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2 Anti-Catholicism in Little Italy We are now in the heart of the business section of the Latin Quarter, and as we pass through the crowds we catch phrases of French, Portuguese, Spanish, and the various musical dialects of Italy. Many quaint shops are to be found here, their windows displaying an infinite variety of foreign goods. Little marble figures such as Italians like, Mexican glass and pottery, and French embroideries . Hardly an American name or sign is in evidence. —Elizabeth Gray Potter, The San Francisco Skyline, 1939 This is one of the largest concentrations of Italian-Americans in the United States. Their influence in San Francisco has been tremendous. Italian life in San Francisco is hearty, colorful and uninhibited. The Latin Flavor of the city; its tradition of European Sunday, the habitual wine-bibbing, its sensitivity to the picturesque is due largely to the Italian population and they have contributed greatly to the city’s folklore and night life. —Leonard Austin, Around the World in San Francisco, 1959 Sylvester Andriano, firmly committed to Catholicism, Americanization , and the maintenance of his Italian cultural heritage , built his law practice in the growing community of Little Italy. But most of the city’s Italian community demonstrated little interest in citizenship or Americanization. As the decade of the twenties began, 80 percent of the city’s Italian immigrants maintained their Italian citizenship, and ten years later only 44 percent of the men and 31 percent of the women were United States citizens . And as the number of Italian residents in San Francisco grew from the beginning of the century to the 1920s, so did Little Italy’s contingent of anti-Catholic anarchists, socialists, and masons. The new Sts. Peter and Paul Church quickly attracted antiCatholic hostility. Between 1922 and 1924 Andriano raised over 24 CHAPTER 2 one hundred thousand dollars toward the construction of this church, which stood on Filbert Street, facing Washington Square. The largest of three Catholic churches established to serve the growing Italian American community between 1897 and 1914, this new (second ) Sts. Peter and Paul Church was in the heart of Little Italy and quickly acquired the status of a cultural landmark for the city as well as the neighborhood. Its massive Carrara marble altar and similar embellishments earned the edifice the title of “the Italian Cathedral of the West.”1 Built in the Romanesque Revival style, the church, its twin spires towering 191 feet above the neighborhood, announced that Italian Catholics intended to practice their faith in a dignified and impressive structure second to none. In 1923, while it was still under construction, Cecil B. DeMille used the church for scenes in his spectacular movie The Ten Commandments. San Francisco Catholics celebrated when craftsmen completed the work three years later and the parish dedicated the new altar. But others scoffed at the celebration and regarded the new church as a symbol of ancient superstition and popular ignorance, its priests and their lay confidants as recipients of undeserved wealth and power, and after the new Sts. Peter and Paul was dedicated, dynamiters attacked it. Between January 1926 and January 1927, four separate church bombings shook the neighborhood, causing substantial but not extensive damage. Anti-Catholic resentments smoldered beneath the sounds of the Italian Colony’s “musical dialects” and behind its facade of “quaint shops” and “colorful and uninhibited” folk culture.2 After the fourth bombing, city police announced to the press that they could no longer afford to protect the church, but secretly, Detective Sgt. Thomas DeMatei organized a squad that kept watch on the church twenty-four hours a day. The detective’s cousin was a Salesian priest, and it was the Italian Salesian religious order that staffed the church. In the early morning hours of March 6, 1927, two men approached the church; one stood guard and the other struck a match to light the fuse of a bundle of dynamite. DeMatei and his men shot them, killing one and wounding the other. City police were familiar with Celsten Eklund, the wounded man, who died in custody several months later. He was a well- ANTI-CATHOLICISM IN LITTLE ITALY 25 known figure in the community of single men who lived in boardinghouses and residential hotels in the South of Market Street neighborhood , the area Jack London made famous as a hotbed of radicalism in his 1909 short story “South of the Slot.” Eklund’s talents as a soapbox orator extended well beyond San Francisco, and Seattle...

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