a savings bank that catered to Italian immigrants. Motivated to fill what he considered a void in the expanding Italian community, Barsotti founded Il Progresso in 1880. By 1920, the newspaper had become the most important, and largest, daily Italian language newspaper in the United States.1
Faced with incessant calls to restrict immigration based upon race, a fierce hypernationalism unleashed by World War I, and frequent violence and discrimination, historically provincial Neapolitans, Sicilians, and Calabrians found themselves united by a common antagonist. At the forefront of campaigns to uplift the race was an Italian language mainstream press that sought to justify Italian worthiness as a civilized race. The mainstream press accomplished this by focusing on italianita, or a celebration of all things Italian. Newspapers highlighted community events, defended Italians from American nativism, and sponsored campaigns to erect monuments to figures such as Christopher Columbus and Giovanni da Verrazzano and in the process contributed significantly to an emerging racial identity as Italian that had never existed in the old country.2 Despite the obvious financial and narcissistic appeal motivating prominenti such as Barsotti to trade in the discourse of nationalism, it nevertheless appealed to southern Italian immigrants faced with a nativist American environment. During the period of mass immigration, Italian language newspapers experienced explosive growth as the city swelled with immigrants and exercised a crucial role, not only in the assimilation of Italian immigrants but in the creation of an identity as Italian, American, and white.3
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Italian immigrants did not arrive with a collective Italian consciousness, and the social, educational, and cultural divides that had historically separated northern and southern Italians did not disappear upon entry into the United States. The lower half of the Italian peninsula, or Mezzogiorno, was marked by a history of economic exploitation, political oppression, and cultural discrimination.4 Centuries-old problems such as uneven social arrangements and poverty-level existence relegated most of the agrarian proletariat in the South to a protofeudal existence. Although Italian political unification in 1861 did not create the problems within the Mezzogiorno, it failed to address them, and in the years after 1861 disparities between the two regions actually increased. The northern-dominated Italian government failed to include the South in public works programs, transportation improvements, educational reforms, and badly needed irrigation projects. These policies served to ensure the continued poverty of the South. Further exacerbating the situation, the central government increased taxes on the southern peasantry compelling them to bear a disproportionate share of the public debt.
During this period the notion of Italian dualism originated, and a series of powerful images permeated the consciousness of national public opinion. Illustrations of rural brigands hanging from scaffolds intertwined with stories of barbarous actions increasingly informed the image of a demonic Mezzogiorno. Many northerners viewed the South as a primitive land where the climate induced laziness, irresponsibility, and the rule of nature over civilization. The perception of the Mezzogiorno as a land forgotten by history was buoyed by powerful racial connotations intimately connected to Africa. For example, according to sociologist Gabriella Gribaudi, the “South was considered a frontier dividing civilized Europe from countries populated by savages from Africa.”5 French author Crueze de Lesser remarked in 1806 that “Europe ends at Naples and ends badly. Calabria, Sicily and all the rest belong to Africa.” In 1860, an envoy of Italy’s first prime minister, Camillo Cavour, wrote of the South: “What barbarism! Some Italy! This is Africa: the bedouin are the flower of civilized virtue compared to these peasants.”6
By the late nineteenth century, writers such as Alfredo Niceforo and Cesare Lombroso claimed to have scientifically validated southern Italian inferiority through the theories of the positivist school of biological racism. Lombroso, a noted Italian criminologist, pinpointed biological, rather than socioeconomic, reasons behind the proliferation of crime in the southern regions. Alfredo Niceforo, an Italian academic, reasoned that the moral and social structure of the South revealed an inferior civilization that was reminiscent of a primitive and quasi-barbarian age. Describing southerners as feminine, or popolo donna, and northerners as masculine, or popolo uomo, Niceforo processed civilization and barbarity through a gendered lens that served to clarify and reinforce the notion of southern Italian barbarism. Constructing a relationship between femininity and barbarity versus masculinity and civilization,7 these “scientific” conclusions only served to reinforce what northern Italians had come to accept: southern Italians were an inferior breed of savages and barbarians biologically distanced from progressive, civilized northern Italians.8 These theories had a transnational impact and influenced the anti-immigration and restrictionist forces in the United States. Indeed, in 1905, four years after Giuseppe Sergi’s The Mediterranean Race was published, the U.S. commissioner-general of immigration revised the government’s classification of Italians and began to distinguish between northern and southern Italians as two peoples. Informed by Sergi’s theories, the congressional commission charged with investigating immigration, more commonly known as the Dillingham Commission, elaborated upon this distinction and concluded in its findings, published in 1911, that Italians comprised two distinct races: northern Italian and southern Italian.9 These racial differences remained at the core of the commission’s recommendations to restrict new Italians described as a “long-headed, dark, ‘Mediterranean’ race of short stature.”
Italian Immigrants and New York City
In 1882, a total of 648,000 European immigrants immigrated to the United States, the overwhelming majority (87 percent) hailing from northern and Western Europe, while roughly 13 percent came from eastern and southern Europe. By 1907, however, the origin, as well as the perception, of the immigrant would change markedly. During the course of that year, immigrants from eastern and southern Europe accounted for roughly 81 percent (or 972,000) of European immigration to the United States. The number from Italy alone amounted to 286,000; this was more than three times the total of all eastern and southern European immigrants for the year 1882.10 The migration from Italy accounted for 17 percent of the total immigration during the period from 1880 through 1924 as 4,569,918 Italians immigrated to the United States. The influx of Italian immigrants was so staggering that by World War I Italy had been losing population to emigration at a rate of more than a half million a year.11
Focused on New York City, the epicenter of Italian immigrant life in the United States, this study will rely extensively on the most important newspapers published there during the period 1880 through 1920, when Italian migration to New York changed the face of the city. According to the 1910 census, between 1880 and 1900 the Italian population of New York City increased by 20,000 to 225,026, and by 1910 New York contained 340,765 foreign-born Italians, with the total number of people identifying as Italian speaking numbering 544,449.12 Not only did 95 to 98 percent of all Italian immigrants pass through Ellis Island, but 54.5 percent of the total in 1901 delineated New York City as their final destination. These numbers are more impressive given what was certainly an underrepresentation of these official figures due to mitigating factors ranging from Italian distrust of civic authority to congested boardinghouses and tenements.13
Italian settlements spanned every part of New York City, and where Italians decided to live was primarily influenced by proximity to employment or a desire to reunite with family or friends from their particular town or region. Every borough of New York City housed Italian immigrants; some sections contained only a few, whereas Italians constituted well over 90 percent of the population in other enclaves. By 1903, one community study revealed the only section of Manhattan that did not contain Italians stretched from 72nd Street to 140th Street on the west side of the island. Given the fluidity of these communities, population statistics cannot tell the entire story, although they can provide an important snapshot of how these communities evolved. The two most densely populated and renowned Italian colonies during this period were the areas around Mulberry Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and East Harlem, from 100th Street to 115th Street and from Second Ave to the East River. By 1918, the Mulberry Bend district housed approximately 110,000 Italian immigrants and
