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Caucasian by default White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945
White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945, is an important book. Indeed, as the winner of the prestigious 2004 Frederick Jackson Turner Award, professional historians have deemed it such. Yet Thomas Guglielmo's central arguments deserve a much broader reading, well beyond the academic circles and into the national dialogue about identity, race, ethnicity, and color. Guglielmo, an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, argues beginning with his very title that Italian immigrants were "white on arrival" to the United States. In doing so, he builds his case on recent studies about race, immigration, and "whiteness." But Guglielmo disagrees with several recent "whiteness" studies that argue Europeans arrived in America as "inbetween people" whose status conferred upon them an identity neither fully black nor fully white. Guglielmo's challenge to this position does not lack nuance; nor is he a Pollyanna who dismisses the difficulties of Italian immigrants. Rather, he argues that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Americans distinguished between race and color. Significantly, the federal government's applications for naturalization asked immigrants to fill in both their race and their color. For Italians their race was either North or South Italian and their color was always white. With that distinction in mind, Guglielmo points out that Italians might have been undesirables to many American citizens, but they were undesirables who were white. Indentity is a tricky thing and it is important to acknowledge that Italian Americans saw themselves in a different light. Though labeled white, until World War II Italians did not identify closely with their whiteness; instead they were much more likely to emphasize their racial identity as Italian or from a specific region of Italy. Guglielmo believes that being white conferred privilege and that Italian Americans enjoyed the privilege of being white. In fact, Guglielmo maintains that for Italian immigrants trying to make it in America, whiteness was their "most prized possession"; it was what allowed them to be accepted relatively easily in Chicago compared to African Americans, who made their way north during the Great Migration. Being white meant that Italians held a higher position in the hierarchy that defined the Second City's social system, and significantly, allowed them greater access to the largesse offered by government. Without a color barrier, Italian Americans' whiteness "opened the Golden Door" to a successful acculturation process, Guglielmo asserts. The fact that he focuses on Chicago offers certain advantages. First, Chicago was one of the top three American destinations for Italian immigrants during the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries. Also, not surprisingly, Chicago has strong archives on its Italian population, thanks to the University of Chicago sociology department, as well as a large collection of oral histories from the Italians in the Chicago Project. Finally, with such events as the Race Riot of 1919, Chicago's history is central to understanding urban northern cities and the development of the color line. Guglielmo builds his story around a number of central events that show how the Italian immigrants' identity base changed from ethnicity to race. Italians who first immigrated to the United States around the turn of the century did not emphasize their white identity, nor did they hold any great antipathy for African Americans. But the Race Riot of 1919, the 1924 Immigration Act, the emergence of Italian organized crime, the deportation drive of 1926, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, and union activity during the Great Depression all strengthened an Italian-American identity and broadened the color line that separated them from people of color. Around World War II, Italians began to fully embrace their whiteness. In particular, when it came to issues of housing and community, Italian Americans were whites, and they were whites who did not want to integrate with African Americans. To that end, Italian Americans fought integration at Cabrini homes, they joined white homeowner associations designed to prevent African Americans from entering a community, and they even resorted to racial violence and harassment. Guglielmo's study helps explain how Italian identity shifted from undesirable "New Immigrants" at the turn of the twentieth century to "White Ethnics" in postwar America. While White on Arrival is a significant work, it does have shortcomings. Although Guglielmo expertly explains the relationship of Chicago's Italian immigrants to its African-American population, he could have done more to compare Italian experiences with those of the Irish and the Germans. Second, while Guglielmo emphasizes that Italian Americans increasingly embraced whiteness, he does not explore whether they felt pressured to abandon their Italian identity once their ancestral homeland became America's enemy during World War II. The reader is left to wonder, then, whether the Italian Americans of that era encountered cultural pressures similar to those faced by German Americans during World War I. —Alan Bloom Alan Bloom is an Assistant Professor of History at Valparaiso University and is currently writing a book on the history of homelessness in mid-Nineteenth-century Chicago. Illinois Heritage| 23 |
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