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
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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.
1
The Italian Language Press and the Creation of an Italian Racial Identity
On April 2, 1927, Carlo Barsotti, the founder and owner of New York’s Il Progresso Italo-Americano (Italian American Progress), was laid to rest in what was reported to be an exact replica of Rudolph Valentino’s coffin. In 1872, the twenty-two-year-old Pisan had arrived in the United States a poor immigrant, but by the time he died he had become one of the wealthiest and most influential leaders in the Italian immigrant community. Barsotti earned a lucrative living as a labor agent, or padrone, directing gangs of Italians on the railroads, ran as many
