A Great Conspiracy against Our Race
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Racial history has always been the thorn in America’s side, with a swath of injustices—slavery, lynching, segregation, and many other ills—perpetrated against black people. This very history is complicated by, and also dependent on, what constitutes a white person in this country. Many of the European immigrant groups now considered white also had to struggle with their own racial identities. In A Great Conspiracy against Our Race, Peter Vellon explores how Italian immigrants, a once undesirable and “swarthy” race, assimilated into dominant white culture through the influential national and radical Italian language press in New York City. Examining the press as a cultural production of the Italian immigrant community, this book investigates how this immigrant press constructed race, class, and identity from 1886 through 1920. Their frequent coverage of racially charged events of the time, as well as other topics such as capitalism and religion, reveals how these papers constructed a racial identity as Italian, American, and white. A Great Conspiracy against Our Race vividly illustrates how the immigrant press was a site where socially constructed categories of race, color, civilization, and identity were reworked, created, contested, and negotiated. Vellon also uncovers how Italian immigrants filtered societal pressures and redefined the parameters of whiteness, constructing their own identity. This work is an important contribution to not only Italian American history, but America’s history of immigration and race.
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A GREAT CONSPIRACY AGAINST OUR RACE
General Editors: Daniel Bender and Kimberley L. Phillips
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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.
Attempting to build on the success of Il Progresso, Vincenzo Polidori, along with Giovani Vicario, a Naples-born attorney, established L’Araldo Italiano (the Italian Herald) in 1889. L’Araldo was published every day except Mondays and was soon accompanied by an evening newspaper, Il Telegrafo.35 The paper employed “valorous journalists” such as Luciano Paris, Giuseppe Gulino, Luigi Roversi, Paolo Parisi, Ernesto Valentine, and Agostino DiBiasi and at various times was listed as a Republican paper and other years identified as independent.36 Some historians described the paper as more balanced in its reporting than Il Progresso and more friendly to labor than its chief rival, especially after 1910.37 However, despite having a larger circulation than Il Progresso in the early part of the twentieth century, L’Araldo could not keep up with Il Progresso’s explosive growth and reached its circulation zenith at 18,000 in 1916.38 By 1917, both L’Araldo and Il Telegrafo were sold by Vicario to Il Giornale Italiano, edited by Ercole Cantelmo and part of Frank Frugone’s publishing consortium. By 1920, the paper’s circulation narrowed to 12,454 copies.39
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