D’Alesandro was born in Baltimore in 1903 and was a man of old school politics when knowing people and neighborhoods mattered. He worked his way up through the gritty neighborhoods of east Baltimore in Italian, Jewish, Irish and Black political machines, later forming his own city-wide organization.
D’Alesandro was a member of the Maryland House of Delegates from 1926 to 1933. In the Maryland General Assembly, he led a successful campaign to rescind a law forbidding movies on Sunday. He was a general deputy collector of internal revenue in 1933 and 1934 and a member of the Baltimore City Council from 1935 to 1938. From 1944 to 1968 he was a delegate to each Democratic National Convention. He served in the U.S. House of Representative from 1939 until his resignation on May 16, 1947, to become Mayor of Baltimore. He was a Roosevelt New Deal democrat and one of his children was named Franklin Delano Roosevelt D'Alesandro. He served as chairman of the House District Committee, where he became known in those pre-home rule days as the “mayor of Washington.” He favored full suffrage and called for District representation in both House and Senate.
He was a three-term mayor of Baltimore and served from May 1947 to May 1959 when he was defeated for renomination in the primary election by J. Harold Grady, the Baltimore City SAO. Some of the highlights of his mayoral term were the opening of Friendship Airport (now Thurgood Marshall-Baltimore-Washington International Airport). He played a key role in the return of the Baltimore Orioles to major league baseball in 1954 when the St. Louis Browns came to Baltimore. He lost to J Glenn Beall in 1958 in the US Senate race.
President Kennedy appointed him to the Federal Renegotiation Board, where he served from 1961 to 1969. Before getting the job, Kennedy ordered a background investigation by the FBI. A routine FBI name check revealed “allegations” against D’Alessandro, according to a February 6, 1961, teletype from “FBI Director.” The director at the time was J. Edgar Hoover. FBI — Federal Bureau of Investigation
“The White House has requested that we proceed with a special inquiry investigation but that if substantial derogatory information were developed, we should report this and discontinue any further inquiries because substantiation of any of the allegations would eliminate Mr. D’Alesandro,” the FBI director wrote in the teletype that is located on page 19 of the trove.
“Assign immediately,” Hoover wrote, instructing the Baltimore and Washington field offices to “afford continuous attention” to the investigation.
In sometimes illegible and heavily redacted reproductions, the 248-page collection shows that FBI agents were tasked with running down rumors and facts surrounding their man.
“In 1945 it was alleged that one Charles F. Cammarata had been able to get away with all sorts of criminal activities in Baltimore, Maryland, and had operated almost unmolested due to his friendship with and the protection of Congressman D’Alesandro,” one unnamed agent wrote in a January 30, 1961, memo to the White House.
In the same memo, which begins on page 38 of the collection, the agent summarizes allegations that a powerful D’Alesandro took payoffs from applicants to the police force, and that he helped to hinder the investigation and prosecution of crimes.
Elsewhere, the memo cites a “confidential source, who has furnished reliable information in the past,” reporting that D’Alesandro appeared onstage at a 1943 rally for the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, which was Formed in 1943 by the Communist Party in the United States as a Soviet front group according to the FBI.
The following year, the memo notes, D’Alesandro was reported as the main speaker at an event for the International Workers Order, an insurance organization placed on a list of subversive organizations by the U.S. attorney general in 1947 and later disbanded by order of the New York State Insurance Department for being too closely aligned with the Communist Party, in violation of regulations prohibiting political activity in the industry.
In a series of endorsements commencing on page 129 of the trove, a phalanx of associates — judges, politicians, friends, and acquaintances — described D’Alesandro in glowing terms. He was “upright,” they said, or “loyal,” “honest,” and a devoted family man.
Two acquaintances hedged their praise. In an undated memo, one agent wrote: “Another individual stated he would be hesitant in recommending D’Alesandro for any office where he would be in a position to award contracts without first having the approval of another supervisor.”
After working in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations he stepped away from the public spotlight and died on August 23, 1987.
UB has his papers.
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