Stefano Luconi (University of Padua)

Initially, Italian Americans’ attitude toward politics was ambivalent. On the one hand, several early- and mid-nineteenth-century immigrants were exiles, banned from or fleeing their motherland afteffr the initial defeats of the Risorgimento, the struggle for Italy’s unification and independence from foreign rule. While deeply committed to politics, they were interested less in casting ballots in US elections than in promoting solidarity with the cause of an independent and unified Italy within the American establishment. On the other hand, most of those who migrated for economic reasons had a sojourner mentality. They planned to return to Italy and enjoy there the money they expected to earn in the United States. Many were “birds of passage,” who moved back and forth across the Atlantic to make a living. As a result, they rarely applied for US citizenship, thus remaining ineligible to vote. Furthermore, since in Italy men’s right to vote was restricted on the basis of income and property until 1913 and women were disfranchised until 1946, most working-class newcomers had had no significant political experience and showed little interest in US elections. Socialism and anarchism gained numerous followers among Italian Americans and produced both radical leaders and activists, including women such as Maria Roda, an anarcho-syndicalist champion of female rights. These ideologies, however, stimulated militancy at the workplace rather than at polling stations. They incited laborers to fight the class struggles in plants and mines, but discouraged voting because they contended that elections under capitalism were a travesty of democracy to the proletariat’s detriment. Consequently, Italian-American turnout was negligible until the 1920s. To the few who did go to the polls, the suffrage was of little value. Many fell prey to the Republican and Democratic machines and sold their votes to the highest bidder, in exchange for money, a job, a license, or some other political favor.

Italian Americans’ mass political mobilization began in the 1920s. The rise of pro-Italy- nationalist sentiments during World War I encouraged many naturalized immigrants to overcome their electoral apathy and vote for the Republican candidate in the 1920 race for the White House, in retaliation for Democratic President Woodrow Wilson’s rejection of Rome’s claims over Fiume at the Paris Peace Conference. The 1921 and 1924 legislation restricting immigration ended the era of the “birds of passage” and encouraged Italians who chose to remain in the United States to apply for American citizenship, which implied securing the franchise, too. During that decade, a generation of US-born Italian Americans came of age. They not only enjoyed suffrage by birthright, but had been educated in America in the veneration of electoral democracy. Finally, when New York State Governor Alfred Smith ran for the White House on the Democratic ticket in 1928, many Italian Americans rushed to the polls out of ethno-religious solidarity. They identified with the first presidential candidate of either major party who, like themselves, was Catholic and did not belong to the Anglo-Saxon establishment. While Italian Americans never formed a solid voting bloc, these dynamics signaled a shift in partisan affiliation.

In the 1930s, those ethno-religious determinants of electoral participation yielded to economic issues, as Italian Americans, most of whom were workers, grew stronger in their Democratic affiliation. The 1932 protest vote against Republican Herbert Hoover, held responsible for the depression, turned into a mandate for Democrat Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 to protect the social and labor legislation of the New Deal. Furthermore, the 1930s witnessed the rise of politicians of Italian descent. Remarkably, San Francisco, New York City, and New Orleans had Italian-American mayors, respectively Angelo Rossi (1931-1944), Fiorello H. La Guardia (1934-1945), and Robert Maestri (1936-1946). Some Italian Americans, driven by ethnic pride, also formed a pressure group to support the foreign policy of the fascist regime. They admired Benito Mussolini for allegedly turning Italy into a great power which they believed also improved their own standing in the United States. However, when identification with fascism became a liability during World War II, Italian Americans did not hesitate to repudiate the regime.

Disavowing fascism did not equate to severing ties to Italy. Support for Roosevelt declined in 1940, as many Italian Americans feared he was preparing to wage war against the country where they still had relatives and friends. It further declined in 1944, after the war had actually broken out and in the wake of charges that the US government was neglecting civilians’ basic needs in Allied-occupied Italian territories. Italian Americans also came out against a punitive peace settlement for Italy. Yet, Democratic president Harry Truman received a majority of their votes in 1948, by cashing in on the relevance of the Marshall Plan for Italy’s postwar economic reconstruction. Four years later, the American Committee on Italian Migration was established to lobby Congress to repeal the discriminatory national-origins system, which had penalized prospective Italian newcomers since the early 1920s, an objective that was eventually achieved with the passing of the Hart-Celler Act in 1965.

Some Italian Americans also joined an anti-communist campaign targeting voters in their native country. When Italy held its 1948 parliamentary elections, they sent letters to kinsfolk and acquaintances still living on the other shore of the Atlantic, urging them not to cast their ballots for the Popular Democratic Front, the fusion ticket of the Communist and Socialist Parties. The embrace of Washington’s anti-communism during the Cold War, however, can be interpreted as a stratagem by which Italian Americans legitimized their lobbying efforts on behalf of their ancestral land while they called on the US government to implement policies that would let Italy regain her prewar status as a mid-sized Mediterranean power. Once that goal was achieved, the expedient strategy was discontinued and efforts to involve Italian Americans in another anti-Communist letter-writing campaign at the time of Italy’s 1976 parliamentary elections proved a failure. In addition, the rise of third- and fourth-generation Italian Americans with looser connections to Italy than their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents undermined Italian Americans’ role as spokespersons for the claims of their ancestral country.

In the meantime, Italian Americans’ political ascendancy continued. In 1950, all three major candidates in New York City’s mayoral election—Democrat Ferdinand Pecora, Republican Edward Corsi, and independent Vincent Impellitteri, who ultimately won—were all of Italian descent. That same year, Democrat John Pastore, who had been governor of Rhode Island since 1945, became the first Italian American to serve in the US Senate. Female politicians emerged, too. In 1974, in Connecticut, Democrat Ella Grasso was the nation’s first woman elected governor in her own right. By the mid of that decade, the increase in the number of US Representatives and Senators of Italian background resulted in the creation of the Italian American Congressional Delegation, a bipartisan caucus involved in legislation affecting issues of interest to the Italian-American community.

As Italian Americans moved up the social ladder and entered the middle class in the postwar decades, many became more conservative and returned to the GOP. Notable exceptions to this trend were the support for Democrat and fellow Catholic John F. Kennedy in 1960 and, in the emotional aftermath of his assassination, for his successor Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. However, many Italian Americans soon reverted to the Republican column driven by their pro-life stance and in response to the alleged Democratic support for what were seen as encroachments by African Americans. Access to the spoils of whiteness consolidated many Italian Americans’ Republican allegiance throughout Donald Trump’s presidency. Yet, New York State’s Democratic Governors Mario Cuomo (1983-1994) and his son Andrew (2011-2021) kept alive a progressive tradition. Moreover, Trump’s supporters, such as former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (1994-2001), did not exhaust the range of Italian Americans’ partisan affiliation. One of Trump’s most outspoken critics was California’s Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives (2007-2011, 2019-2023), while Gina Raimondo, former governor of Rhode Island (2015-2021), served as Secretary of Commerce under Democratic President Joe Biden (2021-2025).

Involvement in Italian politics further waned in the late twentieth century. In 1997, for instance, no more than 50,000 out of roughly 15 million Italian Americans endorsed a petition urging the Clinton administration not to deny Italy a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council as part of a short-lived reform proposal to expand this organ. Disengagement continued in the following years. A 2000-2001 constitutional reform allowed Italian citizens residing abroad to vote by mail in Italy’s parliamentary elections. Nonetheless, turnout among Italian citizens in the United States peaked at 32 percent in 2008—already relatively low—before dropping to 20 percent in 2022.

Resources

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