamblers, disorderly persons, and beggars were posited as impediments to the foregoing, they were targeted for elimination from the public sphere by La Guardia’s regime. The fact that such criminal categories were, in Brooks’s words, “entirely reliant on social hierarchies” and landscapes of racial, gender, and class inequality, was “overlooked” by La Guardia and Valentine.³⁹ And insofar as La Guardia’s policing of the public sphere was conducted in the putative interest of the general moral and mental hygiene of the city, it included shutting down gay bars and banning drag queens from Times Square.⁴⁰

In turn, La Guardia and Valentine were met by fierce and consistent criticism and resistance to their new paradigm for policing. “Their tenure,” Brooks writes, “was, in fact, bookended by two mass uprisings in Harlem driven partly by frustration with racist policing. Through the 1930s and 1940s, Black New Yorkers, youth, and working-class women across races individually and collectively resisted the heightened surveillance and criminalization that the mayor and police commissioner sought to introduce. During these years, ending racially targeted police brutality and harassment was a central civil rights demand for both newly arrived and long-established Black New Yorkers.”⁴¹ A biographical analysis of the legacy of La Guardia published by the La Guardia-Wagner Archives housed at La Guardia Community College in Queens, New York, further explains: “Like most liberals at the time, La Guardia focused more on issues of class than on race. Decades of neglect and discrimination worsened the plight for the city’s black population, small but growing, and largely concentrated in Harlem. Racial riots in Harlem in 1935 and 1943 exposed the problems and revealed the limitations of New Deal liberalism, which proved, as poet Langston Hughes predicted, that sooner or later ‘a dream deferred” would “explode.’”⁴²

In March 1935—a year into La Guardia’s inaugural mayoralty—Harlem erupted in rebellion against racial inequality, citywide discrimination, racist policing, and widespread poverty. Black people in New York City had suffered years of Great Depression privations, similar to but even worse than White people. During the daylong “riot,” three people died, hundreds were injured, and an estimated $2 million in property was damaged.

Initially, the district attorney and La Guardia attempted to deflect and scapegoat the Communist Party for inciting the uprising. However, a commission set up by the mayor to investigate the “outbreak” concluded that it was a “spontaneous” response to “injustices of discrimination in employment, the aggressions of the police, and racial segregation,” and that, if anything, Communist activists deserve “more credit than any other element in Harlem for preventing a physical conflict between whites and blacks.”⁴³

Police vans outside Harlem court on March 20, 1935, as prisoners arrested during the previous night’s riot were brought in for arraignment. Officers lead captives from the vans through crowds of onlookers. March 19, 1935 Photo Credit: AP Commons — Police vans outside Harlem court on March 20, 1935, as prisoners arrested during the previous night’s riot were brought in for arraignment. Officers lead captives from the vans through crowds of onlookers.
March 19, 1935.
Photo Credit: AP Commons

Partially because the commission’s report was so damning of the oppressive conditions inflicted on Black people in the city, and partially because elements of the report held La Guardia directly responsible for some of those conditions, La Guardia tried to have the report suppressed. It was only made known to the public after it was leaked to and then published in a leading Black newspaper, the New York Amsterdam News.⁴⁴

The influential Black Communist, Cyril Briggs, wrote a series of articles in the Daily Worker on the Harlem uprising and its aftermath, attacking La Guardia and the racist white ruling class of New York City. (The Communist Party at this point had yet to become the staunch La Guardia apologist of its later “Popular Front” period). Briggs accused the “‘liberal’ La Guardia administration [of] following the example of lynch rulers of the South and giving starving Negroes 25 per cent less in relief than [whites].” Moreover, “hundreds of Negro and Latin-American families are denied any relief whatever, and are threatened with arrest and deportation when they apply for relief.”⁴⁵

…the structural limitations of any endeavor to reform American capitalism from the top and within are necessarily such that to ignore race is to abide the reproduction of preexisting relations of racial oppression. Even universalist measures of economic populist reform do not actually close the prevailing racial gap between white and Black people…

Briggs pointed out that—as reported by the more conservative Black organization, the Urban League, and admitted by the right-wing New York Post—the unemployment rate among Black Harlemites neared 80 percent, and the death rate in Harlem was twice the city rate. Across New York City, the tuberculosis mortality rate was five times greater among Black people than whites.

No demagogic attacks by Mayor La Guardia on the Communist Party and militant Negro and white workers…can conceal this terrific indictment of the jim-crow capitalist system. [The Harlem uprising was] an undisciplined expression of the pent-up anger of the Negro population against jim-crowism in jobs, relief, against exorbitant rents and unhealthy housing conditions, against police brutality and the savage persecution and oppression of the Negro population at the hands of the white ruling class, its courts and other agencies of oppression….It is on the La Guardia administration, and the whole capitalist set-up in the city that the responsibility for these conditions rests.⁴⁶

Over a year later, with portions of La Guardia’s Harlem commission report still suppressed, the Daily Worker published the leaked findings of the “health and hospital” section of the report, which was one of the most damning. The report held La Guardia “personally responsible” for widespread horrific conditions obtaining in health agencies run by the city and the city-run Harlem Hospital, which displayed intensive racial discrimination and abuse.⁴⁷

Throughout the late-1930s and early-1940s, conditions for Black people in New York City and Harlem stagnated despite minor policy gestures of the La Guardia administration in the wake of the 1935 uprising. During this period, New York City, like much of the nation, north and south, including the US military that was mobilized during World War II, practiced a ubiquitous form of then-legal racial segregation and discrimination. In practice, this meant that the economic gains resulting from the New Deal during the Great Depression and the industrial-state mobilization of a war economy during WWII were curtailed for Black people.

Misery increased in Harlem and protests multiplied, as La Guardia continued to countenance racial segregation in both private and public spheres. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (who became the city’s first Black city councilmember in 1942) emerged as one of La Guardia’s greatest critics, as the latter continued to attempt to use public funds to create segregated or white-only facilities, affordable housing units, and municipal projects.⁴⁸

In 1943, as La Guardia was nearing the end of what would be a twelve-year stint as mayor, another “riot” erupted in Harlem. While the immediate precipitating event was the shooting of a Black soldier by a white cop, the underlying causes remained essentially similar to those of the 1935 uprising—namely, the simmering discontent over widespread racial inequality, poverty, and injustice. During the 1943 Harlem uprising, six people were killed by the police, seven hundred were injured, six hundred arrested, and millions of dollars of property was damaged, which included the mass looting of basic consumer articles.

In sum, as in the case of labor and the irreconcilable conflict inherent to class relations under capitalism, La Guardia’s mayoralty maintained the essential racial hierarchy peculiar to and inextricable from the historical development of racialized slavery-cum-capitalism in the United States and New York City.⁴⁹ La Guardia was neither an outspoken exponent nor consistent opponent of white supremacist ideology. But again, the structural limitations of any endeavor to reform American capitalism from the top and within are necessarily such that to ignore race is to abide the reproduction of preexisting relations of racial oppression.

Even universalist measures of economic populist reform do not actually close the prevailing racial gap between white and Black people, although they may grant equal improvements in metrics of welfare across the board. Because racial inequality, hierarchy, disempowerment, and oppression are relative social phenomena, if a White populace and ruling class remains structurally advantaged over a Black populace, then changes in the exact values of the numerator and denominator are less relevant than changes in the ratio itself.

Thus, like myriad otherwise liberal administrators of northern urban centers in the Great Depression and postwar eras, the expanded reproduction of an economically reformed capitalism on a “color blind” basis either perpetuated or exacerbated racial segregation, inequality, enmity, and violence. This mode of “racial liberalism,” to use the phrase of historian Karen Miller, is the necessary twin of the law-and-order liberalism that informed and circumscribed La Guardia’s mayoralty.⁵⁰

IIC. Ethno-Nationalist Populism and Nationalist-Socialism

La Guardia was no socialist, but more specifically, he did not primarily view society as chiefly divided between irreconcilable socioeconomic classes—namely, those who labor and those who appropriate the products of the former. Rather, he viewed the world according to the division that is the default of modern bourgeois nation-states—ethnicities and nationalities. If La Guardia sought to uplift the rights and welfare of workers it was because the latter were entitled to such as “hardworking Americans.” Instead of a supranational identification with the working class, La Guardia ascribed to a supraclass identification with the nation. Thus, if considered a populist, his was of a distinctly Völkisch character that was concerned with the welfare of the Volksgemeinschaft.⁵¹ Hopefully a generous reading of such an analysis will be allowed, as the claim is not that La Guardia was a fascist. (Although in truth the edges of fascism and the “normal” racism, militarism, and repression of capitalist liberal democracy bleed into one another).⁵²

The claim is rather that certain homologies manifest when it comes to adopting a social standpoint as a manager of “one’s own” nation or center of capital accumulation as opposed to that of a working class arrayed against international capitalism. On this basis, the maximand of national unity takes precedence over any special focus on internecine racial division, oppression, or hierarchy; as addressed above, this has deleterious consequences within a system of racialized capitalism and imperialism. But it also entails the embrace of the repressive and militaristic aspects of the capitalist nation-state, whether the army or the police.

For his part, La Guardia consistently evinced a nationalist-militarist political bent that permeated an array of disparate features of his mayoralty. His prowar jingoism during the imperialist slaughter of the First World War has been discussed above. This continued through the Second World War, in which La Guardia inveigled President Roosevelt to assign him a military command. (The latter unsuccessfully lobbied Henry Stimson, Secretary of War, to place La Guardia as viceroy of the US-occupied Philippines; Stimson demurred that La Guardia’s “vigorous personality” would unnecessarily upset the natives).⁵³

His nationalist-militarist bent was also reflected in his relationship to the fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini in Italy. Until 1940, when Italy entered the war on the side of Germany, La Guardia had little problem being publicly associated with the Mussolini regime on an ethnonationalist basis. Even as Mussolini carried out violent political repression against socialists, workers, and independent unions; mobilized for racist imperial incursions in Africa; and began issuing antisemitic decrees, La Guardia refrained from publicly criticizing the Italian government. According to Kessner, La Guardia’s “fear of offending [Italian-Americans] the single most valuable group of supporters that he had forced him to be quiet about Mussolini.” Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party leader, charged La Guardia with craven opportunism.⁵⁴

Hands Off Ethiopia!’ Is Demand of 100,000 in Harlem Rally’ by Cyril V. Briggs from The Daily Worker. Vol. 12 No. 186. August 5, 1935. Via: Revolution Newstand — Hands Off Ethiopia!’ Is Demand of 100,000 in Harlem Rally’ by Cyril V. Briggs from the *Daily Worker* 12, no. 186. August 5, 1935.
Via: Revolution Newstand

In the fall and winter of 1935, after fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia, hundreds of thousands of Black people and antifascist whites engaged in months of protests, marches, and sometimes mass fighting with pro-Italy and fascist sympathizers. La Guardia deployed the NYPD as if on “war duty” to suppress these uprisings. He also supported and spoke at a number of pro-Italy events during this time that were either directly sponsored by or inclusive of fascist organizations, including a mass rally held at Madison Square Garden in which La Guardia presented an official of the Italian fascist government with a $100,000 check.⁵⁵

In a related vein, the largest pro-Nazi rally in US history occurred at Madison Square Garden in 1939. Against twenty thousand attendees saluting both Nazi and American flags, one hundred thousand antifascist counterprotesters mobilized in the hopes of shutting down the vile racist pageant. La Guardia was no proponent of the Nazi rally, but neither did he try to stop it; in fact, he mobilized the largest number of police to guard a single event in the city’s history to defend the Nazi rally from the antifascist throng, who were subjected to widespread police violence.⁵⁶

Finally, as was true of many Roosevelt-aligned social liberals, La Guardia maintained a virulently racist anti-Japanese disposition throughout World War Two and after. He vociferously supported the federal policy of rounding up and interning tens of thousands of Japanese and Japanese-American citizens in concentration camps across the western United States, and he refused to allow internees to relocate to New York City once freed. Regardless of their citizenship status, La Guardia referred to these Japanese-Americans as “alien enemies,” and ordered the NYPD to surveil New Yorkers of Japanese descent (a measure not extended to those of German or Italian descent).⁵⁷

It was this mass pressure from below…[that] potentiated the progressive reforms of the era. And it was the waning of these struggles, which coincided with the abandonment of the project of growing an independent working-class socialist movement…that…explains the subsequent rightward turn and increasing bourgeois authoritarianism of figures such as La Guardia, Roosevelt, Truman, and both the Democratic and Republican parties…

Owing to this profoundly mixed record, in combination with the steady increase in La Guardia’s personal authoritarian approach to city government, Kessner writes that “by 1943 New York progressives were prepared to make an open break with the most successful reform politician in the city’s history.” The ACLU, along with a list of influential reformers, issued a public condemnation of La Guardia’s heavy-handedness, his predilection to encourage and resort to police violence, and his repression of municipal workers and unions. Kessner’s diagnosis is that “New Deal dollars had made La Guardia’s New York the most innovative city in the nation,” but with the entry of the United States into the fighting in World War II, the redirection of federal funds to military-industrial purposes “now absorbed these dollars and that imagination.”⁵⁸

It is tempting to read the operation of some sort of suprahistorical iron law of power and corruption into the seemingly inexorable devolution of La Guardia from an early “radical” economic populist to an imperious custodian of the status quo. There is a degree of truth to this, insofar as La Guardia’s centrist authoritarianism increased in the degree to which he became further ensconced within the matrices of power latticing the capitalist administrative state. But his transformation also reflects the vicissitudes of the broader US political economy during the turn of the interwar and postwar eras. These vicissitudes, as will be discussed below, were a function of not only world historical events occurring within the global system of capitalist nation-states and the shifting role of US capitalism within this hierarchal schema, they were also a function of the politics and tempo of the class struggle within the United States as it approached and then crested into an historic inflection point.

III. The New Deal Era and the Class Struggle

Among liberals and social democrats, the New Deal era often figures as a model of enduring allure and nostalgia. The recent rise in popularity of Bernie Sanders’s brand of “democratic socialism,” which posits Roosevelt and his agenda as the north star, has only heightened this trend.⁵⁹ If there were a social democratic analog to the Make America Great Again slogan, it would be oriented on this moment of US history.

To be sure, the New Deal era, which can be generally understood as coterminous with the era of La Guardia’s mayoralty, was one of massive and substantial reforms that specifically benefited the working class. The merits apply equally to the impact of both the La Guardia and Roosevelt administrations on New York City and the nation: largescale housing construction, expanded welfare programs, improvements to infrastructure, increased healthcare access, elevated rates of worker unionization, and Depression relief measures. The “public sphere” also massively expanded during this era, with La Guardia in particular overseeing the construction of scores of new public schools, expanded free higher education through the City University of New York system, and the proliferation of parks, swimming pools, playgrounds, and the like.

Fiorello LaGuardia and Franklin Delano Roosevelt Photo Credit: National Archive and Records Administration — Fiorello LaGuardia and Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Photo Credit: National Archive and Records Administration

The truly crucial thing to understand about this pivotal historical period, however, is that none of these reforms were brought about in a vacuum, reducible to the acumen or goodwill of a single administrative official. The 1930s was a decade of exceptionally high levels of autonomous working-class struggle and upheaval, and concomitantly, exceptionally high levels of autonomous political organization of the working class within explicitly radical formations and parties, such as the Socialist and Communist Parties.⁶⁰

By the late 1930s, the Communist Party boasted an estimated membership of seventy-five thousand nationwide, with another half a million or so members in Communist-affiliated mass organizations.⁶¹ The Communist Party and the CIO had also by the end of the 1930s wholly subordinated themselves to the political limitations of the Popular Front and class collaborationism within the liberal led New Deal coalition. However, well before this time, largely in the crucial years stretching from 1932–37, New York City and the nation experienced a rising wave of militant class struggle and generalized radicalism, unmatched hitherto or since.

It was this mass pressure from below—of protests and uprisings of workers, the unemployed, tenants, Black people, the disabled, and the left—which potentiated the progressive reforms of the era.⁶² And it was the waning of these struggles, which coincided with the abandonment of the project of growing an independent working-class socialist movement nationwide, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, that also explains the subsequent rightward turn and increasing bourgeois authoritarianism of figures such as La Guardia, Roosevelt, Truman, and both the Democratic and Republican parties generally.⁶³

The veteran socialist labor organizer and historian, Kim Moody, describes how “prior to Roosevelt’s election in 1932 and the early New Deal, many of the first signs of working-class rebellion and organization in response to the Great Depression took the form of increased disruptive developments, such as unemployed organizations that grew to 350,000 to 400,000 members, their mass demonstrations, grocery store ‘mob lootings,’ forced eviction reversals, hunger marches, farmers’ ‘strikes’ and ‘holidays,’ the veterans’ ‘Bonus March,’ and strikes.”⁶⁴

Labor scholar Michael Goldfield additionally locates the origins of New Deal labor legislation in the general social unrest sweeping the nation in the early 1930s:

Protests of the unemployed from 1930 to 1932 were often massive and militant. No serious commentator doubts that they were virtually all radical-led, largely by open communists. On 6 March 1930, well before the passage of any of the new labor legislation, over one million people demonstrated across the country under Communist Party leadership against unemployment.…In New York City, in January 1930, [fifty thousand people] attended the funeral for a party activist killed by the police.…Perhaps nowhere was the upsurge so militant and the rapid influence of communists as dramatic as it was in African-American communities.”⁶⁵

Between 1934–37, in particular, the US working class experienced the most significant and effective sustained strike wave in its—or perhaps any other nation’s—industrial history. Tens of millions of workers engaged in strikes for union recognition and improved working conditions and compensation. In a single year, from 1936–37, amid an unprecedented “sit-down” strike wave, the number of workers in unions nearly doubled, from 4.2 to 7.2 million. Most of these strikes and union victories, it should be noted, actually occurred outside of the auspices or authority of the governmental ambit—that is, the National Labor Relations Board—but rather through directly forcing employer concessions.⁶⁶

Concomitantly, a real and rooted movement began to take shape across the working class for a labor party formation genuinely independent of the ruling Democratic and Republican parties. Citing the research of the labor scholar-activists, Eric Lief Davin and Staughton Lynd, Moody describes developments “in the wake of the huge strike wave of 1934,” in which

twenty-three cities saw labor parties launched and candidates fielded, with some winning office, while ten central labor councils in other cities voted in favor of one. So did the state labor federations of Wisconsin, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, and New Jersey….By 1936, the labor party movement spread to at least 22 states, with varying degrees of strength. Most of the major industrial unions except the miners voted for a labor party at their conventions in 1935, while at that year’s AFL convention, the Textile Workers’ resolution for a labor party lost by a narrow delegate vote of 104 to 108….At its 1936 convention the United Mine Workers’ delegates, in defiance of [union President] John Lewis, passed a labor party resolution….There was, in other words, an independent class-based political dynamic taking shape as class conflict intensified.⁶⁷

As Goldfield explains, this was the context impelling “virtually unanimous opinion among New Deal Democrats and progressive Republicans (the overwhelming majority in both Houses after the November 1934 elections)” that substantial welfare, industrial, and labor reform was necessary to restore national order. Among many political and economic elites, it is no exaggeration to say that they very much feared the prospect of outright revolution should the government fail to respond to the “growing strength of radicalism in the working class” with major political, legal, and economic concessions.⁶⁸ In sum, through a combination of genuine redistributive reform and a sort of “elite capture” of the labor movement officialdom, a new social order was constructed in the wake of the 1930s class upheaval, for which figures such as Roosevelt and La Guardia are often (erroneously) individually credited.⁶⁹

The question is less one of what Mamdani will do, and more one of what we ought to do, not only in defending him against reactionary attacks from capital and the organized right, but in holding him accountable and even pushing him to advance our struggle beyond his wont.

As even the aforementioned labor historian Joshua Freeman concedes, notwithstanding his proffering of La Guardia as a “model” for socialist mayoralty, “La Guardia did not have direct ties to a social movement….But his advances were possible because of the national and local mobilizations of workers, the unemployed, tenants, and political radicals in response to the Great Depression. Their disruptions pushed national politics to the left and drove the New Deal to launch its huge investments in urban improvements.”⁷⁰

If a single summary lesson could be gleaned from this history, it is the following. The lasting and substantive reforms enjoyed by working class and oppressed people during the La Guardia era were those that were purchased by their own autonomous struggle. It was not by subordinating or circumscribing their interests and demands to the narrow electoral calculus of a singular politician or a cross-class, liberal-oriented coalition, that gains were wrought and empowerment obtained.

The organized and militant sections of the working class and the oppressed, rooted among larger masses, disdained to mute their criticisms of and challenges to the city’s ruling class and, as circumstances demanded, the La Guardia administration itself. This vanguard eschewed a reformist route, in which their historical agency would be transferred to a singular avatar of putative political surrogacy situated atop the capitalist state bureaucracy. Rather, theirs was a route from below, oriented simply on the autonomous collective self-activity, self-empowerment, and self-emancipation of the working class and the oppressed.⁷¹

Unfortunately, the imminency of this historical lesson risks being completely lost on those inclined toward a redwashed view of the La Guardia mayoralty.

Conclusion and Present Orientations

Amidst a crowded field of commentators proffering comparisons between La Guardia and Mamdani, Kim Phillips-Fein brings much needed sobriety to the task by foregrounding some important historical contrasts.

La Guardia came to power at a moment when the city’s old economic elites were reeling under the Depression, the New Deal Democratic Party was emerging, and the president had every reason to ally with New York. Today, the city is home to a phenomenally wealthy upper class that has been growing more powerful rather than less, the Democratic Party is divided, and Washington can anticipate political rewards from attacking New York.…La Guardia spoke to the reforming middle classes of the city, who were tired of the tent cities and Hoovervilles that were spreading throughout the city. Turnout in wealthier city neighborhoods was especially high in the 1933 mayoral race, and much of this went to La Guardia.…Finally, La Guardia marshaled the protest politics of the early 1930s—the unemployed marches, anti-eviction rallies, and overall vigorous left-wing scene that included rival Socialist and Communist wings.

La Guardia, then, represents both the high point of New York’s 20th-century liberalism and its limits—and understanding these internal contradictions also helps us see more clearly the challenges confronting Mamdani today. Mamdani cannot draw in city elites by leading the charge against a corrupt political machine. The mainstream Democratic Party still in some ways functions like a political machine of old: It manages to mobilize and deliver working-class votes without doing anything substantive for the working population of the city. But it is still very different from the Tammany Hall of the early 20th century, which used public funds to buy patronage and favors; today’s Democratic Party, by contrast, has been more fully captured by business interests as a whole—which thus have little incentive to join a crusade against the establishment.⁷²

On the one hand, the temptation by the Mamdani campaign and its supporters to redwash La Guardia as a precursor to socialist mayoralty is understandable as populist strategy. On the other hand, to do so is not merely to falsify history or engage in opportunism; it politically disarms the present insofar as it obscures important lessons from the past regarding the structural limits of a social reformism that accommodates the norms of racial capitalism.

Being the largest capitalist metropolis within the largest capitalist world empire, New York City is a political economy characterized by certain inherent features. These include hyper policing and incarceration, yawning racial disparity, and structural impediments to the exercise of the autonomous power of an organized working class. Short of mounting an implacable challenge to these features, any would-be mayoral reformer hazards not only fecklessness and capitulation but fundamental deleteriousness. Put simply, rent-freezes and free buses would be great, but they are no substitute for the mass independent struggle of workers and oppressed people, which is the only force truly capable of contesting the power of capital and the police state.

In fact, the most serious potential pitfalls of a Mamdani mayoralty are not that he will likely fall short of his campaign promises or even engage in outright opportunistic betrayals while in office. Even many of his most ardent supporters and active campaigners realize this fact of bourgeois electoral politics.⁷³ The question is less one of what Mamdani will do, and more one of what we ought to do, not only in defending him against reactionary attacks from capital and the organized right, but in holding him accountable and even pushing him to advance our struggle beyond his wont.

To this end, we must be extremely vigilant against those voices from within progressive, left, and socialist venues that counsel precisely the opposite course; who argue for our complete subordination to, and self-censorship in the putative interests of, a Mamdani mayoralty. This danger is already manifest.

In a recent article, Jacobin columnist Liza Featherstone asks what the “Left” ought to do about the centrist bourgeois-liberal Democratic Party governor, Kathy Hochul, who has the power (and seeming inclination) to block much of Mamdani’s agenda, her belated endorsement of his candidacy notwithstanding. “Mamdani will have to be diplomatic on Hochul’s shortcomings…[and] making an enemy of her could be catastrophic,” Featherstone writes. Then, as if in rehearsal of the debilitating approach referenced above, Featherstone poses a fateful question: “Given that Mamdani’s struggles to govern the city successfully will also determine the near-term success or failure of New York City’s socialist movement, do we make it easier on him by following his lead, not antagonizing the governor too much?”⁷⁴

An even more patently absurd and destructive manifestation of this tendency was recently demonstrated within the New York City chapter of DSA (NYC-DSA). NYC-DSA held an emergency general meeting on October 14, 2025, to put up for a membership vote a non-amendable resolution proposed by the Steering Committee. The resolution stated, in part,

NYC-DSA’s goal in campaigning to elect a democratic socialist mayor is not primarily to elect a target for ourselves.…If we succeed in electing Zohran Mamdani, our priority will not be policing the mayor’s lapses and demanding accountability—orientations the left has adopted in moments of decline and marginality. Our priority in campaigning for a democratic socialist mayor is to expand working-class power and win material improvements in the lives of the working class. Our members must put first the project of moving and shaping a new political landscape, before the task of critique.⁷⁵

This question is of course not new, but how socialists approach it is of grave consequence. In 1911, George Lunn of the Socialist Party was elected the mayor of Schenectady, New York. A famed example of “municipal socialism,” otherwise known as “sewer socialism,” Lunn’s administration did in fact construct a modern sewer system for the city, but otherwise practiced a relatively conservative form of “administrative efficiency.” Eventually, Lunn’s overall moderatism, unaccountability, and personal careerism led the local Socialist Party to expel him while in office. (Lunn subsequently rebranded himself as a “progressive Democrat”). However, before that point had been reached, a young Walter Lippmann had this to say upon resigning from Lunn’s administration: “I have often thought of the slashing articles the Socialists in Schenectady would write about the present administration if they weren’t responsible for the administration. As it is, they have to pretend that what they are doing is wonderful, epoch-making and beyond criticism. Reform under fire of radicalism is an educative thing; reform pretending to be radicalism is deadening.”⁷⁶

The greatest possible outcome of a Mamdani administration is that it facilitates the growth of the autonomous organization, politics, and power of the working class and oppressed as against the capitalist class and the repressive police apparatuses of the capitalist state. The worst possible outcome is that the most active and political sections of the working class and oppressed become sundry appendages, lieutenants, and apologists of a rightward moving “socialist” administration that does harm to the working class and oppressed, generally, while undermining precisely the autonomous organization, politics, and power of the latter.

If there are lessons to be drawn from the La Guardia mayoralty, which indeed are myriad, it is certainly not that his approach to the administration of a capitalist bureaucracy should be emulated. Neither should La Guardia’s politics of social liberalism be confused with a genuine socialist and working-class program for substantive reform, let alone revolutionary transformation. In a word, La Guardia was no comrade. And insofar as the foregoing has immediate relevance to a Mamdani mayoralty and the prospects for organized socialists, the key lesson is that the mutability of the prevailing conditions of exploitation and oppression are a function of the mass autonomous struggle of workers and the oppressed, not a “savvy” figure ascending the bureaucracy to whom our struggles must be subordinated and our collective agency must be vicariously transferred.

New York City, Racial capitalism, Social Movements, socialism

Keith Rosenthal

Keith Rosenthal is a PhD candidate in History at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. His writings on disability, racism, capitalism, and labor have been published by the Disability History Association, Disability Studies Quarterly, Jacobin, Spectre, Tempest, New Politics, and Monthly Review. He is the editor of Capitalism & Disability: Selected Writings by Marta Russell (Haymarket Books, 2019).

“The Greatest New York City Mayor of All Time”

A Historical Reappraisal of Fiorello La Guardia