Way Back Machine | If Not for Bias in Ariz., N.Y. Might Be Good for Organ Grinders
By SAM ROBERTS
Courtesy New York Public Library Digital Gallery Not on the Little Flower’s watch: organ grinder and monkey, 1873, decades before the mayor had them declared illegal. Nobody ever succeeded in making a monkey out of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia. But the reason there are no organ grinders in New York is that neighborhood bullies in Arizona tried to, during an earlier episode of ethnic conflict in that state.
La Guardia’s mother was from Trieste, Italy, his father from Foggia. Though born in Manhattan, La Guardia grew up partly in Prescott, Ariz., where his father was an Army bandmaster. His memories of life there in the late 19th-century were mostly good, until an organ grinder came to town.
Young Fiorello had already witnessed discrimination against Indians, but it became personal, as he got his “first glimpse of racial feeling born of ignorance.” He wrote in his autobiography:
I must have been about 10 when a street organ-grinder with a monkey blew into town. He, and particularly the monkey, attracted a great deal of attention. I can still hear the cries of the kids: ‘A dago with a monkey! Hey, Fiorello, you’re a dago too. Where’s your monkey?’
It hurt. And what made it worse, along came Dad, and he started to chatter Neapolitan with the organ-grinder…. He promptly invited him to our house for a macaroni dinner. The kids taunted me for a long time after that. I couldn’t understand it. What difference was there between us? Some of their families hadn’t been in the country any longer than mine.
As a result, La Guardia would bristle for years when he heard “For He Is an Englishman” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s “H.M.S. Pinafore,” with its lyric “He might have been a Roosian / A French, or Turk, or Proosian / Or perhaps Itali-an!”
“The traditional gesture mimicking the organ-grinder and the word ‘Eyetalian’ always annoyed me,” La Guardia recalled.
So in 1936, as mayor of New York, he banned organ grinders. He didn’t harp on his experience in Arizona. Instead, he blamed them for traffic congestion. Also, he said, licensing organ grinders was tantamount to licensing begging.
Whatever La Guardia’s stated reasons, the humiliation that the son of immigrants suffered years before in Arizona still stung. He was embarrassed by low-class Italian stereotypes, just as Gail Collins wrote last week that the television program “Jersey Shore” must be Mario Cuomo’s worst nightmare (the organ grinder ban was repealed a few years before Mr. Cuomo was elected governor).
“It was with a great deal of gusto that I banned the organ-grinder from the streets of the City of New York,” La Guardia wrote.
Sure, it caused some resentment. One woman, he recalled, “berated me mildly for depriving her of her favorite organ-grinder. ‘Where do you live?’ I asked. ‘Park Avenue,’ she said. ‘What floor?’ ‘The fourteenth,’ she answered.”
La Guardia argued that phonographs and record players had rendered organ grinders superfluous. Also, he said the simple, sentimental hurdy-gurdy man had become an instrument of the racketeers. “My sentimental correspondents did not realize that the Italians’ instruments were rented to them by padrones
at exorbitant fees,” he wrote.
Joe Carella, the spokesman for the Italian American Museum on Mulberry Street, said that if the absence of organ grinders were an invisible legacy of La Guardia’s days in the Southwest, at least one visible reminder remained in Arizona: A plaque on the La Guardia Bridge, on North Montezuma Avenue in Prescott.
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