POLITICAL NOTES: Vito & Mr. Wall Street

DON’T PAY RENT INCREASES. IF YOUR LANDLORD ASKS FOR A RENT INCREASE, REPORT HERE AND I SHALL HELP YOU FIGHT THE REAL ESTATE TRUST—Your Congressman Vito Marcantonio.

That promise, displayed across a two-story building on Manhattan’s upper First Avenue, meant more last week to the polyglot voters of slum-ridden East Harlem than any amount of campaign oratory. It was the reason thousands of them would turn out as usual next month to support the sardonic, sallow little man who has long been the, Communists’ most zealous congressional spokesman. It was the same formula which had made Vito Marcantonio the absolute boss of one of New York’s roughest, toughest congressional districts.

Lost Opportunity. This year there had been signs that rabble-rousing Vito Marcantonio’s Communist-line record would be enough to defeat him for reelection. He had lost the federal patronage which went with his onetime Republican and Democratic backing. He had lost the power of local handouts when New York’s Mayor William O’Dwyer booted his American Labor Party henchmen out of City Hall. But then both major parties had kicked away their one real chance of breaking Vito’s stranglehold by failing to combine against him.

Instead, they had both nominated their own candidates. The Republicans (and Liberals) had picked 35-year-old Navy Veteran John Ellis, who suffered from the political disadvantage of being a Wall Street broker and not living in the district he sought to represent. The Democrats had dug up a stumble-tongued electrical contractor and ward boss named John Morrissey, who likes to boast of his “farfetched knowledge of electricity.” By belaboring each other, as well as denouncing Marcantonio, they simply made Vito’s job easier.

Favors & Results. Meanwhile, Vito concentrated on dealing out favors to his constituents. Sitting in his grimy First Avenue headquarters, assisted by a battery of secretaries, he put in long, patient hours defending everything from eviction cases to felony raps for the Negroes, Italians and Puerto Ricans who make up almost half of the district’s voting lists.

At night he clambered into an old Packard to stump the district, stopping at street-corner meetings to harangue the crowds from, an accompanying sound truck. Dressed in a dark, single-breasted suit, his voice rising to a strident shout, he switched smoothly from English to Italian to Spanish. With him went a top-hatted ventriloquist who called himself Mr. Wall Street and carried a tail-coated dummy representing Social Registerite John Ellis. Cried Marcantonio: “I’m doing something no candidate for office ever does. I’m introducing you to my opponent.”

Brushing off Candidate Morrissey as a testa di cappuccio (cabbage-head), Marcantonio flailed away at Ellis’ Wall Street background, lambasted the Marshall Plan as a plot against the workers of Italy. Who but Marcantonio, he shrilled, was fighting to bring new housing and lower prices to the voters? Flourishing a copy of the Social Register, he demanded: “Do you want the Four Hundred? Or do you want me, one of 140 million working Americans?” In a district where concrete results are more important than ideologies, the answer was not hard to find. With the opposition against him divided, the 18th would probably send Marc back to Congress for the seventh time.