The Italian Americans

by Maria Laurino

  Or, as Sacco later told the journalist Mary Heaton Vorse, “If I was arrested because of ‘The Idea,’ I am glad to suffer. If I must I will die for it. But they have arrested me for gunman job.” The evidence against both men for this “gunman job” was so weak that it exposed the prejudices and limitations of the American judicial system and created a worldwide outrage over the men’s eventual executions.

  Nicola Sacco (right) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (middle) would become the face of Italian anarchism in this country.

  Judge Thayer decided to try Vanzetti for another payroll robbery, a botched and unsuccessful earlier incident in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Despite conflicting testimony—bystanders thought the assailants were either Russian or Polish—Vanzetti’s dark, “foreign” countenance created enough suspicion for people to change their original identification. The attempted robbery took place on Christmas Eve, yet Vanzetti’s alibi—he had been selling the traditional fish that Italians devour that night—did not convince the jury, despite the testimony of sixteen witnesses who said they had bought eels from him. The jury determined that the Italians, who could barely speak English, were merely assembling a group alibi to protect one of their own. Even the governor of Massachusetts commented that the word of Italians couldn’t be believed. The Italians, on the other hand, were shocked that their words, no matter how unpolished, weren’t deemed credible. Once the jury declared a guilty verdict, the wheels were set into motion: the trial for the Braintree robbery was bound to produce the same verdict, despite a substantial lack of evidence against Vanzetti and a case against Sacco that left many doubts.

  Their trial, which lasted six and a half weeks, called on a dizzying 167 witnesses. Many eyewitnesses could not identify either Sacco or Vanzetti. Vanzetti was accused of driving the getaway car, but the driver had been heard to speak perfect English, unlike Vanzetti’s heavily accented tongue. Witnesses supported Sacco’s alibi that he was at the Italian consulate that day obtaining a passport to return to Italy. A bullet traced to Sacco’s gun was said to have killed the payroll guard, but there was credible evidence that the bullet had been substituted during a test firing. While reasonable doubt existed, the jurors, charged to find a “consciousness of guilt,” quickly reached a guilty verdict.

  Defense lawyer Fred Moore, a flamboyant labor attorney from California who had helped secure the release of Ettor and Giovannitti and never failed to make the staid Judge Thayer wince, requested a new trial. The subsequent odyssey for both men would last seven years. During this time, a hardened criminal named Celestino Madeiros confessed to the Braintree robberies while in jail. Although Madeiros wouldn’t name his gang, his description fit a group of thugs led by Joe Morelli, who were among the original suspects. Morelli’s mug shot bore a striking resemblance to Sacco’s profile, their Buick getaway car matched the vehicle the police sought, they possessed the type of guns used in the crime, and Madeiros had been found with nearly $3,000 in cash, while no money had ever been traced to Sacco and Vanzetti.

  The Sacco and Vanzetti case received international attention as unions and activists around the country rallied to the two men’s defense.

  The bias of Judge Thayer was also revealed: after denying Sacco and Vanzetti another trial, he was overheard at a Dartmouth football game (the judge’s alma mater) saying to a professor, “Did you see what I did with those anarchist bastards the other day? I guess that will hold them for a while! Let them go to the Supreme Court now and see what they can get out of them!”

  The case’s many inconsistencies and the government’s determination to prosecute radicals without sufficient evidence prompted Felix Frankfurter, who would later become a Supreme Court judge, to write an article for Atlantic Monthly in 1926 that challenged the conduct of the trial and detailed its many weaknesses. Frankfurter later expanded his article into a book, which further enraged the clubby Boston establishment, furious that a Jewish outsider would suggest a tainted legal system in the commonwealth.

  Despite the overwhelming amount of new material, the Massachusetts Supreme Court would not reverse Thayer’s denial of a new trial. Pleas were then taken to the governor of Massachusetts, Alvan T. Fuller, who appointed a three-man commission headed by the president of Harvard. But the bias against the men was too strong—despite a swelling support in the United States and worldwide rallies, protests, and strikes—to make any difference. Fuller’s commission ultimately upheld the conviction, and after seven excruciating years, all pleas were exhausted.

  The denial of the right to a new trial sent supporters into despair because they believed that America’s judicial system had been badly, if not irreparably, tarnished. As Katherine Anne Porter explained in The Never-Ending Wrong, a reflection written fifty years after her participation in the protests, “It was a silent assembly of citizens—of anxious people come to bear witness and to protest against the terrible wrong to be committed, not only against two men about to die, but against all of us, against our common humanity and our shared will to avert what we believed to be not merely a failure in the use of the instrument of the law, an injustice committed through mere human weakness and misunderstanding, but a blindly arrogant, self-righteous determination not to be moved by any arguments, the obstinate assumption of the infallibility of a handful of men intoxicated with the vanity of power and gone mad with wounded self-importance.” Porter was among those who stood vigil the night of the execution, watching the light in the prison tower flicker shortly after midnight on August 23, 1927—the sign that powerful voltages of electricity had been charged through the bodies of Sacco and Vanzetti.

  The passion surrounding the case only grew more intense as the men became worldwide martyrs. Cities feared reprisals, and police were sent to guard subways, railroads, and ship terminals. Hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets for their funeral. Over the years, in addition to Porter, the painter Ben Shahn, writers John Dos Passos and Upton Sinclair, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and folk singer Woody Guthrie created works about them. A year after their execution, supporters published the Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti, and both Sacco’s tentative English prose, which had grown more graceful through years in prison, and Vanzetti’s often lyrical passages won more hearts. “The truth is that not only have I not committed the two crimes for which I was convicted, but I have not stole a cent nor spilt a drop of human’s blood—except my own blood in hard labor—in my whole existence,” wrote Vanzetti.

  The truth about the information Sacco and Vanzetti possessed is shrouded in mystery. The majority of their supporters knew little about the depth of their anarchist activity; they were protesting the lack of evidence against the two men for the payroll robberies. Sacco and Vanzetti became a parable of justice denied: the judicial system will be merciless; no one will believe your innocence if you are swarthy, speak accented English, and are accused of a crime.

  The actions of the American elite, the Dartmouth judge, the Harvard-led commission, and the prosecutors in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts reflected the warning President Woodrow Wilson had made a decade earlier: “Hyphenated Americans,” he said, “have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life.” The fanatical actions of militant anarchists, a tiny fraction of the millions of Italian Americans then residing in America, tainted the community and helped to fuel anti-Italian prejudice.

  In 1924, three years before Sacco and Vanzetti’s death, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act that put into place large-scale immigration quotas, drastically cutting the number of people who could emigrate from southern and eastern Europe. A key expert witness to the congressional panel and the man largely responsible for getting the legislation passed was Harry Laughlin, a eugenicist and vowed proponent of eugenic sterilization, who believed that the American stock had been polluted by “alien hereditary degeneracy.” Congressman Albert Johnson, who chaired the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, was himself an honorary president of the Eugenics Research Association. The a
ctions of Congress deepened the perception of “good” Americans and “untrustworthy,” biologically inferior foreigners who were now, to the lawmakers’ dismay, rapidly reproducing. President Calvin Coolidge concurred, explaining, “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend.”

  After the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the message to Italian Americans became clear: any dissent or difference will no longer be tolerated. Blending fully into American life, a difficult dance for southern European Catholics struggling to understand Anglo-Saxon culture, could be the only path ahead.

  Angela Bambace

  It was the end of a long day on March 25, 1911, when a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trapping the workers who occupied the top three floors. The fire claimed the lives of 146 garment workers, mostly Italian and Jewish immigrant women. Bystanders on Greenwich Village streets noticed smoke and saw bundles falling from the top-floor windows. To their horror, they realized these were the bodies of young women, mostly between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three, leaping to their deaths. Many had been fighting the previous year for better working conditions during a citywide garment strike, but the Triangle owners refused to let them unionize.

  The horror of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire became a galvanizing force for young immigrant women, whose sorrow turned to rage and then to a purposeful anger. One of those future leaders was Angela Bambace, who was thirteen at the time of the incident and by the age of eighteen had begun organizing garment workers.

  Angela Bambace grew up in East Harlem, and like her mother, who trimmed hat plumes and worked in a shirtwaist factory, she became a seamstress. Both Angela and her sister Maria began to attend Italian socialist and anarchist meetings and decided to organize workers to improve factory conditions. Their mother, Giuseppina, supported her daughters but also feared for their safety, knowing that hired thugs often roughed up union advocates. Giuseppina accompanied her daughters to their union activity, always carrying a rolling pin to ensure that a protective motherly swing was in arm’s reach.

  In 1919, when Angela was galvanizing women garment workers to go on strike, she also agreed to her father’s wish that she marry Romolo Camponeschi, a Roman-born immigrant who worked as a waiter. The mismatched pair—Romolo sought the normalcy of domestic life while Angela set out to improve the lives of the working class—grew further apart after Angela gave birth to two boys, Oscar and Philip. It was boring, she would later admit to her grandchildren, “to stay home and make gnocchi and take care of the kids.”

  Angela Bambace and sons Philip (left) and Oscar.

  The marriage ended a few years later, followed by a bitter custody battle. Because of her organizing activities and involvement in socialist and anarchist circles, the judge ruled Angela an unfit mother and awarded custody to the father. Luckily for the distraught Angela, her mother lived near Romolo and agreed to help raise the grandchildren, allowing Angela to see them.

  Through the years, the boys had to endure their mother’s frequent absences and the many causes she supported. When Oscar celebrated his seventh birthday, he discovered the bad luck of being born on the date set for the midnight execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. His “party” consisted of a roomful of heartbroken adults gathered around the kitchen table, underneath which Oscar spent the evening.

  After a long day’s work as a factory seamstress, Bambace took on the perilous activity of union organizing. She was thrown down a flight of stairs by an enraged employer and even landed in jail. In the 1930s the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) sent her to organize small factory shops in Maryland and Virginia. Never learning to drive, she was chauffeured to these southern towns by a union worker. The two formed a motley pair: an Italian-American woman who spoke like a longshoreman and an African-American driver who had only one eye. They often had to sleep in the car because hotels refused to accommodate a black man.

  Angela Bambace became the first Italian-American woman elected into the male-dominated labor hierarchy, as vice president of the ILGWU. During the half century that Angela Bambace worked for the union, she recruited and organized thousands of workers, shaping the ILGWU into a powerful force. She dedicated her life to improving conditions for garment workers and helping to ensure that tragedies like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the worst industrial accident in New York City’s history, would never take place again.

  Protestant lawmakers, detesting what they saw as the menace of alcohol, enacted legislation to restrict it. Any drink with a standard alcoholic content could no longer be legally sold.

  Panicked by the addition of millions of immigrants, the incipient rise of organized labor to counter the brutalities of industrialization, and the emergence of radical politics, white Protestant lawmakers resorted to a more zealous moralism. Detesting what they saw as the menace of alcohol and its effects on the ethnic working class, they became determined to enact the “noble experiment” of restricting it. But the reformers could never have imagined that their impulse to control human behavior by forbidding a five-cent saloon beer at the end of a long day would lead to the creation of a sophisticated organized crime network that operated successfully for the rest of the twentieth century.

  On January 16, 1920, the Volstead Act, named for Minnesota congressman Andrew J. Volstead, became law, forbidding “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.” From the start, the law was almost completely unenforceable, with roughly thirty-three hundred agents to patrol a population of nearly 106 million people. Many of these agents were political appointees, the products of patronage machines, which meant they could be easily bribed. Prohibition did stop working-class people from socializing in neighborhood saloons. But it also whet the appetite of the middle and upper classes, especially young and newly emancipated women, ready to flaunt convention and rebel against an oppressive moralism, as they stepped into unlicensed bars known as speakeasies.

  Before Prohibition, a clear demarcation existed between a dangerous criminal element and the majority of the hardworking citizenry, with the two rarely, if ever interacting. Prohibition erased this line, allowing gangsters the ability to socialize with the affluent in speakeasies and nightclubs. In cities like New York, indulging in Prohibition nightlife and its aura of gentle illegality not only was titillating but defined cosmopolitanism. Keeping the social set wet by stocking speakeasies, cabarets, and nightclubs with liquor, as well as becoming the private bootlegger for parties held by the elite, helped legitimize gangsters, earned them hundreds of millions of dollars, and provided them with the accoutrements of a successful life: cars, women, and fancy homes.

  For middle-class and wealthy women, drinking at a speakeasy defined cosmopolitanism.

  Italian-American criminals in the earlier part of the century, like the Black Hand gangs, had made their money through prostitution, gambling, and extortion schemes. In states that had been dry before Prohibition, Italian Americans controlled a bootlegging business; in the formerly dry state of Colorado, for example, that business centered in Denver. But Italian Americans did not dominate the national crime scene until Prohibition, which turned previous hoodlums, muggers, and robbers into gangsters—cunning, brutal, and enormously successful.

  Members of the Italian-American Monte Vulture Social Club celebrate with wine in the dry year of 1929. As an old proverb had it: “Six months a year Italians drink wine; the other six months, they don’t drink any water.”

  As soon as the law went into place, criminal activity soared, starting with the robbing of warehouses stocked full with spirits that could no longer be legally sold. After that supply ran dry, some bootleggers worked with brewery owners willing to skirt the law. Breweries continued the usual distilling process of producing spirits with a standard alcohol content of 3–4 percent, and then “de-alcoholized” the product to 0.5 percent, the legal limit under Prohibition. This process enabled the owners, or the gangsters who now fronted for them, to siphon off the
harder stuff from the original production.

  The Genna brothers, members of a Chicago gangster family, raise a glass together.

  Much of the alcohol consumed during Prohibition was smuggled from Canada and overseas via trucks, trains, boats, and airplanes. Bootleggers also used homemade stills, and criminals like former Black Hand member Frank Yale (Americanized from “Uale”) paid residents of the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn to produce spirits with one-gallon home stills—and shot those who seemed inclined to squeal about the practice. In Chicago, the Genna brothers paid neighbors fifteen dollars a day to produce moonshine in every home so that the brothers could sell the home stills’ production of roughly 350 gallons of raw alcohol a week.

  The original bootleggers were Irish and Jews, with Italians following behind. Italian-American criminals ran bootlegging businesses in Los Angeles, Kansas City’s Little Italy, Boston’s North End, Detroit, Chicago, and New York. These children of immigrants thought school a burden, not a means to success, and most dropped out when they were fourteen or even younger, finding a shortcut to the American dream of wealth and power.

  Because the money to be made was enormous, so was the amount of blood shed. Former Black Hand members, now newly minted bootleggers, understood how to employ brutal and unpredictable violence to eliminate rival gangs and consolidate their power. One of the most famously violent of this new crop of gangsters was Chicago’s Al Capone. He assumed control of his syndicate from a mastermind named John Torrio, who had both politicians and police on his payroll and managed competing criminal interests like a savvy CEO. Torrio advocated cooperation among gangsters instead of competition, and the arrangement lasted until a mayor was elected who wouldn’t succumb to the syndicate’s tactics. When Torrio was finally arrested, the tenuous gangster peace ended, eventually replaced by a bloody free-for-all.