Son of Italy: Immigrant Ambitions and American Literature

Abstract

The United States themselves are essentially poem. ... Here is not merely nation but seeming nation of nations. ... The American poets are to enclose old and new for America is race of (Whitman iii, iv, v) Walt Whitman's expansionist definition of United States as greatest poem and a nation of nations and the race of races has air of radical democracy that is also radically imperialist (Simpson 177-96). American literature as an object of desire became as grandiose as everything else to which national label could be affixed: army, navy, dollar. As an institution, this literature has long confronted immigrants with same complacent hugeness as steps of Capitol or concourse at Grand Central Station. This literature is not only transcontinental but it is omnivorous. It will eat your nationality and digest your race. This is its normal mode of operation. Many of its most frequently-cited texts are monuments to its gigantic appetites: The Pioneers, Moby-Dick, and especially Song of Myself: am large ... I contain multitudes (Whitman 55). (1) United States culture reached exasperated apogee of its imperialist phase at turn of twentieth century with triumph of Admiral Dewey in Manila Bay (1898) and consequent destruction of Spanish Empire. America's Great White Fleet (1907-09) took dominion on Spanish Main. It was during this moment of imperial glory, when very seas became American, that Europeans in unprecedented numbers were crossing Atlantic to work in United States. Those who came from Italy more often than not had firm intention of returning, but many ended by remaining. Those who did settle in United States needed to confront, and to deal with, staggering disequilibrium between this political Leviathan and themselves. They might, as many did, simply retreat into associations and communities of an intensely local character, composed mostly of persons who had come from their own home towns or regions in Italy. This meant refraining from most kinds of civic life, and it certainly meant refraining from anglophone American literature. Another option, more promising to anyone needing to confront national agenda of United States, was first to begin long process of acquiring an Italian national identity, something most immigrants had conspicuously lacked when leaving their native land. Italy had no Whitman of its own, but it too was a nation of nations and a race of races. After close of Risorgimento in 1860s, successive governments in Rome worked to find ways of achieving sense of national unity and purpose. War and empire, to some Italian leaders, seemed best roads to follow. Prime Minister Francesco Crispi believed in these methods, and he designed Italy's invasion of Africa in 1894 with this kind of nation-building purpose (Duggan 711). Italy's miserable defeat that year in battle of Adua failed this aim and indeed intensified felt need for signs and institutions that would embody an expanding Italian nation. At same time, every year hundreds of thousands of Italian poor were climbing into ships and leaving Italy forever, or at least for very long time. When they left, they were far more likely to think of themselves as carrying, along with their Italian passports, an identity belonging to some sovereignty older, and for them much more real, than new nation. They were Neapolitans or Sicilians. They were Romans or Abruzzesi. They were often illiterates with no knowledge whatever of imperial Italian catechism: My mother never heard of Michelangelo; great deeds of Caesars had not yet reached her ears. She never heard great music of her native land. She could not sign her name (Puzo, Godfather Papers 25). Many of immigrants were no better prepared than Mario Puzo's mother to think of themselves as Italians in any instrumental sense. …