Italian Americans

Italian Americans. The 1990 U.S. Census reported some 14.7 million persons of Italian ancestry, of whom the great majority were descended from 5 million Italians who immigrated to the United States after 1890. The high point of the immigration occurred in the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, when some 3.4 million Italians arrived. Predominantly males of working age, peasants, artisans, and laborers, about half remained and sent for wives and families.

This vast migration resulted from fundamental changes in Italian society, including population growth, capitalist innovations that disrupted traditional forms of agriculture and craft production, and burdensome taxes and military conscription imposed by the new Kingdom of Italy. Poverty and illiteracy characterized southern Italy, where two‐thirds of the immigrants originated.

World War I and American restrictive legislation reduced Italian immigration to a trickle (the Immigration Act of 1924 established an annual quota for Italy of 3,845). Following World War II, the family‐reunification provision of American immigration policy enabled a modest number of new immigrants to enter the United States. By the 1970s, however, Italy had become a country of immigration rather than emigration.

While the Italian immigrants included wine‐makers and fishermen in California, stonecutters in Vermont, cigarmakers in Florida, sugarcane workers in Louisiana, and miners from Pennsylvania to Utah, over two‐thirds were concentrated in cities along the East Coast from Philadelphia to Boston and west to Chicago. Replacing the Irish, the Italians became the major source of unskilled labor in railroads and construction. In time, increasing numbers, especially women, found jobs in factories and mills, particularly textiles and clothing manufacturing.

Immigrants who had been labor activists in Italy brought their radical ideologies to America. Italian‐born anarchists, socialists, and syndicalists played an important role in such Industrial Workers of the World‐led strikes as those of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Paterson, New Jersey. Italian immigrants figured in the leadership and rank‐and‐file of American Federation of Labor unions and (with their children) of the Congress of Industrial Organizations unions of the 1930s. Initially denounced as strikebreakers, Italians earned a reputation as radicals, a reputation reinforced by the Sacco and Vanzetti case of the 1920s.

The immigrants formed clustered settlements, composed of persons from the same regions and even villages. Here they re‐created their cultural patterns and social networks, including banks established by padrones (labor contractors), mutual‐aid societies providing sickness and death benefits, and the festa of the town's patron saint. Nominally Roman Catholic, many immigrants were anticlerical, and Italian parishes were established with great difficulty. Parents preferred to send their children to free public schools rather than parochial schools. Yet, the second generation became acculturated to American Catholicism and more devout than the first.

Attached to the particular villages from which they came, the immigrants initially did not identify as “Italians.” World War I and the rise of fascism engendered a nationalist spirit among many, however. Denounced as “dagoes,” Italians faced prejudice and discrimination; thus, when Benito Mussolini encouraged pride in Italy, many embraced him as a savior. In the 1930s, fascist propaganda exploited this predisposition. Despite a militant antifascist minority, most Italian Americans initially sympathized with Mussolini's regime.

Slow to naturalize, Italians played a minor role in American politics until after World War II. Fiorello La Guardia, first a congressman and then mayor of New York City, and Vito Marcantonio, a radical congressman from East Harlem, were exceptions. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor and Italy's declaration of war on the United States, the 600,000 Italian immigrants who were still not naturalized became “enemy aliens.”

World War II marked a major turning point in Italian American history. Eager to prove their loyalty, Italian Americans served in the U.S. armed forces, purchased bonds, and otherwise supported the war effort. On 12 October 1942, Attorney General Francis Biddle removed the stigma of “enemy alien” from nonnaturalized Italians. In contrast to the mass internment of Japanese Americans, only a few hundred alleged Italian fascists were placed in concentration camps. The war also accelerated Americanization, as young people left their “Little Italy” neighborhoods for military service and jobs in war industries.

Following the war, the G.I. Bill (Servicemen's Readjustment Act) and enlarged education and work opportunities accelerated the social mobility of the second generation—a process reflected in increased migration to the suburbs. The Little Italies also suffered incursions by new migrants, urban renewal, and highway construction. When the “black revolution” convulsed America's central cities in the 1960s, Italian Americans who sought to defend their turf were accused of a racist “backlash.” Solidly Democratic since the New Deal Era, they increasingly voted Republican in reaction to the cultural conflicts of those years and as an expression of their higher socioeconomic status.

Various indices show Italian Americans' assimilation to the norms of middle‐class life. Indeed, by the 1980s, some had attained positions of power and prestige: New York governor Mario Cuomo; Lee Iacocca, head of Chrysler Corporation; Judge Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court; A. Bartlett Giamatti, president of Yale University; and the filmmaker Martin Scorsese.

Ethnic consciousness not only survived, however, but experienced a resurgence in late twentieth‐century America. Italian Americans explored their experience through history and the arts, visited archives and cemeteries in Italy, and reestablished ties with long‐lost cousins. Old organizations such as the Sons of Italy in America took on new life, while new organizations proliferated. Partially attributable to the general ascendance of the multicultural paradigm, this resurgence, for some, also offered compensation for the feeling that they were not yet fully accepted as Americans. (In the media, Italian Americans continued to be stereotyped as gangsters and stupid.) For others, it was a search for an identity to counter the impersonality of postmodern society. The Italian‐American presence remained strong as the century ended and clearly would persist well into the future.
See also Anarchism; Assimilation; Cultural Pluralism; Democratic Party; Immigration Law; Labor Markets; Nativist Movement; Roman Catholicism; Socialism; Suburbanization; Textile Industry; Urbanization; Women in the Labor Force; Working‐Class Life and Culture.

Bibliography

Alexander De Conde , Half Bitter, Half Sweet: An Excursion into Italian‐American History, 1971.
Richard D. Alba , Italian Americans: Into the Twilight of Ethnicity, 1985.
Rudolph J. Vecoli , The Search for an Italian American Identity: Continuity and Change, in Italian Americans, ed. Lydio Tomasi, 1985, pp.88–112.
Jerre Mangione and and Ben Morreale , La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience, 1992.
Michael J. Eula , Between Peasant and Urban Villager: Italian‐Americans of New Jersey and New York, 1880–1980, 1993.
Rudolph J. Vecoli , The Italian Diaspora, 1876–1976, Cambridge Survey of World Migrations, ed. Robin Cohen, 1995, pp.114–22.

Rudolph J. Vecoli