A century ago Italian immigrants supplied the backbone of American anarchism; their later conservatism was the price of being accepted as white.
Say Italian American today and the picture is Rudy Giuliani stumping for Trump, Samuel Alito, Mike Pompeo. In post-2016 polling, Italian Americans were the second-largest European ethnic group behind Trump, ahead of the Irish and the English.
But that Italian-language newspaper calling Columbus a pirate and an adventurer ran in 1892.
Where they came from
Most early arrivals came from the south, from Sicily and around Naples. The region was still effectively feudal, and after unification the gains went to the industrial north.
As the activist Carlo Tresca put it, they did not need to read Marx to be convinced society had to change.
In America, more than 80 percent were unskilled peasants. Immigration officials listed them separately as South Italians, and papers called them naturally bloodthirsty, treacherous and vengeful.
They stood with Black workers, then stopped
The first Italians had not been shaped by the Anglo-American racial order. Many worked alongside Black labourers and lived in adjoining slums. Employers called them black labour.
Italian radical papers reported Southern lynchings in detail and attacked the government for denying Black Americans equal rights.
But once they saw the price of being black, as Rudolph Vecoli writes, they hurried to distance themselves and be accepted as white. The Irish and the Jews made the same move; the Italians made it more slowly.
The trial that ended it
In 1920 a shoemaker and a fishmonger, Sacco and Vanzetti, were charged with a robbery-murder in Massachusetts. Both followed the anarchist Galleani, and anti-anarchist and anti-Italian prejudice drowned out the evidence.
They went to the electric chair in 1927. Sacco's last words were, Long live anarchy. Fifty years later a Massachusetts governor formally acknowledged they had been treated unjustly.
After that, Italian America moved to the centre and then to the right.
Today the stalls in New York's Little Italy sell Al Capone and John Gotti on a T-shirt. Imagine Tresca, Sacco, Vanzetti and Galleani instead.
Why it matters
The image of an ethnic group tends to freeze at wherever its last collective turn ended, and that turn was usually arithmetic, not character. Between anarchism and the Republican Party sits a bargain — becoming white — that other groups are still being offered today.
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