3

Native Americans, Asians, and Italian Americans

Constructions of a Multilayered Racial Consciousness

In 1891, roughly three months after the murder of eleven Italian men in New Orleans, Louisiana, six months after the U.S. military’s massacre of Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, and less than a year after the U.S. Census Bureau declared that the American frontier had been settled, Il Progresso Italo-Americano published an illuminating article titled “I Pelle Rossa” (The red skin) in its expanded Sunday supplemental edition. “Try to imagine the endless prairies and plains that stretch to the West of the populous cities of the United States,” Giuseppe Balbi wrote. “This is the home of the red skins.” Balbi’s article presented a sweeping portrait of Native Americans’ lives in the United States and their dim prospects for survival in the future. Positioning Native Americans, or redskins (pelle rosse), as the press consistently identified them, beyond the boundaries of civilization, Balbi’s article offered remarkable insight into how the Italian language press constructed race, color, and civilization during the early years of mass immigration.1

This chapter examines the press’s perception of two groups that generally remained outside Italian immigrant circles of familiarity but nonetheless attracted attention within the pages of the Italian language press: Native Americans and Asian Americans. This conversation occurred during an intense period of crisis in national identity sparked in no short order by the influx of eastern and southern Europeans whose race and color were dissected, questioned, and feared.² Often influenced by issues and events relevant to their own predicament and experience in the United States, the press teased different meanings from the plight and future of Native Americans and Asian Americans. For example, although Native Americans (pelle rose [redskins]) and Asian Americans (la razza gialla [the yellow race]) remained consistently set apart by color, or more specifically by their nonwhite status, the category of civilization remained the key determinant in assessing the value of both cultures. As Italian language newspapers sought to carve out their own niche during the early decades of mass immigration, both mainstream and radical publications revealed a fluid racial worldview in which categories of color, civilization, and class often intersected, overlapped, and at times operated at each other’s expense. And, although savagery and nonwhiteness usually remained intimately connected, Italian language newspapers exposed a willingness to entertain a more nuanced view of race that would disappear by the World War I period.

Given the paucity of real-life interaction and familiarity with Native Americans, Italian language newspapers found that pelle rosse provided an impeccable exemplar with which to contrast the merits of Italian immigration and Italian civilization. For the prominenti press in particular, Native Americans’ resistance to America’s civilizing influence and their existence along the “boundaries” of society, rather than in the modern urban spaces, starkly differentiated pelle rosse from other nonwhite peoples.3 It is probably not a coincidence that Balbi’s article detailing the decline and savagery of Native Americans is juxtaposed with a large illustration of the recent monument built in Rome to honor the executed Italian astronomer and philosopher Giordano Bruno. At a moment of extreme hostility toward southern Italian immigrants, determined prominenti newspapers such as Il Progresso Italo-Americano, in particular, exposed Americans to a class-based construction of Italian identity through celebratory coverage of high-brow Italian achievements. A necessary tangent to this portrayal required fostering a sense of Italianness by constructing an other or others deemed outside the acceptable spatial boundaries of civilization and whiteness.

Conversely, although the press positioned Chinese and Japanese within an established racial hierarchy, the Asian American struggle with immigration restriction and, worse, exclusion, touched a nerve in the Italian language press as both the mainstream and the radical press would see parallels in the United States’ effort to pass racially motivated immigration restriction and coercive economic policies. Prominenti newspapers, in particular, proved willing to entertain a more complex and malleable construction of civilization and savagery to suit their own community’s needs. Despite Chinese and Japanese societal marginalization and nonwhiteness, the Italian language press used America’s continued exclusion of la razza gialla as another opportunity to chide American racial and economic prejudice. Unlike Native Americans, defined as outside civilized society, this mutual interest served to inform a much more positive view of Asian Americans, who were described as worthy representatives of civilization.

However, as is demonstrated more fully in subsequent chapters, prominenti newspapers, in particular, sharpened an ever-evolving racial outlook as they became more erudite in the lessons of American race and color. By the World War I period, the black/white divide emerged as central to this equation. Unwilling to consistently defend Asian Americans from white American transgressions, prominenti papers chose instead to direct their wrath at efforts to stigmatize Italians as not part of the white American mainstream. Viewing race and civilization along a more simplistic, and rigid, binary of white and black, the Italian language mainstream press advocated for Italian whiteness to the exclusion of any group defined as the darker other.

Pelle Rosse

At the very moment when Italian immigrants began to fill Ellis Island’s immigration processing hall and suffer the most extreme forms of prejudice in the form of lynching, Native Americans—the first Americans—endured the latest phase of white American aggression. On December 29, 1890, members of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry regiment, led by Colonel James Forsyth, indiscriminately massacred approximately 150 Lakota Sioux men, women, and children, wounding an additional 50 at Wounded Knee Creek on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The massacre was but one, albeit brutal, aspect of a larger pattern of violence, deception, and extermination of Indian tribes that occurred intermittently over the course of the nineteenth century. Less than three months later, Italian language newspapers exploded over the gruesome news that eleven Italians, acquitted of murdering New Orleans police chief David Hennessy, had been brutally and summarily murdered by a mob of local whites. For prominenti such as Carlo Barsotti, government hostility toward Native peoples and newly arrived immigrants could have presented a situation of shared mutual interest, but it was not to be. Instead, uncomplicated references to pelle rosse littered the pages of prominenti-owned and, to a lesser extent, radical publications, as pelle rosse (similar to the term Africa tenebrosa) became a phrase symbolizing savagery wedded to nonwhiteness. The Italian language press organically constructed a unique Italian American identity informed by notions of race, color, civilization, and exclusion influenced in part by its understanding and perception of Native Americans.

Italian language mainstream newspapers frequently appropriated the image of Native Americans or, more specifically, the redskin (pelle rosse) to express barbarism and savagery. Much like they would employ the image of Africa tenebrosa, prominenti utilized a familiar language of race, civilization, and color to construct and explain the acceptable parameters of civilized behavior to their readers. And, although this sort of negative racial imagery appeared in the radical press, it occurred much less frequently there.4 For prominenti, however, recurrent episodes of Italian immigrant lynching, for example, offered a unique platform to express their shock, horror, and indignation over American civilization while concurrently offering a glimpse into how these newspapers constructed acceptable parameters of civilization. After the New Orleans lynching in 1891, Il Progresso revealed its frustration over American mistreatment of Italians and bluntly complained that in New Orleans Italians were treated not even as “semi-civilized black skinned people,” referring to African Americans, but as “blood thirsty pelle rosse.”⁵ Chiding the lynch mob, and white Americans in general, Il Progresso stated, “The phrase goes that if you scratch a Russian you find a Cossack…. To the citizens of the Crescent City we would change this phrase to the following: if you scratch an American from New Orleans you will find a Pellerossa [redskin].”⁶ Surely intended to expose American hypocrisy, this critique simultaneously reminded white Americans about their tangled and intimate history with the continent’s “first” Americans: the wild and savage pelle rosse. Other newspapers such as Cristofero Colombo just as easily substituted pelle rosse for “savage,” declaring in 1891 that the “civilized world was horrified over the lynching of eleven Italian immigrants and wondered if New Orleans was inhabited by people descended from European races, or did there exist [there] a population of pelle rosse?”7 Italian immigrant readers revealed a familiarity with these categories. In a letter written to Il Progresso Italo-Americano shortly after the 1891 lynching, A. Gentini expressed his outrage against the crimes “committed … by the Pelli Rossi of New Orleans,” declaring them “the shame of the 19th century” and “assaults against civilization by barbarism.”⁸

Ironically, the mainstream press did not exempt Italian immigrants from its harsh judgment and criticism. An article titled “Scenes of Savagery” described how a mob in the Italian American community in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, took the law into its own hands and viciously attacked another paesano accused of improper sexual relations with a fourteen-year-old girl. Il Progresso remarked that the men “surrounded the accused and began a savage ceremony of death—acting and dancing like Indians, singing songs of death…. the sad fact is that certain of our countrymen have nothing to envy from the Pelli Rosse.”⁹ In using the trope of the savage pelle rosse to convey its disappointment and disgust, Il Progresso served to scold, and in many ways caution, Italian immigrants by offering a graphic example of uncivilized behavior deemed unacceptable to “Italians.”

* * *

In the late nineteenth century the American West and the “frontier” elicited romantic visions in the European imagination and in the Italian mind. The great plains of the United States represented virgin lands that had been conquered by the army of “progress,” leaving behind the remnants of a dwindling Native American population.

Although Italian immigrants in New York City and Native Americans had very limited interaction, sensational stories related to Native Americans ran intermittently within the Italian language press and evoked scenes mimicking popular images of the wild and savage pelle rosse. In 1891, Il Progresso Italo-Americano gave wide coverage to a “sad” account of two young Italian immigrants, Alfonso Lauriano and Francesco Schetti, fighting in the U.S. Seventh Cavalry Regiment at Fort Sill, Indian Territory, Oklahoma. In line with owner Carlo Barsotti’s penchant for highlighting crimes against Italians, it could not have been clearer to the paper’s readers that Lauriano and Schetti had died valorously fighting on the side of civilization, whiteness, and progress. According to the article, the “Pelle Rosse” captured Schetti after he had lost control of his horse. Despite insurmountable odds, Schetti fought back courageously with his cavalry sword but eventually died in battle. According to Il Progresso, “After he died, the savages scalped the victim as is their barbarous custom, and mutilated the rest of his body.” Sensational tales such as this helped establish clear boundaries between civilized Europe and the nether regions of barbarism inhabited by pelle rosse.10

The prominenti press’s characterization of pelle rosse, unlike its treatment of African Americans, whom it often viewed with empathy, more closely resembled its perception of black Africans. For example, writing in Il Progresso some months after Wounded Knee, Giuseppe Balbi argued that with regard to skills, Native Americans “are inferior to the blacks of Africa, who are at least familiar with the art of making cloth and dyeing it.”¹¹ To that end, mainstream newspapers worked within a colonial mind-set, much as they did with respect to Africa, ultimately justifying coercive policies as the natural, and inevitable, triumph of civilization over savagery. Prominenti fascination with William Cody, more commonly known as Buffalo Bill, is one measure of this framework. According to historian Paul Reddin, Cody’s Wild West Shows offered eager consumers, within the United States and internationally, a portrait of American life that many perceived to be wholly authentic. Cody’s productions “reduced the Western saga to a morality play in which Cody, along with scouts and cowboys, represented the forces of good and civilization and Indians … symbolized evil and barbarism.”¹² To bourgeois Italians, Buffalo Bill symbolized not only the romantic notions of expansion and adventure, in this particular case expansion westward, but also the triumph of “civilization over barbarism.” After all, Buffalo Bill had brought “progress” to the West in the form of postal delivery; he blazed trails westward before railroads had simplified matters and, most important, had withstood the constant danger of Indian violence.¹³

From January through April 1890, Cody’s Wild West Shows toured Naples, Rome, Florence, Bologna, Milan, and Verona, arriving with Indians, horses, and tepees to give the lazzaroni of Naples, or the lumpenproletariat, a taste of the “savage West.”14 After Naples, Cody took his show to Rome, where his arrival was widely anticipated. Immense traffic jams developed throughout Italy’s capital city as thousands of carriages tried to make their way to the Monte Mario district to capture a glimpse of the makeshift Indian village constructed for the show. Constructing a nascent and newly emergent class-based italianita coming out of Italian unification that owed much to exalted notions of Italian civilization and race, prominenti newspapers closely followed Cody’s tour, with front-page coverage containing headlines such as “The Wild West in Rome” and replete with schedules detailing his arrival in Italian cities.¹⁵ In addition, these stories often appeared alongside front-page reports of Italy’s colonial ventures in Africa. Given the Italian “civilizing” mission under way in Africa in the 1890s, this was a receptive message among Italian language newspapers struggling with immigrant acceptance in the United States. For the Italian middle class, in general, Buffalo Bill represented military conquest and, in some ways, the American equivalent of Italian King Victor Emmanuel II or folk hero Giuseppe Garibaldi.¹⁶ The romance of the Wild West Shows suggested and reinforced notions that the forces of nature ordain the advance of civilization and progress against the insidiousness of barbarians.¹⁷

Unlike their critical view of white American oppression toward African Americans during this period, mainstream newspapers tepidly responded to atrocities committed against Native Americans perceived to live outside the boundaries of civilization. For radical papers, such as Il Proletario, class considerations remained dominant despite positioning Native Americans as pelle rosse. The newspaper steadfastly critiqued capitalism and colonialism by calling attention to the United States’ stained history of relations with both African Americans and Native Americans:

The bourgeois make the laws in their favor so that when an American or European bourgeois want to take something they find any excuse. In America, it was that the Indians didn’t cultivate the land; in Africa the pretext was that they were barbarians and savages…. the situation becomes worse every day so that the poor Indians, who were owners of the land, are now described as savage beasts to be massacred and tortured.¹⁸

To be sure, the mainstream press clearly did not condone American actions. For example, as more facts became available following the December 29 incident at Wounded Knee, headlines, often appearing on the front page of Il Progresso, progressed from the mundane “The Subject of the Indians” to the more sympathetic “The Poor Indians.”19 The Italian language mainstream daily Cristofero Colombo rebuked American soldiers for acting “without prudence … and out of sheer ferocity” and asked rhetorically, “If this is the truth we ask who are the savages?”²⁰ However, rather than genuine empathy, mainstream newspapers exploited Native American suffering by opportunistically rebuking American “civilization” in an effort to exalt their own status.

Indeed, Il Progresso commonly viewed Native Americans as the aggressors in provoking violence between themselves and white Americans. Shortly after Wounded Knee, Il Progresso remarked that “hostile tribes were getting together to make war,” noting that “this was something they had done before.”²¹ In 1891, Il Progresso underscored that the “definitive account of Native people’s valor, honesty, morality, and industriousness had not yet been written. Certain people who have lived among Native tribes declare they possessed rudimentary elements of civilization and were more victims, than culprit…. others say they are the worst of the savages, only dedicated to stealing and killing.”²² Yet, despite what appeared to be an equitable assessment, the newspaper chose to print a damning and judgmental letter as the final word on this subject. Written by Mr. Cioli, a Progresso subscriber from South Dakota, the letter purported to provide readers with expert testimony from someone who had actually lived among Native Americans for three years and had become accustomed to their language, customs, and character. Cioli described Native Americans as indolent thieves, shameless, without morals of any kind, utterly dishonest, and “traitors beyond belief who were willing to use every method to deceive white people.” Ultimately, according to Cioli, only through “intermingling with whites” could Native people improve their condition.²³

Moreover, mainstream Italian language newspapers perceived Native Americans as culpable for their own plight and solely responsible for their demise, rather than as victims of white oppression. In 1906, Il Progresso published a story about an Italian immigrant and his Mexican wife who were killed by pelle rosse in Arizona. Without commenting upon what was viewed as a hybrid union at the time, the paper scornfully described these Indians as “savage beings who resist every attempt at civilization as well as humanitarian sentiment.”24 For a prominenti press wrestling with attempts to fashion an Italian American identity deemed acceptable by white Americans, Native Americans willingly and stubbornly squandered their chance at civilization. Referring to the dwindling Ute tribe in Montana, Il Progresso feared that “race hatred is very profound in these few representatives of this very unhappy race who have refused the civilization of the invaders.”²⁵ Balbi neatly summarized the viewpoint of the mainstream press when he argued that “the nomadic life means that they [Indians] do not dedicate themselves to industry or agriculture…. this is the way the Indians of America are, whose race, because of its resistance to the civilizing process, a resistance more tenacious than that of Africans, is destined to be extinguished in the not too distant future.”²⁶

In the 1909 book Gli Americani nella vita moderna osservati da un italiano, written by Alberto Pecorini, the future editor of Il Cittadino dedicates a chapter titled “Una Razza che Muore” (A dying race) to explain the disappearance of Native Americans. Pondering how to incorporate this race among whites, Pecorini concludes that maybe the “most generous thing we can do is let them die out.”²⁷ Throughout the period of mass immigration, it appears quite obvious that the Italian language mainstream press, in line with a majority of American society, did not envision a long existence for the pelle rosse. Immediately after Wounded Knee in 1891, Il Progresso critiqued the United States for only prolonging what was inevitable: “Why they don’t have the courage to terminate this unequal opera of destruction with a general massacre and end it once and for all…. it would be better to shorten the Indians’ agony.”²⁸ In 1914, an article in Il Progresso titled “The Last Redskin: A Race Destined to Expire” became an unintentional bookend to Giuseppe Balbi’s 1891 synopsis of Native Americans. Balbi’s confident prediction in 1891 that the pelle rosse were soon to be extinguished was confirmed, albeit wistfully, by Il Progresso: “At the time of the discovery of America the pelle rosse were counted by the millions, now they are counted at approximately 350,000. You do not have to be a prophet to know that these people are destined to vanish. In two or three generations there will no longer be any representatives of the pelle rosse who persist in living outside the law and dying of misery.”29 Ironically, by conflating whiteness and civilization, redskins and savagery, the prominenti press could never reconcile these two worlds as they related to Native Americans. For prominenti, the image of Native Americans served as a stark reminder of the boundaries of American civilization and barbarism. Illuminated by its coverage of Native Americans, the press offered a narrative of assimilation and inclusion informed, in part, by its construction of a counternarrative of pelle rosse marginality, resistance to civilization, and eventual eradication.

La Razza Gialla

Despite their marginalization in American society via immigration restriction, Italian language mainstream and radical newspapers would find more in common with Asian Americans, whether through their role as “workers” or as victims of race-based immigration restriction, than with Native Americans, who were perceived as outside the boundaries of civilization. In addition, factors deemed important in the process of Italian racial uplift, such as imperial success and more immediate domestic issues affecting both Asian and Italian communities, informed a more positive racial view of Japanese and Chinese peoples. Reflecting, in part, an Italian language press coming to terms with its own idealistic constructions of Italian American identity, newspapers balanced Chinese or Japanese otherness with declarations of worthy civilizations informed by military prowess and ancient cultures. In doing so, at least initially, the mainstream press, in particular, revealed a willingness to maintain a fluid, multifaceted approach to racial construction.³⁰ By World War I, however, mainstream newspapers such as Il Progresso and Bolletino della Sera pursued a more rigid conception of race and color, rendering subtle distinctions irrelevant.

Colonial conquest often served as a common measuring stick to determine a nation-state’s arrival on the international scene, as well as an indicator of superior racial status. Italian language mainstream newspapers, engaged in their own attempt at racial uplift by championing the glory of Italian military ventures, reacted favorably to Japan’s military accomplishments during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. In the days leading up to the peace agreement brokered by President Theodore Roosevelt in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Giuseppe Sergi, a prominent Sicilian-born anthropologist, authored an article in Il Progresso titled “The Yellow Race.” Viewing Japan as a rising power, the article probed the geopolitical and social ramifications of its military victory over Russia. Sergi did not agree with some in the United States who feared a “yellow peril” threatening the safety of the United States and Europe; rather, he interpreted Japan’s burgeoning hegemony in the Pacific as a positive result of the war. “Even though they [the Japanese] are the dominant power in the Orient, it is a good thing since it will preserve the Asiatic race which has had civilization for thousands of years,” commented Sergi.31 Regarding China, Sergi maintained that the yellow race possessed a history of civilization that enabled it not to be bullied by white European colonialism:

The methods of colonialism that Europe never tires of—from treating indigenous peoples as inferior, or using conquered people as work horses or worse—will not be possible in China. This is so because China as a nation is not comprised of primitive tribes like those of the Damara or the Daomei of Africa. In China the Europeans have shown to be less civilized than the Chinese, who are extremely civilized. In fact, if Europe were to conquer China it would be a disaster for humanity, a return to barbarism, and would destroy one of the most ancient and important models of world civilization.³²

In a front-page article, Il Progresso maintained that Japan exhibited all the tenets of a progressive civilized race, including European nations such as Italy: “In Japan popular education flourishes and people in America are afraid of a “yellow peril! … There are many schools and illiteracy is very low, especially if compared to Russia and Italy…. it has all the elements of civilization in its evolution…. This is what Japan teaches us—it is civility in its highest form.”³³

Yet, despite these positive perceptions, at times the Italian language press did struggle with the inherent tension of implying racial equality among la razza gialla and the United States or Europe. Praise for Japanese or Chinese civilization was often tempered by an emphasis that Westerners had imparted civilization to Asian peoples. As coverage of Japan and China increased during the period of the Russo-Japanese War, articles that maintained support for Japan and China revealed an interesting and familiar theme. For instance, La Luce, a paper from Utica, New York, remarked that “the true miracle of the yellow race is how in a few years Japan had changed from feudalism to democracy and in doing so had gained the sympathy of the civilized world.” However, acknowledging the Japanese had not completely assimilated with European culture, La Luce argued nonetheless that “the Japanese had learned to appropriate the spirit of American industry and civility…. they have learned from us industrially and agriculturally.34 Similarly, an article in L’Araldo Italiano examining the evolution of Chinese medicine and its march toward modernity argued, “It’s possible to predict a quick evolution that could bring China, as has happened with Japan, toward an equal civilization with, and maybe superior to, the ones of old Europe.”³⁵ Even Sergi, who maintained that “we have no prejudice towards any race or nationality but rather feel that any human faction, and any type or color, should be respected along with its history, independence and existence,” supported a racial hierarchy with Europe at the top. Despite his positive view of China, Sergi explained that even with its historic civilization China “will return to its course of evolution and probably emulate the white European races.”³⁶

Although newspapers such as the socialist Il Proletario never extolled white, American, or European civilization as frequently, or blatantly, as the prominenti press, an assumption of Western superiority pervaded even its pages. At times one could find comments similar to those made by the papers’ mainstream counterparts such as “China did not accept … the civility of Western civilization but they have something else in common which is revolution.”³⁷ In “Americans and Americanization,” Il Proletario portrayed a variety of races as less civilized than their Western counterparts. In this discussion of the benefits of socialism to humanity, the author, writing under the pseudonym Ilion, described the influx of immigrants to the United States as a form of voluntary colonialism. However, unlike European colonies such as Italian Eritrea, Americans did not perform menial labor in the United States but rather left such work to European immigrants. Ilion described a process of “Americanization” whereby various races, such as the descendants of the Irish immigrants who arrived in the 1840s and 1850s, ascended from this menial status. “Maybe in time,” remarked Ilion, “the Italians and Poles will leave this bestial labor to other races—possibly the Chinese—and rise above this bloody toil in favor of the kind of work performed by the more evolved races.”38 Within Ilion’s racial hierarchy the constant influx of immigrants into the United States had created a “leveling of the races” by “bringing less civilized peoples into contact with more evolved people.”³⁹ It is this motivation that prompted Ilion’s disclaimer that “my observations are not here to create hate or conflict between races but are just plain by all to see. This is why socialism is not restricted to some races, but rather involves all humanity.”⁴⁰ Therefore, somewhat illogically, Ilion argued for the insignificance of racial difference by delineating how racial difference would directly lead to a socialist society.

Race-Based Immigration Restriction

Although entitled to legal entry and naturalization under the 1790 immigration law that permitted “any alien being a free white person,” Italian immigrants consistently confronted accusations impugning their racial characteristics and suitability for citizenship. White Americans often used unflattering comparisons to people of color as a vital component in disparaging Italian immigrants. Although the most immediate and salient comparisons would be to African Americans, it was not unusual for Americans to describe Italian unskilled laborers as the “Chinese of Europe.” One Italian American editor in Detroit maintained, “Italians are maltreated, mocked, scorned, disdained, and abused in every way. The inferiority of the Italians is believed to be almost that of the Asiatics.” However, one issue that affected both communities, although to much different degrees, and seemingly created mutual sympathy remained the area of immigration restriction and exclusion. Vigilant against attempts to target their race for restriction, Italian language newspapers remained wary of attacks such as the one from a German language newspaper in Chicago that, borrowing a phrase from a “certain Anglo-American newspaper” labeling Italians the “Chinese of the East,” justified its desire for immigration restriction from Italy by citing the Chinese exclusion laws.⁴¹ The Italian language press found commonality in restriction laws targeting specific groups for exclusion, and this became a crucial factor in informing a divergent view of la razza gialla from pelle rosse. However, although both mainstream and radical Italian language newspapers interpreted Asian restriction as an issue of race and class, by the period of World War I both prominenti and radical newspapers worked more rigidly within a paradigm of Asian racial otherness.

Roger Daniels has referred to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 as the “pivot on which all American immigration policy turned, the hinge on which Emma Lazarus’s ‘Golden Door’ began to swing toward a closed position. It initiated an era of steadily increasing restrictions on immigration of all kinds that lasted until 1943.”42 Exclusion laws and gentlemen’s agreements limiting, if not discontinuing, Chinese and Japanese immigration to the United States effectively placed these two nonwhite races on the margins of American society. Between the years 1850 and 1890, some 290,610 Chinese immigrants arrived in the United States, with their numbers increasing threefold from the 1850s to the 1870s.⁴³ In response to the increasing number of Chinese newcomers, the U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, prohibiting the immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years and denying citizenship to eligible Chinese. The measure was unique in that it was the first federal law ever passed banning a group of immigrants solely on the basis of race or nationality. Congress amended and renewed the law in 1892, 1902, and 1904 to shore up remaining loopholes and created a policy so strict that it excluded all Chinese laborers and their spouses.⁴⁴

The U.S. government pursued a somewhat similar policy with respect to Japanese immigrants. After the United States annexed Hawaii following the Spanish-American War in 1898, a majority of the Japanese immigration flowing to the Pacific States originated from Hawaii, not Japan. However, annexation produced alarm among white Americans who sought to maintain the racial purity of American citizenship. Because roughly half of Hawaii’s population descended from Japan and a quarter from China, Congress soon realized the potential problem of admitting a territory that contained a nonwhite majority. Congress repeatedly denied Hawaii’s admission as a U.S. state until 1959. President Theodore Roosevelt responded to growing anti-Japanese restrictions in California, in particular the San Francisco School Board’s attempt to segregate Japanese schoolchildren, by directly intervening in Japanese immigration policy in 1906. Unlike his negative opinion of Chinese immigrants, Roosevelt’s perception of the Japanese race was generally positive, but informed as well by their status as a rising international power. Attempting to avoid an international incident, Roosevelt and Secretary of State Elihu Root brokered with Japan what commonly became known as the Gentlemen’s Agreement. In effect, the agreement consisted of six notes exchanged over 1907 and 1908 outlining that the Japanese government would not issue passports for laborers headed to the continental United States. Under threat of a lawsuit, Roosevelt pushed the leaders from California’s legislature and San Francisco’s school board to discontinue the policy of segregation with respect to Japanese schoolchildren. On paper the Gentlemen’s Agreement barred further Japanese immigration to the United States; in practice, however, various loopholes, such as the immigration of picture brides, allowed the Japanese population to expand. For example, the U.S. Census of 1900 listed 24,788 people of Japanese origin, but that number increased to 67,744 in 1910 and 81,502 in 1920.45

For radical papers such as Il Proletario, Asian Americans, particularly Japanese Americans living in California, fit nicely within a working-class narrative that never properly suited Native Americans. According to Il Proletario, exclusionary legislation aimed at Asian Americans simply reflected the capitalist class’s attempt to scapegoat Chinese immigrants for the economic problems facing the nation. The capitalists “lied to Americans and trade unions alike” in an effort to manipulate the American public and conceal their own actions, claiming that the Chinese, whom they described as an “inferior race, dressed in filthy Chinese clothes, and economized their wages in order to send it back to China.”⁴⁶ Il Proletario targeted capitalism’s pernicious exploitation of the worker as the root of these injustices. Therefore, even immigrants who allowed themselves to be used as replacement workers deserved criticism for their shortsighted economic outlook. According to Il Proletario, “We have scabs from every nationality. The scab does not recognize a country and the exploitation of capitalism has no nationality.”⁴⁷ The Italian Socialist Federation maintained that part of the reason that most unions and newspapers, such as the Masons and Bricklayers Union in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, supported Chinese exclusion was directly related to the strong competition the Chinese posed to manual labor in the United States. Pressing for a class-based, transnational alliance, Il Proletario protested against any form of organized labor that would confuse its interests with that of capital: “We cannot understand organized workers who vote against their brothers of other nationalities instead of the capitalist system, which is the first cause of all the evils.”48

The discourse relating to Japanese immigrants was much the same. Before World War I, Il Proletario ran a series of articles on the “Japanese question” written by the Italian American radical editor and poet Arturo Giovannitti.⁴⁹ The series focused on immigration legislation that sought to exclude Japanese immigrants and severely hinder their economic progress. Similar to Il Proletario’s analysis of Chinese restriction, Giovannitti insisted that the motivation behind California’s Alien Land Bill had more to do with class oppression than race hatred. He sardonically mocked American hypocrisy by noting the law had been inspired by the descendants of “the people who stole land from the Indians.”⁵⁰ According to Giovannitti, “If the inalienable right to own property is such a revered tenet, than how does the United States justify the hypocrisy of denying these ‘constitutional’ rights to certain citizens?” Further, he argued that such a law contradicted and subverted all the alleged benefits that capitalism sought to offer the “common citizen,” most notably the chance of social mobility. “If the law denying the right to own property is allowed to perpetuate,” observed Giovannitti, “it undermines the alleged justification of capitalism that contends anyone can become an Astor or Rockefeller.”⁵¹ More broadly, however, Giovannitti interpreted the exclusion acts as a provocative capitalist strategy aimed at securing and exploiting markets for American corporations. He likened the effort to the infamous sinking of the USS Maine in 1898 that precipitated war between Spain and the United States: “This is the real reason and the only reason for the acrimony against the Japanese.”⁵² According to Giovannitti, these acts of exclusion are “something big companies are pushing … in order to open up new countries to trade…. more specifically these companies would welcome a war with Japan as a way to capture the Asiatic and especially the China trade.”⁵³

Immigration Restriction and the Hardening of the Color Line

On June 18, 1909, New York City police officers discovered the murdered body of Elsie Sigel, granddaughter of the famous Civil War general Franz Sigel, in an apartment on West Forty-Eighth Street in Manhattan. Miss Sigel was found stuffed into a trunk with a rope tightened around her neck. The New York Times reported that Lung Lin (also known as William Leon) and Chung Sin, the “Chinamen” who occupied the apartment, had vanished and could not be found by police.54 Sigel, a nineteen-year-old white woman who hailed from a middle-class New York family, was described by the Times as “a missionary worker on the east side” who was “lured to the home of the Chinamen.”⁵⁵ Through letters recovered by the New York City Police Department, it appeared that Miss Sigel may have been involved in a love triangle with Mr. Leon and Chi Gain, a manager of a nearby Mott Street restaurant.

Unlike most of the New York press, which latched onto Sigel’s murder in a sensational manner that reflected, in part, the public’s obsession and fierce concern with interracial relationships during this period, Il Progresso remarked that this type of “hybrid union” between Chinese and Americans was not something entirely new in Brooklyn.⁵⁶ In fact, marriages between members of the la razza gialla and Americans, usually in the form of missionary Sunday school instructors marrying their Chinese students, had occurred since the late 1880s.⁵⁷ Instead, Il Progresso expressed great surprise that “hybrid unions” of this sort could still occur in the United States, where “racial prejudice is as deeply rooted as anywhere in the world.” Further astonishing was that these unions occurred across class lines as these schools had been frequented not by wealthy Chinese men but predominantly by “men from humble and modest economic backgrounds working in laundries, or as servants and cooks.”⁵⁸

Il Progresso’s interpretation of the Sigel case is a clear example of how the mainstream and, to a lesser extent, the radical press perceived a changing racial landscape within the United States during the period of 1910 through 1920. Il Progresso’s surprise that “hybrid unions” could still occur in New York City, despite their presence since the 1880s, indicates a reworking of the race/color hierarchy. In so doing, Il Progresso reflected the press’s own progression toward a less nuanced and more simplistic construction of race and color where one’s race (American, Chinese, Italian) became even more intimately fastened to one’s color (white, yellow, swarthy). Surprised that a society so deeply rooted in racial prejudice would allow a union between Americans and Chinese, the paper conflates “American” with white and facilely describes Chinese as the yellow race. As will be explored in chapters 4 and 5, Italian mainstream newspapers, in particular, constructed an Italian American identity reliant upon the establishment of an Italian race defined as civilized and white. Educated in U.S. racial policy for some two decades and facing increasing attacks on their own racial suitability, prominenti papers moved away from comparisons to nonwhite groups and increasingly made their case for inclusion based upon their civilization, whiteness, and Americanness.

It is through this lens of a progressing race-color connection that the press weighed in on increasing calls for race-based immigration restriction aimed at Asian Americans. Prominenti newspapers followed the debate over Chinese and Japanese restriction with keen interest as Italians continued to be targets of such restrictionist attempts. Concerned that support for the precedent of race-based immigration restriction could indirectly legitimize calls for Italian restriction, mainstream newspapers did criticize the concept of singling out one race for exclusion. However, a more nuanced analysis reveals that apparent support remained mostly an exercise in self-interest. As exclusion became increasingly tied to one’s race and color, Italian language newspapers endeavored to clearly mark the difference between Asians and Italians. Therefore, predicating their own racial and color-based appeals for inclusion on the insistence that Italians were civilized and white, prominenti never undertook a comparable approach with respect to Asian Americans during this decade.

In 1913, Arturo Giovannitti, a famous Italian radical author, poet, and activist, wrote an article for Il Proletario discussing the Alien Land Bill and the Japanese in California. Although Giovannitti continued to work within the confines of an economic interpretation, he stressed other reasons for anti-immigrant policies and considered racial difference a primary factor in Asian exclusion. Arguing that the continued influx of Japanese into California would change not only the ethnicity of the state but also the character of the nation, Giovannitti clearly acknowledged the role that race had played in policy makers’ perceptions. For instance, he alluded to “special laws” singling out Asian immigrants such as those restricting entry of “Mongol women” and those disallowing citizenship for Japanese immigrants. According to Giovannitti, immigration laws “requiring certain qualifications of the Japanese and Chinese were race specific doctrines—applied to members of the ‘Asiatic’ (yellow) race and not asked of those Europeans of the Caucasian race.” Unlike mainstream newspapers, Giovannitti’s indictment of capitalism and the U.S. government did not abate. Yet incorporated within this critique Giovannitti placed some blame on Asians for their own exclusion. According to Giovannitti, the “Japanese in the West are completely segregated because there is too much difference between their race and the ‘yankee race.’” This owed mostly to the fact that “Asians did not have the faculty and the willingness to assimilate to the host culture due to racial differences.”59 This rhetorical approach spoke to the radical tendency to privilege class, but it often indirectly acknowledged that categories of race and color remained equal obstacles to full inclusion. Moreover, Giovannitti clearly links Europeans to Caucasian/white and Asians to yellow, further cementing the intimate connection between race and color during this period.

Conversely, the mainstream press practiced a cautious approach toward Asian immigration restriction that reflected the increasingly rigid race/color paradigm in which Chinese and Japanese remained marked as the yellow race. Mainstream newspapers such as Il Progresso expressed concern that laws singling out Chinese laborers could, if passed, give “the impression that we are against Chinese of all classes and that the guiding impulse of the bill is racial prejudice.” The newspaper acknowledged the diversity of races and cultures arriving from various parts of the globe and stated that “the immigration laws should be applied with flexible methods so as not to damage or offend the sensibilities of any one people.” However, despite a rather tepid warning in 1908 that exclusionary laws governing Chinese immigration to American territories were in “open opposition to the principles of the republic and the spirit of our institutions,” the mainstream press soon discovered the difficulty in maintaining full-throated racial support for Asian inclusion.⁶⁰

Concerned with American assaults on Italian racial suitability, the mainstream Italian language press remained reluctant to extoll the virtues of Japanese and Chinese civilization as a qualification for their inclusion. Prominenti opposed California’s proposed Asian restriction laws in a superficial, self-interested manner as any hints of a racial defense of la razza gialla ultimately undermined and contradicted their own argument for Italian inclusion based upon on their race’s civilization, whiteness, and Americanness. For example, stories appeared offering a platform for anti-Asian views, but, unlike instances when Il Progresso used African American lynching as a platform to condemn American racial violence, the paper chose to remain silent. One example from Il Progresso highlighted the story of Assemblyman Drew, whom the paper described as “one of the most radical agitators against the Japanese.”61 Drew had openly challenged the authority of the president by attempting to maintain segregation among the races in California—particularly the “white and yellow races.” According to Drew, “In the history of races the amalgamation of whites with blacks and yellow is prejudicial to the first and not useful to the second.”⁶² Drew maintained that the “yellow race has brought with it to America all the negative elements of civilization…. furthermore, the white race cannot remain in a territory where the yellow or negro races are multiplying through immigration or procreation. If a Japanese person buys a house near a white person, the white person should absolutely leave because there is too much difference between the two in custom, habits, etc. You cannot have a strong and laborious generation with the amalgamation of races.”⁶³ By 1909, Drew’s perception fit nicely with an emerging prominenti construction of race and color privileging white over nonwhite.

Bolletino della Sera’s consistent coverage of the Alien Land Bill debate taking place in California during the spring of 1913 demonstrated the extent to which prominenti viewed the issue of exclusion as one that could potentially impact the Italian community.⁶⁴ Indeed, the paper’s disclosure that the Italian ambassador had asked Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan for more information regarding the specifics of the Alien Land Bill demonstrated the wider concern Italians had about racially motivated exclusion laws.⁶⁵ Those concerns did not inspire the mainstream press to rally around Asian inclusion based upon racial suitability. Instead, lukewarm endorsements of Japanese rights appeared all too willing to avoid any hint of their racial bona fides. So despite Il Progresso’s sentiment that all foreigners, including the Japanese, had a right to buy land because they were “part of the pantheon of rights of all people,” nowhere in its intellectual defense of people’s rights did Il Progresso maintain Japanese racial characteristics earned them inclusion in American society.66 More to the point, Bolletino della Sera quoted a report from the Times of London that exonerated California exclusionists of racial profiling by stating that “these tendencies are not provoked by race hate, but rather by the instinct of self-preservation.” The paper perspicaciously observed with some confidence that “although Japan wanted to be treated the same as western nations, the people of the white race have no intention of recognizing these rights.”⁶⁷

Despite rationalizations pointing to self-preservation rather than race hate as the motivating factor behind the Alien Land Bill, it became increasingly apparent that whiteness, and its perceived boundaries, played the primary role. For Italian American mainstream newspapers promoting the Italian race as civilized and white, racial defenses in support of la razza gialla would become impossible to maintain. As the rhetoric surrounding Asian exclusion heated up between 1910 and 1920, Bolletino della Sera chose to highlight the words of Anthony Caminetti, an Italian American state senator from California. Caminetti was not just another state senator but had been only the second Italian American to serve in Congress (1891–1895) in the United States, and the first from outside New York. Although many in New York City may not have heard of Caminetti, Bolletino’s decision to cite his views probably owed much to prominenti pride in Caminetti’s achievements: the first American-born descendant of Italian immigrants elected to the California state legislature, a former congressman, and U.S. commissioner of immigration from 1913 to 1921.⁶⁸ Either way, Italian Americans read about one of their own race who not only supported the California restriction bill but bluntly declared its purpose was “to prevent the Japanese from being here.” In fact, Caminetti emerged as a vociferous critic of Asian immigration who, in his capacity as immigration commissioner, testified before a special hearing of the House Immigration Committee in 1914 that “Asiatic Immigration is a menace to the whole country and particularly to the Pacific Coast. The danger is general. No part of the United States is immune.”⁶⁹

With the publication of the forty-one-volume Dillingham Commission report describing southern Italians as an inferior race, in addition to increasing hypernationalism unleashed by the war and energetic pleas for immigration restriction, Italian fitness for citizenship was by no means settled. Based upon an examination of Native Americans and Asian Americans, it is clear that in the years leading up to this period the Italian language press remained more willing to entertain a complex, multilevel racial consciousness. Categories of race, color, civilization, and class did not always work together in a uniform fashion, but rather operated as a set of overlapping influences, either independent of one another or in combination. In essence, depending upon the circumstances, whiteness did not necessarily need to be fastened to civilization as a measure of racial superiority and classification.

However, after two decades of intense exposure to American racial norms, prominenti newspapers refashioned and reconstructed their own racial hierarchy. Uneasy with complex characterizations that could potentially reinforce existing negative stereotypes positioning Italians as inferior and swarthy newcomers, Il Progresso solidified the connection between race and color, civilization and whiteness, American and other. Actively constructing an identity informed by an italianita defined as Italian, American, and white, prominenti newspapers became less willing to negotiate the nuances of race and color. Instead, Italian language newspapers employed a more rigid paradigm that constructed race, color, civilization, and hence (Italian American) identity along a more inflexible and crucial black/white binary. For Italian immigrant readers of the prominenti press, Anthony Caminetti’s race, as much as his message, must have at least fleetingly soothed anxious feelings within Italian American communities. Exposed to a press that now constructed race along a black/white binary and revealed an increasing unwillingness to allow civilization to trump one’s nonwhiteness, Caminetti was living proof that a pathway to whiteness, and ultimately full inclusion as Americans, could yet be forged. In essence, he served as a glaring example that Italians could be the excluders rather than the excludees.