If you’ve kept up with mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, you’ve probably heard him refer to Fiorello La Guardia as “the greatest mayor in our history.”
As speculation grows about what a future left-leaning mayor of New York City might accomplish, authors Joshua B. Freeman and Kim Phillips-Fein are reviving La Guardia as a progressive precedent. According to these writers, La Guardia, mayor from 1934 to 1945 (12 years across three terms), was a reformer who modernized the city and improved aspects of working-class life.
La Guardia (1882–1947) was born to immigrant parents in Manhattan and grew up in Arizona. Before his tenure as mayor, he became a lawyer at NYU and served as a congressional representative. As a Republican with progressive leanings, La Guardia built a broad, cross-class base of support through the Fusion Party, the Republican Party, the American Labor Party, and even the Socialist Party.
In Jacobin, Freeman praises his tenure as “successful” and calls him an “ambitious New Dealer,” while Phillips-Fein, writing in Jewish Currents, calls him a “good-government politician, bent on reform and on transparent governance.” Both celebrate his accomplishments in building roads, tunnels, subways, parks, markets, and schools, as well as founding the New York City Housing Authority and other social services.
These infrastructure projects have not been free from criticism. La Guardia’s commissioner Robert Moses took on these tasks, becoming a symbol of classist, technocratic, and undemocratic urban planning. As we develop in this article,
Today, the largely Black and Brown communities that live along highways like the Cross-Bronx are subjected to intense air and noise pollution and the chronic health problems those bring — even exacerbating the impact of Covid-19. Because housing is cheapest where exposure is the greatest, the most vulnerable sectors of the working class continue to suffer from urban planners’ undemocratic, profit-driven decisions of more than half a century ago.
According to Freeman and Phillips-Fein, some analogies can be drawn between La Guardia and Mamdani: both ran against sectors of the city’s political establishment — Tammany Hall then, Cuomo/Adams now. Both come from immigrant backgrounds and ran “unexpectedly successful” mayoral campaigns. But these authors also recognize important differences: Mamdani would face a far-right president and establishment Democratic governor actively working to undermine his administration, unlike La Guardia, who collaborated with Franklin D. Roosevelt throughout his entire tenure as mayor.
From California to Washington, DC, the Trump administration is increasingly using armed federal agents to advance an authoritarian right-wing political project. Trump has named Chicago and NYC as the next targets of his attacks. It’s clear that Trump will not accept even the minimal demands put forward by the Mamdani campaign, nor any limits on ICE activity in the city.
La Guardia was not a socialist — Freeman and Phillips-Fein agree on that. He enacted reforms that pushed the city’s business elite to accept a greater degree of government intervention aimed at improving aspects of working-class life as the U.S. emerged from the Great Depression. But he never challenged the core interests of business or real estate — let alone capitalism itself. He consistently argued that government involvement in housing, welfare, and employment rights was essential to maintaining the city’s economic stability — while the rich continued to thrive.
That’s the blueprint they see: a pragmatic and efficient mayoralty that, despite facing big enemies, can win over a sector of the bourgeoisie and create a broad coalition that improves some aspects of working-class conditions without alarming capital too much. In other words, a politics that abandons any attempt to break with capitalism and that retreats to the minimum program and welfare state.
Labor Containment, Not Class Struggle
In several instances, La Guardia openly opposed organized labor. He strongly resisted unionizing in the public sector. In 1940, 400 labor leaders, representing 300 local unions with a combined membership of 800,000, sent La Guardia a strongly worded appeal, urging him to recognize transit workers’ right to collective bargaining as the city prepared to assume control of the Interborough and BMT systems. As the New York Times reported, the city refused to “recognize the right to strike, the closed shop or the principle of collective bargaining through labor unions when the 27,000 Interborough, and B.M.T. employees are taken into city service under unification.”
In June 1945, about 1,700 newspaper delivery workers walked off the job in New York City, halting the distribution of 14 metropolitan daily newspapers for 17 days, impacting 13 million readers. La Guardia called this strike “stubborn, silly, idiotic defiance of the government” and went on the radio to read the news and comics that people were missing because of the strike — in other words, scabbing for the bosses. According to Joshua B. Freeman,
La Guardia … aggressively supported organized labor during a moment of explosive union growth. The mayor backed the closed shop and declared he wanted to make New York a “100 percent union city.” This was in line with FDR’s national orientation toward unions, epitomized by his famous quote: “If I were a worker in a factory, the first thing I would do would be to join a union.”
But FDR and La Guardia’s policies and gestures toward unions and the labor movement were calculated moves to co-opt and contain them. The working class was being shaken by powerful strikes, often led by Socialists, Communists, and Trotskyists. The Minneapolis Teamsters strike of 1934, led by Trotskyists in Local 574, turned their fight into a class confrontation, facing police repression and martial law, and becoming a pivotal moment for the Teamsters and the working class in the United States.
That same year, the Toledo Auto-Lite strike saw nearly 10,000 workers clash with 1,300 National Guardsmen over union recognition; two were killed and more than 200 injured. The Battle of Toledo, as it was known, was a victory for the union, which secured its recognition, further radicalizing the movement. Two years later, the General Motors sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, forced recognition of the UAW after 44 days of factory occupations. These inspiring waves of union victories across the country were not delivered from the mayor’s office or the White House; they were waged and won by rank-and-file militancy.
As Jason Koslowski points out, “When the massive power of unions started to stir in 1930, that power did not come out of nowhere. The labor movement was building itself in important part upon the experience and lessons of the last major strike wave of the era — the one that ran from around 1915–16 to 1920–21.” We must understand FDR and La Guardia’s pro-union gestures as attempts to co-opt the labor movement, pacify its radicalism through concessions, diminish the influence of more radical left currents, and limit union growth to the framework of the New Deal project — channeling energy away from building an independent political force that could challenge capitalism itself.
Today, we are not in a moment of radical working-class activity. But we are experiencing significant changes in the labor movement. As Daniel Kovac explains,
Over the last several years, the youth have become more sympathetic to socialism, and the labor movement has shifted to take a more active position in national politics. Strikes and unionization drives have increased in number, although overall unionization rates have continued to decline. Analyzing the tenets of the current crisis of the bipartisan regime is key to grasping the potential for more acute class struggle to emerge and how it might take paths towards class independence.
In the post-COVID labor resurgence, the working class has influenced national politics in a way unseen since the advent of neoliberalism. Nowhere was this clearer than in the 2023 UAW Big Three strike. In speculating about a Mamdani mayoralty, Freeman draws a parallel to Biden: “Imagine if the mayor walked the picket lines at retail stores and other establishments where workers were trying to unionize, as President Joe Biden did during the 2023 United Auto Workers strike.”
But in holding up Biden as a model of pro-union governance, Freeman completely misses the point. Biden walked the picket line not out of principle but because of the immense popularity of the UAW strike, its impact amid shifts in the labor movement, and — most importantly — as a countertactic against the Democratic Party’s ongoing realignment crisis, which cost them the last elections. Even Trump attempted to relate to the ongoing strike, even though he did so at a nonunion plant.
The overtures that both capitalist parties were forced to make to the working class reflected the increasingly impossible-to-ignore role that the working class plays. This should not signal to socialists a strategy to follow; rather, it should clearly illuminate these overtures as mechanisms of co-optation and containment.
This approach of both authors is similar to labor intellectuals like Eric Blanc, who in a recent article in the Nation wrote that
it’s too often forgotten that America’s most successful populist mayors — like Milwaukee’s sewer socialists and New York’s Fiorello La Guardia, a hero of Mamdani’s — leaned on powerful workers’ movements to counteract employer and media scaremongering, to muscle through their policy agenda, and to keep up morale in the face of setbacks.
Blanc sees the revitalization, strengthening, and radicalization of unions as the key tool to halt political dealignment and reinvigorate the Democratic Party — giving unions greater weight to counterbalance Wall Street’s influence. The working class becomes a mass for politicians to “lean on,” rather than a sector to grow the independent power of the working class and lead the transformation of our society.
Class Collaboration vs. Class Independence
Phillips-Fein highlights that La Guardia
built a political coalition that united immigrant workers, left-leaning activists, and an influential faction of the city’s upper-middle class, drawing them together in opposition to a corrupt Democratic political machine and offering them a radical vision of New York as a working-class city, a city of immigrants, and — as such — an emblem of American democracy and possibility.
His coalition included representatives of Wall Street as well as those of the working class.
What La Guardia actually did was absorb radical street activism into his mayoral campaigns, converting the anger of unemployed workers and tenants into votes for his own progressive image — pulling energy out of the streets and into City Hall politics. The 1930s were an epoch of upheaval in the working class, with revolutionary processes occurring around the world. Bringing the working class to the ballot box was intended to prevent these struggles from turning into a movement that challenged U.S. imperialism and capitalism.
James Casey, a writer for Socialist Appeal (Organ of the Socialist Party of New York, Left Wing Branches), wrote in 1937,
Having no mass parties of labor or the left, a true 1930s “Popular Front” was not a real possibility in the U.S. Perhaps the closest was the support unions, Socialist and Communist Parties gave to New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s 1937 re-election. […] It is this striking unity on the part of Wall Street reaction and Stalin’s representatives for their “all-inclusive” candidate that makes it imperative for every toiler to become familiar with La Guardia’s anti-working-class record.
This tactic was part of a broader international turn by Communist Parties, following Stalin’s directives, to build coalitions with sectors of the bourgeoisie. It marked an abrupt shift from the ultra-left politics of the Communist International’s “Third Period” — a line dictated by Stalin that promoted sectarian isolation and left the working class unprepared in the face of fascism’s rise — to the “Popular Front” orientation of open class collaboration.
The Socialist Party’s endorsement of La Guardia’s reelection opened a major crisis inside that organization. The more conservative sector endorsed him and ordered the expulsion of the left wing that opposed it. After this split, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) was formed, and James P. Cannon was nominated as its mayoral candidate via a write-in campaign.
“Free Speech” for the Far Right
Voters are using the mayoral election to express their repudiation of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and Mamdani’s candidacy has already generated many Islamophobic and Zionist attacks — even as he leads among Jewish voters with 37 percent. Counterprotests outside his office have already been organized by far-right, conspiracy, and Zionist groups.
Beyond Mamdani’s electoral base, there is the threat of Trump intervening in NYC, sending military forces, and, as Phillips-Fein notes, threatening to “block federal funding to New York if the ‘communist lunatic’ gets elected.”
But when it came to fighting the Far Right, La Guardia was far from exemplary. When he was elected mayor, Hitler and Mussolini were already in power. On February 20, 1939, the German-American Bund drew 20,000 to a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. Rather than mobilize to stop it, the city protected it, deploying roughly 1,700–1,800 cops on horseback—the largest police operation in the city’s history—protecting people with swastika flags.
The newly formed SWP organized a counterprotest attended by about 50,000 people. As The New International recounted, those “demanding their right to picket the meeting, and to show publicly their abhorrence of and resistance to the advance of fascism in this country, were assaulted, clubbed, ridden down and finally beaten back by the troopers of ‘labor’s mayor,’ Fiorello La Guardia.”
Freeman is right to note another contradiction regarding free speech:
When a judge blocked the appointment of renowned philosopher Bertrand Russell to a professorship at City College, citing his iconoclastic views on sex, marriage, and religion, La Guardia refused to appeal the decision.
This is a major issue in today’s context of attacks against students and faculty at universities — such as the Fired 4 at CUNY and the suspension of nearly 100 students at Columbia University. Mamdani has openly opposed the Gaza genocide, making it an important test to defend the right to protest.
Moreover, the mayor’s office is the executive branch of the capitalist state machine in NYC, which is a contradictory position for any socialist. La Guardia used the police not only to repress the counterprotest against the Nazi rally but also against two major uprisings of Black people in Harlem in 1935 and 1943, both expressions of rage against police violence and the housing crisis. In 1943, La Guardia declared a curfew (the last one before the pandemic) and deployed the National Guard, while the police killed six people and arrested 600.
As mayor, Mamdani would have significant influence over the NYPD, one of the largest and most militarized police forces in the world — its budget surpasses that of many entire countries’ militaries — which brutalizes and harasses Black and Brown people and the pro-Palestine movement. While Mamdani previously aligned with the “defund the police” demand that emerged from the Black Lives Matter uprising in 2020, he has since backtracked, now stating that police “have a critical role to play” and pledging to maintain their funding. We have already seen how progressive Mayor Brandon Johnson has recently used police to repress pro-Palestine protests.
If Mamdani is looking to La Guardia as a model, and he has already limited his program on police, we will likely see these contradictions come to fruition.
La Guardia as a Warning, Not a Model
Drawing lessons from La Guardia means administering the capitalist state, using mass movements as leverage in the balance of forces with the city’s capitalists, and winning minimal reforms and defending aspects of the welfare state.
Zohran’s rise shows that the working class in NYC and beyond is open to progressive politics, creating opportunities for the Left to reach wider audiences. His campaign demonstrates that there is space to build a radical program for the working class and youth.
If New York City is to pursue a genuinely socialist course, it will not come from reviving La Guardia–style coalitions and governance. It will come from independent working-class power and a movement that defends democratic rights and fights the genocide. Above all, it will come from a political organization committed to class independence and a program that challenges capitalism itself.