A Renegade History of the United States

by Thaddeus Russell

  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,” were “sober, thrifty and industrious,” and constituted “an unimpeachable racial factor in the formation of the American race of the future.” Nonetheless, in 1924 Congress passed the National Origins Act, which further curbed immigration by southern and eastern Europeans and reduced the flow of Italians to four thousand annually, a reduction of 98 percent from its peak at the beginning of the century.

  Italian American representatives continued to argue that they were inherently American, as when Chicago’s L’Italia newspaper declared in 1928 that “the 200,000 Italians of Chicago represent an honest and laborious community.” In the 1930s, when the Depression made competition over jobs and housing a life-and-death contest, many Italian Americans began to heed the calls to distance themselves from “bad” Americans. Newspapers reported a number of incidents of Italians angrily protesting or violently confronting the influx of African Americans into their neighborhoods. But the efforts to distance themselves from blacks did not cohere into a new Italian American racial identity and culture until the 1940s. As Thomas Guglielmo puts it, “Indeed, not until World War II did many Italians identify openly and mobilize politically as white.” On the Near North Side, where large populations of Italians and African Americans lived in close proximity, “neighborhood hostility between Italians and African Americans was rare in the 1920s and 1930s.” But in the 1940s, Italians waged several battles against black residents in their neighborhoods.

  Father Luigi Giambastiani of St. Philip Benizi Church, the largest Sicilian church in Chicago, led a movement to keep Italians and blacks segregated in new public-housing projects. According to Guglielmo, “prior to the 1940s in his many public statements and essays in defense of Italians,” Giambastiani “mentioned whites rarely,” “defended Italians by highlighting their virtues as Italians, not as whites,” and “even in his neighborhood battles against incoming African Americans in the mid-1930s, he shied away from explicit talk about whiteness.” By the 1940s, however, “Giambastiani’s language had changed dramatically, as Italians became ‘whites’ and race became color.” In a 1942 letter written on behalf of his constituency to the Chicago Housing Authority, Giambastiani explained that “the cohabitation or quasi-cohabitation of Negro and White hurts the feelings and traditions of the White people of this community.” Even more significantly, he declared a fundamental biological difference between his people and black people: “You know neither you, nor I, would cherish the idea of living next door to a neighbor from whom nature, tradition and culture have segregated us. By this cohabitation, the Negroes might be uplifted, but the Whites, by the very laws of environment feel that they will be lowered.” After years of speaking only for “Italians” and “Sicilians,” Giambastiani now represented “the white people of St. Philip” against “the newly come Negroes.” At the same time, a director of the Cabrini public-housing project reported being told “repeatedly” by Italian prospective residents “that families would move in if the Negroes were segregated, but they would not if they are not segregated.”

  A University of Chicago researcher found during the 1940s that attempts by blacks to move into the Italian neighborhood on the Near West Side had “been blocked by the persistence and resistance of the Italian community,” and that “the attempts of Negroes to use public facilities [there] … still meet with violence.” In 1941 a group of young Italian men calling itself the Black Hand Gang began beating and shooting African Americans in the neighborhood, and two years later a riot involving several hundred blacks and Italians erupted after shots were fired into an African American’s apartment. In 1943 local Italians organized a petition drive to persuade city officials and a property owners’ association to buy all the available homes in the area to preempt blacks attempting to buy or rent them. During this time, arsonists set fire to several black homes, and Italian shop owners on the Near West Side began refusing to serve African American customers.

  The rejection of blacks and the embrace of whiteness took on intellectual and political legitimacy during the war. Italian American newspapers and newspapers published by labor unions with large Italian memberships reproduced the basic points in Ruth Benedict’s best-selling 1943 book The Races of Mankind, which included, as one newspaper put it, the point that “the three primary races of the world are: the Caucasoid, the Mongoloid, and the Negroid. The Aryans, the Jews, the Italians are not races.” During the war, the Chicago city government regularly invited Italian Americans to participate in the annual “I Am an American Day” celebrations at Soldier Field, and the city’s newspapers hailed “Chicago’s Army of Italian Folk” who “have been assimilated and Americanized to a large degree” and were going all “out to win the war.” In several major cities, the Order of the Sons of Italy in America launched drives to encourage Italian Americans to purchase war bonds, even though the funds for those bonds went partly toward defeating Italy. In the early 1940s, the U.S. naturalization application no longer re
quired Italians to identify as a race separate from other whites. According to Guglielmo, in the first five decades of mass immigration, “Italians were often listed as southern or northern Italian for race and white for color. By the beginning of World War II, however, Italians, as well as many other groups like Armenians, Yugoslavians, Greeks, English, Syrians, and Mexicans, began offering the same answer for the race and color questions: white.” Perhaps the most powerful evidence of the success of the campaign to assimilate Italians into American culture was the fact that, unlike Japanese Americans, no Italians Americans born in the United States were interned as threats to national security during World War II, even though most Italian American newspapers had supported the rise of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime.

  Relations between blacks and Italians did not improve after the war. In 1947 several hundred students at Chicago’s Wells High School, led by three Italian youths, walked out of classes to protest the district’s allowing “so many Negroes in our school.” One month after the school strike, ten African Americans died in a Near West Side apartment building set ablaze by arsonists. And in 1951 in nearby Cicero, the National Guard was called in and martial law declared when arson and rioting greeted a black family who had moved into an all-white apartment building. Reports that most of the rioters were Italian Americans were affirmed by the Baltimore Afro-American, one of the leading national black newspapers, which identified them as “8,000 frenzied, blood-thirsty descendants of immigrants from the Mediterranean area of Europe.” As Guglielmo concludes, “Whiteness was becoming, for the first time, a central part of Italians’ public selfunderstanding.”

  Like their Irish predecessors, Italian Americans seized on the most militant forms of public service as a means to assimilate. Italian American newspapers encouraged their male readers to enlist in the armed forces and trumpeted the sacrifice and valor of the sons of Italy in the service of Uncle Sam. During the 1940s, Italian Americans also began to move in large numbers into municipal police forces—in many cases supplanting Irish Americans as the dominant ethnic group in law enforcement.

  Frank Rizzo was one of many Italian Americans who used a law enforcement career to establish himself as both a good American and as an enemy of renegades. The son of immigrants, Rizzo joined the Philadelphia police force in 1943 and was assigned to the predominantly African American community of West Philadelphia. He rose through the ranks by raiding underground speakeasies and gambling parlors that were owned and patronized by blacks. In the 1960s, Rizzo, as deputy police commissioner and then chief of police, ordered what he called “my men, my army” to arrest nearly every civil rights and black power activist who demonstrated in the city, including Malcolm X, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and a group of black teenagers who held a rally demanding more courses on African American history in the city’s public schools. In 1970 Rizzo was applauded by many of Philadelphia’s Italian Americans when his officers raided the local headquarters of the Black Panther Party, hauled six members into the street, and forced them to strip naked in front of a news photographer. “Imagine the big Black Panthers with their pants down,” he said. Rizzo also cracked down on bad whites. He closed down beatnik coffeehouses and gay bars and banned hippies from the city.

  In 1971, 86 percent of Philadelphia’s Italian Americans voted for Rizzo in the mayoral election, helping to make him the first Italian American to hold the city’s top office. As mayor, Rizzo opposed public housing in white neighborhoods, arguing that people there “did not want black people moving in with them.” The political scientists Jack Citrin, Donald Philip Green, and David Sears have concluded that Rizzo transcended his Italian identity by becoming “an established symbol of hostility to blacks.” He also, as historian Stefano Luconi puts it, helped Italian Americans replace “their ethnic sense of affiliation based on national ancestry” with a new “racial identity” as white.

  NIGGAZ WITH SHORT MEMORIES

  During the rise of Italian Americans into American respectability, Louis Prima and the hepcats of his generation were replaced by men who did not dance.

  Like many Italians (and Irish before them), Frank Sinatra’s parents moved from disrepute to citizenship through government work. In the 1910s and 1920s, Marty Sinatra worked as a prizefighter and bootlegger and operated a speakeasy with his wife, Dolly, who supplemented the family’s income by performing illegal abortions. But Dolly worked her way up the ranks of the local Democratic Party, becoming leader of the Third Ward in Hoboken, New Jersey, and through her political connections secured a job for Marty as one of Hoboken’s first Italian American firefighters. Though they passed on to their son a racial liberalism that was becoming increasingly rare among Italian Americans, Frank Sinatra’s racial identification was white from the beginning.

  Whereas Louis Prima chose the black street musicians of New Orleans as his role models, Sinatra idolized the symbols of Caucasian performance of his day: Bing Crosby, a descendant of Mayflower pilgrims who grew up in Washington State, and Rudy Vallee, native of Maine and Yale graduate whose first band was called “the Connecticut Yankees.” Crosby and Vallee popularized a new style of singing called “crooning,” which employed the tones of black jazz singers but replaced the bodily sexuality of jazz with a romantic and spiritual eroticism. Both were known for wearing conservative suits, standing stock-still on stage, and for singing ballads instead of dance music. Vanity Fair magazine praised Vallee in 1929 for having “none of the dash or rhythm of the usual jazz player,” while scholars have characterized Crosby’s style as a “disembodied voice” and his personality as exuding “the traditional values associated with white Protestant hegemony: a good work ethic, morality, family, and small-town living.” When a teenaged Frank Sinatra saw Crosby perform in New Jersey, he decided to “do that.” The man who more than anyone reinvented the image of Italian Americans saw Bing Crosby as “the father of my career, the idol of my youth.” The only problem this caused for Sinatra was when Hollywood executives asked him to perform a few dance numbers in movies. “I had never danced,” remembered Sinatra. “I didn’t know how to dance.”

  Along with Sinatra, an entire generation of tuxedo-clad, slow-moving Italian American crooners followed Crosby to stardom. Ruggiero Eugenio di Rodolpho Colombo (Russ Columbo), Pierino Como (Perry Como), Francesco Paolo LoVecchio (Frankie Laine), Dino Crocetti (Dean Martin), Anthony Dominick Benedetto (Tony Bennett), Vito Rocco Farinola (Vic Damone), Gennaro Luigi Vitaliano (Jerry Vale), and Francis Avallone (Frankie Avalon) all credited “der Bingle” of Spokane, Washington, as their primary influence.

  This new generation of Italian American entertainers shared Sinatra’s view of the new dance music that emerged in the 1950s. “Rock-and-roll is the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear,” Sinatra told Congress in 1958. “Rock-and-roll smells phony and false. It is sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons, and by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration, and sly, lewd—in plain fact, dirty—lyrics … it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth.”

  In response to the raw, driving sexuality of black-influenced rock, young Italian American men in New York and Philadelphia did to the new music what Sinatra and his generation had done to jazz. A style combining smooth vocal harmonies, romantic lyrics, and a stationary stage presence, doo-wop was invented in the 1940s by black youth on street corners, but it shot to the top of the pop charts in the late 1950s when Italian Americans adopted it as their own—just as most African American performers moved toward “soul music.” From 1958, when Dion (DiMucci) and the Belmonts placed several songs on the pop charts, until the “British Invasion” of 1964, Italian American doo-wop groups dominated American popular music. All wearing conservative suits and exuding a benign romanticism, the Capris, the Elegants, the Mystics, the Duprees, the Del-Satins, the Four Jays, the Essentials, Randy and the Rainbows, and Vito & the Salutations declared the
arrival of Italians into American civilization.

  During the rise of doo-wop and Frank Rizzo, Malcolm X mocked the newly white Italians. “No Italian will ever jump up in my face and start putting bad mouth on me,” he said, “because I know his history. I tell him when you’re talking about me you’re talking about your pappy, your father. He knows his history. He knows how he got that color.” Though fewer and fewer Italian Americans know the history of which Malcolm X spoke, some have reenacted it.

  As Louis Prima faded as the symbol of Italian America, he nonetheless remained devoted to its primitive past. In 1947 he scored one of his last hits, “Civilization (Bongo, Bongo, Bongo),” a recording that might have served as the renegade immigrant’s anthem. Singing “I don’t wanna leave the Congo” and “I’m so happy in the jungle,” Prima mocks the members of civilization who “hurry like savages to get aboard an iron train.” When “they’ve got two weeks vacation, they hurry to vacation ground. They swim and they fish, ha, that’s what I do all year round.”

  In the early 1950s, Prima joined with Sam Butera, another black Italian from New Orleans, and Butera’s band the Witnesses, and began playing a harder, wilder version of his music. Music critic Art Fein wrote thirty years later, “The music they were playing, and that Prima sensed was vital and even visionary, then had no name. It’s taken historians thirty years to pinpoint it for what it always was—rock-and-roll.” Prima further bucked the trend of Italian Americans toward civilization by proclaiming his admiration for the new jungle music. “There’s nothing, but nothing, wrong with rock-and-roll,” he said. “It’s got that beat, and as long as the kids keep listening to it, they’ll keep out of trouble—don’t sell those kids short—they’ve got an instinct for the kind of music that’s fun to listen to and dance to.” Prima chided his generation for attacking rock-and-roll and thereby renouncing its primitive past. “I don’t know what their parents are complaining about,” he said. “They used to dance the black bottom—and that was downright vulgar.”