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# 85 NOVEMBER 21 , 2016
What happened in the political behavior
of our fellow Italians after 1936?
The Democratic Party began to lose Italian Americans’ support in 1940 after
Franklin D. Roosevelt had stigmatized
Italy’s eleventh-hour declaration of war
on France as a “stab in the back” of her
neighbor. Many Italian Americans feared
that the president’s words would start a
wave of anti-Italian intolerance and pave
the way for the U.S. entry into the war
against their ancestral or native land.
In 1944 the Republican Party further capitalized on many Italian Americans’ dissatisfaction with Roosevelt’s policy towards
Italy after the fall of the fascist regime
and the beginning of the Allies’ military
occupation of the country. Conversely,
the inclusion of Italy among the beneficiaries of the Marshall Plan, a program
of economic aid to European nations
for postwar reconstruction, and Washington’s alleged role in “saving” Italy from
communism helped Democratic President Harry S. Truman gain a majority
of the Italian American vote in 1948. In
the following years, the Republican Party became again the choice of most Italian Americans in presidential elections.
As second- and third-generation Italian
Americans moved to middle-class status, they became more conservative than
their primarily working-class parents.
Indeed, contrary to conventional wisdom, only a small minority – albeit most
vocal and active – of Italian newcomers
were militants of the anarchist movement. Many workers of Italian origin
and descent, especially among textile
and clothing laborers, did join the IWW.
However, the main reason for their adherence to this anarcho-syndicalist organization was that the leading U.S. union
in the early 20th century, the American
Federation of Labor, usually discriminated against Italian immigrants on the
grounds that the newcomers offered unfair competition to U.S.-born workers of
Anglo-Saxon ancestry, allegedly by breaking strikes and accepting substandard
wages. Consequently, the IWW was the
only union that open its membership
to Italian Americans, was willing to re- Their Republican allegiance gained furpresent them, and actually voiced their ther momentum between the late 1960s
claims.
and the late 1980s. In these decades,
Italian Americans distanced themselves from the Democratic Party on the
grounds that the latter had neglected
their claims and had become the advocate of African Americans’ demands.
There were, however, a few exceptions.
For instance, in 1960 Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy received a majority of the Italian American votes. So did
Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 by cashing in
on the emotional reaction to Kennedy’s
1963 assassination.
Did the religious factor play an important role in the political decisions of the
Italian Americans?
Yes, it did, although its influence on the
vote was discontinuous. In the case of
Italian Americans “the religious factor”
obviously means Catholicism. As I have
mentioned earlier, Catholicism was key
to the Italian American vote for Alfred
E. Smith in 1928. It also contributed to
bringing out Italian Americans for John
F. Kennedy in 1960.
The Catholic faith accounted for Ronald
Reagan’s large following among Italian
Americans because of his pro-life stand
on abortion. The latter issue also explained why many Italian Americans turned
their backs on Geraldine Ferraro in 1984.
She was the first vice presidential candidate of Italian ancestry and expected
the endorsement of her fellow ethnics.
But, as a Democratic candidate, she was
pro-choice, too, and displeased a significant number of Italian American Catholics.
Geraldine Ferraro
electrocution triggered off waves of protest in the Little Italies throughout the
United States. Yet, support for Sacco and
Vanzetti among Italian Americans resulted less from ideological allegiance
to anarchism than from ethnic solidarity. Many immigrants and their progeny
thought that Sacco and Vanzetti had
been unjustly sentenced to death because of the anti-Italian prejudice of the
court (the trial judge, Webster Thayer,
referred to the defendants as “Italian
bastards”), not because of a conservative police and judiciary campaign that
had been targeting radicalism since late
1917 to prevent a Bolshevik-style revolution in the United States.
# 85 November 21 2016
Similarly, Italian Americans failed to rally behind Rudolph Giuliani’s bid for the
Republican presidential nomination in
2008. Even leaving aside his tumultuous
marital life, his support for abortion, same-sex civil unions, and embryonic stem
cell research was in open conflict with
many Italian American Republicans’ Catholic faith.
In your opinion, why has there never
been an Italian American President? Will
it ever happen in the future? And if so,
Ronald Reagan
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