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Meyerson on TAP

Mamdani: Son of La Guardia and FDR

His platform, his movement, and his super-rich enemies all fit the historic pattern of New York’s politics.

Zohran Mamdani delivered a major speech last night to thousands of supporters who’d crowded into New York’s United Palace to hear him lay out the stakes in the upcoming mayoral election. To the historically sentient, the speech was replete with echoes of New York’s previous progressive heroes—Franklin D. Roosevelt, Fiorello La Guardia, and A. Philip Randolph in particular.

Mamdani began by acknowledging the legions who’d walked precincts and made phone calls on his candidacy’s behalf. “There is something special in this room tonight: It’s power,” he said, “the power of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers … working together for a New York where dignity is delivered to all.”

“When has dignity ever been given?” he asked. “When organized labor won the weekend,” he answered, “that was power won, not given.” He continued, citing the battles previous generations of progressives had to wage to wrest the power needed to create better cities and better lives from the powerful of those times. “Great leaders like Fiorello La Guardia taught us that aspiration is something to embrace, not something that we treat as a crime. When we shake loose the shackles of small expectations, our city builds parks and hospitals, and we show the world that ambition and compassion are in fact intertwined.”

If Mamdani’s speech were footnoted, we’d have to reference two New York socialists for the above quotes. A. Philip Randolph—the lifelong Harlem socialist who headed the first successful Black trade union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, whose threats of a march on Washington compelled Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman to desegregate, respectively, defense plants and the armed forces, and who chaired the great 1963 March on Washington—famously told his own legions, “At the banquet table of nature, there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold.” Less metaphorically, he instructed generations of activists that
“Freedom is never given; it is won,” and “Justice is never given; it is exacted.”

As to La Guardia—was he a socialist? Wasn’t he just a maverick liberal and nominal Republican due to his opposition to the machine Democrats of Tammany Hall?

Well, consider: In 1924, when Republicans nominated incumbent Calvin Coolidge for president and the Democrats nominated corporate lawyer John W. Davis, La Guardia, then a Republican congressman representing a polyglot East Harlem, backed the independent progressive campaign of Robert La Follette, quit the GOP, and ran, successfully, for re-election on the Socialist Party’s ballot line. As mayor from 1934 through 1946, he was twice re-elected not just on the Republican but also on the American Labor Party’s ballot line, the ALP being the creation of the city’s Socialist- and Communist-led unions. La Guardia appointed longtime socialist leader Paul Blanshard to serve as his de facto inspector general, in which capacity Blanshard exposed and eliminated the graft and corruption hard-wired into many city departments.

Like Mamdani, La Guardia was attacked as some kind of pie-in-the-sky socialist for supporting municipal control of municipal necessities. In 1935, The New York Times editorialists condemned him as being “fond of toying with haphazard proposals that may be benevolent in intention but are dangerous or impossible in practice. He seems always to want to have in hand some socialistic plaything or other. Just now it is a municipal power plant.” (Thanks to Waleed Shahid for excavating this foreshadowing of the Times’ Mamdani phobia on his substack.)

In his speech last night, Mamdani also called out his campaign’s enemies. There are, he noted, “some who oppose that vision [of a more democratic and affordable New York that he has put forth]. Billionaires like Bill Ackman and Ronald Lauder have poured millions of dollars into this race because they say that we pose an existential threat. And I am here to admit something. They are right. We are an existential threat to billionaires who think their money can buy our democracy.”

Here, Mamdani was echoing New York’s greatest political leader, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the speech he delivered in Madison Square Garden three days before his sweeping re-election victory in 1936. Anyone who thinks Mamdani exceeded the bounds of political propriety by attacking billionaires for threatening democracy should consult FDR’s address. During his first term, Roosevelt said,

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.

Roosevelt, the politically sentient understood, was referring not just to “organized money” generally, but also to the financial backers of The Liberty League, a super PAC avant la lettre, which had poured millions of dollars, much of it from the DuPont family (the largest shareholders at the time in General Motors), into negative, apocalyptic, and largely fictitious attacks on Roosevelt. Some of the League’s leaders were prominent former Democrats—including former Democratic National Committee chairman John J. Raskob—who savaged FDR for transforming the Democratic Party from a dutifully pro-big-business organ into one that enacted such “socialist” (so they said) policies as Social Security, collective bargaining rights for workers, and more progressive taxation.

So—New Yorkers, Mamdani could correctly note, have been there and done that before. They’ve heard the attacks leveled against him also leveled against La Guardia and FDR. They’ve heard from the Democrats’ ancien régime of how socialists have hijacked the party. Then again, they’ve also heard campaign platforms like Mamdani’s before, and they worked successfully during the 1930s to see them realized. And if some of the defining issues of the 1930s have returned in different form to resonate today, and to mobilize the 80,000 New Yorkers who’ve now walked the sidewalks on Mamdani’s behalf, it’s because most New Yorkers, now as then, don’t want to live in an unaffordable city where wealth is concentrated at the top.

So: Is Mamdani as dangerous to civilization itself as Randolph, La Guardia, and Roosevelt were? We can only hope he is.

– HAROLD MEYERSON

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