Fiorello La Guardia
Fiorello La Guardia · Philosophy & Social Sciences
Mayor of New York from 1934 to 1945, son of a Jewish mother from Trieste, who broke Tammany Hall and rebuilt the city
11 décembre 1882, New York, États-Unis — 20 septembre 1947, New York, États-Unis
New York
Fiorello La Guardia is recognized among Jewish contributors to Philosophy & Social Sciences — Mayor of New York from 1934 to 1945, son of a Jewish mother from Trieste, who broke Tammany Hall and rebuilt the city
Origins and early life
Fiorello La Guardia was born in New York on 11 December 1882, the son of Achille La Guardia, a bandmaster from Foggia and a lapsed Catholic, and of Irene Coen Luzzatto, a Jew of Trieste whose family descended from the great scholar Samuel David Luzzatto; his mother taught him the Shema as a child, but he was raised without religion and chose the Episcopal Church as an adult, and this fiche rests on his mother alone. He grew up on army posts in Arizona, worked in the American consulates of Budapest, Trieste and Fiume, and as an interpreter at Ellis Island while he studied law at night; elected to Congress as a Republican in 1916, he left it to fly bombers on the Italian front, returned, and in fourteen years in the House became the tribune of the immigrant poor, co-author of the Norris–La Guardia Act of 1932 that protected the right to strike.
Work and career
In 1933 he was elected mayor of New York on a fusion ticket against the Tammany Hall machine, and in twelve years he remade the city: he drove the racketeers out of the markets, unified the subways, built the airport that bears his name, the Triborough Bridge, hundreds of playgrounds and the first public housing in the country, and read the Sunday comics to the children over the radio during a newspaper strike. His Jewish descent became public in the 1930s, when he denounced Hitler from City Hall and the Nazi press answered by calling him a Jew — 'I never thought I had enough Jewish blood in my veins to justify boasting of it', he replied; his sister Gemma survived Ravensbrück. He directed the United Nations relief agency UNRRA in 1946 and died in New York on 20 September 1947.
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Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Fiorello-Henry-La-Guardia
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Mayor of New York from 1934 to 1945, son of a Jewish mother from Trieste, who broke Tammany Hall and rebuilt the city
Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Fiorello-Henry-La-Guardia
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