A Great Conspiracy against Our Race. Peter G. Vellon
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University of New Orleans, as well as the staff at the Archivio Storico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri in Rome, Italy.
Special thanks are also extended to the many friends and family members who were instrumental in pushing me along during the wearisome process of writing and researching. My Graduate Center posse and dear friends Cindy Lobel, Delia Mellis, Erica Ball, Kathy Feeley, and Terence Kissack offered plenty of advice, suggestions, and comedic interludes during the process. I am so appreciative for having met them. I thank David Aliano for his friendship and support, as well as some helpful translations. Thanks to Jeffrey Trask, who opened his apartment to our writing group; the time spent there proved instrumental 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 passed after a long battle with cancer. His unflinching courage and audacious enthusiasm to persist despite the enormous odds have been awe-inspiring. He was taken much too soon and is deeply missed. My father, Philip, and my mother, Anna, passed away in 2006 within eight months of each other. Coming from blue-collar backgrounds, no doubt they were initially confused about my pursuit of a PhD. Over time, however, I think they grew proud of what I had achieved. I wish they could have held on to see this book, as I wished they could have stayed longer to see my children grow up. The book is written in their memory.
Introduction
In 1886, in response to a lynching in Vicksburg, Mississippi, the local Commercial Herald declared, “The lynching of those who commit rape is the best possible protection from the horrible crime.”1 White southerners often touted the preservation of southern female virtue as the standard defense of lynching, especially because proving guilt regarding rape was deemed difficult. Moreover, even in cases where guilt was proved, lynching served as the antidote to punishments interpreted as too lenient. Extralegal violence, or “popular justice,” as many southerners described it, also served the purpose of protecting the victim and her family from further public dishonor. According to the Commercial Herald, “It is the refinement of cruelty and humiliation to put upon the witness stand the victim of the outrage, and perhaps members of the family to prove the horrible details and face the badgering of the lawyers for the defense. Any respectable family would shrink from such an ordeal, and no respectable community should exact it.” Expressing obvious approval of the Vicksburg lynching, the Commercial Herald warned, “God help the community where there are not willing arms of brave men, to protect the females. Southern sentiment has always [been] sound on this point, and the standard of virtue is higher in the Southern States than anywhere else in the world.”2 Although the tone and content seemed relatively standard for incidents of mob violence in the South, the Commercial Herald wrote the article in response to the lynching not of an African American but rather of Frederico Villarosa, an Italian immigrant from Palermo, Sicily. In what was described as the first lynching to have occurred in Vicksburg in fifty years, Villarosa was arrested and eventually murdered for allegedly assaulting the young daughter of a prominent townsman.3 Investigating the murder, the Italian ambassador wrote that lynching was usually a practice applied to blacks in the South, a fact that must not have gone unnoticed by recent immigrants in the United States.4
Villarosa, the owner of a grocery near Wilson’s drugstore on Jackson Road, had an immigrant experience that mirrored that of other southern Italians who had settled in the American South. However, his murder at the hands of a bloodthirsty lynch mob left the Italian immigrant colony in Mississippi, as well as Italian immigrants around the country, deeply alarmed. Adelino Tirelli, a local shoemaker, wrote to the Italian consul in New York arguing that Villarosa’s lynching was a crime directed at all Italians, claiming that proof of the victim’s innocence was available but ignored by Vicksburg authorities. A year after the lynching, Tirelli formed a mutual aid society called Margherita di Savoy, named after the queen of Italy, and informed the Italian consul, “This society was not formed for the usual reasons you create a mutual aid society, rather it was created to protect our lives, our honor, and our interests.”5
Villarosa’s ordeal, in an extreme manner, reflected the precarious racial position of southern Italian immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Perceived by many Americans as a swarthy, inferior race, Italian immigrants thrust themselves into an American racial hierarchy that privileged white, northern and Western European races. Empathizing with Tirelli, New York’s mainstream Italian language daily Il Progresso Italo-Americano accused the Commercial Herald of perpetrating a “shameless and wicked crusade against Italians” that consistently subjected them to base and revolting insults.6 As the Italian immigrant press grew in proportion to the immigrant community during this fluid period of mass immigration, mainstream newspapers such as Il Progresso commonly expressed full-throated defenses of Italian immigrants. Responding to American assaults labeling Italians as inferior “swarthy sons of the sunny south,” mainstream newspapers owned by prominent community leaders, or prominenti, functioned as an institution dedicated to defending the “race.”7 In doing so, the Italian immigrant press worked within a familiar language of race and civilization that reflected a broader understanding of where Italians, as well as nonwhite races such as Asians, Native Americans, Africans, and African 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 anti-immigrant rhetoric, manifesting most immediately in continued calls for race-based