Unto the Sons (95 page)

Roosevelt’s speech in June 1940, however, made Joseph circumspect about defending Italy openly. He had been an American citizen for more than a decade, and he was not responsible for the situation in Italy. Since leaving his homeland in 1920 he had never desired to return, even for a visit—contrary to what he professed in letters to his mother. He had sent money and care packages back to Maida every month. He had sent enough money to his old parish priest to have his family remembered at each Sunday Mass. He had tearfully mourned the passing of his grandparents Ippolita and Domenico, who died of old age, and his history teacher Don Achille, who died in a rock slide that crushed his carriage and killed his horse. Joseph sent wedding gifts, christening gifts, grants, and loans in response to every announcement and request from abroad. He thought
constantly of Maida. But once he had landed in America, that is where he wanted to stay. In his nightmares he often saw himself as middle-aged in Maida—unable to get back to America, imprisoned in the village for some undefined offense, or bedridden next to Sebastian. If Mussolini and Roosevelt were now on a collision course, which, sadly, appeared to be the case, Joseph knew where he stood—indeed, he had already declared it when he became an American citizen. Still, he was inwardly tormented and guilt-ridden by the turn of events. He now invented excuses to avoid going to Brooklyn, unwilling to face what he assumed would be much overweening smugness on the part of his cousin and other I-told-you-so Italians. Joseph despised Roosevelt for stirring up added animosity toward Italians in America and vowed he would never again vote for him. In November 1940, Joseph switched everlastingly to the Republican Party, backing Wendell L. Willkie in the presidential election race.

Other Italo-Americans were similarly upset with Roosevelt, as was evident in the press that carried statements by some
prominenti
accusing the president of being anti-Italian; but whatever consolation this brought Joseph was lost in his sadness and even bitterness over the fall from grace of the one man he was counting on to restore power and pride to the Italian people. Now with the Duce deemed no better than Hitler, who was there left to admire among contemporary Italians? Joseph could think of very few. And of those few, even
he
had reservations.

Perhaps this explained why Italians collectively could admire only those who had been dead for centuries. Only saints could survive Italian scrutiny and jealousy. Only when they named saints were the Italians the most generous and magnanimous people on earth. As for himself, Joseph was shamefully disappointed to admit that the Italians he most admired on earth were invariably products of northern Italy. Why was this true now in 1940, a half-century after the mass immigration of southerners to the United States? Were his southern countrymen really so dim-witted and insufficiently ambitious to rise quickly in America—except through the Mafia? Or were the honest, earnest southerners held back by the prejudicial Anglo-Saxons who controlled the nation and were more favorably disposed to the usually fairer-skinned immigrants from Piedmont and Tuscany? In Argentina, for example, the southern immigrants had gained legitimate power within one generation. And consider the progress made by his cousin Antonio in Paris. But here in the United States, where the overwhelming majority of Italy’s five million settlers were refugees from the old Bourbon kingdom that stretched between Naples and Palermo—a number that would have been much larger if one counted
the many southerners who concealed their heritage by changing their names, or by lying to, or hiding from, the survey-takers—the fact remained that it was the small fraction of northerners to whom Joseph turned for a confirmation of Italian worthiness in America.

Prominent among these was the California-based financier Amadeo P. Giannini, who expanded from a small Italian neighborhood banker in San Francisco to the founder in 1930 of the powerful Bank of America, which would soon have branch offices throughout the nation. Giannini’s ancestors were from Genoa—hardly within range of a southern Italo-American’s search for prideful regional identity; but, as in the case of Christopher Columbus, Joseph took what he could get. The NBC Symphony Orchestra was headed by another northerner whom Joseph looked up to: Arturo Toscanini, who was a native of Parma, southeast of Milan—although Toscanini
had
by 1940 installed as his first flutist a southern Italian, a future composer and conductor named Carmine Coppola. Coppola had an infant son who would grow up to become a Hollywood director, of such films as
The Godfather
. But as in the case of the younger Coppola—named Francis
Ford
Coppola because he was born in Detroit—the famous offspring of the Bourbon kingdom (offspring that would also include the 1984 vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, the New York senator Alfonse D’Amato, the architect Robert Venturi, the artist Frank Stella, and the feminist leader Eleanor Cutri Smeal) were at least a generation away from success and recognition. More typical of the occupation of southern Italo-Americans between World Wars I and II in America were such unheralded figures as Nicola Iacocca, who worked variously as a shoemaker, a short-order cook, and a seller of auto tires in Allentown, Pennsylvania (his son Lee would become president of Ford Motor Company in 1970); and Andrea Cuomo, who dug sewers in northern New Jersey (his son Mario would be elected governor of New York in 1982). But in 1940 the only well-known Italian name in American politics was of course that of New York’s Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and if the popular politician was not unduly sensitive about the origins of his bandmaster father, Achille (a native of the southern town of Foggia), he most likely
was
about the origins of his Trieste-born Jewish mother, Irene. When her background was revealed in a New York Yiddish newspaper during the mayor’s first term, La Guardia initially refused to discuss it.

Insecure and factionalized as the Italians in America seemed to be—especially after Roosevelt’s stab-in-the-back comment in 1940—there was one politician who believed he could take advantage of this situation and swing great numbers of unhappy Italian voters to his side. He was the
Republican candidate for president, Wendell L. Willkie. And during his campaign against Roosevelt, he often dared the president to repeat his reference to the Italians as back-stabbers. But Roosevelt avoided doing so. Although the race was close—with Willkie carrying most neighborhoods heavily populated by Italo-Americans—Roosevelt won an unprecedented third term with a popular vote of 27 million to Willkie’s 22 million. After this, as far as Italians in the United States were concerned, things only worsened.

Roosevelt’s declaration of war against Japan after the latter’s surprise air attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, meant that Japan’s Axis allies, Italy and Germany, were obliged to take sides against the United States; and thus Americans of Italian descent were now officially at war with their families in Italy. Joseph’s situation was typical: while he was parading his patriotism by volunteering for patrol duty along the boardwalk with other members of his Rotary Club, his brothers and other relatives overseas were dressed in Fascist uniforms strutting to the goose step that Mussolini had introduced in the hope that his soldiers might look and act more like the bellicose Nazi troops whom the Duce envied and revered.

But unfortunately for the Duce, he could not turn Italians into Germans; and their battlefield performances from the outset of the war most often embarrassed him. His forces had hardly gained enough mileage against the weakened French in 1940 to be worthy of an armistice—France’s yielding to Italy had more to do with Hitler’s strong desires than with Mussolini’s timid invaders—and the Italian army proved equally inept after attacking Greece in 1940 (where the Italians again needed German help). And Italy was no more persevering in the African campaigns that followed from 1941 through 1943; every Italian advancement in the desert was followed by military blunders and setbacks, including one in Ethiopia, which allowed the British to transport back to his palace and his throne the deposed emperor, Haile Selassie. While an exasperated Mussolini could only conclude that Italy’s generals and soldiers were unworthy of his leadership, a more plausible explanation was perhaps offered by
The Christian Science Monitor
’s correspondent in Rome, Saville R. Davis, who observed: “It is not possible to fight modern battles with an army of conscientious objectors.”

The national Italian persona, individualistic in the extreme, simply could not be regimented into a war machine by Mussolini or probably anyone else. At this point in their history, the people of Italy were beyond regimentation. Anyone who doubted this had merely to watch Italian soldiers
marching in a parade: they were rarely in step. The average Italian conscript saw no reason to fight in World War II. In World War I, there had at least been the longtime animosity toward Austria, dating back before the Risorgimento. But whom could they be convinced to hate in World War II, especially after Italy had gained so little after the costly triumph of World War I? The Italian people had no real quarrel now with the French, or even with the British, whose country had long enriched Italy with friendly tourists and admiring travel writers; and
certainly
no quarrel with the United States, the locale of myriad Little Italys generating the income that kept multitudes of Italians from starvation. It was also true that Italian men, by their very nature, are averse to impersonal killings, which was what a soldier was expected to accomplish, and what most countries’ conscripts adapt to doing quite readily. But as trigger-happy as the average Italian male might be in avenging a
personal
affront—some other man’s winking at his girlfriend; seducing his wife; stealing his sheep: three offenses that many hotheaded Italian men would punish with equal vigor—the same man would instinctively absent himself from the
impersonal
bloodletting that was endemic to battlefields occupied by clashing infantrymen, machine-gunners, and tankers. If he had learned anything from Italian history, it was that today’s enemy will be tomorrow’s friend; and that in conflicts fought at the behest of kings, or dictators, or politicians, there was very little that was worth dying for.

There were, to be sure, Italian males who were exceptions to the norm, and many of these were employed by the Mafia—in which perhaps most of Italy’s natural-born “soldiers” were enlisted, and in which there still might exist the residue of the predatory blood that once flowed through the veins of Roman warriors. The
mafiosi
were, if nothing else, the Italians most capable of “impersonal” killings—bringing death to absolute strangers if need be to fulfill an order from a
capo mafioso
, who routinely passed it down from above. Many of the better Mafia soldiers had immigrated to America after their civil rights in Sicily and southern Italy had been curtailed by the frequently lawless raids of Fascist lawmen. But when Mussolini required a reliable gunman, as he did in 1943, he was, ironically, obliged to purchase an expensive contract killing via a Fascist deputy to a Sicilian-born Mafia boss in Brooklyn, whom the Duce’s law enforcers had banished from Italy as an undesirable citizen. Shortly after the boss had reviewed the contract, and received a lucrative down payment, he approved the order and relayed it down the ranks to be carried out by one of his soldiers, a sharpshooter of Sicilian origin named Carmine Galante—who efficiently did his job. After stalking for a few
days the man whom Mussolini had come to abhor as a political nemesis in the United States, and wanted to have eliminated, the
mafioso
Galante finally confronted the man on a dark street in lower Manhattan and pumped bullets into one of his lungs and his brain.

Carlo Tresca died almost immediately.

46.

A
dolf Hitler’s control over France from the spring of 1940 into the summer of 1944 meant that Antonio Cristiani, as a citizen of Italy, was free to travel back and forth across the French–Italian border; and he often arrived in Maida with bundles of gifts that brightened the spirits of the melancholy townspeople, who greeted him sometimes with outbursts of cheering that, whether he deserved it or not, he thoroughly enjoyed.

With each visit home the number of his greeters increased, no doubt because the train station’s indiscreet telegrapher, after receiving Antonio’s wired time of arrival from Paris and relaying the message to the elderly Cristianis by donkey express, then shared the information with the station’s carriage drivers, who in turn circulated it throughout the village and persuaded a growing number of local dignitaries and bureaucrats (each seeking favors from Maida’s most distinguished native son) to book carriage reservations to the terminal in time to welcome their potential benefactor. Although Antonio lacked the financial resources and political influence in either Paris or Rome to achieve most of his countrymen’s desires, he never rejected their requests or hinted that it was beyond his power to fulfill them; for what his countrymen most needed he felt compelled to encourage—the notion that anything was possible. This notion was fundamental to their religious faith, to their belief in miracles, to their strength and stoicism in times of natural and manmade upheavals. Southern Italy was a fountainhead of dark fantasies, turmoil, and hope.

Submerged but reachable by a true and probing touch, every southerner’s sense of hope was tempered by the rock-hard reality that nature progressed slowly in this part of Italy, where the planters of olive trees never survived to see the fruits of their labor, and where individuals seeking favors from high places anticipated a
very
long wait. But the average needy southerner found comfort in the familiarly slow process by which
all requests for special treatment were lobbied by aspiring benefactors up through the hierarchy of influence-peddling bureaucrats and
prominenti
(people not always corrupt, but rarely incorruptible); and then further up to the levels of Machiavellian ministers and magistrates renowned for their pondering and vacillation, and their expectation that with every favor they dispensed they would receive one in return—if not today, then tomorrow; if not on earth, then in heaven.