Immigrants, Progressives, and Exclusion Politics: The Dillingham Commission, 1900–1927. By Robert F. Zeidel. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004. x, 198 pp. $42.00, isbn 0-87580-323-7.)

Abstract

In the face of a growing scholarship stressing Italian Americans' conservatism, the purpose of the book under review here is to rescue the radical experience of this ethnic minority from historical oblivion. To this end, Philip V. Can-nistraro and Gerald Meyer have gathered an impressive collection of essays that deal with the multifaceted components of such a tradition, spanning from the inner struggles within the anarchist movement at the turn of the twentieth century to the activities of Father James Groppi and Mario Savio in the civil rights and student movements of the 1960s. That Savio was also involved in the mobilizations against California's propositions 187 and 209 in 1994 and 1996 offers evidence for the survival of some components of the Italian American radical militancy into the late twentieth century. Still, Groppi's and Savio's cases were too peculiar to challenge the thesis of the ultimate “loss” of the world of Italian American radicalism, as Donna Gabaccia conversely suggests in her conclusion (p. 318). Actually, the two decades before the end of World War I witnessed the heyday of Italian Americans' class consciousness. But in the following years, as Rudolph Vecoli aptly argues, the Red Scare and the “fascistization” of the Little Italys marked the collapse of radicalism in the Italian American communities. Specifically, the spread of nationalistic feelings in the wake of Benito Mussolini's rise to power helped the demise of the transnationalism on which Italian Americans' radical world view had rested. Indeed, while American society perceived socialism, anarchism, and Communism as foreign ideologies, an exchange of ideas between Italy and the United States nourished Italian American radical thoughts and actions. Many contributors reveal that militants looked not only to Bolshevik Russia but primarily to their native country and drew on the theoretical debate and class warfare strategies of their fellow ethnics in Italy.