A Renegade History of the United States Read online

  But Jewish Americans who wish to revive their renegade heritage can now find heroes in the unlikeliest places. Though most Americans now think of her as the kindly former judge on a popular talent contest—and are probably unaware of her ethnic background—Paula Abdul is as funky and as Jewish as any of the dancing Hebrews of the vaudeville era. Her father, Harry Abdul, is a Syrian Jew, and her mother, Lorraine Rykiss, was born into one of the few Jewish families in Saint Boniface, Manitoba. Abdul regularly attends Chabad of Bel Air, an orthodox synagogue in Los Angeles. Since 1988, she has placed five singles in the top forty of Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs Chart, formerly called the Black Singles Chart; and ten singles in the top forty of Billboard’s Hot Dance Club Play Chart, a weekly national survey of the most popular songs in dance clubs.

  Jews have also made impressive inroads into hip-hop. The Beastie Boys, a group formed in the early 1980s by Michael Diamond, Adam Yauch, and Adam Horovitz, are one of the longest-lived and most successful hip-hop groups. Rick Rubin, who convinced the Beastie Boys to switch from punk rock to hip-hop early in their career, founded Def Jam Records and created much of the music in the 1980s that made hip-hop the dominant genre in the music industry. In the late 1980s, Michael Berrin of Far Rockaway, Queens, grabbed the mic and the stage name MC Serch, styled his kinky hair into a “high-top fade,” busted MC Hammer–type dance moves, and became one of the leading rappers of his time. As front man for the group 3rd Bass and later as a solo act, Serch produced five top-twenty singles on the Billboard Rap Charts. The Beasties and Serch are often credited with creating the archetype of the “white nigga” or “wigga.”

  Today, two of the most sought-after producers of hip-hop beats are Scott Storch, an aficionado of “bling” jewelry and founder of Tuff Jew Productions, and Alan Daniel Maman, better known as the Alchemist, a master of combining disparate noises into hip-hop hits who took his name from the Sephardic Jews of the Middle Ages who mixed common metals into gold, silver, and potions for eternal life.

  Mock them all you like as “inauthentic” wannabes, but Jewish wiggas might be truer to their heritage than any accountant, lawyer, or doctor will ever be.

  8

  ITALIAN AMERICANS: OUT OF AFRICA

  In the 1830s, when there was only a trickle of Italian immigrants into the United States, a prominent gentleman in New York declared, “A dirty Irishman is bad enough, but he’s nothing comparable to a nasty … Italian loafer.” A few decades later, the eminent American historian and philosopher John Fiske concurred, estimating that “the lowest Irish are far above the level of these creatures [Italians].” The most common claim made against Italians was that they possessed “a natural inclination toward criminality,” as the New York Times put it in 1876, but they were accused of other unsuitable behaviors as well, as the Times remarked in the same editorial: “The Italian is lazier, more gossiping, and fitter for intrigue than the American.” The newspaper concluded that it was “hopeless to think of civilizing them, or of keeping them in order, except by the arm of the law.” The philanthropist Charles Loring Brace wrote in 1872 of his failed attempts to reform new arrivals from Italy and concluded that Italian immigrants were “without exception, the dirtiest population I had met with.” The dark skin of Italians and their home country’s proximity to Africa made many suspect that the immigration service was allowing into the country a new population of Negroes—“black-eyed, swarthy, and wicked,” according to an 1881 New York Times article. The Times was especially concerned that Italians wielded a primitive sexual power. There were “hundreds of romantic young women in this City whose imaginations have been fired” by the newcomers, since “the romantic nature craves something Southern, Latin, and intense.”

  Direct comparisons of Italians to the other “primitives” living in the United States were often made, especially in Louisiana and Mississippi, where Italians immigrated in large numbers to take jobs vacated by blacks who had fled to the North. A Sicilian immigrant who worked in the sugarcane fields of Louisiana remembered that “the boss used to call us niggers” and “told us that we weren’t white men.” In 1890, after the chief of police of New Orleans was murdered, the New Orleans Times-Democrat accused Sicilian immigrants, “whose low, repulsive countenances, and slavery attire, proclaimed their brutal natures,” of committing the crime. After nineteen Sicilian men were charged but acquitted, a mob broke into the jailhouse where they were being held, slashed limbs from the men and hanged them from trees. Over the next two decades, Italians were lynched in Denver, Tampa, Gunnison, Colorado, Tallulah, Louisiana, and Johnston City, Illinois.

  Less murderous blackening of Italians was common as well. In the Mississippi Delta, attempts were made to segregate “white” and Italian schoolchildren and to disenfranchise the newcomers. A local newspaper in the Delta said in 1898, “when we speak of white man’s government, they [Italians] are as black as the blackest Negro in existence.” For these reasons, in the 1890s the term guinea, which had been used for slaves from the coast of West Africa, was applied to Italian Americans.

  Comparisons of Italians with blacks became increasingly common in the North as well. Leslie’s Illustrated reported in 1901 on the “instincts” of the Italian immigrant, which included many of the natural characteristics widely believed to be those of African Americans: “He plays cards, throws dice, gets up all kinds of gambling games, and stakes his all with the same shiftless indifference as though something other than his own purposes protected him.” Of the Italian birth rate, “there is sixty per cent that is illegitimate. The papers are full of affairs between men and women … and girls little more than children have their children whose coming into the world was not sanctioned through law or sacrament.” The following year, the president of Princeton University and future president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, wrote that Italians who came to America constituted “the more sordid and hapless elements of their population, the men whose standards of life and of work were such as American workmen had never dreamed of hitherto.” A 1904 commentary by Popular Science Monthly welcomed immigrants from northern Italy, who were “often of lighter complexion” and were very often “skilled in some trade or occupation” but warned against admitting “the southern Italian,” who was “short of stature, very dark in complexion” and “invariably is an unskilled farm laborer.” Like blacks and the first Irish and Jewish immigrants, Italians were perceived as a people completely of the body. The southern Italian’s “intelligence is not higher than one could imagine in the descendant of peasantry illiterate for centuries,” said Popular Science Monthly, but “nevertheless, they are wiry and muscular and capable of prolonged physical exertion” and “have a deftness of hand which adapts them to trades requiring manual skill.” Accordingly, wages for Italian Americans were comparable to wages for African Americans in many labor markets.

  In 1910 the Chicago Tribune sent anthropologist George A. Dorsey to Italy to study the source of the undesirable immigrants. Southern Italians in particular, concluded Dorsey, were clearly of “Negroid” ancestry and therefore “of questionable value from a mental, moral, or physical standpoint.” And in its 1911 report, the United States Immigration Commission warned against admitting the southern Italian “race,” which was “excitable, impulsive, highly imaginative, impracticable” and had “little adaptability to highly organized society.” The commission’s reports on the work habits of southern Italians echoed descriptions of the work habits of black slaves: “It seems generally agreed that the Sicilians are less steady and less inclined to stick to a job day in and day out than other races. They will take a day off now and then whether they lose their positions or not.” Even more damning was the conclusion that “certain kinds of criminality are inherent in the Italian race.” After receiving the commission’s report, the U.S. House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization debated—with inconclusive results—whether one should regard “the south Italian as a full-blooded Caucasian.”

  In the 1910s, se
veral scholars examined the racial lineage of Italians and were disturbed by what they found. Edward Ross, professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin and president of the American Sociological Association, argued in a 1914 book that because there was “no small infusion of Greek, Saracen, and African blood in the Calabrians and Sicilians,” they had reached only “a primitive stage of civilization.” Ross reported that southern Italian immigrant children, “with the dusk of Saracenic or Berber ancestors showing in their cheeks, are twice as apt to drop behind other pupils of their age as are the children of the non–English-speaking immigrants from northern Europe.” He also found that in the U.S. South, “a fear has sprung up lest the Italians, being without the southern white man’s strong race feeling, should mix with the Negroes and create a hybrid.” Ross described a number of characteristics in Italians that were commonly associated with blacks. Notably, they were “addicted to gambling,” often resistant to work, and therefore prone to criminal behavior: “In an Italian quarter are men who never work, yet who have plenty of money. ‘No,’ they say, ‘we do not work. Work does not agree with us. We have friends who work and give us money. Why not?’ It is these parasites who commit most of the crime.” The country from which they came “has from three to four times the violence of the North, while its obscene crimes, which constitute an index of sensuality, are thrice as numerous.” To Ross, these racially determined behaviors meant that “half, perhaps two-thirds, of our Italian immigrants are under America, not of it.”

  Madison Grant’s influential The Passing of the Great Race (1916), which moved the Irish to “Nordic” status, argued that, in contrast, southern Italians exemplified the lowest race in Europe. While Grant placed “Mediterraneans” within the “white” category, he made no bones about what many suspected: those people had a lot of black in them. “A study of the Mediterranean race shows that, so far from being purely European, it is equally African and Asiatic,” he wrote. With similar pessimism for the prospect of Italian assimilation, the chairman of the Missionary Education Committee, a Protestant Evangelical organization, declared in 1917 that Italian immigrants “have very little or no knowledge of what Christian living means. Sunday to them is a fete day not a holy day; drinking is a matter of course; sexual morality is at a very low ebb among the men; and so far as their appreciation of the value of the truth is concerned, the less said the better.”

  Italians flunked a number of intelligence tests that were given to immigrants in the 1910s and 1920s. Dr. Arthur Sweeny administered one such test to several thousand immigrants among sixteen nationalities and concluded in 1922 that “we can … strenuously object to immigration from Italy,” since 63.4 percent of the Italians who took the test scored in the “D class”—the bottom category of intelligence. The D class represented “a stage between imbecility and dull normality,” and as a class of workers “was somewhat more useful” than the mentally retarded “but little more dependable.” Only the Polish scored lower on the test. Owing to their lack of discipline, Italians “were in no sense soldier material,” said Sweeny. Rather, they were best suited to dig ditches, clean latrines, and contribute “only in a muscular way to the work of the army.” The shiftlessness of Italians was described in terms nearly identical to those used for the behavior of slaves: “Constant supervision of their work was necessary. Even simple tasks were beyond their powers if continuous labor was necessary. They wholly lacked initiative.” And like blacks, while Italian immigrants were believed to lack rationality and discipline, they were also thought to be better able to perform and enjoy the pleasures of the body. “Men of the D class are physically well developed,” Sweeny reported. “A large number of them are attractive,” and, “by reason of their emotional instability, are regarded on first sight as unusually quick and responsive. They laugh easily and are with equal ease moved to tears.” Some members of the D class were also marked by a “lack of inhibition” that made them value leisure over work, freedom over responsibility, and gratification over sacrifice: “What gives him pleasure is the height of his ambition.”

  In a 1919 study written by Harvard economics professor Robert F. Foerster, Italian immigrants were found to be sorely lacking the American work ethic. Foerster reported that employers often described the Italian worker as “lazy, shirking, tricky, a time server” and complained that Italians were known—just as slaves were once known—to “feign sickness in order not to have to work in bad weather.” Their “bad qualities” included “low efficiency and inability to withstand cold weather,” said one employer. Others interviewed by Foerster preferred black workers over Italians: “Our opinion is that generally the amount of work done per Italian laborer per day is not equal to the amount of work done per laborer per day by our other white laborers or by Negroes.” Foerster reported that the results of a test conducted by a company to determine the efficiency of Italian workers showed that in a given time they completed only 35 percent to 50 percent of the same work done by nonimmigrant workers. In line with their poor work discipline was a lack of sexual control: “Plenty of testimony exists to show that loose living on the part of male Italians abroad is common. Our witnesses, who are generally also critics, affirm that there is often a ready frequenting of prostitutes” as well as a high rate of “wife desertion.” Foerster attributed all these failings to the Italians’ general lack of civilization. “In many things, the Italian has the mind of a child,” he wrote. “Sometimes what is impressive is a sheer lowness of standards, a state of contentment with those modes of living which civilized people, as much by metaphor as by knowledge, surely, call primitive.” For instance, the Italian’s “universal vice was his dirtiness; he was dirtier than the Negro.” For all these reasons “it is no compliment to the Italian to deny him whiteness, yet that actually happens with considerable frequency.”

  The biological claims about the blackness of Italians, in particular southern Italians, were not without merit. Since much of southern Italy is closer to Africa than to Rome and for millennia experienced flows of population to and from the “dark continent,” it “should be no surprise,” as historian Thomas Guglielmo puts it, “that many social scientists at the time considered meridionali [southern Italians] part African—in many cases they were (and are).”

  During the great wave of immigration, most of the Italians who relocated to the United States moved even closer to Africans. They settled in neighborhoods in New York, Chicago, and New Orleans that were populated by African Americans, and many shared tenement buildings, workplaces, and recreational facilities with blacks. This, as Guglielmo says, “often meant the most intimate of contact.” According to historian Robert Brandfon, since Italian immigrants in New Orleans and neighboring plantations did not hesitate to take “nigger work,” “the Italians assumed the status of Negroes. One blended into the other, and Southern thinking made no effort to distinguish between them.” Another scholar found that at the height of Jim Crow segregation in the southern states, “Italians, not schooled in the racial prejudice of the South, associated freely with the blacks, going against the accepted social order.” Italian American newspapers in Chicago reported casually of marriages or sexual liaisons between Italians and African Americans. Social worker Jane Addams, who led the movement to assimilate immigrants through settlement houses and who may have observed more immigrants at the time than anyone, reported that Italians in Chicago “held no particular animosity toward Negroes, for those in the neighborhood were mostly from South Italy and accustomed to the dark-skinned races.” Moreover, Addams concluded that the “Mediterranean” immigrants were “less conscious than the Anglo-Saxon of color distinctions, perhaps because of their traditional familiarity with Carthage and Egypt.”

  After the infamous “Red Summer” of 1919, when dozens of African Americans were killed by whites in rioting on the streets of Chicago, the city’s leading Italian newspaper, L’Italia, sympathized with the black victims of the riots and condemned not only the white perpetrators but also the
failure of Americans to live up to their official creed of universal equality and justice for all. According to Guglielmo, a few Italians participated in the mayhem, but “the vast majority of Italians do not appear to have taken part in the Color Riot of 1919.” The Chicago Commission on Race Relations reported that in the area known as “Little Sicily,” the rioting was “not serious” and that “immediately after the fracas, the Negroes and Italians were again on good terms.” Three years later, the commission reported, “friendly relations exist between the Sicilians, who predominate [on the Near North Side] and their Negro neighbors. Some Negroes live harmoniously in the same tenements with Sicilians. Their children play together, and some of the Negro children have learned Sicilian phrases so that they are able to deal with the Sicilian shopkeepers.”

  Many African Americans in Chicago shared this view. In 1925 the National Urban League, the leading black civil rights organization in the city, noted that “Negro families often reported their Italian neighbors as being very friendly, visiting and even rendering assistance in some few cases of sickness and poverty.” A University of Chicago social scientist who studied the city’s ethnic groups in the 1920s found that African Americans “are usually found in close associations with Jewish or Italian communities. These two groups are, on the whole, the most recent immigrant groups in the city, and they do not seem to have acquired the marked prejudice against the Negroes which characterizes many of the older immigrant and American groups in the city.” And in 1930 a director of the West Side Community Center remarked that the two largest unassimilated immigrant groups were the most willing to cross the American color line: “the Jew and the Italian seem to be the only people who will live in the same house with the Negroes. I think that is why the Italians are coming into this neighbor-hood—they follow right on the heels of the Negroes.” Similarly, in New York, historian Salvatore J. LaGumina found numerous instances of recreational cooperation between Italian Americans and African Americans during this period and that “African American and Italian American relations were generally devoid of violence and antagonism before the 1930s.”