East Harlem and Vito Marcantonio:

My Search for a Progressive Italian-American Identity

 

In June of 1966, a few weeks before my 21st birthday, I moved into a tenement on East 104th Street, between Lexington Avenue and the grimy, fortress wall of the Park Avenue El, in El Barrio, East Harlem’s Puerto Rican community. Filled with drug addicts, nodding on stoops or hustling from corner to corner, the block was known locally as “Junkie’s Paradise.” I entered this world as a member of a summer-long, student project sponsored by Cornell University and the East Harlem Tenants Council. An unhappy cadet, sick of Pennsylvania Military College’s dogma and discipline, I joined the project at the urging of its student director, my cousin Don Cavellini.

The area’s largest antipoverty agency, the East Harlem Tenant’s Council, offered students opportunities to get involved in a variety of activities. Along with three other students, I chose to be a counselor in a summer day camp for sixty children. On the day the camp was to open, the police refused to issue a permit allowing the street to be closed from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. One of the mothers spoke to the police, pointing out that permits had been issued in previous years. The offi­cer in charge shook his head and said that the precinct captain had ordered the street open twenty-four hours a day as an express route for emergency vehicles. The parents began to argue that since school was out, their children needed a safe place to play. After a few angry ex­changes, the police turned their backs and walked away. But they didn’t walk far before grim-faced parents and jeering children sat down in the street and vowed to block traffic until they had their play street. After a tense stand-off, the police promised to issue a permit, and I had my first exposure to the people of East Harlem’s fighting spirit.

At the summer’s end I left the neighborhood and suffered through a final year at P.M.C. Little did I realize the far-reaching impact that my three-month stay in Harlem would have on my life. It would lead to a career in social work and onto a political trajectory that would take me far to the left of the political mainstream. While much of my identity was forged in the 60s and early 70s, one discor­dant note lingered.

With few exceptions, such as Mario Cuomo and Geraldine Ferraro, I had come to think of Italian-American politicos as a pretty conser­vative bunch. I had been disgusted by Philadelphia mayor, Frank Rizzo, who cast himself as the skull-cracking savior of the white race, and former liberal Frank Sinatra, who fawning before the rich and powerful, made music for Reagan in the White House. How could I reconcile my Italian-American heritage with my work and politics?

In an ironic twist, the road towards reconciling my Italian-Ameri­can identity and my progressive politics led back to East Harlem, back to the life of radical Congressman Vito Marcantonio, a protege of another Italian-American progressive, Fiorello La Guardia. For seven terms, between 1934 and 1950, Marcantonio represented East Harlem in the House of Representatives where he acted as floor leader for major civil rights legislation, submitted five bills for Puerto Rican in­dependence, led the fight against the Cold War, and rallied to pre­vent the passage of the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act. In his last term, he cast the sole votes against the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and against the Korean War. “Marc” served as state chairman of the American Labor Party and was a founder of the Progressive Party. He served as attorney for Pedro Albizu Campos, W. E. B. DuBois, William Patterson, Ben Gold, and the Communist Party. Marcantonio’s political career contained a great paradox: Out­spokenly radical, he continued to earn the unflagging support of Ital­ian Harlem, a community that shared the conservative sentiments of other Catholic ethnic groups on such issues as support for Fascist rule in Italy and Spain.

Discovering how Marc blended his politics with the culture of Southern Italy, I began to understand how my background and up­bringing opened the way for the radical changes that I first experi­enced in 1966.

Like any good Italian son, I will begin by talking about my family, in particular, what I know about their political beliefs. My mother, Benedettina Fiocco Fagiani, was born in Capo D’Orlando, a seacoast town in the province of Messina, which the New York Times reported has become famous as the only town in Sicily to successfully resist Mafia extortionists.[1] While a young girl, she immigrated with her family to Greenwich Village, an area heavily populated by Italian immigrants. At twelve she moved to Villa Avenue, an Italian neigh­borhood in the North Bronx. Her father was a carpenter, a cabinet maker in her words, who took evening classes to learn English. My grandfather Carmello Fiocco read the Hearst press and had a cousin who belonged to a Republican Party club. Laid off of work during the Great Depression, he sent my mother to speak to an official in his cousin’s club about getting a job. It was no-go. Carmello, who had been voting Republican, switched his vote to the Democratic party, and supported Roosevelt’s New Deal.

My mother’s Uncle Saverio La Rosa lived one block away. She re­calls that he was a shop steward at the Deman Shoe Company and a strong supporter of the labor movement. A socialist sympathizer and early critic of Mussolini, she remembers him arguing with her father, who like most Italians, praised the Fascist leader’s building projects and improvements in transportation.

In the 1930s, my mother was influenced by the socialist and Com­munist literature that was widely available in the Bronx. As a child I remember her speaking contemptuously of those who amassed great wealth and privilege. She voted at first for the Socialist Party, sup­porting Norman Thomas’s presidential bid in 1940. Her outspoken support of the Civil Rights Movement influenced not only me, but my first cousins on my father’s side, Don and Bill Cavellini.

Both my father, Mario Fagiani, and his mother were born around Mulberry Street in Lower Manhattan’s Little Italy. His mother’s family, the Disirios, originally came from the town of San Chirico di Rappare in the region of Basilicata. At age sixteen my paternal grandfather, Comincio Fagiani, emigrated from the city of Lanciano, in the Abruzzi region of Italy, southwest of the Mezzogiorno, the tra­ditional dividing line between Northern and Southern Italy.

Although technically from the South, my father would banter and boast that his father was from the more economically and politically powerful North. My mother would challenge his attempt to identify with Italy’s dominant region. From their playful squabbling, I became aware of the diffences between a wealthy North and impoverished South.

Settling first in Manhattan, and later the Arthur Avenue section of the Bronx, my father’s family included businessmen, store managers, and lawyers, who surviving relatives told me were Republicans. Matthew Disirio, a secretary to La Guardia who later became a judge, made the front page of the Daily Mirror for jailing a prostitute whose daughter had gotten in trouble with the law. He reasoned that the mother’s negligence made her responsible for her daughter’s delin­quency.

Like his father, Comincio started out as a tailor, but quickly went on to become a successful clothing designer. He specialized in fur coats and his garments adorned some of the most famous models and Hol­lywood stars of the time. He even designed the fur coat that President Warren Harding’s wife wore on his Inauguration Day in 1921. Unfor­tunately for my grandfather’s paesani in the old country, Harding signed a bill later that year establishing an immigrant quota system designed to choke off further immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe. According to family legend, anti-union sentiment took hold in my father’s family when union goons beat Comincio for crossing a picket line during a strike.

My father, a life-long Republican, became the director of purchas­ing for a textile firm. His political views, when he chose to express them, were much more conservative than my mother’s. In political matters, I grew up thinking of my parents as polar opposites. My Si­cilian mother was the warm, caring liberal; while my father, whose family came from the more northern part of Italy, remained the cold, business-minded conservative.

I lived the first five years of my life in a three-story apartment building on 204th Street, a block away from the Villa Avenue neigh­borhood. The heart of the neighborhood consisted of half a dozen city blocks filled with wood frame houses and tenements, interspersed with small shops that catered to the tastes of the mainly Southern Italian residents. A jeweler and shoe repair shop, along with a bread store, bars, restaurants, groceries, and butcher shop served the small community.

Around the corner on the Grand Concourse rose St. Phillip Neri Catholic Church, a turn-of-the-century, gray stone structure, where until after World War II, masses were said in Italian. I remember my mother’s words, “The church was built by Italian laborers but taken over by wealthy Irish parishioners.” Much of the community’s social life centered around activities sponsored by the church. Especially notable, were the the festa of Saint Anthony celebrated in June, and the festa of Saint Assunta celebrated in August, which were accompa­nied by colorful street parades, including marching bands, along the Concourse.

Villa Avenue had a brief moment of glory in the late 40s when a teenage boy claimed he saw the Madonna. My Uncle Charlie Fiocco remembers the Grand Concourse being jammed with thousands of peo­ple, forcing the police to close down a section of the city’s second widest boulevard. The people came seeking supernatural solace for their physical ailments and personal problems, or perhaps out of cu­riosity. Some claimed miraculous cures, while others reported seeing a halo in the sky. Today, next to a tall apartment building, can still be found a small shrine commemorating the vision.

Sweet and haunting memories remain of Villa Avenue. I remember entering St. Phillip Neri with my grandmother and being awed by the towering ceiling, the gleaming marble, and the smell of incense, or going with her to visit nearby family, friends, and amiable fruit and vegetable vendors. My biggest thrill was walking hand and hand with her under the colored lights of the summer street feste and eat­ing tangy lemon ices.

In 1950, my father took advantage of a V.A. loan and bought a house in Springdale, Connecticut. He called our newly-fabricated, suburban neighborhood, the Colony. Long-standing Yankee residents, mostly of English and German ancestry, as well as Irish, Poles, and Italians, inhabited the lean rows of Cape Cod and saltbox dwellings. Only one or two Jews, but no people of color, lived within miles, until Jackie Robinson, the first black to play major league baseball, bought a house in a wealthy section of North Stamford.

I had mixed feelings about the move. I enjoyed the greater freedom that living in a house and frolicking in the countryside gave me, but I missed my mother’s extended family, and their warm, friendly neighborhood. This ambivalence became paradigmatic for the way I would feel about my Italian roots.

One of the immediate cultural changes I had to adjust to when I moved to Springdale was the preoccupation that kids my age had about race. I didn’t recall hearing in the Bronx kids “ranking” or “sounding on” each other by claiming that their friend’s relatives were black. It didn’t take me long to discover that the ultimate insult in the Colony was calling somebody’s mother a “nigger.” The Colony kids had their share of fights, and more than a fair share were trig­gered by somebody claiming that somebody else’s mother was a “nigger.” Although I found the obsession with race weird, since there weren’t any black people around, I got into it soon enough.

I palled out with a boy named Roy Black whose father was En­glish and sold Jaguar sportscars. I became his tormentor. I remember going to class before anyone was there and inserting the word “is” be­tween his first and last names on the blackboard. This caused students to break out in laughter when they came into the classroom. After that, any chance I had I inserted the word “is” before Roy’s last name. I probably had more fights with Roy than any kid in the Colony. At the time I thought it was well worth it: I was a big hit with my peers.

Within walking distance of the Colony, behind Springdale’s main drag, existed a patchwork of streets that made up, what some people called “Guinea Village.” The Italians who lived there worked chiefly in the building trades. After work many could be seen building additions to their own homes.

From an early age, my father impressed upon me the importance of earning money so I could go to college. “You’ll either make your living with your back or your brains,” he would warn me. Starting at about thirteen I had a newspaper route that wound through “Guinea Vil­lage.” During the 50’s and 60’s, many Italians who lived there pros­pered from a construction boom. Still I thought of them as a crude and threatening people. The first week on my route, one of them signaled me to come to his porch.

“You see this money?” he said, showing me some change in his open hand. “Where you leave the paper is where I leave the money. You throw the paper in the bushes, I throw the money in the bushes. You throw it on the roof, I throw your money on the roof.”

I walked away shaken. He was an ape of a man, hulking and hairy; a real cafone, as my mother would say. My mother broke down the Italian people into three groups. On the top were the rich. They were bastards. Below them were the decent, humble, hard-working people of any occupation. And at the bottom were the cafoni: those flashy, foul-mouthed, ill-mannered brutes, that besmirched our proud heritage. “Ours was the glory of Rome,” she would quote her father as saying.

Although unable to conceptualize it at the time, I thought of the inhabitants of “Guinea Village” as a stigmatized population, because they made their living with their hands in an area that was fast be­ing taken over by white collar workers, many of whom, like my fa­ther, commuted to New York City. Also, the “Villagers” ranked among the worst students in school, “non-college material” as teach­ers routinely called slow learners in the 50s. I remember the shock I felt once, when I discovered that one of their fathers, a contractor who had made a lot of money building the Connecticut Thruway, read comic books.

Finally, they were looked down upon not just because of class and education, but because of their skin color. Italians, as the darkest people in a place beset by “status-anxiety” about race, developed a sensitivity about their tenuous position. Once on my paper route, a shirtless Italian construction worker jumped off his bulldozer.

“Driving all day in the sun,” he said, disgustedly, “has made me black as a nigger.” And indeed his skin was a deep shade of brown, which combined with his tight, curly hair, made him look darker than many Cubans and Puerto Ricans I would meet later in life.

Nothing brought home the degraded status of working class Ital­ians in Springdale more, than the two sisters, I’ll call the Maculata sisters. The Maculatas lived in a run-down house, with broken shut­ters, alongside a sprawling factory on the fringe of “Guinea Village.” Mr. Maculata, a dark, heavyset, cigar-smoking man, eked out a living as a plummer. I never heard of a Mrs. Maculata. The Maculata sisters were a light shade of brown, what Puerto Ricans call trigueña, or wheat-colored. They wore cheap, gaudy clothing and had wiry hair and rotten teeth. They were known as the “Whore-rats of Spring­dale.”

I was about ten when I began to hear the stories about how carloads of guys would drive up to the Maculata house to get their “pipes cleaned and ashes hauled.” These tales of “gang-banging” titillated many of my friends, but made me sick. Any torture, I thought, even death, would be preferable to being branded as the “Whore-rats” of our small, supposedly respectable, town. The closest people in my life were all Italian women: my mother, my maternal grandmother, and my maternal aunts. To me they could do no wrong, and I revered them the way I did the Virgin Mary. The Maculata sisters were Italian too, and for this reason I found their public defilement very disturb­ing.

While I grew up with a fear of working class Italians, at the same time I identified with them. Short and slight for my age, I was drawn to the macho posturing of Italian boys. When I started high school I joined a weightlifitng club with many of them. Later I hung out with the hot rod set, which included Italians who worked as auto mechan­ics. The simultaneous aversion and attraction I felt was a continuation of the ambivalence I had always felt for working-class Italians. To­wards middle class Italians, as epitomized by my father’s family, and such Italian-American success stories as Perry Como and Lee Iacocca, I felt outright disdain.

During the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, I felt an affinity with blacks as the underdogs. At a time when many whites believed in the innate inferiority of black people, I had ferocious arguments with virtually all my high school friends about whether blacks were fully human. I was a shy, insecure teenager, and I’ve often wondered what motivated my taking this unpopular position. A few people, aside from my mother, influenced me. My Cousins Don and Bill took an exploratory car ride to Mississippi in the early 60’s and came back sympathetic to the plight of black people in the Deep South. As a habitual reader, I was aware of the hate and violence that greeted Civil Right’s protesters’ efforts to end official segregation. Although unconscious of it at the time, the intensity of my identification with blacks resulted from my being a member of an ethnic group, which along with Jews, had the least status in the environs of the Colony. This was especially true of the final arbitrator of status: skin color. I also experienced few, if any, successes in high school, and graduated with a pervasive sense of aimlessness and inadequacy. As a result, I felt an emotional linkage with blacks who were fighting for dignity and equal rights.

From 1963 to 1967 I attended Pennsylvania Military College, whose military regimen I hoped would force me to buckle down, do better in school, and think about planning for a career. Instead, the extremely conservative campus environment, if anything, hastened my political movement to the left, and played a major role in my wholesale repudiation of middle class values.

In the summer of 1966 I followed my cousin Don into El Barrio, which runs from the East River to Central Park, and roughly 96th to 125th Streets in Manhattan’s east side. A community of amazing con­trasts, where sweet tropical sounds and smells, bustling sidewalks, friendly outdoor vendors and domino games, coexist with rampant poverty, crime, disease, and addiction.

Living and working with its Puerto Rican residents resulted in my having a conversion experience. But leaving the heavy stuff aside for the moment, what seems striking to me now, was the relative lack of discomfort that I felt being there despite a conception of Puerto Ricans shaped by seeing movies like “The Young Savages,” and reading lurid newspaper accounts of psychopathic street gang leaders.

El Barrio was an immigrant community that was both bicultural and bilingual. The noisy Spanish-speaking enclave kept my memories of Villa Avenue alive. My mother as well as other members of my family were immigrants. From an early age I heard Italian spoken. My maternal grandmother and her sister never learned to speak En­glish. Hearing immigrants speak their native language or maintain Old World customs never seemed odd or shameful. Finally, questions of culture and skin color didn’t seem terribly strange. There were obvi­ous similarities between Italian culture and the Hispanic legacy of Puerto Ricans. And my perception as a kid of Italians as the neigh­borhood “darkies” tended to reduce the alienating potential of dark skin.

After the summer of 1966 I resumed classes at P.M.C. for another two semesters, returning to live in East Harlem in May of 1967 where I remained for another two years. Intensely involved with the neigh­borhood, I took part in community meetings, protest marches, block parties, and the annual festa of Our Lady of Mount Carmel along 116th Street. East Harlem is where I struck up many close relation­ships and met my first wife, a local Puerto Rican woman, who is the mother of my two sons, Matthew and Mario. This is where I learned to speak Spanish and developed my life-long love of Latin music (my current Latin collection includes more than 700 albums and cassettes).

From the beginning of my stay in East Harlem I formed a negative impression of the small Italian community that remained along Pleasant Avenue. In 1966, members of the Pleasant Avenue commu­nity, probably allied to local gangsters, opposed the organizing ef­forts of the East Harlem Tenants Council. This opposition included shooting out the windows of storefront offices that encroached on what they felt was their territory. In addition, having witnessed firsthand the pain and sadness of parents with drug-addicted chil­dren, it disgusted me to see the massive heroin wholesaling operation that emanated from Pleasant Avenue. Ignored by the police, the drug trafficking flourished until a series of spectacular arrests in 1971.[2]

Finally, petty conflicts occurred between Italians and Puerto Ri­cans over turf, street hustles, and romance. Having lived among Puerto Ricans and having befriended them, I took their side in these con­flicts. While I would occasionally go to the Italian section to buy fresh bread and pastry, I thought of the holdovers of Italian Harlem, with few exceptions, as racist diehards and Mafia scum.

Looking back, I’m troubled by the lack of compassion I felt for the Italian residents of East Harlem. No doubt some of it stemmed from the middle class snobbery implicit in my mother’s denunciation of ca­foni. But on a deeper level it reflected my own self-estrangement. Be­yond seeing myself as part of an amorphous movement for social change, I lacked a firm sense of identity, and couldn’t handle a group of people likely to stir up all the hurt and anger I felt towards my family, upbringing, and ethnic background.

After the summer of ’66, I moved from radical pacifism and social democracy, to Trotskyism and Maoism; the political path traveled by the “New Left.” Living in Harlem gave me a close-up view of the human suffering that belied the smugness and hypocrisy of so many hucksters of the American dream. What I saw was the American nightmare, and it fueled within me a rage that was impatient with reasonable discourse and piecemeal reforms.

As the 60s came to an end and Vietnam casualties mounted, I threw myself into efforts to stop US military intervention in Southeast Asia. I took part in week-long, antiwar demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, participated in sit-down demon­strations against the draft, and charged past military police at Fort Dix, New Jersey to protest the jailing of antiwar GIs. Trampled by crowds and gassed by the police, I took seriousy the rhetoric of the times that committment to social change meant “putting one’s body on the line.”

I had been working with a group of Bronx residents since the end of 1969 to set up treatment facilities for drug addicts, when in 1971 I helped lead an exodus of dissident residents and staff members from LOGOS, a corrupt Bronx drug program. Calling ourselves the Spirit of LOGOS (S.O.L.), we adopted the perspective of such radical groups as the Young Lords Party, a militant Puerto Rican community organi­zation, that saw the growing drug plague in El Barrio and the South Bronx, not so much in terms of individual pathology, but as a product of racism and poverty. We detoxified addicts from heroin and barbit­uates, educated them as to the political dimension of their addiction, and fought against draconian drug laws and the defunding of drug-free programs in favor of government-funded methadone maintenance clinics.

Six months later, following the practice of much of the Left, black and Puerto Rican members of the S.O.L. declared that they could no longer work with whites. After seceding, they briefly formed their own separate organization, and soon after disbanded. At the sugges­tion of an Italian woman who had grown up in the Bronx Congres­sional bailiwick of Mario Biaggi, the remaining dozen or so whites renamed the group White Lightning. The name was meant to under­score our commitment to fight substance abuse, and to draw attention to what we hoped would be our base: poor and working class whites.[3] Moving beyond our original focus, we put out a monthly newspaper for several years and tried to mobilize people around their health, hous­ing and educational needs.

We believed it essential to support the liberation struggles of peo­ple of color. We joined picket lines organized by the mostly Mexican American United Farm Workers Union, as well as demonstrations against the massacre at Attica State Prison and the political repres­sion directed at the Black Panthers, Young Lords, and the American Indian Movement.

White Lightning’s membership represented a variety of ethnic backgrounds: Danish, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Norwegian, Polish, and Ukranian and unlike other radical groups, the majority of members were working class. Disenchanted with much of the white left, we be­lieved that middle-class leaders, whose style and agenda effectively excluded poor and working-class recruits, dominated their organiza­tions.

White Lightning viewed the following questions as critical: How could we get working-class whites to see they had a stake in left poli­tics? How could we convince them to look at people of color as their logical allies instead of their natural enemies?

For some time black and Latino political organizations had used the histories of their people’s resistance to oppression as vehicles to refashion new and positive ethnic identities. Inspired by their exam­ples, we began to read and study the histories of various immigrant groups of European ancestry.   

We learned that the United States accorded the Irish, Italians, Poles, and Eastern European Jews far from cordial receptions. They faced discrimination and often violent attacks, such as the lynching in 1891 of eleven Sicilians by a mob led by the district attorney of New Orleans.[4] In the 20s the nativistic reaction that focused its at­tacks on Roman Catholicism and Southern European immigration led to the peak growth of the Ku Klux Klan.

We also discovered that the history of European immigrant groups wasn’t just one of passive resignation in the face of discrimination and exploitation. Members of these groups participated in the great bat­tles for union recognition and the social movements that led to the New Deal. White ethnics made up a large percentage of the member­ship of radical political organizations, including the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies), and various progressive, farmer-labor, socialist, and communist parties.

What the members of White Lightning discovered about the past, hardly squared with the official version of European immigrant his­tory. That version, raised to the level of sacred myth by textbooks and popular media, depicted European immigrants moving up the ladder of economic success, without recourse to collective action, and without impediments to their rise except their own individual weak­nesses.

Feeling armed with the truth, we tried to show white ethnic groups in the communities we sought to organize, that by and large their history comprised the history of poor and working people. In addition, we related to them how ethnic divisions, like present-day racial divisions, had destroyed political unity and discouraged social change. As it succumbed to the sectarian infighting and dogmatism endemic on the Left, White Lightning abandoned its efforts to use ethnic awareness to build class unity.

My initial search for a progressive ethnic identity left me feeling disappointed. With the exception of Sacco and Vanzetti and La Guardia (who I couldn’t fully appreciate), I found few historical fig­ures I could identify with. Then in 1983 I discovered seven-term, radi­cal Congressman Vito Marcantonio. I had come across his name before in historical accounts of the American left. Back in 1968 I had read The American Communist Party, by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, which refers to Marc as a “fellow-traveling demagogue.”[5] Except for the curiosity I felt about his Italian surname, I never gave him much thought. I was doing graduate research on the Italian-American fam­ily, when I stumbled across “Vito Marcantonio and Ethnic Politics in New York,” by Peter Jackson in The Journal of Ethnic and Racial Stud­ies.[6] The article left three powerful points of identification about Marcantonio in my mind: his Southern Italian background, his resi­dency in East Harlem, and his radical left politics. From then I sought to read everything I could find about Marc, although I soon re­alized the paucity of material about him in print. Furthermore, what existed tended towards some variation of the “Commie-demogogue” theme, or explained his politics as having no organic connection to his ethnicity. Indeed, most authors maintained that he was radical in spite of his Southern Italian background.

Fortunately, in 1989 Gerald Meyer, a professor of American history at Hostos Community College in the South Bronx, published Vito Marcantonio, Radical Politician, 1902–1954.[7] His book helped me to resolve a remaining source of ambivalence about my ethnicity: my stereotype of Italian-American leaders as universally conservative, and my own attraction to the political left. This ambivalence mir­rowed what most political commentators had considered to be Marc’s great paradox: his radical politics and the consistent support he re­ceived from Italian Harlem. Meyer shows how Marc mobilized the latent rebelliousness of Southern Italians by accepting and living in accord with the values of Italian Harlem and by skillfully taking advantage of the political implications of the Southern Italian so­cial structure.

For contemporary readers the name Italian Harlem may sound in­congrous. The core of the neighborhood ran from East 99th Street to East ll9th Street, and the East River to Third Avenue. In 1930, 80,000 mainly Southern Italians lived in Italian Harlem, making it the largest Italian-American community in the United States. Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Italian Harlem’s pre-eminent institution, sponsored the nation’s most popular ethnic street festival: la festa of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. By the thirties, Italian-American communities or­ganized pilgrimages from as far away as California, and upwards to 500,000 people attended its week-long activities.[8]

From its very inception Italian Harlem was a tenement district, a dormitory community for the poor. In 1934, 90 percent of its structures had been built before the enactment of the 1901 Tenement Laws. Even in 1939, after the worst of the Great Depression had passed, it re­ported 29 percent unemployment and an additional 10 percent em­ployed in public work projects. In 1940, less than one percent of the population from the most predominately Italian health areas had graduated from college. As late as 1950, the majority of its work force were employed as craftsmen, laborers, and operatives.

These grim statistics, however, reveal only part of the picture. Italian Harlem was also a vital, well-organized community contain­ing mutual benefit societies, youth organizations, athletic teams, church groups, social clubs, barber shops, and cafes. At a time when Italians still hadn’t escaped the insinuation of being an inferior race, Italian Harlem affirmed their culture and provided a sense of belong­ing and dignity denied them elsewhere.

In 1943, the New York State Legislature gerrymandered Marcan­tonio’s district to include Yorkville, a predominately German- and Irish-American area. Three years later it passed the Wilson-Pakula Act, which prevented Marc from entering the primary of a party of which he was not enrolled without the permission of the party’s county committee. The Act, which Marc said had everything but his picture on it, forced him to run soley on the rapidly declining Ameri­can Labor Party line.

By the late 40s, Vito Marcantonio was vilified in the mass-circu­lation newspapers as a Communist agent and traitor. This was at the height of the anti-Communist hysteria, right after the Chinese Communists had triumphed and the Soviet Union had developed an atomic bomb. Forced to run soley on the Communist-smeared A.L.P. line, and facing a single canadate agreed upon by the Democratic, Re­publican, and Liberal Parties, Marc lost his Congressional seat in 1950. Despite the slander and red-baiting, and the opposition of such powerful voices as Cardinal Francis Spellman and F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover, residents of Italian Harlem turned out for Marc, and their vote actually increased from 57 percent in 1948 to 62 percent. But in spite of this, the vote from Yorkville overwhelmed him.

The secret of Marc’s success can be found in his italianità:  his un­derstanding of the Southern Italian ethos. First, there was la fa­milia, a concept of family that included all relatives, both by blood and marriage. Traditionally, the Southern Italian family functioned as the supreme societal organization, and demanded of its members a loyalty that was so strong that it excluded loyalty to a larger commu­nity or class. Then there was respetto, whch included courtesy and at­tention to the desires of older people. Marcantonio was the sole sup­port of his mother, grandmother, and reclusive brother, who was probably schizophrenic. They all lived in the same building, along with some cousins and later his wife’s invalid brother.

The term comparaggio, refers to the selection of outsiders to be ad­mitted to the family circle in the role of godparents. The privileges and obligations extended to godparents approaached those of kin with blood ties. Both literally, and in spirit, Marcantonio served as godfather to many residents of Italian Harlem, and their phenome­nal loyalty towards him can best be understood as an expression of comparaggio. The notions of paesani and campanilismo, or village-mindedness, extended to include those who by propinquity and inter-marriage formed a tight inner circle. Marcantonio himself never lived further than four blocks away from where he was born on East 112th Street. An associate of his would recall that he would frequently say, “Isn’t Harlem the greatest community in the world?”[9] But while he loved his neighborhood and lived in accordance with its mores, this did not result in his being insular or sectarian. For it was through his creation of a coalition of East Harlem’s Italian-American, Puerto Ri­can, and African-American communities, and the mobilized support of the Left, that he became the nation’s most electorially successful rad­ical of this century.

At times racial prejudice created tensions that threatened the unity of Marc’s coalition. When this happened Marc was forthright in struggling against racism in his own community. In 1938, in the midst of a Congressional campaign, a series of violent confrontations broke out between Italian-American and Puerto Rican youths. The two communities quickly became armed camps. Marcantonio was a key figure in defusing the situation, chairing unity meetings that at­tracted up to two thousand residents.

Again in 1945, a fight broke out in Benjamin Franklin High School between black and white students at a time of far more serious distur­bances in Chicago and elsewhere. Marcantonio personally contacted Mayor La Guardia, arranged for Frank Sinatra to appear at the school, and organized an integrated contingent of Benjamin Franklin students to march in the Columbus Day parade. Both in Italian and English, Marc reminded the residents of Italian Harlem that they, too, had once been the target of violence and discrimination, and it was particularly shameful of them to indulge in such tactics against others.

Southern Italians had a traditional wariness and hostility to­wards strangers. Therefore, the vicious press campaign that was aimed at Marcantonio because of his radicalism and his relationship to the Communist Party did not turn the residents of Italian Harlem against him. Marc exploited the dynamics of alienation and revolt which characterized much of the Italian response to an inhospitable America.

The Vito Marcantonio Political Association was the most effective political machine in New York City. Besides its successes in register­ing voters and getting them to the polls, it dispensed services on a scale unmatched by any other political organization. Unlike con­stituents of other districts Marc’s political machine encouraged resi­dents to see the leader on a first-come, first-served basis. Everyone who saw “the Congressman” had the sense that “Marc fixed it.”

Southern Italians came from a place where the abyss between the people and government necessitated intermediaries, known at the time as padroni. Vito Marcantonio was the most ideological of politi­cians, yet as the padrone par excellence none took more to heart the immediate concerns of his constituents.

To an unusual degree Puerto Ricans shared the values of family, community and padrinismo. In addition, EI Barrio had a significant history of left-wing activism. For example, it was the only New York community in which the American Labor Party constituted the major­ity party. Meyer writes that “el Barrio and Marcantonio were an al­most perfect marriage of constituency and political leader.”[10]

Meyer’s book debunks the notion of a negative cultural determinism that makes the inhabitants of Italian-American communities into racist goons. Throughout his tenure in office, Marcantonio joined the interests and the historical fates of the African-American, Puerto Ri­can, and Italian-American people. He referred to them “as our sons of Garibaldi, de Hostos (a Puerto Rican patriot and educator), and Fred­erick Douglas.”

For over twenty-five years I have made attempts—sometimes fit­fully, sometimes on a more sustained basis—at integrating my politics with my ethnic identity. Back in 1967 I met Italian leftists at a Columbia University-hosted international conference on revolution­ary youth who later formed Collettivi di Communicazione Rivoluzionaria (Revolutionary Communication Collectives) in Turin, Rome, and Milan. In 1971 they published EACS (Europe America Communication Service), a biweekly newsletter in English that they hoped would serve as a distribution outlet in the US for information and documents on revolutionary struggles in Europe.[11] In practice, most of EACS news coverage was limited to Italy and I met and corre­sponded regularly with members of the Collettivi, exchanging politi­cal literature and analysis with them. It was at this time that I read about Italy’s radical traditions, and tried to distill meaning from the fact that Italy had the largest communist party of any non-Commu­nist state in Europe. I read the influential Marxist theoretician Anto­nio Gramsci, and Italy’s most celebrated anarchist, Errico Malatesta. Paradoxically, the more familiar I became with Italy’s powerful left traditions, the more distant I felt from Italian Americans, whom I re­garded with rare exceptions as political reactionaries.

In the early 70s I rediscovered Nicola Sacco and Bartolemo Vanzetti whose execution in 1927 was the culmination of the most im­portant political trial in twentieth-century US history. I even wrote an article attempting to show the parallels between their political persecution and the then murder trial of Black Panthers, Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins in New Haven.[12] I also discovered Carlo Tresca: anarchist, labor leader, and crusading anti-fascist, whose assassina­tion on the streets of Lower Manhattan in 1943, is still officially un­solved.

My efforts to develop a progressive ethnic identity continue to this day. In the spring of 1990, I wrote a review article on Gerald Meyer’s book about Marcantonio, in which I began by relating the anger and shame I felt when counseling my sons, both part Puerto Rican and part Italian, to stay out of Italian-American neighborhoods like Benson­hurst in Brooklyn, where a mob of whites had recently killed a young African American.[13]

In November 1991, I helped organize a conference on Vito Marcan­tonio, giving recognition to this much neglected political leader. The conference theme was the multicultural curriculum and the lessons to be learned from Marc’s approach to ethnic conflict and coalition building. Along with a host of talks and workshops, a special award was given to one of Marc’s campaign managers, Annette Rubenstein, who also edited a collection of his Congressional speeches and de­bates.

In January of 1992, I co-founded Italian Americans for a Multicul­tural US (IAMUS) and helped draft a signed statement criticizing the upcoming Quincentennial Celebration of Columbus’s voyage to the Americas.[14] We rejected Columbus as a hero, called for the recogni­tion of the genocide and exploitation that followed in his wake, and offered a diversity of Italian-American figures—including Marcanto­nio—as role models for our youth. In October 1992 I appeared as a guest along with two other IAMUS members, on Channel 7’s black public affairs show, “Like It Is,” hosted by Gil Noble. We spoke about Columbus, racism, and relations between African Americans and Ital­ian Americans.

At the prompting of IAMUS, Manhattan borough President Ruth Messinger declared January 11, 1993 (the fiftieth anniversary of Tresca’s assassination) Carlo Tresca Day. In March 1993, I moderated a symposium on Carlo Tresca that drew 100 people to the Tamiment Library of NYU. Other IAMUS activities that I’m involved with in­clude: a curriculum development project that would give students a broader and more balanced role of Italian Americans, and the plan­ning of a second Vito Marcantonio Forum with the theme of multicul­tural, coalition-building.

For me all roads lead back to East Harlem and Vito Marcantonio. After all East Harlem opened my eyes to the reality of our country’s class and racial oppression, as well as the creative forces that can be mobilized to fight against it and build a better society. Marcantonio’s life clarified my own experiences as an Italian American, and con­firmed for me that progressive politics do exist as part of the Italian-American legacy.

 

 

Gil Fagiani

Astoria/Long Island City

 

 

 

 

 


[1]Allan Cowell, “Italians Defying Shakedowns Pay With Lives,” New York Times 12 Nov. 1992: A13.

[2]David Durk, Arlene Durk, and Ira Silverman, The Pleasant Avenue Connection (New York: Harper, 1976).

[3]Gil Fagiani, “An Italian-American on the Left: Drugs, Revolution and Ethnicity in the 1970’s,” Italian-Americans in a Multicultural Society, eds. Jerome Krase and Judith De Sena (New York: Forum Italicum, 1994) 217–35.

[4]Richard Gambino, Vendetta (New York: Doubleday, 1970).

[5]Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party: A Critical History (New York: Praeger, 1957) 420.

[6]Peter Jackson, “Vito Marcantonio and Ethnic Politics in New York,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 6.1 (Jan. 1983): 50–71.

[7]Gerald Meyer, Vito Marcantonio, Radical Politician, 1902–1954 (New York: State UP, 1989).

[8]Robert Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1985).

[9]Ibid. 178.

[10]Ibid. 172.

[11]Europe American Communication Service, “The Collettivi CR and What Is Revolutionary Communication?” EACS Newsletter (June 1972): 5–8.

[12]Gil Fagiani, “Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian Ancestors of Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins” (unpublished essay, 1971): 1–7.

[13]Gil Fagiani, “Marcantonio: East Harlem’s Bread of the Poor,” Guardian 16 May 1990: 10–11.

[14]“Founding Statement—January 1992” (New York: Italian Americans of a Multicultural US, 1992): 1–2.