A Great Conspiracy against Our Race: Italian Immigrant Newspapers and the Construction of Whiteness in the Early 20th Century 9780814788493

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A Great Conspiracy against our race

Culture, Labor, History Series

General Editors: Daniel Bender and Kimberley L. Phillips The Forests Gave Way before Them: The Impact of African Workers on the Anglo-American World, 1650–1850 Frederick C. Knight Unknown Class: Undercover Investigations of American Work and Poverty from the Progressive Era to the Present Mark Pittenger Steel Barrio: The Great Mexican Migration to South Chicago, 1915–1940 Michael D. Innis-Jiménez Ordering Coal: Railroads, Miners, and Disorder in the Gilded Age, 1870–1900 Andrew B. Arnold A Great Conspiracy against Our Race: Italian Immigrant Newspapers and the Construction of Whiteness in the Early Twentieth Century Peter G. Vellon

A Great Conspiracy against Our Race Italian Immigrant Newspapers and the Construction of Whiteness in the Early Twentieth Century

Peter G. Vellon

a NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York and London

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London www.nyupress.org © 2014 by New York University All rights reserved References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vellon, Peter G. A great conspiracy against our race : Italian immigrant newspapers and the construction of whiteness in the early twentieth century / Peter G. Vellon. pages cm —  (Culture, labor, history Series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8147-8848-6 (cloth : alkaline paper) 1.  Italian American newspapers—History—20th century. 2.  Italian Americans—Race identity—History—20th century. 3.  Whites—United States—Race identity—History—20th century. 4.  Immigrants—United States—History—20th century. 5.  Italian Americans— Cultural assimilation—History—20th century. 6.  Italian Americans—Social conditions— 20th century. 7.  United States—Race relations—History—20th century.  I. Title. PN4885.I8V45 2014 071’.308951—dc23 2014016413 New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

vii 1

1. The Italian Language Press and the Creation of an Italian Racial Identity

15

2. The Italian Language Press and Africa

37

3. Native Americans, Asians, and Italian Americans: Constructions of a Multilayered Racial Consciousness

57

4. The Education of Italian Americans in Matters of Color

79

5. Defending Italian American Civility, Asserting Whiteness

105

Epilogue

129

Notes

135

Index

163

About the Author

172

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Acknowledgments

In 1997, I had the good fortune of meeting Philip V. Cannistraro at the Graduate Center at The City University of New York. One of the leading scholars in Italian American history, Phil took an immediate interest in my work on ethnicity and race. Although Phil passed away much too soon in 2005, it is not an understatement to say this book could have never been published without him. He consistently provided keen advice, insightful comments, and much-needed encouragement. His generosity as a scholar and mentor continue to inspire me to provide the same guidance for my students. I am eternally grateful to have called him my friend. I am also indebted to Carol Berkin, who has bravely served as my unofficial adviser and sage after Phil’s passing. Simply put, Carol has always been there when I needed her. Whether she was reading chapters of the manuscript, offering her expertise in the realm of academia, or lending an ear to my neurotic ramblings, Carol’s kindness is truly extraordinary. There are many others who have made this book a reality. I owe a great debt to David Roediger, whose own work has inspired the way I interpret and read history. In 2006, he reassured me that a book centered on the Italian language press and race would be not only worthwhile but a welcome addition to the literature. At a very delicate time in my life, his confidence in the project proved vital to my going forward. Heartfelt thanks go to Mary Anne Trasciatti and the late Nunzio Pernicone, who both read through the manuscript during its early stages, offering invaluable advice. A host of other scholars have read specific chapters, provided insightful comments, and offered pointed critiques or suggestions about sources or methodology. The book is >> vii 

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in completing two chapters. I have also benefited from the support of colleagues and friends in the History Department at Queens College/ CUNY, especially Joel Allen, Sarah Covington, Premilla Nadasen, and Frank Warren. Many thanks to Augusto Pasquariello, who tirelessly translated hundreds of Italian language newspaper articles without complaint. Thanks also to Nella Giusto, who spent her vacation in New York City helping with translations as well. Sometimes you meet special people along the way, often for brief periods, who influence the trajectory of your future. One such person is Richard DiMedia. I thank him for his inspiration in the classroom and his belief that I could pursue and earn a PhD in history. Hratch and Leslie Zadoian are two people who have remained influential in my life and whose friendship I treasure. Hratch continues to be an endless source of knowledge, wisdom, and humor. I am a better person for knowing him. Finally, deep gratitude goes to my family, on both the Vellon and Pasquariello sides. Thanks to my brothers, Michael and Steven, and my sister, Kathleen, for always having my back. My many sisters and brothers through marriage—Maryann, Mary, Adrienne, Giovanna, Carmine, and Saverio—provided unwavering support. Special gratitude goes to my father-in-law, Augusto Pasquariello, and my mother-in-law, Maria, for caring for me like their own son. Rose, my best friend, confidante, therapist, and (probably her most difficult role) spouse, has been with me since the beginning of this long, long journey. She has selflessly read through chapter after chapter, offered crucial advice, and helped me through the inevitable intellectual dead ends along the way. Her unyielding emotional and spiritual support over the past twenty-three years has carried me to places I didn’t think possible. Simply put, she has made me a better person. To paraphrase Walt Whitman: “We were together. I forget the rest.” My two unique and special boys, Jack and Luca, have literally grown up with this book. At various times they have proved to be a welcome diversion from the rigors of research and writing and have filled my life with unimaginable joy, humor, goofiness, and stress. They will never know how much it meant to me to see them so excited over this book’s eventual publication. This book is for them as proof that hard work and perseverance never go unrewarded. Tempering the excitement of the book’s publication is the absence of loved ones no longer with us. My nephew Michael Vellon recently

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Americans belonged racially. Coverage of racially charged events such as lynching, race riots, and slavery, as well as frequently discussed topics such as capitalism and religion, exposed an immigrant press coming to grips with, and navigating, the vicissitudes of American race and color. Wrestling with unflattering racial characterizations directed at Italians, Italian American newspapers initially interpreted discrimination and violence within an African American context. For example, in the early decades of Italian immigration, newspapers frequently expressed sympathy and understanding for African American victims of white racism, often exhibiting a sharp critique of white American racism and oppression as one deeply rooted in skin color. However, despite apparent prominenti sympathy for the plight of African Americans, their acknowledgment of the intimate connection between race and color proved to have unintended consequences. Exposed to the intense heat of World War I hyperpatriotism and antiimmigrant rhetoric, manifesting most immediately in continued calls for race-based immigration restriction and demands for 100 percent Americanism, mainstream Italian language newspapers grappled with the continued uneasiness over Italian immigrant marginality. Concurrently, during this period the United States increasingly came to focus on the “Negro question” as the foremost social issue affecting the nation. This owed to several factors, including the migration of African Americans into the urban North and the emergence of the New Negro movement. According to Matthew Pratt Guterl, “The result was a culture of racial thinking termed ‘bi-racialism’ by the eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard, which encouraged Americans to focus on race-as-color, and almost solely on whiteness and blackness.”8 During this emerging “biracialist” period, Italian immigrant prominenti espoused a particular class-based notion of Italian identity, or italianita, influenced by the recent Italian unification in Italy. Steeped in racial nationalism, prominenti versions of Italian identity argued for full inclusion as Americans based upon an imagined “Italian” heritage of civilization and whiteness. By the period of World War I, mainstream newspapers, cognizant of the strong association between one’s racial grouping and their defined whiteness or nonwhiteness, abandoned a racial perspective that had concomitantly entertained color, race, and civilization in favor a more rigid binary of black and white.

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history embraces categories in addition to black. What these works attempt to accomplish, in general, is to recover, or uncover, a racial identity to whiteness that belies the traditional assumption that being “white” means racial transparency. According to Coco Fusco, an activist and writer, “Racial identities are not only black, Latino, Asian, Native American, and so on; they are also white. To ignore white ethnicity is to redouble its hegemony by naturalizing it.”10 Although southern Italians were white enough to enter the country and naturalize as American citizens, consistent alarm over their suitability to become full members of the American republic included concerns regarding their race and whiteness.11 Historians have attempted to describe this precarious racial status in a variety of ways, from “conditionally white” to “situationally white” or “not quite white.”12 Along with historians such as Robert Orsi, John Higham, David Roediger, and others, I believe the term “inbetween” most accurately describes the racial position in which European immigrants found themselves as they learned and negotiated the American racial landscape. Writing in particular about southern Italian immigrants in East Harlem, Orsi proved instrumental in establishing the notion of inbetweeness and the effort to establish a border between oneself and those perceived as the “darker other.” As historian Ian Haney López and others have demonstrated, race is understood not as an absolute category but rather “as comparative taxonomies of relative difference. Races do not exist as defined entities, but only as amalgamations of people standing in complex relationships with other such groups.”13 Orsi’s work deftly presents the various degrees of perception that undergird racial othering—between us and them, white and black, Protestant and Catholic, American and foreign. Defined as an inferior race by many Americans, southern Italian immigrants arrived already stigmatized by northern Italian constructions of race and civilization coming out of Italian unification branding them as turks or African. Learning and adapting to the American racial system would be a process fraught with confusion, requiring an intimate struggle against the uncertainties and realities of “inbetweeness.” According to Orsi, “The immigrants were transformed first into ‘Italians’ in this country, initially in the perceptions of others who were hostile to them and their dark skins; then they had to become ‘Americans’ at a time when this identity itself had become the site of bitter, often racially charged conflict.”14

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from their privileged color status as whites.” This distinction between race and color, argued Guglielmo, explains how southern Italian immigrants could face racial discrimination upon their arrival but still enjoy privileges due to their whiteness. Guglielmo contends that the notion of racial inbetweeness must be refined in order to account for the fact that “Italians did not need to become white; they always were in numerous, critical ways.”18 A Great Conspiracy against Our Race approaches the concept of race, color, and inbetweeness in several divergent ways from White on Arrival. First, the book will work within segments of the historiography that challenge Guglielmo’s assertion that race and color can be neatly disentangled. According to David Roediger, although Italians did not experience the same kind of “hard racism” as African Americans, new immigrants often were placed between calls for their racial exclusion and greater acceptance. Therefore, “to argue inbetweeness necessarily involves a willingness to keep both similarity and difference at play.” Indeed, an ironic twist to the fuss over terms such as “inbetweeness” is that this description of southern Italians is not the invention of contemporary historians but rather nomenclature of the period. At various times newspaper headlines explicitly described Italians as a group “between white and black” and questioned the racial fitness of Italian “swarthy sons of the sunny south” by focusing upon some of the many markers informing race, such as physical appearance, culture, religion, language, color, class, and placement within the hierarchy of labor.19 Although southern Italians enjoyed privileges based upon legal definitions as white, their consistent depiction as swarthy and frequent comparisons to African Americans, as well as the Italian language press’s own correlation of race, civilization, and color, complicate the notion that race and color can be so easily divorced. Indeed, as Roediger has maintained, the “separation between race and color that Guglielmo posits (when he argues that Italian immigrants were securely white in the critical category of color but vulnerable to intra-European rankings of races) is difficult to sustain.”20 Further, it is important to note that the connection between race and color only grew more intimate through the World War I period and later; according to Guterl, “By the late 1920s and early 1930s American political culture was almost singlemindedly focused on ‘the Negro’ and on race-as-color.”21

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examining how newspaper owners, editors, and journalists evaluated a range of “nonwhite” races such as African and African American, Japanese, Chinese, Asian Americans, and Native Americans. Influenced by Gail Bederman’s work linking the discourse of civilization to race, whiteness, and manhood, insights into the Italian American press’s palimpsest of race, color, and civilization emerge. The pages of the press reveal, especially early in the immigrant experience, a complex racial worldview in which one’s perceived civilization could potentially trump one’s nonwhiteness in the hierarchy of race.24 By making Italians active agents in the construction of U.S. racial ideologies, this book also contributes to a fuller understanding not only of the interconnectedness of ethnicity, race, class, and identity but, more specifically, of how immigrants filtered societal pressures, redefined the parameters of whiteness, and constructed their own identity as Italian, American, civilized, and white.

The Importance of the Italian Language Press The immigrant press in the United States dates to the eighteenth century, but its maturation occurred with the mass arrival of newcomers, predominantly from southern and eastern Europe, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historian Robert Harney observes that “the press is the best primary source for an understanding of the world of non-English-speaking groups in the United States, their expectations and concerns, their background and evolution as individual communities.”25 Although many scholars acknowledge the immense role played by the immigrant press in facilitating or expediting the process of assimilation to the host country, the Italian language press in the United States has often been overlooked in comparison to other immigrant publications.26 Indeed, as recently as twenty years ago, a volume on the ethnic press in the United States did not include an essay on the Italian language press.27 In order to glean the importance of these newspapers in Italian immigrant enclaves, one need look no further than the immense readership they enjoyed, as well as how many newspapers went in and out of existence during the period of mass migration. Arriving at the same time as Italians in New York City, eastern European Jews, while statistically more literate, provide a useful comparison to demonstrate Italian immigrant thirst for the written word.

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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 L’Araldo 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 *

*

*

The organization of this manuscript follows a thematic format yet maintains a loose chronological approach. Chapter 1 provides a glimpse into the Italian communities of New York City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter sketches where Italian immigrants lived, the cultural institutions and networks they built, and the types of employment they found. Moreover, it provides a detailed breakdown of the multifaceted Italian language press in New York City and its impact and importance for the immigrant community. Examining the role of prominenti such as Carlo Barsotti, the chapter argues that Italian language newspapers played a vital role in shaping immigrant attitudes toward race, color, civilization, class, and identity. Chapters 2 and 3 reveal how the Italian American press perceived nonwhite peoples such as Africans, African Americans, Native Americans, Chinese, Japanese, and Asian Americans. Chapter 2 examines how mainstream and radical newspapers employed Africa as a trope for savage behavior by analyzing their discussion of wage slavery, imperialism, lynching, and colonialism, in particular Italian imperialist ventures into northern Africa in the 1890s and Libya in 1911–1912. The Italian language press constructed Africa as a sinister, dark continent, representing the lowest rung of the racial hierarchy. In expressing moral outrage over American violence and discrimination against Italians, the press utilized this image of Africa to emphatically convey its shock and disgust. This dialogue would reveal much about the press’s

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outside attempts to posit otherwise as extremely dangerous. Continued demands for full incorporation into American society were inextricably tied to establishing not only the civilized nature of the Italian race but also Italians’ acceptability as whites. Finally, the epilogue peers into the succeeding decades and speculates how and why second- and third-generation Italian Americans became firmly entrenched as pan-ethnic, white Americans. For Italian immigrants and their descendants, the twentieth century proved transformative in many ways. Affected by major external events such as Fascism in Italy, World War II, and civil rights movements, as well as internal desires to “be American,” a crucial aspect of their adaptation would be racial in nature. From victims of lynching to perpetrators of racial violence, the journey of Italian Americans uniquely embodies the tremendous costs of an assimilation process that inculcates the values of white over black.

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 York’s Il Progresso Italo-Americano (Italian American Progress), was laid to rest in what was reported to be an exact replica of Rudolph Valentino’s 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 

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to sociologist Gabriella Gribaudi, the “South was considered a frontier dividing civilized Europe from countries populated by savages from Africa.”5 French author Crueze de Lesser remarked in 1806 that “Europe ends at Naples and ends badly. Calabria, Sicily and all the rest belong to Africa.” In 1860, an envoy of Italy’s first prime minister, Camillo Cavour, wrote of the South: “What barbarism! Some Italy! This is Africa: the bedouin are the flower of civilized virtue compared to these peasants.”6 By the late nineteenth century, writers such as Alfredo Niceforo and Cesare Lombroso claimed to have scientifically validated southern Italian inferiority through the theories of the positivist school of biological racism. Lombroso, a noted Italian criminologist, pinpointed biological, rather than socioeconomic, reasons behind the proliferation of crime in the southern regions. Alfredo Niceforo, an Italian academic, reasoned that the moral and social structure of the South revealed an inferior civilization that was reminiscent of a primitive and quasi-barbarian age. Describing southerners as feminine, or popolo donna, and northerners as masculine, or popolo uomo, Niceforo processed civilization and barbarity through a gendered lens that served to clarify and reinforce the notion of southern Italian barbarism. Constructing a relationship between femininity and barbarity versus masculinity and civilization,7 these “scientific” conclusions only served to reinforce what northern Italians had come to accept: southern Italians were an inferior breed of savages and barbarians biologically distanced from progressive, civilized northern Italians.8 These theories had a transnational impact and influenced the anti-immigration and restrictionist forces in the United States. Indeed, in 1905, four years after Giuseppe Sergi’s The Mediterranean Race was published, the U.S. commissioner-general of immigration revised the government’s classification of Italians and began to distinguish between northern and southern Italians as two peoples. Informed by Sergi’s theories, the congressional commission charged with investigating immigration, more commonly known as the Dillingham Commission, elaborated upon this distinction and concluded in its findings, published in 1911, that Italians comprised two distinct races: northern Italian and southern Italian.9 These racial differences remained at the core of the commission’s recommendations to restrict new Italians described as a “long-headed, dark, ‘Mediterranean’ race of short stature.”

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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 Manhattan’s 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 Riis’s 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 Sicily—filled 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

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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 York’s Irish American–dominated 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

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home to more than any other city by 1920 with 12.25 However, this did not capture the full breadth of the press’s 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 York’s 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

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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 paper’s 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 paper’s 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 Barsotti’s 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 L’Araldo Italiano (the Italian Herald) in 1889. L’Araldo 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, L’Araldo could not keep up with Il Progresso’s explosive growth and reached its circulation zenith at 18,000 in 1916.38 By 1917, both L’Araldo and Il Telegrafo were sold by Vicario to Il Giornale Italiano, edited by Ercole Cantelmo and part of Frank Frugone’s publishing consortium. By 1920, the paper’s 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 York’s mainstream newspapers. In 1898, Frank Frugone founded

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Throughout the period, many mainstream newspapers came in and out of existence that did not possess the circulation numbers of Il Progresso or Bolletino yet were influential nonetheless. In 1910, Italian scholar and author Alberto Pecorini founded and edited Il Cittadino (the Citizen), a newspaper issued by the Civic League Publishing Association. The paper was published every Thursday and was identified as having an independent political orientation.46 Pecorini published prominently in Il Cittadino, often using the front page to inform Italians, as well as English-speaking Americans, of issues and events important to both. In a section titled “To Our American Readers,” Pecorini offered substantive discussions and editorials on topics such as Americanization, citizenship, immigration restriction, and literacy.47 These topics were well represented in books he authored such as Gli Americani nella vita moderna osservati da un italiano (The Americans in modern life observed by an Italian), published in 1909, and La Storia dell’America (The history of America), a concise history of the United States intended for use in Americanizing Italian immigrants, which he published for the Massachusetts Society of the Colonial Dames in 1920.48 Il Cittadino was published for ten years and was widely respected by American readers as well as by English language newspapers such as the New York Times, which labeled it “one of the best of the city’s foreign language papers.”49 Although mainstream newspapers dominated circulation within the Italian immigrant colonies, radical or sovversivi (subversive) publications rivaled their intellectual grip on the community.50 Championing class struggle and class consciousness, radical newspapers contained political theory and consistently reported news of labor activities and strikes. Italian language newspapers not only tried to connect workers with employers but also often functioned as their protectors. Especially in radical newspapers, numerous articles detailed the scurrilous practices of American employers and Italian labor bosses, alerting Italians to strike activities and employer exploitation around the country.51 For example, religious festivals such as those at Our Lady of Mount Carmel in East Harlem were harshly condemned as sad spectacles where the church and prominenti padded their own pockets with the hard-earned wages of ignorant and exploited Italian workers.52

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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 IWW’s 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

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Uplifting the Race in the Pages of the Press The Italian language press provided an institutional framework for the cultural transformation of the Italian immigrant population and the development of a collective Italian identity as American and white in the United States. In conjunction with an exploding Italian population in New York City, Italian language newspapers addressed multiple needs and facilitated immigrant orientation to new surroundings. According to historian Rudolph Vecoli, the press “took on an importance [it] lacked in the old country.”61 For example, Il Progresso published classified employment listings on its front page that sought “twenty bricklayers” to work on Spring Street in downtown Manhattan or women to “cook, clean, and iron for a good salary,” stipulating that speaking English was not necessary.62 The second page of the standard four-page format featured news from communities in and outside New York, where readers could find a “detailed report of the crimes, feste, arrests, and other prominent features of the local life.”63 Moreover, articles and notices detailing the numerous dinner dances, meetings, and religious feats sponsored by the many Italian immigrant societies also appeared on this page.64 This news kept Italians connected with kin or paesani who may have settled elsewhere, whether in East Harlem, Brooklyn, or even Chicago, and chipped away at regional identities in favor of a more national collective consciousness as Italians. However, in addition to providing tangible services such as employment listings and announcements of neighborhood events, newspapers served as a construction site for multiple campaigns to manufacture, assert, and defend the Italian race. The first page of daily newspapers usually reserved three to four columns for news from Europe, specifically Italy, and the other half for news of the day from the United States. Amid negative American perceptions, dislocated Neapolitans, Calabrians, and Sicilians yearned for any news from Italy and were especially attentive to colonial ventures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Ethiopia and Libya, as well as a series of natural disasters that ravaged parts of Italy. Prominenti such as Barsotti capitalized on these unfortunate events by initiating subscription drives to raise money for earthquake victims, as was the case in 1887, 1905, and 1908 when earthquakes ravaged different parts of the mainland and Sicily.65

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Italian immigrants and lobbied to have the Italian language taught in New York City public schools. According to Il Progresso, “Nine-tenths of the children of Italians born in America and those who arrived at a tender age without a teacher to teach them their language or their patriotic and religious traditions end up ignorant of the slightest knowledge of their country of origin.”71 Led by prominenti, Italian immigrants viewed the adoption of Italian into the New York City schools as a measure that validated their race and culture as worthy of American respect. In 1906, Il Progresso exclaimed that the introduction of Italian “was a great moral victory following years of struggle for the Italian community of New York,” reflecting not only the emerging prominence of Italians as an interest group but, more importantly, “the growing appreciation of the American public for our community.”72 Since the majority of southern Italian immigrants spoke only their own regional dialects rather than a standard Italian, the emphasis on the Italian language, and what it represented in this new and often hostile environment, helped forge a group identity that did not exist in Italy. Historians have noted the importance of the Italian language press in facilitating an ideological shift among immigrants from a more provincial worldview as Neapolitans, Calabrians, and Sicilians to a collective identity as Italians.73 This transition has been described, often negatively, as one that postponed the assimilation of Italians into American society. With constant appeals to Italian nationalism and frequent displays of Italian pride, many have asserted that men such as Barsotti sought to keep immigrants isolated and dependent upon their own patronage as a means to maintain their power and control. Indeed, seeking to extend their influence and exposure as community leaders, former padrones, bankers, and lodging house owners perceived newspaper ownership as a powerful vehicle to accomplish these goals. To realize the full impact of Italian language newspapers, however, one must peer beyond the retrograde intentions and narcissistic impulses of Italian immigrant community leaders. And, although historians such as Rudolph Vecoli have wisely noted that Italian immigrants were not simply acted upon, but decided for themselves what was reality, to ignore the power of newspapers to shape or create the rubric of debate is untenable. These men were so concerned with their influence and public image that internecine battles among newspaper owners, often fought within

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the colony.78 However, imperceptible to Pecorini, and even Barsotti and Frugone at the time, was how the Italian mainstream press’s defense of Italians and Italian civilization would prove critical to establishing a collective identity as Italians. Rather than retard immigrant acculturation, uplifting the race afforded Italians a platform from which to proudly argue for their full inclusion in American society as Italian, American, and white. As Todd Vogel states with respect to the African American press, “A periodical analyzed as a cultural production creates an ideal stage for examining society. . . . In this way, the press gives us the chance to see writers forming and reforming ideologies, creating and recreating a public sphere, and staging and restaging race itself.”79 During mass immigration, Italian language newspapers emerged out of necessity to fill a crucial void in the lives of an ever-increasing stream of settlers. Whether reporting on events in Italy, organizing subscription drives for Italian earthquake victims or memorials to Italian heroes, publishing employment advertisements, or providing information about labor organizations, the Italian language press catered to its consumers and offered a life preserver for many Italians grasping for normalcy in their new environment. According to Robert Park, along with city life, mainstream newspapers such as Il Progresso served to break down the “local and provincial loyalties with which immigrants arrived, and substituted a less intense but more national loyalty in its place.”80 Implicit in this process, Park stressed, was the importance of the press in fostering, or creating, a hybrid identity, “neither American nor foreign, but a combination of both.”81 Italian language newspapers played a pivotal role in this process by forging an unique class- and race-based identity centered upon an exalted civilization rooted in an Italian past wiped clean of sectional discord and questionable racial and color status.

2 The Italian Language Press and Africa

A day after the brutal lynching of eleven Italian immigrants in New Orleans in 1891, Il Progresso Italo-Americano published a letter on its front page written by an Italian American named Marchese. Marchese expressed outrage over the cruel work of the mob in New Orleans and added that his hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts, commiserated with the victims. Moreover, he expressed particular shock over how this could happen in a “civilized” nation such as America. Echoing a sentiment that prevailed throughout the Italian American press, Marchese concluded that the barbaric act of lynching might be expected in Africa tenebrosa (dark, murky Africa) but not in the United States.1 In a letter to Cristofero Colombo, another New York Italian American daily, Alberto Dini went one step further by maintaining that “not even the savage population of Central Africa would approve of such a disgraceful action.”2 According to a cynical Italian American press, the line between African “savagery” and American “civilization” became blurred: “But where are we? The only difference now between the free sons of America and the savages of Africa is that Americans have yet to become flesh eating cannibals.”3 In a scathing indictment of American lawlessness, African “savagery” was held as the standard against which to judge American society. In response to Dini’s letter, the Cristofero Colombo asserted, “At least cannibals respect the laws of primitive tribal justice so that a massacre like this would have been avoided.”4 Marchese’s and Dini’s letters reflect not only the vicissitudes of Italian immigrant topographies of race, color, and civilization in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century U.S. society but also a transnational racial awareness. These immigrants had seen parallel >> 37 

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Frequently New York’s Italian language press constructed Africa as a primitive, savage continent, the polar opposite of European, Western societies, and often employed the phrase continente Nero (black continent) or Africa tenebrosa (murky, dark Africa).7 Africa became a convenient trope for Italian language newspapers wrestling with their own questions of Italian American identity in a new and often inhospitable country. In addition, radical Italian language newspapers utilized this image to express their incredulity over how gullible immigrants allowed themselves to be bamboozled by religious doctrines and leaders. For mainstream newspapers, however, their portrayals of Africa as the savage, black continent served multiple goals. Empowered by the moral certainty of their case, mainstream newspapers responded to American violence and American calls for race-based immigration restriction by questioning American civilization. This harsh rhetoric, and the inflated sense of their own community’s civility, bolstered an emerging Italian identity. In addition, Italian colonial ventures into northern Africa in the 1890s and again in 1911–1912 served to further inform this identity by providing fertile ground for hypernationalistic appeals within the Italian immigrant community. The perception of Africa as uncivilized, savage, and dark was a key element of this strategy. *

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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

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is a civilized nation, she [America] has a duty to educate the barbarians from the South.”14 Unlike their own claims supporting Italian colonial ventures into Africa, mainstream newspapers attacked American imperial claims of bearing the white man’s burden. Indeed, the press ironically mocked American missionary excursions into China and central Africa in light of the uncivilized behavior directed at Italian immigrants in the United States.15 Perhaps the harshest contemporary criticism “demoted” American civilization to a racial classification akin to African. In 1899, the mainstream Il Progresso declared, “Why do they say they [Americans] have to send people to civilize the barbarians in the Philippines when we have white Matabeli here in the United States?” The word Matabeli is derived from “Matabeleland,” which is contemporary Zimbabwe. In this example, the uncivilized actions of Americans contradict their supposed mission to civilize Filipinos. However, by juxtaposing racial signifiers and giving the “savage” a white face, use of the term “white Matabeli” raised questions as to whether Il Progresso believed Americans could ever be completely equivalent to “uncivilized” and “black” Africans.16 Although espousing a progressive agenda toward human rights and social, political, and economic equity, the Italian language radical press also embraced the familiar language of racial hierarchy, in particular the image of Africa tenebrosa. Inveighing against capitalism, southern Italian ignorance, religion, or prominenti, the radical press, much like its mainstream counterpart, often expressed scorn and disappointment through comparisons to savage Africa. For example, “Ancient and Modern Cannibalism,” an article in the anarchist La Questione Sociale, lamented the exploitive character of capitalism by juxtaposing modern nations with primitive societies. “We are worse than the savages because we have a keenly developed intellect and should know better. . . . in the so called civilized countries and especially in those we inhabit the form of savage African cannibalism does not exist. . . . however, many people are still killed by the thousands in different ways every day.”17 Radical papers often employed the image of African savagery even when condemning race-based theories of oppression. In 1916 the socialist Il Proletario sarcastically chided a Boston clergyman for promoting race purification theories. The paper added that the reverend was fortunate his comments had a forum such as America, “which is the land of the

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to the Italian language radical press, spectacles such as religious feasts and processions served as a clandestine ruse designed to divest the Italian working class of its wages. For example, every summer, socialist and anarchist newspapers served to reinforce existing images of civilization and savagery in its coverage of the religious feast held at Our Lady of Mount Carmel in East Harlem. Embarrassed and frustrated over the behavior of their countrymen and countrywomen, Italian radical newspapers excoriated southern Italian immigrants for their gullibility and ignorance. Il Proletario asked incredulously if the “orgies and fantasies of the pelli rosse or the ottentoti could be any more inferior to the sad spectacle our Italian colony has offered us the last few days.”26 Pelle rosse (redskin) was a frequently used term for Native Americans in both the mainstream and the socialist press. Referring to the language of the Khoikhoi peoples of southwestern Africa and Namibia, ottentoti derived from the Italian word ottentotto, meaning Hottentots, and was an oft-used marker to distinguish savage from civilized in the Italian language press during the period of mass immigration.27

“The Hearts of Immigrants Beat in Unison with That of Mother Italy” An Italian civilization defined in part by the image of a black, African other informed the emergence of an Italian identity within the pages of Italian language mainstream newspapers. Given that the Italian language press so frequently associated what was considered uncivilized or savage with Zulus and Hottentots, it was unsurprising that Italians perceived themselves as quite the opposite. And, for immigrant arrivals who did not possess a strong sense of nation or Italianness upon arrival, the Italian government’s late nineteenth-century and early twentiethcentury colonial wars with African countries served as a graphic example of this perceived racial hierarchy. Following the example of other European states in the late nineteenth century, Italy embarked on a colonial path into Africa. This was fueled by a belief that only European civilization could deliver Africa, yet African conquest would solve domestic problems as well. For the recently unified Italian nation, the “scramble for Africa” served to awaken political and popular consciousness about people of color and highlighted issues

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del Duomo in Milan to demonstrate against Crispi, shouting, “Viva Menelik,” “Abbasso Crispi,” and “Via dall’Africa.” According to Umberto Levra, a “preinsurrectional tension exploded in spontaneous demonstrations in the piazzas of Italy.”32 Although Italy retained the territories of Eritrea and Somalia, the defeat at Adowa remained embedded in the collective popular consciousness of Italians. Mass-produced pamphlets containing songs and poems were sold and circulated widely throughout the country in the aftermath of Adowa. One particular pamphlet, in an effort to avenge the defeat psychologically, drew attention to the period before Adowa as if to deny the experience of disaster. Entitled “Vittoria Italiana in Africa” (Italian victory in Africa), the epic poem describes the honor and valor of Italian soldiers as they battled the “wicked and nasty” African soldiers. The image of the African is that of the barbarian savage who engages in military subterfuge that “civilized” nations such as Italy would not employ in battle. Produced for mass propaganda, these kinds of pamphlets created a negative image of the African that seeped into the popular mind.33 Despite the disappointing outcome, Italy’s attempts to colonize Ethiopia in the 1890s functioned as an important element in community formation within Italian immigrant enclaves.34 A leaflet that was printed in Baltimore by Il Comitato Italiano, an Italian immigrant organization that supported Italy during its Ethiopian campaign, stressed, “Although there is support in Italy, we here in the United States want to assert our solidarity with our brothers across the great ocean. . . . our sentiments are so strong we need to assert ourselves as Italians.”35 Addressed to “Connazionali,” or countrymen, the leaflet was distributed all over the country and even as far away as Denver, Colorado, to champion the cause of the homeland. Throughout the campaign, which had begun in January 1896, such manifestations of support for Italian victory over African forces appeared to be ubiquitous within the Italian immigrant communities from Lawrence, Massachusetts, to Chicago, Illinois.36 Italian immigrants inaugurated new ethnic organizations that began by “saluting the heroic Italian soldiers in Africa and the hope for a deserved victory.”37 A group of Italian women in Chicago organized within the ethnic community a collection drive specifically for the war with Ethiopia, the proceeds of which were sent directly to Queen Margherita of Italy.38 Italian American men were sufficiently inspired

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was impossible. The great benefit would be in creating an Italian race on the other side of the sea—a democratic society made up of proprietary farmers.”44 After Italy’s costly defeat at Adowa in 1896, Italian Americans feared that losing to an African army would not only damage Italian prestige internationally but exacerbate an already negative American perception of Italians. Therefore, although Adowa did not produce the victorious result desired by the nascent immigrant community, the mainstream press continued to depict Ethiopia with racially informed and bitter characterizations. For instance, various newspapers described victorious Ethiopians as “barbaric cannibals who eat raw meat and do not wear shoes.”45 L’Eco d’Italia vividly described the physical attributes of Menelik, the Ethiopian emperor who led the war against Italy, and emphasized his “flat nose with large nostrils, a mouth that is too large along with large teeth that protrude outward and are very visible as soon as he opens his fat lips.”46 The Italian language mainstream press also directed some bitterness toward European countries that had assisted African nations with military aid. L’Eco d’Italia lamented that through military assistance to African nations, European countries such as Russia and France had violated custom and degraded them. “Russia and France have broken the usual agreement that European nations do not help these kinds of barbarians. . . . it was understood that European nations went there to bring civilization and progress and that is what Italy is doing.”47 While incredibly humbling and unsuccessful, Italian colonial efforts in Africa during 1896 provided Italian immigrants in the United States an opportunity, albeit brief, to uplift the Italian race. It is not at all inconceivable that the rhetoric of Italian civilizing missions in Africa ameliorated immigrant self-consciousness, as well as informed a concerted effort to impress American detractors who questioned the racial suitability of Italians. Only fifteen years later, events in North Africa would provide Italians in New York City with another opportunity to bask in the civilized glory of the Italian race and nation.

Libya and Tripoli, 1911–1912 After the prospect of colonizing Ethiopia ended abruptly with the defeat of the Italians at Adowa in 1896, an opportunity to avenge this disaster

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over a certain class of Italians: “Why is Italy going to Tripolitania when it can bring civility to Italy first. . . . It appears that the primitive tribes are happy the way they are as opposed to southern Italians who are miserable.”49 The small town of Africo, Calabria, provided a graphic example of how sovversivi relied upon the image of Africa to construct the ideal Italian immigrant and in doing so often embraced a perception of Africa very similar to that of Il Progresso Italo-Americano.50 Writing in Il Proletario, Leonardo Frisina, a Calabrian and occasional contributor to the socialist newspaper, argued that Italian governmental resources could be better spent at home and attacked the misdeeds of Italy’s colonial effort in Libya. To defend this premise, Frisina cited an article published in 1912 in the patriotic and influential Italian journal Tribuna Illustrata. Africo, the article informed, probably received its name from the descendants of African slaves who were captured, and possibly escaped, during the days of the Roman Empire. Differentiating between African and Italian culture, the author explained the unique customs and practices particular to this town, such as burying pigs before eating them, stealing sheep, and begging in the streets. According to Frisina, when socialists argued “in Calabria there still existed barbarous and savage villages,” Italian nationalists had summarily dismissed their views as the rant of political extremists.51 With some measure of sarcasm Frisina played an interesting game of logic as he attempted to expose the hypocrisy of the Italian government’s colonial excursions. Criticizing the patriotic and self-aggrandizing habits of the Italian government, and in particular the Tribuna Illustrata (a paper that the socialists perceived as a government-subsidized mouthpiece), Frisina stated that “if Darwin could show in 1912 that Africans in Calabria were nearer to orangutans than Adam and Eve, this demonstration still would not satisfy the Tribuna Illustrata because they must always adhere to the notion that Italy is a civilized country.”52 However, in an effort to condemn the jingoistic patriotism of a journal such as Tribuna Illustrata, he conveyed an acceptance of the Italian belief of Africa as uncivilized: “Never would they [Tribuna Illustrata] say there are uncivilized people in Italy. . . . In fact, when there are feasts these African people sell our sons and daughters into slavery to rich people . . . we suggest that Tribuna Illustrata advise the Italian government to

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Ultimatum to Turkey Blows Today.” Only two days later the headline read, “Tripoli Ours.”56 Bolletino’s 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, Italy’s 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 Menelik’s 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 Italy’s 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 “Italy’s glorious tricolor flag” would “open the eyes of faraway people in a new era of redemption. It’s 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

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confused as to how American journals could possibly defend savagery over civilization. Highlighting differences between Western, civilized, and Christian nations and Muslim countries, Il Progresso reminded Western newspapers of Turkish massacres in Armenia and added, “The difference between Italian civilizations is that we treat all people the same way.”67 Mainstream owners and editors interpreted events in Tripoli within the context of an emerging collective identity as Italians informed by an italianita generated from their experience in the United States. And, as they had done in the past, they took the lead in stoking, and in many respects creating, a collective Italian racial consciousness. L’Araldo Italiano described the jubilant displays of Italians whose excitement and pride over the Italian conquest sent the paper’s editions, along with its evening journal, Il Telegrafo, flying off the newsstands. Reflective of the importance and reach of the immigrant press within Italian colonies, L’Araldo stated, “Whoever has a newspaper— and everyone has one in the Italian community—reads aloud the latest news to everyone.”68 By March, readers could see full-page advertisements peddling the latest illustrated editions of the “true and complete history of the Italian and Turkish War.”69 Akin to Columbus Day celebrations and exhortations to have Italian language taught in New York City schools, proprietors such as Barsotti organized subscription drives to collect money in support of Italian soldiers and their families. One such drive in Il Progresso in December 1911 pointed to the “colonies’ meritorious charity to the race” and listed the names of donors who were instrumental in “renewing the ancient glory of Rome” in their support of Tripoli’s conquest.70 L’Araldo Italiano also ran a public subscription drive urging Italian immigrants to support the cause with the headline “For Heart, Patriotism, and National Dignity.”71 Quick to point out the fervency of the New York City Italian colonies in support of the Tripoli invasion, newspapers reported that the “hearts of immigrants beat in unison with that of mother Italy.”72 Although loath to admit it, prominenti sought to capitalize on this moment of conquest, especially during this crucial period, by tracing Italy’s invasion of Tripoli as part of a legacy of imperialist conquest stretching back to ancient Rome. Articles laden with jingoistic language celebrated how military conquest would serve as redemption

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racial pride. Prominenti interpreted military ventures within the most glorious example they could conjure: the Roman Empire. In the process, the glory of Rome would serve as an instrumental force in healing the emotional and political wounds still lingering from the humiliation at Adowa. Consistent with subscription drives to honor Italian heroes such as Columbus and Dante, or efforts to have the Italian language taught in New York City schools, proprietors such as Barsotti and Frugone tapped into the glory of Rome as a strategy in identity formation well before Benito Mussolini’s rise to power in the 1920s. With an eye toward an American audience, as much as the Italian immigrant community, the prominenti press perceived and transmitted military dominance of an African country not only as evidence of Italian civilization but as a venture that was seamlessly rooted in the newly imagined Italian past.

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. military’s 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.” Balbi’s 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, Balbi’s 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 press’s 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 

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and malleable construction of civilization and savagery to suit their own community’s needs. Despite Chinese and Japanese societal marginalization and nonwhiteness, the Italian language press used America’s continued exclusion of la razza gialla as another opportunity to chide American racial and economic prejudice. Unlike Native Americans, defined as outside civilized society, this mutual interest served to inform a much more positive view of Asian Americans, who were described as worthy representatives of civilization. However, as is demonstrated more fully in subsequent chapters, prominenti newspapers, in particular, sharpened an ever-evolving racial outlook as they became more erudite in the lessons of American race and color. By the World War I period, the black/white divide emerged as central to this equation. Unwilling to consistently defend Asian Americans from white American transgressions, prominenti papers chose instead to direct their wrath at efforts to stigmatize Italians as not part of the white American mainstream. Viewing race and civilization along a more simplistic, and rigid, binary of white and black, the Italian language mainstream press advocated for Italian whiteness to the exclusion of any group defined as the darker other.

Pelle Rosse At the very moment when Italian immigrants began to fill Ellis Island’s immigration processing hall and suffer the most extreme forms of prejudice in the form of lynching, Native Americans—the first Americans—endured 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

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inhabited by people descended from European races, or did there exist [there] a population of pelle rosse?”7 Italian immigrant readers revealed a familiarity with these categories. In a letter written to Il Progresso Italo-Americano shortly after the 1891 lynching, A. Gentini expressed his outrage against the crimes “committed . . . by the Pelli Rossi of New Orleans,” declaring them “the shame of the 19th century” and “assaults against civilization by barbarism.”8 Ironically, the mainstream press did not exempt Italian immigrants from its harsh judgment and criticism. An article titled “Scenes of Savagery” described how a mob in the Italian American community in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, took the law into its own hands and viciously attacked another paesano accused of improper sexual relations with a fourteen-year-old girl. Il Progresso remarked that the men “surrounded the accused and began a savage ceremony of death—acting and dancing like Indians, singing songs of death. . . . the sad fact is that certain of our countrymen have nothing to envy from the Pelli Rosse.”9 In using the trope of the savage pelle rosse to convey its disappointment and disgust, Il Progresso served to scold, and in many ways caution, Italian immigrants by offering a graphic example of uncivilized behavior deemed unacceptable to “Italians.” *

*

*

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 Barsotti’s penchant for highlighting crimes against Italians, it could not have been

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lumpenproletariat, a taste of the “savage West.”14 After Naples, Cody took his show to Rome, where his arrival was widely anticipated. Immense traffic jams developed throughout Italy’s capital city as thousands of carriages tried to make their way to the Monte Mario district to capture a glimpse of the makeshift Indian village constructed for the show. Constructing a nascent and newly emergent class-based italianita coming out of Italian unification that owed much to exalted notions of Italian civilization and race, prominenti newspapers closely followed Cody’s tour, with front-page coverage containing headlines such as “The Wild West in Rome” and replete with schedules detailing his arrival in Italian cities.15 In addition, these stories often appeared alongside frontpage reports of Italy’s colonial ventures in Africa. Given the Italian “civilizing” mission under way in Africa in the 1890s, this was a receptive message among Italian language newspapers struggling with immigrant acceptance in the United States. For the Italian middle class, in general, Buffalo Bill represented military conquest and, in some ways, the American equivalent of Italian King Victor Emmanuel II or folk hero Giuseppe Garibaldi.16 The romance of the Wild West Shows suggested and reinforced notions that the forces of nature ordain the advance of civilization and progress against the insidiousness of barbarians.17 Unlike their critical view of white American oppression toward African Americans during this period, mainstream newspapers tepidly responded to atrocities committed against Native Americans perceived to live outside the boundaries of civilization. For radical papers, such as Il Proletario, class considerations remained dominant despite positioning Native Americans as pelle rosse. The newspaper steadfastly critiqued capitalism and colonialism by calling attention to the United States’ stained history of relations with both African Americans and Native Americans: The bourgeois make the laws in their favor so that when an American or European bourgeois want to take something they find any excuse. In America, it was that the Indians didn’t cultivate the land; in Africa the pretext was that they were barbarians and savages. . . . the situation becomes worse every day so that the poor Indians, who were owners of the land, are now described as savage beasts to be massacred and tortured.18

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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 don’t 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 Balbi’s 1891 synopsis of Native Americans. Balbi’s 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

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Theodore Roosevelt in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Giuseppe Sergi, a prominent Sicilian-born anthropologist, authored an article in Il Progresso titled “The Yellow Race.” Viewing Japan as a rising power, the article probed the geopolitical and social ramifications of its military victory over Russia. Sergi did not agree with some in the United States who feared a “yellow peril” threatening the safety of the United States and Europe; rather, he interpreted Japan’s burgeoning hegemony in the Pacific as a positive result of the war. “Even though they [the Japanese] are the dominant power in the Orient, it is a good thing since it will preserve the Asiatic race which has had civilization for thousands of years,” commented Sergi.31 Regarding China, Sergi maintained that the yellow race possessed a history of civilization that enabled it not to be bullied by white European colonialism: The methods of colonialism that Europe never tires of—from treating indigenous peoples as inferior, or using conquered people as work horses or worse—will not be possible in China. This is so because China as a nation is not comprised of primitive tribes like those of the Damara or the Daomei of Africa. In China the Europeans have shown to be less civilized than the Chinese, who are extremely civilized. In fact, if Europe were to conquer China it would be a disaster for humanity, a return to barbarism, and would destroy one of the most ancient and important models of world civilization.32

In a front-page article, Il Progresso maintained that Japan exhibited all the tenets of a progressive civilized race, including European nations such as Italy: “In Japan popular education flourishes and people in America are afraid of a “yellow peril! . . . There are many schools and illiteracy is very low, especially if compared to Russia and Italy. . . . it has all the elements of civilization in its evolution. . . . This is what Japan teaches us—it is civility in its highest form.”33 Yet, despite these positive perceptions, at times the Italian language press did struggle with the inherent tension of implying racial equality among la razza gialla and the United States or Europe. Praise for Japanese or Chinese civilization was often tempered by an emphasis that Westerners had imparted civilization to Asian peoples. As coverage of Japan and China increased during the period of the Russo-Japanese

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and Poles will leave this bestial labor to other races—possibly the Chinese—and rise above this bloody toil in favor of the kind of work performed by the more evolved races.”38 Within Ilion’s 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 Ilion’s 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.

Race-Based Immigration Restriction Although entitled to legal entry and naturalization under the 1790 immigration law that permitted “any alien being a free white person,” Italian immigrants consistently confronted accusations impugning their racial characteristics and suitability for citizenship. White Americans often used unflattering comparisons to people of color as a vital component in disparaging Italian immigrants. Although the most immediate and salient comparisons would be to African Americans, it was not unusual for Americans to describe Italian unskilled laborers as the “Chinese of Europe.” One Italian American editor in Detroit maintained, “Italians are maltreated, mocked, scorned, disdained, and abused in every way. The inferiority of the Italians is believed to be almost that of the Asiatics.” However, one issue that affected both communities, although to much different degrees, and seemingly created mutual sympathy remained the area of immigration restriction and exclusion. Vigilant against attempts to target their race for restriction, Italian language newspapers remained wary of attacks such as the one from a German language newspaper in Chicago that, borrowing a phrase from a “certain Anglo-American newspaper” labeling Italians the “Chinese of the East,” justified its desire for immigration restriction from Italy by citing the Chinese exclusion laws.41 The Italian language press found commonality in restriction laws targeting specific groups for exclusion, and this became a crucial factor in informing a divergent

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immigrants, Roosevelt’s perception of the Japanese race was generally positive, but informed as well by their status as a rising international power. Attempting to avoid an international incident, Roosevelt and Secretary of State Elihu Root brokered with Japan what commonly became known as the Gentlemen’s Agreement. In effect, the agreement consisted of six notes exchanged over 1907 and 1908 outlining that the Japanese government would not issue passports for laborers headed to the continental United States. Under threat of a lawsuit, Roosevelt pushed the leaders from California’s legislature and San Francisco’s school board to discontinue the policy of segregation with respect to Japanese schoolchildren. On paper the Gentlemen’s Agreement barred further Japanese immigration to the United States; in practice, however, various loopholes, such as the immigration of picture brides, allowed the Japanese population to expand. For example, the U.S. Census of 1900 listed 24,788 people of Japanese origin, but that number increased to 67,744 in 1910 and 81,502 in 1920.45 For radical papers such as Il Proletario, Asian Americans, particularly Japanese Americans living in California, fit nicely within a workingclass narrative that never properly suited Native Americans. According to Il Proletario, exclusionary legislation aimed at Asian Americans simply reflected the capitalist class’s attempt to scapegoat Chinese immigrants for the economic problems facing the nation. The capitalists “lied to Americans and trade unions alike” in an effort to manipulate the American public and conceal their own actions, claiming that the Chinese, whom they described as an “inferior race, dressed in filthy Chinese clothes, and economized their wages in order to send it back to China.”46 Il Proletario targeted capitalism’s pernicious exploitation of the worker as the root of these injustices. Therefore, even immigrants who allowed themselves to be used as replacement workers deserved criticism for their shortsighted economic outlook. According to Il Proletario, “We have scabs from every nationality. The scab does not recognize a country and the exploitation of capitalism has no nationality.”47 The Italian Socialist Federation maintained that part of the reason that most unions and newspapers, such as the Masons and Bricklayers Union in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, supported Chinese exclusion was directly related to the strong competition the Chinese posed to manual labor in the United States. Pressing for a class-based, transnational

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Franz Sigel, in an apartment on West Forty-Eighth Street in Manhattan. Miss Sigel was found stuffed into a trunk with a rope tightened around her neck. The New York Times reported that Lung Lin (also known as William Leon) and Chung Sin, the “Chinamen” who occupied the apartment, had vanished and could not be found by police.54 Sigel, a nineteen-year-old white woman who hailed from a middle-class New York family, was described by the Times as “a missionary worker on the east side” who was “lured to the home of the Chinamen.”55 Through letters recovered by the New York City Police Department, it appeared that Miss Sigel may have been involved in a love triangle with Mr. Leon and Chi Gain, a manager of a nearby Mott Street restaurant. Unlike most of the New York press, which latched onto Sigel’s murder in a sensational manner that reflected, in part, the public’s obsession and fierce concern with interracial relationships during this period, Il Progresso remarked that this type of “hybrid union” between Chinese and Americans was not something entirely new in Brooklyn.56 In fact, marriages between members of the la razza gialla and Americans, usually in the form of missionary Sunday school instructors marrying their Chinese students, had occurred since the late 1880s.57 Instead, Il Progresso expressed great surprise that “hybrid unions” of this sort could still occur in the United States, where “racial prejudice is as deeply rooted as anywhere in the world.” Further astonishing was that these unions occurred across class lines as these schools had been frequented not by wealthy Chinese men but predominantly by “men from humble and modest economic backgrounds working in laundries, or as servants and cooks.”58 Il Progresso’s interpretation of the Sigel case is a clear example of how the mainstream and, to a lesser extent, the radical press perceived a changing racial landscape within the United States during the period of 1910 through 1920. Il Progresso’s surprise that “hybrid unions” could still occur in New York City, despite their presence since the 1880s, indicates a reworking of the race/color hierarchy. In so doing, Il Progresso reflected the press’s own progression toward a less nuanced and more simplistic construction of race and color where one’s race (American, Chinese, Italian) became even more intimately fastened to one’s color (white, yellow, swarthy). Surprised that a society so deeply rooted in racial prejudice would allow a union between Americans and Chinese,

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immigration laws “requiring certain qualifications of the Japanese and Chinese were race specific doctrines—applied to members of the ‘Asiatic’ (yellow) race and not asked of those Europeans of the Caucasian race.” Unlike mainstream newspapers, Giovannitti’s indictment of capitalism and the U.S. government did not abate. Yet incorporated within this critique Giovannitti placed some blame on Asians for their own exclusion. According to Giovannitti, the “Japanese in the West are completely segregated because there is too much difference between their race and the ‘yankee race.’” This owed mostly to the fact that “Asians did not have the faculty and the willingness to assimilate to the host culture due to racial differences.”59 This rhetorical approach spoke to the radical tendency to privilege class, but it often indirectly acknowledged that categories of race and color remained equal obstacles to full inclusion. Moreover, Giovannitti clearly links Europeans to Caucasian/white and Asians to yellow, further cementing the intimate connection between race and color during this period. Conversely, the mainstream press practiced a cautious approach toward Asian immigration restriction that reflected the increasingly rigid race/color paradigm in which Chinese and Japanese remained marked as the yellow race. Mainstream newspapers such as Il Progresso expressed concern that laws singling out Chinese laborers could, if passed, give “the impression that we are against Chinese of all classes and that the guiding impulse of the bill is racial prejudice.” The newspaper acknowledged the diversity of races and cultures arriving from various parts of the globe and stated that “the immigration laws should be applied with flexible methods so as not to damage or offend the sensibilities of any one people.” However, despite a rather tepid warning in 1908 that exclusionary laws governing Chinese immigration to American territories were in “open opposition to the principles of the republic and the spirit of our institutions,” the mainstream press soon discovered the difficulty in maintaining full-throated racial support for Asian inclusion.60 Concerned with American assaults on Italian racial suitability, the mainstream Italian language press remained reluctant to extoll the virtues of Japanese and Chinese civilization as a qualification for their inclusion. Prominenti opposed California’s proposed Asian restriction laws in a superficial, self-interested manner as any hints of a racial

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in American society.66 More to the point, Bolletino della Sera quoted a report from the Times of London that exonerated California exclusionists of racial profiling by stating that “these tendencies are not provoked by race hate, but rather by the instinct of self-preservation.” The paper perspicaciously observed with some confidence that “although Japan wanted to be treated the same as western nations, the people of the white race have no intention of recognizing these rights.”67 Despite rationalizations pointing to self-preservation rather than race hate as the motivating factor behind the Alien Land Bill, it became increasingly apparent that whiteness, and its perceived boundaries, played the primary role. For Italian American mainstream newspapers promoting the Italian race as civilized and white, racial defenses in support of la razza gialla would become impossible to maintain. As the rhetoric surrounding Asian exclusion heated up between 1910 and 1920, Bolletino della Sera chose to highlight the words of Anthony Caminetti, an Italian American state senator from California. Caminetti was not just another state senator but had been only the second Italian American to serve in Congress (1891–1895) in the United States, and the first from outside New York. Although many in New York City may not have heard of Caminetti, Bolletino’s decision to cite his views probably owed much to prominenti pride in Caminetti’s achievements: the first American-born descendant of Italian immigrants elected to the California state legislature, a former congressman, and U.S. commissioner of immigration from 1913 to 1921.68 Either way, Italian Americans read about one of their own race who not only supported the California restriction bill but bluntly declared its purpose was “to prevent the Japanese from being here.” In fact, Caminetti emerged as a vociferous critic of Asian immigration who, in his capacity as immigration commissioner, testified before a special hearing of the House Immigration Committee in 1914 that “Asiatic Immigration is a menace to the whole country and particularly to the Pacific Coast. The danger is general. No part of the United States is immune.”69 With the publication of the forty-one-volume Dillingham Commission report describing southern Italians as an inferior race, in addition to increasing hypernationalism unleashed by the war and energetic pleas for immigration restriction, Italian fitness for citizenship was by no means settled. Based upon an examination of Native Americans and

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Italian immigrants who wrestled with their own reception as racially inbetween. This chapter illustrates how the Italian language press learned and taught readers about race and color during the formative years of immigration, how it interpreted white American racism, and how it perceived African American victimization as a reflection of its own. Second, it demonstrates how this coverage and discussion of American racism served a critical purpose for how the Italian immigrant press ultimately constructed an identity as white. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Italian language mainstream press did not see a conflict in upholding Italian Americans as a civilized race while simultaneously championing African American rights and condemning white American racism. However, informed by the realities of white American racism, the press constructed an identity more closely aligned with the dictates of a black/white binary. By the World War I period, Italian immigrants staked a viable route toward full inclusion, a path not available to African Americans, by championing their race as civilized, American, and white.

Italians in the South Although a majority of Italian immigrants settled in industrial cities in the Northeast and encountered American racial codes there, it was in the American South that racial stratification and adherence to the color line of black and white remained most rigid. The segregated South was a stark context for news stories detailing the travails of southern Italian immigrants who were perceived by many white Americans as racially inferior and not quite white. Southern newspapers described Italian immigrants in racial terms that ranged from being “black as the blackest Negro in existence” to being “white,” or simply as “Dagoes.”5 Some plantation time books illustrated this confusion or “betweeness” by separating African Americans, “Dagoes,” and whites in the payroll accounts.6 In 1906, a Mississippi school district revealed its own uncertainty regarding the position of incoming Italian immigrants when it could not decide whether Italian children should attend whiteonly schools. A New York Times front-page headline encapsulated the

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of the South, warning that if the “immigration movement which has for its ulterior object the supplanting of Negro labor in the South . . . should be successful it would be the greatest calamity that has befallen the Negro since he set foot upon this continent.”10 The indignation and anxiety over Italian immigration southward was accompanied by an undercurrent of pride in the abilities and loyalty of black labor and an expectation that as “true” Americans, this loyalty should be repaid. In many cases, African American opinion makers were quick to point out that the South’s “experiment” with Italians would fail. After an Italian man was beaten in Mississippi for trying to “get Italian children into white schools,” New York Age commented, “the new departure of the South in inviting foreign immigration to supplant the tried and true black labor of that section is already bearing bitter fruit.”11 The African American Detroit Plaindealer satisfyingly recounted how white southern newspapers extolled Italian workers and hoped they would replace black labor. However, after the New Orleans lynching of 1891, “it doesn’t think so now. In a few years more when labor troubles assume the attitude in the South that they have in the North the South will begin to realize that it really has a problem on its hands.”12 Rather than foster unfettered immigration of Italians, journalist Henry Dotry assailed the federal government and declared, “It is surely time that the title ‘American citizen’ meant something. There are hundreds of thousands of white Americans and Afro-Americans who need caring for.”13 However, some prominent African Americans, such as Booker T. Washington, believed that the “studies” forecasting success for the Italian laborer, particularly in the South, were premature in their conclusions and did not account for the accompanying difficulties in recruiting Italian labor. While acknowledging the skills of the Italian farm laborer, Washington warned that these immigrants would be harder to manage than African Americans: “He is an alien; he does not desire to settle in the country, as a rule, and remains only long enough to make enough money to return to Italy.” Welcoming the competition as a “good” thing for African Americans, Washington remained “doubtful about the ultimate effect upon social conditions.”14 White southerners and African Americans vigorously debated and discussed the possibility that southern Italians could permanently alter

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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 South’s 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

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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

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between African American newspapers and the Italian language press. After the New Orleans lynching in 1891, a headline in the New York Age asked, “Is the White South Civilized?” In its condemnation of the South, and especially the people who perpetrated the crime, the paper recounted in outrage the lynching of the “defenseless” Italians. According to the Age, “As defenseless as they were, under the protection of lawful authority, and easily to have been protected by fifty men, they were murdered by the ‘the best citizens’” while the police looked on.30 After the lynching of 1899 in Tallulah, Louisiana, the Richmond Planet editorialized that the lynching “was without palliation or excuse. They [the Italian victims] were charged with murder when there had been no murder. They have since been charged with conspiracy when up to this writing it has not been proven. . . . Lawlessness is rampant, and civilization in many sections has been overthrown.”31 In 1891, the Detroit Plaindealer asserted that if lynching was not a common and lauded practice [in the] South, the magnitude of this butchery might be attributed to a frenzy of the moment. But lynching is a Southern art, the details of which are deliberately planned and discussed. . . . The South is the only place in the civilized world where a mob is the last resort for justice. This time the fury of the mob is spent on eleven defenseless Italians, instead of Afro-Americans as has usually been the case.32

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

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Although American racism came under scrutiny, Italian radical newspapers, unlike their mainstream counterparts, used Italian victimization not to promote italianita but as a means of educating the masses about economic exploitation. According to Il Proletario, lynching was a means of worker control and really “the most horrible consequence of tyrannical capitalism in this country.”36 Using the African American experience as a model, sovversivi (subversives) were comfortable threading a line from slavery to contemporary conditions of wage slavery and did not shrink from their perception that wage slavery was more brutal. Discussing peonage conditions faced by Italian laborers in Hawaii, Il Proletario declared that “the treatment Italians receive in Hawaii is no different from that which Blacks received before the Civil War. . . . It is the very slavery that United States law abolished but still exists in the traditions and customs of inhumane and avaricious owners.”37 In fact, the “old” slavery was abolished not through any pressure from abolitionists or antislavery politicians but rather because the system became “useless to capitalists.” Wage slavery was perceived as “much more advantageous” to the capitalists than the old form of slavery, which targeted only blacks: “Now capitalist owners could augment their pool of workers by enslaving whatever color people they wanted.”38 African American slaves were viewed as part of a paternalistic social web whereby white slave owners “looked after their slaves” in order to maintain productivity.39 The fact that “modern” slaves were equal under the law, unlike African Americans prior to the Fourteenth Amendment, prompted Italian American radicals to believe a more pernicious system of slavery existed in the modern era. According to Il Proletario, “Today, we are all equal in front of the law, but it was better to be a slave without any worry for the future than to be a free worker now. . . . the conditions of the new slavery are worse than before. . . . There are Italian immigrants from the North and South living in ‘shanties.’ These people are so miserable and downtrodden that they cannot rebel.”40 In 1906, Carlo Tresca, at the time the editor of Il Proletario, scolded Italian American labor agents who lured Italian immigrant workers to the South with false ideas of prosperity and declared that “the form of slavery created by the bourgeoisie is the worst kind of slavery.”41 Exasperated with Italians’ willingness to

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occurred in 1901 when a newspaper feud broke out between two of New York’s leading mainstream dailies, L’Araldo 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 L’Araldo 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 South’s 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

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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 L’Araldo Italiano. In fact, the paper proclaimed that Shaler’s 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 L’Araldo 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 Paris’s acceptance of lynching as “insane and cannibalistic.” The paper considered L’Araldo Italiano’s refusal to condemn this lynching a “disgrace” and “rejected the indecent words written about the two dead men.”52 Il Progresso’s defense of the two Italians, as well as its opposition to the sort of mob violence justified by L’Araldo Italiano and Shaler, was consistent with its reaction to previous crimes of this sort. Moreover, the clash reflected a wider dispute among New York’s 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 Shaler’s analysis, L’Araldo clearly aligned itself with a white American narrative that defended lynching as necessary to protect white citizens from dangerous black men. While Shaler’s argument focused on African Americans, Paris’s 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

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newspapers such as Il Progresso that consistently maintained racial oppression in the United States turned on color, more specifically white oppression of blacks. After eleven Italians were lynched in 1891, Il Progresso remarked that “although many thousands upon thousands in New Orleans dress in the genteel styles of the 19th century . . . and have the privilege of white faces—they are much worse than the savage Indians with red skins.”58 Lynching frequently attracted attention. Although some articles simply recited the facts of each case and were devoid of commentary, the headlines told a different story. Phrases such as “The Country of Lynching,” “Lynching at Full Speed,” “Always Lynching,” and “Another Negro Lynched” reflected exasperation and disgust as well as an awareness that “the famous lynch law” or “the summary justice of Judge Lynch,” as it was often referred to, was a endemic problem within the United States.59 During the era of the Jim Crow South, when increasing numbers of African Americans lived and worked in northern industrial cities such as New York, race riots involving blacks and whites became an unfortunate occurrence. Il Progresso’s coverage of violent episodes in which African Americans were surrounded by angry white mobs shouting “Lynch the Negro, kill him!” were commonplace in the early 1900s. On July 11, 1905, Il Progresso published an article titled “Race Hatred,” which detailed the plight of Henry Hart, an African American involved in an altercation with a “mob of whites” in Manhattan. When shots rang out between Hart and a James White, it led to a throng of almost 5,000 people who descended upon Hart’s house, screaming “Lynch the blacks!” Roughly a week later, Il Progresso covered a riot that broke out in the San Juan Hill district of Manhattan, between SixtyFirst Street and Amsterdam Avenue and Sixty-Third Street and West End Avenue, with the headline reading, “Another Fight between Blacks and Whites.”60 The appearance of news stories related to local, and even national, racial conflicts extended beyond simply covering the facts of each occurrence. Whether it was Il Progresso’s coverage of a major race riot or a local neighborhood skirmish, the paper demonstrated a keen understanding of why race riots erupted throughout American society. Under the headline “The Struggle of Race in New York,” Il Progresso dedicated three columns of its front page to one such incident in August

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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 don’t want to agree that this race has to be treated equal to the white race. . . . Instead here is a solution posed by the Governor—one 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 Lincoln’s 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 Lincoln’s 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

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“guilt.” According to Il Progresso, “Knowing how to die was more or less all that was permitted to Jim Crow. Furthermore, without formality or process, whites are there to lend a ‘hand’ in this endeavor at the slightest indication.” Seemingly disconnected from its target of condemnation, the newspaper rebuked white America, lamenting that only when the “great dawn of justice arrives will it free the white race from the chains of prejudice and redeem them from their cruel past!”70 In 1906, Il Progresso decided to reprint an article from the Tribune, an English newspaper that published a story on H. G. Wells’s personal tour of the northern United States. Although Il Progresso’s motivation for running the article is unknown, it filled three columns in the paper’s Sunday edition. The substance of Wells’s piece was an exploration of racial coexistence in the United States, or, as someone asked Wells, “Will it ever be possible that blacks and whites can live together?”71 Wells methodically exposed as bankrupt many of the defenses of black inferiority proffered by those white Americans who identified themselves as fine Christians. In strong language Wells stated, “Americans want to continue with the perpetuation of what is a ‘real nigger.’ The truth is Blacks are gentle people—educated, refined, lawyers, doctors, diplomats whose ancestors took part in the Norman conquests— yet they can’t ride on a train for whites only. . . . It’s useless to remind Americans that he is a more direct relative of these people than from the immigrants from the Orient.”72 Despite documenting numerous examples of African American civility and education, Wells pessimistically predicted, “Blacks and whites are not able to live next to each other without injustices. The differences in race are too apparent unless the population wants to ignore it.” He concluded, “Of all the races around the world who have suffered, the Negro is still indicted for his blood and his color as a sin.”73 Suggestive of the Italian American press’s interpretation of pelle rosse and la razza gialla, Wells and Il Progresso similarly conveyed an understanding that African Americans who were civilized and of a certain class must be closer to white. In the essay, Wells’s admiration for those “civilized and educated” African Americans, such as Washington and DuBois, rested upon their divergence from average African Americans—“domestic workers and railroad porters”—which solidified their status as “the white-negro,” “the civilized Negro,” or the “white-black.”74

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society. For instance, alongside stories concerning African Americans, Italian immigrants continued to read about Italian aqueduct workers in Paterson, New Jersey, who engaged in a scuffle with American coworkers only to be targeted by a mob of 500 people and nearly murdered. Other instances saw Italians threatened with lynching over simple street arguments and altercations—many times needing the protection of policemen firing warning shots to quell the angry crowd. Stories with headlines such as “The Menace of Lynching,” referring to the attempted lynching of Italians in West Virginia, or those reporting how Italians were chased by “American” mobs in Ohio shouting “lynch the Italian” increasingly warned Italian immigrant readers about the perilous consequences if white Americans perceived them as the other.76 The gradual understanding of how categories of race and color operated in the United States, as well as the continued white American questioning of Italian racial status and, at times, color status, would prompt Italian language newspapers to discard their analogy to the experiences of African Americans. The realization emerged that an association with African Americans could foster perceptions of dissimilarity between Italian immigrants and white Americans. In addition to other factors during the World War I period, including their own learning curve with respect to race and color in the United States, the Italian American mainstream press sensed the urgent need to assert the immigrants belonged because they were not only Americans but white Americans.

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 paper’s 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 writer’s 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 Cassin’s 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 

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“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 one’s racial grouping and one’s 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

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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 Italy’s 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

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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 man’s 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.

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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 paper’s regular front-page section titled “To Our American Readers.” In it, the paper echoed these sentiments and added that this bill would damage America’s 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

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Italy and we must demonstrate to the American people in every way that we are entirely worthy. It is our mission to participate in all of the festivities and to offer all our enthusiasm and generosity.”31 For Italian Americans, American recognition of Italy’s important role on the world stage and its acceptance as a member of the civilized world only reinforced, and in many ways vindicated, what Italian language mainstream newspapers had declared since their inception. On May 25, 1918, Il Progresso Italo-Americano gushed enthusiastically about how all of the metropolitan New York English language newspapers exalted the valor of Italy and the positive role it played in the war.32 Shortly after the United States entered the war, Il Cittadino referred to “the splendid articles on Italy published recently . . . containing public and official acknowledgement of the importance of Italy among the great civilized nations now at war.” The paper continued with pride that “an altogether different opinion and a new sentiment are awakening in this country toward our race.”33 For some, the patriotic fervor unleashed by the war would be a blessing in that it would accelerate Americanization, and theoretically full inclusion, more expeditiously than peacetime government measures. According to Il Cittadino, because Italian Americans would be “fighting for their Country, for a permanent peace and human civilization and for their most cherished ideals of a liberty loving and independent people,” American entry into the war would unleash a supernatural power that would “‘coin’ real Americans faster than any other process.”34 However, the reception that Italian immigrants often received from white Americans remained contemptuous and, for some observers of Italian immigrant history, had much to do not only with race but also with the questionable character of their whiteness. As Matthew Frye Jacobson has argued, from the founding of American society, “the idea of citizenship had become thoroughly entwined with the idea of ‘whiteness.’”35 Establishing and gaining acceptance as a civilized race required the Italian American press to construct and refashion Italian American identity. However, the other side of this coin, and also intimately connected to this conception of civilized race, was the notion of full inclusion as whites. Informed by Italian immigrants’ own history and education in American racial dynamics, the press simultaneously asserted their whiteness more forcefully than ever before during this period and

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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

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“Unexpected Fortunes of Gianduiotto,” Il Giornale Italiano, March 21, 1915. Seeing Gianduiotto ringing a bell to attract customers to an auction sale, the Italian boys have their own sale in mind.

Italian boys are angered by Gianduiotto’s ability to capitalize on their cruelty, they are not willing to perform the degrading jobs offered to Gianduiotto. This reflected an uneasy economic reality for Italians.45 In their push for full inclusion, Italians were inclined to disassociate themselves from black work, although for economic reasons many were still employed in positions they increasingly viewed as stigmatized. Two episodes in particular vividly reflect Italians’ continued status anxiety, as well as their evolving perception that full inclusion required a forceful distancing from African Americans. In one example, the Italian boys use a seesaw to catapult Gianduiotto over a brick wall. Upon landing on the other side, Gianduiotto is greeted by a well-dressed, bonnet-wearing, blond white girl who exclaims, “Look at the beautiful little Negro.” She tells Gianduiotto, “If you play with me I will share my toys with you.” The final scene shows Gianduiotto walking out the girl’s front door with toys under his arm as the Italian boys look on in great surprise. “Who gave you those?” ask the Italians. Gianduiotto confidently replies: “Go away! I play with the nobility now, not with the lower class

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who is hired by a white onlooker to perform as “Fatima, the dancing Egyptian.”47 Symbolically, the ascension of the Italian boys to the role of white slave master surely impacted readers familiar with earlier Italian language mainstream newspaper interpretations that willfully positioned Italian victimization and struggle within an African American context. The cartoon’s plots demonstrated how Italian racial ascension could occur, yet they concurrently reflected an uneasy, often competitive, scramble for pecuniary success and social mobility marked by Italian violence against blacks. And, although suggestions that African American success resulted solely from “good luck” created the impression that hard work and industriousness were virtues belonging only to the immigrant masses, they also served as a warning that hard work alone might not be the surest path to full inclusion.

“The Humiliation of Being Treated Like Negroes” To create an identity as American and white, it was necessary not only to establish that Italians were a civilized race but also to emphasize what they were not. Becoming American was intimately connected to, and often interchangeable with, whiteness. The Italian American assertions of whiteness required a distancing from African Americans with an ardor and urgency clearly lacking in the first two or three decades of mass immigration. The Italian language press increasingly employed this strategy in its quest to secure its group’s status as acceptably white. This reflected Jennifer Hochschild’s contention that “much of the history of the 20th century suggests that some immigrants defined success as demonstrating that they are not like blacks.”48 Although the Italian language mainstream press had always acknowledged a strong correlation between dark skin and inferior status, during the period 1910 through 1920 these same newspapers reacted much more aggressively to any depiction of Italians as nonwhite. Reflective of Reverend Cassin’s outrage in 1909, newspapers such as Il Cittadino similarly conceded that the most degrading comparison for Italians in the United States was the “humiliation” of “being treated like Negroes.”49 By 1919, Il Cittadino’s resistance to even the slightest representation that might damage Italians’ image reflected how immutable the boundary between black and white had become.

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newspapers of the period. Il Cittadino rationalized that “great evils often demand great remedies.” The paper mildly criticized the lynching of blacks but then offered that “in some cases the [black] crimes were so shocking and so frequent that the white population in determined self defense disregarded legal proceedings . . . by instituting the Vigilante citizens bodies that administered justice in a summary way. The lynching mob of today and the Vigilantes of yesterday are and were a product of communities of energetic citizens.”53 Il Progresso, the most prominent daily newspaper, continued to report incidents of African American lynching but rarely accompanied these reports with judgmental commentary such as in 1900 when the paper rebuked white mob violence and white supremacy.54 In a noticeable shift throughout the decade, Italian American newspapers such as Il Progresso did not offer scathing critiques of white American violence against African Americans even when murderous riots starkly revealed racial fault lines across American society. Southern African Americans had been migrating to areas like East St. Louis, Illinois, since 1910, searching for employment in industrial plants and stockyards. As the black population grew, white residents began to resent their presence, especially in the workplace. By 1916, tensions boiled over as whites’ resentment of blacks turned on their use as strikebreakers, and political parties exploited and fanned racial antagonism for their own gain. From May through July 1917, riots erupted in East St. Louis, culminating in a murderous frenzy in July when thirty-nine African Americans and nine whites lost their lives. During 1919, racial violence would engulf the nation, as race riots broke out in twenty-five towns and cities all over the country that summer and fall. The bloodiest riot occurred in Chicago, where twenty-three African Americans and fifteen whites were killed in a murderous rampage.55 Despite continued coverage dedicated to race riots involving blacks and whites, mainstream Italian language newspapers now refused to include commentary probing and criticizing white American discrimination. Instead of viewing the race riots as examples of white American oppression, the mainstream press appeared quite content to let events speak for themselves. In the process, it offered a much different narrative than it had constructed in the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s. Three major race riots that occurred in 1917 and 1919 illustrate

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of African Americans but for continued discrimination against Italian Americans: For us Americanized foreigners a story of this nature offers us a moment to reflect, as well as a precious opportunity to present our civilization’s contribution to this country’s development, which represents one of the greatest political and social experiments in the history of the world. . . . It is symptomatic that these painful events have taken place in that peaceful city in which the heart of the American nation beats and which gives visitors the impression of being a city sacred to the greatest hopes not only of America but of the entire world. This is the impression that we had last September when we went to implore the Government to strike a blow against the racial prejudice that victimized our compatriots in the army.61

Mainstream newspapers such as Il Progresso modified traditional interpretations of race conflict involving African Americans. They no longer expressed critical empathy but myopically focused on how matters of race and color could affect their group’s status. Reflecting this trend, it is not surprising that the newspaper perceived a major race riot between whites and blacks as an opportune moment to trumpet the cause of Italian civility, scold Americans for racism directed at Italian Americans, and subtly remind white Americans that their adversaries resided not in the Italian immigrant community but in growing black enclaves. Discussing the 1919 Chicago riot, Il Progresso declared that “many Italians had participated in the struggle against the negroes.” In an article carrying the headline “Two Italians Had Been Killed,” the paper sadly identified the deceased as “our countrymen Mario Lozzerano and Aroldo Brignardello.” There was no longer a question of where Italian Americans positioned themselves in this battle of black and white. Italian American newspapers had always reported on violence between Italians and many other groups, but for readers of Il Progresso the Chicago race riot of 1919 offered a graphic example of how identities become redefined. Maintaining their racial identity as Italians, Lozzerano and Brignardello were engaged in attacks against blacks in a twosided struggle reminiscent of Il Cittadino’s warning of an impending

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not only by appealing to the virtues of the Italian race but also by proving Italians’ whiteness. Reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s 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 City’s Bolletino della Sera and WHOM, using these instruments to exhort Italians to learn English, naturalize, and register to vote.1 Although Pope’s 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 Mussolini’s 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 

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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 Procaccino’s 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. . . . I’ve 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

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to rob white boys.” Anthony Minucci, Nick Minucci’s uncle, defended his nephew by emphatically stating, “He’s not a racist. We’re not racists. He’s definitely not racist.” Convicted of first-degree robbery as a hate crime, Nicholas Minucci was sentenced on July 17, 2006, to fifteen years in jail. After his sentencing Minucci stated to the court that his actions had been deemed a hate crime only because of where they occurred: Howard Beach. His lawyer, Albert Gaudelli, went one step further, telling reporters outside the courtroom that “the term Howard Beach has become synonymous with racism.”11 Racial incidents pitting white Italian Americans against African Americans marred the city and relegated the relationship between Italian Americans and blacks as one of outright hostility and distance. Despite its relevance in the 1980s, the process of distancing from African Americans (people of color) was not a recent phenomenon but had emerged some seventy years earlier. Although the Italian immigrant past is replete with an understanding of what it meant to be black in American society, it would be this understanding, as well as their own darker past, that would point subsequent generations toward the once unattainable goal of whiteness. The roots of the tragic racial events in Howard Beach and Bensonhurst lie deep within the broader scope of Italian American history—a history earmarked by an uneven, complicated journey from immigrant to American in a highly racialized society.

Notes

Notes to the Introduction

1. Commercial Herald, March 30, 1886. 2. Ibid. 3. Unidentified newspaper, Archivio storico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Rome (hereafter ASMAE), Ambasciata di Washington, busta 59, fascicolo 18, “Linciaggio di un italiano accusato di stupro, 1886–1887.” See also Consular Agent Piazza to Italian Consul in New York, ASMAE, Ambasciata di Washington, busta 59, fascicolo 18, “Linciaggio di un italiano accusato di stupro, 1886–1887”; Vicksburg Evening Post, March 26, 1886. 4. See Italian Ambassador, Washington, DC, to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Rome, ASMAE, Ambasciata di Washington, busta 59, fascicolo 18, “Linciaggio di un italiano accusato di stupro (Allegato: due numeri del “Progresso italo-americano”), 1886–1887. 5. Letter from Adelino Tirelli to Italian Consul, ASMAE, Ambasciata di Washington, busta 59, fascicolo 18, “Linciaggio di un italiano accusato di stupro (Allegato: due numeri del “Progresso italo-americano”), 1886–1887. 6. See “Ancora del linciaggio dell’italiano a Vicksburg, Miss.,” Il Progresso ItaloAmericano, in ASMAE, Ambasciata di Washington, busta 59, fascicolo 18, “Linciaggio di un italiano accusato di stupro (Allegato: due numeri del “Progresso italo-americano”), 1886–1887. 7. New York Times, November 28, 1892. 8. Matthew Pratt Guterl, The Color of Race in America, 1900–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 6. 9. For example, see Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 11. 10. Quoted in David W. Stowe, “Uncolored People: The Rise of Whiteness Studies,” Lingua Franca 6, no. 6 (1996): 70. The literature on “whiteness” is extensive and growing. For some benchmark works, see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1999); Roediger, Towards an Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and >> 135 

136  137 22. With respect to Jewish immigrants, Eric Goldstein states: “By casting light on the constant, albeit unsuccessful effort to fit Jewishness into a black/white framework, the book reveals white Americans’ anxious attempts to obscure the fissures that divided them internally, underscoring just how tenuous the notion of a stable, monolithic whiteness has been in American life.” Goldstein, Price of Whiteness, 2–3. Matthew Jacobson argues that the notion of a monolithic whiteness did not exist during this period as the category of Caucasian fractured along multiple degrees of racial fitness. In his work The White Scourge, historian Neil Foley asserts that in the first two decades of the twentieth century, “whiteness also came increasingly to mean a particular kind of white person. Not all whites, in other words, were equally white.” See Jacobson, Whiteness of Different Color; Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 5. 23. See Giorgio Bertellini, “Duce/Divo: Masculinity, Racial Identity, and Politics among Italian Americans in 1920s New York City,” Journal of Urban History 31 (2005): 691. 24. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Race and Gender in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 25. Quoted from Sally Miller, ed., The Ethnic Press in the United States: A Historical Analysis and Handbook (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), xii. See also Todd Vogel, ed., The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 2–3. Surprisingly, scholars of the Italian immigrant experience have historically understated the importance of the Italian language mainstream press. This is in stark contrast to scholars of other immigrant groups such as the Poles and the Greeks, who have demonstrated that “in reading and responding to their press, the immigrants and their descendants learned to act—and think—like Americans.” Andrew Kopan perceived the role of the Greek press in this way: “Despite its role as a carrier of ethnicity, the Greek ethnic press has also been a means of assimilation.” Andrew T. Kopan, “The Greek Press,” in Miller, Ethnic Press in the United States, 174; see also A. J. Kuzniewski, “The Polish American Press,” in Miller, Ethnic Press in the United States, 286. 26. Miller, Ethnic Press in the United States, xvi. 27. The editor explained she could not locate an available specialist in the field to undertake the assignment. See ibid., xiii. 28. Between 1899 and 1909, a total of 1,517,768 southern Italians emigrated with an illiteracy rate of 54.2 percent, and 311,243 northern Italians emigrated with a rate of 11.8 percent. The illiteracy rate for all Italian immigrants arriving during this period was 47 percent. See table 15 in U.S. Immigration Commission Reports, vol. 4, Emigration Conditions in Europe, 41. 29. Italian language circulation figures from Nathan H. Seidman, The Foreign Language Market in America: A Study of the Racial and National Groups in the United States, Their Geographical Distribution, Occupations, Their Social and

138  139 between the northern and southern economies was explored through the notion of “dualism”—the idea that two completely separate economies existed side by side within the same country. During the 1980s, however, new scholarship began to challenge the basic premises of meridionalismo, asserting instead that constantly interpreting the South through an implicit comparison with the North distorted the realities of the Mezzogiorno. The older scholarship, revisionists argued, positioned the South as a static, backward society completely separated from any of the positive features of Italian history. In Latifundium: Moral Economy and Material Life in a European Periphery (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), Marta Petrucewicz challenges this notion by focusing on the economic, social, and moral functioning of a Calabrian latifondo. It ahistorically implied that the South was a homogeneous region made up of various provinces that possessed similar characteristics. In essence, the revisionists warn of the dangers of trying to analyze the South within the “old” historiographical framework of a “southern problem” set forth by their predecessors. See Jonathan Morris, “Challenging Meridionalismo: Constructing a New History for Southern Italy,” in Robert Lumley and Jonathan Morris, eds., The New History of the Italian South: The Mezzogiorno Revisited (London: University of Exeter Press, 1997), 1–19. 5. Gabriella Gribaudi, “Images of the South: The Mezzogiorno as Seen by Insiders and Outsiders,” in Lumley and Morris, New History of the Italian South, 87. 6. Quoted in John Dickie, “Stereotypes of the Italian South, 1860–1900,” in Lumley and Morris, New History of the Italian South, 122. See also John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Vito Teti, ed., La razza maladetta: Origini del pregiudizio antimeriodionali (Rome: Manifestolibri, 1993); Claudia Petraccone, Le due civiltà: Settentrionali e meridionali nella storia d’Italia dal 1860 al 1914 (Storia e societa) (Rome: Laterza, 2000). 7. The connections between late nineteenth-century constructions of masculinity, gender, and civilization are explored in Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization. 8. See Gribaudi, “Images of the South,” 95; Dickie, “Stereotypes of the Italian South,” 114–121; see also Mary Gibson, “Biology or Environment? Race and Southern ‘Deviancy’ in the Writings of Italian Criminologists, 1880–1920,” in Jane Schneider, ed., Italy’s “Southern Question”: Orientalism in One Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 9. U.S. Immigration Commission Reports, vol. 5, Dictionary of Races or People, 82. 10. Thomas Kessner, The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City, 1880–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 7. 11. Annual report, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1973. 12. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910: Population (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913), table 13, p. 217.

140  141 29. Fenton, Immigrants and Unions, 58. 30. Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 236–237; Vecoli, “Italian Immigrant Press,” 20. 31. See, for example, Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 11, 1891. 32. Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 238. 33. Alfredo Bosi, Cinquant’anni di vita in America (New York: Bagnasco Press, 1921), 404. 34. Ibid.; N. W. Ayer & Son’s, American Newspaper Annual and Directory, 1920, 680. 35. New York Times, July 6, 1945; Bosi, Cinquant’anni di vita in America, 408. 36. Bosi, Cinquant’anni di vita in America, 408. 37. Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 240; Fenton, Immigrants and Unions, 599. 38. For example, L’Araldo Italiano had a circulation of 11,200 in 1902; 12,500 in 1905 (compared with 6,500 for Il Progresso Italo-Americano); 12,500 in 1906; 15,132 in 1917; and 12,454 in 1920. See N. W. Ayer & Son’s, American Newspaper Annual and Directory, 1902, 1905, 1906, 1917, 1920. 39. Bosi, Cinquant’anni di vita in America, 408; N. W. Ayer & Son’s, American Newspaper Annual and Directory, 1920. 40. Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 211–212; United States, Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, House of Representatives, 62nd Cong., 2nd sess. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1912), 102; New York Times, November 13, 1936. 41. New York Times, November 3, 1906. 42. Bosi, Cinquant’anni di vita in America, 408. 43. N. W. Ayer & Son’s, American Newspaper Annual and Directory, 1911, 629. 44. Fenton, Immigrants and Unions, 186, 599. 45. Seidman, Foreign Language Market in America, sec. D, 32. 46. N. W. Ayer & Son’s, American Newspaper Annual and Directory, 1917, 652. 47. For some examples, see Il Cittadino, January 14, 1915; April 15, 1915; February 10, 1916; June 8, 1916; July 6, 1916; July 20, 1916; May 31, 1917. 48. California Immigration and Housing Bulletin, Commission of Immigration and Housing of California, San Francisco, CA, 1920, p. 13. 49. New York Times, November 2, 1916. 50. The most recent monographs on Italian American radicalism include Marcella Bencivenni, Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890–1940 (New York: NYU Press, 2011), especially chap. 3, “A Literary Class War: The Italian American Radical Press”; Philip V. Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer, eds., The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); Donna R. Gabaccia and Fraser M. Ottanelli, eds., Italian Workers of the World: Labor Migration and the Formation of Multiethnic States (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001); Donna R. Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta, eds., Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); and Michael M. Topp, Those without a Country: The

142  143 27, 1905; June 29, 1909; August 19, 1910; January 23, 1915; May 24, 1915; May 10, 1918; L’Araldo Italiano, July 25, 1901. 65. The two examples cited here refer to the subscription drive for the Garibaldi statue and the earthquake that struck Italy in 1887. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, March 5, 1887; April 16, 1887. 66. Bosi, Cinquant’anni di vita in America, 384–385. 67. Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 182. 68. See Claudia L. Bushman, America Discovers Columbus: How an Italian Explorer Became an American Hero (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992); Gerald McKevitt, “Christopher Columbus as a Civic Saint,” California History 71 (1992/93): 516–534; George E. Pozzetta and Gary R. Mormino, “The Politics of Christopher Columbus and World War II,” Altreitalie, no. 17 (1998): 6–15. 69. Michele H. Bogart, The Politics of Urban Beauty: New York and Its Art Commission (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 108–117; see also Pozzetta and Mormino, “Politics of Christopher Columbus,” 6–9. 70. See Il Progresso Italo-Americano, December 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 1890. See also Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 183–184, in which he discusses Il Progresso’s subscription drive on behalf of Italians accused of murdering Chief Hennessey. 71. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, November 4, 1906. 72. Ibid. Although Covello began teaching Italian at De Witt Clinton High School in 1920—the first class of its kind in that school—it was not until May 1922 that the New York City Board of Education began offering Regents credits that placed Italian on an equal footing with other languages. Covello, who was appointed principal of Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem in 1934, argued strenuously that the children of immigrants needed knowledge of their native language to give them a sense of identity in American society. See Leonard Covello with Guido D’Agostino, The Heart Is the Teacher (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958), 129–137; and Francesco Cordasco, ed., The Social Background of the Italo-American Schoolchild: A Study of the Southern Italian Family Mores and Their Effect on the School Situation in Italy and America (New York: Brill, 1967). For a broader perspective on immigrants and New York City schools, see Stephen F. Brumberg, “Going to America, Going to School: The Immigrant Public School Encounter in Turn-of-the-Century New York City,” American Jewish Archives 36 (1984): 86–135. 73. See Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 242; Vecoli, “Italian Immigrant Press,” 22–25; Fenton, Immigrants and Unions, 65. 74. Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 235; Fenton, Immigrants and Unions, 58–59. 75. Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 250. 76. La Piana, “What Do the Italians in America Read,” 13–14. 77. New York Times, September 3, 1911. In 1914, Pecorini’s broadsides expedited his arrest for libel and brought a legal suit for $2,000 against Il Cittadino’s publisher,

144  145 and savagery. Ironically, its outrage at European colonial ventures is littered with acknowledgments that “civilized” people should know and act in a more humane manner—not necessarily that “native people” should not be treated this way at all. See Il Grido degli Oppressi, June 30, 1892. 10. Il Proletario, December 15, 1900. 11. The implicit understanding of civilized versus uncivilized was ubiquitous in a host of articles dealing with a variety of topics. Discussing the Russo-Japanese War, Carlo Tresca held France up as the “pioneering republic of civility.” Il Proletario, April 16, 1905. 12. Filippo Manetta, La razza negra nel suo stato selvaggio in Africa e nella sua duplice condizione di emancipata e di schiava in America (Turin: Tipografia Del Commercio, 1864), 44. 13. Giuseppe Giacosa, Impressioni d’America (Milan: Tipografia Editrice L. F. Cogliati, 1898), 153. 14. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, July 29, 1899. 15. Ibid., March 16, 1891. 16. Ibid., August 5, 1899. 17. La Questione Sociale, October 27, 1906. 18. In addition to outright comparisons associating “savage” Africans with southern Italians, for example, there was also a tendency to use Africans metaphorically to illuminate a point. For instance, in an article criticizing the prominentiowned Italian language press in New York, Il Proletario maintained that these newspapers were vehicles for exploitation and prostitution and exclaimed in disgust that prominenti newspapers were full of such grotesque nonsense that “not even a Zulu would accept it.” Il Proletario, October 28, 1916. 19. La Questione Sociale, November 26, 1904. After the fatal shooting of Giovanni Bazzani, a young Italian boy who mistakenly trespassed onto a farm in Clinton, Indiana, La Questione Sociale used this “unpardonable crime” to outline the evils of private property in the United States. In its outrage, La Questione Sociale complained, “Is this how American farmers defend their property? These crimes are so atrocious that they would horrify and disgust even savage beasts from central Africa.” 20. See Il Proletario, June 2, 1911. Common references to Africa as “savage” were present in Il Proletario. In one article students on horseback from Harvard were criticized for creating a slight melee after an altercation occurred between a prostitute and the police. Il Proletario stated that the students resembled the “conquistadors of savage Africa.” Il Proletario, March 1, 1912. 21. Ibid., July 19, 1902. 22. Ibid., July 21, 1900. Mainstream newspapers used similar images of “barefoot” natives to convey the primitiveness of Africans. See Eco d’Italia, March 26, 1896; L’Araldo Italiano, March 20, 1896. 23. Il Proletario, July 21, 1900.

146  147 Ambasciata di Washington, busta 107, fascicolo 14, “Mobilitazione di italiani negli S.U. per la campagna d’Africa, 1896.” 37. Consul General of New York, April 17, 1896, G. B. Rosasco to Italian Ambassador in Washington, DC, ASMAE, Ambasciata di Washington, busta 107, fascicolo 14, “Mobilitazione di italiani negli S.U. per la campagna d’Africa, 1896.” 38. C. Pierorazio, Chicago, IL, to Italian Ambassador, Washington, DC, ASMAE, Ambasciata di Washington, busta 107, fascicolo 14, “Mobilitazione di italiani negli S.U. per la campagna d’Africa, 1896.” 39. Italian Consul, Denver, CO, to Italian Ambassador, Washington, DC, February 14, 1896, ASMAE, Ambasciata di Washington, busta 107, fascicolo 14, “Mobilitazione di italiani negli S.U. per la campagna d’Africa, 1896.” 40. Archangelo Pagani, Director of Agency for the Employment of Both Sexes in New York City, to Italian Ambassador, Washington, DC, ASMAE, Ambasciata di Washington, busta 107, fascicolo 14, “Mobilitazione di italiani negli S.U. per la campagna d’Africa, 1896.” 41. Professor V. A. Scaletta, Montreal, Canada, to Italian Ambassador, Washington, DC, ASMAE, Ambasciata di Washington, busta 107, fascicolo 14, “Mobilitazione di italiani negli S.U. per la campagna d’Africa, 1896.” 42. L’Araldo Italiano, March 11, 1896; Il Progresso Italo-Americano, March 19, 1896; March 22, 1896. 43. L’Eco d’Italia, March 5, 1896. 44. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, June 17, 1891. 45. L’Eco d’Italia, March 26, 1896; L’Araldo Italiano, March 20, 1896. 46. L’Eco d’Italia, April 9, 1896. 47. Ibid., April 30, 1896. 48. In many articles the Italian word tenebrosa was attached to descriptions of Africa. Similar to the mainstream Italian language press, particularly Il Progresso Italo-Americano, the word, meaning “dark” or “murky,” was often used as an adjective to describe the “primitive” African continent. See Il Proletario, March 24, 1917. 49. Il Proletario, January 5, 1912. For an excellent discussion of Italian American radicals and the Italian invasion of Libya, see chap. 2, “A Transnational Syndicalist Identity,” in Michael Miller Topp, Those without Country: The Political Culture of Italian American Syndicalists (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), especially 62–81. 50. With a population of only 1,776 in 1910, Africo gained prominence as the site for the story of Saint Leo, popularly known as Beato Leone, a revered figure who had lived during the fifth century. Upon Leone’s death, a struggle ensued between the people of Africo and Bova, where Leone had been born, over where Leone’s body would ultimately rest. The townspeople of Bova eventually succeeded in keeping the body but offered one of Leone’s fingers to the people of Africo. Thereafter, the residents of Africo observed every May 12 as a solemn feast day when the sick and indigent would pilgrimage to the river LaVerde,

148  149 67. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, October 17, 1911. 68. L’Araldo Italiano, October 1, 1911. 69. Il Telegrafo, March 14, 1912. 70. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, December 17, 1911. 71. L’Araldo Italiano, November 22, 1911. 72. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, September 30, 1911. 73. L’Araldo Italiano, September 30, 1911; also see L’Araldo Italiano, September 29, 1911; Il Telegrafo, October 18, 1911; October 23, 1911. 74. L’Araldo Italiano, November 22, 1911; Il Progresso Italo-Americano, September 30, 1911. 75. Bolletino della Sera, October 6, 1911. 76. L’Araldo Italiano, November 22, 1911. 77. Ibid., September 30, 1911.

Notes to Chapter 3

1. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, June 7, 1891. 2. See Alan Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), xxiii. 3. In 1906, Il Progresso reported on a band of 700 Indians in Utah and Wyoming who had depleted the supply of wild animals and had turned their attention to more domesticated animals, such as cattle. This had created concern among local cattle raisers, who feared the killing of their livestock. Symbolically, this story contextualized the position that Native Americans were seen to occupy. Perceived to belong in the “wild” hunting for wild animals, it was only when pelle rosse crossed the boundary into the white, European sphere of “civilization” that they caused concern. The boundaries of “civilization” and “savagery” were clearly delineated. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 10, 1906. 4. Radical newspapers such as Il Proletario often worked within a similar framework whereby Native peoples served a useful and familiar role in establishing barbarism and savagery. This was the case in socialist diatribes against capitalism and colonialism, as well as against those who profited from these systems of exploitation, such as Italian immigrant prominenti. Il Proletario, January 5, 1912. 5. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, April 10, 1891. 6. Ibid., March 18, 1891. 7. Cristofero Colombo, March 15, 1891. 8. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 3, 1891. Aside from Il Progresso ItaloAmericano, other New York Italian American newspapers such as L’Eco d’Italia also appropriated pelle rosse to signify “savage.” Given the facile way in which it was used, it appears that these sentiments were widespread within the Italian American community. For more examples of the comparison of lynch mob participants to “redskins,” see, Eco d’Italia, March 17, 1891; Il Progresso ItaloAmericano, March 16, 1891; July 16, 1901. 9. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 2, 1910.

150  151 “American,” as articles containing the headline “White Slave Trade” would describe “fifty American girls” held in China. For “yellow slave trade,” see Il Progresso Italo-Americano, October 20, 1905; August 2, 1907. For “white slave trade,” see Il Progresso Italo-Americano, October 24, 1905. See “Il Piu’ Grande Paese,” Il Proletario, February 21, 1914; “Il Congresso dell’ A.F. of L: I Socialisti—La razza gialla,” Il Proletario, December 6, 1913; “Gli Schiavi Bianchi diretti alle Hawaii si Ribellano,” Il Proletario, February 2, 1901. 31. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, July 9, 1905. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., December 16, 1905. 34. La Luce, March 12, 1904. 35. L’Araldo Italiano, July 9, 1905. 36. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, July 9, 1905. 37. Il Proletario, November 8, 1911. 38. Ibid., June 4, 1905. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. See Donna Gabaccia, “The ‘Yellow Peril’ and the ‘Chinese of Europe’: Global Perspectives on Race and Labor, 1815–1930,” in Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, eds., Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (Berne: Peter Lang, 1997), 195–196; for the Detroit quote, see David R. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 46; Marco D’Eramo, The Pig and the Skyscraper: Chicago: A History of Our Future, trans. Graeme Thomson (London: Verso, 2002), 158–159. 42. Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 19. 43. During the decade of the 1850s, a total of 41,397 Chinese immigrants arrived, the majority of whom settled in California. In the 1870s, this number would increase to 123,201. Leonard Dinnerstein and David M. Reimers, Ethnic Americans: A History of Immigration and Assimilation (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975), 162–163. 44. Michael Lemay and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds., U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), xxxii–xxxiii. 45. See U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division, Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-Born Population of the United States: 1850–1990, table 4, “Region or Country or Area of Birth of the Foreign-Born Population” (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1990). 46. Il Proletario, November 23, 1901. 47. Ibid., April 12, 1902. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., May 17, 1913; May 31, 1913.

152  153 64. Bolletino della Sera ran almost daily coverage of the debate over the Anti-Alien Land Bill. See, for example, April 20–24, 1913; April 26, 1913; April 29–30, 1913; May 1, 1913; May 5, 1913; May 9, 1913; May 13, 1913; May 15, 1913; May 19, 1913. 65. Ibid., April 20, 1913. 66. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, April 21, 1913. 67. Bolletino della Sera, May 19, 1913. 68. Ibid., April 22, 1913. Both Caminetti’s father and mother had been born in Italy (Calabria and Genoa, respectively), and he had served in the California Senate since 1907, as well as serving as U.S. commissioner of immigration from 1913 to 1921. See http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/collections/italianamericans/timeline_ immigration.pdf. 69. New York Times, February 14, 1914.

Notes to Chapter 4







1. New York Times, March 15, 1891. 2. Ibid., March 29, 1891. 3. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, March 28, 1891. 4. The idea of understanding whiteness in relation to who was considered nonwhite corresponds to Ian Haney López’s work on the legal construction of race and whiteness. Analyzing the racial prerequisite cases to naturalization during the period 1870 through 1952, Haney López argues that “the established not so much the parameters of Whiteness as the non-Whiteness of Chinese, South Asians, and so on.” See Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: NYU Press, 1996), 27. 5. George E. Cunningham, “The Italian: A Hindrance to White Solidarity, 1890–1898,” Journal of Negro History 50 (June 1965): 34. 6. Jean Ann Scarpaci, Italian Immigrants in Louisiana’s Sugar Parishes: Recruitment, Labor Conditions, and Community Relations, 1880–1910 (New York: Arno Press, 1980), 222. 7. New York Times, November 8, 1906. 8. Upon migrating to southern states, Italian immigrants also labored in the lumber industry, railroad industry, and truck farming. See Scarpaci, Italian Immigrants in Louisiana’s Sugar Parishes, 5. On the efforts to promote immigration, see Rowland T. Berthoff, “Southern Attitudes toward Immigration, 1865–1914,” Journal of Southern History 17 (1951): 328–360; Bert James Loewenberg, “Efforts of the South to Encourage Immigration, 1865–1900,” South Atlantic Quarterly 33 (1934): 363–385; Henry Marshall Booker, “Efforts of the South to Attract Immigrants, 1860–1900” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1965); Alfred Holt Stone, “The Italian Cotton Grower: The Negro’s Problem,” South Atlantic Quarterly 4 (1905): 42–47; Emily Fogg Meade, “Italian Immigration into the South,” South Atlantic Quarterly 4 (1905): 217–223; Lee J. Langley, “Italians in the Cotton Fields,” Southern Farm Magazine 12 (1904), 8–9. 9. New York Age, February 21, 1891; May 16, 1891.

154  155 33. For reporting of African American lynching, see “L’americana,” La Questione Sociale, August 2, 1902; “Civiltà americana,” La Questione Sociale, March 23, 1907. 34. See “Contro il Linciaggio,” Il Proletario, August 12, 1899. 35. Il Proletario, June 4, 1909. 36. “I Linciaggi,” Il Proletario, May 5, 1900. There are many other examples in which Italian American socialists reduced racial attacks such as lynching to acts of class warfare. After the brutal lynching of a black man in Colorado in 1900, a disgusted Il Proletario described how the townspeople rejoiced as the young black man was burned at the stake for allegedly violating a white girl. However, in its commentary, rather than castigate a racial caste system that had allowed this type of behavior, Il Proletario chose to direct its ire at churches and priests. See “La Settimana-Un linciaggio,” Il Proletario, November 24, 1900. 37. Il Proletario, September 20, 1900. 38. “Fatti e opinioni: Un Prete e la Schiavitu,’” La Questione Sociale, June 6, 1900. 39. “La Buona Propaganda: Avanti, Schiavi,” Il Proletario, July 25, 1914. 40. Ibid. 41. “Verso La Schiavitu’?,” Il Proletario, April 1, 1906. 42. “Italiani derubati a Springfield Mass.,” Il Proletario, January 13, 1900. 43. See “L’avvenimento di New Orleans,” Il Proletario, August 4, 1900. For some examples of how racial distinctions were made in this paper, see “La Vera Civilta,’” Il Proletario, January 11, 1902; “Decota, W. Va: Poeveri lavoratori!,” Il Proletario, June 26, 1904; “La liberta’ del lavoro,” Il Proletario, June 26, 1904. 44. “La Schiavitu’ in America,” Il Proletario, May 5, 1900. 45. Arkansas Gazette, July 13, 1901. 46. L’Araldo Italiano, August 2, 1901; July 14, 1901. In these articles, Paris echoed the general stereotype that Italians were prone to violence. 47. “I Linciaggi,” Il Proletario, May 5, 1900. 48. G. DeMarco, “La Psicologia del Linciaggio,” L’Araldo Italiano, July 25, 1901. 49. Nathaniel S. Shaler, The Autobiography of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), 27. 50. L’Araldo Italiano, July 25, 1901. 51. Ibid. 52. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, July 16, 1901. 53. Papers such as Bolletino della Sera and L’Araldo Italiano made specific efforts to seek approval from American newspapers such as the New York Times, often at the expense of Barsotti’s willingness to endlessly promote italianita. One event occurred in 1910. At the heart of the matter was the promotion of a health clinic in Harlem that had been reportedly underpromoted by the community, especially the Italian language press. The Times commended newspapers such as L’Araldo Italiano and Bolletino della Sera for quickly spreading the word of the clinic for the benefit of their Italian countrymen. The Times article reprinted in English a pointed critique of Barsotti published in Bolletino. Although it did not

156  157 64. La Questione Sociale, October 26, 1901. 65. Ibid., December 26, 1903. 66. Il Proletario, February 16, 1899. 67. In February 1904, the anarchist La Questione Sociale noted that Americans were hypocritical to commemorate Lincoln if the values of capitalist America opposed what Lincoln stood for. See La Questione Sociale, February 20,1904. For other articles dealing with the martyred Lincoln, see Il Proletario, July 11, 1914; July 17, 1915. 68. “Civiltà americana,” La Questione Sociale, November 9, 1901. See also “Bianchi e neri,” Il Proletario, November 16, 1901. 69. “Jim Crow,” Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 19, 1905. 70. Ibid. 71. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, December 9, 1906. 72. Ibid. Two months later the New York Times reported on the speech given by W. E. B. DuBois at Carnegie Hall in which he echoed these sentiments: “As a subtle and far-reaching blend of blood, you have in many great white men this negro element coming in to color and make wonderful the genius which they had—a fact which was as true of Robert Browning and Alexander Hamilton as it was of Lew Wallace and a great many other Americans who may wish to have it forgotten.” New York Times, February 18, 1907. 73. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, December 9, 1906. 74. Ibid. 75. Gail Bederman demonstrates that by the 1890s the dominant version of civilization interwove particular ideas about race and gender. According to Bederman, “The discourse of civilization linked both male dominance and white supremacy to a Darwinist version of Protestant millennialism.” See Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 25. 76. “Tentativi di Linciaggio in Brooklyn,” Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 6, 1907; “Volevano Linciarlo,” Il Progresso Italo-Americano, September 15, 1906. “The Menace of Lynching,” L’Araldo Italiano, July 25, 1901; “Da Akron, Ohio: Tentativo di linciaggio contro un italiano,” Il Progresso Italo-Americano, February 7, 1911. These examples are but a small sample of articles detailing violence toward Italian immigrants during this time.

Notes to Chapter 5

1. “Gli italiani e la razza bianca,” Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 21, 1909. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, July 14, 1914. 5. “Patriottismo barbaro,” Il Proletario, April 8, 1916. 6. See Matthew Pratt Guterl, The Color of Race in America, 1900–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 6; on northward African American migration and increasing militancy, see James Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago,

158  159 19. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, March 29, 1891. 20. Desmond King, Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 48. 21. 1882 Immigration Act, chap. 376, 22 Stat. 214, 47th Cong., 1st sess., August 3, 1882. 22. Congress first passed an immigration bill with a literacy test provision in 1896, but President Grover Cleveland vetoed the bill. Congress again passed a literacy test provision in 1909 and 1913 and President Taft vetoed both. In 1915 and 1917, Congress passed a literacy test but had to override President Wilson’s veto in 1917 for the bill to become law. Michael Lemay and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds., U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), esp. 41–48. 23. L’Avvenire, June 21, 1902; January 31, 1903. 24. La Luce, January 1, 1913. 25. Il Cittadino, January 14, 1915 26. Ibid., April 15, 1915. 27. La Luce, February 8, 1913. 28. Il Cittadino, July 20, 1916; May 31, 1917. 29. Ibid., October 12, 1916. 30. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, May 15, 1918. 31. Ibid., May 23, 1918. 32. Ibid., May 25, 1918. 33. Il Cittadino, May 31, 1917. 34. Ibid., December 6, 1917. See Christopher Sterba, Good Americans: Italian and Jewish Immigrants during the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 35. See Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 25. 36. Il Cittadino, February 10, 1916. 37. Ibid. 38. King, Making Americans, 20. 39. Il Cittadino, July 6, 1916. 40. Ibid., June 8, 1916. 41. The title did change but usually maintained a similar composition, for example, The Sounds of Gianduiotto, The Adventures of Gianduiotto, and The Curious Sounds of Gianduiotto. Other titles included The Sounds of Little Chocolate and The Expected Good Fortune of Gianduiotto. See Il Giornale Italiano, March 7, 1915; March 21, 1915; April 4, 1915; April 18, 1915; April 25, 1915; June 13, 1915. 42. Ibid., April 25, 1915. 43. Ibid., June 13, 1915. 44. In one story, two white men, astonished by Gianduiotto’s musical talent, come to his rescue and hire him. As the men take the boy away on a flatbed truck, he is chased by the Italian boys, who ask for remuneration for creating this

160  161









Un-making of the Italian American Working Class,” in Philip V. Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer, eds., The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003). For an opposing view, see Madeline J. Goldman, “The Evolution of Ethnicity: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in the Italian American Community, 1914–1945” (PhD diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 1993. Although Fascism’s effect on Italian American communities, vis-à-vis the growth of an Italian nationalism intertwined with racism, was undeniable, in many ways these trends were intimately enmeshed with becoming American. The interpretation of Mussolini’s nationalist policies must be examined through an American context where the pressures of assimilation and Americanization were constantly at work. 3. On Italian Fascism and its effect on Italian America communities, see John Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972); Philip V. Cannistraro, Blackshirts in Little Italy: Italian Americans and Fascism, 1921–1929 (New York: Bordhigera, 1999); Stefano Luconi, La “diplomazia parallela”: Il regime fascista e la mobilitazione politica (Milan: Angeli, 2000). 4. For the reaction of the Italian American community to the African American uprisings over the Ethiopian invasion, see Nadia Venturini, “African American Riots during World War II: Reactions in the Italian American Communist Press,” Italian American Review 6, no. 2 (Autumn/Winter 1997–1998): 80–97; Venturini, Neri e Italiani ad Harlem: Gli anni Trenta e la guerra d’Etiopia (Rome: Edizioni Lavoro, 1990); Fiorello B. Ventresco, “Italian Americans and the Ethiopian Crisis,” Italian Americana 6 (Fall/Winter 1980): 4–27. For the African American reaction to the invasion, see Joseph E. Harris, African-American Reactions to War in Ethiopia, 1936–1941 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994); William R. Scott, The Sons of Sheba’s Race: African Americans and the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935–1941 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1993). See also Thomas Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), chap. 6, “Fascism, Empire, and War.” 5. Cannistraro and Meyer, Lost World of Italian American Radicalism, 24. 6. For an overview of the impact of the war on Italian Americans, see Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta, “Italian Americans and the 1940s,” in Philip V. Cannistraro, ed., The Italians of New York: Five Centuries of Struggle and Achievement (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1999), 139–153. 7. Federal Bureau of Investigation case files for Italian enemy aliens Antonio Buonapane and Peter Cassetti reveal that even up through 1942, Italians were still not defined as “white.” FBI Case Files, July 24, 1942, August 3, 1942, Class 146 Files, Folder 146-13-2-017-36, Alien Enemy Unit, Department of Justice, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. For insight into Italian Americans’ experience as America’s enemy aliens, see Stephen Fox, The Unknown Internment: An Oral History of the Relocation of Italian Americans during World

162  163 

164  165 Conditionally white, 5 Covello, Leonard, 143n72 Crispi, Francesco, 44–45 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, 16–17, 139n4 DuBois, W. E. B., 99; New York Times on, 157n72 Earthquake relief, 31 East Harlem, 19 L’Eco d’Italia (Echo of Italy), 138n1; on colonialism, 46; exile mentality of, 24; founding of, 24 Employment: in American South, 153n8; L’Araldo Italiano, 25; assistance, 20; classified, 31; lynching and, 154n15; skilled, 140n19; unskilled, 20 Enemy aliens, 130, 161n7 L’Era 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, 45–46; support for war in, 45–46

Ethnic myths, 131 Evening Bulletin. See Bolletino della Sera Extralegal violence, 1 Faggi, Angelo, 29 Fall of Rome, 32 Fascism: Vecoli on, 160n2; whiteness and, 4, 129. See also Nationalism Feast of Saint Alfio, 50 Feast of Saint Rocco, 22 Federazione Socialista Italiana del Nord America (FSI), 28 Female virtue, 1 Feminine, 17 Fenton, Edwin, 26 Ficarrotta, Castenge, 87 Foley, Neil, 137n22 Forsyth, James, 59 Franchetti, Leopoldo, 46–47 Fraternal organizations, 20; psychological and social rules of, 21 Frisina, Leonardo, 49–50 Frugone, Frank, 25–26; New York Times on, 26 FSI. See Federazione Socialista Italiana del Nord America Fugazy, Louis V., 23–24 Fusco, Coco, 5 Galleani, Luigi, 30 Gambino, Richard, 154n15 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 24 Gaudelli, Albert, 133 Gentini, A., 61 Gentlemen’s Agreement, 71 Giacosa, Giuseppe, 40, 158n15 GI Bill, 131 Giolitti, Giovanni, 48 Il Giornale Italiano, 25 Giovane Italia, 28 Giovannitti, Arturo: on Alien Land Bill, 74–75; on Asian Americans, 74–75; on immigration restriction, 72, 74–75

166  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, 61–62 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, 50–51; colonialism and, 47–55; European reactions to war in, 52; fundraising for war in, 53; italianita and, 53; motivations for, 51; Il Proletario on, 48–49; prominenti and, 53–55; radical newspapers on, 48–49 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 López, Ian Haney, 5

Lotta di Classe, 158n7 Lower East Side, 19 Lower West Side, 19 Lozzerano, Mario, 125 La Luce: on Asian Americans, 68; on assimilation process, 109–10; on literacy test, 113 Luconi, Stefano, 146n34 Lui, Mary, 152n57 Lynching, 37, 60; of Albano, 87; in American South, 86; Il Cittadino on, 123; class and, 155n36; as control, 91; defense of, 1; Detroit Plaindealer on, 89; Il Diritto on, 88; employment and, 154n15; equality and, 110; of Ficarrotta, 87; Gambino on, 154n15; headlines, 97; Leavenworth Advocate on, 88; legitimacy of, 93; newspapers on, 88–89; New York Age on, 89; Paris on, 93, 95–96; Il Progresso Italo-Americano on, 40–41, 88, 95, 122; Il Proletario on, 90–91, 93–94; pseudodefense of, 122–23; La Questione Sociale on, 89–90; rationale for, 94–95; Richmond Advocate on, 88; Richmond Planet on, 89; savagery of, 111; Il Secolo on, 88; Shaler on, 94–95; Speranza on, 86–87; Vicksburg, 1–3; of Villarosa, 1–3; yellow fever simile, 95–96 Malatesta, Errico, 30 Manetta, Filippo, 40 Margherita di savoy, 2 Mariano, John, 21, 140n14 Masculinity, 140n7; civilization and, 17, 157n75 Massachusetts Society of the Colonial Dames, 27 May Day, 28 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 24 McBride, Andrew, 30 The Mediterranean Race (Sergi), 17 Meridionalismo, 139n4

168  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, 131–32 Il Progresso Italo-Americano (Italian American Progress), 4, 23; Bosi on, 25; circulation figures, 10–11, 25; on Commercial Herald, 2; criminal defense of, 32–33; Cristofero Colombo merged with, 25; expansion of, 25; founding of, 15, 138n1; on interracial relationships, 73–74; on Italian language learning, 33; “The Last Redskin: A Race Destined to Expire,” 65–66; on lynching, 40–41, 88, 95, 122; masthead, 25; on Native Americans, 62, 64–66; office of, 24; on Overton, 79–80; Pope purchasing, 129; race riot coverage by, 97–98, 124–26; relief funds sponsored by, 32; on Washington, 100; whiteness asserted by, 106 Il Proletario (Proletariat), 11, 28–29; on African savagery, 145n20; “Americans and Americanization,” 68–69; on Asian Americans, 68–69, 71–72; circulation of, 29; ideological split, 29; on immigration restrictions, 71–72; labor news in, 142n51; on Libya, 48–49; on Lincoln, 99; on lynching, 90–91, 93–94; racial hierarchy and, 41–42; raiding of, 29; on savagery, 40; on slavery, 91–92; on Southern Italy, 148n54 Prominenti: African American sympathy from, 2–3; influence of, 33–35; Libya and, 53–55; national celebrations defined by, 32; newspaper ownership, 24;

newspaper phase of, 23–24; Pecorini attacking, 34; Pozzetta on, 32; public image concerns of, 33–34; radical newspapers attacking, 34–35 La Questione Sociale, 11; “Ancient and Modern Cannibalism,” 41; banning of, 30; circulation of, 30; founding of, 30; on Lincoln, 99, 157n67; on lynching, 89–90 Race: American, 116; color connected with, 75; color separated from, 7–8; immigration restriction based on, 69– 72; markers, 7. See also specific races Race riots: newspaper coverage of, 123–24; Il Progresso Italo-Americano coverage of, 97–98, 124–26; after World War I, 124–25 Racial hierarchy, 38; Americanization and, 68–69; Asian Americans and, 58–59; biologically determined, 108–9; Jacobson on, 6; in newspapers, 39, 41; Il Proletario and, 41–42; radical newspapers and, 41; reconstruction of, 78; Sergi on, 68; slavery and, 92 Racial transparency, 4 Racism: color and, 80; hard, 7; Roediger on, 7 Radical newspapers, 27; African savagery and, 41–42; elimination of, 158n7; influence of, 28; on Libya, 48–49; on Native Americans, 63, 149n4; number of, 142n55; Park on, 28; prominenti attacked by, 34–35; racial hierarchy and, 41; religious traditions and, 42–43. See also Anarchist newspapers; specific radical newspapers La razza gialla (the yellow race). See Asian Americans Reddin, Paul, 62 Redskin. See Native Americans Regional rivalries, 21

170  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, 1–3 “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., 101–2 White, James, 97 White ethnicity, 5

Whiteness: advantages of, 96–97; Alien Land Bill and, 77; asserting, 4, 106, 117–18, 129; civilization and, 4, 115, 157n75; defined by who they were not, 80; fascism and assertions of, 4, 129; Foley on, 137n22; hierarchy of, 6; indifference to, 6; Jacobson on, 6, 115, 137n22; literature on, 135n10; pathway to, 78; Patterson on, 122; premises of, 4–5; Il Progresso ItaloAmericano asserting, 106; as racial transparency, 4 Wild West Shows, 62; Italian tour, 62–63; romance of, 63 Wilson, Woodrow, 112 Winter, Alice Beach, 90 Working class narratives, 71–72 World War I, 29, 114–15; nationalism and, 15; race riots after, 124–25 World War II, 130–31; enemy aliens during, 130, 161n7 Wounded Knee, 59; Cristofero Colombo on, 64 Yellow race. See Asian Americans

About the Author

Peter G. Vellon is Associate Professor of History at Queens College. He was born in Queens, New York City, and earned his PhD from the Graduate Center, The City University of New York. He is the author of several articles on Italian American history.

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