Mamdani: Son of La Guardia and FDR

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-10-14-zohran-mamdani-new-york-city-socialist-laguardia-roosevelt-randolph/



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.”

Related: Could Anyone Be More New York Than Zohran Mamdani?

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.

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