Biography
John Santo was a leading organizer of the CIO's Transport Workers Union in New York and an immigrant from the old Austro-Hungarian lands who became one of the most prominent labor figures targeted for deportation in the postwar anti-Communist drive. In 1948 the government arrested him on immigration charges and moved to deport him as an alien Communist — a case the press likened to Washington's earlier, failed effort to deport the longshore leader Harry Bridges. Santo, a World War II veteran who said he had tried more than twenty times to become a U.S. citizen, lost his fight; as the National Guardian reported in its first issue, he was ordered deported, and he left the United States for Hungary in 1949.
