Soft Soil, Black Grapes: The Birth of Italian Winemaking in California

10. Wine and the Alchemy of Race II: Prohibition

 207  chapter 10 Wine and the Alchemy of Race II Prohibition As a moment of profound caesura in the history of California winemaking , Prohibition also had distinct racial implications, pitting as it did a largely nativist, Protestant, and rural America against an ethnic, urban, and Catholic one. In fact, the Eighteenth Amendment would establish the image of winemaking as one in which Italian immigrants indulged in particular, adding to it the stigma of illegality. At the same time, it would also provide these recent arrivals with new and unexpected opportunities, which came as a result of their near monopoly of an industry that had taken on a semi-criminal status. The origins of such circumstances can be traced back to the state of the political debate on the present and future of the American nation at the turn of the twentieth century. Ironically, with their antiAsian racism, Italian Americans in California had helped forces that were essentially their own enemies. In fact, California itself was a hotbed for nativism and anti-immigration legislation. The state was the setting for the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882— the first important triumph for the nationwide movement to restrict 208  Wine and the Alchemy of Race II immigration. After intermediate victories, such as the Immigration Act of 1917 (also known as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act), this movement would achieve its main objective in 1924 with the introduction of the law that regulated immigration to the United States on the basis of national quotas—and strongly penalized Italians. In addition to upholding the ban against the Chinese and allowing only “free white persons” to naturalize, the Immigration Act of 1924 reduced legal entries of European natives from countries of more recent immigration, like Italy, to a pitiful number. Scholars of scientific racism and many Americans alike viewed Italians —especially those from the South—as less than commendable for immigration by virtue of being Catholic; rural; poor; overly prolific; mostly illiterate; ill accustomed to liberal democracy and its institutions ; and well represented among criminals, socialists, and anarchists. This last aspect was particularly relevant during World War I amid rampant doubts over immigrant loyalty to the national war effort. Such tensions only grew after Russia’s 1917 October Revolution unleashed a violent, antiradical hysteria throughout the United States that came to be known as the Red Scare. The most famous emblems and victims of this repressive climate were two Italians—Puglia native Nicola Sacco and Piedmont native Bartolomeo Vanzetti—who were executed following a controversial murder trial. The event marked a turning point and caused the big American capitalists—formerly the most influential supporters of an open policy toward immigration—to join forces with the historical opponents of open immigration, the Protestant middle class and the big unions. The coalescence of this new social bloc in turn paved the way for the restrictive legislation of the Immigration Act, which included both Northern and Southern Italians among the races considered undesirable. The ensuing prohibitionist movement thus became inextricably intertwined with these debates, drives, and fears: “Like the Red Wine and the Alchemy of Race II  209 Scare, Prohibition employed coercive means, the force of law, to impose cultural unity on an increasingly heterogeneous and complex society.”1 While the temperance movement had already been nurturing nativist sentiments from the early nineteenth century on, these began taking on distinctly racist implications in the climate of mounting aversion toward immigrants at the dawn of the twentieth century. The arrival in the United States of “foreign hordes” of mostly Catholic Irish, German, Polish, and Italian drinkers greatly concerned the predominantly Anglo-Saxon Protestant prohibitionist reformers, who wished to uphold ideals of sobriety, respectability , and productivity. For the latter, the saloon’s rapid expansion as a meeting place for new immigrant workers represented an alarming attack on the democratic virtues of the American nation. In the prohibitionist imagination, the saloon became the principal breeding ground for the growth of Roman Catholicism, anti-American foreign radicalism, and the corrupt power of immigrant party bosses, as noted in the resolution of the General Baptist Convention of California in 1894: “That, as members of the denomination which was first to uphold the liberty of consciences and separation of church and state, we put ourselves on record as utterly opposed to any attempt to secularize the public schools, and to control our government in the interest of a foreign hierarchy...