De Blasio's Trip To Italy Gets Ink, But Impellitteri's Was A Sensation

When New York City Mayor Vincent Impellitteri’s plane touched down at Ciampino Airport in 1951, he was met by tens of thousands of Italians, who lined the streets hoping to catch a glimpse of the visiting dignitary. On Mayor de Blasio’s recent first day in Rome, dozens of onlookers and some paparazzi greeted him.

Impellitteri’s 32-day trip to Italy and Israel appears to have been more energized and regal than his distant successor’s. A “large force of police” was needed to quiet the clamorous crowd before he could officially be greeted by Rome’s mayor. He was feted at one of Italy’s “biggest receptions since the war”—World War II, that is—where two thousand people “drank champagne from huge silver receptacles” and dined from tables splayed through five rooms and a garden.

While de Blasio’s interactions with the Vatican have been limited to a meeting with the top aide to Pope Francis—the Holy Father could not fit the mayor into his schedule this week—Pope Pius XII gave Impellitteri a private audience in which he blessed New York City and gave the mayor’s wife a gold rosary. Similarly, the current incumbent’s visit to his ancestral village seems to be a quiet affair. In contrast, Impellitteri’s visit to his hometown of Isnello involved fireworks, pealing church bells, and a command from the town crier for sheep and donkeys to be removed from the streets.

Impellitteri’s travels were choreographed with the help of the White House. The trip was taken during an early apogee of Cold War tensions. The day before the mayor left, President Truman labeled the Soviet Union the most tyrannical government in history, and news from Korea frequently appeared above details about Impellitteri’s visit. Italy seemed likely to be the next domino to fall: during the autumn of the mayor’s trip, the American media repeatedly highlighted the growth of a militant faction with plans to throw the rebuilding country’s economy into turmoil. A visit from an Italian émigré who had worked his way up the ladder of democracy might provide a countervailing narrative to the appeals of communism. The mayor thus was granted an audience with Truman four days before departing, and the State Department issued a public letter praising the mayor’s journey.

Nonetheless, public criticism followed. A candidate for City Council President claimed the mayor had skipped town to avoid acting on accusations of ties between his deputy city treasurer and the mafia.  The New York Post used “Mayor to Fiddle in Rome and City Hall Is Burning” as the headline announcing his impending departure. The paper pointed to the “growing municipal problems” he left behind, including financial stress in the transit system and city employees who claimed they were due for raises.  The Post later recommended that “all schoolchildren be invited to write essays on the burning local question of the day: Is the Mayor’s Absence Felt?”

There has been significantly less backlash to de Blasio’s trip so far. The relative brevity of his travels certainly helps. And technological changes have clearly made it easier for an executive to remain connected to his city than in previous decades. Impellitteri returned from his European travels via ocean liner; the barrage of tweets from reporters covering the de Blasio trip has resulted in the mayor’s family’s quotidian lives being made more public than at any other point in recent months. There is certainly still a symbolic and perhaps psychic need for a mayor’s presence during difficult times – de Blasio’s one-day delay after the death of a Staten Island man in police custody and the response to Mayor Bloomberg’s presence in Bermuda during a blizzard clearly illustrate this.  But as a practical matter, officials nowadays can handle many of their responsibilities while out of the country.

Why, however, was Impellitteri greeted so much more warmly than de Blasio sixty some years later? Some of the explanation clearly lies in the Cold War climate, as Italians facing a communist threat were eager to celebrate the renascent relationship with their erstwhile enemy. This threat also created an atmosphere in America in which the geopolitical interests of New Yorkers were more closely in sync with the nation’s than usual. Italy and the new Jewish homeland became strategic foci, and the line between their mayors’ traditional ethnic advocacy and the country’s ambassadorial needs grew thinner. 

Since that time, Big Apple mayors have increasingly acted as the executive of an autonomous international unit. Consider, for example, comments made by mayors Beame and Bloomberg. When Beame visited Jerusalem, he quipped that his city’s $12.5 billion budget was roughly the same as Israel’s, with the main difference being that New York did not “have a standing army.” In contrast, Bloomberg recently bragged about “hav[ing his] own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world.”

There have always been tensions between the foreign policy perspectives of New York and Washington.  Generally cooperative Cold War mayors griped about the costs associated with hosting the UN and defied the State Department by refusing to host Arab dignitaries. But in recent decades, as seen in Giuliani’s attempts to collect parking tickets from foreign ambassadors and Bloomberg’s international climate change initiatives, there are more examples of mayors who attempt to unilaterally deal with the world. In this atmosphere, it’s less likely that a mayor will act with the formalities that come with a semi-ambassadorial role.

Impellitteri was elected in a milieu in which New York’s political campaigns focused on catering to the “three I’s”: Israel, Ireland, and Italy. Impellitteri was first elected to citywide office when Democratic leaders, who had already settled on Lazarus Joseph and William O’Dwyer for comptroller and mayor, desperately needed a man with a very Italian name to run for City Council President and check off the third demographic box. Conversely, de Blasio’s ascent to the mayoralty began with a primary in which the sole African-American candidate was only able to pull out a tie for first among black voters, the lesbian candidate finished second among self-identified LGBT voters, and none of the Jewish or Hispanic candidates finished in the top three among voters of their demographics. De Blasio’s predecessors, who campaigned with a stronger focus on their ethnicity, could more comfortably fit into the role of a returning hero when visiting their ancestral homes.

The ruins visited by these two mayors are remains of a city that was the cultural, financial, and political center of empire. New York, in contrast, is in the historically unique position of being the most important city in the world yet not the center of political power. The fact that de Blasio is not widely viewed as operating within a system of traditional ethnic identity politics might reduce the likelihood a foreign audience will provide him with an imperial greeting. Perhaps it does indicate, however, that modern mayors can better represent the wide variety of international interests that co-exist in the seat of cultural and financial empire that they govern.

Bill Mahoney is research coordinator for NYPIRG and a PhD student in American political history at UAlbany.