Wall Street execs, tech titans, and other corporate bigwigs were sent reeling by 33-year-old state representative Zohran Mamdani’s upset win in NYC’s Democratic mayoral primary last month. The democratic socialist’s bold pledge to fund social services by raising taxes on the rich has raised fears among some of an exodus of high-net-worth individuals from the city. Billionaire Bill Ackman has even vowed to bankroll any challenger seeking the keys to Gracie Mansion.
But if elected, Mamdani would hardly be the first New York City mayor to advance a sweeping, ambitious progressive agenda.
In July 1939, Fortune profiled Fiorello LaGuardia, today revered as one of the city’s greatest mayors, but known at the time as “the Roistering Rebel, the Wild Bull of Manhattan, the Fireball” in both the local and national press. Not unlike Mamdani, LaGuardia—for whom the mayoralty was “the first administrative job he had ever held,” after his years in the House of Representatives—was determined to shake up business-as-usual city government when he was elected in 1933.
LaGuardia’s first order of business upon taking office in 1934 was to free the city from Tammany Hall’s stranglehold of corruption, and reclaim the mayoralty’s authority. He then “proceeded with furious energy to carry out, all at once, every reformation that his years of study of New York—its politics, geography, people, government—had convinced him was necessary.” (This drastic upheaval initially created “an administrative mess,” Fortune noted, before LaGuardia settled into his job and became “mellower.”)
Fortune’s LaGuardia profile was part of a special issue devoted to New York City, which catalogued in detail the companies that populated Wall Street and the city’s many other specialized business districts in a sort of walking tour. (This travelogue, modeled on the Baedeker travel guides, notes that the North Beach Airport in Queens was then “nearing completion.” Later, Mayor LaGuardia would champion a WPA-funded expansion that helped transform New York into a major air transit hub; the new and improved airport was officially named for him in 1947.)
Then as now, the Big Apple was seen not only as a financial capital and power center, but also as a bellwether of the country’s direction—even its national identity. And today as in the 1930s, its chief executive—or even the front-runner for the office—is thrust onto the national stage, subject to cheers and jeers, in a way that no other U.S. city’s is.
Not for nothing is the NYC mayoralty called, in the words of 1960s mayor John Lindsay, the “second toughest job in America.”