VIDEO: Charles Lindbergh's Transatlantic Flight Remembered by Professor Janet Lieberman 85 Years Later

Steven A. Levine 

Coordinator for Educational Programs

Eighty-five years ago today Charles Lindbergh landed in Paris, the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. His accomplishment is seen as one of the most important events of the 20th century, but memories have dimmed and, in an age when jet airplanes routinely cross the Atlantic Ocean, we have lost sight of its significance. In a YouTube video, accompanied by film footage of Lindbergh's flight, La Guardia Community College Professor Emerita Janet Lieberman gives her childhood recollections of the event and a Brooklyn parade celebrating Lindbergh, which she attended with her family. The magnificent Brooklyn parade took place on June 16, 1927 its 22-mile route crowded with 700,000 school children and their parents. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R3fGL67mas

Lindbergh was a little-known air mail pilot based in St. Louis in early January 1927, when he heard about a $25,000 prize being offered to the first non-stop flight between New York and Paris. Lindbergh's historic flight earned him this prize and the adulation of the nation. Radio and newsreel film, new media of the age, spread news of his feat in ways unimaginable only ten years earlier. The 1920s was a decade of ballyhoo and heroes, and the Lone Eagle's transatlantic flight made him the quintessential hero of the era. His momentous feat also became the catalyst for the growth and preeminence of the American aviation industry, overtaking its European rivals.

This is only one piece of the Lindbergh story. To learn more about Lindbergh, including the kidnapping of his son, his associations with Nazi Germany, and support of American isolationism, see the excellent biography The Flight of the Century: Charles Lindbergh & the Rise of American Aviation by CUNY Distinguished Professor Thomas Kessner.  http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/HistoryAmerican/19001945/?view=usa&ci=9780195320190

Re-Segregation in New York City's Public Schools

Tara Jean Hickman

Educational Associate

Joel Motley Talks About the Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education

According to a recent article in The New York Times, New York's public school system is one of the most segregated in the country.

This week in history, The U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregation in public schools unconstitutional in the historic Brown v. the Board of Education case.

As the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's associate counsel, Constance Baker Motley participated in writing the briefs for Brown v. Board of Education, and had a major impact on ending racial discrimination. Her son, Joel Motley discusses Brown v. Board of Education and the momentum it carried to the Voting Rights Act on our You Tube website.

In addition to these documents, the La Guardia and Wagner Archives has a rich array of primary documents on New York City cultural and social issues. Please feel free to leave comments or questions below.

Remembering the Queens Blvd Trolley and Queens historian Vincent Seyfried

Steven A. Levine

Coordinator for Educational Programs

Queens Boulevard Trolleys, narrated by Vincent Seyfried

Last month, Vincent Seyfried, “the dean of Queens County historians,” died at the age of 93. Seyfried chronicled the history of Queens and of its railroads and trolleys, publishing more than 30 books in his lifetime. He made important contributions to the La Guardia and Wagner Archives, including descriptions of trolley car lines captured on film in the 1930s. The Archives has made these films and Seyfried’s narrations available on our YouTube site. 

To learn more about Vincent Seyfried, you can read his obituary in the Queens Gazette. If you want to learn more about the history of Queens or have any memories of Vincent Seyfried or Queens history, please leave your comments below.   

Professor Emerita Janet Lieberman Remembers the 1939 New York World's Fair

Professor Emerita Janet Lieberman 

Remembers the 1939 New York World's Fair

Steven A. Levine

Coordinator for Educational Programs 

On Sunday April 30, 1939, the New York World’s Fair officially opened with a formal ceremony that included a speech by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Fair’s opening was selected to coincide with the 150th anniversary of George Washington’s inauguration as the first president of the United States in New York City.

In commemoration of the Fair’s opening, the La Guardia and Wagner Archives has posted on its YouTube channel a video containing footage of the Fair and the memories of La Guardia Community College Professor Emerita Janet Lieberman visiting the Fair. The video was compiled and edited by Sandy Chase.

The 1939 New York World’s Fair offered a vision of a utopian city of tomorrow—one in which life was going to be easy thanks to new technology that would revolutionize transportation, home economics and daily life. Yet, the Fair made no mention of war, no sense of a troubled present, in spite of the looming world nightmare.

Fifty Years Later: The Other America and the Origins of the War on Poverty

Steven A. Levine
Coordinator for Educational Programs

At Gracie Mansion, Mayor Robert F. Wagner (left) stands with two other participants in ceremonies announcing the new Mobilization for Youth Program, June 12, 1962.

Fifty years after the writer, activist and democratic socialist Michael Harrington published The Other America: Poverty in the United States, the New York Times recently reported poverty rising to 21% in New York City, a sad commentary on our government’s and nation’s lack of commitment to addressing poverty.  Harrington chronicled the lives of the poor, a group largely invisible in the 1950s.  His book, which estimated a 25% poverty rate, found its way to the Kennedy White House and increased interest in fighting poverty.  The Other America became an inspiration for President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, which turned to New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner’s Mobilization for Youth program on the Lower East Side as a model for reducing poverty. 

Mobilization for Youth (MFY) was an anti-juvenile delinquency project organized by Columbia University Professors Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin.  The MFY sought to empower youth through job training, education, public employment, and neighborhood centers for social services.  It also became involved in rent strikes, support for the civil rights movement and a school boycott by supporters of integration.  By August 1964, the Daily News was accusing MFY of Communist influence and the NYC Department of Investigation was also looking into MFY activities.  The Department of Investigation and an investigation by Mobilization for Youth found little truth in the Communist charges, but did suggest the reorganization of MFY.  Click here to read documents about the investigation. 

MFY’s programs became a model for LaGuardia Community College’s co-operative education programs.  One of the staff members of MFY was Martin Moed, a founder of LaGuardia Community College, who served as a vice president and acting president of the College.

To learn more about the Mobilization for Youth, click here to read a speech by Mayor Wagner.  If you are interested in learning more about the War on Poverty and Mobilization for Youth, please feel free to contact me.

Women's Suffrage

Steven A. Levine

Coordinator for Educational Programs

Ninety-nine years ago today, more than 6,000 women marched on Washington in support of women’s suffrage.  This is one of the hundreds of facts you can learn from the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives’ “This Date in History App.”  To download the App to your smart phone, click here for Android and here for Apple.  A Spanish version of the App is also available for the Android. 

To learn more about women’s history, you can go to the Archives’ Women’s Leadership click here Website and Curricula.  The Website and Curricula are filled with information and primary sources you can use in your classroom, including the role of women the anti-lynching and prohibition movements, and the struggles of migrant farm workers.   

New York's Public Heath Champion: Dr. Leona Baumgartner

Steven A. Levine
Coordinator for Educational Programs

NYC Health Commissioner Dr. Leona Baumgartner and Mayor

Robert F. Wagner holding a child who received free oral polio

vaccination from the mobile free clinic behind them. May 25, 1962

IIn celebration of Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day, the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives salutes the life and legacy of Dr. Leona Baumgartner, Mayor Robert F. Wagner’s Commissioner of Health.  The first woman appointed to this position, in 1954, she seized the platform to become a leader in public health locally and nationally.  This was especially true in regards to the polio vaccine and the fluoridation of water. To read her speech about the distribution of the polio vaccine in New York City, click here.

Dr. Baumgartner was born in 1902 to Swiss immigrant parents.  Raised in Lawrence, Kansas, where her father was a zoologist at the University of Kansas, she earned degrees there before studying at Yale, where she completed a Ph.D. in immunology in 1932 and became an M.D. in 1934.  Instead of taking these skills to the laboratory or the hospital, Baumgartner became a public health pediatrician.  She worked her way up in New York’s Department of Health, teaching health and hygiene, and coordinating health services in the city’s clinics, including venereal diseases, family planning, and parenting classes. 

As Mayor Wagner’s Commissioner of Health, she oversaw the vaccination of millions of New Yorkers against polio rewrote the sanitary code, spoke regularly about public health to national television audiences, created New York’s Public Health Research Institute, and won the long battle to fluoridate New York’s water supply and sharply reduce tooth decay.  After resigning as commissioner in 1962, she became the director of research at the U.S. Agency for International Development, where she convinced President Johnson to include birth control in U.S. foreign aid programs to developing countries. 

In addition to her speech on polio, you can learn more about Dr. Baumgartner from a biography at the National Library of Medicine and her obituary in The New York Times.  She was also featured in the Archives’ You and Your Health: Public Health in New York City  4th grade curriculum as a "health hero."

If you want to learn more about Leona Baumgartner or the history of public health in New York City, please leave us a comment.