WTI Magazine #40    2014 July, 23
Author : Giuseppina Salzano e Giovanni Verde      Translation by:

One of the three major airports in New York has an all-Italian name: the closer to the city and the smallest. And small in stature and close to the city and its citizens was he who the airport was named after, one of the politicians symbols of the Big Apple and of the United States of America: Fiorello La Guardia.

Fiorello, "Little Flower" for everybody, was born in New York on December 11, 1882. His father Achilles, musician, was an Italian immigrant originally from Cerignola, Puglia; his mother Irene Coen Luzzatto, was an Italian Jewish from Trieste. Thanks to his parents Fiorello will travel a lot since his early age, and will have a solid musical talent and a rich polyglot training.

At 16 years old he moves to Trieste, due to his father's illness, a soldier in the 1898 Spanish-American War. Fiorello will have the opportunity to work in U.S. consulates in Budapest, Trieste and Fiume, learning the languages spoken in these places. When he returns to New York, in 1906, La Guardia fluently speaks Italian, French, German, Hungarian, Hebrew and Yiddish.

In 1916, Fiorello La Guardia becomes the first Italian American to be elected to the U.S. Congress, representing the Lower East Side of Manhattan for the Republican Party.

He then enlists for the First World War and is nominated captain of the American pilots stationed in Italy, where he has the opportunity to meet the famous Italian writer and poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, at a reception organized by the Italian King.

In 1933 La Guardia decides to run for New York mayor, with the Republican Party, against Tammany Hall, the organization linked to the Democratic Party which until then had decided the political landscape of the city and had often been accused of corruption. In twelve years as mayor, La Guardia will earn a solid reputation of man of integrity, straight administrator, hard opponent of the corrupt politician, and great innovator.

It is said that upon his arrival at the town hall, he shouted in Italian "E' finita la cuccagna!". At the request explanation of the phrase, La Guardia translated it with "No more free lunch!".

He will then fight tirelessly against the organized crime, with a determination that will be an inspiration for future politicians of every part of the world. Often at odds with his own Republican colleagues, La Guardia decides to expand social services health, build parks, improve transport and the provision of public education.

Even at an international level, La Guardia will practice an inflexible opposition to the regimes of Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany. In August 1940, President Roosevelt thinks of La Guardia as Minister the war, but then appoints him as President of the American side of the US-Canadian Defense Board. In 1943 La Guardia asks Roosevelt to return in the armed forces. The President refuses, convinced of the extraordinary aid that Fiorello could give as Mayor of New York, through its network of contacts and with his reputation and nature of man above the parties.

La Guardia, in fact, always consider himself far from the party-political dynamics. "I don't want you to use the word "politician" in describing me. It has such a connotation that I think it should not be used, except for the politicians: and of these there are many. But I'm not one of these". Yale University will confer him the Honorary degree with this motivation: "He has taken democracy from the politicians and given it back to the people".

Fiorello la Guardia dies on September 20, 1947. On June 1st of the same year the city airport is named after him, though still alive. La Guardia goes down in history as a man with an absolute dedication to his work, a personal control of each political mechanism, and an extreme awareness of his own quality.

One day, joking, he said: "I do not do a lot of mistakes, but when I do, it's a beaut!".

His tenacity and belief in his own ability will allow Fiorello La Guardia to become emblem of integrity and political foresight of an entire, great nation.