In 1923 the Italian government tried to stop Carlo Tresca from publishing his leftist Italian-American newspaper Il Martello (“The Hammer”). The American government, concurring with the Italian embassy’s description of Tresca as an agitator, arrested and jailed him for publishing in Il Martello a two-line advertisement for a book written by a physician about birth control. The literary critic H. L. Mencken was so incensed by this assault on free speech that he ran the same ad in his magazine, the American Mercury, and, to no avail, challenged the government to arrest him. The mounting criticism of the government’s actions influenced President Coolidge’s decision to commute Tresca’s sentence of a year’s imprisonment to four months.
After Giovannitti’s imprisonment during the Lawrence Strike, he continued to write political poetry.
Of all the pro-Fascist Italian-American newspapers, the most important propaganda vehicles were San Francisco’s L’Italia, published by Ettore Patrizi (both A. P. Giannini’s Bank of America and Di Giorgio Fruit Corporation bought ad space in this publication), and New York’s Il Progresso Italo-Americano, which had the largest national circulation.
Generoso Pope had come to America from southern Italy penniless. As a young man he had hauled water to workers in New York City building the Pennsylvania Railroad, worked his way up to foreman, and eventually made his fortune as the owner of the Colonial Sand & Stone Company, the largest supplier of sand and gravel in the country. Along the way he befriended gangsters like Frank Costello, who was godfather to one of Generoso’s sons.
In 1928, Pope bought Il Progresso for over $2 million. Before he purchased the paper, the Italian ambassador and counsel general both became personally involved with the sale, each expressing concern that the paper needed to fall into sympathetic hands. They had nothing to worry about with Pope; he accepted its “free telegraph service,” went to Italy to receive a private audience with Mussolini, and faithfully printed Fascist falsehoods until 1941.
Pope also helped organize one of Mussolini’s biggest propaganda stunts in the United States: the overseas flight of the Fascist air marshal Italo Balbo. In 1933, during a time when trips across the Atlantic were still considered perilous, Balbo led a squadron of twenty-five seaplanes flying to Chicago’s World’s Fair. On the shores of Lake Michigan, tens of thousands of Italian Americans eagerly waited to see the fleet’s pageantry as it flew in a perfect V formation. Balbo then headed to New York, where he would be welcomed by two million people with a ticker tape parade organized by Pope, followed by a lunch at the invitation of President Roosevelt. The Italian-American masses, thrilled at this American recognition of Italian strength, listened rapturously as Balbo used the opportunity to reinforce Mussolini’s key propaganda message: “Be proud you are Italians,” he told the cheering crowd. “Mussolini has ended the era of humiliations.”
Italian Americans believed that Fascism celebrated the glory of being Italian. “You’ve got to admit one thing,” a young anti-Fascist Italian-American woman observed at the time. “He has enabled four million Italians in America to hold up their heads, and that is something. If you had been branded as undesirable by a quota law, you would understand how much that means.”
But what Italian Americans didn’t know, watching Balbo’s show and expressing a love for the motherland, was the increasingly militaristic and oppressive nature of the regime. Mussolini, now known as Il Duce (“the leader”), directed his secret police to spy on and imprison dissenters—or the next-worst fate, exile them to southern Italy. Militaristic Fascist rallies took place each Saturday for schoolchildren because Mussolini wanted to condition every child and citizen to prepare for a perpetual state of war. And still, President Roosevelt welcomed Balbo to the United States and called Mussolini “that admirable Italian gentleman.” The following year, Fortune magazine ran a feature praising Fascism’s “ancient virtues” of “discipline, duty, courage, glory, and sacrifice.”
Only when Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935, his first step in restoring Italy to the greatness of the Roman Empire, did Americans take a second look. When Ethiopia’s leader, Haile Selassie, pleaded for the world’s help, America was shocked to learn about the Italian dictator’s dive-bombing raids and use of mustard gas on the Ethiopian people. Yet, conservative publications like Henry Luce’s Time magazine still had plenty of laudatory words for the dictator. The readers of Time learned that “Mussolini is a spellbinder . . . [He] is more controlled, more disposed to reticence, less expansive than the average Italian . . . He gives the impression that confidence will be well placed in him, and power turned to good uses . . . It is this un-Italian steadiness which marks him off from the rest.”
Italian Americans continued to buy this kind of praise. When Mussolini declared a “Day of Faith” in Italy, telling every woman to give up her gold wedding ring to raise money for the country’s war efforts, rallies were held in Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and New York. Italian-American women handed over their precious gold wedding bands and in return received steel ones blessed by local parish priests. Generoso Pope led a huge Madison Square Garden rally in support of the war, declaring that he had sent a check of $100,000 to Mussolini’s government in Rome.
Roosevelt wanted to stop the aggression and agreed with the League of Nations’ decision to impose economic sanctions on Italy, calling for a “moral embargo” on trade. Generoso Pope, most likely working with the Italian embassy, ran a campaign in Il Progresso urging Italian Americans to protest the embargo, including a template protest letter. The government was barraged with tens of thousands of letters, and Roosevelt backed down. While the United States didn’t ship weapons, it continued to send exports to Italy.
Nonetheless, Roosevelt refused to recognize Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia. Republicans tried to capitalize on his position, telling the Italian-American community not to reelect a man who refused to support Italy and instead backed the wishes of African Americans to support Selassie. These two communities, which had coexisted, if at times uneasily, now found themselves political enemies. Combined with the Depression and competition for jobs, neighborhoods like East Harlem became rife with racial taunts, street brawls, and an increased police presence in the streets.
Mussolini was stripping away civil liberties in Italy, but many Italian Americans remained blind to his actions.
Mussolini personally told his Italian-American mouthpiece, Generoso Pope, that Italy would not discriminate against Jews, and the publisher dutifully reported the dictator’s words. Yet Italian Jews soon discovered the reality behind Mussolini’s blatant lie as their rights were slowly eroded. By the time Mussolini’s racial laws fully came into effect, Jews had been stripped of their citizenship and prohibited from public jobs, skilled professions, and schools.
Even Generoso Pope couldn’t accept the 1938 racial decrees, and while he continued to support the dictator, he criticized Mussolini’s regime for the first time in decades. With atrocities rapidly taking place in Europe, in the following years anti-Fascist Italian-American groups finally began gaining ground against pro-Fascist publications. In California, anti-Fascists took on San Francisco’s L’Italia; Carlo Tresca continued to devote his energies to writing against Pope and denouncing Mussolini; and Carlo Sforza, a former count and foreign minister, became a leading member of the anti-Fascist Mazzini Society (founded in 1939 by the historian and Italian exile Gaetano Salvemini), and had the ear of top members of Roosevelt’s administration.
President Franklin Roosevelt (left) and Il Progresso publisher Generoso Pope. In 1941, FDR finally insisted that Pope rein in his support for Fascism in the Italian-American press.
Fiorello La Guardia, fed up with the Fascist propaganda in Il Progresso, decided it was time to play hardball with Generoso Pope, whom La Guardia referred to as a cullo di cavallo (“horse’s ass”). He asked the FBI to investigate Pope’s tax returns and grill him about his Fascist activities. The FBI balked until Roosevelt granted his permission. In 1941, Roosevelt asked Pope to come to
Washington for a private meeting and told him that it was time to rein in his support of Fascism. Whatever FDR said, or threatened, during the meeting, Pope stopped praising Mussolini in his editorials and finally, several months before Pearl Harbor, denounced Mussolini in Il Progresso in both Italian and English.
Not until Mussolini attacked France in 1940 did the majority of Italian Americans begin to understand the regime’s brutality and the true meaning of Fascism. For a year the community waited in fear, worried about the events taking place in Italy, and wondering if America would enter the war. Four days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, on December 11, 1941, they received their answer: Mussolini, standing on the balcony of Rome’s Piazza Venezia, declared war on the United States, forever ending the decade-long romance with America and Italian Americans.
Arturo Toscanini
After Mussolini’s March on Rome, Arturo Toscanini—then fifty-five years old and considered one of the most illustrious conductors in the world—was not impressed. As most of Italy and America embraced the daring of the would-be dictator, Toscanini reportedly said to a friend before the march that if he were capable of killing a man, he would kill Mussolini.
Toscanini had met Mussolini in 1919, and even briefly flirted with a form of radical socialism that Mussolini first supported. Toscanini’s roots were antimonarch—his father, Claudio, had been a soldier under Garibaldi and had fought among the Thousand in Sicily. Arturo, perhaps inheriting his father’s political sense, feared Mussolini’s ambitions earlier than others, and as an artist he inherently understood the dangers of authoritarianism to freedom of expression.
Toscanini had a famous temper to match his perfectionism, and he refused to tolerate the slightest bit of laziness or slack on the part of musicians or staff. His embrace of rigor and excellence in pursuit of artistic freedom would clash magnificently with Fascism’s crudity and heavy-handedness. From the earliest days of Mussolini’s rule, Fascists began requiring that the “Giovinezza,” the party anthem, be played during concerts. In one performance of Falstaff at La Scala, members of the audience demanded the “Giovinezza” before the third act. The conductor refused and their chants continued, leading Toscanini to smash his baton and leave the pit.
Toscanini’s renown enabled him to escape the Fascist stranglehold, and he traveled often to America, serving as a conductor for the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera. It wasn’t until 1931 that Toscanini’s position would have personal repercussions, after Mussolini wrote into law that the “Giovinezza” had to be played at public events. When the sixty-four-year-old conductor refused to play the anthem for a concert in Bologna, Fascist thugs surrounded and attacked him outside the theater, punching him in the face and neck. In the next years, life became intolerable for Toscanini, whose phone was tapped and movements monitored by the secret police.
A well-timed offer provided another opportunity to live and work in America. Trying to improve its radio content, the National Broadcasting Company invited Toscanini to create and conduct an orchestra for weekend broadcasts. Beginning in 1937 on radio and lasting until 1954 on television, Toscanini was America’s “maestro,” conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra. The first classical conductor to become a household name, Toscanini brought the music of Verdi, Wagner, Vivaldi, Brahms, and Beethoven into millions of homes. Combining technical perfection with bold imagination, he famously elicited brilliant performances from his musicians.
Toscanini enraptured American audiences, but his defiance of Mussolini continued to endanger him. During one of his return trips to Italy, Mussolini, furious that the conductor had traveled to Palestine in protest of the newly implemented racial laws, seized his passport. Friends feared imprisonment or death, and a Swiss journalist seeking to help posed as a Fascist informer. The journalist suggested that the American press was on the verge of learning about Mussolini’s actions. Il Duce, still concerned about his image in America, fell for the ruse and had Toscanini’s passport returned.
Returning to New York, Toscanini settled permanently in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. On July 25, 1943, an announcement interrupted one of his NBC broadcast concerts: Mussolini had been toppled. The aging conductor clasped his hands and looked to the heavens.
Albert Onesti (left) had second thoughts about the enemy after visiting his family’s ancestral village.
In schoolyards, kids booed Italian boys, called them “Mussolini,” and flung the words “dago” and “wop” as easily as brown-bag lunches. For older boys, wearing the uniform of the US military was the ultimate show of patriotism, and huge numbers of Italian Americans answered this call by enlisting. Even more responded dutifully to the draft. By 1942, US Attorney General Francis Biddle acknowledged that half a million Italian-American men were serving the country, a high percentage for an ethnic group numbering five million. The Italian-American newspaper Il Progresso now performed a 180-degree turn, trumpeting the call of American patriotism against Fascist Italy, and featuring page after page of Italian Americans participating in the war effort. The war had tested the meaning of the hyphen, and the answer was clear: one’s heritage might be Italian, but one’s allegiance was to America.
Ambivalence, however, coincided with this allegiance, causing Italian Americans much grief. As author Jerre Mangione wrote in his memoir An Ethnic at Large:
Anxiety was a common trait of all my relatives, myself included, and the war worried them as nothing else in the United States ever had. Even the years of the Depression, when many of them lost their homes to the banks, were not as fraught with anxiety. It worried them that their adopted country, the birthplace of their children, was at war with their native land, dropping American bombs on their own kin. They worried that their sons might be drafted, killed, wounded, or taken prisoners, all of which was happening with increasing frequency. They were not the only ones in the nation who had such worries, of course, but their capacity to emotionalize their anxieties seemed to surpass that of any other people I knew, and I could not help wondering if this was a peculiarly Mediterranean legacy of theirs, an instinctive anticipation of tragedy germinated through the centuries by frequent traumas and tears. In any case, their worries loomed distinctively large and black compared to the general mood of the nation which was bizarrely optimistic.
But lingering doubts and dark fears had to be kept private, or among closest family, certainly not shared with the larger population. This “two-ness” dilemma, as it was labeled, affected many second-generation Italian-American enlisted men, as well as those who watched their brothers and neighbors sent to Italy. Alberto Onesti, a World War II private, articulated this predicament more than seventy years later as he recalled his basic training in South Carolina in 1943. His superiors had asked if he would have any objection to killing Italian soldiers. “Absolutely not,” Onesti had replied. “He’s wearing a different uniform than I am. I don’t care if he’s Italian, Polish, German. I’m going to kill him.”
The answer satisfied the commanding officers, who sent Onesti to Italy. But upon reaching the same roads once traveled by his ancestors, Onesti’s initial reaction grew more nuanced. He decided to track down his family’s former village in Umbria and met a man who asked Onesti what town he was looking for. “Olveto,” Onesti responded, prompting more questions from the man. “He heard my name and he went crazy. He says, ‘we talk about you all the time.’ The whole town came out—they gave me such a welcome. You can’t ever believe it, like a hero walked in. I met my aunts, my cousins. I still was against Mussolini and Fascists. But I had a whole family out there.”
As Italian-American soldiers grappled with this dilemma, at home the ethnic group worked hard to suppress anything that announced one’s “Italianness.” Along with the Germans and Japanese, Italians spoke the “enemy’s language,” and the FBI had been monitoring Italian publications because so many of them had been pro-Fascist. One result of this intense scrutiny was that the Italian language and its numerous dialects, once part of th
e polyglot of America, began to fade. Italian-American newspapers changed the names of their publications to English or stopped publishing altogether; store owners put up signs announcing, “No Italian spoken for the duration of the war”; and the number of high school and college Italian language classes dropped precipitously.
Italian Americans understood that to be American meant helping with the war effort, and they found many ways to contribute. At home, Italian-American women, with their dominant presence in the garment industry, worked tirelessly in large cities around the country. Many of them were employed by Italian-American dress and suit store owners who manufactured and supplied uniforms to the GIs, specializing in popular styles like the short-cut Eisenhower jacket.
Italian-American merchants showed their support for the war effort. Some even posted signs announcing that Italian couldn’t be spoken for the duration of the war.
The US military approached the Italian immigrant chef Ettore Boiardi, who had been mass-producing his own sauces and spaghetti, to provide supplies for the servicemen. His factory employees, working seven days a week in twenty-four-hour shifts to produce enough spaghetti, meatballs, and tomato sauce, became the largest supplier of rations to US and Allied troops. Boiardi’s company also made other items popular with the troops, like ham and eggs and hot dogs, and it supplied fat-laden staples to the Russians to get them through the harsh winters. The American troops liked the canned pasta and sought it out once the war was over, finding the product under its easier-to-pronounce phonetic label: Boy-Ar-Dee.
The Italian Americans Page 14