Thursday, March 30, 2006
Book: "The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism" (Social Reformers).
The ANNOTICO Report
Italian Americans have a lengthy and influential record of radical [reformist] working-class activity, for which the IA Community should be justly proud.
But that positive history of promoting issues, such as Labor Unions, Safety on the Job, Social Security, just a few among a overwhelming list of Rights that we now take for granted, were considered "radical" then, has been ignored, and come close to being buried, because the IA Community felt that the "radical" actions in a "host" country seemed to be ungracious, and reflect badly on the IA Community, and many IAs hoped to become much like "the establishment", and therefore shunned the "activists".
This book emerged out of a 1997 academic
conference on Italian American radicalism and includes essays by prominent
scholars such as Rudolph J. Vecoli, Jennifer Guglielmo , Fred Gardaphe, and
Donna K. Gabaccia.
Book Review: The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism
Political Affairs Magazine
By Clara West
March 30, 2006
Edited by Philip Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer
Westport, Connecticut, Praeger, 2003
The Lost
World of Italian-American Radicalism is an important collection of essays on
Italian American working-class history. Generally perceived as conservative,
Italian Americans have a lengthy and influential record of radical
working-class activity. According to the editors, this conservative image,
fueled by media stereotypes, presents Italian Americans as "hostile to
political, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities."
The radical history of Italian Americans is often ignored by people in that
community because it is deemed "somehow too Italian and not sufficiently
American" for fear that this history "deviated from the norms of
dominant society." In the view of the ed! itors, distorting or ignoring
this history "increase[s] the community?s vulnerability" by
eliminating a rich history of socialists, anarchists, communists and civil
rights activists who sought solidarity and equality of all working-class
people.
Often prominent Italian American figures and organizations led the way in
erasing this past and pushing a conservative image. They emphasized a
historical narrative, say the editors, of Italian American history that ignored
politics and insists that Italian Americans have no need for ideology or
struggle for society-wide equality. A recovery of this history is needed, argue
the editors, in order to tell the truth about Italian Americans and to
re-inspire the community to reclaim its long tradition of political activism.
This book emerged out of a 1997 academic conference on Italian American
radicalism and includes essays by prominent scholars such as Rudolph J. Vecoli,
Jennifer Guglielmo , Fred Gardaphe, and Donna K. Ga! baccia.
Vecoli’s essay provides a broad picture of the forging of Italian
American working class radicalism and its early demise in the first half of the
20th century. Vecoli notes the eagerness with which Italian immigrants joined
the US labor movement in the first
decades of the century. Italian radicals, moved by the Russian Revolution,
urged "the uprising of the American working class." Left-wing figures
such as Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were persecuted for their
involvement in workers? struggles. And by the Depression-era and the founding
of industrial unionism, Italian American workers "participated in unions
and labor struggles on a larger scale than ever before."
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Vecoli
catalogs a number of factors, both domestic and transnational, that affected
the early demise of this radical ferment. Political repression in the US leading to deportations of Italian American radical
leaders was one major factor. Another was the rise of fascism in Italy. Italian American organizations
like the Order Sons of Italy in America promoted support for fascist Italy and rejected their previously pro-labor positions. (Vecoli notes, in
contrast to this, that Italian American radicals were among the leading figures
in the anti-fascist movement.) The rise of gangsterism in working-class
institutions, a phenomenon spearheaded by Irish and Jewish criminal elements
and taken up by some well-known Italian American individuals, writes Vecoli,
also contributed to the decline of radical activism in the community. By the
late 1940s and early 1950s, McCarthyism and anti-labor laws severely curtailed
left elements and pushed conservative! working class figures to the foreground.
Most important, perhaps, was the issue of racism. Like other European immigrant
communities, Italian Americans were racialized in the US as white. This process, both a result of existing
racist practices and institutions in the US
and of pro-fascist attitudes among Italian immigrants and Italian American
communities, according to Vecoli, receives further examination by Jennifer Guglielmo.
Guglielmo, co-editor of another book titled Are Italians White?: How Race is Made
in America, points out that by the 1940s with the decline of radical leadership
and activism in the Italian American community, like many other European
immigrant communities, Italian American workers had begun "to insist on
their whiteness, entitling them to privileged political rights, better-paying
jobs, and leadership of the union." Guglielmo goes on to add that they
"did so by practicing and institutionalizing policies of racialized
exclusion in the ! union and industry." Thus white identity for many
Italian American workers came as a result of their direct attack on the equal
democratic rights of non-white workers.
Fred Gardaphe?s essay works toward recovering the left tradition among Italian
American writers. Gardaphe looks briefly at the works of such figures as
Communist Party founder Louis Fraina (Lewis Corey), Communist Party member and
author of the proletarian novel, Christ in Concrete, Pietro di Donato,
pro-working class writer Jerre Mangione, anti-fascist biographer Frances Winwar,
pro-Communist novelist and McCarthyite witch hunt victim Carl Marzani, and
writer Angello Pelligrini as well as a score of other radical poets, novelists,
artists and essayists.
Immigrant historian Donna K. Gabaccia closes the book with an interesting essay
that argues essentially that none of this history was inevitable or the result
of inherent cultural or racial characteristics of Italians or Italian
Americans. Rather! , the trajectory of the history of Italian Americans
resulted from the domestic and global contexts in which it occurred.
"Capitalism," Gabaccia concludes, "class, politics, and the
state were not trivial players in the making of Italian Americans, or in the
making of Italian American ethnicity. They determined Italian Americans? losses,
restricted their choices, and made them ? along with Italian American studies ?
what they are today."
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/
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