Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America

5. Song: A Punch in Everyman’s Kisser

chapter 5 Song A Punch in Everyman’s Kisser if Frank Sinatra could Do so much for the man who was the horror of horrors, To sing such that he could make it through a day Just think what such listening can do for me. —Gerald Early, 1989 The “long” American 1950s—the postwar period running from Harry S Truman’s dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945 to John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 and the subsequent passage of civil rights and immigration-reform legislation in 1964—was the first great watershed for Italians in the United States, when they finally achieved their American dreams of no more hunger and much more dignity. In 1942 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took Italians off the “suspect aliens” list and shut down the relocation operations.1 Conspicuous in numbers and valor during World War II, the Italian Americans breathed a collective sigh of relief, wrapping themselves in their hard-won reputation as solid, upright, God-fearing citizens who practiced family values. Postwar prosperity and the GI Bill brought economic security, making the second and in most cases third generations solidly blue-collar, not entirely immune to prejudice, particularly class prejudice, but able to operate without fear for body or basic livelihood. No one would have advertised her own foreignness, but it 90 was no longer an embarrassment to admit grandparents or parents had been Italians. Despite the gaudy Italian presence in organized crime, the vast majority of Americans understood that ordinary Italian Americans subscribed to “the American way of life,” and no everyday Italian American was going to go out of her way to undermine the safeguards of that common impression. “We [Americans] are all third generation,” as anthropologist Margaret Mead put it.2 Poverty had been vanquished from their midst; the taint of unassimilable backwardness had slipped off their shoulder; and (im)migrant workers from the Caribbean and the Pacific Rim—“Hispanics,” “Orientals ,” and “West Indians,” as the polite terminology then went—were, increasingly, the new kids in town. The guineas, it seems, had gotten white. Or had they? In the 1950s ethnicity was something you were supposed to leave behind, if not entirely then at least when you went out in public, which makes the Italians of the postwar period a special instance, because in certain key arenas they were—for the first time outside of organized crime—very much out in public. It was at mid-century that Italians, in significant numbers, made their first great breach into legitimate America —into ward and city politics (Fiorello LaGuardia and Vito Marcantonio ), into sports (baseball especially, but also Vince Lombardi and others in football), and, most importantly, into arts and entertainment—as character actors, classical musicians, big band instrumentalists, graphic artists, theater and film production folk of all sorts (including directors Frank Capra and Vincente Minnelli), but, especially, as makers of popular music. By the mid-1950s—at the height of postwar consensus and complacency , when Joe McCarthy was finally censured by Eisenhower for his anti-Semitic anti-Communism, and the only official problem left that everyone knew about was the monstrosity of Jim Crow (the immigrationrestriction laws and Southwestern border patrols being dirty little halfsecrets )—there was hardly a popular singer in sight, at least not a white male singer before Elvis, who wasn’t an Italian American, whether his name ended with a vowel (Mario Lanza, Julius La Rosa, Jimmy Durante, Al Martino, Louis Prima, Perry Como) or had been anglicized in fact or pronunciation (Bobby Darin, Frankie Avalon, Dean Martin, Tony Bennett , Vic Damone, Jerry Vale, and Connie Francis). And all of this happened at a time—what we would call, retrospectively, the conformist song 91 1950s—when, ethnically speaking, no one was even supposed to notice, and the children and grandchildren of the Italian immigrants, solidly blue-collar without being threateningly upwardly mobile, were supposed to be settling in nicely. In some ways what we see here is a classic pattern of ethnic advancement : from the factories (immigrant generation) to the entertainment industries (second and, in the Italian case, third generation) to the corporate and professional boardrooms (breached, finally, in the 1970s). But that Italians are apt to be found singing is the oldest of ethnic archetypes, transcending period (organ grinders and East Side divas at century’s end, Enrico Caruso and crooners like Columbo between the wars, Mitch...