As New York’s Democratic mayoral primary nears, an unwonted name is being heard on the hustings: Fiorello La Guardia, the Republican who occupied Gracie Mansion decades ago. Turns out that the Little Flower, as he was nicknamed, is the former mayor most admired by the leftist assemblyman rising in the polls, Zohran Mamdani. While La Guardia stood at but 5 feet, 2 inches tall, though, his are big shoes to fill. Is Mr. Mamdani up to it?

Even if Mr. Mamdani has a pleasant countenance — and at 33, the vigor of youth — the omens are not promising. His demagogic demands to tax the rich and freeze rents are the stuff of socialists and bad dreams for the rest of us. Plus, too, his campaign trail gaffe, sympathizing with the motto “Globalize the Intifada,” evinces his hostility to Israel. In that, Mr. Mamdani reflects the moral blindness afflicting many on the left these days, both at home and abroad.

La Guardia, whatever his faults, was not prone to such errors of judgment. Indeed, while he is best-known for his Italian heritage, Hizzoner was half Jewish. The polyglot former mayor, who spoke German, Yiddish, Italian, and even Croatian, was a kind of one-man embodiment of the city’s “Gorgeous Mosaic” of races and creeds, to use Mayor Dinkins’s fine term. Yet La Guardia refused to pander to, say, Jewish voters by touting his heritage. 

During Hizzoner’s pre-mayoral career in Congress, the corrupt Tammany Democrats sought to drive him from office by putting forward a Jewish opponent and smearing La Guardia as an antisemite. Fiorello rejected the suggestion to play up his ancestry, calling it “self-serving.” Instead, he issued, in Yiddish, a public call to debate, in Yiddish, his opponent — who didn’t speak the language. That put paid to the baseless accusation of hostility to Jews.

As mayor, too, La Guardia was an ardent foe of Hitler, proposing that Germany’s pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair be “a chamber of horrors.” In 1947, when La Guardia died, a Sun editorial hailed “his great talent” for “having eyes” that he kept “open to see: and his great gift to his fellow New Yorkers was that he opened other eyes.” If his blunt talk “often stung or offended,” the Sun could not begrudge “his honest appraisal of what was in the public interest.” 

Yet in 1933, when La Guardia was a candidate for mayor, the Sun mocked his vow to “go out of politics” if he won: “We shall have a City Hall in which the atmosphere, purified by the air conditioner of non-partisanship, will be too rare for the wicked to breathe.” The Sun worried, too, over his earlier call to cut payments owed on federal debt. “Repudiation,” the Sun called it. “Shall the faith and credit of the city of New York be committed to such hands?”

When La Guardia won, though, the Sun exclaimed that “New York has escaped from the grip of Tammany Hall.” La Guardia would prove to be one of the city’s greatest mayors, even if his penchant for government intervention in the free market helped set the stage for problems like high taxation and overregulation that would afflict the city. Feature, say, the push to drive the city’s private subway lines out of business and replace them with a public operation.

Riding an injection of largesse from FDR’s New Deal, La Guardia presided over a wave of road-building, public housing construction, park expansion, and other public works. Yet he also eliminated the old pushcarts that plied the Lower East Side, forcing the colorful peddlers into new municipal markets — another example of his fondness for the heavy hand of the state over free enterprise, echoed today in Mr. Mamdani’s pitch for city-owned grocery stores.

Despite early criticism, the Sun’s appraisal of La Guardia in 1947 had mellowed into admiration. Were Mr. Mamdani to be hoisted into office, could his career follow a similar narrative arc? The assemblyman’s pretensions notwithstanding, the Sun’s estimate of La Guardia some 80 years ago appears to hold: “In the mingled qualities of mind and heart, in the interplay of temperament and temper, New York will not soon look upon his like again.”