From Marc to Cuch: The Evolution of Italian American Attitudes About Immigrants

Rep. Vito Marcantonio (left) and Trump administration immigration official Ken Cuccinelli.

Rep. Vito Marcantonio was born in the United States, son of a family hailing from Basilicata, the hill town of Picerno, in southern Italy. His grandmother and parents traversed Ellis Island on their way to establishing a difficult life in New York’s East Harlem. 

Ken Cuccinelli is the Trump administration’s Director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, descendant of Italians who also passed through Ellis Island on their way to establishing a life in America. 

The two men’s roots are similar, but their attitudes toward the immigrants who came after their own families did, are not. 

Marcantonio was more than a defender of immigrants’ rights. He was a proponent of expanding them. Cuccinelli’s policy goals are to limit and rescind. 

A September 5, “New York Times”  article noted that Cuccinelli imposed a rule to deny immigrants legal status if they were deemed likely to use government benefit programs. 

One day after announcing the policy, “The Times” reported, “Mr Cuccinelli revised the iconic sonnet on the Statue of Liberty to read, "Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet, and who will not become a public charge." 

Cuccinelli’s hard-hearted revision of Emma Lazarus' magnificent poem indicated just how far many Italian Americans had drifted from their roots as immigrant stock. 

“Mr. Cuccinelli,” noted The Gray Lady, “tends to tailor his views based on whether the legal immigrants in question are fleeing desperation south of the border or, like his ancestors, escaping Europe.” 

In “Vito Marcantonio: The People’s Politician,” Salvatore LaGumina noted that, in his first term as congressman, the East Harlemite legislated to humanize the immigrant experience.   

“These bills, designed to prevent the separation of families were especially important to his constituents since so many Italo-Americans were affected,” wrote LaGumina. 

In addition to his legislative efforts, Marcantonio often interceded with the commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization (today’s ICE) on behalf of the aliens drawn from his Italian constituency. 

He was walking a path hacked out by his mentor, Fiorella LaGuardia who, as congressman, battled  the Johnson-Reed Act, aka, the Immigration Act of 1924. Signed by Calvin Coolidge, it reduced quotas for Italian, Jewish, Japanese, Slavic and Greek immigrants by 90 percent, while opening the door for those from “Nordic” countries. 

Traces of this sentiment that northern Europeans are, if not more superior, at least more desirable than the swarthy hordes from southern and eastern Europe, streaked across the national landscape when President Trump lamented that today’s immigrants don’t come from places like Norway. 

In “LaGuardia: A Fighter Against His Times,” author Arthur Mann observed that, in the 1920s nationalistic arguments, “made a wide appeal, namely, that before America had been free of vice and crime, of slums and drunkards, that it had been, in short, a paradise of Protestant Nordics living on farms and in small towns.”

LaGuardia took the Johnson-Reed bill personally, wrote Mann, “for it placed a stigma on the American-born children of the new immigrants as well as on the immigrants themselves.”

Being "legal" didn't make Italian immigrants feel more welcome. 

With no way to prevent its passage, The Little Flower thought it best to dignify his cause by dragging the fight out until the bitter end. 

He tangled with the likes of Republican Rep. Jasper Tincher from Kansas who told the House, “On the one side is beer, Bolshevism, unassimilating settlements, and perhaps many flags. On the other side is constitutional government; one flag, the Stars and Stripes; America, ‘a government of, by, and for the people’; America our country.”

A decade later, with Marcantonio occupying LaGuardia’s congressional perch, the  leading restrictionist, Rep. Martin Dies of Texas stated, “There is no middle ground or compromise. Either we are for or against America. If we are for America, we must be for the exclusion of these new-seed immigrants and the deportation of those unlawfully here.” 

So Marcantonio was filling his mentor’s shoes when he took up cudgels on behalf of newly-minted Americans against men of this particular ilk; Cuccinelli’s political antecedents. 

Cuccinelli has taken up cudgels on behalf of a not-insignificant Italian American contingent who have no truck with today’s immigrants and dismiss any comparison of them with the Italians who came prior. 

Their forebears, this block contends, were a different breed than today’s immigrants. They came to work, not for a handout. They were legal. Integrating quickly, Italians learned English, never waved Italian flags, and strained not the social fabric. 

In his time, Marcantonio was the most politically prominent Italian American congressman. 

It was Marc’s job to look after not only his constituency, but his people, and the hard copy record of those efforts details what Italian Americans needed from their government and what they didn’t need. 

His advocacy reflected the material circumstances Italians, and their American-born children, endured throughout Marcantonio's congressional tenure, representing a district that encompassed the largest Little Italy in America. 

“It is important to observe that since many of his constituents were Italo-American immigrants, people characterized by a rather strong resistance to naturalization,” LaGumina pointed out, “it behooved him to be sensitive to any matter concerning them.” 

Rather than morph into good and obediant naturalized citizens, Italian Americans, La Gumina noted, were slow at melting into the pot, remaining as aliens for a longer period than any other immigrant group. 

In Marcantonio’s time there was continued nationwide agreement as to the need for limitations on immigration.

One of the freshman congressman's first speeches addressed immigration policy that separated families.

On Feb. 19, 1935, a congressional colleague proposed barring extra-quota admissions to resident aliens’ wives and children and Marcantonio bolted down to the House Well. 

He responded, “Does the gentleman believe it is wrong for families to be reunited, and unAmerican and detrimental to the economic welfare of this nation?”

Breaking up families by deporting one or more alien parents was not only being cruel, he argued, it would increase relief expenditures by the nation’s obligations to their dependents, who were citizens. 

“You cannot deport them,” Marcantonio railed. “You have no right to. They are not cattle. Starve the father and you starve the American child.”

Some weeks later, on March 4, 1935, the radical congressman excoriated a bill empowering the Secretary of Labor to deport aliens promoting propaganda “hailing from foreign soil.” 

“This bill is vicious,” spat Marcantonio. “It would carry an avalanche of alien and sedition legislation and further persecution of aliens. Let us remember that we are living in 1935 and not in 1917. Let us legislate not by hysteria, but by common sense.” 

The Cuccinelli Creed.

Pilloried as “Stalin’s Stooge” and used as a kind of Red measuring stick by which his collaborators were identified and impugned, Marcantonio’s arguments were based on the nation’s sacred texts. 

In a May 23, 1939, radio address Marcantonio leaned upon the Constitution in skewering H.R. 5643. 

The Hobbs Bill established that any alien ordered deported, but whose deportation was not effectuated within 90 days, should be detained and confined until such time as deportation was feasible. 

Reading between the legislative lines, Marcantonio construed this as meaning indefinite detention and deemed it a “concentration camp” bill. 

“Nowhere in this bill is any provision found for due process; for any kind of a trial, with or without a jury,” Marcantonio told his radio audience. “What constitutes a concentration camp, what constitutes a Bastille, is the method by which persons are sent to those places.”

Such imprisonment, he noted, can be provided for by Congress only in accordance with the Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth constitutional amendments.

“The language of the amendments, please note,” he emphasized, “uses the word ‘person’ and not ‘citizen.’ This clearly establishes that the constitutional guarantees are as equally applicable to aliens as they are to citizens.”

Marcantonio again hit the radio waves on July 30, 1940, over a bill requiring noncitizens to be fingerprinted and registered. In this instance he drew the force of his argument from another document essential to the nation’s democratic DNA. 

“Remember when the Founding Fathers said in that everlasting document, the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal? They did not say that all men are created equal except Italians. They did not say that all men are created equal except Jews. They did not say that all men are created equal except Negroes,” he hammered away, “nor did they say that all men are created equally except noncitizens. They said that all men are created equal. By this they meant no discrimination, no segregation, and no persecution of the foreign-born.” 

This is a posture far afield from that found in Cuccinelli's policies, which focus on the paper status of his deportation targets.

Wrote LaGumina: “He was attempting to teach the moral that minorities must be protected regardless of their citizenship status. He fought vigorously for the right of aliens who were faced with deportation on the grounds that they had entered the country illegally, but who were otherwise of good character.”

Marc laid the foundation for an argument that held American rights to be universal and worthy of being extended wherever possible. 

His support of the Second World War was contingent upon more democracy at home as recompense for the Americans dying in its name overseas. 

As the war took center stage, Marcantonio addressed the House on Feb. 28, 1942, over a policy still with us today:  

“On the one hand we draft the foreign-born who is not a citizen, and on the other hand we now seek to prevent the endowment of citizenship on the foreign-born who wears the uniform of our country and who is ready to fight and lay down his life for our country.  

“What greater requisite for citizenship can there be than that of service in the armed forces in time of war?”

His efforts were trans-ethnic, for Marcantonio’s life experience in an immigrant ghetto opened him to those grappling with the same kind of experience.

Marcantonio used the stated democratic objectives of the war as opportunities to eliminate other vestiges of discrimination against the undocumented. 

In one instance he extended a helping hand to Filipinos living in the U.S. 

The Philippines’ stand against Japanese aggression had earned the admiration of Americans who were largely unaware of the harsh discrimination Filipinios suffered in Western states or that they were denied citizenship given their classification as “Asiatics.” 

When the U.S. finally gained control of the Philippines, efforts to naturalize Filipinos living in the U.S. were launched, but did not prosper. 

In 1939, Marcantonio introduced the first such resolution, but it was shelved by the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. He offered similar resolutions three times more during the war on behalf of these nonItalian immigrants. 

“Marcantonio’s position,” wrote LaGumina, “was so unique and so radical that one is led to believe that even if no immigrants resided in his district, he would have espoused their cause, just as he did for the miners of West Virginia or the marble workers of Vermont - neither of whom votes in East Harlem.”

Where, or when, did Italian Americans diverge from the kindred spirit evident in Marcantonio’s empathetic approach to the immigrants and move toward Cuccinelli’s hairsplitting new arrivals into classifications of desirability?

“How did Italian Americans end up identifying themselves, and being identified, with such conservative values and reactionary political forces?” asks Marcella Bencivenni in a 2006 discussion of “The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism,” in the “Monthly Review.” 

The book edited by Philip Cannistraro and Vito Marcantonio Forum Co-Chair Gerald Meyer, “shows that, despite their present conservative image, Italian Americans have a vibrant and rich radical past,” she wrote. 

Bencivenni noted the important role Italian immigrants played in early 20th century working-class struggles such as the Lawrence textile strikes (1912 and 1919), the Patterson silk strike (1913), the Mesabi Iron Range strikes (1907 and 1916), and the New York City Harbor strikes of 1907 and 1919. 

“For most Italian Americans the radical past of their families still remains impenetrable - buried by their own parents’ and grandparents’ fears of ethnic discrimination and political persecution,” wrote Bencivenni.

She posited that Italian American radicalism was dismantled by the Red Scare of 1917-20 with its thousands of arrests and deportations. The 1927 execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, she added, demoralized American Italians, driving many to bury aspects of their radical past for fear of political persecution. 

Later, the Red Scare of the 1950, Bencivenni wrote, “further distanced Italian Americans from their radical past.”

And made way for Ken Cuccinelli and his caucus of anti-immigrant descendants of immigrants. 

Analyses of Marcantonio’s fall tend to focus on his leftism, but his supporters would have been justified in thinking he was just as likely ruined for being Italian as for being Red.

"The Goodfather (A Novel: The Rising Fall of the Marvelous Marcantonio," can be found here: MARC LIVES

Marc on the City

“Intoxication comes over the man who walks long and aimlessly through the streets.”  

                                               Walter Benjamin                                                                                              

Speaking from the House well on Aug. 3, 1939, Rep. Vito Marcantonio identified himself as: “one who was born in the slums, who was raised in the slums, and who still lives in the slums…”

Alan Schaffer wrote in “Vito Marcantonio: Radical in Congress” that, “Few men in public life have been so intimately linked with a particular urban neighborhood.”

Born and reared in East Harlem, Schaffer noted, “Marcantonio’s permanent home was never more than four city blocks from his place of birth, and for 14 years he represented the district and its people in Congress. 

“In many ways the man was the product and personification of the neighborhood.” 

Salvatore LaGumina, in “Vito Marcantonio: The People’s Politician,” envisioned Marc, “either as a three-year old riding his tricycle on the crowded sidewalks, or as a young teenage boy swimming in the garbage-polluted East River.” 

All images from "In the Street," 
by Levitt, Agee and Loeb.

“The streets of a poor quarter of great cities are above all a theater and battleground. There, unaware and unnoticed, every human being is a poet, a masker, a warrior, a dancer and in his innocent artistry he projects against the turmoil of the street, an image of human existence.”

So reads the inter-title of “In the Street," a short film by Helen Levitt, James Agee and Janice Loeb, which captures the sidewalks of Marcantonio’s East Harlem, his boyhood turf, his congressional district. 

Filmed in 1948, when Marc was still in office, the landscape of “In the Street” is, “haunting because it is at once part of the banned city as well as intensely used by the residents,” wrote urban planner Vojislava Filipcevic. (“In the Streets of Harlem: Race and Textures of Space in Helen Levitt’s New York Photographs and the Levitt-Agee Documentary Films,” Columbia Journal of American Studies). 

Said Filpcevic, “The East Harlem block is an ‘agitated social space’ and an ‘immobile physical space’ of abandonment left to decompose as an area of urban blight.” 

The Abandoned City

The film, she said, is set in what could be termed “an abandoned city,” defined by political theorist Herbert Marcuse as, “the ‘place for the very poor, the excluded, the never employed and permanently unemployed, the homeless and the shelter residents where crumbling infrastructure, deteriorating housing, the domination of outside impersonal forces, direct street-level exploitation, racial and ethnic discrimination and segregation, the stereotyping of women, are everyday reality.” 

Yet Marcantonio’s biographers note how East Harlem was humming with humanity and buzzing with small scale commerce; not all ghetto darkness. 

“In the Street,” is a roving, secret camera that captures peddlers’ carts, meaty armed Italian “mamas,” toddlers in rough-hewn gowns, roving cool-dude dogs, mean and gamboling boys, gossiping grandmas, fedora-sporting gangster types, disconcerting Halloween masks, and children and children and still more children. 

From "In the Street." 

“In the Street,” stated Filipcevic, reveals the slum as, “a place of camaraderie and a space of creativity — a set of neighborhoods in which children felt impelled to make various marks upon a given world…”

This claim upon the streets — the same claim Marcantonio made with his tricycle — results from, “a lack of space — for playing, growing up, and learning; the activities of children are displaced on the street as a form of appropriation of space,” said Filipcevic. 

Michael Parenti recalled his East Harlem childhood in “Waiting for Yesterday”: 

“In whatever way we could, we tried to accommodate ourselves to an unaccommodating environment…We kids lived in the neighborhood’s interstices, constantly inventing and reinventing spaces of our own: empty lots, stoops, cellars, backyards, street corners, and the fronts of abandoned stores.” 

Visualizing the street as “theater” and also a “battleground,” the film showed the East Harlem dwellers’ assertion of urban existence through everyday expressions of uniqueness, said Filipcevic.  

East Harlem was a cheap labor reservoir from which people issued forth, each day in the manner depicted in this passage from Thomas McGrath’s, “This Coffin Has No Handles”: 

“A million workers charge down the dusty shutes of the cold water apartment houses, are siphoned off and sucked away into the subways. The bottom has fallen out of the barometer of sleep. Adjustments are made: in the fur district the pressure of industry is rising; and through the fog of bricks and stone , the steel bones of the skyscrapers downtown, you see the thin red line of humanity and profit rise in exact ratio to the falling line on sleep’s soiled glass. Up and down.” 

Marcantonio slid those dusty shoots, was as much a part of larger Gotham as he was of East Harlem. As Schaffer observed, “Each school day for four years, young Marcantonio made his way across the city to DeWitt Clinton High School at 59th and Tenth Avenue." 

In “Vito Marcantonio: Radical Politician,” Gerald Meyer stated that Marc, and the only other kid from East Harlem going to high school, generally walked the four miles to save a nickel trolley fare.

From "In the Street." 

Marc’s first foray into active politics was a tenants’ rent strike in 1920. Perusal of his collected speeches in “I Vote My Conscience,” or the “New York Times” of his day, reveal a consistent concern for housing and the urban environment. 

Housing Links

The “New York Times,” for March 12, 1936, headlined a piece with “Tenants’ Strike Urged,” in which Marc asked members of the City-Wide Tenants League to show their sympathy with the striking building service employees by going on a rent strike. 

Marc called for action against “the Bourbons and Tories,” linking the issue of housing with wages; the people who lived in buildings with those that cleaned them.  

The “New York Times,” for December 4, 1948 ran the headline: “Harlem Dirt Laid to Many Causes” above an article covering a conference addressing the garbage patch that East Harlem could be in places.  

“Mr. Marcantonio,” the article reads, “declared that the overcrowded tenements in the neighborhood fundamentally were at fault. Nothing more can be expected… while people are compelled to live in these tenements.’” 

“New York Times,” Nov. 30. 1950, “18 Families Shiver in Mass Evictions,” reveals the congressman’s response to the sudden, and forced displacement of his constituents.  

“Three of the families,” the article said, “went last night to the office of Rep. Vito Marcantonio at 1455 First Avenue. They brought with them a total of 18 children. There they were told that might remain until they could arrange for more permanent shelter and food was prepared for them.” 

"In the Street." 

On March 16, 1948, he railed in Congress against a bill reducing rent controls. “Speak about property rights; how about the property rights of the 50,000,000 tenants who are going to lose, as a result of this bill, whatever small protection they have heretofore had?”

And so on. 

East Harlem became the starting point in America for successive waves of immigrants that boosted the population and overwhelmed existing housing stock. Modern block towers in park settings were considered the solution and the wholesale wiping out of what many considered “perfectly good housing” was unleashed under the rubric of slum clearance. 

Wrote Nathan Glazer in “City Journal"(Autumn 1991), “A speech from New York City’s greatest mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, in 1944, captures the enthusiasm of a whole generation of urban reformers:

“‘Tear down the old,’ he said. ‘Build up the new. Down with the rotten, antiquated rat holes. Down with hovels. Down with disease. Down with crime! Down with firecraft. Let in the sun. Let in the sky. A new day is dawning. A new life. A new America!’” 

On March 3, 1940, “The Times” ran the headline “Housing Project In 1st Avenue Started,” about the groundbreaking for the East River Housing Projects, secured by Marcantonio and the Harlem Leadership Council, with an assist from his mentor, La Guardia. 

Marc, it was reported, described the occasion as significant not only as an extension of low-cost housing in Harlem, but as “a victory of the citizens of East Harlem in their fight to preserve their riverfront.” 

 Marc at the dedication of
Benjamin Franklin High School.

There is a foreshadowing of things to come in the critical voices quoted in the article, raising questions about the wisdom of placing such projects in “outlying areas” and potential pitfalls associated with crowding too many people into block towers. 

Dramatic Urbanism

The renewal of East Harlem has been deemed as, Glazer noted, “one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of postwar American urbanism.” 

The myriad empty lots documented by “In the Street,” Filipcevic wrote “recall the cinematic city ruins of the bombed European cities [after World War Two.” 

Indeed, urban activist Jane Jacobs observed that, “The war brought with it a tabula rasa that was an essential exercise of modern planning.” 

According to Glazer, East Harlem has been a competing ground for schools of urban planning and subjected to waves of fashion in that field. “For years,” he said, “public housing was not just another social program but part of a utopian vision — the embodiment, in stone and mortar, of the good society.” 

In the 1930s and ’40s, the tight grid of streets typical of New York City was replaced by the “superblock,” with the buildings set at an angle to the street grid.

“The reasons for this unusual site placement were partly ideological,” opined Glazer. “[Architecture critic] Lewis Mumford had denounced the uniform grid, indifferent to features of topography and landscape, as the soulless invention of commercial capitalism, interested only in creating fungible plots to buy and sell.” 

Soon enough, Le Corbusier’s vision of towers nestled in green parkland fell out of favor. 

The Italians of East Harlem initially welcomed the projects, then became adamantly opposed, claiming they drew Puerto Ricans and African Americans. Many blamed Marcantonio for destroying the old neighborhoods. 

The critique of public housing was that, as planned “community units,” the projects were built large as possible and divorced from the neighborhood surroundings, dramatizing the segregation of charity-case families. 

Rationalized “minimum standards” for decent, safe and sanitary housing didn’t necessarily generate homey abodes. Shunting the poor into towers condemned them to a beehive-like existence that enamored few. 

Urbanists moved through successive planning models, and each wave has left a layer of fabric over the East Harlem that eventually emerged, rife with projects, yet healthy in other forms of city living. 

“Perhaps,” concluded Glazer, “there is room, along with the bustling tenement row, for the well-run housing project, for the verdant expanse and sparkling tower as well as the crowded, row-house grid.”

Marcantonio’s life was cut short, denying him a chance to see what the mid-century notion of community confection finally produced, and of another chance to continue developing policies that might improve the lot of his people. 

Marcantonio might have made the new mix work for him. If the buildings were his, as many concluded, so then, might the people who lived in them be his, too. 

Living on into his 50s and 60s’ and ’70s, he could have worked to make things right with the early projects, rather than leaving them to the devices of minds different than his own. 

He might have spent his old age, stooped and gray, reading a book on a bench in one of the green spaces he thought so important, looking up for a moment to contemplate his Marc On The City. 

"The Goodfather (A Novel): The Rising Fall of the Marvelous Marcantonio" can be found here: MARC LIVES