From Wiseguys to Wise Men

The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities

Fred Gardaphe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135397791
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The gangster, in the hands of the Italian American artist, becomes a telling figure in the tale of American race, gender, and ethnicity - a figure that reflects the autobiography of an immigrant group just as it reflects the fantasy of a native population.

From Wiseguys to Wise Men studies the figure of the gangster and explores its social function in the construction and projection of masculinity in the United States. By looking at the cultural icon of the gangster through the lens of gender, this book presents new insights into material that has been part of American culture for close to 100 years.

I

Romancing the Gangster

1

ORIGINS OF AN ARCHETYPE

The gangster as the public knows him today is a strange mixture of fact and fiction. The figure that first appeared in newspapers and newsreels of the 1920s has grown to heroic proportions. Disseminated through powerful mass media exposure, the gangster provides subliminal guidelines for manhood and serves as a cultural icon, reflecting changing notions of masculinity in the United States. The gangster emerged in response to the evolution of corporate capitalism in the early twentieth century. Although criminal gangs had long occupied American cities, the Prohibition Act of 1920 and the desperate poverty brought on by the Great Depression in the 1930s provided opportunities for individual crime leaders to emerge and thrive.

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, the exploits of gangsters such as Al Capone, John Dillinger, “Baby Face” Nelson, and “Pretty Boy” Floyd became national news, fueled fictional accounts, and captured the popular imagination. These real-life gangsters rose above ordinary criminals by committing their crimes with bravado; they were all blatant transgressors of the boundaries between good and evil, right and wrong, and rich and poor. As corporate capitalism promoted consumerism and widened the gap between rich and poor, Americans became infatuated with the gangster, a man of humble origins who affected stylish dress and fancy cars, defying the boundaries separating social classes.

These increasingly fascinating characters began to appear in American films during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Early films often portrayed gangsters as degenerate and overly feminized men losing their independence in the new capitalist society, but later films recast them as men who wielded power through sexuality and guns. Films such as Little Caesar (1930) and Scarface (1932) established a lasting association in popular culture between the gangster and particular ethnic groups: Jewish, Irish American, African American, Asian, and—especially— Italian American. The cinematic images of masculinity associated with these ethnicities stereotyped and marginalized these groups. This marginalization was amplified in the 1960s and 1970s when, amid growing feminist criticism of conventional understandings of manhood, the ethnic gangster embodied the masculine qualities under attack. Al Capone's rise to iconic status came during America's “Roaring Twenties,” a time of excess and changing morality stimulated by a booming economy. At the same time, reactionary religious and social activist forces then exerted enough pressure to lead Congress to pass the Volstead Act, legally prohibiting the production and sale of alcoholic beverages. This created a ripe opportunity for smart street thugs to thrive in the resulting black market. A legend in his own time, Capone became a symbol of contemporary power; right or wrong, Capone's actions told Americans that crime didn't just pay—it paid handsomely. His legend became the basis for the many gangster films of the 1930s. Later, as the New York police detective Remo Franceschini witnessed during his surveillance of John Gotti, the real gangsters started imitating the characters in the Godfather films. After a generation, one could hardly tell the difference between the real and artificial gangster.¹ This transference of fact into fiction, and the subsequent influence of fiction on fact, is the subject of this book.

Through books such as Mario Puzo's The Godfather (1969), Gay Talese's Honor Thy Father (1971), and William Kennedy's Legs (1975), and especially through the films of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Brian DePalma, the American ethnic gangster of fiction eventually became more rounded, more thoughtful, and less inclined to act violently. These more recent depictions represent the efforts of ethnic groups to take control of their own stories, and they also reflect advances in cultural analysis made by feminist critiques of masculinity.

As African Americans began breaking down the social and economic barriers of earlier times, filmmakers began to exploit the black man in gangster films such as Shaft (1971) and Black Caesar (1973). The black gangster then became a kind of revolutionary figure as African Americans began making their own films and music. Rap groups like Public Enemy, Niggas with Attitude, and Capone-N-Noreaga adopted the powerful gangster pose to depict ghetto life in the 1980s and 1990s. Their “gangsta rap” was featured in gangster films such as Colors (1988), New Jack City (1991), Boyz N the Hood (1991), and Menace II Society (1993).

The gangsters’ actions also reflected changing notions of manhood. Historians such as David Ruth have suggested that the gangster figure helped shift ideal masculinity away from traditional qualities such as honor to traits like violence, independence, and the ability to exploit the social system.² These aspects of the gangster have captured the public imagination from the 1930s to today. Whether a distilled version of the Italian stereotype, an imitative performer of gangsta rap, or a newly sensitized Mafia man, à la Tony Soprano, the gangster continues to reflect cultural perceptions of true manhood. More than an urban evolution of the western outlaw, the gangster came into American culture at a time when great change was occurring in American society and he has remained there in one form or another ever since.

The goal of this first chapter is to explain why America keeps creating this figure and exporting it throughout the world. What is it about the gangster figure that keeps people returning to the theaters for more, and why are the gangsters usually Americans of Italian descent?

HERMES AND THE EMERGENCE OF GREEK DEMOCRACY

The importance of retrieving ancient archetypes—character and event types that recur widely in world mythologies—and using them to help understand contemporary human behavior has been well established by psychologists such as Carl Jung. The Greek god Hermes came to represent popular appropriation of the trappings of aristocratic culture, and he can be seen as an archetype for performing masculinity. There must be something archetypal in the gangster figure, I thought, for it to wield power over artists and audiences. As I searched throughout the cultural warehouse of Western civilization, I found my way back to Greek mythology and came across two aspects of Hermes that suggested him as a possible pathway to understanding the behavior of the American gangster and its representation in American culture.

Hermes, son of Zeus and the nymph Maia, served many functions in the Greek pantheon, and these roles changed over time. Norman O. Brown writes in Hermes the Thief, “The story of the infant Hermes’ theft of the cattle of his elder half-brother, Apollo, represents the original core of the mythology of Hermes and reflects the primitive mores of Greek pastoral tribes.”³ Hermes wants to be considered an equal to Apollo, so he steals the cattle. To the ancient Greeks, equality was a reasonable rationale for thievery. Hermes tells his mother that “her scruples about his activities are childish; that he intends to put his own interests first and follow the career with the most profit in it; that a life of affluence and luxury would be better than living in a dreary cave; that he is determined to get equality with Apollo—by illegal means [thievery] if he cannot get it by legal means (that is, by gift of Zeus).”⁴ As Brown points out, Hermes’ intention to profit from his work connects him to the negative qualities of the newly developing commercial culture. Thus, Hermes becomes a figure associated with both the idea of clever thievery and the idea of profit. Brown also identifies Hermes as a trickster, whose “trickery is never represented as a rational device, but as a manifestation of magical power.”⁵ Hermes, like any gangster kingpin, is the wiseguy, the man with the plan.

Beyond Hermes’ relevance as a model for the gangster figure in society is his development as a god during a period of transition in Greek history. The societies of the Hellenic states changed radically from 1500 to 500 BC, as the decline of the self-sufficient family and tribe and the rise of monarchy forced a new organization onto the family. Over this time, class divisions were created and the landowning aristocracy gained control over some states. Popular resistance to aristocratic repression led in some states, notably Athens, to nascent forms of constitutional democracy. Brown writes: “In this vortex of social change were crystallized other phenomena which are themselves potent catalytic agents—the development of slavery, the codification of law, the invention of money.”⁶ He notes a corresponding shift occurring in the Olympian pantheon. “The component gods were given ranks and positions analogous to the component orders in society. Hermes, previously an independent and autonomous trickster, becomes the subordinate of Zeus the King, his messenger and servant-in-chief.”⁷ Hermes becomes the patron of “a class of ‘professional boundary-crossers’—skilled and unskilled workmen” subordinate to the king, representing “service obtained beyond the boundary, from outside the family.”⁸ In essence, he becomes what today we might call a “godfather” figure, one who connects the family to the world outside its boundaries and oversees the interactive mechanism between those inside and outside the family.

But as Brown points out, Hermes’ image eventually became tarnished. In the time of Hesiod, around 700 BC, the figure of Hermes became associated with the sinister through his giving to Pandora, a woman whom Zeus created to answer to Prometheus’ theft of fire, the box of woes that triggers her “mind of a cur and a stealthy disposition⁹”. Through this act, Hermes plays a role similar to that of Eden's serpent in Christian myth. He begins to represent a power against familial collectivism and for acquisitive individualism. Hesiod interprets Hermes’ trickery as a design to gain profit. Wealth, up until this point, came the old-fashioned way, through the gods, and this was the ideal of success. But the new way to succeed was through individualism. Hermes became the model for the self-made man who gains power through profit, the antithesis of the behavior championed by Hesiod, Solon, and Plato who, in Brown's words, “begin to use ‘theft’ and ‘robbery’ as interchangeable metaphors in their denunciations of acquisitive individualism, thus ignoring the earlier distinction between forcible and fraudulent appropriation.”¹⁰

Enacted here is the traditional battle between the powerful and the helpless. “The theme of strife between Hermes and Apollo,” writes Brown, “translates into mythical language the insurgence of the Greek lower classes and their demands for equality with the aristocracy.”¹¹ Hermes goes on to become god of the lottery, the means by which Athenians (after 487 BC) elected public officials. The lottery, Aristotle wrote in Politics and Rhetoric, reflects “the democratic principle of the absolute equality of all citizens.”¹² In the Hymn to Hermes, the aspirations of the industrial and commercial classes are projected onto the figure of Hermes; their conflict with the aristocracy is projected into the conflict with Hermes and Apollo. On a final note, Brown tells us that “Hermes’ intrusion into the musical sphere [through his invention of the lyre, which he gave to Apollo to make amends for his cattle thievery] paralleled the initiation of the lower classes into the cultured pursuits previously monopolized by the aristocracy.”¹³

In sum, Hermes becomes a champion for equality through the acquisition of what the ruling class has. He is, thus, an archetype of the gangster, especially the fictional gangster seen as a trickster figure used to represent deviant forms of behavior against which a society can form its ideas of proper behavior, and to create a sense of shared cultural identity.

THE GANGSTER AS TRICKSTER

The trickster archetype is one that provides for chaos and change. He takes people to places outside the boundaries of traditional and normal society; he reminds them that culture is human-made; and he shows them that those who reach for too much will eventually lose everything. Thus, the gangster can be seen as a natural trickster figure. Stanley Diamond, in his introduction to Paul Radin's The Trickster, writes that civilization changes the primitive trickster into “a segregated and vicarious aspect of human experience” by suppressing the concrete image of the trickster and changing it into “the problem of injustice.”¹⁴ The “dual images of the deity as expressed in the trickster” that “are fused in the network of actions that define primitive society”; they become separated into the two distinct, abstract notions of good and evil. And this, says Diamond, is what enables the development of “moral fanaticism, based as it is on abstract notions of pure good, pure evil, and the exclusive moral possibility or fate of any particular individual—what may be called moral exceptionalism.”¹⁵

In the moral fanaticism of Anglo-American-based culture, good and evil were separated, and as Americans strove toward the notion of pure good, they had to be able to measure their progress by personifying evil in others. As Paul Radin remarks, “Our problem is thus basically a psychological one. In fact, only if we view it as primarily such, as an attempt by man to solve his problems inward and outward, does the figure of the Trickster become intelligible and meaningful.”¹⁶ The only way to understand the trickster, then, is to “study these myths in their specific cultural environments and their historical settings.”¹⁷

The mythographer Karl Kerényi sees the trickster figure as the one who brings disorder to a system: “Disorder belongs to the totality of life, and the spirit of this disorder is the trickster. His function in an archaic society, or rather the function of his mythology, of the tales told about him, is to add disorder to order and so make a whole, to render possible within the fixed bounds of what is permitted, an experience of what is not permitted.”¹⁸

The trickster also works to help us organize our sense of community. Carl Jung sees the trickster as “[a] collective personification … the product of a totality of individuals … welcomed by the individual as something known to him, which would not be the case if it were just an individual outgrowth.”¹⁹ The trickster, Jung writes, serves as a reminder of our shadow selves:

The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. He remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically, when irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing tricks on him or of things being bewitched. He never suspects that his own hidden and apparently harmless shadow has qualities whose dangerousness exceeds his wildest dreams. As soon as people get together in masses and submerge the individual, the shadow is mobilized, and, as history shows, may even be personified and incarnated.²⁰

Jung sees trickster stories as having therapeutic value: “It holds the earlier low intellectual and moral level before the eyes of the more highly developed individual, so that he shall not forget how things looked yesterday.”²¹

Seeing the figure of the gangster as a trickster helps to explain America's fascination with this character. Society needs a figure that can represent fringe behavior against which the mainstream can formulate its values and identity. The Mafia myth has thus served an important function in American society in defining both what is and is not American and what is and is not acceptable behavior in American society.

THE GANGSTER IN AMERICAN CULTURE

In The New Science, the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico identified what he called the mythic stage of history, which developed after families and social institutions were established. During this mythic stage, an aristocracy formed against which the common people revolted as they attempted to gain greater control of their lives. Out of this struggle rose heroic figures to replace the divinities of the previous age, what Vico calls the poetic age, as models for human behavior. Vico claims that this shift occurred whe...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• Introduction
• Part I: Romancing the Gangster
• Part II: Realizing the Gangster
• Part III: Reinventing the Gangster
• Part IV: Looking for a Few New Men
• Notes
• Index