The Italian Americans

Narrator

In 1921, in America the story of a an English heiress and Though the the exotic leading man had female moviegoers He was a southern Rudolph Valentino, movie star

Aleandri

Valentino was very liberating for the women of this period. They were allowed to fall in love with this other who was not the guy down the street or the cowboy in the west. Valentino came almost from another planet. But then, of course, he was Italian; he looked Italian.

Narrator

Overnight, Valentino became one of the silent film era's biggest stars. Dubbed "The Latin Lover" by audiences, Valentino held an irresistible charm for American women.

Aleandri

American men, on the other hand, they were either jealous of him or they wanted to imitate him. They'd slick back their hair with Vaseline. In fact, "Vaseline-o" was the name for anyone that slicked back their hair, like Valentino.

Narrator

Rudolph Valentino was born in Castellaneta, Italy in 1895 and he'd come through Ellis Island alone at the age of 18. Three years later, he found his way to Hollywood, only to discover that there were few roles for Italians.

Aleandri

At this period of time, the ideal on the screen was the American cowboy or the boy next door, the farm boy. This was what America was about.

Italians in movies were always characters

villains and peasants, maybe a crime figure, maybe a thief. Narrator opportunities for Valentino in traditional Hollywood films, he found work instead in romantic fantasies about faraway places. His Italian looks would stand in for Indian rajas, Spanish bullfighters, and, most famously, an Arab sheik. But even as Valentino's star was rising, he couldn't escape the stigma of being Italian in 1920's America.

At the height of his career, he was earning a fraction of what other leading men were making and despite his efforts to play mainstream roles, producers and audiences would only ever accept him as a dark, exotic foreigner.

Aleandri

He tried his hand at other types of roles, but he realized he'd never be Douglas Fairbanks. So, that bothered him. He did say, at one point, that he tried to stay out of the sun, because, being a Southern Italian, if he got sun, he was going to get darker and darker. There was a climate in America of this anti-Italian sentiment, and he was right there in the middle of it.

Italian American immigrants of even the second generation were still considered racially inferior.

Narrator

20 years after the start of the great migration, the next generation of Italians would begin the difficult transition to becoming Americans. For some Italians, that meant fighting on the front lines of the American labor movement, or demonstrating their faith on the streets of New York, while others would find a short cut to their American dream. But no matter how they got there, Italians would challenge the prevailing notion of the American melting pot. Despite the hardships of the earliest immigrants, Italian families, most of them from the impoverished southern provinces, continued to pour into America at record numbers.

In the first decades of the 20th century, nearly one-third of all Italians chose to migrate to America. Increasingly, though, Southern Italians were being singled out at Ellis Island, marked as an inferior class of immigrant.

Gabaccia

After 1900, the United States requires the race of every immigrant. When you go to Ellis Island, the guy in the book writes down either Northern Italian, and that was seen as superior, or Southern Italian, and that was seen as inferior.

Guglielmo

They had a series of blanks that they had to fill in, and one was for race, one was color, one was for complexion, one was for nationality. And so someone coming from a place like Sicily, they would often have under complexion "dark", but their color was white, their nationality was Italian, and their race was Southern Italian, or South Italian. The fact that their race was South Italian meant immense disadvantage for them. The Northern Italian race, they're modern and intelligent, but the Southern Italians are completely different people.

They were thought to be superstitious, ignorant, the antithesis of modern. That was part of the Italian American experience, and they had to constantly contend with these very pervasive ideas about their biological inferiority, their racial inferiority.

The use of all of those negative terminologies

dago, guinea, wop. Italian immigrants, they may not talk about it, but they know it. They know that they're not valued, in all sorts of ways. But, at the same time, you have an American culture that's very clear that this is an English-speaking, white, upper middle class America that expects immigrants to become like us, whatever that means, as quickly as possible.

To cut off ties to their homeland, learn to speak English quickly, gain citizenship quickly.

Narrator

A government report published in 1911 found that of all the immigrant groups in America, Italians were the least likely to become citizens.

Distasi

many Italians who felt that they couldn't become American at all, and many of them didn't particularly want to be American and many of them were suspicious of the fact that their children were becoming perhaps a little bit too American for their taste.

Narrator

Italians did By sending their immigrant parents exposed should forego their singularly American. One of those Italians was Leonard Cove Covello was an educator who wrote about the struggle of Italians to assimilate in New York. But in 1896, he was just a 9-year-old immigrant from Avigliano, Italy named Leonardo Coviello.

Meyer

Leonard Covello, I think he was in the fourth or fifth grade, a teacher said to him, "Your name is no longer Coviello. It's too difficult to say Coviello, and, from now on, your name is Covello." And he went home and told his father, and his father was incensed. A teacher had renamed his son. This is the name of his family, going back centuries upon centuries.

So the exact nightmare that the Italian parents assumed would occur was occurring in his household.

Orsi

In his autobiography, Covello says, even though he respected what they were doing, he says, "They were trying to make us American by getting us to hate our families. They were trying to get us to hate the ways their families lived."

Narrator

It wasn't just schools that were trying to Americanize immigrants. Protestant social workers were a familiar presence in Italian enclaves, preaching the virtues of good hygiene and a proper American diet.

Orsi

There was a huge struggle around oatmeal. For breakfast, you were supposed to eat oatmeal, and that was a healthy breakfast. And Italians viewed oatmeal as pig food. Covello collected a story in the 1920's of an Italian father just exploding, saying, "Look at this, we come to America, we think we're gonna make it here in America, and they're giving us the food of animals to eat."

Gabaccia

This is pig food. This is animal food. What are they doing to us in America? You know, they remove the vowel from your name, they send you home with pig food to eat.

What is this? No, no, no. And no.

Orsi

They wanted Italians to open their windows, because Italians tended to keep their windows shut tight, because they were afraid of drafts on their babies. So these home visitors would come in and just throw the windows open, which was just an outrage to Italians. They tried to get them to stop swaddling their babies. They wanted the baby's limbs to be open and free.

So, very intimate levels of change that they were trying to effect.

Meyer

All of this was to stigmatize the practices of the immigrant groups. The food that they ate, the cultural expression around holidays, was all ridiculed and to be replaced by really Anglo-Saxon practices and culture.

Narrator

City agencies designed to deal with a rash of children orphaned by destitute immigrants aggressively pushed their own agenda to pump out newly minted Americans.

Turturro

My mother was born in Brooklyn on Rockaway Avenue. Her mother died when she was four. So my mother was then taken away to St. Joseph's Orphanage and she lived there for six years, and she was forbidden to speak any Sicilian by Irish nuns.

She was hit if she spoke Sicilian. And she had red hair, so, eventually, she told her father, "Don't talk to me." When her father would come visit her, "Don't talk to me in that language anymore."

Meyer

Really they were caught in a loyalty conflict. If they assumed the values of the schools, they were going to be disloyal to their parents and their community. On the other hand, if they did not assume the values of the school, they were not going to be able to advance in an American way.

Talese

When I was a kid I would take my lunch to school, but my lunch was different from the other kids. They all had white bread ham sandwiches, and we didn't eat white bread at our house. It was always Italian bread. So the food already, you almost were embarrassed and wished you could devour what you ate covertly, you wish you could sneak off somewhere and have your lunch by yourself.

And so I always wished that I was more like these freckle-faced kids. They were the true Americans and people like me were the latecomers. It really made you feel very much conflict with who I was and who my parents were. And so you know the difficulty in becoming an American.

It isn't a sudden process. You get over it, but you don't ever quite get over it. You carry it with you. And that's the great and not-so-great aspect of being, or trying to be, an assimilated American.

Narrator

Just as Italian immigrants were trying to assimilate into the fabric of America, a growing chasm between America's rich and its working class was widening. Laborers were organizing and agitating for better working conditions in factories and mills. Many strikes turned violent, as desperate workers squared off in the streets against company guards and state militias. Italian unskilled and desperate for work, were often forced to cross picket lines.

But that would all change in 1912 in the mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts, when Italians would take the lead in the fight for workers' rights.

Watson

Lawrence, Massachusetts was a quintessential mill town. There were something like 25,000 to 28,000 millworkers filling these huge mills that were several blocks long. They needed a constant flow of human labor. The biggest group was Italians.

Narrator

Textile work was becoming increasingly dangerous. In Lawrence, the average worker didn't live past the age of 39. The damp mills were rife with disease, and the powerful looms' inexorable motion became death traps for exhausted workers.

Trasciatti

Out of necessity,

the whole family worked in the mills

women, men and children. And women worked in the mills when they were pregnant, up until the moment where they gave birth, because they desperately needed the money. There are stories of women giving birth between the looms in the mills.

Watson

They were truly places of utter desp It was one of the major reasons that people were so itchy to change their lives.

Pernicone

There was legislation passed which reduced the number of hours that they could work in the textile mills. The response of the owners in the American woolen industry was a cut in pay. They were not going to accept the fact that the workers could work less for the same amount of money.

Narrator

Friday, January 12, 1912 started out as a typical day in Lawrence, as thousands of immigrant of the American Woolen Company. But just a few hours into the work day, their paychecks were handed out revealing a cut in pay.

Watson

They were ready. They had knives to cut through the belts and the ribbons and the cloth, and they marched through the halls of the mills and yelled, "Short pay, all out!" And that was what began the strike.

Narrator

A riot call sounded, and police marched into the streets to find the indignant crowds shouting, "Strike." By the following week, 15,000 strikers formed picket lines that ringed the massive mill buildings. State Militia with bayonets drawn stood at the ready. At the front of the picket lines were the Italians.

Watson

Of course, there were many nationalities that did follow on strike, but it was really started by the Italians, who were the most active. They had organized all week before the actual day. Because, in the past, Italians in Lawrence had been strikebreakers. They were the last ones to arrive in Lawrence, the last group.

And that meant they were on the bottom rung, and, if there was a strike, often they were the ones who were forced by their economic situation to cross picket lines and be scabs. But all that week, there were some people who said, "Let's not do that this time," or, "Let's stay out."

Trasciatti

They really were so indignant about the cut in wages that they thought, "We'll starve fighting before we'll starve working for people who are exploiting us."

Giovannitti

They came to this country for the promise of a better life, and they were gonna get a better life and they're not gonna sit here and take the abuse that was heaped upon them.

Narrator

As the crowds filled the streets,

strikers held high two flags

one Italian, the other American.

Watson

No matter how much they held their heritage inside their hearts, I think it says that, "We honor our heritage, but we are Americans now."

Narrator

The Italian strikers in Lawrence called for support from the International Workers of the World, a labor union that embraced the rights of all immigrant workers. One of the rising stars of this radical movement was the charismatic Italian poet named Arturo Giovannitti, who arrived in Lawrence a week after the strike began.

Giovannitti

My grandfather mesmerizing public speaker. His own personal belief was in trying to make people understand the really big picture as he saw it, and I think that allowed him to really soar to serious heights as a speaker and really invoke grand themes and grand imagery.

Narrator

After two weeks of violent clashes with police and state militia, strikers were growing weary. Then, just days after his arrival, Giovannitti mounted a stage to deliver an impassioned speech he called, "The Sermon on the Common." "Blessed are they that mourn their martyred dead, for they shall avenge them upon their murderers and be comforted. Blessed are the rebels, for they shall recover the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after equality, for they shall eat the fruit of their labor.

Blessed are the strong, for they shall not taste the bitterness of pity. Blessed are the sincere in heart, for they shall see truth. And blessed are they that do battle against wrong, for they shall be called the children of liberty." Giovannitti's speech rallied stiffened their resolve to stay on strike.

Trasciatti

The leader of the stri Arturo Giovannitti, is an Italian. And here's this guy telling you, "Stick together, workers unite! One for all, all for one!" And he's your fellow countryman, it isn't an English speaking American, it isn't an Irishman. It's somebody who you can trust who's telling you, "You can do this." And then you look and there's someone who's not from your country and doesn't speak your language, but he clearly feels the same way that you do.

And I think it was just a moment of intense solidarity. Everyone who participated in it really talks about it as kind of a magical moment where the possibilities for the working class uniting and really changing conditions seemed very real.

Narrator

But just days after Giovannitti's speech, mill owners struck back. After an Italian worker named Anna Lopizzo was killed by a stray bullet, Giovannitti and IWW Leader Joe Ettor were promptly arrested and charged with her murder.

Giovannitti

Obviously, it was a complete fabrication. They were miles away and had nothing to do with it, but you know, the police in Lawrence were obviously beholden to the mill owners, so they were arrested and thrown in jail. My grandfather, then, was an accessory to murder.

Narrator

News of Giovannitti and Joe Ettor's false arrest only bolstered public support for the workers. Emboldened, the Lawrence they brought with them from Italy.

Watson

In Italy, in previous strikes, they would send their children out of town to sympathetic families. On February 10th, a month into the strike, when conditions were really low and really bad, about 200 mothers and children gathered at the train station on a Saturday morning. And they put their children on the trains and there were handkerchiefs waving and tears. And they came into Grand Central Station to a huge tumult.

The children were quite hungry, quite malnourished.

Trasciatti

When they sent them to New York City, they were greeted by thousands of people in Grand Central Station and people swept them up and carried them on their shoulders with tears in their eyes. They wept when they saw these children. They had threadbare clothes, they were frightened, but they were beautiful and they really symbolized really what the struggle was all about. It was about a better life for these children, for what would be the future of America.

So, it generates a lot of really bad publicity for the mill owners and it inspires a wave of indignation among prominent Americans.

Narrator

Horrified by reports of the children's exodus, President Taft himself ordered an immediate investigation. A week later, Congress held hearings and took testimony from the strikers. They heard from fathers robbed of their dignity, because they could barely provide for their families. And they heard from illiterate children who had to work instead of attending school.

Trasciatti

Children talk about 13 hour days in the mills and, you know, losing fingers and not being able to go to school and it floors people. They just can't believe that these are the conditions that people are working in in the United States.

Watson

It gradually began to dawn on the congressmen that this was Dickensian situation here in America. That was what made William Wood and the other mill owners decide, "We have to settle this strike right now." In many ways, it could be called the most successful strike in labor history. They got raises of about 15%, but even more significantly was all of the mill owners in New England, they met, and they decided they did not want another Lawrence in their town. So, you had almost 300,000 people in all getting a raise as a result of the Lawrence strike.

Because Italians were the leaders in it, it had a huge effect on their self-perception. They weren't just scabs anymore. They weren't just strikebreakers. They really saw they had a place.

Narrator

Giovannitti was eventually acquitted of murder charges and emerged from the strike as a formidable figure. He and other prominent Italian labor leaders, like Carlo Tresca, commanded huge audiences and continued the struggle for immigrant workers rights that reverberates to this day.

Giovannitti

It really was a kind of momentous turning po in just the struggle for dignity, even beyond economic grievances. But just looking at people in the wider context of industrial exploitation and saying, "Hey, people cannot live like this. This is not how human beings can be treated."

inaudible chatter

Narrator

In East Harlem, every summer for the last 130 years, the members of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church remove a statue of the Madonna to be paraded throughout the streets. ♫♫

Male Parishoner

The most important person in the Italian family is your mother. Everything is centered around the mother. And the Italians look at the Madonna as a mother figure. That's where a lot of the devotion comes from, also.

She's the mother of everybody. She's the mother of God.

Narrator

Today, all over to show their devotion. But for the original Italian immigrants who built the church, this festival was yet another demonstration, a way to say that while they wanted to become Americans, Italians would not be told how to practice their faith. When the Italians arrived in America, the Irish were already in control of the country's Catholic Church. By 1879, New York's St.

Patrick's Cathedral stood as a towering symbol of their might. By the turn of the century, Italian Catholics in East Harlem wanted a church of their own, and they set about building Our Lady of Mount Carmel one brick at a time. The centerpiece was to be a statue of the Madonna brought from Italy, made with real human hair and a cape adorned with donated jewelry.

Orsi

Back in Italy, sometimes people made vows to the Madonna. If they had a baby that was sick, they'd buy a wax baby. Or if their arm hurt, they would buy a wax arm. And they would bring the wax objects in to the church, lay it at the front of the altar and there are these descriptions of the front of the church, piled high with wax body parts representing kind of an outward expression of all the ills of the community that the Madonna was presiding over and healing and caring for.

Narrator

But to the Irish-run Archdiocese in America, Italians' their shrines to patron saints seemed exotic, even paganistic.

Meyer

According to Catholic belief, the statues are supposed to be representations to inspire, but that's all they're supposed to be statues. But the Italians treated them as a bit more than that, like they really had, you know warm blood in them somehow. The patron saints were different. It wasn't St.

Patrick, it was Gemeli, the twins. The Irish-Americans had no idea who these people were. St. Lucy with her eyeballs on a plate, I mean, these were unknown to Irish.

Orsi

Italian immigrants were called the "Italian Problem" from the moment they arrived. It's impossible to exaggerate the vitriol with which Irish priests in the United States spoke about Italian immigrants. I mean, these were ignorant people, they said, who knew nothing about the faith, who practiced this weird amalgam of piety that they had never seen before.

Trasciatti

The Italian Catholics were different. It's a culture of sight and sound and taste. It's not a culture of the book in the same way that Jews and the Irish are. Those kinds of rituals, the very aesthetic rituals, and experiencing the world through the senses, those are important in a community for which literacy rates are not very high.

This kind of faith was really important to them in ways that it wasn't, say, to the Irish who preceded them.

Narrator

In response to the "Italian Problem," Irish clergy often forbade Italian Catholics from worshiping at the main altars of churches. And in Harlem, the Madonna of Mount Carmel was to be displayed in the basement.

Orsi

When the church was built, Italians were sent to the basement to worship, and this was common across the United States. Italian immigrants worshipped in the basements of Catholic Churches, in the lower churches, because they weren't understood to be somehow good enough to come upstairs. Italians hated it. They knew they were being insulted.

They knew that to put the Madonna in the basement was an insult to them and to the Madonna.

Narrator

Though Italians were barred from worshiping the Madonna at the main altar, the Irish clergy could do nothing to stop them from bringing her onto the streets. The first festivals were small. But, by 1917, the Feast of Mount Carmel was drawing Italians from enclaves up and down the East Coast. Italian Catholics who'd come to see the glorious Madonna of 115th Street.

Meyer

Literally hundreds and hundreds a thousands of Italian Americans arrived in Italian Harlem, from Astoria, from the Bronx. Italians arrived in buses from Philadelphia, from all over New Jersey.

Orsi

One of the things that drove Irish American Catholics crazy about this festa was the mingling of the sacred and the profane. So here you have this festa in honor of the Virgin Mary, and they're selling food on the streets. There were rides. There's gambling going on.

It was that atmosphere of carnival. I mean this was a spectacle, a huge and embarrassing spectacle for the American church.

Narrator

But for Italians, these festivals were more than a religious tradition. They were an affirmation of their culture.

Trasciatti

If you're denied indoor space, you take outdoor space. That's always what disenfranchised people do. They take the streets. They force people to recognize them.

They display their power in bodily form and for those few hours, they own the streets. You can't walk past. You can't even come near without being accosted with the sounds of what they're doing, and then let alone the sights and the smells.

Meyer

These feasts were an expression of community solidarity. You know, in numbers, there's kind of power. So it was a type of like a demonstration in a way, of taking over the streets, and saying that this was ours. This is our community.

These are our streets.

Narrator

It wouldn't be until the 1920s when the Madonna of 115th Street would be brought up to the main altar. By then, Italian feast days were celebrated annually in cities across the country. ♫♫ By 1919, over 3 million Italians were now residing in America and most were still occupying the lowest rungs of society. Many Italians remained steadfast in their desire for social change, and some were drawn to the far left, embracing the political philosophy of anarchy.

Since the beginning of the great a small but active Italian anarchist movement had flourished in the United States.

Watson

I think the appeal of anarchism, for an Italian-American especially, would be that if you came from Italy, you came from a country that had a king. It had very few notions of representative government whatsoever. And then you came to America. Of the people, by the people, for the people, this was the ideal that you came for.

And yet, you saw that that was not really working for your people. You might dream that someday perhaps people wouldn't need a government. People would watch out for each other in a very altruistic and noble way.

Narrator

Popular anarchist leaders that were folk heroes in Italy regularly toured America's Italian enclaves. These evangelists delivered impassioned speeches and founded radical newspapers.

Watson

There were Italian anarchist picnics. There were plays, Italian anarchist plays. There were Italian anarchist songs that people would sing. They were very active and they were a very interesting group of people and so it was such a sustaining culture for them, for that small group of Italians.

Narrator

But with America's entry into World War I in 1917, the government began cracking down on anarchist groups who were vocal about their opposition to war.

Pernicone

The United States declares war April 6, 19 Within days, President Wilson gives orders to start crushing all forms of dissent. They were relentlessly hounded and persecuted.

Trasciatti

You can't speak out against the war. You can't do anything that will interfere with the war effort, or your publication will be suppressed, you'll be thrown in jail, deported. In 1919, this small group of anarchists decide they're going to strike at the heart of state power.

Just after 11

00 PM, on the night of June 2, 1919, a man dressed in a pinstriped suit and derby hat quietly strolled through a posh Washington D.C. neighborhood. Hidden in his suitcase was 20 pounds of dynamite. As he approached the home of US Attorney General A.

Mitchell Palmer, he tripped and fell.

loud explosion

Just after 11

A deafening explosion shook the entire str shattering windows and throwing sleeping residents from their beds.

Pernicone

The anarchist who was gonna blow up Palmer's house trips and falls and he's blown, literally, to smithereens. Pieces of him were all over the neighborhood.

Watson

Among the pieces that were found was a scalp, an entire human scalp found on a rooftop. And they took it to an expert in these things, and the man said that, based on the dark, wavy hair of the scalp, it must have been an Italian.

Narrator

That same night, bombs across the country in a carefully coordinated attack. The targets were prominent bu politicians and judges, men who had aggressively suppressed radical Italian labor groups and anarchists.

Watson

In many of the bombing sites, they found a pink flier that was signed by the American Anarchist Fighters and it said, "We have reached out, we have tried to dream of peace, and you have jailed us, you have murdered us, you have starved us. From this point on, no compromise, no backing down. We are here to fight."

Narrator

In response to the anarchist bombing, Attorney General Palmer went on a mission to track down every last anarchist in America. He cast a wide net over cities all along the East Coast, raiding clandestine offices and confiscating printing presses.

Watson

Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer began what are known as the "Palmer Raids." Some 4,000 or 5,000 people, radicals and labor leaders as well, were rounded up without any due process. Many were shipped out of the country. And, at that point, anybody who was in any way associated with anarchism went underground as much as possible.

Narrator

After the bombings, two Italian anarchists, Nicolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were picked up by the police. Their arrest would set in motion one of the most infamous events in Italian American history.

Watson

Sacco and Vanzetti were out on a dark night gathering anarchist literature from the homes of their friends. There was all sorts of fear among the anarchists that another raid was coming.

Narrator

But Sacco and Vanzetti were being detained for a robbery and murder of two men that had taken place weeks earlier. Based on a tip, police believed the crime was the work of a gang of Italians. emigrated at the turn of the century but didn't meet until years later, after they became involved with the growing labor movement.

Trasciatti

Neither of them were anarchists when they arrived in the United States, and it was their experiences as workers and the way they saw other working people treated that turned them to this most radical of political philosophies.

Watson

Vanzetti came to America in 1908 with much of the dream of America being a place of prosperity and freedom and, of course, he was appalled by what he saw. He began to live on the street, and he began to do just simply the worst, harshest, kind of labor.

Narrator

Vanzetti would later write, "I arrived in America. I underwent all the sufferings, the disillusions and privations. Here, I saw all the brutalities of life, all the injustice, the corruption in which humanity struggles tragically." Now indicted for first-degree murder, Sacco and Vanzetti stood trial in the summer of 1921. From the start, it was clear that the case was really about anarchy and about being Italian.

Pernicone

Judge Webster Thayer, he was fanatically opposed to radicals. Hated them with a passion. I mean, that's not just a question of a conservative judge. I mean, this is a visceral hatred on his part for these kind of people.

And, of course, the fact they're Italians just makes it all the worse.

Watson

A man who was eventually on the jury was quoted as saying, "They ought to take every one of those damn Italians and hang them by their sensitive parts." The other thing that really hurt Sacco and Vanzetti was, during the trail, they were marched out of the jail every day completely surrounded by police. They were marched through the streets, marched into the courtroom and seated in a cage. So, they looked to the jury like very dangerous men.

Pernicone

So you've got a combination of the i hostility towards Italians, because these are the kind of people who commit these crimes, right? And, thereafter, it's this kind of setup.

Narrator

In April of 1927, after a series of lengthy appeals, Sacco and Vanzetti were sentenced to death. To millions of workers, the verdict was symbolic of a greater injustice played out every day in the factories and mills of a newly industrialized world. Rallies and protestors filled the streets.

Watson

When they were finally sentenced in 1927, then it became the largest cause celeb really that the world had ever seen. And, all of that summer of 1927, there were strikes, there were protests, there were rallies for Sacco and Vanzetti in every major capital around the world.

Trasciatti

They became celebrities at a time where celebrity culture was really beginning to take off. They blessed their pictures all over the place. But if you were an Italian, they were symbolic of ethnic prejudice.

Pernicone

It symbolized from the point of view of not just radicals, in some cases conservative people. They were outraged by the trial proceedings. This was just, you know, a farce.

Narrator

At their final sentencing, Vanzetti delivered an impromptu statement.

Pernicone

Vanzetti, who was always more cerebral, he steps into the chamber, and he says, "I have not been guilty of murder. I've been guilty of some sins perhaps, but never murder."

Watson

He says, "I couldn't even begin to say how we have suffered for things we did not do. I feel I'm also being convicted for things I am guilty of. I've been convicted as the radical and indeed, I am a radical. I've been convicted as an Italian, and indeed, I am an Italian." And then he says, "But I am so convinced of being right that if I could be executed two times, and be reborn two times, I would still live to do what I have done." There were tears in the audience.

People were just stunned by what he'd said.

Narrator

On August 23rd 1927, Sacco first, then Vanzetti, were electrocuted. Their names and their likenesses are forever linked in history. Hundreds of thousands of people came out for the funeral procession as their bodies were paraded through the streets of Boston. To many, they were martyrs.

But to millions of Italians, they saw in Sacco and Vanzetti a disturbing parable.

Pernicone

I think clearly they saw this as the way in which Italians were regarded by this country, by the Anglo-Saxon dominant class, the disdain with which Italians were regarded. So, I think it just reinforced this sense of, "You're an alien; you don't really belong here; you don't fit in here."

Watson

I believe that almost every Italian American, from the day they were arrested until on into the 1960s at least, heard the story, at the kitchen table probably, of Sacco and Vanzetti. It was a lesson. It was a lesson that probably only had to be repeated once. This is what happens or could happen to you as an Italian-American if you step out of line.

Narrator

By 1924, an anxious America was seriously questioning its open door immigration policy. On May 26th, in a ceremony held outside the White House, President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Johnson-Reed Act, which set strict immigration quotas for Italians. Coolidge himself remarked, "Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend." For Italians, the message was clear.

Aleandri

No matter how you raise yourself up in American society, make lots of money, you know, have a great business, you're still an Italian; you're still a dago; you're still a wop to the outer world, to the larger mainstream American community.

Narrator

By the time the act went into effect, some 2 million of the 4 million Italians who journeyed to the U.S. had returned to Italy. Those who remained struggled to forge ahead as Americans. In the midst of the hysteria over Italian radicals, laws to But one of those presented an Overnight, illegal multi-million dollar trade young men to lift themselves out of their ethnic ghettos.

Santopietro

There was just such enormous money to be made by this and there were Irish gangsters, Italian gangsters, Jewish gangsters. It was not predominately Italian; you had people of all ethnicities.

Fox

Before 1920, the American underworld was essentially Irish and Jewish. The Italians were not much involved.

Raab

Through prohibition, two big criminals realized instead of learning about dollars, they could go; they could make thousands, if not close to millions. It turned these amateurs into criminal executives.

Hamill

Within a year after the passage of Prohibition, the number of saloons in New York had doubled, you know, except that they were all illegal.

glass shattering

Fox

P was imposed essentially by white Protestants. They were worried about the drinking habits of various non-WASP populations. They were anxious about these new immigrants coming in and corrupting the America that they had grown up with and that they thought of as the true America. The irony here is that that fantasy of an alien conspiracy becomes a real alien conspiracy, because Prohibition creates organized crime.

Organized crime has always been part of the immigrant experience. That's been one of the ways upward. But, it really doesn't get going until the great bonanza of Prohibition comes along. All of a sudden, the world opens up for gangsters.

The gangster Joe Bonnano said it was such fun being a bootlegger in the 1920s. And he's just an immigrant from Sicily and all of a sudden, he's got money and fancy cars and fast women and nightclubs.

Narrator

immigrant boys caught their first glimpse of how the other half lived, while their own fathers struggled to make ends meet. One of them was the notorious gangster Frank Costello. Born in Calabria as Francesco Castiglia, he was 9 years old when his parents immigrated to East Harlem.

Fox

Frank Costello grows up on the streets. Little Frank always wanted more for himself. He told stories about growing up poor in Italian Harlem. He came here as a young boy and in the squalor and dirt and poverty of Italian Harlem, he looked around and didn't want this and he was furious at his father for not trying harder, for accepting that situation.

So he's one of those guys who, they're aware of what is out there beyond their little Italian neighborhood, the promise of American life. And they want it. And they don't see any way they can get it. The way their father lives, the job their father works.

Well, Costello, he's out of school early and into crime early.

Narrator

Costello and other young criminals, like Lucky Luciano, Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, flocked to Arnold Rothstein, the Jewish gangster who lorded over New York's crime world.

Fox

They're all young punks, roistering around. They're all educated by Arnold Rothstein. Arnold Rothstein is the big man in the rackets, and he takes these young guys under his wing and shows them how to do things, educates them in the rackets and in gambling and in bootlegging.

Raab

You could produce a barrel of beer for $5 and sell it for $100. You could import a case of liquor, oh, maybe for $50 and you could sell it for over $1,000 Who wouldn't want to be in this business?

Narrator

Costello was a quick study and was soon moving hundreds of thousands of dollars of illegal liquor each week. Prohibition allowed Frank Costello to rise from the streets of Harlem to become one of the era's biggest mobsters. He had an apartment overlooking Central Park, hand-made suits and rubbed elbows with politicians and business leaders. He was living a life his father could only dream of.

Fox

The key to his rise is that he's more ecumenical than most Italian gangsters. In fact, in the 1920s, the cops that tailed him only saw him with Irish gangsters and Jewish gangsters. An Italian Catholic, he marries a Jewish woman in a Protestant church. He always seems to be aware of a wider world.

Costello always seems to be looking outward and trying to understand the world and make more of himself.

Narrator

But in 1933, America's experiment with prohibition ended. As many Jewish and Irish gangsters faded away from crime and made their way into legitimate professions, Costello and his cohorts organized themselves into the modern mob.

Raab

Prohibition was on the way out. It was gonna be abolished and Frank Costello decided then the only way for the Italian American gangs certainly, to continue to make millions was to become

diversified conglomerates

labor racketeering, taking over construction unions, taking over entire industries, like the Garment Center. So, in a sense, what they did was they became a mirror of American capitalism. It was hard to become a banker, a lawyer, or succeeding in legitimate business. This WASP-ish system in America made it difficult and was biased against Italian Americans.

So, in a sense, they could justify it by saying, "This was our only avenue for success and prosperity, and for power."

Narrator

Costello and his cronies found a short cut to success, but their exploits made sensational headlines that cast a shadow over ordinary Italians still struggling to find a foothold in America.

Pernicone

Yes, Italians have been crimi and they've been subversives and revolutionaries. Hey, this is part of history. But, unfortunately, I think there's a tendency to see Italians too much in these radical terms. The idea that these people have, you know, a bomb in one hand and a dagger in the other is just nonsense.

In reality, in the 1920s, they are solidly working class. But, the Italians are on the bottom, barely considered white. In so many instances, people who were professionals found their careers thwarted by the very fact that they were Italian. In the 1920s they felt, "Hey, here we are, we're trying to be good Americans and advance and we're getting nowhere." Narrator In the coming decades, the majority of Italians found mainstream success and were able to pull themselves out of their enclaves.

In the 1940s, World War II gave Italians the opportunity to but it would take generations for Italians to overcome the stigma of their earliest American experience.

Announcer

Next time, Italian-Americans enter politics and become a force for change.

Man

LaGuardia took those values of the family and transformed them into social policy.

Announcer

But with the outbreak of war, loyalties are tested.

Man 2

He's a national hero and then his parents are identified as enemy aliens.

Announcer

And Italian-Americans sign up to fight.

Antonin Scalia

There was no doubt what side they'd be on.

Woman

"We're giving up our lives," "We're the back-bone of the country."

Announcer

On the next, "Italian Americans." ♫♫ ♫♫ To learn more about Italian-American culture and history from the late 19th century to today visit PBS.org/TheItalianAmericans. Or visit us on Twitter at #italiansPBS. "The Italian-Americans" is available on DVD; a companion book is also available. To order, visit shopPBS.org or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.

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