A Renegade History of the United States by Russell Thaddeus

Author:Russell, Thaddeus [Russell, Thaddeus]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2010-09-27T22:00:00+00:00

FROM NERO TO BIANCO

Despite his popularity, by the height of his career, Louis Prima was part of a dying breed.

In 1906 an Italian government official named Luigi Villari came to Louisiana to investigate alleged mistreatment of Sicilian agricultural workers. He found that most plantation owners considered the Italian immigrant to be “a white-skinned Negro” and treated him accordingly. Villari regretfully concluded that the “only way an Italian can emancipate himself from this inferior state is to abandon all sense of national pride and to identify completely with the Americans.” Many Italian American leaders learned of Villari’s dictum and were also aware that several influential American thinkers doubted the inherent ability of Italians to become “good” Americans. They knew that a growing number of powerful Americans agreed with the assessment of Edward Ross, the president of the American Sociological Association, who wrote in 1914 of why Italians were among the least likely to assimilate:

As grinding rusty iron reveals the bright metal, so American competition brings to light the race stuff in poverty-crushed immigrants. But not all this stuff is of value in a democracy like ours. Only a people endowed with a steady attention, a slow-fuse temper, and a persistent will can organize itself for success in the international rivalries to come.

Wise to the rules of America, Italian American leaders taught their people to be slow and steady.

This assimilationist campaign gained desperate urgency in the early 1920s, when Congress began curbing the immigration of “undesirable” groups. The 1921 Emergency Quota Act cut the flow of people from Italy and other southern European countries by roughly 75 percent. A year later, David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University, complained that the new law did not go far enough. Jordan called on Congress to completely bar immigration by southern Italians, who were “biologically incapable of rising either now or through their descendants above the mentality of a 12-year-old child.” In 1923, in an article titled “Keep America ‘White’!,” the influential Current Opinion magazine demanded the tightening of quotas on immigration from southern and eastern Europe: “If the tall, big-boned, blue-eyed, old-fashioned ‘white’ American is not to be bred out entirely by little dark peoples, Uncle Sam must not simply continue the temporary quota law in operation, but must make its provisions much more stringent.” The following year, in one of its many articles calling for an end to Italian immigration, the Saturday Evening Post argued that because southern Italians were part African, they were “incapable of self-government and totally devoid of initiative and creative ability.” The Post claimed that “unrestricted immigration [into southern Italy] made a mongrel race of the south Italians” and that “unrestricted immigration [into the U.S.] will inevitably and absolutely do the same thing to Americans.”

Amid the anti-Italian noise, the Order of the Sons of Italy in America sent a letter to Representative Albert Johnson, chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and a leading opponent of Italian immigration, arguing that Italians possessed a “physical vigor and strong mentality,”

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