Big-city American mayors have been in the news lately, specifically, Eric Adams in New York (decrying the busing of migrants to his city) and Lori Lightfoot in Chicago (the same, although she is also dealing with out-of-control crime). The first Asian American and first female mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu, is tackling the renegotiation of police contracts. Her counterparts on the West Coast, San Francisco mayor London Breed (first Black female mayor) and newly-elected LA mayor Karen Bass (the same), are dealing with entrenched homeless populations.  

The ethnicities may have changed but the message is the same: Being a big-city mayor is hard work. Or, to quote the fictional Chicagoan Mr. Dooley, invented by writer Finley Peter Dunne in 1895, “Politics ain’t beanbag.”

This got me to thinking about how Italian Americans have fared when dealing with the headaches of being a big-city mayor. Actually, over-all, they’ve done quite well. And one of them, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York (1933-1945), did so well that, in 1993, a group of American political science professors voted him the best American mayor of the 20th century. In short, LaGuardia and others set high standards for other big-city mayors to emulate. 

A.H. (Andrew Houston) Longino is credited as being the first Italian American mayor in our nation (Mississippi, 1900-1904). Despite being a first-termer, he is remembered for two things: supervising the building of the state capital and inviting President Teddy Roosevelt on a hunting trip in the Mississippi Delta. The state building still stands, and that famous hunting trip – promoted in the national media – inspired the creation of a new toy: the “teddy bear.” 

Skipping up the U.S. map to New York, you can easily see why LaGuardia left such a lasting impression. Fluent in Italian and Yiddish (his mother was an Italian Jew), LaGuardia was a war hero who flew Caproni bi-planes on the Italian/Austrian front. After being elected to Congress, he then became mayor of the Big Apple, overtaking the corrupt Tammany Hall organization. Indeed, in his first act as mayor, LaGuardia invited the press to watch him as he hung a sign over the door of the mayor’s office: “E finita la cuccagna” (‘the party’s over’). 

A progressive on social issues (in 1939, LaGuardia appointed the first Black female judge in the nation – Jane Bolin), he inspired police by accompanying them on gambling raids and charmed his youngest constituents – children – by reading the Sunday “funnies” over the radio during a printing strike. 

Though LaGuardia was only 5′ 2″, he had big shoes to fill. Decades later, however, a tenacious prosecutor named Rudy Giuliani did so during his eight-year reign (1994-2001). Notwithstanding his love of mob movies (even after putting mob guys in jail), and ignoring his later, over-the-top theatrics during the Trump administration, Giuliani was rightfully dubbed “America’s mayor.” Two main reasons why: a) he rid Times Square of rampant crime and b) he rallied New York, and the nation, after 9-11.

Another Italian American mayor, Bill de Blasio, manned the office from 2014-2021 but his terms were far from successful. Though as publicly proud of his ethnicity as LaGuardia, the only thing de Blasio had over him was height (6′ 5″). With the possible exception of introducing Universal pre-K programs early in his administration, de Blasio’s reign alienated cops, outraged citizens, and never secured any kind of sensible footing—all of which still didn’t deter him from declaring a run for president in 2019. Clearly, the term “hubris” doesn’t just apply to the Greeks.

Another mayor who fell short was Frank Rizzo of Philadelphia (1972-1980), a controversial former police commissioner known for his blunt talk and polarizing policies. The record of another controversial mayor, Charles “Buddy” Cianci of Providence, Rhode Island is far more nuanced. A former mob prosecutor, Cianci became, in 1974, the youngest (33 years old), first Italian American, and first-ever Republican mayor of Providence. His two non-consecutive terms (1974-1984 and then 1991-2002) were interrupted with brushes with the law. He resigned in 1984 after pleading nolo contendere (no contest) to a charge of beating a man who had harassed his ex-wife. And in 2002, he was charged with racketeering for allowing corruption among some underlings. 

Ask anyone from Providence, however, and they point to how it became a “Renaissance city” during Cianci’s second term. He transformed downtown into an artist-and-tourist mecca, reducing crime and attracting many new businesses. The title of his memoir says it all: Politics and Pasta: How I Prosecuted Mobsters, Rebuilt a Dying City, Dined with Sinatra, Spent Five Years in a Federally Funded Gated Community and Lived to Tell About It.

Preceding LaGuardia by two years, another Italian American mayor (and another first for his city) mirrored him on the West Coast in San Francisco: Angelo Rossi (1931-1944). A staunch anti-Communist, Rossi was, ironically, accused of being “pro-Fascist” in 1942, shortly after the Roosevelt administration declared 600,000 Italian Americans across the nation as “enemy aliens”. Some feel that this affected his reelection campaign two years later. Nevertheless, Rossi was mayor when that popular symbol of the city was built, the Golden Gate Bridge – financed, of course, by an Italian American banker, A.P. Giannini. 

(Note: Another Italian American, singer Tony Bennett, would romanticize the city even further with his 1962 song, I Left My Heart in San Francisco.) 

Another San Fran mayor, Joseph Alioto, was elected at the tail-end of the turbulent 60s (1968-1976), although the City by the Bay became the chief landing port of the gentle hippies. Alioto made the city literally move with BART (the Bay Area Rapid Transit System) and presided over two major additions to the skyline: the Embarcadero Center and the Transamerica Pyramid. He was followed by the so-called “people’s mayor,” George Moscone, whose tenure was tragically cut short after he and a city supervisor, gay activist Harvey Milk, were shot and killed by another city supervisor, Dan White. 

The city of Boston’s nickname, Bean Town, is now associated with espresso beans thanks to the popular Thomas Menino. During his twenty years in office (1993-2013), Menino cleaned up the Charles River, reduced crime, and reinvigorated “Boston Strong” pride. After the 2014 Boston Marathon bombings, the then ex-mayor, dying in a hospital from cancer, held a press conference to reassure his fellow Bostonians that they (unlike he) would still survive. 

One Italian American mayor moved on from local politics to even higher office: Anthony Celebrezze of Cleveland. Like Alioto, Celebrezze (first elected in 1953) reinvigorated his city’s mass-transit system. He was still serving as mayor in 1962 when President Kennedy tapped him to become his secretary or Health, Education and Welfare. He continued on in this position under President Johnson, where he helped pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Social Security Act of 1965. 

Later that year, he asked President Johnson if he could return to Cleveland as “we (my family) are going to lose our home if I stay here.” Johnson joked that Celebrezze was “too honest” for Washington as he was “the first cabinet secretary to go broke while working at the White House” (i.e., drawing only one salary and not politicking for other income). He left in 1965 but was later appointed an appellate judge by a grateful Johnson. 

Bill Peduto, the first Italian American mayor of Pittsburgh (2014-2021), created the city’s permit program system, reinvested in city parks, and, like Menino in Boston, was environmentally minded, cleaning out lead in the city’s sewer systems. In 2018, he embraced a broken city after the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue. Out of that tragedy, Peduto created a taskforce which came up with a mass-shooting handbook which other mayors could use.

Chicago? No Italian American pol ever managed, as Menino did in Boston, to break that city’s Irish stranglehold on politics. But another city known the world over for its entrenched corruption, New Orleans, had two Italian mayors: Robert Maestri (1936-1946) and Victor Schiro (1961-1970). 

Maestri started out well but his associations with the corrupt Huey Long soon got the better of him; he cut a deal with the New York gambler Frank Costello to split payments from illegally run gambling parlors. And Schiro was actually a Sicilian of “Arbereshe” (Albanian) descent. On the down side, he was a staunch segregationist. 

Interestingly, three of the mayors (Celebrezze, Alioto and Menino) served as president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, a tribute to their leadership skills. Many of them publicly fought for the rights of the poor or the oppressed. Many had an almost avuncular relationship with their voters. (New Yorkers, for example, referred to LaGuardia in public by the translation of his first name: Fiorello – “Little flower.”) Many viewed crime as an affront to basic dignity. 

Each and every one of these mayors is a far cry from Carmine DePasto, the fictional mayor in the 1978 comedy film Animal House. Ditto Frank Anselmo, the corrupt (and again, fictional) Italian American pol played by Danny Aiello in the 1996 film City Hall (based on a non–Italic Queens, NY pol Donald Manes). 

Other than the Broadway show Fiorello from the late 1950s, where are the projects celebrating the real-life accomplishments of these inspiring public servants? More to the point: Where are the current Italian American civic and cultural leaders to help coordinate, fund, and promote such projects? 

If there’s any lesson to be learned from the lives of these noble Italian American politicians, it’s this: Leaders lead. Let us learn from their examples. -BDC