Italian Immigrant Radical Culture

The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890-1940

Marcella Bencivenni

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814709443
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

· “An important contribution to the history of the Italian-American left.” – Fraser Ottanelli, Professor of History, University of South Florida

· “A welcome introduction to the poorly understood immigrant sovversivi. ” – Donna Gabaccia, University of Minnesota

· “A superb analysis of radical working-class poetry, drama, and art.” – Nunzio Pernicone, author of Italian Anarchism, 1864-1892

· “Anyone interested in the topic will benefit from Bencivenni's deep understanding of her subject, her exhaustive research, and her clear organization and writing.” – R.J. Goldstein, Choice

· “An impressive book that nicely complements existing studies… It deserves a wide audience.” – Mike Rosenow, H-Net Reviews

· “Bencivenni’s superb analysis… ensure[s] that the works of these men and women will have a lasting legacy.” – Diane C. Vecchio, Furman University

· “A great book that will benefit well-established scholars, newly minted Ph.D.'s, and graduate students.” – Caroline Merithew, Italian American Review

· “Sheds illuminating light on a part of that history that is often overlooked.” – Stefan Bosworth

1
Italian American Radicalism

Old World Roots, New World Developments

Old World Roots

The story of Italian American radicalism begins with the massive emigration of Italians who entered the New World between 1880 and 1920. More than five million—four-fifths of them from the southern regions and the islands—migrated to the United States during this period. Italians became the largest nationality of the “new immigrants” from southern and eastern Europe, constituting more than 20 percent of the total immigration population. The great exodus of Italians was the result of economic, social, and political pressures. Like other European countries, Italy experienced a severe agrarian crisis in the 1870s, resulting largely from the expansion of the American economy. To make things worse, the South was also plagued by a series of calamities that occurred between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century: first the epidemics of malaria and cholera (1884–87) followed by the spread of phylloxera in the vineyards, then the volcanic eruptions of Vesuvius and Etna (1906), and finally the earthquakes of 1908, which destroyed much of the Sicilian province of Messina and part of Calabria. The extraordinary growth of the population from eighteen million in 1801 to thirty-two million in 1901 and increasing political unrest also contributed significantly to massive emigration.¹

With the important exception of a small portion of artisans and craftsmen, such as barbers, tailors, shoemakers, and masons, the great majority of Italian immigrants entered the American labor market as wage earners, and as unskilled, manual workers. Between 1899 and 1910 only 0.5 percent of all emigrants from Italy were listed as professionals; 5 percent were artisans, and 83.9 percent were contadini, land-poor peasants who generally lived in small villages under pre-modern social and economic conditions.²

Their rural origin was a significant factor in their reception in the United States and their adaptation to the new environment. To Anglo-Saxon Americans, the looks, habits, and cultural traditions of the new immigrants appeared backward, primitive, and ultimately inferior. Italians were seen as not only of a lower stock, but also frequently as not “white.” Employers, for example, “referred to South Italians as ‘black labor’ as opposed to the ‘white men’ of Northern Europe.”³ Similarly, U.S. immigration officials used “South Italian” as a separate designation that put Italians in a middle ground within the racial order of white-over-black. As Matthew Jacobson has pointed out, “it was not just that Italians did not look white,” but “they did not act white.”⁴ Popular magazines and newspapers, for example, warned repeatedly that southern Italians were “by nature” emotional, bloody-minded, treacherous, and vengeful—a view that was encouraged and reinforced by sensational accounts of “Black Hand” criminality, the material of vaudeville comics, and nativist propaganda.⁵

Discrimination toward Italians in America was of course neither as systematic nor as harsh as the racism experienced by people defined clearly as nonwhites, like African Americans, Asians, and Mexicans. As Thomas Guglielmo has argued, Italian immigrants by virtue of their “color status” were “on arrival” granted important political and legal privileges such as the right to naturalize, to live in certain neighborhoods, to apply for certain jobs, and to intermarry, privileges that were instead regularly denied to people of African or Asian descent.⁶

Yet as scornful epithets like “Dago,” “Wop,” and “Guinea” indicate, Italians did suffer from extensive ethnic hostility. Anti-Italian feelings emerged more dramatically in the South and Midwest, where American mobs lynched Italian immigrants on at least a dozen occasions. The most infamous lynching occurred in New Orleans on March 14, 1891, when eleven Italians were killed by a mob after a jury acquitted nine of them of the charge of murdering the local chief of police. Justifying the mob’s actions, the New York Times published an editorial that powerfully encapsulated general perceptions of Italian immigrants at the time. “There can be no doubt that the mob’s victims were desperate ruffians and murderers,” the editorial read. “These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cut-throat practices and the oath-bound societies of their native country, are to us a pest without mitigation.”⁷

Even American labor officials exhibited nativist prejudices, casting Italian immigrants as “undesirable” and “injurious.” By the 1890s, when southern Italians began to arrive in large numbers, American trade unions rallied in support of legislative restrictions against them, arguing that new immigrants (mostly Italians and Slavs) were undercutting the American workers’ standards of living. To Samuel Gompers, the president of the American Federation of Labor, Italian workers were nothing more than unorganizable wage cutters, incapable of appreciating the value of unionism because of their rural background and culture.⁸

These negative perceptions profoundly affected Italian immigrants’ adjustment to American society, as well as their response to labor organization and struggle. Samuel Baily in his comparative study of Italian immigrants in New York and Buenos Aires shows that racial discrimination was an important variable in the assimilation process. In Argentina, Italians adjusted rapidly and successfully to the new environment; they also made up about 40 percent of the organized workers and provided the most important leadership in the labor movement. By contrast, Italians in the United States were notoriously slow to assimilate into and reluctant to participate in American mainstream unions. Baily argues that the reasons for this discrepancy lay in distinct economic, political, and social conditions, as well as in the host societies’ different perceptions of the Italians. Argentinians saw the Italians, who emigrated there mostly from the northern regions of the peninsula, as better than and “superior” to the darker indigenous population and welcomed them as bearers of “civilization” and “whiteness.” The U.S. establishment, instead, considered Italian immigrants members of an inferior race that threatened to corrupt the dominant Anglo-Saxon stock and culture, and consequently restricted opportunities for them, instigating in turn among Italian workers diffidence and resentment toward American institutions.⁹

Sweeping generalizations and stereotypes about pre-modern cultures in general, and southern Italians in particular, also resonated in early scholarly studies of Italian immigration and American labor. Until the 1980s, when social historians brought new attention to minorities and other marginalized voices, many scholars uncritically accepted the view of southern Italians as a homogeneous peasantry—an undistinguished mass of conservative, subservient, and apathetic “amoral familists.” According to this perception, which was first advanced by the sociologist Edward Banfield in the 1950s, southern Italians were incapable of collective and political action because their entire worldview revolved around and was limited to the nuclear family.¹⁰

Centuries of foreign rule, political oppression, and economic mismanagement had indeed convinced the contadini that states were inherently oppressive and corrupt—a sentiment aptly captured by the still popular imprecation “governo ladro” (thief of a government). Skeptical of institutionalized power and authority, they naturally learned to rely mostly on themselves and their immediate clans, creating an intricate interlocking web of patronage and mutual obligations.¹¹ However, as an increasing number of revisionist works have shown, this did not prevent them from organizing themselves, cooperating with fellow workers, or understanding the principles of unionism and socialism. In fact, one can find many examples of Italian peasants participating actively in strikes and revolts, just as there is ample evidence of peasant solidarity and cooperation. Donna Gabaccia has also noted that the contadini were, in their own way, intensely class conscious. Many Italian folk proverbs, for example, divided the world starkly into two antagonistic classes—the rich and the poor—clearly expressing “the exploitative interdependence between the two groups.”¹² The level of injustice was such that in the words of Carlo Tresca, one of most important Italian immigrant radicals, “You did not need to read Karl Marx to be convinced that society as it stood had to be changed.”¹³

Moreover, new studies on southern Italy indicate that Italian rural society was not fixed, immutable, and static, as traditionally described. The life of the contadini was actually characterized by great mobility, job flexibility, and social activism. The seasonal nature of the Italian rural economy, based on olives, nuts, citrus, grain, and wine harvests, encouraged constant moving and migrant flows. Similarly, off-season unemployment drew peasants to work as masons, joiners, blacksmiths, shoemakers, weavers, and spinners, often hundreds of kilometers away from their homes. This phenomenon of “coming and going” was indeed so intense that, according to Andreina De Clementi, it constituted “the major system of temporary emigration of western Europe.”¹⁴

Rural life was characterized not only by mobility but also by unrest, conflict, and rebellion, manifested mostly in the form of jacqueries, riots, banditry, and brigandage, as discussed by Eric Hobsbawm in his classic study of pre-modern social revolt.¹⁵ By the late nineteenth century, as Italy underwent industrialization and modernization, these traditional types of spontaneous protest evolved into more organized struggles aiming at a fundamental political, economic, and social change. Italy achieved unification in 1861, but the Risorgimento, as the movement for national independence was known, brought neither the political stability nor the economic prosperity Italians were longing for. The newly established state failed to develop the infrastructure and social reforms so desperately needed, especially in the South. Conditions of life throughout the peninsula actually worsened after the agrarian crisis of the 1870s, and so did popular resentment at the state. The result was a gradual awakening of working-class consciousness and a surge of organized activism, discernible in the growth of mutual aid societies, workers’ leagues, chambers of labor, cooperatives, and strikes.

Already in 1868, following the imposition of a tax on flour, violent protests and demonstrations occurred in the northern province of Verona and rapidly spread to the rest of Italy. Flour millers shut down their mills while peasants broke into municipal buildings and public offices shouting: “Down with the city administration and the city taxes: we want to pay, but when we can!” The protests were eventually suppressed by the police: 257 demonstrators were killed, 1,000 wounded, and almost 4,000 arrested. Its failure notwithstanding, the revolt against the flour tax showed that the peasants and mill workers were not “potatoes in a sack,” incapable of organization or revolt. In fact, in the following decade, from 1870 until 1880, they carried out 465 strikes (one-fifth of them in the textile industry) demanding wage increases and general welfare for the workers.¹⁶

The gradual rise of literacy also contributed to the promotion of greater class consciousness. Before Italian unification only 21.8 percent of the total population over five years of age could read and write. After 1861, however, public schooling became mandatory, and illiteracy decreased steadily. According to governmental statistics, by 1911 the Italians who could read and write numbered 18,322,866, or 58 percent of a total population of 34,671,377.¹⁷

But an even more important factor in the rise of working-class organizing was the circulation of new radical ideas embodied first by republicanism, then anarchism, and eventually socialism. Republicanism emerged out of the Italian political movement for national unification led by Giuseppe Mazzini. Combining republican values, egalitarianism, and inter-class cooperation, Mazzini’s program of national unity inspired Italians to fight not only for the country’s unification but also for the “moral improvement” of the nation and the progress of the entire humankind. Mazzini’s unrelenting opposition to caste, privilege, and inequality and his emphasis on universal suffrage and education contributed powerfully to the development of the Italian labor movement.¹⁸

It was in the spirit of Mazzini’s collectivism and cooperation that Italian workers formed the first Società di mutuo soccorso (mutual aid societies) in Piedmont during the 1850s. These institutions were self-help organizations that provided legal, medical, and educational assistance to their members. By 1895, there were 6,725 mutual aid societies spread throughout Italy; 1,597 of them were in the South, which at that time had 37 percent of the country’s population. Each society was autonomous, but all of them were animated by a spirit of comradeship and class solidarity.¹⁹

Although not strictly labor organizations, the mutual aid societies provided a model for emergent workers’ leagues and cooperatives, which in turn led the way to chambers of labor based on the French anarcho-syndicalist bourses de travail and modern trade unions such as the Confederazione Generale del Lavoro (CGL, 1906) and the Unione Sindacale Italiana (USI, 1912). These working-class organizations functioned as important centers of political propaganda and helped significantly to spread socialist ideas, develop a sense of solidarity among workers, and promote social and economic reforms.²⁰

But after Italy’s unification and Mazzini’s death in 1872, anarchism supplanted republicanism as Italy’s revolutionary vanguard. The Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin arrived in Italy in 1864 and attracted many converts, including a large number of intellectuals, especially in Naples and in the region of Emilia-Romagna. Bakunin advocated immediate social revolution and the destruction of power and authority in all their forms, including the state. His anti-statism naturally found fertile ground in Italy, where localism and distrust of government were, and to some extent still are, strong. Bakunin also attacked Mazzini and Marx for their neglect of the peasantry, insisting that the revolution should start from the country, not the cities. His stress on the role of the peasantry to carry out the social revolution, as well as his emphasis on spontaneous and voluntaristic revolt, fit perfectly the Italian situation and also explains his popularity in other European rural areas—most notably Andalusia, Spain’s southern region. By 1874 anarchists were the leaders of the anti-authoritarian wing of the Italian section of the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International), claiming more than 30,000 members.²¹

In the following decade, however, anarchism began to decline as a result of internal dissent and governmental repression, and it was eventually overshadowed by the rise of socialism. Socialist ideas made their first inroads in Italy in the late 1870s as Marxist works were translated into Italian; by the 1890s, socialism became the Left’s predominant radical force. Among the most important disseminators of Marxism were Antonio Labriola, probably the most important Italian Marxist theoretician, and Filippo Turati, the main founder of the Italian Socialist Party, which was formed in August 1892 following the Congress ...