Fiorello H. La Guardia—the down-to-earth idol of the city’s working people; the flamboyant ex-congressman who’d belligerently represented a congested East Harlem district of poor Italians and Jews for five terms, who as early as 1933 described Hitler as a “perverted maniac” and called for a boycott of German goods; the tenacious spokesman for the unions, the needy, and the unemployed who’d battled almost single-handedly against Hoover’s do-nothing congressional Republicans during the first dark year of the Depression and, to the dismay of his own party, called for taxation to “soak the rich”;
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