In the early 20th century, when George Lunn served as mayor of Schenectady, New York City also managed to elect the occasional socialist to Congress and the city council. This tradition ended in 1951 with Vito Marcantonio, New York’s last socialist member of Congress until the Bronx and Queens sent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Washington in 2019. Marcantonio was by no means a historical footnote: he represented East Harlem for seven terms in Congress, where he pushed for a radically redistributionist welfare state and made a lasting impact on civil rights.

Raised among working-class Italian immigrants, Marcantonio became a labor lawyer, a community organizer, and an ally of populist mayor Fiorello La Guardia. He was initially elected to Congress amid the Great Depression as a progressive Republican in La Guardia’s mold, but after losing his seat in 1936, he returned in 1938 as a member of the American Labor Party, which was led by socialist New Dealers. In the House, he was a crusader for labor rights and Puerto Rican independence; repeatedly investigated by the FBI for his links to communists, he opposed the creation of the CIA and US involvement in the Korean War. These stances made him a beloved figure in Harlem, with the support of nearly 50 labor unions and an ironclad coalition that included Italian American, Jewish, black, and Puerto Rican voters.

When Marcantonio finally lost his seat in 1951, it took the Democratic, Republican, and Liberal parties coming together behind a single challenger to defeat him, as well as a new law banning candidates from running in the primaries of parties other than their own; this was seen as a concerted attack on Marcantonio, who was so popular that he would often win the primaries of all the major parties in his district. If Marcantonio has been little remembered for decades, his legacy is making a comeback alongside the rebirth of New York’s socialist tradition. On the eve of the 2025 election, Zohran Mamdani released a video about Marcantonio, in which the soon-to-be mayor hailed the congressman as “an unapologetic socialist, a steadfast ally to organized labor, and a champion for those who were often forgotten.”