A Great Conspiracy against Our Race. Peter G. Vellon
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“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 single-mindedly focused on ‘the Negro’ and on race-as-color.”21
Even if one were to uphold Guglielmo’s separation of race and color, as well as his claims that attacks upon Italian whiteness were never systematic or sustained, it would still not account for how important institutions such as the Italian language press approached the issue. Historians examining other new immigrant groups during this period have contended that their own “intricate means of self-definition” often served as a factor complicating their relationship to whiteness.22 The Italian language press maintained a consistent discourse, at times lamenting the connection between race and color, specifically as it related to African Americans. This conversation occurred in the midst of a process whereby mainstream newspaper proprietors and editors promulgated an image of the Italian cleansed of the sort of “racial” baggage applied by American commentators. According to historian Giorgio Bertellini, along with institutions such as the Italian Catholic Church and popular entertainments such as opera, the ethnic press “echoed a proud sense of patriotic allegiance.” In an effort to cultivate a more palatable representation of their countrymen, Italian mainstream newspapers employed the language of civilization and savagery and pleaded their case for full inclusion based upon a bourgeois construction of an Italian race deemed superior by virtue of a past linked directly to the glory of Rome, the Renaissance, and the Risorgimento. Bertellini explains that the invention of a shared Italianness provided southern Italian immigrants “with resources to affirm a distinction from American culture and way of life but also their necessary inclusion within the realm of Western civilization in the face of harsh nativist allegations of racialized inferiority.” Despite arriving with identities linked to local towns, villages, and regions, rather than to an Italian nation-state, southern Italian immigrants eagerly embraced patriotic associations that served to provide a ladder for racial and class uplift unavailable to them as provincial Neapolitans or Calabrians. By World War I, prominenti definitions of an Italian race became incompatible with any perceptions defining Italian as not fully white.23
While some scholars tend to discuss Italian racial consciousness solely in terms of a black/white binary—that is, in relation to African Americans—A Great Conspiracy against Our Race reveals that Italian Americans grappled with a series of competing and complicated racial discourses and hierarchies. This book adds to the literature on whiteness by 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.
Although Italian immigrant literacy rates stood in marked contrast to those of Jewish immigrants, whose illiteracy rate was only 26 percent, illiteracy among Italian immigrants in the period from 1890 through 1920 was not as severe as was once thought. Regions such as Sicily and Calabria did indeed have illiteracy rates of more than 80 percent at the turn of the century; however, between 1899 and 1909, immigrants arriving from Italy had an illiteracy rate of nearly 47 percent. In other words, more than half of all Italian immigrants could read.28 Immigrant newspapers were ubiquitous within Italian communities and served as a potent source of information for first-generation immigrants. For example, by 1920, there were roughly 803,048 Italians living in New York City in comparison to 1,375,000 Jews. That same year the total circulation for the daily Italian language press in New York City was estimated at 241,843 compared with 356,262 for the Jewish daily press. This equates to a higher circulation ratio for Italian New Yorkers: one paper for every 3.8 Jewish New Yorkers versus one paper for every 3.3 Italian New Yorkers.29
As impressive as circulation figures were, they far underestimated actual circulation. Not only were newspapers widely distributed hand to hand within immigrant communities, they were also found in local public libraries and were often read aloud to friends or family members unable to read themselves. In 1925, librarian May Sweet observed that in densely populated Italian communities, “one of the first places to which most foreigners come is the branch library nearest them.” Newspapers such as Il Progresso Italo-Americano could be found free at local public libraries and were popular with all classes of Italians.30 Increasing the exposure of news was the tradition of immigrant readers, who served to partially offset immigrant illiteracy. Writing about this phenomenon in 1905, three American authors revealed that the practice of reading aloud greatly expanded the influence of these newspapers.31 George La Piana, a Sicilian immigrant, scholar, and teaching fellow at Harvard’s