World War I cut sharply the numbers of newcomers from overseas. Italian immigration declined from 283,738 in 1914 to 49,688 in 1915 (the first full year of war) to 5,250 in 1918, ending the constant stream of newcomers into the Italian-American communities. The smaller supply of cheap labor, combined with wartime manpower demands, offered those already in the country wider job opportunities at higher wages than ever before. Large-scale Italian immigration resumed after the war, but it was almost immediately blocked again by restrictive legislation in the 1920s. The Immigration Act of 1924 assigned to Italians a yearly quota of only 3,845. 

The case of Nicola Sacco (1891-1927) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1888-1927) illustrated the tensions that had led to this legislation. Americans saw untrammeled immigration and the radicalism it was said to import from abroad as twin dangers, and the Sacco and Vanzetti case seemed to prove the point. The two immigrant anarchists, accused of robbing and killing the paymaster of a shoe factory and his guard in South Braintree, Mass., on April 15, 1920, were tried for murder and found guilty, a decision many believed was based more on their foreign birth and alleged anarchist beliefs than on the evidence. The presiding judge, Webster Thayer, boasted to his golfing companions that he had "done in" the "anarchist bastards," and during the trial he permitted the prosecuting attorney to make radicalism the cornerstone of his case. After numerous delays and despite the pleas of many concerned Americans, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed on August 23, 1927. Supporters of the two men never lost hope that they would be exonerated. 

The Italians, along with more recently arrived immigrant groups, profited from the general prosperity bred by a wartime economy and the booming twenties, and this comparative affluence brought self-esteem to the Italian-American community. Combined with immigration restrictions, it also helped disperse the Italian neighborhoods. The comparatively modest economic gains of the 1920s were significant to the people involved. A comparison of occupations in New York City in 1916 and in 1931 showed Italians moving away from jobs as unskilled laborers. Fifty percent were employed as laborers in 1916; 31 percent just 15 years later. Increasing numbers of Italians worked as chauffeurs, clerks, mechanics, carpenters, salesmen, painters, and plasterers. Italian women dominated the garment industry; during the 1920s they displaced the Jews as the largest single group in the needle trades. By 1937, according to International Ladies Garment Workers Union president David Dubinsky, immigrant and second-gcneration Italians in the union numbered about 100,000 out of a total membership of 250,000 in the New York area. 

Political patronage continued to provide benefits for loyal Italian voters, but organized crime became an even more lucrative source of income, thanks to the Eighteenth Amendment and the Prohibition Enforcement (Volstead) Act, which went into effect on January 16, 1920. Supporters of the Eighteenth Amendment had predicted that Prohibition would usher in a new era of “clean thinking and clean living,” but the noble experiment instead provided quite different opportunities. The Capones, O'Banions, and Lanskys set about building the illegal liquor trade into a lucrative business. 

The association of Italians with crime was not new. Long before Prohibition, the Italians had been plagued by their identification in the public mind with the Mafia. In southern Italy and Sicily secret criminal societies like the Mafia were part of the fabric of life, and like any other newcomers to the United States, the immigrant criminals were eager to recreate their familiar institutions and traditions in the new land. Transplanting the Mafia to the Italian districts of American cities proved not to be so simple. The constant and heavy turnover of residents prevented the formation of a stable community, and the Mafia and similar criminal societies could thrive only in a static environment. Mafia leaders had not even wanted. to move to the United States, but in the 1920s the Fascists forced many of them out of the country, and they headed for the United States for the same reason that everyone else did-they expected to get rich quicker there. 

But while American awareness of Italian immigrant criminals was limited to the activities of Black Hand extortion gangs and tales of Mafia blood oaths, the bootleggers, whether Italian- or American-born, grew up as products of the American urban environment. They had little desire to associate with the immigrant criminals and were not averse to eliminating them when they got in the way. While the attention of the public was distracted by Black Hand bomb-throwers and the like, these young men quietly entered the world of illicit liquor, gambling, prostitution, narcotics, and extortion. The experience they gained and their contacts with politicians, the police, and fellow criminals served them well. 

Although Prohibition had launched Italian Americans in entrepreneurial crime, repealing it did not reverse their fortunes. Gambling, narcotics, prostitution, and business and labor racketeering formed the basis of their profitable enterprises. Syndicate leaders loosely patterned their organizations on those of the legitimate business world and made entrepreneurial crime an avenue to prosperity for the American-born generation. Loyalty and cooperation were essential in the competitive world of American syndicate crime, and its leaders played an important role: Frank Costello, Charles "Lucky" Luciano, Frank Lazia, Al Capone, Joe Adonis, and John Torrio were in their way innovators and experimenters. The institutions and procedures they and their associates set up in cities throughout the country provided the framework within which criminal syndicates functioned thereafter. 

Italians had few political successes comparable to their spectacular gains in syndicate crime. The most successful Italian-American politician was Fiorello H. La Guardia. Born in Greenwich Village of an Italian father and a Jewish mother, La Guardia was raised in Arizona. In 1914 he won his first elective office, a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican from a traditionally Democratic district. He was elected in 1919 to the presidency of the Board of Aldermen of New York City, the most important elective position that any Italian had won in a major American city up to that time. Two years later La Guardia ran unsuccessfully for mayor, but the following year he regained the seat he had earlier held in Congress, which he kept from 1923 to 1933. Then he returned to New York and ran for mayor again-this time successfully-remaining in the post for the next twelve years. Two contemporary Italian Americans also served as mayors: in 1931 Angelo Rossi (1878-1948), son of Genoese immigrants, was elected in San Francisco and held office until 1944. Robert S. Maestri, son of an Italian father and a French mother, was mayor of New Orleans from 1936 to 1946. 

A close and mutually beneficial alliance was formed between the urban political machines and the underworld organizations. In exchange for a free hand in operating houses of prostitution, saloons, and gambling halls, their operators helped get out the vote on election day and kept the opposition away from the polls by intimidation, bribery, violence, and trickery. A number of Italian politicians based their successes on connections with organized crime, often controlled by men with whom they had grown up and gone to school. When they sought political office, their underworld friends could be useful contacts; gangster-controlled votes held the balance of power in many wards. 

In the 1920s events in the homeland attracted the attention, and for some the admiration, of Italians in the United States; Benito Mussolini was a popular topic in the Italian-language press. Catholics approved of his efforts to bridge the chasm between the Vatican and the Italian government. The concordat known as the Lateran Treaty of February 11, 1929 (by which the Church recognized the Italian government and the occupation of Rome in exchange for acceptance of the sovereign status of Vatican City, indemnities, and recognition of Catholicism as the state religion) was greeted with wild enthusiasm by Italian Americans. Middle-class and working-class Italians differed on a number of issues, but Fascism was not one of them-they were united in their admiration for Mussolini, who seemed to have provided Italy with an ideal government. They also supported and glorified Fascist Italy, partly because they thought it was winning American admiration and partly because they took pride in Italy's position as an international power. 

Enthusiasm waned, however, as the repressive aspects of the regime became more apparent. A group of distinguished Italians who arrived as exiles in the 1930s attested to increasingly repressive government methods. This group included, along with Toscanini, historians Gaetano Salvemini (1873-1957) and Giuseppe Borgese (1882-1952), former Italian foreign min-ister Carlo Sforza (1872-1952), virologist Salvador Luria (1912-), journalist Max Ascoli (1898-1978), literary historian Renato Poggioli (1907-1963), and physicists Enrico Fermi (1901-1954), Emilio Segre (1905-), and Bruno Rossi (1905-). 

The thirties were a time of conflict within Italian-American communities between the loyal supporters and the growing number of opponents to Mussolini's Fascism. The battle raged in the press, on the radio, in the meetings of Italian organizations, and occasionally in the streets. But despite lavish outlays of money and extensive propaganda efforts by the Fascist government, after 1941 Italian Americans fully supported the American war effort against the Axis powers. Concern about the loyalty of alien Italians in the United States and a reluctance to employ them in war industries soon subsided, and by the fall of 1942 their enemy-alien status had been removed. of more than 600,000 Italian aliens in the United States, only 228 were interned. An estimated 500,000 Italian Americans served in the armed forces; at least 12 received the Congressional Medal of Honor and 10 the Navy Cross. 
 

GROUP MAINTENANCE 

After World War II another half-million Italians en-tered the United States, about 228,000 of them in the decade following the passage of the 1965 immigration law that replaced the national-quota system. The 1970 U.S. Census counted over 4 million first- and second-generation Italian Americans, almost 70 percent in the heavily industrialized and urban Northeast (see Table 5). Italian immigrants and their offspring no longer necessarily lived in central-city districts, but they still tended to live in or around major cities. In 1970 nearly 2.3 million resided in only 12 metropolitan areas; 1 million of these in the New York metropolitan area, the rest in Boston, Providence, R.I., Buffalo and Rochester, N.Y., Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Chi-cago, San Francisco-Oakland, and Los Angeles-Long Beach. 

Table 5. Regional distribution of Italian Americans, 1970. 

Region   Foreign-born  Native-born of  Total 
    Italian or   Italian Americans 
    mixed parentage 

Northeast  706,940    2,196,732   2,903,672 
North Central  150,873   473,026   623,899 
South  53,501   228,244   281,745 
West  97,219   334,244   431,463 

Total   1,008,533   3,232,246   4,240,779 

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of the Population, 1970, Characteristics of the Population (Washington, D.C., 1973), vol. 1, pt. 1, sec. 2,1087-1088. 
 

The old immigrant-community institutions fell into disuse. Mutual-benefit societies and the Italian-language press had by the 1960s come on hard times. A survey of more than 300 Italian residents of Chicago's Near West Side found that none of the people inter-viewed belonged to an Italian fraternal organization and that none read a foreign-language newspaper, nor did anyone else in the family. Many were not even aware of the existence of the two largest Italian fraternal groups: the Sons of Italy and the Italo-American National Union. Only the Catholic Church continued to attract support: almost without exception, residents claimed membership in one of the three Catholic churches in the area, although religious observances appeared to be more common among the older generation than among their children. 

The elderly in Chicago still obtained news of events in Italy from Italian-language radio broadcasts and from a monthly paper, Fra Noi, put out by a Catholic religious order, which regularly printed a summary page in Italian. During the mid-sixties Fra Noi was the only Chicago publication written about and for Italian Americans. Later a weekly, L'Italia, with a circulation in 1977 of 6,000, was started. The Italian-language press is somewhat stronger in the East, where Italian immigrants continue to arrive and congregate. Yet only New York's Il Progresso Italo-Americano, which has a national as well as a local edition, publishes daily. Il Progresso's circulation in 1977 was 68,637; the next largest Italian-language paper had a circulation of only 14,500. 

Italians remain loyal to the Catholic Church, though they do not exert leadership within it in proportion to their numbers. In 1972 more than half of an estimated 21 million Americans of Italian descent were still active Catholics (about 20 percent of the total Catholic population in the country), but there were only nine bishops of Italian background in the entire United States. In contrast, Irish Americans constituted 17 percent of the Catholic Church's membership and provided more than half its bishops. Italians have had to reconcile themselves to Irish domination over the U.S. Catholic Church. 

Nonethnic parochial schools, parishes, and church-sponsored social organizations have raised the incidence of intermarriage with non-Italian Catholics. Intermarriage by Italians in Buffalo, for example, increased from 12 percent in 1930 to 27 percent in 1950 and 50 percent in 1960. Intermarriage among third-generation Italian Americans in the United States was 58 percent in 1963-1964. Even when Italians marry outside the group, however, they tend to remain within the church and choose a mate of either Irish, German, or Polish Catholic background. 

As La Guardia's success represented the coming of age of Italian Americans in city politics before World War II, the career success of John 0. Pastore (1907-) indicated their acceptance on state and national levels. In 1946 Pastore, whose parents had migrated from Southern. Italy to Providence, became the first Italian Ameri-can to be elected governor of a state (Rhode Island), although Charles Poletti and Louis W. Cappelli had been elected lieutenant governors before that time. Pastore was chosen as running mate for incumbent governor J. Howard McGrath in 1944, and within a year he had succeeded McGrath, who had resigned to become U.S. solicitor-general. In 1946 and 1948 Pastore was reelected governor, and in 1950 he was ready to seek national office. Although Italian Americans had served in the House of Representatives at least as early as 1887, when New York's Francis B. Spinola (1821-1892) began the first of his three terms, Pastore was the first Italian American to be elected senator. He remained in the senate from 1950 until his retirement in 1976. Pastore's victories, like La Guardia's, were based on his ability to appeal to Italians and non-Italians alike. As a result of their achievements, no city, state, or national office is beyond the reach of Italian politicians. 

Italian Americans have shared fully in the general prosperity that the nation has enjoyed since World War II. Many veterans used the G.I. Bill to finance college educations and take professional training; they obtained jobs in industry or started businesses of their own. A 1963-1964 study of occupational patterns among Italian Americans found that 48 percent of the respondents were employed in white-collar jobs and 52 percent in blue-collar jobs. In contrast, 26 percent of the fathers of the respondents held white-collar positions, 71 percent were in blue-collar jobs, and 3 percent were employed as farmers. Furthermore, Italians in working, class occupations had shifted from unskilled to semi skilled and skilled jobs. 

Movement out of the ethnic districts slowed during the 1930s because of the Depression, and during the 1940s because of wartime housing shortages, but by the 1950s the process had accelerated, and the formerly heavy concentration of Italians in immigrant neighborhoods has thinned out. Chicago's Near West Side had an Italian immigrant population of 12,955 in 1920; the same area contained 5,140 first-and second-generation Italians in 1960, and only 1,806 ten years later. The return migration from the suburbs of middle-and upper-income whites, especially young married couples, has played an important role in the breakup of some working-class Italian neighborhoods. In others the Italians have dispersed because of the influx of blacks, Puerto Ricans, and southern whites. Italians regarded these low-income newcomers with much the same apprehension that earlier residents had felt toward Italians; in the case of the blacks, however, prejudice has been tinged with envy and sometimes grudging respect for their effective use of political pressure to gain economic and other benefits. 

Political demands by Italian Americans significantly did not include a return to the days of free immigration. The acrimony aroused by the 1924 restrictive quotas was directed against the attitude that Italians were somehow less acceptable citizens than others, as implied by their small quota (3,845), rather than against restrictive measures per se. Even the demands for a larger quota dwindled as the years wore on and finally ended altogether with the enactment of the 1965 law, which gave all nations the same access, with priority to immediate relatives of American citizens and alien residents.