A Great Conspiracy against Our Race. Peter G. Vellon
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how “illiterate Italians in their moment of leasure [sic] especially in winter time gather together in the kitchen around the stove and one of their friends who reads Italian reads them the paper.”32 Taking this into consideration, with a circulation of roughly 108,000 in 1920, it is not unrealistic to multiply Il Progresso’s reach into the Italian community by two or three times. As the center of Italian immigrant life in the United States, New York and the metropolitan area were home to mainstream newspapers such as Il Progresso Italo-Americano, Bolletino della Sera, and L’Araldo Italiano, as well as radical papers such as Il Proletario and La Questione Sociale. Containing the largest single concentration of newspapers in the country, New York City offers the perfect locale to explore the vitally important but underexamined Italian language press. Given distribution and circulation figures, as well as what the Italian language press provided to the community by way of news, nostalgia, and direction, Italian American newspapers assumed immense importance by “providing a forum, or staging area, where identity, culture, and race interacted.”33
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The organization of this manuscript follows a thematic format yet maintains a loose chronological approach. Chapter 1 provides a glimpse into the Italian communities of New York City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter sketches where Italian immigrants lived, the cultural institutions and networks they built, and the types of employment they found. Moreover, it provides a detailed breakdown of the multifaceted Italian language press in New York City and its impact and importance for the immigrant community. Examining the role of prominenti such as Carlo Barsotti, the chapter argues that Italian language newspapers played a vital role in shaping immigrant attitudes toward race, color, civilization, class, and identity.
Chapters 2 and 3 reveal how the Italian American press perceived nonwhite peoples such as Africans, African Americans, Native Americans, Chinese, Japanese, and Asian Americans. Chapter 2 examines how mainstream and radical newspapers employed Africa as a trope for savage behavior by analyzing their discussion of wage slavery, imperialism, lynching, and colonialism, in particular Italian imperialist ventures into northern Africa in the 1890s and Libya in 1911–1912. The Italian language press constructed Africa as a sinister, dark continent, representing the lowest rung of the racial hierarchy. In expressing moral outrage over American violence and discrimination against Italians, the press utilized this image of Africa to emphatically convey its shock and disgust. This dialogue would reveal much about the press’s racial vocabulary, especially as it would relate to its initial, empathetic account of African Americans.
Chapter 3 explores how the press interpreted nonwhite races, such as Native American and Asian Americans. Consistently differentiating these races according to color as either pelle rosse (redskin) or la razza gialla (the yellow race), the Italian language press teased different meanings from each group based upon factors such as civilization, race, and shared circumstances. For example, despite perceiving Native Americans as outside the bounds of civilization and, hence, destined to perish, Italian language newspapers entertained a divergent view of Japanese and Chinese peoples based upon alternate constructions of civilization and mutual threats such as race-based immigration restriction. By the World War I period, however, Italian Americans would trend toward a more simplistic construction of race less willing to perceive a nonwhite race as civilized.
The final two chapters explain how the press moved from a complex view of race to a more simplistic construction that relegated race and color to a black/white binary. Chapter 4 investigates how the Italian American press negotiated and digested the American racial system by examining its discussion of Italian and African American issues. In response to American violence against Italian immigrants, especially lynching, mainstream newspapers such as Il Progresso resorted to the experience of African Americans as a frame of reference to understand their own racialization. In addition, empathetic news stories about issues such as segregation and race riots were ubiquitous within the Italian American press alongside sympathetic commentary.
Chapter 5 argues that the Italian language mainstream press modified its outlook toward African Americans during the years 1909 through 1919. Informed by their own growing understanding of American racial mores, as well as by consistent calls for immigration restriction and Americanization campaigns unleashed by World War I, Italian American sympathy toward African Americans waned. Throughout the decade, mainstream newspapers shifted noticeably from criticizing white racism toward African Americans, to chiding white Americans for their rhetoric of racial exclusion toward Italian immigrants. Consistent with this argument, Italian language mainstream newspapers discontinued comparisons to African Americans and viewed any outside attempts to posit otherwise as extremely dangerous. Continued demands for full incorporation into American society were inextricably tied to establishing not only the civilized nature of the Italian race but also Italians’ acceptability as whites.
Finally, the epilogue peers into the succeeding decades and speculates how and why second- and third-generation Italian Americans became firmly entrenched as pan-ethnic, white Americans. For Italian immigrants and their descendants, the twentieth century proved transformative in many ways. Affected by major external events such as Fascism in Italy, World War II, and civil rights movements, as well as internal desires to “be American,” a crucial aspect of their adaptation would be racial in nature. From victims of lynching to perpetrators of racial violence, the journey of Italian Americans uniquely embodies the tremendous costs of an assimilation process that inculcates the values of white over black.
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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