works by sam: Anti-Italianism & Portrayals of Italian-Americans

Anti-Italianism & Portrayals of Italian-Americans

December 9, 2009 | An Essay By Sam Smith

In 1907, Italian Immigration into the United States peaked at just under 286,000 men, women and children. By 1940, there were millions of native-born Italian-Americans living in the US. But well before the numbers grew to be this large, when far less Italians were settled in North America, strong anti-Italian prejudice existed. In 1891, a fiction book targeting the growing Mafia of Louisiana appeared on the bookshelves of The New York Detective Library in Manhattan just weeks after the lynching of eleven Italians. The book, titled The New Orleans Mafia embodied three key elements of brutal anti-Italian discrimination. First, much like Kristallnacht-era illustrations of Jews in central Europe, or ‘scientific’ explanations of the African man’s inferiority to the white man during the civil rights movement, the book both exaggerated and entirely invented generalizations about the appearance of Italians. “It was evident to the boy that both were Italians for the color of their skin and the unattractive contour of their features amply proclaimed their nationality. ‘Dagoes!’ he muttered.” By depicting Italians to be easily distinguishable by simple facial features, The New Orleans Mafia helped create and fuel a stereotypical notion of the Italian people. Second, the text goes on to depict Italians to be extremely violent. “The Sicilians have always been the most bloody- minded and revengeful of the Mediterranean races”. Claims that Italians were a bloodthirsty people became a constant theme of anti-Italianism. Third, the book bluntly groups Italians with African-Americans. “Like the Negro, the favorite weapon of the Sicilian is the razor”. Stereotypes geared toward Sicilians were often the same as stereotypes geared towards blacks, as Italians were typically and frequently conveyed as ‘White Negroes’.

In this paper, I will present and analyze these three stereotypes and their relation to the discrimination against Italians present in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. I will examine the media of the time’s role in this discrimination as well as societal disadvantages Italians faced from institutions throughout the south. I will also analyze modern day depictions of Italian-American history threw films like The Godfather and Gangs of New York and how these films relate to the topic of Italian intolerance. Finally, I will conclude by looking into the Italian Immigrants response to inequity and the current state of Italian Immigrants. The central source for this paper, as the source of all but one quote will be this week’s reading Whiteness of a Different Color by Matthew Frye Jacobson.

Throughout areas of Louisiana, Mississippi and West Virginia, Italians fostered peaceful relations and interrelations with blacks. Despite persistent and vigorous acts of racism against African-Americans, Italians stood by them “liv[ing] and work[ing] comfortably among blacks” (57). Although even socializing with colored people went against local race codes, Italians went as far as to intermarry and raise families with blacks throughout Louisiana especially. Because Italian immigrants made no effort to separate themselves by living in black communities, and freely permitting blacks to live in theirs, “southern thinking made no effort to distinguish” the two groups (57). They thus received the title ‘white nigger’, or dago. This was by no means a harmless perception, as “being like niggers” meant “being as bad as niggers” and resulted in the lynching of Italian immigrants (57).

The media largely fueled the perception of Italians as “white niggers”. The New York Times was the consistent leader of the pack when it came to anti-Italian editorials and news clippings. One article claimed it was not an “uncommon thing to see at noon some swarthy Italian…resting and dining from his tin kettle, while his brown-skinned wife is by his side”. And this was the least offensive of the Times slanders. Besides questioning the Italian’s “fitness for citizenship” the paper callously referred to them as “rattlesnakes” from a “cowardly”, “lawless” race (56). Jacobson links the relationship between media and violence, courageously exposing the New York Times role in anti-Italian brutality:

“…all the key elements common to the New York Times editorials: the depiction of the Italian colony not as properly white, the question of good citizenship; and, hence the ultimate righteousness of the lynch mob”.

-Page 61

“the little jail was crowded with Sicilians, whose low, receding foreheads, dark skin, repulsive countenances and slovenly attire proclaimed their brutal nature. ”

-The New York Times[1]

The Times, while perhaps the most unrelenting force of anti-Italianism in popular eighteenth and nineteenth century media (perpetrating discrimination against Italians based on solely on appearance, in particular) was not alone. The Portland Oregonian described Italian immigration into New Orleans as “an explosion of cheap Latin fury and braggadocio” (58). Henry Calbot Lodge of The North American Review refused not only to label the lynching of Italians as racist, but referred to the lynchings as a “reasonable response of good citizens to the immigrants’ offensive secret organizations” (60). Mainstream newspapers were largely anti-immigrant at the time and approved of the lynchings across the board, coldheartedly throwing around the term “lynch law” for “unrestricted immigration” (60). Despite the obvious racism present in newspapers across the country, so-called journalists claimed that they were being practical and that the people of America saw “no hostility towards the Italians” whatsoever (60). But when one reads a “news” article from the Times that hints upon threats of a genocide of Italians in America, it is hard to claim vicious anti-Italianism is not a factor:

“…the Times went on to warn that, if Italians failed to fall in behind other “descent” American citizens…than the mob would [succeed] in doing away with the “criminals””

-Page 58

This language, which sounds much like that that came out of the genocide of the 1990s in Rwanda in which Tutsis were referred to as “cockroaches”, suggests that the Italian people are practically sub-human, because they are indecent and criminal. White supremacists grew furious, fueled by the image created by the media that portrayed Italians as being uncivil, and took action threw violent means. Due to this sentiment, Italians lived “in constant danger of being lynched” (62). But white supremacists, typically deemed as typical radicals, were not so radical in the time, and it was in-fact the courts, the legislation and the police force that acted as perhaps the largest perpetrator of anti-Italianism.

Police engaged in Italian discrimination after a mob went after Italians following the assassination of the police chief of New Orleans. Hundreds of Italian immigrants, who were not criminals, were arrested by law enforcement for the assassination they had no link to. The courts, when dealing with situations of criminality convicted but an Italian-American citizen, again and again brought race into the picture. “Did Italian racial character have anything to do with the original crime?” the court would ask. Even on a year as late as 1921, Congress passed a quota which limited the number of aliens, including Italians, that were allowed to immigrate to the United States annually. The justification was on the basis that “legislation should suppress what is becoming a menace to the country”. On that very same year, two Italian Immigrants were convicted of a murder despite the “lack of evidence against them” (114). They were given the death penalty, and modern historians agree that this was an undeniable example of anti-Italian prejudice. Racism became so regularized that even Judges themselves were involved in the root of institutionalized anti-Italianism, making legal matters racial:

“One local judge, R. H Marr, Jr., pointed to the racial clannishness of the Italian colony to explain the community’s fierce outpouring of anti-Italian sentiment…Convictions in crimes involving Italians had been notoriously scarce, he charged, because, when questioned “any number of Dagoes swear to the most positive and circumstantial alibi…these people had so far as the public knew, confined their operation to their own race.”

-Page 58

The suggestion that all Italians were normally in communication with one another but that regarding a crime, Italians were so lawless that they did things in secrecy applies racial terms and conditions to a simple matter of crime and punishment. Judges, who played a key role in the imprisonment of innocent Italians, seemed to be more interested in participating in anti-Italianism than in serving justice. The Godfather, which portrays police crackdowns on the mob as being simple criminal crackdowns of the mid 1900s, neglects to expose police crackdowns on the mob as being targeted anti-Italian crackdowns that ignored mobs of other nationalities. But of course, The New York Times was back at it again, claiming the police were not persecuting people “as Italians”, while Jacobson depicts the police’s actions as heavily targeted.

The Godfather also fed into a stereotype about Italians as mobsters, one heavily refuted by Italian-Americans throughout the course of HBO’s series The Sopranos, suggesting that a typical Italian family is one of carnage and unlawfulness. As Jacobson would say, director Francis Ford Coppola perpetrates the “popular understanding of Italians’ innate criminality.” (56). Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film Gangs of New York depicted the early discrimination of Irish settlers in Manhattan, but did not hint at the rise to power the Irish had in the late mid 1800s and the strong role they had in Anti-Italian discrimination. The “Anglo-Saxon” south was largely dominated by Irish Immigrants and anti-Italian policy was “represented by the Irish police chief” who was eventually assassinated in New Orleans by rebelling Italian mobsters. (59). It is not only stereotypes perpetrated by film that paint a negative image of Italians, but what is left out about their struggle that leads to misinformation surrounding their history. These two major motion pictures, both Best Picture nominations at the Academy Awards, portray undeniably moving and important stories, but they do not deal with a story commonly untold: that of anti-Italianism.

One subject largely but intentionally ignored by this essay up to this point is the response of Italian immigrants to the prejudice, discrimination, racism and hatred of the time. Quite simply, they did not sit by quietly. “Italian protestors themselves mobilized a racially accented language of “barbarism” and “civilization” in addressing the wrongs perpetrated in New Orleans”. Language led to revolt, and protests led to results. Inch my inch, Italians gained their ground in the south, and across America they became a emblem of culture and diversity. By 1941, they were proclaimed one of “liberty’s children” (202) by the Detroit Free Press. They were finally viewed as a respectable ethnicity, and not simply a race excluded from other whites. The transition from separating people based on European origins to separating people simply by white or black moved Italians away from the line of fire. Unfortunately, for African-Americans, a large number or Italians joined in with Irish, Swedish, Polish, Dutch, German and French Americans (now fully assimilated and identifying themselves as ‘Americans’) in the more focused and intense intolerance of blacks. Italian-Americans today are a vibrant and beloved icon of American culture. From Little Italy in lower Manhattan to pizza joints across Chicago and San Diego, Italians contribute millions of dollars and endless heart into the fabric of today’s United States.

I wrote this paper because Whiteness of a Different Color exposed to me what was a crucial part of American history largely ignored by society. Seeing films that, in small part, perpetrated this ignorance further inspired me to delve deeper into the historical portrayal of Italian Americans, focusing particularly on the late eighteenth and early nineteen century south of course. The simple yet stunning facts surrounding Italian-Americanism and Anti-Italianism could not simply be ignored. One fact was: the largest lynching in American history was of Italians. How could I not write a paper on the topic after hearing something like that? Italians may be, as historians can debate, the second most discriminated upon race in the time period this paper covers. It was of my interest what connections there were between the discrimination of blacks and discrimination of Italians, as well as the medias role in anti-Italianism was. I am glad we, as a modern American salad bowl of culture, now live peacefully in a country where rampant racism does not lead to lynch mobs or even widely accepted notions of inferiority. However, less than one hundred years ago, this discrimination was a consistent part of what defined American immigration and this is a past that must never be forgotten.