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.

Constance Baker Motley Nominated to be the first African-American Woman Federal Judge

Steven A. Levine

Coordinator for Educational Programs

In celebration of African-American History Month, the La Guardia and Wagner Archives is featuring a video of Joel Motley, discussing the nomination of his mother, civil rights attorney Constance Baker Motley to the federal district court by President Lyndon Baines Johnson.  Find out why Senator Robert F. Kennedy planned to nominate her, but then withdrew his support because of a conflict in the Democratic Party about who would control the New York State Legislature.  Motley, who won 9 of 10 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, was an ally of Mayor Robert F. Wagner and had been serving as a New York State Senator and Manhattan Borough President before she became the first African-American women to serve as a federal judge. 

The Archives has developed related civil rights materials including a web page Black Suffrage and the Struggle for Civil Rights and two lessons Jim Crow and Voting Rights and Mississippi Freedom Summer 1964. 



Mayor La Guardia, Japanese Internment and World War II: 70 Years Later

Manzanar Relocation Center, by Dorothea Lange
(National Archives)

Steven A. Levine

Coordinator for Educational Programs

Seventy years ago on February 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 authorizing the internment of tens of thousands of U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident Japanese aliens on the West Coast of the United States into camps (along with much smaller numbers of Germans and Italians). As Japanese-Americans began to be released in 1944, a few hundred were re-settled in New York City. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia vehemently opposed their arrival using language tinged with, for him, an uncharacteristic racism, which was nonetheless common throughout the U.S. during World War II.

The La Guardia and Wagner Archives holds the fascinating correspondence between Mayor La Guardia, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, and La Guardia confidante C.C. Burlingham on this subject. The Archives has also developed a webpage about Japanese internee Mitusye Endo's struggle for freedom and a lesson on Japanese Internment. If you would like to learn more about La Guardia and/or Japanese Internment, please contact me or Tara Jean Hickman thickman@lagcc.cuny.edu .

            In his correspondence with Interior Secretary Ickes on April 11 and 21, 1944, La Guardia deemed Japanese-Americans a security threat, despite their having been vetted by the U.S. Government. He asked "Is there one single solitary United States official who will vouch for each and every one of them." He ominously wrote that "If anything happens, the responsibility is not with the city. The responsibility is with the Federal Government." He proposed that all evacuees return to the states of their original residence and it was "unfair . . . to force them upon New York City."

            Ickes berated La Guardia's narrow-minded views in a personal letter and in a statement published in The New York Times on April 28, where he accused him of "playing the discordant theme of racial discrimination." When C.C. Burlingham, his patrician adviser, learned of La Guardia's position, he responded with dismay, you are "in bad company and the sooner you clear yourself the better," and since "penitence is out of your line, I suggest subtlety." He proposed that La Guardia should adjust his position to state that he saw "no reason, military or legal, for interning loyal citizens or transferring them from their homes."

            If La Guardia responded to Burlingham, the Archives has no record of it, but his response to the arrival of a few hundred Japanese-Americans citizens to New York City is indicative of the racism and demonization of the enemy that invariably occurs during wartime.

Terry Parker Discusses His Experiences During the Integration of his North Carolina High Schools

Steven A. Levine

Coordinator for Educational Programs

In celebration of African-American History month, the Archives is featuring a video of Terry Parker, the LaGuardia Community College's Coordinator of Media Services, on our website's featured page.   In the video, Terry describes his experiences during the desegregation of the two North Carolina high schools he attended in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  He captures an important moment in his own life and in U.S. history, as Jim Crow education came to an end in North Carolina.  Terry describes the fear, ambivalence, conflict, cooperation and excitement that occurred for him, his family and the communities affected by this radical change.  It is a moving story, which tells a larger story of race in American history.

I hope you will take the time to watch the video and let us know your thoughts.