Son of Italy: Immigrant Ambitions and American Literature

The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. ... Here is not merely a nation but a seeming nation of nations. ... The American poets are to enclose old and new for America is the race of races. (Whitman iii, iv, v) Walt Whitman's expansionist definition of the United States as the "greatest poem" and "a nation of nations" and "the race of races" has the air of radical democracy that is also radically imperialist (Simpson 177-96). American literature as an object of desire became as grandiose as everything else to which the national label could be affixed: the army, the navy, the dollar. As an institution, this literature has long confronted immigrants with the same complacent hugeness as the steps of the Capitol or the concourse at Grand Central Station. This literature is not only transcontinental but it is omnivorous. It will eat your nationality and digest your race. This is its normal mode of operation. Many of its most frequently-cited texts are monuments to its gigantic appetites: The Pioneers, Moby-Dick, and especially "Song of Myself": "I am large ... I contain multitudes" (Whitman 55). (1) United States culture reached the exasperated apogee of its imperialist phase at the turn of the twentieth century with the triumph of Admiral Dewey in Manila Bay (1898) and the consequent destruction of the Spanish Empire. America's Great White Fleet (1907-09) took dominion on the Spanish Main. It was during this moment of imperial glory, when the very seas became American, that Europeans in unprecedented numbers were crossing the Atlantic to work in the United States. Those who came from Italy more often than not had the firm intention of returning, but many ended by remaining. Those who did settle in the United States needed to confront, and to deal with, the staggering disequilibrium between this political Leviathan and themselves. They might, as many did, simply retreat into associations and communities of an intensely local character, composed mostly of persons who had come from their own home towns or regions in Italy. This meant refraining from most kinds of civic life, and it certainly meant refraining from anglophone American literature. Another option, more promising to anyone needing to confront the national agenda of the United States, was first to begin the long process of acquiring an Italian national identity, something most immigrants had conspicuously lacked when leaving their native land. Italy had no Whitman of its own, but it too was "a nation of nations" and "a race of races." After the close of the Risorgimento in the 1860s, successive governments in Rome worked to find ways of achieving a sense of national unity and purpose. War and empire, to some Italian leaders, seemed the best roads to follow. Prime Minister Francesco Crispi believed in these methods, and he designed Italy's invasion of Africa in 1894 with this kind of nation-building purpose (Duggan 711). Italy's miserable defeat that year in the battle of Adua failed this aim and indeed intensified the felt need for signs and institutions that would embody an expanding Italian nation. At the same time, every year hundreds of thousands of Italian poor were climbing into ships and leaving Italy forever, or at least for a very long time. When they left, they were far more likely to think of themselves as carrying, along with their Italian passports, an identity belonging to some sovereignty older, and for them much more real, than the new nation. They were Neapolitans or Sicilians. They were Romans or Abruzzesi. They were often illiterates with no knowledge whatever of the imperial Italian catechism: "My mother never heard of Michelangelo; the great deeds of the Caesars had not yet reached her ears. She never heard the great music of her native land. She could not sign her name" (Puzo, Godfather Papers 25). Many of the immigrants were no better prepared than Mario Puzo's mother to think of themselves as Italians in any instrumental sense. …