A Great Conspiracy against Our Race: Italian Immigrant Newspapers and the Construction of Whiteness in the Early Twentieth Century

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1. Commercial Herald, March 30, 1886.

2. Ibid.

3. Unidentified newspaper, Archivio storico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Rome (hereafter ASMAE), Ambasciata di Washington, busta 59, fascicolo 18, “Linciaggio di un italiano accusato di stupro, 1886–1887.” See also Consular Agent Piazza to Italian Consul in New York, ASMAE, Ambasciata di Washington, busta 59, fascicolo 18, “Linciaggio di un italiano accusato di stupro, 1886–1887”; Vicksburg Evening Post, March 26, 1886.

4. See Italian Ambassador, Washington, DC, to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Rome, ASMAE, Ambasciata di Washington, busta 59, fascicolo 18, “Linciaggio di un italiano accusato di stupro (Allegato: due numeri del “Progresso italo-americano”), 1886–1887.

5. Letter from Adelino Tirelli to Italian Consul, ASMAE, Ambasciata di Washington, busta 59, fascicolo 18, “Linciaggio di un italiano accusato di stupro (Allegato: due numeri del “Progresso italo-americano”), 1886–1887.

6. See “Ancora del linciaggio dell’italiano a Vicksburg, Miss.,” Il Progresso Italo-Americano, in ASMAE, Ambasciata di Washington, busta 59, fascicolo 18, “Linciaggio di un italiano accusato di stupro (Allegato: due numeri del “Progresso italo-americano”), 1886–1887.

7. New York Times, November 28, 1892.

8. Matthew Pratt Guterl, The Color of Race in America, 1900–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 6.

9. For example, see Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 11.

10. Quoted in David W. Stowe, “Uncolored People: The Rise of Whiteness Studies,” Lingua Franca 6, no. 6 (1996): 70. The literature on “whiteness” is extensive and growing. For some benchmark works, see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1999); Roediger, Towards an Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (London: Verso, 1994); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America (London: Verso, 1990); Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, vol. 1, Racial Oppression and Social Control (London: Verso, 1994); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (London: Oxford University Press, 1993); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London: Verso, 1992); Ian F. Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: NYU Press, 1996); Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994).

11. See, for example, Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, eds., Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America (New York: Routledge, 2003); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Robert Orsi, “The Religious Boundaries of an Inbetween People: Street Feste and the Problem of the Dark-Skinned Other in Italian Harlem, 1920–1990,” American Quarterly 44 (1992): 313–347; David R. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005); David R. Roediger and James Barrett, “Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality and the ‘New Immigrant’ Working Class,” Journal of American Ethnic History 16 (1997): 28–29; Rudolph Vecoli, “Are Italian Americans Just White Folks?,” Italian Americana 13 (1995): 149–161.

12. See Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 60; John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955); Roediger, Working toward Whiteness, 12–13.

13. Haney López, White by Law, 27.

14. Orsi, “Religious Boundaries of an Inbetween People,” 318.

15. Roediger and Barrett, “Inbetween Peoples,” 29.

16. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 6–7.

17. Guglielmo, White on Arrival, 8.

18. Ibid., 7

19. New York Sun, August 4, 1899; New York Times, November 28, 1892.

20. Roediger has argued that to uphold the category of inbetweeness one must accept “the messiness of the racial order in which immigrants found themselves, and placed themselves.” See Roediger, Working toward Whiteness, 12–13, 37.

21. Guterl, Color of Race in America, 13.

22. With respect to Jewish immigrants, Eric Goldstein states: “By casting light on the constant, albeit unsuccessful effort to fit Jewishness into a black/white framework, the book reveals white Americans’ anxious attempts to obscure the fissures that divided them internally, underscoring just how tenuous the notion of a stable, monolithic whiteness has been in American life.” Goldstein, Price of Whiteness, 2–3. Matthew Jacobson argues that the notion of a monolithic whiteness did not exist during this period as the category of Caucasian fractured along multiple degrees of racial fitness. In his work The White Scourge, historian Neil Foley asserts that in the first two decades of the twentieth century, “whiteness also came increasingly to mean a particular kind of white person. Not all whites, in other words, were equally white.” See Jacobson, Whiteness of Different Color; Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 5.

23. See Giorgio Bertellini, “Duce/Divo: Masculinity, Racial Identity, and Politics among Italian Americans in 1920s New York City,” Journal of Urban History 31 (2005): 691.

24. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Race and Gender in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

25. Quoted from Sally Miller, ed., The Ethnic Press in the United States: A Historical Analysis and Handbook (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), xii. See also Todd Vogel, ed., The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 2–3. Surprisingly, scholars of the Italian immigrant experience have historically understated the importance of the Italian language mainstream press. This is in stark contrast to scholars of other immigrant groups such as the Poles and the Greeks, who have demonstrated that “in reading and responding to their press, the immigrants and their descendants learned to act—and think—like Americans.” Andrew Kopan perceived the role of the Greek press in this way: “Despite its role as a carrier of ethnicity, the Greek ethnic press has also been a means of assimilation.” Andrew T. Kopan, “The Greek Press,” in Miller, Ethnic Press in the United States, 174; see also A. J. Kuzniewski, “The Polish American Press,” in Miller, Ethnic Press in the United States, 286.

26. Miller, Ethnic Press in the United States, xvi.

27. The editor explained she could not locate an available specialist in the field to undertake the assignment. See ibid., xiii.

28. Between 1899 and 1909, a total of 1,517,768 southern Italians emigrated with an illiteracy rate of 54.2 percent, and 311,243 northern Italians emigrated with a rate of 11.8 percent. The illiteracy rate for all Italian immigrants arriving during this period was 47 percent. See table 15 in U.S. Immigration Commission Reports, vol. 4, Emigration Conditions in Europe, 41.

29. Italian language circulation figures from Nathan H. Seidman, The Foreign Language Market in America: A Study of the Racial and National Groups in the United States, Their Geographical Distribution, Occupations, Their Social and Economic Standing, the Publications They Support, with Rates, Circulation and Other Authentic Data for the Guidance of Advertising Agencies, and Advertisers (New York: American Association of Foreign Language Newspapers, 1923), sec. D, 31–32; population figures from U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920: State Compendium: New York (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1924), table 12, p. 54; and Seidman, Foreign Language Market in America, sec. D, 27; Jewish press circulation numbers from N. W. Ayer & Son’s, American Newspaper Annual and Directory: A Catalogue of American Newspapers (Philadelphia: Newspaper Advertising Agents, 1920), 652–689; also see Robert Park, The Immigrant Press and Its Control (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1922), 91.

30. May M. Sweet, The Italian Immigrant and His Reading (Chicago: American Library Association: 1925), 17.

31. See Eliot Lord, John J. D. Trenor, and Samuel J. Barrows, The Italian in America (New York: B. F. Buck, 1905), 245–246.

32. George La Piana, “What Do the Italians in America Read” (1917), George La Piana Papers, Harvard Theological Library, Manuscripts, 15.

33. See Vogel, The Black Press, 2–3.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

1. New York Times, April 3, 1927. An apocryphal story about Il Progresso’s origin suggested that Barsotti’s decision to enter the publishing business ostensibly revolved around Pietro Baldo, an Italian immigrant convicted of murder in 1879. Aggrieved by what he perceived as a tepid defense of his convicted countryman by L’Eco d’Italia (the Echo of Italy), the only Italian language newspaper serving a relatively small community of Italian immigrants in New York City, Barsotti wrote a letter of protest to the paper. When the newspaper ignored the letter, an insulted Barsotti decided to start Il Progresso, justified by his conviction that L’Eco d’Italia was not defending and protecting the honor and integrity of Italians living in the United States.

2. George Pozzetta, “The Italians of New York City, 1890–1914” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 1971), 242–243.

3. Klaus Bruhn Jensen and Nicholas W. Jankowski, eds., A Handbook of Qualitative Methodologies for Mass Communications Research (New York: Routledge, 1991), 18; see Vogel, The Black Press, 2–3.

4. In the past two decades, significant shifts have taken place in the interpretations of southern Italy. Scholarship has begun to move away from interpretations that attempt to explain the “peculiarities” and “idiosyncrasies” of southern Italy through a comparison with northern Italy. This approach, known as meridionalismo, evolved shortly after Italian unification as intellectuals strove to explain the reasons behind the South’s apparent underdevelopment in relation to the North. These interpretations were extremely influential in the subsequent historiography on what became known as the “southern problem.” For example, the contrast between the northern and southern economies was explored through the notion of “dualism”—the idea that two completely separate economies existed side by side within the same country. During the 1980s, however, new scholarship began to challenge the basic premises of meridionalismo, asserting instead that constantly interpreting the South through an implicit comparison with the North distorted the realities of the Mezzogiorno. The older scholarship, revisionists argued, positioned the South as a static, backward society completely separated from any of the positive features of Italian history. In Latifundium: Moral Economy and Material Life in a European Periphery (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), Marta Petrucewicz challenges this notion by focusing on the economic, social, and moral functioning of a Calabrian latifondo. It ahistorically implied that the South was a homogeneous region made up of various provinces that possessed similar characteristics. In essence, the revisionists warn of the dangers of trying to analyze the South within the “old” historiographical framework of a “southern problem” set forth by their predecessors. See Jonathan Morris, “Challenging Meridionalismo: Constructing a New History for Southern Italy,” in Robert Lumley and Jonathan Morris, eds., The New History of the Italian South: The Mezzogiorno Revisited (London: University of Exeter Press, 1997), 1–19.

5. Gabriella Gribaudi, “Images of the South: The Mezzogiorno as Seen by Insiders and Outsiders,” in Lumley and Morris, New History of the Italian South, 87.

6. Quoted in John Dickie, “Stereotypes of the Italian South, 1860–1900,” in Lumley and Morris, New History of the Italian South, 122. See also John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Vito Teti, ed., La razza maladetta: Origini del pregiudizio antimeriodionali (Rome: Manifestolibri, 1993); Claudia Petraccone, Le due civiltà: Settentrionali e meridionali nella storia d’Italia dal 1860 al 1914 (Storia e societa) (Rome: Laterza, 2000).

7. The connections between late nineteenth-century constructions of masculinity, gender, and civilization are explored in Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization.

8. See Gribaudi, “Images of the South,” 95; Dickie, “Stereotypes of the Italian South,” 114–121; see also Mary Gibson, “Biology or Environment? Race and Southern ‘Deviancy’ in the Writings of Italian Criminologists, 1880–1920,” in Jane Schneider, ed., Italy’s “Southern Question”: Orientalism in One Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

9. U.S. Immigration Commission Reports, vol. 5, Dictionary of Races or People, 82.

10. Thomas Kessner, The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City, 1880–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 7.

11. Annual report, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1973.

12. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910: Population (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913), table 13, p. 217.

13. U.S. Congress, House, Report of the Industrial Commission, vol. 15, Immigration, 57th Cong., 1st sess., 1901, H.R. 184, 465. See also Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 71–76.

14. According to John Mariano, by 1918, the Italian colonies in New York City numbered 310,000 in Manhattan; 115,000 in the Bronx; 20,000 in Richmond (Staten Island); 235,000 in Brooklyn; and 55,000 in Queens. See John Mariano, The Italian Contribution to American Democracy (Boston: Christopher Publishing House, 1921), 19–22.

15. See Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 97–101; Mariano, Italian Contribution to American Democracy, 19–22.

16. Mariano, Italian Contribution to American Democracy, 19; Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 103.

17. Robert Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 16.

18. Mariano, Italian Contribution to American Democracy, 33.

19. Regarding skilled workers, between 1899 and 1910, 77 percent of southern Italians were employed in the category “Laborers, including Farmers”; for northern Italians this figure was 66.5 percent. The category “Skilled Occupations” showed the numbers to be 14.6 percent and 20.4 percent, respectively. See Mariano, Italian Contribution to American Democracy, 32; also see Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 93–94; Kessner, Golden Door.

20. Mariano, Italian Contribution to American Democracy, 154.

21. Ibid.; quoted in Edwin Fenton, Immigrants and Unions: A Case Study: Italians and American Labor, 1870–1920 (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 53.

22. Fenton, Immigrants and Unions, 53–54.

23. Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 247.

24. Mariano, Italian Contribution to American Democracy, 156–157.

25. Philadelphia was a distant second with seven Italian language newspapers in 1920. See N. W. Ayer & Son’s, American Newspaper Annual and Directory: A Catalogue of American Newspapers (Philadelphia: Newspaper Advertising Agents, 1920).

26. This is in contrast to ninety-five Yiddish newspapers published and circulated during the same thirty-six-year period. See table XVI in Robert E. Park, The Immigrant Press and Its Control (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1922), 313.

27. By 1920, Il Progresso published an edition for Philadelphia, and according to Humbert Nelli, during and after World War I, Il Progresso became as influential in Chicago as the local hometown Italian newspaper, L’Italia. See Humbert Nelli, “The Role of the Colonial Press in the Italian American Community of Chicago, 1886–1921” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1965), 48. See also N. W. Ayer & Son’s, American Newspaper Annual and Directory, 1920, 680.

28. Rudolph Vecoli, “The Italian Immigrant Press and the Construction of Social Reality, 1850–1920,” in James P. Danky and Wayne A. Wiegand, eds., Print Culture in a Diverse America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 20.

29. Fenton, Immigrants and Unions, 58.

30. Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 236–237; Vecoli, “Italian Immigrant Press,” 20.

31. See, for example, Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 11, 1891.

32. Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 238.

33. Alfredo Bosi, Cinquant’anni di vita in America (New York: Bagnasco Press, 1921), 404.

34. Ibid.; N. W. Ayer & Son’s, American Newspaper Annual and Directory, 1920, 680.

35. New York Times, July 6, 1945; Bosi, Cinquant’anni di vita in America, 408.

36. Bosi, Cinquant’anni di vita in America, 408.

37. Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 240; Fenton, Immigrants and Unions, 599.

38. For example, L’Araldo Italiano had a circulation of 11,200 in 1902; 12,500 in 1905 (compared with 6,500 for Il Progresso Italo-Americano); 12,500 in 1906; 15,132 in 1917; and 12,454 in 1920. See N. W. Ayer & Son’s, American Newspaper Annual and Directory, 1902, 1905, 1906, 1917, 1920.

39. Bosi, Cinquant’anni di vita in America, 408; N. W. Ayer & Son’s, American Newspaper Annual and Directory, 1920.

40. Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 211–212; United States, Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, House of Representatives, 62nd Cong., 2nd sess. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1912), 102; New York Times, November 13, 1936.

41. New York Times, November 3, 1906.

42. Bosi, Cinquant’anni di vita in America, 408.

43. N. W. Ayer & Son’s, American Newspaper Annual and Directory, 1911, 629.

44. Fenton, Immigrants and Unions, 186, 599.

45. Seidman, Foreign Language Market in America, sec. D, 32.

46. N. W. Ayer & Son’s, American Newspaper Annual and Directory, 1917, 652.

47. For some examples, see Il Cittadino, January 14, 1915; April 15, 1915; February 10, 1916; June 8, 1916; July 6, 1916; July 20, 1916; May 31, 1917.

48. California Immigration and Housing Bulletin, Commission of Immigration and Housing of California, San Francisco, CA, 1920, p. 13.

49. New York Times, November 2, 1916.

50. The most recent monographs on Italian American radicalism include Marcella Bencivenni, Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890–1940 (New York: NYU Press, 2011), especially chap. 3, “A Literary Class War: The Italian American Radical Press”; Philip V. Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer, eds., The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); Donna R. Gabaccia and Fraser M. Ottanelli, eds., Italian Workers of the World: Labor Migration and the Formation of Multiethnic States (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001); Donna R. Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta, eds., Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); and Michael M. Topp, Those without a Country: The Political History of Italian American Syndicalists (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

51. Socialist organs such as Il Proletario consistently carried labor news from around the country. For some representative examples, see Il Proletario, September 9, 1899; March 31, 1900; April 20, 1901; April 19, 1902; August 23, 1902; December 31, 1902; October 9, 1904; September 2, 1906; November 28, 1914; see also Il Progresso Italo-Americano, February 6, 1909; August 4, 1909; August 7, 1919.

52. On Italians and the Catholic Church in New York City, see Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 267–304, esp. 289–295; Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street. For some representative examples from the radical press, see “Patriottismo barbaro,” Il Proletario, April 8, 1916; “La Madonna del Carmine e L’Araldo Italiano,” Il Proletario, July 21, 1900; “Medio Evo in Secolo XX,” La Questione Sociale, July 25, 1903; “Cose di Paterson: La Madonna del Carmine,” La Questione Sociale, July 27, 1907.

53. Vecoli, “Italian Immigrant Press,” 25–28. Vecoli quoted a Department of Justice report from 1920 that listed 220 foreign language radical newspapers in the United States: 27 were in Italian, second only to Hebrew and Yiddish, which together totaled 35.

54. Park, Immigrant Press and Its Control, 360.

55. Bruno Cartosio, “Italian Workers and Their Press in the United States, 1900–1920,” in Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder, eds., The Press of Labor Migrants in Europe and North America, 1880s–1930s (Bremen: Publications of the Labor Newspaper Preservation Project, University of Bremen, 1985), 426–427.

56. Ibid., 433.

57. Elisabetta Vezzosi, “Class, Ethnicity, and Acculturation in Il Proletario: The World War One Years,” in Harzig and Hoerder, Press of Labor Migrants in Europe and North America, 453; Cartosio, “Italian Workers and Their Press in the United States,” 434.

58. Vecoli, “Italian Immigrant Press,” 25.

59. Vezzosi, “Class, Ethnicity, and Acculturation in Il Proletario,” 435–436.

60. Rudolph J. Vecoli, “‘Free Country’: The American Republic Viewed by the Italian Left, 1880–1920,” in Marianne Debouzy, ed., In the Shadow of the Statue of Liberty: Immigrants, Workers, and Citizens in the American Republic, 1880–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 27–30; Fenton, Immigrants and Unions, 194–195.

61. Vecoli, “Italian Immigrant Press,” 18.

62. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, April 3, 1887; April 10, 1887.

63. See Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 241, Vecoli, “Italian Immigrant Press,” 20–21; George La Piana, “What Do the Italians in America Read” (1917), George La Piana Papers, Harvard Theological Library, Manuscripts, 8.

64. For some representative examples, see Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 9, 1886; February 18, 1887; October 8, 1893; August 11, 1896; August 14, 1901; July 27, 1905; June 29, 1909; August 19, 1910; January 23, 1915; May 24, 1915; May 10, 1918; L’Araldo Italiano, July 25, 1901.

65. The two examples cited here refer to the subscription drive for the Garibaldi statue and the earthquake that struck Italy in 1887. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, March 5, 1887; April 16, 1887.

66. Bosi, Cinquant’anni di vita in America, 384–385.

67. Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 182.

68. See Claudia L. Bushman, America Discovers Columbus: How an Italian Explorer Became an American Hero (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992); Gerald McKevitt, “Christopher Columbus as a Civic Saint,” California History 71 (1992/93): 516–534; George E. Pozzetta and Gary R. Mormino, “The Politics of Christopher Columbus and World War II,” Altreitalie, no. 17 (1998): 6–15.

69. Michele H. Bogart, The Politics of Urban Beauty: New York and Its Art Commission (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 108–117; see also Pozzetta and Mormino, “Politics of Christopher Columbus,” 6–9.

70. See Il Progresso Italo-Americano, December 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 1890. See also Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 183–184, in which he discusses Il Progresso’s subscription drive on behalf of Italians accused of murdering Chief Hennessey.

71. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, November 4, 1906.

72. Ibid. Although Covello began teaching Italian at De Witt Clinton High School in 1920—the first class of its kind in that school—it was not until May 1922 that the New York City Board of Education began offering Regents credits that placed Italian on an equal footing with other languages. Covello, who was appointed principal of Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem in 1934, argued strenuously that the children of immigrants needed knowledge of their native language to give them a sense of identity in American society. See Leonard Covello with Guido D’Agostino, The Heart Is the Teacher (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958), 129–137; and Francesco Cordasco, ed., The Social Background of the Italo-American Schoolchild: A Study of the Southern Italian Family Mores and Their Effect on the School Situation in Italy and America (New York: Brill, 1967). For a broader perspective on immigrants and New York City schools, see Stephen F. Brumberg, “Going to America, Going to School: The Immigrant Public School Encounter in Turn-of-the-Century New York City,” American Jewish Archives 36 (1984): 86–135.

73. See Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 242; Vecoli, “Italian Immigrant Press,” 22–25; Fenton, Immigrants and Unions, 65.

74. Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 235; Fenton, Immigrants and Unions, 58–59.

75. Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 250.

76. La Piana, “What Do the Italians in America Read,” 13–14.

77. New York Times, September 3, 1911. In 1914, Pecorini’s broadsides expedited his arrest for libel and brought a legal suit for $2,000 against Il Cittadino’s publisher, Civic Publishing Company. The aggrieved party was Giuseppe Musso, the president of the Intercontinental Telephone and Telegraph Company, who accused Pecorini of using the pages of Il Cittadino to “attack well-to-do and successful Italians in the city.” Pecorini claimed that Musso’s company had defrauded some of its investors. The New York Times, however, repeatedly praised Mr. Pecorini and his newspaper for its actions on behalf of the Italian immigrant community. Defending him from sharp critiques from rival newspapers L’Araldo Italiano and Il Giornale Italiano, the paper stressed that Pecorini’s “character for frankness, uprightness, and fair dealing, and his honest efforts in behalf of his fellow-countrymen are well known.” New York Times, September 7, 1911. The Times also published multiple letters to the editor from Pecorini. See “Italian Black Hand: Why Did the Police Records of 700 Ex-Convicts Disappear?,” New York Times, August 21, 1913; and “False Picture of Italy,” New York Times, October 16, 1913.

78. Fenton, Immigrants and Unions, 54–58.

79. Vogel, The Black Press, 2–3.

80. Park, Immigrant Press and Its Control, 294–295.

81. Quoted from ibid., 79, 84, 87.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

1. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, March 16, 1891. After the lynching of three Italians in Hahnville, Louisiana, in 1893, a letter written to Il Progresso from a man in New York City echoed almost verbatim the sentiments of Marchese’s letter. Again, the word tenebroso was used to describe the African continent. Ibid., July 30, 1893.

2. Cristofero Colombo, March 18, 1891. An article in Cristofero Colombo expressed outrage and surprise that such an atrocity “would happen in a ‘civilized’ nation such as America…. if it had occurred in Africa this type of savagery would be more understandable.” Ibid., March 20, 1891.

3. L’Araldo Italiano, August 11, 1896.

4. Cristofero Colombo, March 15, 1891.

5. See John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 1–23.

6. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1984); see also Dickie, Darkest Italy, 18.

7. L’Eco d’Italia, March 5, 1896; L’Araldo Italiano, March 10, 1896; Il Progresso Italo-Americano, March 16, 1891.

8. Il Proletario, March 16, 1899.

9. Il Grido degli Oppressi, July 14, 1892. Labeling Columbus the “symbol of ferocity for his period,” Il Grido degli Oppressi continued its criticism of European colonialism, stating that “the infantile passion of the savages for these bright, shiny objects, such as mirrors, became for the civilized man a desire for gold and power.” In critiquing the relationship between colonizer and indigenous peoples, Il Grido still worked within racial hierarchies juxtaposing civilization and savagery. Ironically, its outrage at European colonial ventures is littered with acknowledgments that “civilized” people should know and act in a more humane manner—not necessarily that “native people” should not be treated this way at all. See Il Grido degli Oppressi, June 30, 1892.

10. Il Proletario, December 15, 1900.

11. The implicit understanding of civilized versus uncivilized was ubiquitous in a host of articles dealing with a variety of topics. Discussing the Russo-Japanese War, Carlo Tresca held France up as the “pioneering republic of civility.” Il Proletario, April 16, 1905.

12. Filippo Manetta, La razza negra nel suo stato selvaggio in Africa e nella sua duplice condizione di emancipata e di schiava in America (Turin: Tipografia Del Commercio, 1864), 44.

13. Giuseppe Giacosa, Impressioni d’America (Milan: Tipografia Editrice L. F. Cogliati, 1898), 153.

14. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, July 29, 1899.

15. Ibid., March 16, 1891.

16. Ibid., August 5, 1899.

17. La Questione Sociale, October 27, 1906.

18. In addition to outright comparisons associating “savage” Africans with southern Italians, for example, there was also a tendency to use Africans metaphorically to illuminate a point. For instance, in an article criticizing the prominenti-owned Italian language press in New York, Il Proletario maintained that these newspapers were vehicles for exploitation and prostitution and exclaimed in disgust that prominenti newspapers were full of such grotesque nonsense that “not even a Zulu would accept it.” Il Proletario, October 28, 1916.

19. La Questione Sociale, November 26, 1904. After the fatal shooting of Giovanni Bazzani, a young Italian boy who mistakenly trespassed onto a farm in Clinton, Indiana, La Questione Sociale used this “unpardonable crime” to outline the evils of private property in the United States. In its outrage, La Questione Sociale complained, “Is this how American farmers defend their property? These crimes are so atrocious that they would horrify and disgust even savage beasts from central Africa.”

20. See Il Proletario, June 2, 1911. Common references to Africa as “savage” were present in Il Proletario. In one article students on horseback from Harvard were criticized for creating a slight melee after an altercation occurred between a prostitute and the police. Il Proletario stated that the students resembled the “conquistadors of savage Africa.” Il Proletario, March 1, 1912.

21. Ibid., July 19, 1902.

22. Ibid., July 21, 1900. Mainstream newspapers used similar images of “barefoot” natives to convey the primitiveness of Africans. See Eco d’Italia, March 26, 1896; L’Araldo Italiano, March 20, 1896.

23. Il Proletario, July 21, 1900.

24. See La Questione Sociale, July 25, 1903; also see similar comments regarding the medieval aspects of the Feast of La Madonna del Carmine from Paterson, New Jersey—a vibrant anarchist Italian colony. La Questione Sociale, July 27, 1907.

25. Ibid., September 30, 1905.

26. Il Proletario, July 21, 1900.

27. Ibid., September 4, 1915. In 1915, Il Proletario used the same comparison to condemn Americans for their violent behavior toward African Americans. “This attack was in defense of property ownership and the victims were Black, however, the ‘civil’ people of society will say it was perpetrated ‘without racism, without prejudice and was inspired by the highest sense of humanitarianism. If this is civility I would prefer to associate myself with the Hottentots of the Congo.”

28. For a more thorough discussion of the European quest for colonies in Africa in the late nineteenth century, see Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa: White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912 (New York: Avon Books, 1991).

29. Martin Clark, Modern Italy, 1871–1982 (New York: Longman, 1984), 47.

30. Christopher Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism, 1870–1925 (London: Methuen, 1967), 118.

31. For a fuller discussion of Italian colonialism in Africa in the late nineteenth century, see Clark, Modern Italy, 46–48, 99–101; Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism, 98–182.

32. Umberto Levra, Il colpo di stato della borghesia: La crisi politica di fine secolo in Italia, 1896–1900 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1975), 7–13.

33. Pamphlet, “Storia della Vittoria Italiana in Africa e disfatta di Ras Mangascia” (Florence: Tipografia Adriano Salani, Viale Militare, 1910). The illustration depicted an African man dressed in a tunic, with braided hair held in place by metal rods, and protruding teeth.

34. According to Stefano Luconi, “Stimulating a sense of nationalistic identity out of a military defeat … was rather difficult.” However, despite the “shame” of losing to Menelik’s indigenous forces, the emergence of a nascent national identity cannot be underestimated, or dismissed, predicated solely on the eventual negative outcome (from the Italian perspective). Indeed, the prevalence of rhetoric seeking to avenge the loss at Adua during the Libyan campaign was proof of the effects that campaign had on identity formation in Italian immigrant communities. See Stefano Luconi, “The Impact of Italy’s Twentieth-Century Wars on Italian Americans’ Ethnic Identity,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 13 (2007): 465–491.

35. Leaflet, Connazionali, January 21, 1896, ASMAE, Ambasciata di Washington, busta 107, fascicolo 14, “Mobilitazione di italiani negli S.U. per la campagna d’Africa, 1896.”

36. Francesco Marrocco to Consul General, New York, April 17, 1896, Carlo Ginocchio to Italian Ambassador in Washington, DC, April 2, 1896, ASMAE, Ambasciata di Washington, busta 107, fascicolo 14, “Mobilitazione di italiani negli S.U. per la campagna d’Africa, 1896.”

37. Consul General of New York, April 17, 1896, G. B. Rosasco to Italian Ambassador in Washington, DC, ASMAE, Ambasciata di Washington, busta 107, fascicolo 14, “Mobilitazione di italiani negli S.U. per la campagna d’Africa, 1896.”

38. C. Pierorazio, Chicago, IL, to Italian Ambassador, Washington, DC, ASMAE, Ambasciata di Washington, busta 107, fascicolo 14, “Mobilitazione di italiani negli S.U. per la campagna d’Africa, 1896.”

39. Italian Consul, Denver, CO, to Italian Ambassador, Washington, DC, February 14, 1896, ASMAE, Ambasciata di Washington, busta 107, fascicolo 14, “Mobilitazione di italiani negli S.U. per la campagna d’Africa, 1896.”

40. Archangelo Pagani, Director of Agency for the Employment of Both Sexes in New York City, to Italian Ambassador, Washington, DC, ASMAE, Ambasciata di Washington, busta 107, fascicolo 14, “Mobilitazione di italiani negli S.U. per la campagna d’Africa, 1896.”

41. Professor V. A. Scaletta, Montreal, Canada, to Italian Ambassador, Washington, DC, ASMAE, Ambasciata di Washington, busta 107, fascicolo 14, “Mobilitazione di italiani negli S.U. per la campagna d’Africa, 1896.”

42. L’Araldo Italiano, March 11, 1896; Il Progresso Italo-Americano, March 19, 1896; March 22, 1896.

43. L’Eco d’Italia, March 5, 1896.

44. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, June 17, 1891.

45. L’Eco d’Italia, March 26, 1896; L’Araldo Italiano, March 20, 1896.

46. L’Eco d’Italia, April 9, 1896.

47. Ibid., April 30, 1896.

48. In many articles the Italian word tenebrosa was attached to descriptions of Africa. Similar to the mainstream Italian language press, particularly Il Progresso Italo-Americano, the word, meaning “dark” or “murky,” was often used as an adjective to describe the “primitive” African continent. See Il Proletario, March 24, 1917.

49. Il Proletario, January 5, 1912. For an excellent discussion of Italian American radicals and the Italian invasion of Libya, see chap. 2, “A Transnational Syndicalist Identity,” in Michael Miller Topp, Those without Country: The Political Culture of Italian American Syndicalists (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), especially 62–81.

50. With a population of only 1,776 in 1910, Africo gained prominence as the site for the story of Saint Leo, popularly known as Beato Leone, a revered figure who had lived during the fifth century. Upon Leone’s death, a struggle ensued between the people of Africo and Bova, where Leone had been born, over where Leone’s body would ultimately rest. The townspeople of Bova eventually succeeded in keeping the body but offered one of Leone’s fingers to the people of Africo. Thereafter, the residents of Africo observed every May 12 as a solemn feast day when the sick and indigent would pilgrimage to the river LaVerde, where it was believed Beato Leone bathed, and pass under the box that contained Saint Leo’s finger. See Antonio Melis and Rosario Nardi, eds., Dizionario geografico dei comuni e delle frazioni dei comuni (Rome: Società Tipografico-Editrice Romana, 1910), 3; see also Luigi Fossati, ed., Dizionario grafico-itinerario (Milan: Bietti Editori, 1902); Giulio Palange, La Regina dai Tre Seni: Guida alla Calabria magica e leggendaria (Soveria Manelli, Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 1994), 9.

51. Il Proletario, April 19, 1912.

52. Ibid.

53. Ibid.

54. Ibid. Michael Topp examined the relationship between the leaders of the Italian Socialist Federation and the wider Italian immigrant community and revealed that Il Proletario, the ISF’s main organ, frequently carried disparaging remarks about southern Italians, using the article on Africo as one example. According to the author, “The fact that articles portraying Southern Italians as backward and even barbaric appeared in Il Proletario, whether they were representative of views of most ISF members or not, made it clear that the syndicalists in the ISF were themselves somewhat alienated, if not from the land where they were born, then from the people they were seeking to organize.” It appears, however, that the racial constructs of radical Italian leaders—both northern and southern Italian—reflected these views more widely than previously thought. See Topp, Those without Country, 69–74.

55. Il Proletario, January 5, 1912.

56. Bolletino della Sera, September 28, 1911; September 30, 1911.

57. L’Araldo Italiano, September 29, 1911. L’Araldo retold the apocryphal conversation between an Arab and an Italian in Tripoli: “It’s already known, as one Arab said to an Italian, we are like a family without a father.”

58. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, October 15, 1911.

59. Bolletino della Sera, October 6, 1911.

60. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, October 15, 1911; October 8, 1911; Bolletino della Sera, October 7, 1911. L’Araldo Italiano stated, “The European colony of Libya is like a loose flap of the mother country on the black continent.” L’Araldo Italiano, October 9, 1911.

61. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, October 15, 1911.

62. Ibid., September 29, 1911.

63. Bolletino della Sera, October 7, 1911.

64. See examples in Il Progresso Italo-Americano, October, 2, 1911; October 17, 1911; L’Araldo Italiano, October 1, 1911.

65. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, October 2, 1911

66. See ibid., October 2, 1911; October 7, 1911; October 11, 1911. Both L’Araldo Italiano and Bolletino della Sera prominently noted, as if to suggest the imprimatur of legitimacy, that the New York Evening Journal was part of William Randolph Hearst’s publishing empire. See Bolletino della Sera, October 6, 1911; L’Araldo Italiano, October 6, 1911; quotation is from L’Araldo Italiano, October 1, 1911.

67. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, October 17, 1911.

68. L’Araldo Italiano, October 1, 1911.

69. Il Telegrafo, March 14, 1912.

70. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, December 17, 1911.

71. L’Araldo Italiano, November 22, 1911.

72. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, September 30, 1911.

73. L’Araldo Italiano, September 30, 1911; also see L’Araldo Italiano, September 29, 1911; Il Telegrafo, October 18, 1911; October 23, 1911.

74. L’Araldo Italiano, November 22, 1911; Il Progresso Italo-Americano, September 30, 1911.

75. Bolletino della Sera, October 6, 1911.

76. L’Araldo Italiano, November 22, 1911.

77. Ibid., September 30, 1911.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

1. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, June 7, 1891.

2. See Alan Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), xxiii.

3. In 1906, Il Progresso reported on a band of 700 Indians in Utah and Wyoming who had depleted the supply of wild animals and had turned their attention to more domesticated animals, such as cattle. This had created concern among local cattle raisers, who feared the killing of their livestock. Symbolically, this story contextualized the position that Native Americans were seen to occupy. Perceived to belong in the “wild” hunting for wild animals, it was only when pelle rosse crossed the boundary into the white, European sphere of “civilization” that they caused concern. The boundaries of “civilization” and “savagery” were clearly delineated. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 10, 1906.

4. Radical newspapers such as Il Proletario often worked within a similar framework whereby Native peoples served a useful and familiar role in establishing barbarism and savagery. This was the case in socialist diatribes against capitalism and colonialism, as well as against those who profited from these systems of exploitation, such as Italian immigrant prominenti. Il Proletario, January 5, 1912.

5. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, April 10, 1891.

6. Ibid., March 18, 1891.

7. Cristofero Colombo, March 15, 1891.

8. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 3, 1891. Aside from Il Progresso Italo-Americano, other New York Italian American newspapers such as L’Eco d’Italia also appropriated pelle rosse to signify “savage.” Given the facile way in which it was used, it appears that these sentiments were widespread within the Italian American community. For more examples of the comparison of lynch mob participants to “redskins,” see, Eco d’Italia, March 17, 1891; Il Progresso Italo-Americano, March 16, 1891; July 16, 1901.

9. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 2, 1910.

10. Ibid., February 26, 1891.

11. Ibid., June 7, 1891.

12. See Paul Reddin, Wild West Shows (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 60–85; quotation on 76.

13. Marcello Venturoli, La Patria di marmo: Tutta la storia del Vittoriano, il monumento piu’ discusso dell’eta’ umbertina, tra arte, spettacoli, invenzioni, scandali e duelli (Rome: Newton Compton editori, 1995), 130–133.

14. See ibid., 131.

15. See Il Progresso Italo-Americano, February 22, 1890; February 26, 1890; March 5, 1890; March 8, 1890; March 10, 1890; March 11, 1890; April 5, 1890; L’Eco d’Italia, April 19, 1890.

16. See Venturoli, La Patria di marmo, 131.

17. See, for example, Il Progresso Italo-Americano, March 5, 1890.

18. Il Proletario, December 31, 1909.

19. See Il Progresso Italo-Americano, January 14, 1891; January 24, 1891.

20. Cristoforo Colombo, January 7, 1891.

21. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, January 1, 1891.

22. Ibid., January 14, 1891.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid., December 30, 1906.

25. Ibid., November 1, 1906.

26. Ibid., June 7, 1891.

27. Alberto Pecorini, Gli Americani nella vita moderna osservati da un italiano (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1909), 296–297.

28. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, January 24, 1891.

29. Ibid., November 14, 1914.

30. There is little doubt that the Italian language press worked within a familiar language of race and color when discussing the Japanese and Chinese. Very similar to its usage of pelle rosse to differentiate Native Americans, the press clearly marked Chinese and Japanese peoples as nonwhite within the pages of its newspapers. Phrases such as “the yellow Japanese, and also the Chinese” were often simply conflated as la razza gialla, or “the yellow race,” in both the mainstream and the radical press. For example, see La Luce, May 28, 1904; Il Progresso Italo-Americano, July 9, 1905; February 16, 1909; June 22, 1909; Il Proletario, December 13, 1913; February 21, 1914. Articles discussing prostitution and the forced importation of women under the banner of the “yellow” and “white” slave trade provide additional, illuminating examples of the importance of color as a defining difference among races. Headlines referring to la tratta delle schiave gialle, or the “yellow slave trade,” and “yellow slaves in California” did not differentiate between Chinese and Japanese, who were interchangeably grouped into the same racial category according to skin color. Conversely, headlines describing white girls sold into sexual slavery referred to la tratta delle bianche, or “the white slave trade.” Often, the term “white” simply became interchangeable with “American,” as articles containing the headline “White Slave Trade” would describe “fifty American girls” held in China. For “yellow slave trade,” see Il Progresso Italo-Americano, October 20, 1905; August 2, 1907. For “white slave trade,” see Il Progresso Italo-Americano, October 24, 1905. See “Il Piu’ Grande Paese,” Il Proletario, February 21, 1914; “Il Congresso dell’ A.F. of L: I Socialisti—La razza gialla,” Il Proletario, December 6, 1913; “Gli Schiavi Bianchi diretti alle Hawaii si Ribellano,” Il Proletario, February 2, 1901.

31. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, July 9, 1905.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid., December 16, 1905.

34. La Luce, March 12, 1904.

35. L’Araldo Italiano, July 9, 1905.

36. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, July 9, 1905.

37. Il Proletario, November 8, 1911.

38. Ibid., June 4, 1905.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid.

41. See Donna Gabaccia, “The ‘Yellow Peril’ and the ‘Chinese of Europe’: Global Perspectives on Race and Labor, 1815–1930,” in Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, eds., Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (Berne: Peter Lang, 1997), 195–196; for the Detroit quote, see David R. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 46; Marco D’Eramo, The Pig and the Skyscraper: Chicago: A History of Our Future, trans. Graeme Thomson (London: Verso, 2002), 158–159.

42. Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 19.

43. During the decade of the 1850s, a total of 41,397 Chinese immigrants arrived, the majority of whom settled in California. In the 1870s, this number would increase to 123,201. Leonard Dinnerstein and David M. Reimers, Ethnic Americans: A History of Immigration and Assimilation (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975), 162–163.

44. Michael Lemay and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds., U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), xxxii–xxxiii.

45. See U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division, Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-Born Population of the United States: 1850–1990, table 4, “Region or Country or Area of Birth of the Foreign-Born Population” (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1990).

46. Il Proletario, November 23, 1901.

47. Ibid., April 12, 1902.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid., May 17, 1913; May 31, 1913.

50. Ibid., May 17, 1913.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid.

53. Ibid., May 31, 1913.

54. New York Times, June 19, 1909.

55. Ibid.

56. Much like the English language press in New York City, the Italian language press noticed the “curious” world of the quartiere cinese (Chinese quarter) well before the Sigel murder and had published stories pertaining to other delitti e misteri (crimes and mysteries) occurring in that part of the city. See front-page article, with photographs, titled “La delinquenza nel quartiere cinese” (The delinquency of the Chinese quarter), in L’Araldo Italiano, August 27, 1905. Regarding New York City’s English language press, see Mary Ting Yi Lui, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 2. Given the circumstances surrounding the murder of a “respectable” white woman by a Chinese man, however, newspapers such as Il Progresso Italo-Americano and Il Telegrafo offered coverage with front-page headlines and photographs that would continue for months after the initial story broke. In doing so, the Italian language mainstream press reinforced existing stereotypes that viewed Chinatown as a racialized space associated with crime and Chinese men, and therefore off limits to any white women deemed respectable. See Il Telegrafo, June 22, 1909; June 23, 1905; June 24, 1905; June 25, 1905; July 3, 1909; July 6, 1909; July 9, 1909. On the Sigel murder, see Lui, Chinatown Trunk Mystery.

57. According to Il Progresso, the first of these marriages had occurred in Brooklyn two decades earlier in 1889 and caused a public sensation. By 1903, however, Chinese men marrying white, mostly working-class, women had become a more frequent occurrence. See Il Progresso Italo-Americano, June 22, 1909. Given the absence of antimiscegenation laws in New York, it is unsurprising, as Mary Lui demonstrates, that interracial marriages had become more common in New York City than in other parts of the country bound by legal barriers to marriage. Due to the relatively small number of Chinese women in the United States, within the Chinese immigrant community intermarriage became vital to establishing families. According to Lui, in 1900, 60 percent of all marriages in New York City’s Chinatown were between Chinese men and white women. See Lui, Chinatown Trunk Mystery, 10–11, 143–174.

58. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, June 22, 1909.

59. Ibid., May 17, 1913.

60. Ibid., April 5, 1908.

61. Ibid., February 16, 1909.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid.

64. Bolletino della Sera ran almost daily coverage of the debate over the Anti-Alien Land Bill. See, for example, April 20–24, 1913; April 26, 1913; April 29–30, 1913; May 1, 1913; May 5, 1913; May 9, 1913; May 13, 1913; May 15, 1913; May 19, 1913.

65. Ibid., April 20, 1913.

66. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, April 21, 1913.

67. Bolletino della Sera, May 19, 1913.

68. Ibid., April 22, 1913. Both Caminetti’s father and mother had been born in Italy (Calabria and Genoa, respectively), and he had served in the California Senate since 1907, as well as serving as U.S. commissioner of immigration from 1913 to 1921. See http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/collections/italianamericans/timeline_immigration.pdf.

69. New York Times, February 14, 1914.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

1. New York Times, March 15, 1891.

2. Ibid., March 29, 1891.

3. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, March 28, 1891.

4. The idea of understanding whiteness in relation to who was considered nonwhite corresponds to Ian Haney López’s work on the legal construction of race and whiteness. Analyzing the racial prerequisite cases to naturalization during the period 1870 through 1952, Haney López argues that “the established not so much the parameters of Whiteness as the non-Whiteness of Chinese, South Asians, and so on.” See Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: NYU Press, 1996), 27.

5. George E. Cunningham, “The Italian: A Hindrance to White Solidarity, 1890–1898,” Journal of Negro History 50 (June 1965): 34.

6. Jean Ann Scarpaci, Italian Immigrants in Louisiana’s Sugar Parishes: Recruitment, Labor Conditions, and Community Relations, 1880–1910 (New York: Arno Press, 1980), 222.

7. New York Times, November 8, 1906.

8. Upon migrating to southern states, Italian immigrants also labored in the lumber industry, railroad industry, and truck farming. See Scarpaci, Italian Immigrants in Louisiana’s Sugar Parishes, 5. On the efforts to promote immigration, see Rowland T. Berthoff, “Southern Attitudes toward Immigration, 1865–1914,” Journal of Southern History 17 (1951): 328–360; Bert James Loewenberg, “Efforts of the South to Encourage Immigration, 1865–1900,” South Atlantic Quarterly 33 (1934): 363–385; Henry Marshall Booker, “Efforts of the South to Attract Immigrants, 1860–1900” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1965); Alfred Holt Stone, “The Italian Cotton Grower: The Negro’s Problem,” South Atlantic Quarterly 4 (1905): 42–47; Emily Fogg Meade, “Italian Immigration into the South,” South Atlantic Quarterly 4 (1905): 217–223; Lee J. Langley, “Italians in the Cotton Fields,” Southern Farm Magazine 12 (1904), 8–9.

9. New York Age, February 21, 1891; May 16, 1891.

10. Ibid., July 12, 1906.

11. Ibid., October 10, 1907.

12. Detroit Plaindealer, April 24, 1891.

13. New York Age, May 16, 1891.

14. Booker T. Washington, letter to Anna Norwood Hallowell Davis, March 14, 1910, in Louis R. Harlan and Raymond W. Smock, eds., The Booker T. Washington Papers, vol. 10, 1909–1911 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 278.

15. Scarpaci stated, “Direct economic competition for jobs obviously provoked hostility against Italians in Louisiana.” Further, she argued that “much of the hostility directed against Italians in a period of crime, as had been the case in the Hahnville and Tallulah episodes, appeared to be connected with economic competition.” Scarpaci, Italian Immigrants in Louisiana’s Sugar Parishes, 253–255. Richard Gambino also emphasizes economic factors that led to the lynching of eleven Italians in New Orleans in 1891 in Vendetta: A True Story of the Worst Lynching in America, the Mass Murder of Italian-Americans in New Orleans in 1891, the Vicious Motivations Behind It, and the Tragic Repercussions That Linger to This Day (New York: Doubleday, 1977).

16. New York Sun, August 4, 1899.

17. Florence Dymond, box 453, folder 10 titled “Grinding,” Florence Dymond Collection, Howard Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA.

18. Cunningham, “The Italian,” 32.

19. Scarpaci, Italian Immigrants in Louisiana’s Sugar Parishes, 211–212.

20. Ibid., 150.

21. Quoted from ibid., 254.

22. New York Age, June 15, 1905.

23. Colin A. Palmer, Passageways: An Interpretive History of Black America, 1863–1965, vol. 2 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), 109–110.

24. Speranza wrote a letter to the New York Times in 1904 claiming that Italians did not receive equal justice guaranteed under the Constitution. Acknowledging the existence of Italian criminals, Speranza concluded, “It cannot be denied that there exists a popular prejudice against Italians as ‘men of passion’ prone to use the knife.” New York Times, August 28, 1904.

25. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, December 26, 1905; see also “L’antagonismo di razza in America,” Il Progresso Italo-Americano, October 12, 1906.

26. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 11, 1896.

27. Ibid., March 22, 1891.

28. Quoted in Il Progresso Italo-Americano, March 29, 1891.

29. Leavenworth Advocate, May 9, 1891; Richmond Planet, August 29, 1896.

30. New York Age, March 21, 1891.

31. Richmond Planet, July 29, 1899.

32. Detroit Plaindealer, March 20, 1891.

33. For reporting of African American lynching, see “L’americana,” La Questione Sociale, August 2, 1902; “Civiltà americana,” La Questione Sociale, March 23, 1907.

34. See “Contro il Linciaggio,” Il Proletario, August 12, 1899.

35. Il Proletario, June 4, 1909.

36. “I Linciaggi,” Il Proletario, May 5, 1900. There are many other examples in which Italian American socialists reduced racial attacks such as lynching to acts of class warfare. After the brutal lynching of a black man in Colorado in 1900, a disgusted Il Proletario described how the townspeople rejoiced as the young black man was burned at the stake for allegedly violating a white girl. However, in its commentary, rather than castigate a racial caste system that had allowed this type of behavior, Il Proletario chose to direct its ire at churches and priests. See “La Settimana-Un linciaggio,” Il Proletario, November 24, 1900.

37. Il Proletario, September 20, 1900.

38. “Fatti e opinioni: Un Prete e la Schiavitu,’” La Questione Sociale, June 6, 1900.

39. “La Buona Propaganda: Avanti, Schiavi,” Il Proletario, July 25, 1914.

40. Ibid.

41. “Verso La Schiavitu’?,” Il Proletario, April 1, 1906.

42. “Italiani derubati a Springfield Mass.,” Il Proletario, January 13, 1900.

43. See “L’avvenimento di New Orleans,” Il Proletario, August 4, 1900. For some examples of how racial distinctions were made in this paper, see “La Vera Civilta,’” Il Proletario, January 11, 1902; “Decota, W. Va: Poeveri lavoratori!,” Il Proletario, June 26, 1904; “La liberta’ del lavoro,” Il Proletario, June 26, 1904.

44. “La Schiavitu’ in America,” Il Proletario, May 5, 1900.

45. Arkansas Gazette, July 13, 1901.

46. L’Araldo Italiano, August 2, 1901; July 14, 1901. In these articles, Paris echoed the general stereotype that Italians were prone to violence.

47. “I Linciaggi,” Il Proletario, May 5, 1900.

48. G. DeMarco, “La Psicologia del Linciaggio,” L’Araldo Italiano, July 25, 1901.

49. Nathaniel S. Shaler, The Autobiography of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), 27.

50. L’Araldo Italiano, July 25, 1901.

51. Ibid.

52. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, July 16, 1901.

53. Papers such as Bolletino della Sera and L’Araldo Italiano made specific efforts to seek approval from American newspapers such as the New York Times, often at the expense of Barsotti’s willingness to endlessly promote italianita. One event occurred in 1910. At the heart of the matter was the promotion of a health clinic in Harlem that had been reportedly underpromoted by the community, especially the Italian language press. The Times commended newspapers such as L’Araldo Italiano and Bolletino della Sera for quickly spreading the word of the clinic for the benefit of their Italian countrymen. The Times article reprinted in English a pointed critique of Barsotti published in Bolletino. Although it did not mention Barsotti by name, it was clear from the substance of Bolletino’s critique that the owner of Il Progresso was the intended target. “The reproaches of the American journal are for the most part just, but they do not apply to us…. It is true that certain Italian papers which pretend to represent the majority put forth their activities and forces for the erection of monuments…. We are and always shall be against such charlatanism…. Moreover, we have always fought rather for the erection of schools and educational institutions than monuments, showing for a long time, as the Times has done today, that Italian youths should be educated exclusively by American institutions.” See New York Times, September 19, 1910. For some other representative examples of Italian newspaper disputes crossing over into the English language press, see “Has Made Himself Disliked,” New York Times, February 24, 1888, 2; “Denounced by His Countrymen: Italians Object to Carlo Barsotti as Their Representative,” New York Times, May 24, 1891; “Italian Editor Here Wins: Has Journalist Convicted of Libel—Another Defendant Freed,” New York Times, December 23, 1912.

54. Shaler’s assessment in his autobiography that southern Italians carried the “mark of African blood” and “no trace of Greek” only served to complicate Paris’s notion, based on Shaler’s work, of a facile transformation from Italian to American. See Shaler, Autobiography of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, 321.

55. L’Araldo Italiano, July 25, 1901.

56. “Che razza di unioni,” Il Proletario, September 13, 1902.

57. La Fiaccola, July 9, 1910.

58. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, March 16, 1891.

59. For example, L’Araldo Italiano, July 26, 1899; July 27, 1899; July 25, 1901; August 3, 1901; Cristofero Colombo, June 21, 1892; August 3, 1893; Il Progresso Italo-Americano, June 21, 1892; August 27, 1901. Headlines quoted in L’Araldo Italiano, August 3, 1901; Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 21, 1901; June 21, 1892; August 27, 1901; December 9, 1906; La Luce (Utica, NY), June 27, 1908. In research conducted around the dates of Italian American lynchings, these were just a portion of articles located and do not represent the full range of coverage pertaining to African American lynching from the period 1890 through 1915.

60. “Tumulti a Brooklyn,” Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 24, 1900; “Odio di Razza,” Il Progresso Italo-Americano, July 11, 1905; “Un Altra Rissa Fra Neri e Bianchi,” Il Progresso Italo-Americano, July 19, 1905. Il Progresso commented, “A real battle began in that area due to the pervading race hatred that exists there.” See “Volevano linciare una negra,” Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 23, 1906. The article recounted the attempted lynching of a black woman in Brooklyn, New York, by an angry mob.

61. “La Lotta di razza in New York-Nuovi disordini,” Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 18, 1900.

62. Ibid.

63. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 18, 1900 (italics mine).

64. La Questione Sociale, October 26, 1901.

65. Ibid., December 26, 1903.

66. Il Proletario, February 16, 1899.

67. In February 1904, the anarchist La Questione Sociale noted that Americans were hypocritical to commemorate Lincoln if the values of capitalist America opposed what Lincoln stood for. See La Questione Sociale, February 20,1904. For other articles dealing with the martyred Lincoln, see Il Proletario, July 11, 1914; July 17, 1915.

68. “Civiltà americana,” La Questione Sociale, November 9, 1901. See also “Bianchi e neri,” Il Proletario, November 16, 1901.

69. “Jim Crow,” Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 19, 1905.

70. Ibid.

71. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, December 9, 1906.

72. Ibid. Two months later the New York Times reported on the speech given by W. E. B. DuBois at Carnegie Hall in which he echoed these sentiments: “As a subtle and far-reaching blend of blood, you have in many great white men this negro element coming in to color and make wonderful the genius which they had—a fact which was as true of Robert Browning and Alexander Hamilton as it was of Lew Wallace and a great many other Americans who may wish to have it forgotten.” New York Times, February 18, 1907.

73. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, December 9, 1906.

74. Ibid.

75. Gail Bederman demonstrates that by the 1890s the dominant version of civilization interwove particular ideas about race and gender. According to Bederman, “The discourse of civilization linked both male dominance and white supremacy to a Darwinist version of Protestant millennialism.” See Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 25.

76. “Tentativi di Linciaggio in Brooklyn,” Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 6, 1907; “Volevano Linciarlo,” Il Progresso Italo-Americano, September 15, 1906. “The Menace of Lynching,” L’Araldo Italiano, July 25, 1901; “Da Akron, Ohio: Tentativo di linciaggio contro un italiano,” Il Progresso Italo-Americano, February 7, 1911. These examples are but a small sample of articles detailing violence toward Italian immigrants during this time.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

1. “Gli italiani e la razza bianca,” Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 21, 1909.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, July 14, 1914.

5. “Patriottismo barbaro,” Il Proletario, April 8, 1916.

6. See Matthew Pratt Guterl, The Color of Race in America, 1900–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 6; on northward African American migration and increasing militancy, see James Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America (New York: Vintage, 1992); Colin Palmer, Passageways: An Interpretive History of Black America, vol. 2, 1863–1965 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), see chap. 6, “The Generation of 1917,” 106–129.

7. Although I have engaged the most influential socialist and anarchist press available in the New York area, with a few exceptions what was left of the radical press was fragmentary. An examination of New York radical papers such as La Giustizia (the newspaper of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union), Il Lavoro (the union newspaper of the American Clothing Makers of America, 1915–1932), and Lotta di Classe (the newspaper of the Shirt and Cloak Makers Union, 1912–1917) unearthed no real discussion of race or color. In addition, during the war period, major radical newspapers such as Il Proletario focused almost exclusively on issues related to interventionist and anti-interventionist positions. After April 1917 and American involvement in the war, radical papers suffered extreme suppression and harassment, resulting in their virtual elimination in the short term. Therefore, this chapter’s focus on the mainstream press has as much to do with its active role in constructing identity as with its availability and popularity.

8. A common example illustrating this comes from the socialist Il Proletario. Protesting against the unlawful imprisonment of its political allies in Italy, the newspaper wondered how this could occur in the Italy of 1899: “Italy was barbarian, but now we do not occupy the last rung in the ladder of civilized nations.” Il Proletario, May 10, 1899.

9. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, November 8, 1906.

10. La Luce, December 14, 1907.

11. L’Avvenire (Utica, NY), January 24, 1903.

12. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, March 24, 1891.

13. Cristofero Colombo, March 22, 1891.

14. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 10, 1899 (italics mine).

15. On the question of American civilization, see travelers’ accounts such as that of Giuseppe Giacosa. Notwithstanding all the vituperative attacks in the press, some Italians continued to endorse America’s self-proclaimed role as a “civilizing nation.” Giacosa, a well-known playwright from northern Italy who toured the United States in the 1890s, declared that “anyone who has lived here for any length of time must readily acknowledge that the [American] people behave in a more civilized and dignified manner than ours.” Giuseppe Giacosa, Impressioni d’America (Milan: Tipografia Editrice L. F. Cogliati, 1898), 153.

16. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, July 29, 1899.

17. Ibid., March 16, 1891.

18. Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Rome, to Ambassador, Washington, DC, April 7, 1900, “Linciaggio di Tallulah: bills Davis e Hitt: 1900–1901,” ASMAE, Ambasciata di Washington, busta 103, p. 8, n. 1866.

19. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, March 29, 1891.

20. Desmond King, Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 48.

21. 1882 Immigration Act, chap. 376, 22 Stat. 214, 47th Cong., 1st sess., August 3, 1882.

22. Congress first passed an immigration bill with a literacy test provision in 1896, but President Grover Cleveland vetoed the bill. Congress again passed a literacy test provision in 1909 and 1913 and President Taft vetoed both. In 1915 and 1917, Congress passed a literacy test but had to override President Wilson’s veto in 1917 for the bill to become law. Michael Lemay and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds., U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), esp. 41–48.

23. L’Avvenire, June 21, 1902; January 31, 1903.

24. La Luce, January 1, 1913.

25. Il Cittadino, January 14, 1915

26. Ibid., April 15, 1915.

27. La Luce, February 8, 1913.

28. Il Cittadino, July 20, 1916; May 31, 1917.

29. Ibid., October 12, 1916.

30. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, May 15, 1918.

31. Ibid., May 23, 1918.

32. Ibid., May 25, 1918.

33. Il Cittadino, May 31, 1917.

34. Ibid., December 6, 1917. See Christopher Sterba, Good Americans: Italian and Jewish Immigrants during the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

35. See Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 25.

36. Il Cittadino, February 10, 1916.

37. Ibid.

38. King, Making Americans, 20.

39. Il Cittadino, July 6, 1916.

40. Ibid., June 8, 1916.

41. The title did change but usually maintained a similar composition, for example, The Sounds of Gianduiotto, The Adventures of Gianduiotto, and The Curious Sounds of Gianduiotto. Other titles included The Sounds of Little Chocolate and The Expected Good Fortune of Gianduiotto. See Il Giornale Italiano, March 7, 1915; March 21, 1915; April 4, 1915; April 18, 1915; April 25, 1915; June 13, 1915.

42. Ibid., April 25, 1915.

43. Ibid., June 13, 1915.

44. In one story, two white men, astonished by Gianduiotto’s musical talent, come to his rescue and hire him. As the men take the boy away on a flatbed truck, he is chased by the Italian boys, who ask for remuneration for creating this “opportunity” for him. Gianduiotto tells them, “Take my music as payment” as he continues to play the piano as the truck pulls away. Ibid.

45. For example, in various episodes Gianduiotto is alternately hired to perform in drag as Fatima the Egyptian dancer or as a human target in a carnival game. Ibid., March 21, 1915; April 4, 1915.

46. Ibid., March 7, 1915.

47. Ibid., March 21, 1915.

48. Jennifer Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 246.

49. Il Cittadino, May 31, 1917.

50. Ibid., June 26, 1919.

51. Orlando Patterson, The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s Racial Crisis (Washington, DC: Civitas/Counterpoint, 1997), 69.

52. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, June 12, 1915.

53. Il Cittadino, February 21, 1918.

54. See, for example, Il Progresso Italo-Americano, November 18, 1918; June 29, 1919; September 1, 1919. For an example of critical commentary, see Il Progresso Italo-Americano, August 18, 1900.

55. Palmer, Passageways, 118–121.

56. Il Progresso Italo-Americano, May 30, 1917.

57. Ibid., May 31, 1917. Regarding the East St. Louis race riot, see also Il Progresso Italo-Americano, July 4, 1917; July 7, 1917. For more coverage of racial disorders in Chester, Pennsylvania, see Il Progresso Italo-Americano, July 29, 1917; July 31, 1917.

58. Palmer, Passageways, 119; quoted from Elliot Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, July 2, 1917 (Urbana: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964), 28.

59. For the Washington, DC, riot, see Il Progresso Italo-Americano, July 21, 1919; July 23, 1919; July 24, 1919; July 26, 1919; July 29,1919. For the Chicago race riot, see Il Progresso Italo-Americano, July 29, 1919; July 30, 1919; July 31, 1919; August 1, 1919; August 2, 1919; August 8, 1919.

60. Ibid., July 23, 1919

61. Ibid.

62. Toni Morrison, “On the Backs of Blacks,” Time, special issue, November 18, 1993, vol. 142, no. 21, 57.

NOTES TO THE EPILOGUE

1. Philip V. Cannistraro, “Generoso Pope and the Rise of Italian American Politics, 1925–1936,” in Lydio F. Tomasi, ed., Italian Americans: New Perspectives in Italian Immigration and Ethnicity (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1985), 264–288.

2. Historian Rudolph Vecoli takes a somewhat different approach: “Rather than the Americanization of the Little Italies during the interwar years, it would then be more accurate to speak of their Fascistization.” See Vecoli, “The Making and Un-making of the Italian American Working Class,” in Philip V. Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer, eds., The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003). For an opposing view, see Madeline J. Goldman, “The Evolution of Ethnicity: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in the Italian American Community, 1914–1945” (PhD diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 1993. Although Fascism’s effect on Italian American communities, vis-à-vis the growth of an Italian nationalism intertwined with racism, was undeniable, in many ways these trends were intimately enmeshed with becoming American. The interpretation of Mussolini’s nationalist policies must be examined through an American context where the pressures of assimilation and Americanization were constantly at work.

3. On Italian Fascism and its effect on Italian America communities, see John Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972); Philip V. Cannistraro, Blackshirts in Little Italy: Italian Americans and Fascism, 1921–1929 (New York: Bordhigera, 1999); Stefano Luconi, La “diplomazia parallela”: Il regime fascista e la mobilitazione politica (Milan: Angeli, 2000).

4. For the reaction of the Italian American community to the African American uprisings over the Ethiopian invasion, see Nadia Venturini, “African American Riots during World War II: Reactions in the Italian American Communist Press,” Italian American Review 6, no. 2 (Autumn/Winter 1997–1998): 80–97; Venturini, Neri e Italiani ad Harlem: Gli anni Trenta e la guerra d’Etiopia (Rome: Edizioni Lavoro, 1990); Fiorello B. Ventresco, “Italian Americans and the Ethiopian Crisis,” Italian Americana 6 (Fall/Winter 1980): 4–27. For the African American reaction to the invasion, see Joseph E. Harris, African-American Reactions to War in Ethiopia, 1936–1941 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994); William R. Scott, The Sons of Sheba’s Race: African Americans and the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935–1941 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1993). See also Thomas Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), chap. 6, “Fascism, Empire, and War.”

5. Cannistraro and Meyer, Lost World of Italian American Radicalism, 24.

6. For an overview of the impact of the war on Italian Americans, see Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta, “Italian Americans and the 1940s,” in Philip V. Cannistraro, ed., The Italians of New York: Five Centuries of Struggle and Achievement (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1999), 139–153.

7. Federal Bureau of Investigation case files for Italian enemy aliens Antonio Buonapane and Peter Cassetti reveal that even up through 1942, Italians were still not defined as “white.” FBI Case Files, July 24, 1942, August 3, 1942, Class 146 Files, Folder 146-13-2-017-36, Alien Enemy Unit, Department of Justice, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. For insight into Italian Americans’ experience as America’s enemy aliens, see Stephen Fox, The Unknown Internment: An Oral History of the Relocation of Italian Americans during World War II (Boston: Twayne, 1990); Lawrence DiStasi, ed., Una Storia Segreta: When Italian Americans Were Enemy Aliens (Berkeley: American Italian Historical Association, 1994).

8. Procaccino quoted in Peter Vellon, “Immigrant Son: Mario Procaccino and the Rise of Conservative Politics in Late 1960s New York City,” Italian American Review 7, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 1999): 130. See also Maria Lizzi, “‘My Heart Is as Black as Yours’: White Backlash, Racial Identity, and Italian American Stereotypes in New York City’s 1969 Mayoral Campaign,” Journal of American Ethnic History 27, no. 3 (2008): 43–80.

9. See Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Stefano Luconi, From Paesani to White Ethnics: The Italian Experience in Philadelphia (New York: SUNY Press, 2001); Roediger, Working toward Whiteness.

10. Helen Barolini, “Buried Alive by Language,” in Chiaroscuro: Essays of Identity (West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera, 1997); Giorgio Bertellini, “New York City and the Representation of Italian Americans in the Cinema,” in Cannistraro, Italians of New York, 115–128; John Kifner, “Bensonhurst: A Tough Code in Defense of a Closed World,” New York Times, September 1, 1989; Joseph Sciorra, “‘Italians against Racism’: The Murder of Yusef Hawkins (R.I.P.) and My March on Bensonhurst,” in Guglielmo and Salerno, Are Italians White?, 192–209.

11. New York Times, June 30, 2005; July 18, 2006.