An Offer They Could Not Refuse - Italian American Ethnicity in American Culture

 “The way some people link every Italian to the Mafia in a half joking way does not bother me. Actually, the Mafia has always been considered glamorous. I don’t know why people find bullies that glamorous, yet it seems to be an unending source of fascination to Americans. Some things have reached a level of the classic.”

-          Frank Stella, artist, Growing Up Italian [i]  -

An Offer They Could Not Refuse - Italian American Ethnicity in American Culture

Few ethnic groups have had a more dominant and lasting impact on American culture than the Italian Americans. The United States itself is in its entirety a product of immigration and from the very first colonist to the current immigrants arriving in the US, almost every American has recent roots in immigration. It should come as no surprise then, that the initial streams of immigrants, such as those from Italy, combined with all the other ethnic influences over the years, created an entirely new forms of ethnicity, that still exist to this day. These new ethnicities, such as the Italian American one, however, faced numerous obstacles and challenges throughout their existence. Italian Americans have had to struggle against discrimination and the ever present link to the Mafia.   

            In this paper I will investigate the subject of Italian American ethnicity in the United States and how it is represented in popular culture. Principally I will attempt to establish an general overview of the creation and development of the Italian American ethnicity through literature. From this I will examine the representations of the Italian Americans in American popular culture. In doing this, I will primarily focus on the quintessential pieces of Italian American cinema, The Godfather trilogy, and television, The Sopranos. By comparing and contrasting the two, I will endeavor the come to an analysis of how Italian Americans are represented in these aspects of American media and whether or not this image has changed significantly in  the years that passed between the two productions.

            The bond between Italy and “the New World” has always been a close one. Primarily, there is of course Christopher Columbus, who became a hero after discovering America. Besides Columbus, there were several prominent Italian explorers who, according to La Storia authors Mangione and Morreale, created enough excitement in their homeland to become a major subliminal force in initiating the mass migration towards the United States in the nineteenth century.[ii] From the moment America became colonized, there was a small but steady stream of Italian colonists. It is estimated that approximately twelve thousand Italians came to America between the founding of the American Republic in 1783 and the establishment of modern Italy in 1871, a relatively small number when compared to the 1.5 million German and 2 million Irish migrants between 1820 and 1860. The Italian group scattered throughout the land and was made up mostly of tradesmen, artists, teachers and political refugees who had the intention of staying in America.[iii] Up until the mass migration, cultivated Americans generally considered the Italian migrants as a civilizing influence on a society that still very much relied on Europe for cultural guidance. [iv]

            It was the aforementioned unification of Italian states into one country that drastically changed the situation. This unification led to a period of great civil unrest, as many Italians, most notably the Sicilians, refused to subject themselves to the new central authority. Italy was a land divided, as evidenced in the 1870 statement of an Italian statesman: “although we have made Italy, we have yet to make Italians.”[v] And indeed, from 1880 and onward, one of the greatest migration streams in the history of the world took place, reducing Italy’s total population by one third. The most common reason for the move to America was simply economic survival and the inability of the impoverished population to feel any allegiance to the new Italian regime.[vi] To really grasp the position of the poor Italian peasant one should consider Booker T. Washington’s quote: “The Negro is not the man farthest down. The condition of the colored farmer in the most backward parts of the Southern States in America, even where he has the least education and the least encouragement, is incomparably better than the condition and opportunities of the agricultural population in Sicily.”[vii] By 1930, more than 4,5 million Italians had entered the United States, a number that would have been doubled had it not been for the 1924 American immigration laws, aimed to keep out immigrants from Eastern and Western Europe, and the newly established fascist regime in Italy, which prohibited almost all migration from Italy. [viii] As one might expect, the post 1880 migrants received a rather different welcome than their predecessors. The contrast with the earlier wave of Italians was enormous, as most these mass-migrants were not the educated adventurers, artists and scholars, but uneducated, poor Northern Italians, with little to no skills. They were described as “foreign looking,” and were looked down upon even by their Southern fellow Italian Americans, a situation that already existed in the “Old Country.” The sheer number of new Italian-Americans also rubbed the earlier German and Irish migrants the wrong way, as they feared for their own economic welfare.[ix] The new conclusion was that the Southern Italians, especially the Sicilians, “were an undesirable lot, who had neither the wish nor the capacity to assimilate into the American population.”[x]

As with almost all of ethnicities in America, Italian American roots cannot be viewed without the cultural impact of migration and the strain it puts onto new cultures always in the back of our minds. In the article ““Literary Acculturation: What makes Ethnic Literature “Ethnic”,” Berdt Osentdorf opens with the statement that “the very act of emigration forces a disintegration of self, culture and society, and its subsectors. The self is pushed into marginality, and has to deal, from a situation of reduced political participation, with two cultures in a stratified social relationship which assigns to his old heritage the role of subculture within an alien dominant context.”[xi] The description illustrated the struggle that all emigrants have to face in order to establish their culture in a new environment. In this case American society was the “new social area,” in which people had to adjust to an entirely new set of social and cultural circumstances.[xii] Ostendorf himself mentions that this model offers a somewhat simplified view on a culture before leaving the homeland, as if “prior to migration the self was peacefully integrated in culture and society.”[xiii] A valid point and especially relevant in Italy’s case, where, as we have seen, there was no one national identity. Actually, Italian culture appears to have been in crisis even before the great migration. In Feeling Italian Thomas J. Ferraro delves deeper into this subject, as he tackles the idea “feeling Italian in America.” The mass migrated peasants thought of themselves not as Italians, but in terms of the particular family they belonged to, the town they came from or perhaps the area in which all spoke the same dialect. Italy, the new nation that had just been formed, and its government “they distrusted, even despised.”[xiv] It was, in fact, the move to America that started to create an Italian identity for these people, an Italian American identity. It was not until they were confronted with the suspicion and racism of the settled Americans that they started to think of themselves as a unit. Ferraro describes it as Italian-like feelings that were turned into the feeling of being an Italian. “A historical dialectic of representation and self-representation, yes, but it was lived in the blood, the flesh, the soul.”[xv]

            It is not surprising then that Ostendorf argues that “ethnicity is a conflict term,” which involves a battle between different cultural groups in a new social arena. And the key to creating and retaining this new ethnicity lies in striving towards hegemony, or “cultural and political self-determination and self-authentification.”[xvi] This of course leads us to the subject of ethnic art and literature, which is used to assert a sense of self-worth in a new group of people and to actually bind them with a common feeling of a shared culture. Ferraro quotes author and literary and music critic Albert Murray: “Art provides mankind with a definition of itself, its circumstances, its situation, its condition, and also its possibilities. That is what I think stories and poems are about. It is what paintings and sculptural forms are about. It is what music is about—which after all is nothing more if not a soundtrack to which we choreograph our daily activities.”[xvii] Here we see described the importance of art in migrated group of people. An importance maybe even more relevant in the case of the Italian American population, as their new ethnicity had to actually mend the broken up cultural relation that already existed in Italy and successfully combine it with the new challenges the New World offered the new Italian American community. No wonder then that, according to Ostendorf, immigrant literature tends to focus on what he call the “strain of ethnification,” or on the “disjunction of the old and simultaneously on the search for a new integration of artistic self.” The term most appropriate in this case is “creolization,” the practice of constantly assimilating, adding or disposing fragments of old and new culture. [xviii]

            The process of Italian American creolization can be observed very well in their migrant literature. The result of the fact that it was not the Italian cultural elite that came over to America was that the first bibliography of Italian American writers, composed in 1949, contained only 59 writers on a population of nearly five million.[xix] The early mass immigrants, most of whom did not know how to write or read, relied on traditional storytelling to relate stories of their homeland. Early novelists copied this style, still wrote in Italian and mostly focused on stories of “courtly romances and fantasies.” Most early novels, provided an image that American readers wanted to read, not an realistic portrayal of Italian immigrants. [xx] This again seems to fit in with Ostendorf’s theories on ethnification, in the sense that he argues that “the act of migration causes people to withdrawal into a traditional, often conservative auto stereotype.” The new Italian Americans held on to their cultural legacy, which all of a sudden was more relevant and present than it was before the migration, and were very conservative and traditional in their literary tastes.[xxi] The aforementioned “strain of ethnification” started to really show in the so called “second generation” of Italian American writers. These writers started to use English in their work and focused more on hardship their community faced in everyday life. Famous authors from this period were the poet Pascal D’Angelo,  Pietro DiDonato, Constantine Panuzio and Emanuel Carnevali.  D’Angelo wrote Son of Italy (1924) about his struggle to turn from a ditch digger into a poet. The  theme of entering America and facing new challenges for survival became the primary subject one in early Italian-American literature.[xxii]  Panuzio wrote Soul of an Immigrant (1921), an autobiography in which his initial hatred for American society changes in a positive outlook on it, aiming to teach readers the value of self improvement.[xxiii] Most authors, though, spoke of their ambivalent feelings towards both Italy and America. An example is “In America” by Carnevali:

“…everything / Is bigger, but less majestic… / Italy is a little family: / America is an orphan

Independent and arrogant, / Crazy and sublime, / Without tradition to guide her,

Rushing headlong in a mad run which she calls / Progress.” [xxiv]

As Ostendorf writes, there are three forms of immigrant and ethnic literature. First, there is the literature for immigrants and ethnic groups written from the point of view of the old culture. Then there is literature that evolves from the experiences the ethnic group has in America, which appeals to both the groups in question and to a larger audience. Both forms have been discussed above, but is in the third form that we find the real trouble. Namely in the “literature about immigrants and ethnics written from the point of view (actual or implied) of the dominant culture.”[xxv] It was in this literature, and mostly media later on, that stereotypes were established, based on the prejudices people had about Italian Americans the day they set foot in America. It is this last form of literature that has probably shaped the current image of Italian American culture the general public has the most.

                  In the last decades it has arguably been popular culture, and especially television and cinema, which have taken over the identity shaping role literature had in earlier years. Italian Americans take up a prominent role in both media, but in a rather limited capacity. In these media Italian American usually means Mafia, wise guys or street thug. In cinema the examples are numerous, but the main source of an Italian American identity in cinema can only be found by looking at Francis Ford Coppola’s iconic The Godfather (1972). The first thing one should notice is the fact that even though Coppola is an Italian American, he is far from the street wise, though guy he would feature in his movie. Coppola did not come from a working class background, but from well to do family of intellectuals and artists. Born in 1939 in Detroit, he attended UCLA film school and was educated in an intellectual and academic climate. [xxvi] In a way, this actually places Coppola squarely in Ostendorf’s third category of ethnic literature; literature about ethnics written from the point of view of the dominant culture. Even though Coppola is an Italian American, he is completely detached from the actual immigrant culture he shows us. He is part of the same age old separation in Italian heritage that all Italians experienced back in Italy, that of the hard working, uneducated peasant versus the intellectual Italians, who both looked down on each other. And as was noted, this was indeed where problems began to arise. From the moment the film was in production organizations such as the Italian American Civil Right League criticized it for creating a denigrating image of Italians Americans. In a compromise, Coppola removed all mentions of the terms “Mafia” and “Cosa Nostra,” fooling absolutely no one.[xxvii]

            A big point of criticism about The Godfather is the fact that Coppola, and writer of the original novel Mario Puzo, managed to make sympathetic characters out of vicious criminals. This is done, one critic argues, by avoiding basic truths. The sympathy for the characters is created by distorting reality. Don Corleone is portrayed as a ruthless, but honest man, who would never double cross anyone and who refused to go into the drug trafficking business; an image in direct contrast to the actual Mafia leaders of 1930’s, who would not have shown such qualms.  Don Corleone is represented as a good family man, an “Italian American Papa.” He kills and maims only to protect the ones he loves and in the name of family virtue. The Sicilians in the movie are strong family men, whereas outsiders were not. In a time were traditional family values started to disintegrate the movie going public cheered a man who would do anything for his family. [xxviii] The distortion does not stop there though. In the movie it is the non-Italian who marries Corleone’s widowed daughter who cannot handle his wife in a way that Sicilian women are apparently accustomed to in the cliché view world of Coppola. In his relation with the Don, US senator Gerry is actually the corrupt one. Even Michael Corleone’s academic education and heroic service in the US army during World War 2 cannot suppress his Sicilian genes, when the time comes to seek savage revenge for the sake of his family.[xxix]

            Though it is easy to see how Coppola distorted reality in order to create sympathy for his mobster family, it is also perfectly understandable why The Godfather gained such an enormous popularity, amongst Italian Americans and other ethnicities alike. Up to the 1960’s, Italian Americans were thought of as exemplifying the theory of upward social mobility: “success of a group is actually a function of its members breaking away from that group.” It were traditional Italian American values, their “clannishness” and reluctance to participate in mainstream society, that held back their ascent on the social ladder. In comparison to other new successful ethnicities in America, Italian Americans were “blue collar,” but never anything more. Success stories were always individual successes (Frank Sinatra).[xxx] This was a trauma reaching back to the Old Country, where, as we discussed earlier, most peasants lived under extremely impoverished circumstances. What The Godfather did, however, was create an Italian American family organization that was successful and respected in the business world. According to The Godfather, the Sicilian family mentality was the secret to a successful criminal organization and the Italian Americans no longer formed the insignificant industrial underbelly of America, but were the “capitalist nation’s underground brain trust.”[xxxi]

            Vera Dika expands this idea, by quoting from Frederic Jameson’s “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture: “…all contemporary works of arts – whether those of high culture and modernism or of mass culture – have as their underlying impulse – albeit in what is often distorted and repressed unconscious form – our deepest fantasies about the nature of social life, both as we live it now, and as we feel in our bones it ought rather be lived.” After the social unrest of the 1960’s and the war in Vietnam, The Godfather presented the illusion of family unity, and justified violence by an organized group, sometimes against the perceived unjust government.[xxxii]        

            Next to the stereotypical Mafia connection and family ties, The Godfather gave the Italian Americans a new representation of themselves. Over the years the film representation of the Italian American male had been that of “a man of excessive passion for sex or violence, the dumb fool, stumbling over his words and often getting a laugh.” [xxxiii]The social rules of behavior for the Southern Italian male, however, were much closer to the way Vito and Michael Corleone acted. The real Southern Italian man is “a creature of control, a man of pantience, a man who holds his body erect, but composed, his face impassive, and who plans, waits and then acts.” This Sicilian level of machismo is not a notion of shallowness of character but actually a way to focus and direct their passion, resulting in power. Vito and Michael, who both adhere to this code, are successful, while the oldest son, Sonny, fails to control his anger and passion, leading to his downfall. In its own way, The Godfather defined the limits of Italian American masculinity for entire generations watching the movie.[xxxiv]

            If The Godfather defined Italian American ethnicity in 1972, the HBO hit series The Sopranos (1999) showed how this ethnicity was absorbed into daily life. It deals with mobster Tony Sopranos tendency towards depression and his interaction with his family and his “family.” A recurring theme is that of Tony being unable to deal with combining his traditional Italian American values with everyday life in America. In the first episode he confesses to his therapist a feeling of “coming in too late, at the end, when the best of the American Dream is over.” Creator David Chase mentioned that the show’s original joke was “life in America had become so selfish that even a mobster can’t stand it anymore and needs therapy.”[xxxv]

Tony Soprano views himself as a traditionalist and a true Italian American. When the issue of whether or not it is politically correct to view Columbus as a hero is raised in the episode “Christopher,” Tony, his inner circle, and especially his right hand man Silvio Dante express moral outrage over the fact that people would treat Columbus as anything other than a saint. “In this house Christopher Columbus is a fucking hero!” Tony exclaims to his son when he makes a remark about the situation. [xxxvi] His traditional sense of family also seems to come directly from The Godfather. On the one hand Tony, would do anything for his children, but on the other he cheats on his wife every chance he gets. Tony is also often heard saying: “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper? You know, the strong silent type.” Here we see his inability to combine his traditional Godfather inspired machismo behavior with contemporary life. [xxxvii] 

            Another strong statement about Italian American ethnicity in America can be found in the episode “Commendatori,” in which Tony, Christopher and Paulie travel to Italy, in order to do business with an affiliated family. Their initial enthusiasm about visiting the “Old Country” quickly turns into disappointment. Especially Paulie, who throughout the series is known for being extremely proud of his Italian heritage, encounters feelings of estrangement similar to those of the early migrants. Sculptor Attilio Piccirilli said in 1938: “I have been an American for so long – fifty years – that I often forget that I was born in Italy. (…) Once I went back to my native city and planned to stay there for a year or more. (…) What did I find? I was a foreigner in Italy. I could speak the language of course, but I couldn’t think Italian.”[xxxviii]  Paulie tries to communicate with the local population, and talks with a prostitute about how both their ancestors probably came from the same village, but is met with complete disinterest every time. Even their colleagues express disdain for them, exclaiming, after Paulie asks for ketchup with his spaghetti, “and you thought the Germans were classless pieces of shit.” [xxxix]  This situation underlines the aforementioned detachment the Italian Americans experienced. There was no one Italian culture in their homeland, so they created one in America. This Italian American ethnicity, however, is unrecognizable to such an extent that Italians and Italian American have almost nothing in common.

            Something that one immediately notices when watching The Sopranos is the way in which the characters in the series are themselves influenced by The Godfather. Tony and his friends discuss the movies extensively, quoting famous lines and comparing favorite scenes. Throughout the series there are many references to Godfather scenes, such as a dream sequence in which Tony enters the bathroom of a restaurant looking for the gun hidden behind the toilet. He finds nothing, while Michael Corleone found the weapon there, and proceeded to take his revenge. It casually shows the way Italian American ethnicity and masculinity was shaped by The Godfather. A small example of this it the often told anecdote concerning The Godfather claiming that mobster did not use the term “godfather” and did not kiss each other on the cheek before they saw it done in the movie. [xl]

            In the end, we see that it was actually the transition to America that created a sense of being Italian amongst the immigrants. Italian American ethnicity was created through ethnic literature and pop culture. The Godfather provided a new sort of stereotype and something of a role model for the Italian American population and did so along the lines of several of Ostendorf’s theories on ethnicity. The Godfather was created by and for Italian Americans, but, in a way also by and for outsiders. The film focuses on perceived traditional values, but also contains the “strain of ethnification.” The discussion on whether or not this was a positive development remains, as the new image was created by glamorizing negative Italian stereotypes but also created a strong sense pride and accomplishment amongst people who traditionally were in the lowest class of society, both in Italy and America. That the movie had an enormous impact on the Italian American ethnicity cannot be denied either way though, as we have seen in the analysis of The Sopranos. This series showed how Italian American incorporated The Godfather’s ethnicity in their lives and how they did or did not incorporate it in American everyday life.

Bibliography

            Boelhower, William and Rocco Pallone ed. Adjusting Sites: New Essays In Italian American Studies. New York: Forum Italicum. 1999.

Browne, Nick ed. Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather Trilogy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000.

Chase, David. “Christopher.” The Sopranos. Season 4, Episode 3. HBO. 2002.

Chase, David. “Commendatori.” The Sopranos. Season 2, Episode 4. HBO 2000.

Chase, David. “Pilot.” The Sopranos. Season 1, Episode 1. HBO. 1999.

Ferraro, Thomas J. Feeling Italian: The Art Of Ethnicity In America. New York: New York University Press. 2005.

Mangione, Jerre and Ben Morreale. La Storia: Five Centuries Of The Italian American Experience. New York. HarperCollins Publishing. 1992.

Marazzi, Martino. Voices of Italian America: A History Of Early American Literature With A Critical Anthology. Cranbury: Associated University Press. 2004.\

Martin, Brett.  Sopranos The Book: The Complete Collector’s Edition. New York, Time Inc Home Entertainment. 2007.

Ostendorf, Berndt. “Literary Acculturation: What Makes Ethnic Literature “Ethnic”” in Callaloo: No. 25, Recent Essays from Europe: A Special Issue.  John Hopkins University Press. Autumn. 1985. P. 577-586.

Yacowar, Maurica. The Sopranos On The Couch: Analyzing Television’s Greatest Series. New York: Continuum. 2003.

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[i]Vera Dika, “The Representation of Ethnicity in The Godfather” in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Trilogy, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 76-108) p. 76.

[ii] Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale, La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience, (New York: HarperCollins Publishing, 1992, p. 3-4.

[iii] Ibid., p. 8-14.

[iv] Ibid., p 25.

[v] Ibid., p 32.

[vi] Ibid., p.32

[vii] Ibid., p. xv.

[viii]  Ibid., 33-34.

[ix] Ibid., p. 26-27.

[x] Ibid., p. 27.

[xi] Berndt Ostendorf, “Literary Acculturation: What Makes Ethnic Literature “Ethnic”” in Callaloo No. 25, Recent Essays from Europe: A Special Issue, ( John Hopkins University Press, Autumn 1985, p. 577-586) p. 577.

[xii] Ibid., p. 577.

[xiii] Ibid., p. 577.

[xiv] Thomas J. Ferraro, Feeling Italian: the Art of Ethnicity in America, (New York: New York University Press, 2005) p. 3.

[xv] Ibid. p. 3-4.

[xvi] Ostendorf, “Literary Acculturation: What Makes Ethnic Literature “Ethnic”,” p. 579.

[xvii] Ferraro, Feeling Italian: the Art of Ethnicity in America, p. 205.

[xviii] Ostendorf, “Literary Acculturation: What Makes Ethnic Literature “Ethnic”,” p. 577.

[xix] Mangione, La Storia, p.354.

[xx] Martino Marazzi, Voices of Italian America: a History of Early American Literature with a Critical Anthology, (Cranbury: Associated University Press, 2004) p. 22-25.

[xxi] Ostendorf, “Literary Acculturation: What Makes Ethnic Literature “Ethnic”,” p. 581

[xxii] Fred L. Gardaphé, “You Are What You Read: In Search of Italian-American Writers” in Adjusting Sites: New Essays in Italian American Studies, (New York: Forum Italicum, 1999, p.113-124) p. 116.

[xxiii] Marazzi, Voices of Italian America, p. 45.

[xxiv] Mangione, La Storia, p. 361.

[xxv] Ostendorf, “Literary Acculturation: What Makes Ethnic Literature “Ethnic”,” p. 583.

[xxvi] Mangione, La Storia, p. 410-411.

[xxvii]  Ibid.,  p. 412-413..

[xxviii] Ibid. p. 412-413.

[xxix] Ibid., p. 413-414.

[xxx] Ferraro, Feeling Italian: the Art of Ethnicity in America, p. 107-108.

[xxxi] Ibid., p. 108-109.

[xxxii] Dika, “The Representation of Ethnicity in The Godfather”, p. 77-79.

[xxxiii] Ibid., p. 88-89.

[xxxiv] Ibid., p.89.

[xxxv]Maurica Yacowar, The Sopranos On The Couch: Analyzing Television’s Greatest Series, (New York: Continuum, 2003) p. 13-14.

[xxxvi] David Chase, “Christopher,” The Sopranos (Season 4, Episode 3, HBO 2002).

[xxxvii] David Chase, “Pilot,” The Sopranos (Season 1, Episode 1, HBO, 1999).

[xxxviii] Mangione, La Storia, p. 23.

[xxxix] David Chase, “Commendatori,” The Sopranos (Season 2, Episode 4, HBO 2000).

[xl] Brett Martin, Sopranos The Book: The Complete Collector’s Edition, (New York, Time Inc Home Entertainment, 2007) p. 34-35.