Marcantonio’s Funeral

Italian Harlem’s Biggest Funeral: A Community Pays Its Last Respects to Vito Marcantonio
by Gerald Meyer, Ph.D.
Published in The Italian American Review (Spring 1997): 108-120

Vito Marcantonio’s funeral was the largest ever held in Italian Harlem. And much more than most funerals, it revealed the variety of responses to the deceased’s life.

From shortly after 10 AM on August 9th 1954 when upon emerging from the subway he fell dead on Broadway at City Hall Park, until his burial three days after, Italian Harlem was absorbed in saying farewell to Vito Marcantonio, the radical Congressman who served East Harlem in the House of Representatives from 1934 until 1950. Marc (as everyone in East Harlem called him) had merged with this community: it was as if neither could exist without the other. He had been born in 1902 in the heart of this the largest and most Italian of all the Little Italys, and when he died he lived on the community’s corso, East 116th Street, four blocks from where he was born.(1)

The following day, in Giordano’s funeral parlor from 12:30 until 11:30 that night and the following day from 9 AM until 11 PM a procession of openly weeping people passed by the bier at a rate of one thousand per hour. His mother’s keening in Italian set off even greater displays of grief. Throughout the community in the windows of tenements and stores appeared black-bordered signs which read simply: “We Mourn Our Loss.” Black wreaths appeared beside the doors.

The day of his funeral the police halted traffic on First Avenue at East 115th Street to allow for the assembling of a funeral procession of more than one hundred vehicles headed by fifteen coaches filled with flowers. In the surrounding streets, ten thousand openly wept. From the tenement windows, additional on-lookers participated in their final farewell. The sense that swept through the crowd was: “Who will fight for us now?” People blessed themselves according to the Catholic custom and waved goodbyes as the cortege wound its way through the community stopping at his home and then his political headquarters in Italian Harlem, El Barrio, the Puerto Rican community which with which it shared East Harlem, and Yorkville, a predominantly Irish and German-American community to the south.(2)

Everything–except perhaps its enormous scope and extravagant expression of loss–resembled the typical funeral of a prominent son of a traditional Italian American community. Funerals represented the most important ritual moments for this community, the situation around which the community reassembled and reassured itself. It constituted the ultimate assertion of the Italian way of life as transported to America.(3) Italian Harlem gave Marc its most spectacular funeral because he was their most loyal son, its most fervent defender.

Above all else Italian Harlem valued Marcantonio’s simply living there throughout his entire life. He had not only physically lived there, he lived the life of that community–he got his hair cut across the street, bought the newspaper on the corner, stayed up with his friends till the early hours in a corner cafe. In ways small and large, he observed the customs of the community. He shared he same modest brownstone with his mother and grandmother, he kept his jacket on around women, and maintained his boyhood friendships, including those who worked in the post office or for the rackets. [[… and maintained his boyhood friendships regardless of whether they worked in the post office or for the rackets.]]

The outside world continually defamed Italian Harlem. In 1942 an article in the liberal daily PM characterized Marcantonio’s as a “strange, almost sinister figure [who] has skulked though the political half-world of the Upper East Side… with its old-world vendettas, its belly-shrinking poverty, and its complex racial mixture of Negro, Italian, and Spanish bloods.” In 1946, LIFE dismissed East Harlem as: “Vito Marcantonio’s dingy little realm, one of the most crime-ridden sections in any American city. [It consists of] mostly slums, the 18th Congressional District contains few good neighborhoods. By day grimy youngsters play stick ball in tenement-lined streets that at night are paroled by muggers, sluggers, and white slavers. Gambling flourishes… Trucks… are frequently hijacked.” The avowed Social Democrats, Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, when attacking Marcantonio in their standard, The American Communist Party, dismiss East Harlem as “A dismal slum inhabited mainly by Puerto Ricans.”(4)

The residents of East Harlem’s two self-contained communities–Italian Harlem and El Barrio did not think of them as slums. Six residents recalled: “The festa really kept the people up here together. The funeral director [who buried Marc] named one of his sons Vito and the other Marc. On Election Day, we used to make a fire on the street… The action was all out on the street–all the games… New Year’s there was a big party every year. The neighbors would all march in banging their pots and pans. You’d make a big parade, you’d go all over the six apartments up and down the stairs,… It was some neighborhood. [The people] really protected each other. We never said we were poor. We always had something to eat. We just didn’t have steak and everything that they ate. Marcantonio has the big respect here… The old Italians knew him, and they knew he was an honest man… Marcantonio he helped the Puerto Rican people. Everybody called him a Communist because he helped the people… If the landlord wanted to get the rent, he put all your belongings in the street. [When] that happened, they called Marcantonio. He comes himself. [He says,] ‘Put it back again.’ They put it back… I find an apartment from Italian people… I got along with the Italian people, but not the Irish.”(5)

Richard Orsi’s extraordinary study of the cult of Italian Harlem’s madonna, that lies at the center of the annual festa of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, depicts a community that provided a seemingly endless rich experience of family, neighbors, and community. People shared their lives and their meager possessions. It was a place where doors were never locked. Its residents expressed great satisfaction from the creation of a mutually supportive self-conscious community. People gained respect by extending respect and love by giving. They recall it as a clean place, a crime-free place.

Similarly, in his memoirs, Bernardo Vega describes El Barrio as a socially and politically active community whose residents created out of the worst housing in the most overcrowded conditions a rich vibrant society that kept alive Spanish culture and defended its residents from the hostility of the wider society.(6)

East Harlem’s residents completely disagreed with the defamations of East Harlem published in the popular press. However, both inextricably linked East Harlem and Marcantonio. They expressed trust and pride in Marcantonio not only because their leader had achieved fame, although they did know and care about this. They also saw that he stayed in his office every weekend responding to all their requests until the last person was called. After briefly meeting with them, he referred them to one of his staff who then interceded with the appropriate agency. Apartments got painted, toilets fixed, passports arrived, letters of reference written, and sometimes simple or not so simple advice was tendered. Estimates of the numbers of people helped by Marcantonio and his staff each year range as high as twenty thousand. When there was no public agency that could or would help, he reached into his own pocket. He literally gave away all his money, so that by the and of the day his pockets were empty. In a restaurant, he could never pick up a check because he never had money. When he died The New York Times reported his estate was worth less than $10,000.(7)

Moreover, through his leadership, in 1941 East Harlem obtained East River Houses, the second federally-financed public housing project in New York City, and in 1942 Benjamin Franklin High School, a new academic high school, which under the leadership of Leonard Covello achieved national prominence. Vito Marcantonio had treated all the people of East Harlem with respect and they returned to him their most cherished value, respecto/rispetto. Marc’s funeral, however, attracted not only Italian Americans, but almost equally large numbers of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and many from outside the boundaries of East Harlem. When he reached the bier, one Black man held his son up to see Marcantonio and said: “Say goodbye to the best friend the Negro people ever had.” Paul Robeson distributed a press release which described Marcantonio as: “The Thaddeus Stevens of the first half of the twentieth century.” The leader of the Puerto Rican Independence Party, Gilberto Concepción de Gracia, stated in Spanish: “Marcantonio is alive. He is an idea of liberty and justice for all the world–an eternal idea. [He was] the greatest friend of Puerto Rican independence in Congress and the streets.”(8) All of East Harlem–the Puerto Rican, African American, as well as the Italian American communities–were present and from all over came those who, although they did not live in East Harlem, thought of Marcantonio as their Congressman.

The multiracial/multi-ethnic character of the crowds of mourners resembled the composition of the honorary pall bearers. They included: Marc’s boyhood friends (Frank Maurelli and Vincent Velella); leaders of Italian Harlem (Leonard Covello and Joseph Boccia); Puerto Rican leaders (Manuel Medina and Gilberto Concepción de Gracia); African American leaders (Andronicus Jacobs and W. E. B. Du Bois); Communist leaders (Ben Gold and John Abt); famous leftists (former Minnesota Gov. Elmer Benson and Corliss Lamont).(9)

The eulogies similarly reflected this varied human tapestry. A neighborhood Methodist minister, Rev. Nicola Notar, in English and Italian, extolled: “He will be remembered always for his devotion to the people. … He did not maintain an outward expression of religion but he was a deeply religious man. He had a compassionate spirit. The door of his home, the door of his heart, were always open to black and to white alike.” Du Bois recalled Marc’s successful legal defense of him when in 1953 at eighty-five years of age he was handcuffed and arrested as an agent of a foreign government because of his leadership in the campaign to circulate petitions in opposition to nuclear war. He stated: “Marc maintained that Americans had a right to believe whatever seems right to them… That no man should be punished for his faith but only for his acts.” And finally, Luigi Albarelli, his barber, who shaved him daily in his shop across the street from where Marcantonio lived, said in Italian: “Your name will ever remain in the story of the great martyrs who fought for the cause of justice… Your life has been a mission… Your life was ever dedicated to lighten the load of the people who were in need. You lived fearlessly and courageously with affection in your heart for the common man. You were a man of the people, and the people loved you. A rivederci!”(10)

That so many non-Italian Americans participated in this ritual can be understood by those who know Marcantonio’s record. For ten years he had been the major leader for civil rights legislation in the House. Annually, the Dixiecrats would refuse to release Marcantonio’s anti-poll tax bill from the Judiciary Committee, and annually Marcantonio would successfully collect the signatures of one half the members of the House in order to have it brought to the floor of the House. Similarly he led the fight to make lynching a federal crime. Most spectacularly, in 1944 Marcantonio’s deft parliamentary maneuvering forced the passage of the appropriation for the Federal Fair Employment Act when the Dixiecrats had excluded it from an omnibus bill providing funding for eighteen wartime agencies. And in 1945, when fights erupted between the Italian American and African American students at Benjamin Franklin High School which was located in the heart of Italian Harlem, Marcantonio used all of his prestige in that community to quell the disturbances. A leaflet, signed by Marcantonio, reminded his compatriots that: “The same people who hate us… who discriminate against us, also hate the Negro people, the Jews, the Catholics, the foreign born. … Benjamin Franklin is an example of how the People can Unite and live peacefully together. [There are] traitors among our own people… who preach hate. We in our own community bear the responsibility for beating back the Bilboes [racists], because we are in the majority in this area.”

Marcantonio embraced the Puerto Rican cause with passionate tenacity. In the House he submitted five bills for independence for Puerto Rico, which included a provision for the island’s indemnification to “compensate for these scars of imperialist control.” Less spectacular, but no less important was his painstaking work as unofficial Congressman for the two million Puerto Ricans, who while subject to United States law had no representation in Congress. Marcantonio also acted as attorney for Pedro Albizu Campos and six other leaders of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party when in 1936 they were arrested for conspiring to overthrow the United States government. In 1949, during his election eve speech at his Lucky Corner on East 116th Street and Lexington Avenue, he responded to the slurs directed at the Puerto Ricans, by shouting: “Yes, I do defend the Puerto Ricans as our most recently arrived against the kind of discrimination practiced against the Irish, the Jews, and the Italians in the past.”

Throughout the United States, progressives considered Marcantonio–the only Congressman from the American Labor Party (ALP)–as their leader. From the floor of the House, he consistently articulated the left’s position in Congress. During those periods when the left was in ascendancy, he provided leadership for many winning causes. However, as the left declined it seemed he was fighting a one-man battle. In 1949, he helped rally twenty-nine votes in opposition to continuing the appropriation for the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Together with Adam Clayton Powell they gathered seventeen votes in a vain attempt to restore the immigration quota for the British West Indies. His efforts to have Federal funds denied for segregated public facilities mustered sixty votes.(11) By 1950, he was increasingly standing completely alone, such as his lone vote in opposition to United States participation in the Korean War.

From his first term when on the floor of the House when he described the unemployed as victims of an “unjust economic and social system which has failed,” Marcantonio established his radical credentials.(12) However, what set Marcantonio most apart from all other American officials elected to high public office was his singular insistence on the legitimacy of the Communist Party. For example, in the midst of the worst days of McCarthyism, he told the bedraggled remnants of the left who had gathered at the 1952 Progressive Party convention: “The first line of defense of American democracy is the defense of the constitutional rights of the Communists and the Communist Party.”(13) Similarly, in a pre-election debate with his opponent held within the boundaries of Italian Harlem, Marcantonio clearly stated that he welcomed Communist support as well as support of “every other group that believes in the unity of the American working class.” (14) The domestic political repression has erased the record of the many non-Communists who at that time along with Marcantonio admired the Party’s skill and tenacity in fighting for the causes to which he had dedicated his own life. He viewed the Communist Party as a necessary component of an effective left. Perhaps equally important, he considered anti-Communism a weapon that the right used to divide and demoralize progressive movements. Repeatedly he asserted that “Behind the banner of anti-Communism marches reaction.”(15)

The evening before every election, the Italian, Puerto Rican, African American, and leftist supporters of Marcantonio assembled at his Lucky Corner. In 1948 between 25,000 to 30,000 stayed up until 11:00 for a political festa with Italian Harlem’s main street bathed in light, filled with the voice of Paul Robeson, and awaiting the arrival of their favorite son.(16) These were the people who reappeared for his funeral–they had not forgotten.

But how can we explain the seemingly inexplicit facts that the funeral did not take place in Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church and his coffin was interred in Woodlawn Cemetery, a Protestant cemetery?

Marcantonio had been born and died within the shadow of Italian Harlem’s cathedral. The fame of this church had spread to all the Little Italys of New York City and beyond, because its madonna and the festa in her honor possessed the most spiritual and earthly power. Every July hundreds of thousands of Italian Americans–many walking barefooted from Brooklyn and Queens–streamed into Harlem to join the festa. And at the head of the processions as one of the marshals, Marcantonio marched with “taper in hand.”(17)

In his campaign literature and his biographical statements published annually in the Congressional Record, Marcantonio identified himself as a Catholic.(18) When he fell dead, the police called for a priest to administer the last rites of the Catholic Church, because the official police report showed that his pockets held: “a metal crucifix, one religious medal, and a St. Francis Xavier Cabrini religious medal.”(19) In short, Marcantonio’s religious behavior and attitudes typified those of Italian American men in the ghettos, where outward expressions of religious devotion usually remained within the women’s domain.

In contradiction to the man’s life and the wishes of his community, Cardinal Francis Spellman concluded that because Vito Marcantonio “was not reconciled with the Church before his death, he could not be buried in consecrated ground.”(20) At his funeral, comments from the assembled East Harlem residents evidenced great resentment at Spellman’s decision. Their tenor was perhaps best captured by the individual who stated: “Marc doesn’t need the Cardinal to get into heaven.” Pete Pascale recalls that: “Many left the Church because of what Spellman did.” One of Marcantonio’s supporter’s wrote the cardinal accusing him of an act of “cruelty… only exceeded by its stupidity. I attended the wake and in the chapel and in the street with my own ears I heard expressions of bitterness and bewilderment that the friend they mourned had been denied the last rites of their church. Your action was an un-Christian inhumanity to the living–not the dead, for ecclesiastical malice wields no power over them.”

It was as if the community had regressed to the years between 1884 to 1919 when in Our Lady of Mount Carmel, which they had built with their own hands, the pastors had relegated services in Italian and their madonna to the basement–the church inferior. The strength of the Italian community, which as late as 1949 could gather 250,000 to the festa and where at the end of the procession barefooted marched thousands of the penitente had overtaken the official church. However, these gains were already being reversed. In 1946 the parish journal noted that Cardinal Spellman urged support of the local Catholic War Veterans because: “The Red enemies of the church are making their progress felt with every passing year.” The next year, the journal detailed alleged Communist disrespect for the virgin. In 1954, the month after he denied Marcantonio a Catholic burial, the parish journal featured the Cardinal’s picture on its cover.(21)

Marcantonio’s sudden death provided Spellman an opportunity to perform an exemplary act, to show to the faithful the potential results of politically allying with the wrong people. He needed to make perfectly clear that Communism–not racism, poverty, injustice–was the enemy.

How could the residents of Italian Harlem know this? It is not likely that they were aware that Spellman had awarded from his own hands the Club of Champions Medal to J. Edgar Hoover and that he attended a Holy Name Society gathering to show support Senator Joseph McCarthy. He publicly praised McCarthy, stating that he “is against Communism and he has done and is doing something about it.”(22)

The official church’s use of its power against the dead Marcantonio resembled the actions of other pillars of the established order. The press targeted Marcantonio for a campaign of vilification that in that period had no equals. For example, in 1946 from August until election day in November, the Daily Mirror published fifty-eight articles attacking Marcantonio.(23) In 1948, in three successive issues, the New York Times published editorials calling for his defeat.(24) In 1944, the state legislature combined his district with Yorkville, a predominantly German and Irish-American area that had registered one of the lowest percentages of votes for the American Labor Party of any area in Manhattan. Nonetheless, Marcantonio won.

In 1947, the state legislature passed the Wilson-Pakula Act (a bill which Marcantonio said had his picture on it) which outlawed the open primary for candidates. This enormously enhanced the power of the political bosses, because henceforth candidates could only enter the primaries of political parties of which they were not registered members with the consent of the county committees of that party. In Marcantonio’s case this meant he needed the approval of Tammany Hall. Marcantonio, who always entered the major party primaries and had always won at least one of them (in 1942 and 1944 he won both), would now have to run solely on the American Labor Party line, at a time when the entire New York City press identified the ALP as “Communist dominated.”(25) Nonetheless, in 1948 Marcantonio–because of the enormous pluralities he garnered in El Barrio and Italian Harlem–again won. Finally in 1950, James Donovan (a former right-wing Democrat state senator closely identified with Tammany Hall) who by running on the Democratic, Republican, and Liberal party lines accumulated sufficient pluralities in Yorkville to overwhelm East Harlem’s totals, and defeat Marcantonio.

Unknown at the time, the FBI conducted a constantly surveillance of the radical Congressman. Repeatedly among the six thousand items that the FBI has released from its files about Marcantonio is its own determination that he was not a member of the Communist Party. Nonetheless, eighteen days after his 1950 defeat, an “X” was finally placed in the box marked “TAB FOR DECOM”–detain Communist: that is, detain without trial in the event that the Attorney General determined that a national emergency existed.

Cardinal Spellman could not have been acting to defend the faith. Marcantonio–whatever his lapses of ritual observance–had never renounced his Catholicism or caused scandal. He was singled out as very possibly the only Catholic political leader the American Catholic Church has ever refused to bury for the same reasons that the press, the State legislature, the political parties, and the FBI ignored or twisted their own affirmed principles. Vito Marcantonio’s words and his life challenged assumptions that they had decided were not on the agenda for open discussion.

Catholic lay people tried to repair some of the damage done to Marcantonio. Hundreds of mass cards filled the funeral home and several societies affiliated with Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church hired autos for use during the funeral procession.(26) Dorothy Day in the Catholic Worker movement’s monthly wrote an extended obituary that declared he would be remembered because, in the words of the psalms “he understood concerning the needy and the poor.”(27) Together with an assemblage that included children from El Barrio, the Catholic Worker people sang a requiem Mass for Vito Marcantonio.

After his death a group of his friends and supporters under the leadership of Annette Rubinstein and Leonard Covello formed a Vito Marcantonio Association, which arranged for the publication of a book consisting of an extraordinarily well thought through selection of excerpts from his Congressional speeches.(28) In 1970, Public School 50 in East Harlem was officially named after Marcantonio. However, to date the Wilson-Pakula Act remains on the books, the press has printed no retractions, and neither the FBI nor the Roman Catholic Church has acknowledged any wrongdoing.

Endnotes

1. All information in this work not otherwise cited can be found in: Gerald Meyer, Vito Marcantonio: Radical Politician, 1902-1954 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989).

2. Two laudatory accounts of Marcantonio’s funeral are: Virginia Gardner’s Daily Worker articles: “And Still the Thousands Stream Past His Bier” (Aug. 12, 1954), p. 1, and “Thousands Say Sad Farewell to ‘Marc’” (Aug. 15, 1954), p. 2; John McManus, “Tens of Thousands Bid Marc Farewell as People’s Friend,” National Guardian (Aug. 23, 1954), p. 1. See also: “Seven Congressmen Eulogize Marc on House Floor as ‘Truly Good American,’ Honored and Respected,” National Guardian (Aug. 23, 1954), p. 10.

3. Robert Anthony Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 101-2.

4. William Vogel, “As the Communists Went So Went Marcantonio,” PM (Mar. 5, 1942), p. 7; “Marc’s District: People Are Poor and Mostly Foreign Born,” LIFE (Dec. 30, 1946), p. 16 ; The American Communist Party: A Critical History (New York: Praeger, 1962), p. 420; Earl Mazo, in Richard Nixon: A Political and Personal Portrait (New York: Harper, 1959), calls Marcantonio a representative “of a slum district.” p. 81.

5. Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1880’s to World War (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jonvanovic, 1989), pp. 350-380.

6. Bernardo Vega, Memories of Bernardo Vega: A Contribution to the History of the Puerto Rican Community in New York, ed. by Cesar Andreu Iglesias (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984).

7. Since my inquiry into Marcantonio’s life and career began in 1976, the most frequently and otherwise unrefuted story that I have heard from those who knew him related his daily disposal of his cash and state of penury by sundown.

8. “Marcantonio Memorial Held in N.Y.,” National Guardian (Sept. 13, 1954), p. 5. The Furriers Union issued a flyer in English and Yiddish, entitled “We Have Lost a Friend,” which urged its members to attend his funeral. Covello Collection.

9. Covello Collection.

10. Text of Luigi Albarelli’s eulogy in Covello Collection.

11. James Haddon, “The 81st Congress: A Record of Betrayal,” National Guardian (Mar. 3, 1949), p. 5.

12. Quoted in, Kenneth Waltzer, “The American Labor Party: Third Party Politics in New Deal-Cold War New York, 1936-1954” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1977), p. 190.

13. “Progressives Hit Major Candidates: Marcantonio Tells Convention Eisenhower Is a ‘Dunce’ and Taft an Enemy of Labor,” New York Times (July 6, 1952), p. 22.

14. “Bryan in Debate with Marcantonio: Communism Principal Topic as Rivals Meet–Forum Gets Big Police Guard,” New York Times (Nov. 2, 1946), p. 9.

15. See for example: “Progressives Map Fight,” New York Times (Aug. 20, 1951), p. 19.

16. “They Came to ‘Lucky Corner’,” Daily Worker (Nov. 3, 1948), p. 5.

17. “Vito Marcantonio,” Il Martello (Aug. 28, 1940).

18. See for example, “Isaacs Backs Right to Appoint Gerson,” New York Times (Feb. 13, 1938), p. 1.

19. “Marc ‘Neglected Faith,’ Catholic Mass Denied: Throngs View Bier,” Journal American (Aug. 10, 1954).

20. “Vito Marcantonio Falls Dead in Street,” New York Times (Aug. 10, 1954), p. 1.

21. Orsi, pp. 54-55, 70-71. See: Domenico Pistella, The Crowning of a Queen (New York: Our Lady of Mount Carmel, 1954). Il Progresso Italo-Americano estimated that both in 1932 and 1949 250,000 attended the festa. The paper referred to it as “the grandmother of the all the feste in America,” pp. 250, 252.

22. David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Touchstone, 1978), pp. 108-9. Athan Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), p. 299.

23. On two occasions Marcantonio succeeded in obtaining judicial relief. He sued the Mirror and in April 1953, after State Supreme Court Justice James P. O’Malley heard the Mirror’s defense and reportedly advised the paper to settle, won $1,500. Marcantonio announced he would give the money, less legal fees, to settlement houses in his district. “Mirror Settles Marcantonio Libel,” National Guardian (April 6, 1953), p. 3. In 1949, the New York World charged that Marcantonio had met with unnamed persons in a midtown hotel to discuss a $100,000 offer to run for mayor in 1949. He filed suit, won, and was upheld on appeal. Kenneth Waltzer, “The FBI, Vito Marcantonio, and the American Labor Party,” in Beyond the Hiss Case: The FBI, Congress, and the Cold War, ed. Athan Theoharis (Philadelphia: Temple University Pres, 1982), p. 210, n38.

24. “Marcantonio and the U.S.A” (Oct. 12, 1948), p. 24; (Oct. 14, 1948), p. 28; (Oct. 15, 1948), p. 22. For Marcantonio’s reply see: “Record of Vito Marcantonio” (Oct. 30, 1948), p. 14.

25. For example, on September 1, 1946, the Journal American characterized the ALP as backed by: “A coalition of Red Fascist fronts and Communist-controlled unions.” “Mead ‘Certain’ as ALP Choice,” p. 4.

26. “Methodist Pastor Will Conduct Burial Rites for Marcantonio,” Daily Mirror (Aug. 12, 1954). 27. Dorothy Day, “Death in August–Vito Marcantonio,” Catholic Worker (September 1954), p. 1.

28. Annette Rubinstein, ed., I Vote My Conscience: Debates, Speeches, and Writings of Vito Marcantonio, 1935-1950 (New York: Vito Marcantonio Memorial, 1956); reprinted with a new introduction, biography of Annette T. Rubinstein, and a bibliography of published works on Marcantonio by the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute (Queens College/CUNY).

One Response to Marcantonio’s Funeral

  1. felice a. manzi says:

    Vito was my father’s cousin, remember him when I was a small lad. My father and I attended the public school dedication in East Harlem years ago.

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