Читать книгу A Great Conspiracy against Our Race - Peter G. Vellon - Страница 8

Introduction

In 1886, in response to a lynching in Vicksburg, Mississippi, the local Commercial Herald declared, “The lynching of those who commit rape is the best possible protection from the horrible crime.”¹ White southerners often touted the preservation of southern female virtue as the standard defense of lynching, especially because proving guilt regarding rape was deemed difficult. Moreover, even in cases where guilt was proved, lynching served as the antidote to punishments interpreted as too lenient. Extralegal violence, or “popular justice,” as many southerners described it, also served the purpose of protecting the victim and her family from further public dishonor. According to the Commercial Herald, “It is the refinement of cruelty and humiliation to put upon the witness stand the victim of the outrage, and perhaps members of the family to prove the horrible details and face the badgering of the lawyers for the defense. Any respectable family would shrink from such an ordeal, and no respectable community should exact it.” Expressing obvious approval of the Vicksburg lynching, the Commercial Herald warned, “God help the community where there are not willing arms of brave men, to protect the females. Southern sentiment has always [been] sound on this point, and the standard of virtue is higher in the Southern States than anywhere else in the world.”² Although the tone and content seemed relatively standard for incidents of mob violence in the South, the Commercial Herald wrote the article in response to the lynching not of an African American but rather of Frederico Villarosa, an Italian immigrant from Palermo, Sicily. In what was described as the first lynching to have occurred in Vicksburg in fifty years, Villarosa was arrested and eventually murdered for allegedly assaulting the young daughter of a prominent townsman.³ Investigating the murder, the Italian ambassador wrote that lynching was usually a practice applied to blacks in the South, a fact that must not have gone unnoticed by recent immigrants in the United States.⁴

Villarosa, the owner of a grocery near Wilson’s drugstore on Jackson Road, had an immigrant experience that mirrored that of other southern Italians who had settled in the American South. However, his murder at the hands of a bloodthirsty lynch mob left the Italian immigrant colony in Mississippi, as well as Italian immigrants around the country, deeply alarmed. Adelino Tirelli, a local shoemaker, wrote to the Italian consul in New York arguing that Villarosa’s lynching was a crime directed at all Italians, claiming that proof of the victim’s innocence was available but ignored by Vicksburg authorities. A year after the lynching, Tirelli formed a mutual aid society called Margherita di Savoy, named after the queen of Italy, and informed the Italian consul, “This society was not formed for the usual reasons you create a mutual aid society, rather it was created to protect our lives, our honor, and our interests.”⁵

Villarosa’s ordeal, in an extreme manner, reflected the precarious racial position of southern Italian immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Perceived by many Americans as a swarthy, inferior race, Italian immigrants thrust themselves into an American racial hierarchy that privileged white, northern and Western European races. Empathizing with Tirelli, New York’s mainstream Italian language daily Il Progresso Italo-Americano accused the Commercial Herald of perpetrating a “shameless and wicked crusade against Italians” that consistently subjected them to base and revolting insults.⁶ As the Italian immigrant press grew in proportion to the immigrant community during this fluid period of mass immigration, mainstream newspapers such as Il Progresso commonly expressed full-throated defenses of Italian immigrants. Responding to American assaults labeling Italians as inferior “swarthy sons of the sunny south,” mainstream newspapers owned by prominent community leaders, or prominenti, functioned as an institution dedicated to defending the “race.”⁷ In doing so, the Italian immigrant press worked within a familiar language of race and civilization that reflected a broader understanding of where Italians, as well as nonwhite races such as Asians, Native Americans, Africans, and African Americans belonged racially. Coverage of racially charged events such as lynching, race riots, and slavery, as well as frequently discussed topics such as capitalism and religion, exposed an immigrant press coming to grips with, and navigating, the vicissitudes of American race and color. Wrestling with unflattering racial characterizations directed at Italians, Italian American newspapers initially interpreted discrimination and violence within an African American context. For example, in the early decades of Italian immigration, newspapers frequently expressed sympathy and understanding for African American victims of white racism, often exhibiting a sharp critique of white American racism and oppression as one deeply rooted in skin color.

However, despite apparent prominenti sympathy for the plight of African Americans, their acknowledgment of the intimate connection between race and color proved to have unintended consequences. Exposed to the intense heat of World War I hyperpatriotism and anti-immigrant rhetoric, manifesting most immediately in continued calls for race-based immigration restriction and demands for 100 percent Americanism, mainstream Italian language newspapers grappled with the continued uneasiness over Italian immigrant marginality. Concurrently, during this period the United States increasingly came to focus on the “Negro question” as the foremost social issue affecting the nation. This owed to several factors, including the migration of African Americans into the urban North and the emergence of the New Negro movement. According to Matthew Pratt Guterl, “The result was a culture of racial thinking termed ‘bi-racialism’ by the eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard, which encouraged Americans to focus on race-as-color, and almost solely on whiteness and blackness.”⁸ During this emerging “bi-racialist” period, Italian immigrant prominenti espoused a particular class-based notion of Italian identity, or italianita, influenced by the recent Italian unification in Italy. Steeped in racial nationalism, prominenti versions of Italian identity argued for full inclusion as Americans based upon an imagined “Italian” heritage of civilization and whiteness. By the period of World War I, mainstream newspapers, cognizant of the strong association between one’s racial grouping and their defined whiteness or nonwhiteness, abandoned a racial perspective that had concomitantly entertained color, race, and civilization in favor a more rigid binary of black and white.

A Great Conspiracy against Our Race explores the vital institution of the radical and mainstream Italian language press in New York City and seeks to answer how the immigrant press constructed race, class, and identity during the period 1886 through 1920. Examining the press as a cultural production of the Italian immigrant community, the book demonstrates how both radical and mainstream papers often constructed racial hierarchies in tandem with their own class-based interpretations of society. Ultimately, mainstream, or prominenti-owned, newspapers, constructed an identity as Italian, American, and white. The book focuses on Italian immigrants’ self-representation of race at a time when racial categories were being reconstructed as a consequence of mass black migration and European immigration during the decades between Reconstruction and World War I. Italians’ insistence on self-representation provided a much-needed intervention in categories of race meant to normalize extralegal and legal violence. During the years 1909 through 1919, newspapers such as Il Progresso and Il Cittadino proposed that Italian inclusion in American society be based upon the merits of an Italian civilization inextricably linked to whiteness. Constructing a version of southern Italian racial identity at odds with much of the public’s perception, by 1916 certain Italian American newspapers not only insisted Italians were white but claimed they would be responsible for saving the white race in the United States. By 1919, it had become clear to newspapers such as Il Progresso Italo-Americano, at this point the largest Italian daily in the country, that full incorporation into the American republic was intimately tied to one’s whiteness, as well as one’s distance from African Americans. Although scholars maintain Italian American assertions of whiteness actively began with the emergence of Fascism in Italy in the 1920s through the World War II period, this work demonstrates that this process had earlier roots.⁹

Working within scholarship that sees race as central to immigration history, one of the book’s primary presuppositions is that in the United States race and color have been historically connected. Discussions about race became intimately connected, and in some ways interchangeable, with categories such as civilization, savagery, and color. And, it was often assumed that civilized races were white and superior to darker races, which were perceived as primitive. Whiteness studies are grounded on the premise that the racial “other” in American history embraces categories in addition to black. What these works attempt to accomplish, in general, is to recover, or uncover, a racial identity to whiteness that belies the traditional assumption that being “white” means racial transparency. According to Coco Fusco, an activist and writer, “Racial identities are not only black, Latino, Asian, Native American, and so on; they are also white. To ignore white ethnicity is to redouble its hegemony by naturalizing it.”¹⁰

Although southern Italians were white enough to enter the country and naturalize as American citizens, consistent alarm over their suitability to become full members of the American republic included concerns regarding their race and whiteness.¹¹ Historians have attempted to describe this precarious racial status in a variety of ways, from “conditionally white” to “situationally white” or “not quite white.”¹² Along with historians such as Robert Orsi, John Higham, David Roediger, and others, I believe the term “inbetween” most accurately describes the racial position in which European immigrants found themselves as they learned and negotiated the American racial landscape. Writing in particular about southern Italian immigrants in East Harlem, Orsi proved instrumental in establishing the notion of inbetweeness and the effort to establish a border between oneself and those perceived as the “darker other.” As historian Ian Haney López and others have demonstrated, race is understood not as an absolute category but rather “as comparative taxonomies of relative difference. Races do not exist as defined entities, but only as amalgamations of people standing in complex relationships with other such groups.”¹³ Orsi’s work deftly presents the various degrees of perception that undergird racial othering—between us and them, white and black, Protestant and Catholic, American and foreign. Defined as an inferior race by many Americans, southern Italian immigrants arrived already stigmatized by northern Italian constructions of race and civilization coming out of Italian unification branding them as turks or African. Learning and adapting to the American racial system would be a process fraught with confusion, requiring an intimate struggle against the uncertainties and realities of “inbetweeness.” According to Orsi, “The immigrants were transformed first into ‘Italians’ in this country, initially in the perceptions of others who were hostile to them and their dark skins; then they had to become ‘Americans’ at a time when this identity itself had become the site of bitter, often racially charged conflict.”¹⁴

David Roediger and James Barrett employ the phrase the “confusion of inbetweeness” to characterize how immigrants perceived their place in the American racial system. The authors argue that the process was not a clean, linear path toward the attainment of whiteness but an uneven struggle whereby immigrants would simultaneously embrace whiteness, reject it, and many times remain indifferent to it. More specifically, according to Roediger and Barrett, “to assume that new immigrants as a mass clearly saw their identity with non-whites or clearly fastened on their differences is to miss” this confusion.¹⁵ In Whiteness of a Different Color, Matthew Frye Jacobson contends that the privilege of being white in various forms has been a constant since colonial times, but that whiteness itself has been subject to many changes throughout American history. He argues that whiteness became fractured into a hierarchy of scientifically and sociopolitically determined white “races” during the period of mass immigration in the middle to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Stating that American immigration scholarship is guilty of conflating race and color, Jacobson argues that contemporaries did not see “ethnicity” when discussing official categories such as Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Mediterraneans, Hebrews, Slavs, Alpines, and Nordics, but rather distinct “races” ranked according to their perceived proximity to whiteness. Therefore, an immigrant might be considered white yet at the same time be perceived as racially distinct from other whites. Complicating the simple “white-black” dichotomy of some whiteness studies, Jacobson cautions that to “miss the fluidity of race itself in the process of becoming Caucasian is to reify a monolithic whiteness, and, further, to cordon that whiteness off from other racial groupings along lines that are silently presumed to be more genuine.”¹⁶

However, with the publication of White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 in 2003, Thomas Guglielmo challenged the concept of inbetweeness, arguing that scholars have failed to “understand the distinctions between race and color.”¹⁷ According to Guglielmo, when contrasted with African Americans, Asian Americans, and Mexican Americans whose nonwhiteness systematically excluded them from citizenship and equal rights, Italian immigrants could not be described as anything but white. Thus, “While Italians suffered greatly for their putative racial undesirability as Italians, South Italians, and so forth, they still benefited in countless ways from their privileged color status as whites.” This distinction between race and color, argued Guglielmo, explains how southern Italian immigrants could face racial discrimination upon their arrival but still enjoy privileges due to their whiteness. Guglielmo contends that the notion of racial inbetweeness must be refined in order to account for the fact that “Italians did not need to become white; they always were in numerous, critical ways.”¹⁸

A Great Conspiracy against Our Race approaches the concept of race, color, and inbetweeness in several divergent ways from White on Arrival. First, the book will work within segments of the historiography that challenge Guglielmo’s assertion that race and color can be neatly disentangled. According to David Roediger, although Italians did not experience the same kind of “hard racism” as African Americans, new immigrants often were placed between calls for their racial exclusion and greater acceptance. Therefore, “to argue inbetweeness necessarily involves a willingness to keep both similarity and difference at play.” Indeed, an ironic twist to the fuss over terms such as “inbetweeness” is that this description of southern Italians is not the invention of contemporary historians but rather nomenclature of the period. At various times newspaper headlines explicitly described Italians as a group “between white and black” and questioned the racial fitness of Italian “swarthy sons of the sunny south” by focusing upon some of the many markers informing race, such as physical appearance, culture, religion, language, color, class, and placement within the hierarchy of labor.¹⁹ Although southern Italians enjoyed privileges based upon legal definitions as white, their consistent depiction as swarthy and frequent comparisons to African Americans, as well as the Italian language press’s own correlation of race, civilization, and color, complicate the notion that race and color can be so easily divorced. Indeed, as Roediger has maintained, the “separation between race and color that Guglielmo posits (when he argues that Italian immigrants were securely white in the critical category of color but vulnerable to intra-European rankings of races) is difficult to sustain.”²⁰ Further, it is important to note that the connection between race and color only grew more intimate through the World War I period and later; according to Guterl, “By the late 1920s and early 1930s American political culture was almost single-mindedly focused on ‘the Negro’ and on race-as-color.”²¹

Even if one were to uphold Guglielmo’s separation of race and color, as well as his claims that attacks upon Italian whiteness were never systematic or sustained, it would still not account for how important institutions such as the Italian language press approached the issue. Historians examining other new immigrant groups during this period have contended that their own “intricate means of self-definition” often served as a factor complicating their relationship to whiteness.²² The Italian language press maintained a consistent discourse, at times lamenting the connection between race and color, specifically as it related to African Americans. This conversation occurred in the midst of a process whereby mainstream newspaper proprietors and editors promulgated an image of the Italian cleansed of the sort of “racial” baggage applied by American commentators. According to historian Giorgio Bertellini, along with institutions such as the Italian Catholic Church and popular entertainments such as opera, the ethnic press “echoed a proud sense of patriotic allegiance.” In an effort to cultivate a more palatable representation of their countrymen, Italian mainstream newspapers employed the language of civilization and savagery and pleaded their case for full inclusion based upon a bourgeois construction of an Italian race deemed superior by virtue of a past linked directly to the glory of Rome, the Renaissance, and the Risorgimento. Bertellini explains that the invention of a shared Italianness provided southern Italian immigrants “with resources to affirm a distinction from American culture and way of life but also their necessary inclusion within the realm of Western civilization in the face of harsh nativist allegations of racialized inferiority.” Despite arriving with identities linked to local towns, villages, and regions, rather than to an Italian nation-state, southern Italian immigrants eagerly embraced patriotic associations that served to provide a ladder for racial and class uplift unavailable to them as provincial Neapolitans or Calabrians. By World War I, prominenti definitions of an Italian race became incompatible with any perceptions defining Italian as not fully white.²³

While some scholars tend to discuss Italian racial consciousness solely in terms of a black/white binary—that is, in relation to African Americans—A Great Conspiracy against Our Race reveals that Italian Americans grappled with a series of competing and complicated racial discourses and hierarchies. This book adds to the literature on whiteness by examining how newspaper owners, editors, and journalists evaluated a range of “nonwhite” races such as African and African American, Japanese, Chinese, Asian Americans, and Native Americans. Influenced by Gail Bederman’s work linking the discourse of civilization to race, whiteness, and manhood, insights into the Italian American press’s palimpsest of race, color, and civilization emerge. The pages of the press reveal, especially early in the immigrant experience, a complex racial worldview in which one’s perceived civilization could potentially trump one’s nonwhiteness in the hierarchy of race.²⁴ By making Italians active agents in the construction of U.S. racial ideologies, this book also contributes to a fuller understanding not only of the interconnectedness of ethnicity, race, class, and identity but, more specifically, of how immigrants filtered societal pressures, redefined the parameters of whiteness, and constructed their own identity as Italian, American, civilized, and white.

The Importance of the Italian Language Press

The immigrant press in the United States dates to the eighteenth century, but its maturation occurred with the mass arrival of newcomers, predominantly from southern and eastern Europe, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historian Robert Harney observes that “the press is the best primary source for an understanding of the world of non-English-speaking groups in the United States, their expectations and concerns, their background and evolution as individual communities.”²⁵ Although many scholars acknowledge the immense role played by the immigrant press in facilitating or expediting the process of assimilation to the host country, the Italian language press in the United States has often been overlooked in comparison to other immigrant publications.²⁶ Indeed, as recently as twenty years ago, a volume on the ethnic press in the United States did not include an essay on the Italian language press.²⁷ In order to glean the importance of these newspapers in Italian immigrant enclaves, one need look no further than the immense readership they enjoyed, as well as how many newspapers went in and out of existence during the period of mass migration. Arriving at the same time as Italians in New York City, eastern European Jews, while statistically more literate, provide a useful comparison to demonstrate Italian immigrant thirst for the written word.

Although Italian immigrant literacy rates stood in marked contrast to those of Jewish immigrants, whose illiteracy rate was only 26 percent, illiteracy among Italian immigrants in the period from 1890 through 1920 was not as severe as was once thought. Regions such as Sicily and Calabria did indeed have illiteracy rates of more than 80 percent at the turn of the century; however, between 1899 and 1909, immigrants arriving from Italy had an illiteracy rate of nearly 47 percent. In other words, more than half of all Italian immigrants could read.²⁸ Immigrant newspapers were ubiquitous within Italian communities and served as a potent source of information for first-generation immigrants. For example, by 1920, there were roughly 803,048 Italians living in New York City in comparison to 1,375,000 Jews. That same year the total circulation for the daily Italian language press in New York City was estimated at 241,843 compared with 356,262 for the Jewish daily press. This equates to a higher circulation ratio for Italian New Yorkers: one paper for every 3.8 Jewish New Yorkers versus one paper for every 3.3 Italian New Yorkers.²⁹

As impressive as circulation figures were, they far underestimated actual circulation. Not only were newspapers widely distributed hand to hand within immigrant communities, they were also found in local public libraries and were often read aloud to friends or family members unable to read themselves. In 1925, librarian May Sweet observed that in densely populated Italian communities, “one of the first places to which most foreigners come is the branch library nearest them.” Newspapers such as Il Progresso Italo-Americano could be found free at local public libraries and were popular with all classes of Italians.³⁰ Increasing the exposure of news was the tradition of immigrant readers, who served to partially offset immigrant illiteracy. Writing about this phenomenon in 1905, three American authors revealed that the practice of reading aloud greatly expanded the influence of these newspapers.³¹ George La Piana, a Sicilian immigrant, scholar, and teaching fellow at Harvard’s Divinity School, observed further how “illiterate Italians in their moment of leasure [sic] especially in winter time gather together in the kitchen around the stove and one of their friends who reads Italian reads them the paper.”³² Taking this into consideration, with a circulation of roughly 108,000 in 1920, it is not unrealistic to multiply Il Progresso’s reach into the Italian community by two or three times. As the center of Italian immigrant life in the United States, New York and the metropolitan area were home to mainstream newspapers such as Il Progresso Italo-Americano, Bolletino della Sera, and L’Araldo Italiano, as well as radical papers such as Il Proletario and La Questione Sociale. Containing the largest single concentration of newspapers in the country, New York City offers the perfect locale to explore the vitally important but underexamined Italian language press. Given distribution and circulation figures, as well as what the Italian language press provided to the community by way of news, nostalgia, and direction, Italian American newspapers assumed immense importance by “providing a forum, or staging area, where identity, culture, and race interacted.”³³

* * *

The organization of this manuscript follows a thematic format yet maintains a loose chronological approach. Chapter 1 provides a glimpse into the Italian communities of New York City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter sketches where Italian immigrants lived, the cultural institutions and networks they built, and the types of employment they found. Moreover, it provides a detailed breakdown of the multifaceted Italian language press in New York City and its impact and importance for the immigrant community. Examining the role of prominenti such as Carlo Barsotti, the chapter argues that Italian language newspapers played a vital role in shaping immigrant attitudes toward race, color, civilization, class, and identity.

Chapters 2 and 3 reveal how the Italian American press perceived nonwhite peoples such as Africans, African Americans, Native Americans, Chinese, Japanese, and Asian Americans. Chapter 2 examines how mainstream and radical newspapers employed Africa as a trope for savage behavior by analyzing their discussion of wage slavery, imperialism, lynching, and colonialism, in particular Italian imperialist ventures into northern Africa in the 1890s and Libya in 1911–1912. The Italian language press constructed Africa as a sinister, dark continent, representing the lowest rung of the racial hierarchy. In expressing moral outrage over American violence and discrimination against Italians, the press utilized this image of Africa to emphatically convey its shock and disgust. This dialogue would reveal much about the press’s racial vocabulary, especially as it would relate to its initial, empathetic account of African Americans.

Chapter 3 explores how the press interpreted nonwhite races, such as Native American and Asian Americans. Consistently differentiating these races according to color as either pelle rosse (redskin) or la razza gialla (the yellow race), the Italian language press teased different meanings from each group based upon factors such as civilization, race, and shared circumstances. For example, despite perceiving Native Americans as outside the bounds of civilization and, hence, destined to perish, Italian language newspapers entertained a divergent view of Japanese and Chinese peoples based upon alternate constructions of civilization and mutual threats such as race-based immigration restriction. By the World War I period, however, Italian Americans would trend toward a more simplistic construction of race less willing to perceive a nonwhite race as civilized.

The final two chapters explain how the press moved from a complex view of race to a more simplistic construction that relegated race and color to a black/white binary. Chapter 4 investigates how the Italian American press negotiated and digested the American racial system by examining its discussion of Italian and African American issues. In response to American violence against Italian immigrants, especially lynching, mainstream newspapers such as Il Progresso resorted to the experience of African Americans as a frame of reference to understand their own racialization. In addition, empathetic news stories about issues such as segregation and race riots were ubiquitous within the Italian American press alongside sympathetic commentary.

Chapter 5 argues that the Italian language mainstream press modified its outlook toward African Americans during the years 1909 through 1919. Informed by their own growing understanding of American racial mores, as well as by consistent calls for immigration restriction and Americanization campaigns unleashed by World War I, Italian American sympathy toward African Americans waned. Throughout the decade, mainstream newspapers shifted noticeably from criticizing white racism toward African Americans, to chiding white Americans for their rhetoric of racial exclusion toward Italian immigrants. Consistent with this argument, Italian language mainstream newspapers discontinued comparisons to African Americans and viewed any outside attempts to posit otherwise as extremely dangerous. Continued demands for full incorporation into American society were inextricably tied to establishing not only the civilized nature of the Italian race but also Italians’ acceptability as whites.

Finally, the epilogue peers into the succeeding decades and speculates how and why second- and third-generation Italian Americans became firmly entrenched as pan-ethnic, white Americans. For Italian immigrants and their descendants, the twentieth century proved transformative in many ways. Affected by major external events such as Fascism in Italy, World War II, and civil rights movements, as well as internal desires to “be American,” a crucial aspect of their adaptation would be racial in nature. From victims of lynching to perpetrators of racial violence, the journey of Italian Americans uniquely embodies the tremendous costs of an assimilation process that inculcates the values of white over black.