Columbus Day Helped Italians Become White, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Explains
Like the mass of Irish famine refugees who preceded them four decades earlier, the majority of the four million Italian immigrants to the US were fleeing grinding rural poverty in Southern Italy and Sicily. They were peasants stuck in medieval socioeconomic relations, while others were proletarian sharecroppers and migrant farmworkers, all without skills beyond agriculture. Most were motivated by jobs in the booming US Industrial Revolution, with plans to earn money to return to Italy and buy land or start businesses. In the United States, Italian migrants were met with endless insults in newspapers and magazines, which described them as “swarthy,” “kinky haired,” and criminally inclined, and regarded as racially impure in an era of the pseudo race theory of eugenics. Their children were often refused access to schools, and adults were turned away from public places and labor unions, and even in church, forced to sit in segregated church pews set aside for Black people. They were catcalled on the streets with epithets like “dago” and “guinea”—the latter a term of derision applied to enslaved Africans and their descendants—and more racist insults like “white n****r” and “n****r wop.” In 1912, the US House Committee on Immigration debated whether Italians could be considered “full-blooded Caucasians,” and immigrants coming from Southern and Eastern Europe were considered “biologically and culturally less intelligent.”
Employers often preferred light-skinned Slovaks and Poles to Italians. Railroad bosses wouldn’t hire them because of their small stature. In the mining industry, English-speaking workers held the skilled and supervisory positions while Italians were hired as laborers. Even those who were educated and skilled were unable to secure any jobs besides manual labor. Only in the 1920s did Italians become more integrated into the workforce. More Italian immigrants were employed in semiskilled jobs in factories as well as skilled positions, but a third remained in unskilled positions. Even Italian American union members faced prejudice with meetings held in English, and Italians were not elected to official positions.
Three years after the Chicago fair, a group of Italians in New York formed the Sons of Columbus Legion to celebrate future Columbus anniversaries, mingling with the Irish and the Knights of Columbus who had succeeded in getting the seventy-six-foot Columbus Monument installed in the center of Columbus Circle in New York in 1892. By then the Irish had spread throughout the country, as Trouillot notes, “with the full benefits of white status . . . Columbus himself . . . became more Irish than ever— until Italian Americans made new gains in the continuing contest for racial and historical legitimacy.” The Knights lobbied state legislatures to establish October 12 as a legal holiday, and by 1912, they had succeeded in fourteen states and two decades later convinced the Franklin Roosevelt administration to make it a federal holiday.
The oppressed masses of Italian immigrants would find the attachment to Columbus an avenue to acceptance. They realized that the accepted representation of Columbus as “first founder” of the United States served to connect being Catholic and being Italian with the very birth of the United States; therefore, Italian immigrants could present themselves as Italian descendants of the original Italian founder, not so much as immigrants but returnees, as part of the origin story of the United States. Historian Danielle Battisti shows how casting Columbus as “the first immigrant” rewrote history, even though he never set foot on the continental landmass that became the United States and was never an immigrant himself, and even though the English colonies that became the United States did not exist in 1492. Later, in 1965, when Italian Americans campaigned to overturn immigration exclusion restrictions, they employed the origin story based on Columbus to great effect.
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