Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Peter G. Vellon
a
NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS
New York and London
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
vii
1
15
37
57
79
105
Epilogue
129
Notes
135
Index
163
172
>>v
Acknowledgments
viii<<Acknowledgments
much better due to their generosity. Special thanks go to Fred Gardaphe, Michael Topp, Donna Gabaccia, Anthony Tamburri, Thomas Guglielmo, the late Rudolph Vecoli, Peter Carravetta, Stanislao Pugliese,
and Bill Connell.
Many more people and institutions made this book possible. I am
deeply indebted to New York University Press, especially Kim Phillips,
Dan Bender, and former editor Deborah Gershenowitz for believing
in this project. I would also like to thank current editor Clara Platter
and editorial assistant Constance Grady for their hard work, assistance,
and patience. I am very grateful for the funding and support I have
received throughout this process. Awards such as the E. P. Thompson
Fellowship and Mario Capelloni Fellowship from the Graduate Center/
CUNY, along with grants from the National Italian American Foundation, helped me complete the initial stages of my research. Grants from
the Professional Staff Congress/CUNY in the form of a PSC-CUNY
Research Award, as well as being selected to participate in the CUNY
Faculty Fellowship Publication Program, proved immeasurable in shaping the book into its current form. Thanks to my fellow FFPP members
for their comments, especially Virginia Sanchez-Korrol, Kathy Lopez,
and Cindy Lobel. I also would like to thank the staff at the Immigration
Research History Center at the University of Minnesota, especially Sara
Wakefield, for their assistance during my visit. Additionally, thanks to
the staff at the New York Public Library and the Schomburg Center
for Research in Black Culture for their patience while I spent months
immersed in microfilmed Italian language newspapers. Many thanks to
the archivists at Tulane University and the University of New Orleans,
as well as the staff at the Archivio Storico del Ministero degli Affari
Esteri in Rome, Italy.
Special thanks are also extended to the many friends and family
members who were instrumental in pushing me along during the wearisome process of writing and researching. My Graduate Center posse
and dear friends Cindy Lobel, Delia Mellis, Erica Ball, Kathy Feeley,
and Terence Kissack offered plenty of advice, suggestions, and comedic
interludes during the process. I am so appreciative for having met them.
I thank David Aliano for his friendship and support, as well as some
helpful translations. Thanks to Jeffrey Trask, who opened his apartment to our writing group; the time spent there proved instrumental
Acknowledgments >>ix
x<<Acknowledgments
passed after a long battle with cancer. His unflinching courage and
audacious enthusiasm to persist despite the enormous odds have been
awe-inspiring. He was taken much too soon and is deeply missed. My
father, Philip, and my mother, Anna, passed away in 2006 within eight
months of each other. Coming from blue-collar backgrounds, no doubt
they were initially confused about my pursuit of a PhD. Over time,
however, I think they grew proud of what I had achieved. I wish they
could have held on to see this book, as I wished they could have stayed
longer to see my children grow up. The book is written in their memory.
Introduction
2<<Introduction
daughter of a prominent townsman.3 Investigating the murder, the Italian ambassador wrote that lynching was usually a practice applied to
blacks in the South, a fact that must not have gone unnoticed by recent
immigrants in the United States.4
Villarosa, the owner of a grocery near Wilsons drugstore on Jackson Road, had an immigrant experience that mirrored that of other
southern Italians who had settled in the American South. However, his
murder at the hands of a bloodthirsty lynch mob left the Italian immigrant colony in Mississippi, as well as Italian immigrants around the
country, deeply alarmed. Adelino Tirelli, a local shoemaker, wrote to
the Italian consul in New York arguing that Villarosas lynching was a
crime directed at all Italians, claiming that proof of the victims innocence was available but ignored by Vicksburg authorities. A year after
the lynching, Tirelli formed a mutual aid society called Margherita di
Savoy, named after the queen of Italy, and informed the Italian consul,
This society was not formed for the usual reasons you create a mutual
aid society, rather it was created to protect our lives, our honor, and our
interests.5
Villarosas ordeal, in an extreme manner, reflected the precarious
racial position of southern Italian immigrants in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Perceived by many Americans as a swarthy,
inferior race, Italian immigrants thrust themselves into an American
racial hierarchy that privileged white, northern and Western European
races. Empathizing with Tirelli, New Yorks mainstream Italian language daily Il Progresso Italo-Americano accused the Commercial Herald of perpetrating a shameless and wicked crusade against Italians
that consistently subjected them to base and revolting insults.6 As the
Italian immigrant press grew in proportion to the immigrant community during this fluid period of mass immigration, mainstream newspapers such as Il Progresso commonly expressed full-throated defenses of
Italian immigrants. Responding to American assaults labeling Italians
as inferior swarthy sons of the sunny south, mainstream newspapers
owned by prominent community leaders, or prominenti, functioned as
an institution dedicated to defending the race.7 In doing so, the Italian
immigrant press worked within a familiar language of race and civilization that reflected a broader understanding of where Italians, as well as
nonwhite races such as Asians, Native Americans, Africans, and African
Introduction >>3
4<<Introduction
Introduction >>5
6<<Introduction
David Roediger and James Barrett employ the phrase the confusion
of inbetweeness to characterize how immigrants perceived their place in
the American racial system. The authors argue that the process was not
a clean, linear path toward the attainment of whiteness but an uneven
struggle whereby immigrants would simultaneously embrace whiteness, reject it, and many times remain indifferent to it. More specifically,
according to Roediger and Barrett, to assume that new immigrants as
a mass clearly saw their identity with non-whites or clearly fastened on
their differences is to miss this confusion.15 In Whiteness of a Different
Color, Matthew Frye Jacobson contends that the privilege of being white
in various forms has been a constant since colonial times, but that whiteness itself has been subject to many changes throughout American history. He argues that whiteness became fractured into a hierarchy of scientifically and sociopolitically determined white races during the period
of mass immigration in the middle to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Stating that American immigration scholarship is guilty of
conflating race and color, Jacobson argues that contemporaries did not
see ethnicity when discussing official categories such as Anglo-Saxons,
Celts, Mediterraneans, Hebrews, Slavs, Alpines, and Nordics, but rather
distinct races ranked according to their perceived proximity to whiteness. Therefore, an immigrant might be considered white yet at the same
time be perceived as racially distinct from other whites. Complicating
the simple white-black dichotomy of some whiteness studies, Jacobson
cautions that to miss the fluidity of race itself in the process of becoming Caucasian is to reify a monolithic whiteness, and, further, to cordon
that whiteness off from other racial groupings along lines that are silently
presumed to be more genuine.16
However, with the publication of White on Arrival: Italians, Race,
Color, and Power in Chicago, 18901945 in 2003, Thomas Guglielmo
challenged the concept of inbetweeness, arguing that scholars have
failed to understand the distinctions between race and color.17
According to Guglielmo, when contrasted with African Americans,
Asian Americans, and Mexican Americans whose nonwhiteness systematically excluded them from citizenship and equal rights, Italian
immigrants could not be described as anything but white. Thus, While
Italians suffered greatly for their putative racial undesirability as Italians, South Italians, and so forth, they still benefited in countless ways
Introduction >>7
8<<Introduction
Introduction >>9
10<<Introduction
Although Italian immigrant literacy rates stood in marked contrast to those of Jewish immigrants, whose illiteracy rate was only 26
percent, illiteracy among Italian immigrants in the period from 1890
through 1920 was not as severe as was once thought. Regions such as
Sicily and Calabria did indeed have illiteracy rates of more than 80 percent at the turn of the century; however, between 1899 and 1909, immigrants arriving from Italy had an illiteracy rate of nearly 47 percent.
In other words, more than half of all Italian immigrants could read.28
Immigrant newspapers were ubiquitous within Italian communities
and served as a potent source of information for first-generation immigrants. For example, by 1920, there were roughly 803,048 Italians living
in New York City in comparison to 1,375,000 Jews. That same year the
total circulation for the daily Italian language press in New York City
was estimated at 241,843 compared with 356,262 for the Jewish daily
press. This equates to a higher circulation ratio for Italian New Yorkers:
one paper for every 3.8 Jewish New Yorkers versus one paper for every
3.3 Italian New Yorkers.29
As impressive as circulation figures were, they far underestimated
actual circulation. Not only were newspapers widely distributed hand
to hand within immigrant communities, they were also found in local
public libraries and were often read aloud to friends or family members unable to read themselves. In 1925, librarian May Sweet observed
that in densely populated Italian communities, one of the first places to
which most foreigners come is the branch library nearest them. Newspapers such as Il Progresso Italo-Americano could be found free at local
public libraries and were popular with all classes of Italians.30 Increasing the exposure of news was the tradition of immigrant readers, who
served to partially offset immigrant illiteracy. Writing about this phenomenon in 1905, three American authors revealed that the practice
of reading aloud greatly expanded the influence of these newspapers.31
George La Piana, a Sicilian immigrant, scholar, and teaching fellow at
Harvards Divinity School, observed further how illiterate Italians in
their moment of leasure [sic] especially in winter time gather together
in the kitchen around the stove and one of their friends who reads Italian reads them the paper.32 Taking this into consideration, with a circulation of roughly 108,000 in 1920, it is not unrealistic to multiply Il
Progressos reach into the Italian community by two or three times. As
Introduction >>11
the center of Italian immigrant life in the United States, New York and
the metropolitan area were home to mainstream newspapers such as
Il Progresso Italo-Americano, Bolletino della Sera, and LAraldo Italiano,
as well as radical papers such as Il Proletario and La Questione Sociale.
Containing the largest single concentration of newspapers in the country, New York City offers the perfect locale to explore the vitally important but underexamined Italian language press. Given distribution and
circulation figures, as well as what the Italian language press provided
to the community by way of news, nostalgia, and direction, Italian
American newspapers assumed immense importance by providing a
forum, or staging area, where identity, culture, and race interacted.33
*
12<<Introduction
Introduction >>13
1
The Italian Language Press and the Creation
of an Italian Racial Identity
The Italian Language Press and Racial Identity
On April 2, 1927, Carlo Barsotti, the founder and owner of New Yorks
Il Progresso Italo-Americano (Italian American Progress), was laid to
rest in what was reported to be an exact replica of Rudolph Valentinos coffin. In 1872, the twenty-two-year-old Pisan had arrived in the
United States a poor immigrant, but by the time he died he had become
one of the wealthiest and most influential leaders in the Italian immigrant community. Barsotti earned a lucrative living as a labor agent, or
padrone, directing gangs of Italians on the railroads, ran as many as
four lodging houses, and owned a savings bank that catered to Italian
immigrants. Motivated to fill what he considered a void in the expanding Italian community, Barsotti founded Il Progresso in 1880. By 1920,
the newspaper had become the most important, and largest, daily Italian language newspaper in the United States.1
Faced with incessant calls to restrict immigration based upon race,
a fierce hypernationalism unleashed by World War I, and frequent violence and discrimination, historically provincial Neapolitans, Sicilians,
and Calabrians found themselves united by a common antagonist. At
the forefront of campaigns to uplift the race was an Italian language
mainstream press that sought to justify Italian worthiness as a civilized
race. The mainstream press accomplished this by focusing on italianita,
or a celebration of all things Italian. Newspapers highlighted community events, defended Italians from American nativism, and sponsored
campaigns to erect monuments to figures such as Christopher Columbus and Giovanni da Verrazzano and in the process contributed significantly to an emerging racial identity as Italian that had never existed in
the old country.2 Despite the obvious financial and narcissistic appeal
>>15
By 1903, one community study revealed the only section of Manhattan that did not contain Italians stretched from 72nd Street to 140th
Street on the west side of the island. Given the fluidity of these communities, population statistics cannot tell the entire story, although they
can provide an important snapshot of how these communities evolved.
The two most densely populated and renowned Italian colonies during this period were the areas around Mulberry Street on Manhattans
Lower East Side and East Harlem, from 100th Street to 115th Street and
from Second Ave to the East River. By 1918, the Mulberry Bend district
housed approximately 110,000 Italian immigrants and their Americanborn descendants and was the largest Italian colony in New York. The
next largest Italian enclaves were in East Harlem, numbering approximately 75,000, and the Lower West Side of Manhattan, numbering
70,000.14 For many, by the early twentieth century the area known as
Mulberry Bend in Manhattan had become synonymous with the most
visible problems associated with unfettered immigration. With the
publication of Jacob Riiss book How the Other Half Lives in 1890, for
the first time Americans were able to peer into a world they had only
heard about. High population density, overcrowded tenements, unsanitary health conditions, inadequate water and sanitation, crime-ridden
streets, and unintelligible languages became emblematic of the foreignness of Italian immigrants within the city.15
Italians remained loyal to traditional values of campanilismo, or the
desire to trust only those from their very immediate family, extended
family, or town, and through chain migration settled in areas where
kin or extended kin had established residency. Often this resulted in
entire towns or villages being transplanted to specific streets in New
York City.16 For example, the Mulberry Bend area was composed predominantly of southern Italians from Calabria, Naples, and Sicily,
although immigrants from Genoa lived there as well. East Harlem, or
Italian Harlem as it would become commonly known, saw much the
same pattern emerge as immigrants predominantly from the South
Naples, Calabria, Salerno, Avigliano, and Sicilyfilled the tenements.
It was not uncommon for each street to be inhabited by a different
regional population, with Neapolitans living on 106th to 108th Street
and immigrants from Basilicata predominating from 108th to 115th
Street.17
For Italians leaving their towns and villages, New York offered the
prospect of rapid employment and economic betterment. Only 16
percent of the roughly three-quarters of the arriving Italian immigrants who labored in agriculture in Italy did so in the United States,
and a 1917 study found that 82 percent of Italian-born immigrants in
New York City were employed in industry.18 Although Italians were
employed in skilled work, most prominently in the garment industry,
masonry, stonework, and the building trades, by far the largest concentration of jobs fell into the category of unskilled.19 An overwhelming majority of Italians found employment as workers in construction,
railroad gangs, mines, quarries, silk mills, machine shops, subways,
and waterworks. Given New York Citys rapid expansion, Italians were
well represented as laborers digging tunnels for the subway system,
in the Sanitation Department, and working on projects such as the
Jerome Park Reservoir and many other railroad and building projects
around the city.
Informed by the same factors pushing Italians to settle among their
own paesani (countrymen), immigrants started mutual aid and fraternal organizations to provide crucial services such as unemployment
insurance, employment assistance, and death benefits. Men from specific towns of origin organized the clubs and offered Italians, among
other things, a chance to speak in their regional dialects and in many
tangible ways eased the process of dislocation. Most often, leadership
reflected the larger communitys bifurcated social structure as club
leaders came from the upper class. Prominenti took great pride in, and
exerted much energy in, attaining titles and honors befitting men of
such self-importance. These societies played a vital role in easing the
transition of Italians to a new environment by reestablishing and transplanting traditions and customs from the paesi. They were incalculably more popular and relevant among first-generation immigrants than
among their American-born offspring, who did not have one foot in
Italy and another in the United States.20 According to the president of
the Bargolino Benefit Association, a club derived from Italians from
the same part of Sicily, these organizations provided a suitable meeting place in order to avoid having members stand on street corners and
about saloons; to develop socially and to be prepared to mutually assist
one another in every way.21
Early on in the immigrant experience, mutual aid societies and fraternal organizations did little to lessen the regional differences and
rivalries that existed within Italian immigrant enclaves. Performing
important psychological and social roles, these organizations assumed
immense importance and indirectly hindered widespread collective
organization, often to the chagrin of labor organizers.22 However, as
immigrant colonies matured, especially after 1900, attempts at collective organization around a larger consciousness as Italians began to
take hold. For example, the National Order of the Sons of Italy, created
in 1905, was the first organization that began to subsume local fraternal or regional societies under a larger umbrella of federated societies
and lodges. By World War I, the Sons of Italy began to wield significant
power within Italian communities on the local and state levels.23 The
emergence of the Sons of Italy did not replace local mutual aid societies germane to particular villages or towns, but it did coincide with
the creation of an image of Italianness that did not exist in Italy. Society banquets, dinner dances, and annual religious feasts celebrated
regional ties through the lens of a minority population reviled by many
as unwelcome others. As such, organizations often focused on the merits of Italian culture and civilization as a means of community uplift
and survival, thereby promulgating a nascent Italian patriotism. And,
although by 1921 some contemporary observers such as John Mariano
believed mutual aid societies and fraternal clubs prolonged a fractured
Italian identity and sustained anti-Americanization sentiment, these
organizations actually accelerated the emergence of a collective Italian
racial identity.24
Religious observation and practice proved to be an arena where Italian immigrants did not have an easy transition. Although predominantly Roman Catholic, Italian immigrants did not blend smoothly
into New Yorks Irish Americandominated Catholic community. There
were several levels of dissonance between the Irish hierarchy and their
new communicants that for some time posed severe barriers to immigrants full incorporation into the Catholic parishes. Clearly, priests
and upper-level church hierarchy were not immune from the prejudice
and discrimination that targeted southern Italian immigrants in their
new home. Italian attitudes toward priests, church attendance, doctrinal tenets, and the personal manner in which Italians worshipped God
home to more than any other city by 1920 with 12.25 However, this did
not capture the full breadth of the presss impact as 267 additional newspapers, both radical and mainstream, were published and circulated at
various times throughout this period.26 In addition to being the largest
Italian colony, New York City offered advantages to the news industry
not available in most other cities. With respect to successful commercial dailies such as Il Progresso, New Yorks geographic location allowed
the paper to tap into efficient news-gathering resources and dissemination facilities, as well as obtain the latest news from the colony or from
Italy in the shortest amount of time. Published daily, Il Progresso and
Bolletino della Sera became a vital source of immediate information not
only for Italians living in New York but also for those outside the city
and state.27
Italian language newspapers reflected the heterogeneity and fluidity of the community itself. Newspapers frequently went in and out of
existence, and a majority of newspapers could not maintain a lasting
circulation in order to remain financially solvent. Reflecting the community it served, the press varied in its political orientation, ranging
from mainstream political identification as Republican or independent
to more radical ideologies such as socialist and anarchist. The mainstream, or commercial, press enjoyed larger circulations than the Italian radical press and by virtue of subscriptions and advertising revenue
usually experienced a longer life span. Some of this owed to the serious
obstacles socialist and anarchist papers faced, such as fierce governmental repression that severely hampered their print operations. However, radical newspapers were no less important, often beyond what was
reflected in their circulation numbers, and some maintained publication for decades.
The era of mass Italian immigration coincided with the emergence of
what historian Rudolph Vecoli termed the prominenti phase of Italian
journalism in the United States.28 The prominenti, or prominent ones,
were generally Italians who had arrived early on in the migration process, knew some level of English, and established businesses that served
the immigrants. Men such as Carlo Barsotti and Louis V. Fugazy owned
and operated boardinghouses, neighborhood banks, saloons, or grocery stores, worked as labor recruiters and agents, or acted as notary
publics, sometimes combining all of these functions. Their practices did
not come without a price. For example, in addition to providing overcrowded rooms, boardinghouse owners charged exorbitant fees to hold
a transient immigrants baggage, and labor agents, or padrones, as they
were known, often sent unwitting Italian laborers into precarious situations as strikebreakers or contract laborers. However, for many immigrants who arrived without friends or relatives in the United States, and
did not speak English, access to a countryman with some knowledge of
the city and how it worked was a vital resource. Whether it was finding
employment, transferring money to Italy, writing letters for an illiterate immigrant, or settling legal disputes among quarrelling immigrants,
these middlemen became indispensable within the Italian immigrant
colonies. Their capacity to render vital services and dispense patronage earned them a level of prestige and acclaim throughout the colonies
that only buttressed their importance, wealth, and prominence.
For prominenti, newspaper ownership became extremely attractive
as a means to advance their personal agenda and further extend and
widen their influence throughout a community desperate for direction.29 Before mass immigration, G. P. Secchi di Casali, a Mazzinian
exile, and Felice Tocci, an Italian financier and banker, founded LEco
dItalia (the Echo of Italy) in 1849. The first Italian language newspaper
to appear in New York City, LEco dItalia operated ideologically within
an exile mentality and catered to a smaller, more integrated northern Italian community.30 Although the paper covered events within the
scattered Italian communities, it focused primarily on news and events
from Italy. Followers of Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi, the
papers editors intensely debated political and military struggles within
Italy. This focus would change drastically as waves of southern Italian
immigrants began arriving in New York.
By starting Il Progresso Italo-Americano in 1880, Carlo Barsotti cast
the mold for big-city Italian immigrant prominenti and Italian language daily newspapers. With the help of his partner, Vincenzo Polidori, who was born in Rome in 1843, Barsotti started with a staff of two
and a minuscule budget. Its office was located in the rear of the New
York Herald offices on Ann Street in lower Manhattan, not far from the
heart of what would soon become New Yorks Little Italy. Given that
neither employee could translate English stories into Italian, the paper
initially resorted to clipping news stories from a Bologna newspaper
and changing the dates to suit their purposes. In 1882, Barsotti hired
Adolfo Rossi as editor, and the circulation increased steadily to 6,500 by
1890 and 7,500 by 1892. By the early 1890s, the papers masthead already
proclaimed in English that Il Progresso was the most influential Italian
daily newspaper in New York and in the United States and had the
largest circulation of any Italian paper in America.31 During the 1890s,
Barsotti would merge a smaller Italian language newspaper in New
York titled Cristofero Colombo with Il Progresso.32 The papers circulation dramatically increased after 1900, but circulation reached its height
of 175,000 copies during World War I. Its former editor Alfredo Bosi
credited the success to Carlo Barsottis tireless work and many popular
patriotic initiatives.33 By 1920, Il Progresso had expanded to eight pages
and boasted a circulation reaching 108,137. A sixteen-page illustrated
Sunday supplement enjoyed a circulation of 96,186. According to Bosi,
the Sunday supplement was a publication without equal . . . it is printed
on the best machines that produce 40 copies per hour so the paper can
get out quickly to anxious Italian readers across the City.34
Attempting to build on the success of Il Progresso, Vincenzo Polidori,
along with Giovani Vicario, a Naples-born attorney, established LAraldo
Italiano (the Italian Herald) in 1889. LAraldo was published every day
except Mondays and was soon accompanied by an evening newspaper,
Il Telegrafo.35 The paper employed valorous journalists such as Luciano Paris, Giuseppe Gulino, Luigi Roversi, Paolo Parisi, Ernesto Valentine, and Agostino DiBiasi and at various times was listed as a Republican paper and other years identified as independent.36 Some historians
described the paper as more balanced in its reporting than Il Progresso
and more friendly to labor than its chief rival, especially after 1910.37
However, despite having a larger circulation than Il Progresso in the
early part of the twentieth century, LAraldo could not keep up with Il
Progressos explosive growth and reached its circulation zenith at 18,000
in 1916.38 By 1917, both LAraldo and Il Telegrafo were sold by Vicario to
Il Giornale Italiano, edited by Ercole Cantelmo and part of Frank Frugones publishing consortium. By 1920, the papers circulation narrowed
to 12,454 copies.39
At the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, a new daily Italian language evening newspaper added to the increasing competition among
New Yorks mainstream newspapers. In 1898, Frank Frugone founded
Bolletino della Sera (the Evening Bulletin), and his story mirrored Barsottis in several ways. Frugone came to the United States from northern Italy (Chiavara, Genoa) with limited means and attended night
school as he worked as a printers apprentice. Entrenched in the prominent class by 1898, Frugone, along with Agostino Balletto, founded and
edited Bolletino. According to the New York Times, Frugones editorials aided many Italians by advocating for immigrant protection laws,
and in 1912 he offered his testimony to the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization in an effort to prevent passage of a literacy
test for immigrants. Frugone was active within the Italian immigrant
colony as treasurer of the Italian American Educational League, president of the Italian Vigilance Protective Association and Dante Alighieri Society, as well as participating in political and cultural associations and organizations in New York such as the National Republican
Club and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Frugone remained active in
politics and tried unsuccessfully to parlay his influence into a congressional seat in 1904 and 1906.40 Running as a Republican in 1906, Frugone received the endorsement of the New York Times over his Tammany opponent. Although he is of Italian birth, the Times stated, Mr.
Frugone has spent most of his life in this country, where by his own
industry, his talents, and his good character, he has risen to a position
of influence as the editor of a prominent Italian newspaper, and as a
man who is respected and esteemed and listened to by men of his own
race in this country.41
Bolletino published daily, except for Sundays, and used a four-page
format. The paper featured journalist Bernardino Ciambelli, who Alfredo
Bosi called one of the most popular colonial journalists.42 By 1911, the
newspaper had increased to eight pages and had a circulation of 42,000
copies.43 Bolletino della Sera was part of the Italian commercial press
and advertised itself as Republican in political orientation. Historian
Edwin Fenton remarked that, unlike Il Progresso, Bolletino gave extensive coverage and support not only to socialists but also to the American Federation of Labor in its fight against syndicalists, especially from
1908 through 1920.44 By the early 1920s, Bolletino della Sera had a circulation of approximately 75,472 and catered to a readership of workers
in various industries, laborers, miners, farmers and business men.45
Italian socialist movement within the broader American labor struggle. Migrating from Italian-centered dictates and aligning more closely
to the doctrines of revolutionary industrial unionism, Tresca saw the
value of using the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) as the vehicle to push Italians beyond their own provincial worldviews and establish them within a larger, class-based movement. According to Bruno
Cartosio, Tresca was the one who really transformed Il Proletario into
an Italian-American newspaper.56
The fortunes of Il Proletario reflected the twists and turns within
the Italian socialist movement during this period. An ideological split
emerged between those who viewed the IWWs revolutionary socialism
as the path toward class liberation and moderates who wanted to work
within the American socialist movement. In 1907, Giuseppe Bertelli
left his editorial position at Il Proletario and started his own newspaper
in Chicago. Although Il Proletario and the Italian socialist movement
suffered from consistent infighting, from 1909 through World War I,
Il Proletario reached the height of its influence and circulation. This
period coincided with a maturing working-class activism, the rising
influence of the IWW, and the prominent role played by Italian workers in that struggle, especially in northeastern industrial areas such
as Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Paterson, New Jersey.57 During the
repressive period of World War I, legislation such as the Espionage Act,
the Sedition Act, and the Trading with the Enemy Act made it possible
for the Department of Justice and the U.S. Post Office to suppress any
publication the federal government deemed subversive. Il Proletario
was forced to move its headquarters from Boston to the IWW headquarters in Chicago in 1916. Ironically, it was during this period that Il
Proletario reached its high point in circulation at 7,800 copies.58 Along
with the IWW, Il Proletario came under intense government scrutiny
as its offices were raided, its mailing privileges denied, and its editor,
Angelo Faggi, was arrested and deported to Italy in 1919. The newspaper resumed under the title La Difesa, after the war became Il Nuovo
Proletario, and in 1920 published again under the original masthead of
Il Proletario. Although the newspaper would continue to publish for
almost two decades, its lack of strong organizational support reflected
the chilling effectiveness of repressive antilabor campaigns.59
the pages of competing papers, spoke to the stakes at hand in enhancing ones power and prestige within the colony.74 The rivalries became
so heated that certain newspaper owners openly accused one another
of fraud and embezzlement within the pages of major papers.75 In 1917,
George La Piana sarcastically chided newspaper owners for the continual rancor that accompanied their publications. He noted how each
owner proclaims the other a bunch of thiefs [sic], that they escaped
from an Italian prison which was the college where they received their
education, that their sense of honor is below that of the animals, that
their heads are empty boxes where can be written nobody home and
so on.76 Some mainstream newspaper editors, such as Alberto Pecorini,
lashed out at prominenti for intentionally failing to provide adequate
information to foster Italian naturalization and adaptation. For Pecorini,
prominenti simply preyed upon immigrants to advance their own
power and prestige. Writing in the journal the Forum in 1911, he advised
Italians to become American citizens and take away the direction of
their interests from the dealers in votes. The debate reflected divergent
strategies over how Italian immigrants should assimilate into American society. Pecorini believed Barsottis self-aggrandizing focus on the
feats and accomplishments of the Italian race only served to strengthen
prominenti influence within the community, further isolate immigrants in ethnic enclaves, and dangerously delay American acceptance
of Italians. The New York Times agreed with Pecorinis assessment and
stressed, We do not want foreigners in this country who are taught not
to adopt American customs and ways, who do not come here for permanent settlement and citizenship.77
Another way to measure the influence of prominenti-run newspapers within Italian colonies is to look at the vitriolic diatribes emanating from the Italian radical press. Socialists and anarchists dedicated
considerable space in their publications to some of their most loathsome attacks against prominenti, who along with Catholic priests were
defined as a two-headed oppressor intent on increasing their personal
power at the expense of Italian immigrants. To radicals, Barsottis and
Il Progressos message translated into antiworker, antiunion, and procapitalist. The frustration radicals demonstrated over working-class
acquiescence, and in some ways deference to prominenti within the
community, underscored the impact and influence of these men upon
2
The Italian Language Press and Africa
From the 1880s through the 1920s, Italian language newspapers consistently employed the image of Africa as the most appropriate way to
convey savagery. Much like American contemporaries, the editors subscribed to a hierarchical notion of race. Designations of civilized and
savage nations littered the pages of mainstream and radical newspapers
that generally regarded European nations, as well as the United States,
as free, democratic, and civilized nations.8 For instance, the anarchist
publication Il Grido degli Oppressi mocked the tainted accomplishments of Christopher Columbus in a scathing indictment of the man,
as well as the Italian people who revered his image: Rather than slavery
and destruction to the Natives living in America, Columbus could have
brought what is European civility to America and returned to Europe
only what was superfluous of the natural wealth of the American land.9
For the anarchists, therefore, the humanistic goal should have been
cowboys and where civilization is on a par with the barbarians of equatorial Africa. Ironically, this example illuminates the facile manner in
which the press could criticize racial hierarchy by simultaneously sustaining the image of primitive Africa to convey Americas descent into
savagery.18 Many other examples similarly utilized language likening
American capitalism to savage beasts from central Africa19 or conquistadors of savage Africa.20
Perhaps the radical presss most compelling narrative compared
southern Italians, both in Italy and in the United States, to African savages. Flowing from a deep-seated animosity toward the Catholic Church
and clergy, radicals consistently targeted immigrant religious traditions
and rituals as objects of scorn. Radical newspapers often described
transplanted public processions venerating local patron saints or Madonnas as festivals of superstition, prejudice, and ignorancea celebration of darkness in the middle of so much light, civility and progress.21
Further, they portrayed southern Italian immigrants as savage people
from the backcountry of Calabria and Sicilywithout shoes, with
long hair resembling witches more than human beings.22 The radical
presss critique illuminates how easily the civilization of southern Italians could be questioned and marginalized. In addition to condemning priests and prominenti, sovversivi took aim at mainstream Italian
language newspapers such as Il Progresso Italo-Americano and Bolletino
della Sera, criticizing them for their support of a feast organized by a
mass of criminals.23 For example, ridiculing Italian immigrants and the
mainstream newspaper Bolletino della Sera, the anarchist La Questione
Sociale stated that Italians above all people believe in miracles as if they
were in the Middle Ages. . . . it is a conflict between ancient barbary
and modern civilization.24 From their perspective, some of the blame
could be attributed to an infantile trust in priests that permeated southern Italian actions. The anarchist La Questione Sociale explained that
this behavior was not unique to Italians but was exhibited often by Zulu
tribes in Africa.25
Much like its opponents in the mainstream Italian language press, the
socialist Il Proletario remained quite conscious of the perception and
image of Italian immigrants. To radicals, ignorant, illiterate, superstitious southern Italian immigrants had become an easy target for swindling priests and the prominenti who supported them. And, according
to offer their lives in the war against Africa. In Colorado, some wrote
letters to the Italian ambassador in Washington requesting permission
to send volunteer soldiers to fight in Eritrea.39 In New York, one Italian
captain recruited men to fight in the name of the Italian ambassador
until it was discovered that he was not authorized to do so.40 Perhaps
the most symbolic example of the nationalist sentiment provoked by
the African campaign came from a letter to the Italian ambassador in
Washington. The letter was written in the name of a retired captain
who had served in the Italian cavalry in 1867 and now asked if he could
be accorded the honor of serving as a simple soldier in the Italian war
effort in Africa.41 Although the Italian embassy politely refused all considerations for Italian American volunteer soldiers, not to mention the
symbolic gesture of a retired officer, such overtures illustrated the range
of enthusiasm for Italian colonial aims in Africa.
However, the Italian language mainstream press stoked this fierce
nationalist support and played a significant role in making the African
campaign a cause clbre within Italian American communities. Newspaper owners such as Carlo Barsotti fostered a collective sense of Italian
patriotism and fidelity to la patria most immigrants had never experienced. Even efforts to raise funds for the war effort became competitive
ventures as Barsottis Il Progresso Italo-Americano indicted a rival paper,
LAraldo Italiano, for allowing an Italian committee from Baltimore
to fund-raise through that newspaper. LAraldo Italiano responded by
accusing Barsotti, owner of Il Progresso Italo-Americano, of embezzling
contributions from his constituents.42
The Italian language mainstream press, in particular, justified Italian aggression in Africa on the basis of Italian civilization, and coverage of the war frequently defended Italian colonial initiatives for that
reason. According to LEco dItalia, Success in civilizing the African
and suppressing the inferior race will hopefully benefit the civilized
world. . . . Black, obscure Africa is almost coming into the light. European civilization will be imported by love or by forcewith religion or
with the machine gun. Civilizing the inferior races is not a question of
sentiment, it is a necessity that the civilized races cannot ignore.43 In
Il Progresso, Leopoldo Franchetti, an Italian politician who had helped
expose the terrible conditions in Sicily and now urged colonization of
Eritrea by Italian peasants, warned that to abandon the Italian colonies
emerged when Italy invaded Tripoli at the end of 1911. As it did in the
late nineteenth century, the recently unified Italian liberal state felt the
need to assert itself on the stage of geopolitical imperialism. Although
Italy was part of the Triple Alliance with Austria-Hungary and Germany, its leaders were aware of their nations relative lack of power and
wealth compared with its neighbors. Therefore, late to the table of territorial acquisitions, Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti resuscitated the
Italian campaign for Africa by targeting one of the only remaining areas
of Africa to which Italy might possibly lay claim.
Although Libya was a desert and not very fertile, one of the primary
motivations of the colonialists was the hope that this new colony would
provide an area of settlement for the vast number of poverty-stricken
southern Italians. Italian nationalists hoped that once Libya was an Italian possession, the tide of southern Italian migration would be rerouted
closer to home rather than continuing their journey to New York or
Buenos Aires. In 1905, Italy had begun a policy of peaceful economic
penetration into Libya and slowly created an uncomfortable situation
for the Ottoman Turks who ruled the territory. Creating a situation
where Italian business interests would seem to need protection, it was
the apparent assassination of two Italian officials working in Tripoli
in the fall of 1911 that set off a military conflict. Despite the fact that
the war remained at a stalemate for months, Italy achieved its aim by
default. Benefiting from the Ottoman Empires increasing weakness,
in July 1912 the Turks and Italians negotiated a peace settlement. With
the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne on October 8, 1912, Italy formally
annexed Libya.
Unlike New Yorks Italian language mainstream newspapers, the radical press moved quickly to criticize and expose Italian rationales for war
with Libya and the Ottoman Turks. Sovversivi argued that imperialist
gains, rather than advancing civilization, motivated capitalist nations.
However, although condemning the Italian governments imperialism,
and by virtue of this critique defending African sovereignty, the radical
press still maintained a perception of Africa as uncivilized.48 Il Proletario denounced all forms of blind jingoist patriotism as propaganda to
keep the population ignorant or distracted from their miserable plight.
Its criticism of the Italian governments inability and seeming unwillingness to civilize southern Italians resembled a subtle embarrassment
Ultimatum to Turkey Blows Today. Only two days later the headline
read, Tripoli Ours.56 Bolletinos coverage of the conflict was not unlike
that of other Italian language mainstream dailies that draped their front
pages with news about the war, Italian soldiers, and international reaction. This coverage lasted for several months and created an opportunity
for Italian language newspapers to build upon the virtues of Italians, the
narrative of Italian civilization, and, more broadly, the continued construction of an Italian racial identity. The mainstream press was keenly
aware of past military failures in North Africa, particularly the defeat
at Adowa in 1896. Frequent allusions to Adowa rationalized the defeat
as a function of weak national will, while others referenced how these
perceptions remained misguided. Either way, Italys defeat only fifteen
years earlier to Ethiopian forces remained fresh. Although the failed
colonial venture in Ethiopia in the 1890s rallied a nascent nationalism
among immigrant Italians, the bitter defeat to Meneliks forces certainly
stung those Italians in the United States who hoped to gain a measure
of respect from imperialist ventures abroad. Newspaper coverage of
Italian ventures in Libya in 1911 and 1912 served a crucial role in solidifying an emerging nationalist identity, while simultaneously functioning to influence American perceptions of Italians.
Unsurprisingly, the mainstream press portrayed Italys motives in
initiating military actions in Libya as noble and unselfish. Some rationales went as far as implying that Italy was a reluctant aggressor, only
becoming involved out of patriarchal obligation to reconstitute a fatherless family.57 Il Progresso declared that Italys glorious tricolor flag
would open the eyes of faraway people in a new era of redemption. Its
not the cannon that pushes Italy in Tripoli, but the voice of conscience
that brings us to the land of Mohammed to bring a new civility. Providence will guide this patriotic action and vile are the people that try to
stop the glorious sons of Italy.58 Bolletino della Sera agreed, stating that
every honest person who knows the situation has to credit the Italians
in that Italy does not ask for glory in victory over Turks, but simply
wants to end the brutality and protect justice and its people.59
Intense coverage of the Libyan conflict littered the pages of Italian
mainstream newspapers and offered editors and owners a ready-made
opportunity to assert Italian civilization. Although northern Africans had sometimes been distinguished from central Africans, in this
3
Native Americans, Asians, and Italian Americans
Constructions of a Multilayered Racial Consciousness
In 1891, roughly three months after the murder of eleven Italian men in
New Orleans, Louisiana, six months after the U.S. militarys massacre
of Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, and less than a
year after the U.S. Census Bureau declared that the American frontier
had been settled, Il Progresso Italo-Americano published an illuminating
article titled I Pelle Rossa (The red skin) in its expanded Sunday supplemental edition. Try to imagine the endless prairies and plains that
stretch to the West of the populous cities of the United States, Giuseppe
Balbi wrote. This is the home of the red skins. Balbis article presented
a sweeping portrait of Native Americans lives in the United States and
their dim prospects for survival in the future. Positioning Native Americans, or redskins (pelle rosse), as the press consistently identified them,
beyond the boundaries of civilization, Balbis article offered remarkable
insight into how the Italian language press constructed race, color, and
civilization during the early years of mass immigration.1
This chapter examines the presss perception of two groups that
generally remained outside Italian immigrant circles of familiarity but nonetheless attracted attention within the pages of the Italian
language press: Native Americans and Asian Americans. This conversation occurred during an intense period of crisis in national identity
sparked in no short order by the influx of eastern and southern Europeans whose race and color were dissected, questioned, and feared.2 Often
influenced by issues and events relevant to their own predicament and
experience in the United States, the press teased different meanings
from the plight and future of Native Americans and Asian Americans.
For example, although Native Americans (pelle rose [redskins]) and
>>57
Asian Americans (la razza gialla [the yellow race]) remained consistently set apart by color, or more specifically by their nonwhite status,
the category of civilization remained the key determinant in assessing
the value of both cultures. As Italian language newspapers sought to
carve out their own niche during the early decades of mass immigration, both mainstream and radical publications revealed a fluid racial
worldview in which categories of color, civilization, and class often
intersected, overlapped, and at times operated at each others expense.
And, although savagery and nonwhiteness usually remained intimately
connected, Italian language newspapers exposed a willingness to entertain a more nuanced view of race that would disappear by the World
War I period.
Given the paucity of real-life interaction and familiarity with Native
Americans, Italian language newspapers found that pelle rosse provided
an impeccable exemplar with which to contrast the merits of Italian
immigration and Italian civilization. For the prominenti press in particular, Native Americans resistance to Americas civilizing influence
and their existence along the boundaries of society, rather than in
the modern urban spaces, starkly differentiated pelle rosse from other
nonwhite peoples.3 It is probably not a coincidence that Balbis article
detailing the decline and savagery of Native Americans is juxtaposed
with a large illustration of the recent monument built in Rome to honor
the executed Italian astronomer and philosopher Giordano Bruno. At
a moment of extreme hostility toward southern Italian immigrants,
determined prominenti newspapers such as Il Progresso Italo-Americano, in particular, exposed Americans to a class-based construction
of Italian identity through celebratory coverage of high-brow Italian
achievements. A necessary tangent to this portrayal required fostering a
sense of Italianness by constructing an other or others deemed outside
the acceptable spatial boundaries of civilization and whiteness.
Conversely, although the press positioned Chinese and Japanese
within an established racial hierarchy, the Asian American struggle
with immigration restriction and, worse, exclusion, touched a nerve in
the Italian language press as both the mainstream and the radical press
would see parallels in the United States effort to pass racially motivated
immigration restriction and coercive economic policies. Prominenti
newspapers, in particular, proved willing to entertain a more complex
Pelle Rosse
At the very moment when Italian immigrants began to fill Ellis Islands
immigration processing hall and suffer the most extreme forms of
prejudice in the form of lynching, Native Americansthe first Americansendured the latest phase of white American aggression. On
December 29, 1890, members of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry regiment, led
by Colonel James Forsyth, indiscriminately massacred approximately
150 Lakota Sioux men, women, and children, wounding an additional
50 at Wounded Knee Creek on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The massacre was but one, albeit brutal, aspect
of a larger pattern of violence, deception, and extermination of Indian
tribes that occurred intermittently over the course of the nineteenth
century. Less than three months later, Italian language newspapers
exploded over the gruesome news that eleven Italians, acquitted of
murdering New Orleans police chief David Hennessy, had been brutally and summarily murdered by a mob of local whites. For prominenti
In the late nineteenth century the American West and the frontier
elicited romantic visions in the European imagination and in the Italian mind. The great plains of the United States represented virgin lands
that had been conquered by the army of progress, leaving behind the
remnants of a dwindling Native American population.
Although Italian immigrants in New York City and Native Americans had very limited interaction, sensational stories related to Native
Americans ran intermittently within the Italian language press and
evoked scenes mimicking popular images of the wild and savage pelle
rosse. In 1891, Il Progresso Italo-Americano gave wide coverage to a sad
account of two young Italian immigrants, Alfonso Lauriano and Francesco Schetti, fighting in the U.S. Seventh Cavalry Regiment at Fort Sill,
Indian Territory, Oklahoma. In line with owner Carlo Barsottis penchant for highlighting crimes against Italians, it could not have been
clearer to the papers readers that Lauriano and Schetti had died valorously fighting on the side of civilization, whiteness, and progress.
According to the article, the Pelle Rosse captured Schetti after he had
lost control of his horse. Despite insurmountable odds, Schetti fought
back courageously with his cavalry sword but eventually died in battle.
According to Il Progresso, After he died, the savages scalped the victim as is their barbarous custom, and mutilated the rest of his body.
Sensational tales such as this helped establish clear boundaries between
civilized Europe and the nether regions of barbarism inhabited by pelle
rosse.10
The prominenti presss characterization of pelle rosse, unlike its treatment of African Americans, whom it often viewed with empathy, more
closely resembled its perception of black Africans. For example, writing in Il Progresso some months after Wounded Knee, Giuseppe Balbi
argued that with regard to skills, Native Americans are inferior to the
blacks of Africa, who are at least familiar with the art of making cloth
and dyeing it.11 To that end, mainstream newspapers worked within a
colonial mind-set, much as they did with respect to Africa, ultimately
justifying coercive policies as the natural, and inevitable, triumph of
civilization over savagery. Prominenti fascination with William Cody,
more commonly known as Buffalo Bill, is one measure of this framework. According to historian Paul Reddin, Codys Wild West Shows
offered eager consumers, within the United States and internationally,
a portrait of American life that many perceived to be wholly authentic. Codys productions reduced the Western saga to a morality play in
which Cody, along with scouts and cowboys, represented the forces of
good and civilization and Indians . . . symbolized evil and barbarism.12
To bourgeois Italians, Buffalo Bill symbolized not only the romantic
notions of expansion and adventure, in this particular case expansion
westward, but also the triumph of civilization over barbarism. After
all, Buffalo Bill had brought progress to the West in the form of postal
delivery; he blazed trails westward before railroads had simplified matters and, most important, had withstood the constant danger of Indian
violence.13
From January through April 1890, Codys Wild West Shows toured
Naples, Rome, Florence, Bologna, Milan, and Verona, arriving with
Indians, horses, and tepees to give the lazzaroni of Naples, or the
To be sure, the mainstream press clearly did not condone American actions. For example, as more facts became available following the
December 29 incident at Wounded Knee, headlines, often appearing
on the front page of Il Progresso, progressed from the mundane The
Subject of the Indians to the more sympathetic The Poor Indians.19
The Italian language mainstream daily Cristofero Colombo rebuked
American soldiers for acting without prudence . . . and out of sheer
ferocity and asked rhetorically, If this is the truth we ask who are the
savages?20 However, rather than genuine empathy, mainstream newspapers exploited Native American suffering by opportunistically rebuking American civilization in an effort to exalt their own status.
Indeed, Il Progresso commonly viewed Native Americans as the
aggressors in provoking violence between themselves and white Americans. Shortly after Wounded Knee, Il Progresso remarked that hostile
tribes were getting together to make war, noting that this was something they had done before.21 In 1891, Il Progresso underscored that
the definitive account of Native peoples valor, honesty, morality, and
industriousness had not yet been written. Certain people who have
lived among Native tribes declare they possessed rudimentary elements
of civilization and were more victims, than culprit. . . . others say they
are the worst of the savages, only dedicated to stealing and killing.22
Yet, despite what appeared to be an equitable assessment, the newspaper chose to print a damning and judgmental letter as the final word
on this subject. Written by Mr. Cioli, a Progresso subscriber from South
Dakota, the letter purported to provide readers with expert testimony
from someone who had actually lived among Native Americans for
three years and had become accustomed to their language, customs,
and character. Cioli described Native Americans as indolent thieves,
shameless, without morals of any kind, utterly dishonest, and traitors
beyond belief who were willing to use every method to deceive white
people. Ultimately, according to Cioli, only through intermingling
with whites could Native people improve their condition.23
Moreover, mainstream Italian language newspapers perceived Native
Americans as culpable for their own plight and solely responsible for
their demise, rather than as victims of white oppression. In 1906, Il Progresso published a story about an Italian immigrant and his Mexican
wife who were killed by pelle rosse in Arizona. Without commenting
upon what was viewed as a hybrid union at the time, the paper scornfully described these Indians as savage beings who resist every attempt
at civilization as well as humanitarian sentiment.24 For a prominenti
press wrestling with attempts to fashion an Italian American identity
deemed acceptable by white Americans, Native Americans willingly
and stubbornly squandered their chance at civilization. Referring to the
dwindling Ute tribe in Montana, Il Progresso feared that race hatred is
very profound in these few representatives of this very unhappy race
who have refused the civilization of the invaders.25 Balbi neatly summarized the viewpoint of the mainstream press when he argued that
the nomadic life means that they [Indians] do not dedicate themselves
to industry or agriculture. . . . this is the way the Indians of America
are, whose race, because of its resistance to the civilizing process, a
resistance more tenacious than that of Africans, is destined to be extinguished in the not too distant future.26
In the 1909 book Gli Americani nella vita moderna osservati da
un italiano, written by Alberto Pecorini, the future editor of Il Cittadino dedicates a chapter titled Una Razza che Muore (A dying race)
to explain the disappearance of Native Americans. Pondering how to
incorporate this race among whites, Pecorini concludes that maybe the
most generous thing we can do is let them die out.27 Throughout the
period of mass immigration, it appears quite obvious that the Italian
language mainstream press, in line with a majority of American society, did not envision a long existence for the pelle rosse. Immediately
after Wounded Knee in 1891, Il Progresso critiqued the United States for
only prolonging what was inevitable: Why they dont have the courage to terminate this unequal opera of destruction with a general massacre and end it once and for all. . . . it would be better to shorten the
Indians agony.28 In 1914, an article in Il Progresso titled The Last Redskin: A Race Destined to Expire became an unintentional bookend to
Giuseppe Balbis 1891 synopsis of Native Americans. Balbis confident
prediction in 1891 that the pelle rosse were soon to be extinguished was
confirmed, albeit wistfully, by Il Progresso: At the time of the discovery
of America the pelle rosse were counted by the millions, now they are
counted at approximately 350,000. You do not have to be a prophet to
know that these people are destined to vanish. In two or three generations there will no longer be any representatives of the pelle rosse who
La Razza Gialla
Despite their marginalization in American society via immigration
restriction, Italian language mainstream and radical newspapers would
find more in common with Asian Americans, whether through their
role as workers or as victims of race-based immigration restriction,
than with Native Americans, who were perceived as outside the boundaries of civilization. In addition, factors deemed important in the process of Italian racial uplift, such as imperial success and more immediate domestic issues affecting both Asian and Italian communities,
informed a more positive racial view of Japanese and Chinese peoples.
Reflecting, in part, an Italian language press coming to terms with its
own idealistic constructions of Italian American identity, newspapers
balanced Chinese or Japanese otherness with declarations of worthy
civilizations informed by military prowess and ancient cultures. In
doing so, at least initially, the mainstream press, in particular, revealed
a willingness to maintain a fluid, multifaceted approach to racial construction.30 By World War I, however, mainstream newspapers such as
Il Progresso and Bolletino della Sera pursued a more rigid conception of
race and color, rendering subtle distinctions irrelevant.
Colonial conquest often served as a common measuring stick to
determine a nation-states arrival on the international scene, as well
as an indicator of superior racial status. Italian language mainstream
newspapers, engaged in their own attempt at racial uplift by championing the glory of Italian military ventures, reacted favorably to Japans
military accomplishments during the Russo-Japanese War of 19041905.
In the days leading up to the peace agreement brokered by President
War, articles that maintained support for Japan and China revealed an
interesting and familiar theme. For instance, La Luce, a paper from
Utica, New York, remarked that the true miracle of the yellow race is
how in a few years Japan had changed from feudalism to democracy
and in doing so had gained the sympathy of the civilized world. However, acknowledging the Japanese had not completely assimilated with
European culture, La Luce argued nonetheless that the Japanese had
learned to appropriate the spirit of American industry and civility. . . .
they have learned from us industrially and agriculturally.34 Similarly, an
article in LAraldo Italiano examining the evolution of Chinese medicine and its march toward modernity argued, Its possible to predict
a quick evolution that could bring China, as has happened with Japan,
toward an equal civilization with, and maybe superior to, the ones of
old Europe.35 Even Sergi, who maintained that we have no prejudice
towards any race or nationality but rather feel that any human faction,
and any type or color, should be respected along with its history, independence and existence, supported a racial hierarchy with Europe at
the top. Despite his positive view of China, Sergi explained that even
with its historic civilization China will return to its course of evolution
and probably emulate the white European races.36
Although newspapers such as the socialist Il Proletario never extolled
white, American, or European civilization as frequently, or blatantly, as
the prominenti press, an assumption of Western superiority pervaded
even its pages. At times one could find comments similar to those made
by the papers mainstream counterparts such as China did not accept
. . . the civility of Western civilization but they have something else in
common which is revolution.37 In Americans and Americanization,
Il Proletario portrayed a variety of races as less civilized than their
Western counterparts. In this discussion of the benefits of socialism to
humanity, the author, writing under the pseudonym Ilion, described
the influx of immigrants to the United States as a form of voluntary
colonialism. However, unlike European colonies such as Italian Eritrea,
Americans did not perform menial labor in the United States but rather
left such work to European immigrants. Ilion described a process of
Americanization whereby various races, such as the descendants
of the Irish immigrants who arrived in the 1840s and 1850s, ascended
from this menial status. Maybe in time, remarked Ilion, the Italians
and Poles will leave this bestial labor to other racespossibly the Chineseand rise above this bloody toil in favor of the kind of work performed by the more evolved races.38 Within Ilions racial hierarchy
the constant influx of immigrants into the United States had created a
leveling of the races by bringing less civilized peoples into contact
with more evolved people.39 It is this motivation that prompted Ilions
disclaimer that my observations are not here to create hate or conflict
between races but are just plain by all to see. This is why socialism is
not restricted to some races, but rather involves all humanity.40 Therefore, somewhat illogically, Ilion argued for the insignificance of racial
difference by delineating how racial difference would directly lead to a
socialist society.
view of la razza gialla from pelle rosse. However, although both mainstream and radical Italian language newspapers interpreted Asian
restriction as an issue of race and class, by the period of World War I
both prominenti and radical newspapers worked more rigidly within a
paradigm of Asian racial otherness.
Roger Daniels has referred to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
as the pivot on which all American immigration policy turned, the
hinge on which Emma Lazaruss Golden Door began to swing toward
a closed position. It initiated an era of steadily increasing restrictions
on immigration of all kinds that lasted until 1943.42 Exclusion laws and
gentlemens agreements limiting, if not discontinuing, Chinese and
Japanese immigration to the United States effectively placed these two
nonwhite races on the margins of American society. Between the years
1850 and 1890, some 290,610 Chinese immigrants arrived in the United
States, with their numbers increasing threefold from the 1850s to the
1870s.43 In response to the increasing number of Chinese newcomers,
the U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, prohibiting the immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years and denying citizenship to eligible Chinese. The measure was unique in that it was the
first federal law ever passed banning a group of immigrants solely on
the basis of race or nationality. Congress amended and renewed the law
in 1892, 1902, and 1904 to shore up remaining loopholes and created a
policy so strict that it excluded all Chinese laborers and their spouses.44
The U.S. government pursued a somewhat similar policy with
respect to Japanese immigrants. After the United States annexed Hawaii
following the Spanish-American War in 1898, a majority of the Japanese immigration flowing to the Pacific States originated from Hawaii,
not Japan. However, annexation produced alarm among white Americans who sought to maintain the racial purity of American citizenship.
Because roughly half of Hawaiis population descended from Japan and
a quarter from China, Congress soon realized the potential problem
of admitting a territory that contained a nonwhite majority. Congress
repeatedly denied Hawaiis admission as a U.S. state until 1959. President
Theodore Roosevelt responded to growing anti-Japanese restrictions in
California, in particular the San Francisco School Boards attempt to
segregate Japanese schoolchildren, by directly intervening in Japanese
immigration policy in 1906. Unlike his negative opinion of Chinese
the paper conflates American with white and facilely describes Chinese as the yellow race. As will be explored in chapters 4 and 5, Italian
mainstream newspapers, in particular, constructed an Italian American identity reliant upon the establishment of an Italian race defined as
civilized and white. Educated in U.S. racial policy for some two decades
and facing increasing attacks on their own racial suitability, prominenti
papers moved away from comparisons to nonwhite groups and increasingly made their case for inclusion based upon their civilization, whiteness, and Americanness.
It is through this lens of a progressing race-color connection that
the press weighed in on increasing calls for race-based immigration
restriction aimed at Asian Americans. Prominenti newspapers followed the debate over Chinese and Japanese restriction with keen interest as Italians continued to be targets of such restrictionist attempts.
Concerned that support for the precedent of race-based immigration
restriction could indirectly legitimize calls for Italian restriction, mainstream newspapers did criticize the concept of singling out one race for
exclusion. However, a more nuanced analysis reveals that apparent support remained mostly an exercise in self-interest. As exclusion became
increasingly tied to ones race and color, Italian language newspapers
endeavored to clearly mark the difference between Asians and Italians.
Therefore, predicating their own racial and color-based appeals for
inclusion on the insistence that Italians were civilized and white, prominenti never undertook a comparable approach with respect to Asian
Americans during this decade.
In 1913, Arturo Giovannitti, a famous Italian radical author, poet, and
activist, wrote an article for Il Proletario discussing the Alien Land Bill
and the Japanese in California. Although Giovannitti continued to work
within the confines of an economic interpretation, he stressed other
reasons for anti-immigrant policies and considered racial difference a
primary factor in Asian exclusion. Arguing that the continued influx
of Japanese into California would change not only the ethnicity of the
state but also the character of the nation, Giovannitti clearly acknowledged the role that race had played in policy makers perceptions. For
instance, he alluded to special laws singling out Asian immigrants
such as those restricting entry of Mongol women and those disallowing citizenship for Japanese immigrants. According to Giovannitti,
4
The Education of Italian Americans in Matters of Color
Education in Matters of Color
tenuous situation of southern Italian immigrants when it stated: Italians a Race Issue: Mississippi Undecided Whether They Are White or
Not; To Jim Crow Them?; Not Wanted in White Schoolsin Gubernatorial Campaign New Race Issue Bobs Up.7
Informing the decision to immigrate southward were employment
opportunities generated by the perceived labor shortage created from
the abolition of slavery and exacerbated by many African Americans
leaving former plantations. Fearing a chronic labor scarcity, plantation
owners initially tried recruiting Chinese and Scandinavian immigrants.
However, unsatisfied with the results, they turned their attention to
southern European immigrants. Concern was aroused in state governments, professional and business organizations, and railroad agents. All
these entities, together with the Italian government, collaborated in an
effort to attract southern Italian immigrants to work on sugar and cotton plantations in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. Another factor behind this recruitment drive was the white southern perception,
motivated by a virulent racist ideology, that African American laborers
were inadequate. Buttressed by scientific studies comparing Italian
and black agricultural laborers, Italians were consistently praised for
their industry, thrift, and reliability. Moreover, some white southerners
hopefully anticipated a smooth transition to immigrant labor.8
African Americans, however, reacted strongly to the prospect of
Italian labor in the South, as well as characterizations that diminished
their own labor skills and work ethic. The African American paper New
York Age commented, There is going to be only one rival to the Afro
American in the South in regards to labor and that is the Italian. . . . the
Italians are in great numbers and are doing a great deal of work that
the Afro-American ought to be doing. The article, titled Immigration
Evils, stated that usually one of the first things southern Italians learn
after entering upon these shores is prejudice against the Afro-American, and they strive to bar him from various branches of labor. . . . The
white American and Afro-American are shut out from employment on
nearly every side by foreign socialistic labor, which mostly consists of
Mafia-ites, highbinders, and anarchists.9 The fear that Italian immigration to the South would be a disastrous process for the African American was further illustrated in a letter written by J. O. Nixon to New York
Age in 1906. Nixon recommended African Americans hold the labor
the social and racial landscape of the South and, writ large, the country.15
Given the uncertain racial status of Italian immigrants, the manner in
which these newcomers violated standing racial norms provoked suspicion and often made southern Italian immigrants vulnerable to racial
violence in the American South. For example, an article in the mainstream New York Sun in 1899 contended that southern Italians are willing to live in the same quarters with the Negroes and work side by side
with them, and seem wholly destitute of that anti-negro prejudice which
is one of the distinguishing features of all the white races in the South.16
Although altercations inevitably occurred between the groups, racial tension does not appear to have been the primary source. The daughter of a
sugar planter in Louisiana observed with surprise that, given the stiletto
agility of the Italians, and the ability of the negro with the quick razor,
it was amazing that we had so few troubles.17 Following the lynching of
three Italians in Louisiana in 1896, the New Orleans Times-Democrat, one
of the major mainstream newspapers in the region, noted with alarm
that at the burial African Americans and Italians mourned together and
went home from the scene almost terror-stricken. Indeed, in the town
of Hahnville, Louisiana, many whites feared that the Italians would join
with the African Americans to seek revenge for the murders.18
Fueling this fear of a racial alliance between Italians and African
Americans was the perceived indiscriminate manner in which Italian shopkeepers, merchants, and peddlers engaged in business transactions with and sold to African American customers. In Louisiana,
commercial activity brought Italian fruit peddlers into direct contact
with African Americans. To be sure, there were practical reasons for the
business relationship. Because the native white population dominated
the retail trade in many areas of Louisiana, Italian merchants saw the
African American community as a splendid market for cheap goods.
By catering to this market, Italian peddlers established themselves in
a competitive situation.19 However, selling fruit and employing African
Americans to help them with their fruit-vending businesses or owning saloons in African American communities did not carry much
prestige for Italians with the white population. Indeed, the fact that
an economic, and hence a social, relationship was forged drew the suspicion and ire of the native white community.20 An editorial in the New
Orleans Daily Picayune warned that Italians are able to make money
out of the negroes, and the result is a sort of traffic that causes serious
disagreements with the balance of the population.21
Some in the African American community placed great emphasis
on Italian migration to the South and expressed hope that their arrival
would signal the sort of positive changes to the region feared by whites.
Archibald H. Grimke, a noted African American journalist, lawyer, and
racial activist, wrote in the influential New York Age that the influx of
thousands of southern Italians into the South was akin to an arriving
storm. However, Grimke did not believe the result would have negative
consequences for African American southerners but rather thought
Italian propensity for knee-jerk violence and biological predilection for
revenge could be propitious to the [African American] race. He noted
that at no other time in history, save the Civil War, had the South faced
such an opportunity for change, both positive and negative. Predicting
radical changes to the Souths social, political, and industrial structures,
Grimke warned the white South to look out for Vesuvius and Etna, for
the extinction of many a Southern Pompeii of prejudice, of custom, of
tradition.
For Grimke, reliance on the most blatant stereotypes of the day pertaining to southern Italian violence informed his belief that Italian migration would alter the landscape of the South. Unlike African American
labor in the South, remarked Grimke, Italian labor will not be peaceful. . . . Wronged in any way, it will fight and fight hard. . . . The Italian
laborer, unlike the Negro laborer, matches violence with violence, and
fronts the mob with the mob. He is not afraid. He is not afraid to kill in
the open, he is not afraid to kill in the dark. Grimke was impressed by an
Italian unwillingness to back down from capital, to organize strikes, and
when necessary engage in violent uprisings to protect wages. He believed
African Americans did not really lack courage, but only initiative. In
time, though, they would learn not only through the Italian example but
also by inevitable battles with the brawling newcomer. Ultimately, this
would serve African Americans well. By fighting Italians, he will get his
courage to the sticking point to fight the white man. In exaggerated language, Grimke contended that Italian old-world violence and the volcanic lawlessness of the newly found freedom of long submerged classes
would bury forever the Old South and its antiquated half barbaric racial
system and party walls of race segregation.22
Lynching of Angelo
Albano and Castenge
Ficarrotta in Tampa,
Florida, 1910. Department of Special Collections, University of
South Florida.
and there is not a hamlet in that peninsula where the fact of such gross
failure of justice is not known.24 No doubt much of the shock and discomfort over Italian lynching stemmed from an awareness that it was
overwhelmingly directed at African Americans and had become intimately associated with white violence perpetrated upon blacks. Major
newspapers such as Il Progresso covered African American lynching
extensively and published translated articles from American periodicals stating that seventy percent of all victims of lynching between 1885
and 1903 were colored.25
The commentary offered in both African American and Italian American newspapers was remarkably similar. Both sarcastically
assailed the alleged civilization of the South, noting the hypocrisy of
the best citizens who engaged in murder while upholding the racial
superiority of whites.
Italian American radicals responded to Italian and African American
lynching with full-throated critiques of American race relations and,
much like the mainstream press, sharply questioned American civilization in the process. La Questione Sociale, the foremost Italian anarchist
newspaper, perceived the lynching of African Americans as a shameful and cowardly affront to American civilization.33 Among some radicals, interracial cooperation, support, and coalition building would be
the answer to American prejudice and violence. In 1899, shortly after
The Problem of Race, Il Fuoco, September 20, 1914. This illustration created by American artist Alice Beach Winter appeared in the radical journal Il Fuoco, started by Arturo
Giovannitti in 1914.
the lynching of five Italians in Tallulah, Louisiana, the socialist Il Proletario called upon all Italians in the United States to support an organization called the National Anti-mob and Lynch Law Association. The
purpose of this support would be to vindicate our countrymen who
were barbarically lynched in the South and West and to prevent other
similar atrocities.34 However, one of the more piercing critiques called
into question some of the dominant assumptions about race, color, and
sexuality in the United States. Responding to white American justifications of lynching in 1909, Il Proletario commented:
Who do they think they are as a race, these arrogant whites? From where
do they think they come? The blacks are at least a race, but the whites
. . . how many of them are bastards? How much mixing is in their pure
blood? And how many kisses have their women asked for from the
strong and virile black servants, as have they, the white males, desired
to enjoy the warm pleasures of the black women of the sensual lips and
sinuous bodily movements?35
occurred in 1901 when a newspaper feud broke out between two of New
Yorks leading mainstream dailies, LAraldo Italiano and Il Progresso
Italo-Americano. This dustup over an attempted lynching of an Italian
in July exposed conflicting views on how closely to align with African
Americans, how the Italian press should interpret violence directed at
Italian immigrants, and whether Italians perceived themselves as part
of the white majority. It also highlighted the threat of race mixing and
miscegenation so commonly used as justification for lynching African
Americans.
On the night of July 10, 1901, John and Vincenzo Serio, brothers
from Cefalu, Sicily, and their friend Salvatore Liberto were asleep in
their hammocks on the porch of their home in Greenville, Mississippi.
Shortly after midnight they were awoken by a voice calling from the
nearby bushes. Upon asking for the person to identify himself, they
were met with rifle and pistol fire. John and Vincenzo were killed after
the first volley, their bodies riddled by half a dozen bullets. Salvatore,
hit by a bullet to the groin, was mortally wounded. It was reported at
the time of the murders that the men had been warned to leave the area
because they were suspected of stealing cattle. They fled the neighborhood, returning only after unknown parties had notified them that the
trouble had blown over and they would not harmed.45
An article in LAraldo Italiano, written by journalist Luciano Paris,
placed the murder within the context of a broader discussion of lynching. Paris, in a play on two dominant stereotypes of Italians and African Americans, claimed that he supported the practice of lynching in
special cases of habitual criminal offenses. He pointed to the hundreds
of African Americans who were lynched, shot, and burned alive each
year as proof of their continual violation of white women. Speaking of the Souths tendency to lynch Italians, Paris contended that they
were victims of mob justice stemming not from racial hatred but rather
from the Italian predilection toward violence. Although Paris opposed
state-sponsored execution, he perceived lynching as an act of popular
justice that had a legitimate role to play in maintaining order in the
United States.46 Remarkably, just a year earlier, the socialist Il Proletario
made similar comments that laid the responsibility of lynching at the
feet of its victims: As long as barbarian negroes unleash their anger
suppressed during slavery by raping young girls and Italians come to
this country to sell their labor at low prices and make justice with a
knife, the popular furor of summary justice will continue.47
The definition of lynching as an act of popular justice or as a result
of the nonconformist behavior of Italians and African Americans
was reinforced by Pariss use of a sociopsychological article written by
Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, a noted geologist and professor who served
as dean of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard. The article was
published in the English language journal International Monthly Magazine and received front-page attention from LAraldo Italiano under the
title The Psychology of Lynching.48 Shaler, who was born in Newport,
Kentucky, in 1841, recounted in his autobiography the imprint left by
African American domestic slaves who cared for him when he was a
child.49 Although most of his academic publications pertained to natural science, he wrote numerous articles about African Americans and
race throughout his career.
In the article cited by LAraldo Italiano, Shaler sought to understand
the rationale of lynch mobs. He concluded that those who lynched had
a need to feel superior to their victims; that mobs usually consisted of
the best citizens of towns; and that many who participated in lynching believed that its victims were bestial in nature and needed to be
eliminated. Shaler cited the case of hardworking white farmers in Georgia or Alabama who lived side by side with what he described as Ethiopian farmers as dark as charcoal. He noted that despite their black
skin, they would be expected to abide by the law. However, Shaler predicted, this would not be the case. Holding up the trope of white female
virtue, Shaler related the familiar story of a black man raping a white
woman. Moreover, after having gone to the police and suffering great
public dishonor, the white mans ordeal had just begun. Nine months
later a black-skinned baby was born. Shaler asks, Where is your shotgun? Where is the monster who did this? He is smoking a pipe in the
country prison. And who knows, in a few months he may be freed to
attack your family again. . . . however, the next time you will convene
one hundred of your friends who have wives, children, and sisters, and
instead of relying on the law will rely on the rope and gun.50
Shalers aim, much like Pariss, was to interpret mob violence as
a reaction to African American provocation. Shaler reverted to the
opinion of many whites of the period that African Americans needed
to be kept in check because they could not control their own brutish
sexual behavior. In effect, it was the white man who was the victim in
this scenario. This kind of rationale appeared in unison with the opinions expressed in LAraldo Italiano. In fact, the paper proclaimed that
Shalers study gives persuasive reasons to explain how and why white
Americans have developed certain characteristics and qualities. . . . ever
since we have learned and understood the English language, have we
found a writer who has examined the American moral plague of lynching with more astuteness than Professor Shaler?51
When the LAraldo Italiano expressed these views in the context of
the lynching of Italians in Mississippi, Il Progresso Italo-Americano
launched an all-out attack against what it considered anti-Italian, as
well as inhumane, opinions. An editorial in Il Progresso described Pariss acceptance of lynching as insane and cannibalistic. The paper considered LAraldo Italianos refusal to condemn this lynching a disgrace
and rejected the indecent words written about the two dead men.52
Il Progressos defense of the two Italians, as well as its opposition to
the sort of mob violence justified by LAraldo Italiano and Shaler, was
consistent with its reaction to previous crimes of this sort. Moreover,
the clash reflected a wider dispute among New Yorks Italian language
mainstream newspapers related to economic competition, leadership
status, and wider acceptance among the native white population. These
disputes were played out in the Italian language press and the community and often spilled over into the English language press. Carlo
Barsotti, owner of Il Progresso, often found himself at the center of the
controversy and was widely ridiculed by his competitors for putting his
own interests above those of the Italian community and promoting a
false Italian patriotism among immigrants.53
By invoking Shalers analysis, LAraldo clearly aligned itself with a
white American narrative that defended lynching as necessary to protect white citizens from dangerous black men. While Shalers argument focused on African Americans, Pariss inclusion of Italians would
ironically position these immigrants well below white Americans in
status. His suggestion that Italians should Americanize, and in essence
avert comparisons with African Americans, bespoke their indeterminate racial status.54 In fact, Paris posited a simile of lynching as a disease plaguing the United States just as yellow fever plagued Brazil. He
explained that those who ventured to Brazil did so willingly and, despite
taking precautions, ran the risk of contracting yellow fever. More fortunate, he said, are those, instead, who come to the United States and
can assure themselves immunity from lynch law just by living according to the way they see a great majority of the good citizens living. The
major difference between yellow fever and lynching lies in the fact that
the former strikes at random, while the latter instead strikes only those
who seek it.55 According to Paris, if Italian immigrants chose to flout
convention, they would pay a price. Unlike blacks, they had a choice,
and it was incumbent upon them to conform or face the wrath of
white oppression. For LAraldo Italiano, the most successful road to
acceptance and inclusion was not through the promotion of a vibrant
and unapologetic Italian racial identity but through overt demonstrations of white American values. And, although these paths may have
briefly diverged at the time, by 1919 both were intimately connected and
essential to an emerging Italian identity as white and American.
1900. The riot broke out between whites and blacks in New York City
between Thirty-Fourth and Forty-Third Streets along Seventh Avenue,
precipitated by neighborhood whites who sought revenge for the murder of a white police officer. After the policemans funeral, violence
erupted and a large number of people started hunting for Blacks and
upon finding them began to beat them; even newspaper sellers ran after
Negroes.61
Il Progresso reported that the riot was not an isolated incident. By
nightfall other disorders had exploded all over the city, including the
foiled lynching of a black man who was then chased by an angry mob of
whites up Eighth Avenue and eventually forced to jump off a streetcar
to safety. A man named Schwartz was identified as the ringleader who
forced the streetcar to stop by hurling a rock and hitting the motorman.
Before he could throw another stone, Schwartz was physically subdued
by the police and cursed and stoned by an angry mob. At this point
300 police officers arrived to quell the disorder, although further violence ensued between police officers and crowd members. According to
Il Progresso, At 12:00 midnight, the streets were empty except for police
officers, noting that out of the seventy-two people wounded in the riot,
almost all were African Americans.62 The police reportedly beat many
and were criticized for using excessive force on both blacks and whites.
However, of the twenty-seven people arrested, only four were whites.
When they were brought to a West Side court, Il Progresso stated, even
Judge Cornell was amazed that only four white people were arrested
after such a grave disorder provoked by whites, saying theres no need
to beat all Negroes after only one of them has committed a crime.
The newspaper hoped that these scenes, which are a black eye on one
of the most civilized cities, would not be repeated. Summing up the
days sordid events, Il Progresso described how a man that was full
of livid hatred for the descendants of Ham made his way towards the
two beaten Negroes with a rope in his hands and began yelling Lynch
them, lynch them!! The rope was put around the Negros neck and the
drunken people started to pull the poor black who was blameless and
had not done anything wrong, except for having a different skin color
than his oppressor.63 Il Progressos explicit conflation of neighborhood
whites and civilized New York City as oppressors of blacks reflected
an understanding that race and skin color remained intimately related.
In addition to its critique of white American violence, the mainstream press also chose to highlight prominent Americans closely associated with the narrative arc of African American history as arbiters of
civil morality. For example, Abraham Lincoln garnered special attention for his role in emancipating black slaves and served as a powerful symbol in juxtaposition to contemporary injustice. According to
La Questione Sociale, Lincoln represented the American democratic
republic. . . . Lincoln was a martyr because he defended the abolition
of Negro slavery. And when he died, Lincoln said he could die happy
because he freed one and a half million human beings.64 When Italian anarchists extended their analysis of racial injustice beyond class
analysis and identified the ideology of white supremacy as the foundation of oppression, it was Lincoln who was invoked to pass judgment.
The eternal problem in America is the racial problem, declared La
Questione Sociale. The United States wants to give freedom, only in
words, to the Negro people, but they dont want to agree that this race
has to be treated equal to the white race. . . . Instead here is a solution posed by the Governorone that would submit the black race to
whites and make them slaves. Oh, what would the spirit of Lincoln say
about this?65 The socialist Il Proletario criticized American imperialist forays into the Philippines by invoking Lincolns legacy. Describing
poor Lincoln as the man who gave so much to redeem blacks from
slavery, the paper surmised that Lincoln would have been saddened to
see his descendants subjugate people fighting for their own independence.66 Italian American radicals often relied on Lincolns legacy as
the moral yardstick by which American behavior should be measured,
and the anniversary of his birthday usually elicited mention in the radical press.67
As segregation solidified in the American South and became commonplace in the North at the turn of the twentieth century, African
American leaders such as W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington
earned regular coverage. Between 1900 and 1907, DuBois and Washington had offered alternative visions for racial uplift, published influential
books such as Souls of Black Folk, started institutions such as the Tuskegee Institute, and created organizations such as the Niagara Movement,
the precursor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Amid coverage of Italian immigrants, Italian
language newspapers frequently incorporated issues such as segregation, racial coexistence, and the roles played by leaders such as Washington and DuBois.
In 1901, the anarchist La Questione Sociale chided white Americans
who were alarmed by President Theodore Roosevelts White House
lunch with African American leader Booker T. Washington. The paper
remarked how ignorant Americans would prefer it if Roosevelt had
invited rich aristocrats that suck the blood from laboring classes rather
than this educated black man.68 An article titled Jim Crow in Il Progresso covered Booker T. Washingtons speech to the National Negro
Business League at its annual convention in New York City. The newspaper described Washington as a Black Moses and expressed admiration for his ability to overcome racial obstacles and create institutions
such as Tuskegee. Once again reflecting the newspapers conflation of
race and color, Il Progresso noted that although Washington was hailed
as one of the great leaders of the black race, he was surprisingly less well
known than Emperor Menelik of Ethiopia.69
The primary topic of his remarks, Il Progresso reported, was The
South to the Negroes. According to Il Progresso, Jim Crow, the derisive name that was attached to African Americans in the United States
thirty-five years after Uncle Toms Cabin was published and the Civil
War ended, was supported by the assumption, made by Charles Darwin, that the negro was the intermediary between man and beast. Very
methodically, Il Progresso provided examples illustrating prejudices of
the American South with respect to African Americans: the existence
of laws prohibiting the marriage of blacks and whites in Alabama; a
post office that was closed because its director was African American;
the mayor of Charleston blocking the nomination of an African American as tax collector because of his skin color; and, finally, the story of
the Irish woman in an Indianapolis hotel who had received a thousand
dollars for her heroic stand in refusing to make the bed of Booker
T. Washington. Building upon a sustained criticism of American racial
structuresa criticism that included the treatment not only of Italian
immigrants but also of marginalized groups such as African AmericansIl Progresso lamented racisms chilling expediency. African Americans were excluded from the process of social, political, and economic
justice, with skin color being the sole determinant for the assignment of
5
Defending Italian American Civility, Asserting Whiteness
Defending Italian American Civility
In 1909, the Citizen, a Santa Rosa, California, newspaper, published statistics listing individuals arrested for public drunkenness. The data were
arranged according to group identity, and the paper separated what it
called the white majority from Italians and Indians. The Reverend
J. M. Cassin of California was so incensed by the papers characterization of Italians that he wrote a letter to another Santa Rosa newspaper,
the Press Democrat, expressing his surprise and anger that Italians were
not considered part of the white race. Declaring this an insult towards
Italians, Cassin sarcastically chided the author of the article by noting,
Italy was the gentle lady of the world, the leader in the arts when this
writers country [the United States] was still primitive and had not yet
been discovered.1
Where once they had portrayed Italians as distinct from the white
majority, Italian language mainstream newspapers such as Il Progresso
Italo-Americano now aggressively responded to this perceived smear.
Seeing the Italian race as both civilized and white, many Italian language newspapers believed Americans could learn much from Italians
example. In 1909, Reverend Cassins outrage was informed by a feeling
that Italian immigrants continued to be defined as outside, or separate
from, the white majority. He was indignant at the implication that he
possessed dark skin and included a poem by an American poet to
clarify why some Italian immigrants were so grossly mischaracterized:
His hair is curly and black, his face is tan, his brow is covered with
honest sweat, and he earns what he can. He looks the whole world in
the eye, because he knows he is indebted to no one.2 Acknowledging
what others had described as olive, or swarthy, skin, Cassin attributes
>>105
this dark complexion to the tanning Italians experienced while working under the sun of Sonoma County. Further, the popular prejudicial
belief of a connection between nonwhite races and inherent laziness
and indolence is evident in Cassins surprise that such an insult could
be levied at these industrious and hard working people. For Cassin,
the exclusion of Italians from the white race was not only an egregious
mistake but also, within the context of American racial hierarchies, an
atrocious and unmerited insult. Il Progresso lauded Cassin and chose
to print excerpts from his letter. Referring to the nativist vitriol that had
been commonly directed toward these new immigrants from southern Italy, Il Progresso noted that this was not the first time American
papers had insulted Italians. Never before, however, had these insults
been hurled with so much malice and prejudice of race and nationality
like the article published in the Santa Rosa paper. Entitling the article
Italians and the White Race, Il Progresso agreed with Cassins assessment that the exclusion of Italians from the white race constituted an
insult to our nationality.3
This is not to suggest that Il Progressos forceful assertion of Italian
whiteness in 1909 signified a watershed moment. For example, newspapers continued publishing articles criticizing the bankruptcy of
American racial justice, although much of the most strident commentary appeared in the Italian American radical press.4 For example, in
1916, Il Proletario lauded an eleven-year-old African American boy who
refused to salute the American flag at his school. The paper commended
the boys brave action and stated that his words defied the arrogance
with which Americans believe in their countrys representation of all
humanity . . . words that should and could be found on the mouths
of many black men . . . who are treated like animals of the lowest species.5 For Italian language mainstream newspapers, however, articles
lacked the harsh criticism of white supremacy so prevalent during the
first three decades of mass immigration. Instead, defending Italian
nationality, race, and color marked a common theme throughout the
decade. During the period 1909 through 1919, major Italian language
mainstream newspapers forcefully constructed an identity as Italian,
American, and white built upon well-worn notions of Italian civilization and informed by their own checkered immigrant experience with
race and color. Over time, Italian American exposure to, and education
The Unrestricted Dumping Ground, Judge, June 6, 1903. Popular illustrations such as
this one, published in the political magazine Judge, depicted European immigrants as subhuman and swarthy. The imagery played upon contemporary stereotypes viewing Italians
as prone to criminality and violence. In particular, the vermin washing ashore adorn hats
labeled Mafia and carry swords labeled assassination.
in, the rigid color line of black and white in the United States, as well
as the impact of external factors such as immigration restriction and
World War I, narrowed Italian American conceptions of race and color
to a more basic rendering of black and white, civilized and savage. Cognizant of the strong association between ones racial grouping and ones
defined whiteness or nonwhiteness, newspapers such as Il Progresso
distanced Italian Americans from any taint of nonwhiteness and constructed a simplistic, and rigid, conception that reduced full inclusion
to a matter of black and white.
Reflecting this shift, criticism of white Americans would instead
revolve around their reluctance to fully incorporate Italian immigrants
into the white American race rather than white racial oppression of
African Americans. Consistent with this argument, Italian language
mainstream newspapers discontinued comparisons to African Americans and viewed any outside attempts to posit otherwise as extremely
assertions that Italians did not occupy the upper rungs of the racial ladder.8 Rooted in the earliest stages of the migrant experience, the Italian press actively maintained Italian civility, coupled with the Italian
desire to demonstrate to Americans they belonged. This conversation
over Italian immigrant inclusion or exclusion was not a one-way discussion. Although white Americans often defined Italians as racially
inferior, swarthy, and incapable of successfully assimilating into American society, Italian immigrants sought to influence, and in many cases
reshape, their own Italian American identity. For the Italian language
mainstream press, a strong desire to promote the decent, reputable
aspects of Italian civilization served as a buffer to negative American
portrayals depicting Italians as criminal, dangerous, or radical. In many
ways, this defensive reaction to a harsh American perception fostered
within Italian immigrants a sense of a greater italianita than they ever
experienced in their homeland. Newspapers frequently carried articles
covering any instance when an American publicly praised immigrants
for their industriousness or decency. For instance, events within the
colony as mundane as an appearance by Dr. Melville Knox Bailey at
Saint Michaels Church on the West Side of Manhattan in January 1906
garnered front-page attention. According to Bailey, once Americans
find out Italian immigrants are cultured people it would become easier
for both to be friendly.9
By the early 1900s, Italian language mainstream newspapers often
perceived assimilation as a process in which both host and immigrant
must play vital roles if success was to be achieved. To that end, the press
proceeded along multiple but related paths to inform countrymen and
countrywomen, as well as Americans, that Italian immigrants could
successfully integrate into the Republic. Often, articles were littered
with self-congratulatory references to Italian immigrants or Italian civilization, accompanied by recommendations that Italians adapt to their
new home. Some newspapers such as La Luce in Utica, New York, published articles in English to fully impress upon any American readers
that their aim was sincere. One article recounted how many immigrants
had experienced success in their new home, whether building banks or
owning them. It also reminded Americans of Italys storied past with
respect to the arts, literature, and music, naming the ever-present Dante
and Puccini. According to La Luce, a lack of familiarity was the root of
From the 1880s onward, Italian language newspapers stridently criticized Americans for their treatment of Italian immigrants, especially in
instances of lynching, and America was sarcastically mocked within the
pages of Italian language newspapers for savagery only befitting central
Africans or Native Americans. The assumption that the United States
engaged in behavior unbecoming of a civilized nation informed the
moral outrage and shock over lynching. Premised on the assumption
that America was a leading, if not the leading, civilized nation in the
world, most Italians pondered how heinous offenses such as lynching
could be committed.15 How can they be the most civilized people in the
world if they lynch people? asked Il Progresso. Lynching only occurs
in uncivilized nations. . . . And if it is a civilized nation, she [America]
has a duty to educate the barbarians from the South.16 Angry and disappointed Italian Americans targeted American claims of bearing the
white mans burden and transporting civilization to unenlightened
nations as hypocritical. Further, pointing to the uncivilized behavior
rampant within American borders, the press noted the irony in American missionary excursions into China and central Africa.17 Echoing earlier Italian press sentiment, the Italian foreign minister railed that the
violent incidents perpetrated upon Italian subjects in the United States
were crimes not only against Italians but against the interests and
laws of civilization.18 In this context, a revealing discussion of slavery
emerged in articles from the Italian press reprinted in Italian American
newspapers. From Milan, the daily Il Secolo wrote that we are admirers
of the great institutions of the United States such as individual liberty,
but we condemn the savage actions that a great nation has been unable
to escape from. . . . We Italians on this side of the ocean are much less
aggressive and more civilized.19
Italian language papers would continue to maintain Italian civility
and assail, when necessary, American civility throughout the period
1910 through 1920. However, unlike in the early decades of mass immigration, they now forcefully presented a redefinition of America and
Italian Americans. They argued their case for full inclusion by claiming
their bona fides as not only a civilized race but a white one. In doing so,
their sympathy for African Americans would lessen considerably, along
with their willingness to equate their experience with that of blacks.
the problem.23 However, the sense that Italy was being singled out for
exclusion by repeated attempts to pass literacy tests eventually sparked
an outpouring of criticism within the mainstream press. Informed by
economic, political, and moral concerns, after 1911 the Italian language
press responded with a spirited racial defense of continued Italian
immigration. For example, La Luce published a call to arms to demand
that President William Taft veto the Burnett bill, claiming that it was
nothing but a modified version of the Dillingham report. Calling the
law a social injustice, La Luce questioned the motives of restrictionists and asked if Americans realized that singling out Italians and limiting their numbers would retard the industrial progress of the nation.24
The weekly newspaper Il Cittadino published The Literacy Test Again,
an article in English in the papers regular front-page section titled
To Our American Readers. In it, the paper echoed these sentiments
and added that this bill would damage Americas reputation as a real
land of opportunity and refuge for unfortunate men willing and able
to better their condition.25 This section of the paper often published
articles that countered restrictionist arguments, discussed the nature of
citizenship, or expounded on the advantageous qualities of Italians, and
throughout the years 1915 to 1917 it voiced displeasure not with the goals
but with the methods of Americanization.
In response to external forces impugning their suitability for inclusion, their fitness for citizenship, and in effect their racial qualifications,
the Italian language press often insisted that the burden be placed on
America for encouraging an environment where Italian immigrants
remained isolated, thereby fostering an impression of political apathy. Who has made or is making a serious effort, proportionate to the
magnitude of the problem, exhorted Il Cittadino, to tell the immigrant all the things about the history, laws, institutions and purposes
of this country, which very strangely, he is expected to know? The
newspaper pointed to an example from California as a fine lesson to
our American friends of what was necessary to complete the transformation from Italian to American. Rather than being met with hostility and prejudice, Italians, if only sympathetically treated and properly
understood, would no doubt make much better citizens and would
feel much more inclined to love this country and identify their interests
with hers.26 Indeed, the real problem with Americanizing the Italian
immigrant did not lie with the motivations and qualities of Italians.27
Rather, the general belief among the Italians, according to Il Cittadino,
was that he was not a persona grata among the American people.28
One of the critical principles at the foundation of opposition to
restriction laws was a powerful and proactive argument for the benefits
and advantages of the Italian race. Faced with the prospect of dwindling
numbers, Italian language newspapers crafted an argument that not
only maintained Italian contributions to America but smugly reminded
Americans of their own brief history. For example, on Columbus Day
in 1916, Il Cittadino used the occasion to defend Italian immigrants, sarcastically remarking that they find themselves among a people who do
not seem to even care to understand them . . . and who either do not
know, or do not credit the Italians with the grandeur of their history
and their ancestry: who either know not or forget that their being here
in America themselves is due to the genius of one of the Italian race.29
Italys membership in the Allied forces fighting against Germany during World War I served to advance and bolster Italian American claims
of civilization. Although American entry into the war in April 1917
would intensify the focus on hyphenated Americans and unleash wartime propaganda, the Italian press perceived the United States alliance
with Italy as an opportune moment to capitalize on American rhetoric
extolling the virtues of its wartime ally. Many in the Italian American
press remained hopeful that World War I would serve as a watershed
moment for crystallizing their identity as Italians and Americans.
In preparation for what would be the third anniversary of Italian
participation in the war against Germany, Charles Evans Hughes, the
president of the Italy America Society, sent a telegram to the governor
of every state and the mayors of Americas eighty most important cities notifying those officials that May 24 would be a day of appreciation
for all that Italy had done in the war. The telegram went on to suggest
that everyone bring a flower to the various festivities planned in each
state and write a letter of appreciation to a friend in Italy.30 According to
Italian language mainstream newspapers such as Il Progresso, the event,
which was under the patronage of President Wilson and expected to
assume the importance of a great national event, presented Italians
with a chance to make another first impression. Il Progresso advised its
readers that Italy-America Day would be a day of apotheosis for our
distanced the Italian American experience from that of African Americans in a variety of ways.
Discussing the racial problem of the hyphen in the United States,
Il Cittadino explored whether there existed a distinct American race.
The paper offered its own racial taxonomy, not unlike those put forth
by many during this period of scientific racism, claiming that of the
100 million people in the country, 85 percent belong to the Caucasian
race, which predominates in Europe, and fifteen percent belong to the
Mongolic, Indian, and above all African races.36 Included within their
definition of the Caucasian race was the subgrouping labeled Latins in
which they located Italians, both northern and southern. Indeed, the
paper considered any racial separation between northern and southern
Italians on the part of immigration authorities as having no racial value,
but simply serving geographic purposes. In maintaining the whiteness
of Italians, the paper sustained its conception of American as white
when it bluntly stated it is taken for granted that, when we speak of
the American nation as a racial unit, we mean to neglect entirely the
negro element. The American nation is a white nation and, as such, we
think of it and consider it.37 According to Desmond King, the perception of America as white and Protestant was apparent to observers in
the 1910s and 1920s when the Americanization as assimilation movement was at its zenith. . . . the crucial point is how the notion of AngloSaxon, effected in Americanization, defined some groups in and others
out of the dominant conception of U.S. national identity.38 The immigration debate offered an opportunity to redefine who was an American
and provided newspapers such as Il Cittadino and Il Progresso a critical
opportunity to stress to white Americans that Italians were integral to a
master narrative of white supremacy.
In 1916, Il Cittadino published an eight-part series in English titled
The Facts Concerning Immigration in the United States written by
the papers editor Alberto Pecorini. These articles appeared on the
front page in a section titled To Our American Readers. Presented
as polemics against pro-restriction arguments that cited the negative
impact of immigrants upon American cities, employment, and racial
character, the articles usually ran two to three full-length columns.
Each essay concluded with accusations of moral turpitude on the part
of those Americans who sought to bar hardworking Italians. In one
part, focused on the history of American immigration, the paper cleverly maintained a constant thread connecting the history of old and
new immigrants. Both, it argued, were valuable additions. It is the
immigrant again, who has given the United States its dominating place
in the world, and in this last case it has been the immigrant of that particular class which is called by many people undesirable.39
In an explicit article titled A Social Phenomenon of All Times,
the newspaper panned immigration restrictionists who feared southern Italians would dilute the American race and maintained that the
fundamental value of these immigrants went beyond their economic
and social contributions to American society. Refashioning restrictionist claims that questioned Italian immigrant fitness for American
citizenship, Il Cittadino not only asserted their suitability for inclusion
but maintained that their continued immigration should rest above
all upon their whiteness. Thus, the newspaper explicitly constructed
a bipolar landscape, pitting white Americans, including Italian immigrants, against African Americans:
There remains the unshakeable fact that European immigration has preserved and still preserves the United States of America as a field of development for the white race. . . . From the close of the civil war to the present time there have come into the United States about twenty five million
white immigrants from Europe; these, with their children, constitute today
two thirds of the white population of the country. The ratio of the negro to
the white race in this country is now only ten percent, a relatively unimportant proportion: without European immigration it would probably be
twenty five percent and the United States of America would run the very
serious danger of becoming a nation of mixed blood. . . . If in the future
the day should come when the United States shall be compelled to assert
again its character as a white nation, those who will bear the consequences
of the assertion and those who will possibly have to fight to make it, will
be numerically only to a very insignificant extent descendants of the first
British settlers of three centuries ago and in an overwhelming majority the
children of European immigrants of the last two or three generations.40
As Italian language newspapers defended immigrants from American racial assaults in the form of restrictions and Americanization
The Adventures of Gianduiotto, Il Giornale Italiano, March 7, 1915. Gianduiotto asks the
Italian boys to play, but instead they play a trick on him and catapult him over the fence.
For example, the paper attacked certain childrens textbooks for describing Italians as having dark skin and dark eyes. It accused the authors
not only of peddling malignant lies poisoning young minds but also of
engaging in a conspiracy against a great people.50
As Orlando Patterson has maintained, historically,
those who were visibly or vaguely white eagerly sought membership
within the Caucasian chalk circle and were usually welcomed as long as
they could prove no trace of African blood. . . . indeed, whiteness,
or rather non-blackness, became a powerful unifying force. . . . swarthy Sicilians and Arabs now found themselves one with blond Northern
Europeans, Irish Catholics with English Protestants, formerly persecuted Jews with Gentilesall were united in the great white republic
of America by virtue simply of not being tainted by one drop of the
despised Afro-American blood.51
Commentary condemning the violence that arose from white American racism, which had been common before the World War I period,
became much more infrequent and more muted by 1920. Il Progressos
coverage of the 1915 lynching of Giuseppe Speranza, a Sicilian immigrant residing in Johnston City, Illinois, serves as a useful example of
the change in tone and substance of press coverage. The paper explicitly stated Italians were a different color from blacks, even though it
repeated its mantra that white American racism had brutally affected
African Americans. Il Progressos criticism extended to Italian Americans for not forcefully speaking out to prevent Italians from falling victim to the same barbarous treatment. Il Progresso rooted the murder
in its own communitys failure to prevent crimes of this sort. To the
extent that they faced similar brutalities, such as lynching, the newspaper acknowledged that the two worlds of Italian American and African
American were interrelated. But it also acknowledged how unpopular
this link had become by its compulsion to stress differences in color.
We have always condemned lynching, the paper asserted, even when
the victims were a different color from us and were erroneously thought
to be inferior from the same population of Americans.52
By 1918, one could read a pseudodefense of lynching in the Italian language press that paralleled anything published in southern
battle to save the white race. Il Progresso described the riot as a disorder of race hatred between blacks and whites, and in the evolving simplicity of Italian American racial construction, the two slain men were
firmly planted on the dominant side in the struggle of white against
black.
not only by appealing to the virtues of the Italian race but also by proving Italians whiteness. Reminiscent of Toni Morrisons observation that
European immigrants became American by buying into the notion
of American blacks as the real aliens, Italian Americans argued that
it would be their children who would help sustain an enduring form
of American whiteness.62 Noting that the differences separating Americans and Italians paled in comparison to those separating white Americans and African Americans, Italian Americans increasingly situated
themselves as part of the racial solution rather than the problem.
Epilogue
Following in the footsteps of prominenti such as Carlo Barsotti, Generoso Pope purchased Il Progresso Italo-Americano in 1928 for a little
more than $2 million. He proceeded to amass an impressive media
empire of newspapers and radio stations, including purchasing New
York Citys Bolletino della Sera and WHOM, using these instruments
to exhort Italians to learn English, naturalize, and register to vote.1
Although Popes stature increased within the community and city, over
the next few decades the importance of the Italian language press lessened. With immigration restriction preventing a new influx of Italians,
along with a maturing second and third generation, the vital role played
by Italian language newspapers grew more unnecessary for predominantly English-speaking Italian American communities.
Although the Italian American embrace of whiteness had been well
under way, the interwar period expedited the process.2 In the 1920s and
1930s, Benito Mussolinis Fascist regime in Italy, his colonial expansionism, and the impact of Fascism on the Italian American community
emboldened Italian American assertions of whiteness.3 Community
leaders, Italian Americans generally, and major Italian American dailies trumpeted the glory of Fascism and Mussolini, spurred on by the
widespread admiration that Mussolini won among Americans. Fascism
solidified the process of community formation among Italian Americans that had begun earlier, giving Italian Americans symbols of pride
and self-confidence that they had previously lacked. Similar to mainstream newspapers during the period 1910 through 1920, Mussolini and
Fascism reinforced Italian notions of civilization and provided Italian
Americans a sense of pride in their race.
>>129
130<<Epilogue
Epilogue >>131
described the complexion of Italian resident aliens as dark and swarthy suggests the degree to which Italian American whiteness remained
fluid. However, with wartime participation and the eventual shedding
of enemy alien status, Italian American status slowly improved.7
The interaction between Italian Americans and African Americans
after World War II came within the context of a changing America.
Emerging from the Great Depression and World War II, and buoyed
by government programs such as the GI Bill, many Italian Americans
acquired college degrees and, along with millions of other, predominantly white, Americans, flocked to suburban housing developments.
For those who stayed in the old neighborhoods, federal and state housing programs designed to offer low-income populations better housing
increased the number of African American residents and served as a
convenient scapegoat for what appeared to them as declining neighborhoods. By the 1960s, white ethnic hostility toward civil rights militancy,
a deteriorating war in Vietnam, government antipoverty measures and
programs such as school busing, and a stagnating economy informed
what has become known as the white ethnic backlash.
In New York City, Mario Procaccino, the Democratic candidate for
mayor in 1969, provided a case study through which to further understand this shift toward pan-ethnic whiteness and victimization. As African Americans and liberal opponents deemed Procaccinos rhetoric
racist and reactionary, the Italian-born Procaccino appeared perplexed
and frustrated over these attacks. On the campaign trail in Harlem,
Procaccino replied to a critic, I know what discrimination means. . . .
Ive suffered as much as any of you.8 Despite suffering hardship as an
Italian immigrant, Procaccino, like many other Italian Americans by this
period, remained unwilling to recognize or admit the benefits received
through whiteness.9 Ignoring their own reliance on governmental assistance during the New Deal and after World War II, many working-class
Italian Americans viewed Great Society programs as unnecessary and
unfair handouts to African Americans funded by white working-class
tax dollars. Instead, Italian Americans created an ethnic myth whereby
European immigrant achievement resulted solely from hard work. Saturated in racially informed stereotypes, African Americans emerged
as the polar opposite to this immigrant success story. Certainly, Italian Americans did not hold a monopoly on hostility toward African
132<<Epilogue
Americans during this period. Policies such as busing and quotas served
as further evidence to white ethnics, in general, that their histories
remained free of the sort of government handouts so maligned and connected in their minds with blackness. In many ways, by the 1960s and
1970s, Italian Americans had fully distanced themselves from a past of
racial inbetweeness.
On June 22, 1982, only thirteen years after Mario Procaccino ran for
mayor of New York City, a mob of Italian American teenagers murdered Willie Turks, an African American transit worker, in Gravesend,
Brooklyn. At the sentencing of the four convicted murderers, Judge
Sybil Hart Kooper stated in disgust, There was a lynch mob on Avenue
X that night. The only thing missing was a rope and a tree. The Turks
murder would be the first of three high-profile murders involving Italian American youths and African Americans in the 1980s. The killing
of Michael Griffith in Howard Beach, Queens, in 1986 and the killing
of Yusef Hawkins in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, three years later exposed
to the nation what appeared to be a long-simmering fear of, and aversion to, African Americans. Following Hawkinss killing on August 23,
1989, protesters filled the streets of Bensonhurst, seeking justice for a
heinous racial crime. Hawkins had been shot by a mob of Italian American boys protecting their turf from a perceived invader. As African
Americans marched through the streets of the mostly Italian American
neighborhood, they were greeted in some instances by racial taunts and
displays of watermelons. Although not all Italian Americans condoned
or engaged in this type of bigotry, in the minds of many New Yorkers, these acts came to define the current relationship between Italian
Americans and African Americans.10
Sadly, another incident in Howard Beach in 2005 provoked similar
thoughts and uncomfortably raised many of the same issues grappled
with almost twenty years earlier. On June 29, a group of white men
attacked three African American men in what appeared to be a terrible hate crime. The brutal altercation left Glenn Moore in serious
condition with injuries to his head, back, and legs, sustained primarily
from an aluminum baseball bat wielded by nineteen-year-old Nicholas Minucci, known in the neighborhood as Fat Nick. According to
the New York Times, Minucci told investigators that after the beating,
his companion yelled at the victims, This is what you get if you want
Epilogue >>133
Notes
Working Class History (London: Verso, 1994); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and
Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century
America (London: Verso, 1990); Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White
Race, vol. 1, Racial Oppression and Social Control (London: Verso, 1994); Eric
Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (London: Oxford University Press, 1993); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White
(New York: Routledge, 1995); Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters:
The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993); Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Vron Ware,
Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London: Verso, 1992); Ian
F. Haney Lpez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: NYU
Press, 1996); Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says
about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994).
11. See, for example, Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and
American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Jennifer
Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, eds., Are Italians White? How Race Is Made
in America (New York: Routledge, 2003); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness
of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Robert Orsi, The Religious Boundaries of an Inbetween People: Street Feste and the Problem of the Dark-Skinned
Other in Italian Harlem, 19201990, American Quarterly 44 (1992): 313347;
David R. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How Americas Immigrants Became
White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic
Books, 2005); David R. Roediger and James Barrett, Inbetween Peoples: Race,
Nationality and the New Immigrant Working Class, Journal of American Ethnic History 16 (1997): 2829; Rudolph Vecoli, Are Italian Americans Just White
Folks?, Italian Americana 13 (1995): 149161.
12. See Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 60; John Higham, Strangers in the
Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1955); Roediger, Working toward Whiteness, 1213.
13. Haney Lpez, White by Law, 27.
14. Orsi, Religious Boundaries of an Inbetween People, 318.
15. Roediger and Barrett, Inbetween Peoples, 29.
16. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 67.
17. Guglielmo, White on Arrival, 8.
18. Ibid., 7
19. New York Sun, August 4, 1899; New York Times, November 28, 1892.
20. Roediger has argued that to uphold the category of inbetweeness one must
accept the messiness of the racial order in which immigrants found themselves, and placed themselves. See Roediger, Working toward Whiteness, 1213,
37.
21. Guterl, Color of Race in America, 13.
138<<Notes to Chapter 1
Economic Standing, the Publications They Support, with Rates, Circulation and
Other Authentic Data for the Guidance of Advertising Agencies, and Advertisers
(New York: American Association of Foreign Language Newspapers, 1923), sec.
D, 3132; population figures from U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of
the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920: State Compendium: New
York (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1924), table 12, p. 54; and
Seidman, Foreign Language Market in America, sec. D, 27; Jewish press circulation numbers from N. W. Ayer & Sons, American Newspaper Annual and Directory: A Catalogue of American Newspapers (Philadelphia: Newspaper Advertising
Agents, 1920), 652689; also see Robert Park, The Immigrant Press and Its Control
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1922), 91.
30. May M. Sweet, The Italian Immigrant and His Reading (Chicago: American
Library Association: 1925), 17.
31. See Eliot Lord, John J. D. Trenor, and Samuel J. Barrows, The Italian in America
(New York: B. F. Buck, 1905), 245246.
32. George La Piana, What Do the Italians in America Read (1917), George La
Piana Papers, Harvard Theological Library, Manuscripts, 15.
33. See Vogel, The Black Press, 23.
Notes to Chapter 1
1. New York Times, April 3, 1927. An apocryphal story about Il Progressos origin
suggested that Barsottis decision to enter the publishing business ostensibly
revolved around Pietro Baldo, an Italian immigrant convicted of murder in
1879. Aggrieved by what he perceived as a tepid defense of his convicted countryman by LEco dItalia (the Echo of Italy), the only Italian language newspaper
serving a relatively small community of Italian immigrants in New York City,
Barsotti wrote a letter of protest to the paper. When the newspaper ignored the
letter, an insulted Barsotti decided to start Il Progresso, justified by his conviction that LEco dItalia was not defending and protecting the honor and integrity
of Italians living in the United States.
2. George Pozzetta, The Italians of New York City, 18901914 (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 1971), 242243.
3. Klaus Bruhn Jensen and Nicholas W. Jankowski, eds., A Handbook of Qualitative
Methodologies for Mass Communications Research (New York: Routledge, 1991),
18; see Vogel, The Black Press, 23.
4. In the past two decades, significant shifts have taken place in the interpretations
of southern Italy. Scholarship has begun to move away from interpretations
that attempt to explain the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of southern Italy
through a comparison with northern Italy. This approach, known as meridionalismo, evolved shortly after Italian unification as intellectuals strove to explain the
reasons behind the Souths apparent underdevelopment in relation to the North.
These interpretations were extremely influential in the subsequent historiography
on what became known as the southern problem. For example, the contrast
140<<Notes to Chapter 1
13. U.S. Congress, House, Report of the Industrial Commission, vol. 15, Immigration,
57th Cong., 1st sess., 1901, H.R. 184, 465. See also Pozzetta, Italians of New York
City, 7176.
14. According to John Mariano, by 1918, the Italian colonies in New York City
numbered 310,000 in Manhattan; 115,000 in the Bronx; 20,000 in Richmond
(Staten Island); 235,000 in Brooklyn; and 55,000 in Queens. See John Mariano,
The Italian Contribution to American Democracy (Boston: Christopher Publishing House, 1921), 1922.
15. See Pozzetta, Italians of New York City, 97101; Mariano, Italian Contribution
to American Democracy, 1922.
16. Mariano, Italian Contribution to American Democracy, 19; Pozzetta, Italians of
New York City, 103.
17. Robert Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 18801950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 16.
18. Mariano, Italian Contribution to American Democracy, 33.
19. Regarding skilled workers, between 1899 and 1910, 77 percent of southern Italians were employed in the category Laborers, including Farmers; for northern
Italians this figure was 66.5 percent. The category Skilled Occupations showed
the numbers to be 14.6 percent and 20.4 percent, respectively. See Mariano, Italian Contribution to American Democracy, 32; also see Pozzetta, Italians of New
York City, 9394; Kessner, Golden Door.
20. Mariano, Italian Contribution to American Democracy, 154.
21. Ibid.; quoted in Edwin Fenton, Immigrants and Unions: A Case Study: Italians
and American Labor, 18701920 (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 53.
22. Fenton, Immigrants and Unions, 5354.
23. Pozzetta, Italians of New York City, 247.
24. Mariano, Italian Contribution to American Democracy, 156157.
25. Philadelphia was a distant second with seven Italian language newspapers
in 1920. See N. W. Ayer & Sons, American Newspaper Annual and Directory:
A Catalogue of American Newspapers (Philadelphia: Newspaper Advertising
Agents, 1920).
26. This is in contrast to ninety-five Yiddish newspapers published and circulated
during the same thirty-six-year period. See table XVI in Robert E. Park, The
Immigrant Press and Its Control (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1922), 313.
27. By 1920, Il Progresso published an edition for Philadelphia, and according to
Humbert Nelli, during and after World War I, Il Progresso became as influential in Chicago as the local hometown Italian newspaper, LItalia. See Humbert
Nelli, The Role of the Colonial Press in the Italian American Community of
Chicago, 18861921 (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1965), 48. See also N. W.
Ayer & Sons, American Newspaper Annual and Directory, 1920, 680.
28. Rudolph Vecoli, The Italian Immigrant Press and the Construction of Social
Reality, 18501920, in James P. Danky and Wayne A. Wiegand, eds., Print Culture in a Diverse America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 20.
142<<Notes to Chapter 1
Political History of Italian American Syndicalists (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
51. Socialist organs such as Il Proletario consistently carried labor news from around
the country. For some representative examples, see Il Proletario, September 9,
1899; March 31, 1900; April 20, 1901; April 19, 1902; August 23, 1902; December 31,
1902; October 9, 1904; September 2, 1906; November 28, 1914; see also Il Progresso
Italo-Americano, February 6, 1909; August 4, 1909; August 7, 1919.
52. On Italians and the Catholic Church in New York City, see Pozzetta, Italians
of New York City, 267304, esp. 289295; Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street. For
some representative examples from the radical press, see Patriottismo barbaro,
Il Proletario, April 8, 1916; La Madonna del Carmine e LAraldo Italiano, Il
Proletario, July 21, 1900; Medio Evo in Secolo XX, La Questione Sociale, July 25,
1903; Cose di Paterson: La Madonna del Carmine, La Questione Sociale, July
27, 1907.
53. Vecoli, Italian Immigrant Press, 2528. Vecoli quoted a Department of Justice
report from 1920 that listed 220 foreign language radical newspapers in the
United States: 27 were in Italian, second only to Hebrew and Yiddish, which
together totaled 35.
54. Park, Immigrant Press and Its Control, 360.
55. Bruno Cartosio, Italian Workers and Their Press in the United States, 1900
1920, in Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder, eds., The Press of Labor Migrants
in Europe and North America, 1880s1930s (Bremen: Publications of the Labor
Newspaper Preservation Project, University of Bremen, 1985), 426427.
56. Ibid., 433.
57. Elisabetta Vezzosi, Class, Ethnicity, and Acculturation in Il Proletario: The
World War One Years, in Harzig and Hoerder, Press of Labor Migrants in Europe
and North America, 453; Cartosio, Italian Workers and Their Press in the
United States, 434.
58. Vecoli, Italian Immigrant Press, 25.
59. Vezzosi, Class, Ethnicity, and Acculturation in Il Proletario, 435436.
60. Rudolph J. Vecoli, Free Country: The American Republic Viewed by the Italian Left, 18801920, in Marianne Debouzy, ed., In the Shadow of the Statue of
Liberty: Immigrants, Workers, and Citizens in the American Republic, 18801920
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 2730; Fenton, Immigrants and
Unions, 194195.
61. Vecoli, Italian Immigrant Press, 18.
62. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, April 3, 1887; April 10, 1887.
63. See Pozzetta, Italians of New York City, 241, Vecoli, Italian Immigrant Press,
2021; George La Piana, What Do the Italians in America Read (1917), George
La Piana Papers, Harvard Theological Library, Manuscripts, 8.
64. For some representative examples, see Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 9,
1886; February 18, 1887; October 8, 1893; August 11, 1896; August 14, 1901; July
144<<Notes to Chapter 2
Civic Publishing Company. The aggrieved party was Giuseppe Musso, the president of the Intercontinental Telephone and Telegraph Company, who accused
Pecorini of using the pages of Il Cittadino to attack well-to-do and successful
Italians in the city. Pecorini claimed that Mussos company had defrauded some
of its investors. The New York Times, however, repeatedly praised Mr. Pecorini
and his newspaper for its actions on behalf of the Italian immigrant community.
Defending him from sharp critiques from rival newspapers LAraldo Italiano and
Il Giornale Italiano, the paper stressed that Pecorinis character for frankness,
uprightness, and fair dealing, and his honest efforts in behalf of his fellowcountrymen are well known. New York Times, September 7, 1911. The Times also
published multiple letters to the editor from Pecorini. See Italian Black Hand:
Why Did the Police Records of 700 Ex-Convicts Disappear?, New York Times,
August 21, 1913; and False Picture of Italy, New York Times, October 16, 1913.
78. Fenton, Immigrants and Unions, 5458.
79. Vogel, The Black Press, 23.
80. Park, Immigrant Press and Its Control, 294295.
81. Quoted from ibid., 79, 84, 87.
Notes to Chapter 2
1. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, March 16, 1891. After the lynching of three Italians
in Hahnville, Louisiana, in 1893, a letter written to Il Progresso from a man in
New York City echoed almost verbatim the sentiments of Marcheses letter.
Again, the word tenebroso was used to describe the African continent. Ibid., July
30, 1893.
2. Cristofero Colombo, March 18, 1891. An article in Cristofero Colombo expressed
outrage and surprise that such an atrocity would happen in a civilized nation
such as America. . . . if it had occurred in Africa this type of savagery would be
more understandable. Ibid., March 20, 1891.
3. LAraldo Italiano, August 11, 1896.
4. Cristofero Colombo, March 15, 1891.
5. See John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno,
18601900 (New York: St. Martins Press, 1999), 123.
6. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1984); see also Dickie, Darkest Italy, 18.
7. LEco dItalia, March 5, 1896; LAraldo Italiano, March 10, 1896; Il Progresso ItaloAmericano, March 16, 1891.
8. Il Proletario, March 16, 1899.
9. Il Grido degli Oppressi, July 14, 1892. Labeling Columbus the symbol of ferocity for his period, Il Grido degli Oppressi continued its criticism of European
colonialism, stating that the infantile passion of the savages for these bright,
shiny objects, such as mirrors, became for the civilized man a desire for gold
and power. In critiquing the relationship between colonizer and indigenous
peoples, Il Grido still worked within racial hierarchies juxtaposing civilization
146<<Notes to Chapter 2
24. See La Questione Sociale, July 25, 1903; also see similar comments regarding the
medieval aspects of the Feast of La Madonna del Carmine from Paterson, New
Jerseya vibrant anarchist Italian colony. La Questione Sociale, July 27, 1907.
25. Ibid., September 30, 1905.
26. Il Proletario, July 21, 1900.
27. Ibid., September 4, 1915. In 1915, Il Proletario used the same comparison to
condemn Americans for their violent behavior toward African Americans.
This attack was in defense of property ownership and the victims were Black,
however, the civil people of society will say it was perpetrated without racism,
without prejudice and was inspired by the highest sense of humanitarianism.
If this is civility I would prefer to associate myself with the Hottentots of the
Congo.
28. For a more thorough discussion of the European quest for colonies in Africa
in the late nineteenth century, see Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa:
White Mans Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912 (New York: Avon
Books, 1991).
29. Martin Clark, Modern Italy, 18711982 (New York: Longman, 1984), 47.
30. Christopher Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism, 18701925 (London:
Methuen, 1967), 118.
31. For a fuller discussion of Italian colonialism in Africa in the late nineteenth
century, see Clark, Modern Italy, 4648, 99101; Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism, 98182.
32. Umberto Levra, Il colpo di stato della borghesia: La crisi politica di fine secolo in
Italia, 18961900 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1975), 713.
33. Pamphlet, Storia della Vittoria Italiana in Africa e disfatta di Ras Mangascia
(Florence: Tipografia Adriano Salani, Viale Militare, 1910). The illustration
depicted an African man dressed in a tunic, with braided hair held in place by
metal rods, and protruding teeth.
34. According to Stefano Luconi, Stimulating a sense of nationalistic identity out
of a military defeat . . . was rather difficult. However, despite the shame of losing to Meneliks indigenous forces, the emergence of a nascent national identity
cannot be underestimated, or dismissed, predicated solely on the eventual negative outcome (from the Italian perspective). Indeed, the prevalence of rhetoric
seeking to avenge the loss at Adua during the Libyan campaign was proof of the
effects that campaign had on identity formation in Italian immigrant communities. See Stefano Luconi, The Impact of Italys Twentieth-Century Wars on
Italian Americans Ethnic Identity, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 13 (2007):
465491.
35. Leaflet, Connazionali, January 21, 1896, ASMAE, Ambasciata di Washington,
busta 107, fascicolo 14, Mobilitazione di italiani negli S.U. per la campagna
dAfrica, 1896.
36. Francesco Marrocco to Consul General, New York, April 17, 1896, Carlo
Ginocchio to Italian Ambassador in Washington, DC, April 2, 1896, ASMAE,
148<<Notes to Chapter 2
where it was believed Beato Leone bathed, and pass under the box that contained Saint Leos finger. See Antonio Melis and Rosario Nardi, eds., Dizionario
geografico dei comuni e delle frazioni dei comuni (Rome: Societ TipograficoEditrice Romana, 1910), 3; see also Luigi Fossati, ed., Dizionario grafico-itinerario
(Milan: Bietti Editori, 1902); Giulio Palange, La Regina dai Tre Seni: Guida alla
Calabria magica e leggendaria (Soveria Manelli, Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 1994), 9.
51. Il Proletario, April 19, 1912.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid. Michael Topp examined the relationship between the leaders of the Italian
Socialist Federation and the wider Italian immigrant community and revealed
that Il Proletario, the ISFs main organ, frequently carried disparaging remarks
about southern Italians, using the article on Africo as one example. According
to the author, The fact that articles portraying Southern Italians as backward
and even barbaric appeared in Il Proletario, whether they were representative
of views of most ISF members or not, made it clear that the syndicalists in the
ISF were themselves somewhat alienated, if not from the land where they were
born, then from the people they were seeking to organize. It appears, however,
that the racial constructs of radical Italian leadersboth northern and southern
Italianreflected these views more widely than previously thought. See Topp,
Those without Country, 6974.
55. Il Proletario, January 5, 1912.
56. Bolletino della Sera, September 28, 1911; September 30, 1911.
57. LAraldo Italiano, September 29, 1911. LAraldo retold the apocryphal conversation
between an Arab and an Italian in Tripoli: Its already known, as one Arab said
to an Italian, we are like a family without a father.
58. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, October 15, 1911.
59. Bolletino della Sera, October 6, 1911.
60. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, October 15, 1911; October 8, 1911; Bolletino della
Sera, October 7, 1911. LAraldo Italiano stated, The European colony of Libya is
like a loose flap of the mother country on the black continent. LAraldo Italiano,
October 9, 1911.
61. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, October 15, 1911.
62. Ibid., September 29, 1911.
63. Bolletino della Sera, October 7, 1911.
64. See examples in Il Progresso Italo-Americano, October, 2, 1911; October 17, 1911;
LAraldo Italiano, October 1, 1911.
65. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, October 2, 1911
66. See ibid., October 2, 1911; October 7, 1911; October 11, 1911. Both LAraldo Italiano
and Bolletino della Sera prominently noted, as if to suggest the imprimatur of
legitimacy, that the New York Evening Journal was part of William Randolph
Hearsts publishing empire. See Bolletino della Sera, October 6, 1911; LAraldo
Italiano, October 6, 1911; quotation is from LAraldo Italiano, October 1, 1911.
Notes to Chapter 3
150<<Notes to Chapter 3
152<<Notes to Chapter 3
Notes to Chapter 4
154<<Notes to Chapter 4
156<<Notes to Chapter 4
mention Barsotti by name, it was clear from the substance of Bolletinos critique
that the owner of Il Progresso was the intended target. The reproaches of the
American journal are for the most part just, but they do not apply to us. . . . It
is true that certain Italian papers which pretend to represent the majority put
forth their activities and forces for the erection of monuments. . . . We are and
always shall be against such charlatanism. . . . Moreover, we have always fought
rather for the erection of schools and educational institutions than monuments,
showing for a long time, as the Times has done today, that Italian youths should
be educated exclusively by American institutions. See New York Times, September 19, 1910. For some other representative examples of Italian newspaper
disputes crossing over into the English language press, see Has Made Himself
Disliked, New York Times, February 24, 1888, 2; Denounced by His Countrymen: Italians Object to Carlo Barsotti as Their Representative, New York Times,
May 24, 1891; Italian Editor Here Wins: Has Journalist Convicted of Libel
Another Defendant Freed, New York Times, December 23, 1912.
54. Shalers assessment in his autobiography that southern Italians carried the
mark of African blood and no trace of Greek only served to complicate
Pariss notion, based on Shalers work, of a facile transformation from Italian to
American. See Shaler, Autobiography of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, 321.
55. LAraldo Italiano, July 25, 1901.
56. Che razza di unioni, Il Proletario, September 13, 1902.
57. La Fiaccola, July 9, 1910.
58. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, March 16, 1891.
59. For example, LAraldo Italiano, July 26, 1899; July 27, 1899; July 25, 1901;
August 3, 1901; Cristofero Colombo, June 21, 1892; August 3, 1893; Il Progresso
Italo-Americano, June 21, 1892; August 27, 1901. Headlines quoted in LAraldo
Italiano, August 3, 1901; Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 21, 1901; June 21,
1892; August 27, 1901; December 9, 1906; La Luce (Utica, NY), June 27, 1908.
In research conducted around the dates of Italian American lynchings, these
were just a portion of articles located and do not represent the full range
of coverage pertaining to African American lynching from the period 1890
through 1915.
60. Tumulti a Brooklyn, Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 24, 1900; Odio di
Razza, Il Progresso Italo-Americano, July 11, 1905; Un Altra Rissa Fra Neri e
Bianchi, Il Progresso Italo-Americano, July 19, 1905. Il Progresso commented, A
real battle began in that area due to the pervading race hatred that exists there.
See Volevano linciare una negra, Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 23, 1906.
The article recounted the attempted lynching of a black woman in Brooklyn,
New York, by an angry mob.
61. La Lotta di razza in New York-Nuovi disordini, Il Progresso Italo-Americano,
August 18, 1900.
62. Ibid.
63. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 18, 1900 (italics mine).
Notes to Chapter 5
158<<Notes to Chapter 5
Black Southerners and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991); Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and
How it Changed America (New York: Vintage, 1992); Colin Palmer, Passageways:
An Interpretive History of Black America, vol. 2, 18631965 (New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1998), see chap. 6, The Generation of 1917, 106129.
7. Although I have engaged the most influential socialist and anarchist press available in the New York area, with a few exceptions what was left of the radical
press was fragmentary. An examination of New York radical papers such as La
Giustizia (the newspaper of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union),
Il Lavoro (the union newspaper of the American Clothing Makers of America,
19151932), and Lotta di Classe (the newspaper of the Shirt and Cloak Makers
Union, 19121917) unearthed no real discussion of race or color. In addition,
during the war period, major radical newspapers such as Il Proletario focused
almost exclusively on issues related to interventionist and anti-interventionist
positions. After April 1917 and American involvement in the war, radical papers
suffered extreme suppression and harassment, resulting in their virtual elimination in the short term. Therefore, this chapters focus on the mainstream press
has as much to do with its active role in constructing identity as with its availability and popularity.
8. A common example illustrating this comes from the socialist Il Proletario.
Protesting against the unlawful imprisonment of its political allies in Italy,
the newspaper wondered how this could occur in the Italy of 1899: Italy was
barbarian, but now we do not occupy the last rung in the ladder of civilized
nations. Il Proletario, May 10, 1899.
9. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, November 8, 1906.
10. La Luce, December 14, 1907.
11. LAvvenire (Utica, NY), January 24, 1903.
12. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, March 24, 1891.
13. Cristofero Colombo, March 22, 1891.
14. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 10, 1899 (italics mine).
15. On the question of American civilization, see travelers accounts such as that
of Giuseppe Giacosa. Notwithstanding all the vituperative attacks in the press,
some Italians continued to endorse Americas self-proclaimed role as a civilizing nation. Giacosa, a well-known playwright from northern Italy who toured
the United States in the 1890s, declared that anyone who has lived here for any
length of time must readily acknowledge that the [American] people behave in
a more civilized and dignified manner than ours. Giuseppe Giacosa, Impressioni dAmerica (Milan: Tipografia Editrice L. F. Cogliati, 1898), 153.
16. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, July 29, 1899.
17. Ibid., March 16, 1891.
18. Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Rome, to Ambassador, Washington, DC,
April 7, 1900, Linciaggio di Tallulah: bills Davis e Hitt: 19001901, ASMAE,
Ambasciata di Washington, busta 103, p. 8, n. 1866.
1. Philip V. Cannistraro, Generoso Pope and the Rise of Italian American Politics,
19251936, in Lydio F. Tomasi, ed., Italian Americans: New Perspectives in Italian Immigration and Ethnicity (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1985),
264288.
2. Historian Rudolph Vecoli takes a somewhat different approach: Rather than
the Americanization of the Little Italies during the interwar years, it would then
be more accurate to speak of their Fascistization. See Vecoli, The Making and
War II (Boston: Twayne, 1990); Lawrence DiStasi, ed., Una Storia Segreta: When
Italian Americans Were Enemy Aliens (Berkeley: American Italian Historical
Association, 1994).
8. Procaccino quoted in Peter Vellon, Immigrant Son: Mario Procaccino and the
Rise of Conservative Politics in Late 1960s New York City, Italian American
Review 7, no. 1 (SpringSummer 1999): 130. See also Maria Lizzi, My Heart Is
as Black as Yours: White Backlash, Racial Identity, and Italian American Stereotypes in New York Citys 1969 Mayoral Campaign, Journal of American Ethnic
History 27, no. 3 (2008): 4380.
9. See Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 19191939
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Matthew Frye Jacobson,
Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in PostCivil Rights America (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2006); Stefano Luconi, From Paesani to White Ethnics:
The Italian Experience in Philadelphia (New York: SUNY Press, 2001); Roediger,
Working toward Whiteness.
10. Helen Barolini, Buried Alive by Language, in Chiaroscuro: Essays of Identity
(West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera, 1997); Giorgio Bertellini, New York City and
the Representation of Italian Americans in the Cinema, in Cannistraro, Italians
of New York, 115128; John Kifner, Bensonhurst: A Tough Code in Defense of
a Closed World, New York Times, September 1, 1989; Joseph Sciorra, Italians
against Racism: The Murder of Yusef Hawkins (R.I.P.) and My March on Bensonhurst, in Guglielmo and Salerno, Are Italians White?, 192209.
11. New York Times, June 30, 2005; July 18, 2006.
index
Adowa, 4445
The Adventures of Gianduiotto, 120
African Americans: alliance with, 8384;
business transactions with, 8485; discontinuing comparisons with, 1078,
118, 121, 12627; humiliation of being
treated like, 12126; militancy of, 130;
as model, 8696; newspapers, 35; prejudice examples, 100101; prominenti
sympathy for, 23; resentment of, 123;
sexual behavior of, 9495; sympathy
for, 23, 80; unions excluding, 96;
Wells on, 1012
African savagery: Cristofero Colombo
on, 144n3; Ethiopia and, 47; goals of,
39; identity and, 39; metaphorical use
of, 145n18; newspapers and, 3739; Il
Proletario on, 146n20; radical newspapers and, 4142; Southern Italy and,
4243
Agricultural crisis, 44
Albano, Angelo, 87
Alien Land Bill, 72; Bolletino della Sera
on, 7677; Giovannitti on, 7475;
whiteness and, 77
American Clothing Makers of America,
158n7
American Federation of Labor, 26
Americanization, 95; campaigns, 12; racial
hierarchy and, 6869
164<<index
index >>165
Conditionally white, 5
Covello, Leonard, 143n72
Crispi, Francesco, 4445
Cristofero Colombo, 37; on African savagery, 144n3; Il Progresso Italo-Americano
merged with, 25; on Wounded Knee,
64
Daniels, Roger, 70
Dante Alighieri Society, 26
Darwin, Charles, 100
Death benefits, 20
Detroit Plaindealer, 83; on lynching, 89
DiBiasi, Agostino, 25
Dickie, John, 38
La Difesa, 29
Dillingham Commission, 17, 77, 112
Dini, Alberto, 37
Il Diritto, on lynching, 88
Dotry, Henry, 83
Drew, Assemblyman, 76
Dualism, 1617, 139n4
DuBois, W. E. B., 99; New York Times on,
157n72
Earthquake relief, 31
East Harlem, 19
LEco dItalia (Echo of Italy), 138n1; on
colonialism, 46; exile mentality of, 24;
founding of, 24
Employment: in American South, 153n8;
LAraldo Italiano, 25; assistance, 20;
classified, 31; lynching and, 154n15;
skilled, 140n19; unskilled, 20
Enemy aliens, 130, 161n7
LEra Nuova, 30
Eritrea, 44
Espionage Act, 29
Esteve, Pedro, 30
Ethiopia, 44; African savagery and, 47;
justification for invasion of, 130; nationalism and war in, 4546; support
for war in, 4546
166<<index
La Giustizia, 158n7
Goldstein, Eric, 137n22
Gori, Pietro, 30
Great Society programs, 131
Greek newspapers, 137n25
Gribaudi, Gabriella, 17
Il Grido degli Oppressi: on colonialism,
144n9; on Columbus, 39, 144n9
Griffith, Michael, 132
Grimke, Archibald H., 85
Il Gruppo Diritto allEsistenza (Right to
Exist Group), 30
Guglielmo, Thomas, 67
Gulino, Giuseppe, 25
Guterl, Matthew Pratt, 3, 108
Hamilton, Alexander, 157n72
Haney Lpez, Ian, 153n4
Harney, Robert, 9
Hart, Henry, 97
Hawaii, 7071
Hawkins, Yusef, 132
Hennessey, David, 32, 59
Higham, John, 5
Hochschild, Jennifer, 121
House Committee on Immigration and
Naturalization, 26
Howard Beach, 13233
How the Other Half Lives (Riis), 19
Hughes, Charles Evans, 114
Hypocrisy, 60
Identity: African savagery and, 39; classbased, 3, 58; Italian language learning
and, 33; newspapers and, 3135. See
also Italianita; Nationalism
Imagined communities, 38
Immigration: Mulberry Bend district and
problems with, 19; protection laws, 26;
as voluntary colonialism, 68
Immigration restriction, 12, 15; Asian
Americans and, 58, 66; capitalism and,
72; Chinese Exclusion Act increasing,
index >>167
Japanese question, 72
Jewish literacy, 10
Jewishness, 137n22
Jim Crow, 100
Judge, 107
King, Desmond: on American race, 116;
on immigration restriction, 112
Kooper, Sybil Hart, 132
Kopan, Andrew, 137n25
Labor agents, 24
Labor hierarchy, 7
La Piana, George: on literacy rates, 10; on
newspapers, 34
Lauriano, Alfonso, 6162
Il Lavoro, 158n7
Leavenworth Advocate, 88
Leon, William, 73
Leone, Beato, 147n50
Lesser, Crueze de, 17
Levra, Umberto, 45
Liberto, Salvatore, 93
Libraries, 10
Libya: American reactions to war in,
52; annexation of, 48; Bolettino della
Sera coverage of, 5051; colonialism
and, 4755; European reactions to
war in, 52; fundraising for war in, 53;
italianita and, 53; motivations for, 51;
Il Proletario on, 4849; prominenti
and, 5355; radical newspapers on,
4849
Lincoln, Abraham: Il Proletario on, 99; La
Questione Sociale on, 99, 157n67
Literacy rates, 137n28; Jewish, 10; La Piana
on, 10
Literacy test, 26, 112; Il Cittadino on, 113
14; Cleveland veto on, 159n22; La Luce
on, 113; Taft veto on, 159n22
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 112
Lombroso, Cesare, 17
Lpez, Ian Haney, 5
168<<index
index >>169
Pelle rosse (redskin). See Native
Americans
Petrucewicz, Marta, 139n4
Polidori, Vincenzo, 24, 25
Pope, Generoso, 129
Popular justice, 1, 93, 94
Poverty, 16
Pozzetta, George, 32
Press Democrat, 105
Procaccino, Mario, 13132
Il Progresso Italo-Americano (Italian
American Progress), 4, 23; Bosi on,
25; circulation figures, 1011, 25; on
Commercial Herald, 2; criminal defense of, 3233; Cristofero Colombo
merged with, 25; expansion of, 25;
founding of, 15, 138n1; on interracial
relationships, 7374; on Italian language learning, 33; The Last Redskin:
A Race Destined to Expire, 6566; on
lynching, 4041, 88, 95, 122; masthead,
25; on Native Americans, 62, 6466;
office of, 24; on Overton, 7980; Pope
purchasing, 129; race riot coverage by,
9798, 12426; relief funds sponsored
by, 32; on Washington, 100; whiteness
asserted by, 106
Il Proletario (Proletariat), 11, 2829; on
African savagery, 145n20; Americans
and Americanization, 6869; on
Asian Americans, 6869, 7172; circulation of, 29; ideological split, 29;
on immigration restrictions, 7172;
labor news in, 142n51; on Libya,
4849; on Lincoln, 99; on lynching,
9091, 9394; racial hierarchy and,
4142; raiding of, 29; on savagery, 40;
on slavery, 9192; on Southern Italy,
148n54
Prominenti: African American sympathy
from, 23; influence of, 3335; Libya
and, 5355; national celebrations defined by, 32; newspaper ownership, 24;
170<<index
index >>171
Unemployment insurance, 20
Unexpected Fortunes of Gianduiotto,
119
Unions, 96
The Unrestricted Dumping Ground, 107
Ute tribe, 65
Valentine, Ernesto, 25
Valentino, Rudolph, 15
Vecoli, Rudolph, 23, 33; on fascism, 160n2;
on newspapers, 31
Verrazzano, Giovanni da, 15
Vicario, Giovani, 25
Villarosa, Frederico, 13
Vittoria Italiana in Africa (Italian victory in Africa), 45
Vogel, Todd, 35, 137n25
Wage slavery, 91, 92
Wallace, Lew, 157n72
Washington, Booker T., 83, 99; Il Progresso
Italo-Americano on, 100
Wells, H. G., 1012
White, James, 97
White ethnicity, 5
172<<