Sport and Italian American Assimilation

In 1938 Professor Marcus Hansen argued that the full assimilation process required three generations of residence in the country to reach fulfillment. The first generation continued to communicate in their native tongue, followed traditional customs, and had a limited social contact with the dominant American culture. The second generation was required to attend school; they learned the English language, which they used increasingly, but retained their Italian dialect at home. The third generation, often a product of mixed ethnic marriages, no longer spoke their grandparents’ native tongue and had adopted American customs (Gems 2013).The second generation was exposed to American sports in the schools, which held a particular attraction for second-generation Italian boys. With little education and limited English skills, sports provided visual lessons and reinforced American cultural values. All sports required competition, the basis for the American capitalist economy. Team sports required leadership skills and cooperative teamwork, a necessary component of the American democracy. Yet social mobility and a level of social and economic capital might be achieved by individual efforts.Before the immigrants could gain an American identity, they had to reconcile an Italian identity. Sport made a considerable contribution to that purpose as well. In 1899 Lawrence Brignoli (aka Brignolia), the son of an immigrant Italian peddler, defeated sixteen other runners to win the Boston Marathon to considerable acclaim, and immigrants took notice. At the 1908 Olympic Games held in London, another Italian runner, Dorando Pietri, entered the stadium to finish the last lap of the marathon race but collapsed before reaching the finish line. Johnny Hayes, an American, entered the stadium to the dismay of British spectators and officials, as their nation was then in the throes of a battle for world leadership with the United States, in which the Olympics served as a surrogate form of warfare. British officials picked up Pietri and escorted him to the finish to deny the honor to an American, which was later overruled. Thereafter Pietri reclaimed his own honor by engaging in an American tour of long-distance challenge races at urban venues, defeating Hayes and setting a world record in the process. Italian clubs feted the national hero with banquets and expensive gifts. The New York Times gave him front page coverage, and a survey of Chicago spectators revealed a clientele that transcended social classes and occupations. Italian boys soon joined interscholastic track teams (Boston Daily Globe, 1916; “Brignolia Recalls” 1950; Buckley 1900; Gems 2013).Italians had played the American national game of baseball as early as the nineteenth century as a distinct marker of assimilation, but men were not the only enthusiasts. Clementine Brida, an Italian immigrant, assumed the alias Maud Nelson when she starred as a pitcher, and she also played third base on a barnstorming women's team in the early 1890s. Playing for the Boston Bloomer Girls, she traveled throughout the United States and Canada and was recognized as the best female player of the era. She earned eighteen dollars per week as a ballplayer when other working women earned only less than a quarter or half of her salary. In 1899 she appeared in games for the Chicago Bloomer Girls, and she would eventually become owner of her own team in that city. In a career that extended beyond four decades, she would become an ardent supporter of women's baseball (Shattuck 2017). “The attraction of American sports had turned a young Italian girl into an athletic entrepreneur, which would have been an impossibility in Italy” (Gems 2013, 80).True recognition awaited the appearance of Ping Bodie (Francesco Pizzolo), who starred for the Chicago White Sox from 1911 to 1914; he finished his career with the New York Yankees as Babe Ruth's roommate. While fans hailed his play and his clowning on the field, his father remained unimpressed and disowned him for anglicizing his name (Gems 2013).During the same era, a host of Italian boxers also anglicized their names to appeal to ethnic loyalties as Irishmen or to avoid discrimination by promoters or judges. Gaspare Leoni made it to the championship ranks as Casper Leon in the 1890s. Giuseppe Carrora dominated the lower-weight classes as Johnny Dundee; while Andrew Chiariglione fought as a heavyweight for twenty-six years as Fireman Jim Flynn. Even in the genteel sport of golf Gene Sarazen (Eugenio Saraceni) dominated the game, which he had learned to play as a working-class caddie (Gems 2013, 2014).Baseball remained the national game throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The Yankees, like other Major League teams, were reluctant to recruit Italian baseball players in the 1920s, but the large number of Italian residents in the city had the potential to attract a new fan base to Yankee Stadium. In 1925 Tony Lazzeri hit sixty home runs for the Salt Lake City Minor League Baseball team in the tough Pacific Coast League, two years before Babe Ruth accomplished the feat with the Yankees. He also batted in 222 runs and scored 202, records that remain untouched today. A New York sportswriter claimed that Lazzeri “was almost as big a drawing card as Ruth. Italian societies in New York, Boston, Detroit, almost everywhere the Yankees played, held banquets in his honor and showered him with gifts” (Baldassaro 2011, 70). His stellar career in New York earned him election to the Baseball Hall of Fame (Baldassaro 2021).The 1920s also witnessed a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, who vilified Catholics and ethnic immigrants. In the KKK stronghold of Indiana, the Klan even marched on Notre Dame University with the intent of blowing up the school until thwarted by an enraged student body. The long trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti charged with a 1920 robbery and murder proceeded over the decade with their eventual execution in 1927, further questioning Italians’ loyalty and fitness for citizenship. Lazzeri performed his heroics under the pressure of heckling from racist fans. Italians were still suspect aliens, and the US government reinforced such notions by setting immigration quotas throughout the decade, eventually limiting the number of Italian entries to 6,000 (Garaty 1983).The Yankees's acquisition of Joe DiMaggio in 1936 marked the gradual acceptance of Italian Americans as full citizens within the American polity. His early career was mired by journalists’ attention to his lack of education as a high school dropout and reinforcing negative stereotypes of Italians. Yet he played the game with grace and elegance, and his humility eventually won over the skeptics. In his thirteen seasons with the Yankees, the team won ten American League championships and nine World Series titles. Acknowledged as the greatest player of his generation, his fifty-six-game hitting streak in 1941 is a record unlikely to ever be broken. Actor Ben Gazzara admitted that “he was our god, the god of all Italian Americans” (Baldassaro 2011, 228). Like a half-million other Italian Americans, he interrupted his life to serve in the military during World War II even as his parents and other Italians were labeled enemy aliens and removed from their West Coast homes. His marriage to Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe in 1954 established the winning of Whiteness for all Italian Americans (Gems 2013).DiMaggio's acceptance opened the doors for a multitude of Italian American ballplayers over the next two decades, as Blacks still awaited their opportunities after Jackie Robinson finally integrated Major League baseball in 1947. Schools were not integrated until the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The Boston Red Sox did not hire a Black player until 1959.Italian American boxers solidified their claim to Whiteness, which granted them greater acceptance within the dominant WASP society and the full rights of citizenship in the postwar years as they battled Black fighters for championship laurels. John Basilone, a former boxing champ in the army, won a Medal of Honor as a marine at Guadalcanal before giving his life to the American cause on Iwo Jima. Willie Pep (Guillermo Papaleo) began his pugilistic career at the age of fifteen and won the Connecticut state flyweight championship in 1938 as a sixteen-year-old. His father protested the anglicization of his name but favored his earning power. Mr. Papaleo earned fifteen dollars per week as a Works Progress Administration employee. When his son brought home fifty dollars earned by fighting two bouts on the same evening and offered forty dollars to his father, the sire responded by directing him to “fight twice a week from now on” (Gems 2014, 163). By the age of twenty, he had become the world featherweight champion, eventually ending his career with 229 victories. Both the Associated Press and Ring magazine, the bible of boxing, named him the greatest featherweight of all time.Jake LaMotta, Rocky Graziano (Thomas Rocco Barbella), and Rocky Marciano (Marchegiano) fought epic battles that still resonate among aficionados. Each exemplified the toughness of working-class life experienced by so many Italians (Gems 2013; Stanton 2018; Sussman 2018).Both Graziano and LaMotta gained the middleweight championship with displays of their ethnic tenacity, but they traveled different paths thereafter. “Writer Gerald Early asserted that Graziano was the bad boy who became one of the most beloved athletes and personalities in America . . . LaMotta was . . . the bad boy who grew up and became a bad man” (Early 1987, 387). Graziano shared his largess in buying Christmas presents for the children in his old neighborhood. LaMotta bought his family a new home (Gems 2014).Black boxers held the heavyweight title, symbolic of the world's toughest man, from 1937 until 1952. When Marciano knocked out Jersey Joe Walcott in 1952 to gain the heavyweight crown, he unwillingly assumed the role of the Great White Hope, and his tenure as champion “solidified Italian Americans’ claim to whiteness, which had been in question since their massive migration in the 1880s” (Gems 2014, 135).Such athletes became heroes to Italian American boys. Their admirers’ lives lacked the grandeur of their idols, but these examples were no less valuable in the process of assimilation. The life of Frank “Chico” DiBenedetto is a noteworthy example. In 1907 his father, an illiterate Sicilian shepherd, stowed away on the SS Sannio, destined for New York. On board he met a young teenage orphan who had been raised by nuns in an orphanage and was traveling to Chicago with her aunt and cousins to live with the aunt's husband, who had preceded her. By the end of the voyage, he had become smitten and decided he'd also travel to Chicago and marry her. It took a couple years of hard labor building a railroad to Omaha before he could save enough money for that purpose, but his dream was fulfilled in 1911. They would produce eleven children, all delivered by midwives, but only six survived their first year. Chico arrived in 1922. The merged family left their Little Sicily neighborhood, then beset by Black Hand criminals, to purchase a shared home in a mixed ethnic neighborhood (Gems 2021).Chico earned his nickname when his Anglo playmates mistook his mother's dinner calls for “Francicso” to come home to dinner. He and his siblings attended the nearby public school where he engaged in American sports and games. When teams were picked, the players were assigned to either the White or Black teams. He was always assigned as a Black. He learned the games well, so well that as a teenager he joined the Wizard Arrows Athletic Club, a local organization formed in 1918 that fielded teams for games throughout the city against similar clubs. Chico played as a lineman on the football team, where he admitted to engaging in rough tactics, such as tossing dirt into an opponent's eyes as the ball was snapped. As a high school dropout, he earned some spending money as a club boxer, fighting in the numerous city gyms for a few dollars per night. When World War II erupted, he begged his father to let him join the US Navy. The father relented but cautioned him that he'd be crying in one week. He was wrong. Chico didn't last that long, but he did graduate from boot camp and was assigned to combat duty with the Atlantic squadron, although he could not swim (Gems 2021).After the war, he attended a trade school and found work as a plasterer. Italians had proved their allegiance during the war; so, unlike his father, Chico was able to join a trade union. With steady work, he was earning and saving enough money to get married and start a family. Although his wife, Marie Cook, the daughter of Anglo farmers in Michigan, accepted his offer, her family never did, and she was ostracized for marrying an Italian. Chico's social life still revolved around the Wizard Arrows Club, where he was elected president. The office required him to develop teams, raise and manage club funds, and schedule games and officials. He accomplished such tasks so effectively that the football team became a semi-pro unit, playing its games in stadiums throughout the Chicagoland area and drawing newspaper coverage of their contests. Such business acumen taught him leadership skills and administrative abilities that allowed him to start his own small company (Gems 2021).Despite his success, Chico remained anchored to the same neighborhood, where he provided financial and material help to family and neighbors in need. He provided food to the poor and delivered fruit to the priests in nearby parishes, which rewarded him with repair work in the churches and nuns’ convents. One bitter Chicago winter, he suffered a serious injury while trying to help a neighbor whose car was stuck in a snow pile. As the tires spun, they kicked up a chunk of ice, which hit him in the eye, blinding him and requiring its removal. Still he maintained his gregarious, cheerful, and jovial nature. Coworkers sometimes found the glass eye in the bottom of their coffee cups or when they checked their lunch sandwiches to see what their wives had created (Gems 2021).Throughout Chico's long life, he traveled throughout the city just to acquire his favorite Italian foods available in other neighborhoods. He continued his favors to neighbors, never asking for a return other than making the suggestion “that maybe you can help my kids some day” (Gems 2021, 141–42). Having used his profits to buy up empty lots in the decaying neighborhood, he lived to the age of ninety-five, long enough to see the gentrification of the area and ensuring that none of his three children would ever have to labor again as he did (Gems 2021).In recognition of all he had done over the years, the new, upper-class residents petitioned the city government to rename a local street after him with an honorary street sign bearing his name. A grand ceremony accompanied the unveiling, an indication that he had achieved Whiteness and all the considerable benefits attached to that status that had been denied to his parents (Gems 2021).Scholars still debate whether Italian Americans have become fully assimilated in the complete adoption of the values of the host culture. The rise of guido culture expressed by disillusioned youth seeking some sense of fulfillment, the continuation of annual religious festivals that perpetuate otherness, the success of the Godfather movies and the long-running Sopranos television series that perpetuate the appearance of Italians as criminals, and the adherence to Italian food and close family ties all suggest a limited assimilation based on partial acceptance of the dominant norms and values. The attraction of sport and its practitioners, however, provides abundant acceptance of acculturation, the merger of ethnic values with those of the dominant culture rather than a complete assimilation.

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