A Great Conspiracy against Our Race

Italian Immigrant Newspapers and the Construction of Whiteness in the Early 20th Century

Peter G. Vellon

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781479853458
• eBook ISBN: 9780814760505
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In A Great Conspiracy against Our Race, Peter Vellon explores how Italian immigrants, a once undesirable and “swarthy” race, assimilated into dominant white culture through the influential national and radical Italian language press in New York City.

Racial history has always been the thorn in America’s side, with a swath of injustices—slavery, lynching, segregation, and many other ills—perpetrated against black people. This very history is complicated by, and also dependent on, what constitutes a white person in this country. Many of the European immigrant groups now considered white also had to struggle with their own racial identities.

Examining the press as a cultural production of the Italian immigrant community, this book investigates how this immigrant press constructed race, class, and identity from 1886 through 1920. Their frequent coverage of racially charged events of the time, as well as other topics such as capitalism and religion, reveals how these papers constructed a racial identity as Italian, American, and white.

A Great Conspiracy against Our Race vividly illustrates how the immigrant press was a site where socially constructed categories of race, color, civilization, and identity were reworked, created, contested, and negotiated. Vellon also uncovers how Italian immigrants filtered societal pressures and redefined the parameters of whiteness, constructing their own identity. This work is an important contribution to not only Italian American history, but America’s history of immigration and race.

1

The Italian Language Press and the Creation of an Italian 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 motivating prominenti such as Barsotti to trade in the discourse of nationalism, it nevertheless appealed to southern Italian immigrants faced with a nativist American environment. During the period of mass immigration, Italian language newspapers experienced explosive growth as the city swelled with immigrants and exercised a crucial role, not only in the assimilation of Italian immigrants but in the creation of an identity as Italian, American, and white.³

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Italian immigrants did not arrive with a collective Italian consciousness, and the social, educational, and cultural divides that had historically separated northern and southern Italians did not disappear upon entry into the United States. The lower half of the Italian peninsula, or Mezzogiorno, was marked by a history of economic exploitation, political oppression, and cultural discrimination.⁴ Centuries-old problems such as uneven social arrangements and poverty-level existence relegated most of the agrarian proletariat in the South to a protofeudal existence. Although Italian political unification in 1861 did not create the problems within the Mezzogiorno, it failed to address them, and in the years after 1861 disparities between the two regions actually increased. The northern-dominated Italian government failed to include the South in public works programs, transportation improvements, educational reforms, and badly needed irrigation projects. These policies served to ensure the continued poverty of the South. Further exacerbating the situation, the central government increased taxes on the southern peasantry compelling them to bear a disproportionate share of the public debt.

During this period the notion of Italian dualism originated, and a series of powerful images permeated the consciousness of national public opinion. Illustrations of rural brigands hanging from scaffolds intertwined with stories of barbarous actions increasingly informed the image of a demonic Mezzogiorno. Many northerners viewed the South as a primitive land where the climate induced laziness, irresponsibility, and the rule of nature over civilization. The perception of the Mezzogiorno as a land forgotten by history was buoyed by powerful racial connotations intimately connected to Africa. For example, according 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.”

Italian Immigrants and New York City

In 1882, a total of 648,000 European immigrants immigrated to the United States, the overwhelming majority (87 percent) hailing from northern and Western Europe, while roughly 13 percent came from eastern and southern Europe. By 1907, however, the origin, as well as the perception, of the immigrant would change markedly. During the course of that year, immigrants from eastern and southern Europe accounted for roughly 81 percent (or 972,000) of European immigration to the United States. The number from Italy alone amounted to 286,000; this was more than three times the total of all eastern and southern European immigrants for the year 1882.¹⁰ The migration from Italy accounted for 17 percent of the total immigration during the period from 1880 through 1924 as 4,569,918 Italians immigrated to the United States. The influx of Italian immigrants was so staggering that by World War I Italy had been losing population to emigration at a rate of more than a half million a year.¹¹

Focused on New York City, the epicenter of Italian immigrant life in the United States, this study will rely extensively on the most important newspapers published there during the period 1880 through 1920, when Italian migration to New York changed the face of the city. According to the 1910 census, between 1880 and 1900 the Italian population of New York City increased by 20,000 to 225,026, and by 1910 New York contained 340,765 foreign-born Italians, with the total number of people identifying as Italian speaking numbering 544,449.¹² Not only did 95 to 98 percent of all Italian immigrants pass through Ellis Island, but 54.5 percent of the total in 1901 delineated New York City as their final destination. These numbers are more impressive given what was certainly an underrepresentation of these official figures due to mitigating factors ranging from Italian distrust of civic authority to congested boardinghouses and tenements.¹³

Italian settlements spanned every part of New York City, and where Italians decided to live was primarily influenced by proximity to employment or a desire to reunite with family or friends from their particular town or region. Every borough of New York City housed Italian immigrants; some sections contained only a few, whereas Italians constituted well over 90 percent of the population in other enclaves. 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 American-born 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

For Italians leaving their towns and villages, New York offered the prospect of rapid employment and economic betterment. Only 16 percent of the roughly three-quarters of the arriving Italian immigrants who labored in agriculture in Italy did so in the United States, and a 1917 study found that 82 percent of Italian-born immigrants in New York City were employed in industry.¹⁸ Although Italians were employed in skilled work, most prominently in the garment industry, masonry, stonework, and the building trades, by far the largest concentration of jobs fell into the category of unskilled.¹⁹ An overwhelming majority of Italians found employment as workers in construction, railroad gangs, mines, quarries, silk mills, machine shops, subways, and waterworks. Given New York City’s rapid expansion, Italians were well represented as laborers digging tunnels for the subway system, in the Sanitation Department, and working on projects such as the Jerome Park Reservoir and many other railroad and building projects around the city.

Informed by the same factors pushing Italians to settle among their own paesani (countrymen), immigrants started mutual aid and fraternal organizations to provide crucial services such as unemployment insurance, employment assistance, and death benefits. Men from specific towns of origin organized the clubs and offered Italians, among other things, a chance to speak in their regional dialects and in many tangible ways eased the process of dislocation. Most often, leadership reflected the larger community’s bifurcated social structure as club leaders came from the upper class. Prominenti took great pride in, and exerted much energy in, attaining titles and honors befitting men of such self-importance. These societies played a vital role in easing the transition of Italians to a new environment by reestablishing and transplanting traditions and customs from the paesi. They were incalculably more popular and relevant among first-generation immigrants than among their American-born offspring, who did not have one foot in Italy and another in the United States.²⁰ According to the president of the Bargolino Benefit Association, a club derived from Italians from the same part of Sicily, these organizations “provided a suitable meeting place in order to avoid having members stand on street corners and about saloons; to develop socially and to be prepared to mutually assist one another in every way.”²¹

Early on in the immigrant experience, mutual aid societies and fraternal organizations did little to lessen the regional differences and rivalries that existed within Italian immigrant enclaves. Performing important psychological and social roles, these organizations assumed immense importance and indirectly hindered widespread collective organization, often to the chagrin of labor organizers.²² However, as immigrant colonies matured, especially after 1900, attempts at collective organization around a larger consciousness as Italians began to take hold. For example, the National Order of the Sons of Italy, created in 1905, was the first organization that began to subsume local fraternal or regional societies under a larger ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Italian Language Press and the Creation of an Italian Racial Identity
• 2. The Italian Language Press and Africa
• 3. Native Americans, Asians, and Italian Americans: Constructions of a Multilayered Racial Consciousness
• 4. The Education of Italian Americans in Matters of Color
• 5. Defending Italian American Civility, Asserting Whiteness 105
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author