LaGuardia was born in The Bronx and grew up in New York City and was educated at the New York University. The family moved to Trieste after his father was discharged from his bandmaster position in the U.S. Army in 1898. La Guardia served in the U.S. consulate at Fiume (1904–1906). Fiorello returned to the U.S. to continue his education, and during this time he worked as a translator at Ellis Island (1907–1910).
He became the deputy attorney general of New York in 1914. In 1916 he was elected to the New York State House of Representatives, where he developed a reputation as a fiery and devoted reformer. In Congress, LaGuardia represented then-Italian East Harlem. Extending his record as a reformer, LaGuardia sponsored labor legislation and railed against immigration quotas. He was overwhelming defeated by incumbent James J. Walker in the 1929 mayoral election.
LaGuardia was elected mayor of New York City on an anti-corruption "fusion" ticket during the Great Depression. LaGuardia was the City's first Italian American mayor, but LaGuardia was far from being a typical Italian New Yorker. He was Republican, Episcopalian, had grown up in Arizona, and had a Jewish mother.
LaGuardia was born in Greenwich Village in 1882 to Achille Luigi Carlo LaGuardia, a Catholic, and Irene Luzzato Coen, who had been raised in an observant Jewish home in Trieste.
When FiorelloLaGuardia was elected to Congress in 1922, the first bill he introduced called for the death penalty for "scavengers" who supplied tainted food to the military.
LaGuardia reasserted a Progressive’s faith in the rule of reason and the power of enlightened public opinion to face up to the Nazis and confront Hitler." When the U.S. entered the war in 1941, LaGuardia’s principled position was vindicated.
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