Table Of ContentItalian and Italian American Studies
Stanislao G. Pugliese
Hofstra University
Series Editor
This publishing initiative seeks to bring the latest scholarship in Italian and Italian Ameri-
can history, literature, cinema, and cultural studies to a large audience of specialists, general
readers, and students. I&IAS will feature works on modern Italy (Renaissance to the present)
and Italian American culture and society by established scholars as well as new voices in the
academy. This endeavor will help to shape the evolving fields of Italian and Italian American
Studies by reemphasizing the connection between the two. The following editorial board con-
sists of esteemed senior scholars who act as advisors to the series editor.
REBECCA WEST JOSEPHINE GATTUSO HENDIN
University of Chicago New York University
FRED GARDAPHÉ PHILIP V. CANNISTRARO†
Queens College, CUNY Queens College and the Graduate School, CUNY
ALESSANDRO PORTELLI
Università di Roma “La Sapienza”
Queer Italia: Same- Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film
edited by Gary P. Cestaro, July 2004
Frank Sinatra: History, Identity, and Italian American Culture
edited by Stanislao G. Pugliese, October 2004
The Legacy of Primo Levi
edited by Stanislao G. Pugliese, December 2004
Italian Colonialism
edited by Ruth Ben- Ghiat and Mia Fuller, July 2005
Mussolini’s Rome: Rebuilding the Eternal City
Borden W. Painter Jr., July 2005
Representing Sacco and Vanzetti
edited by Jerome H. Delamater and Mary Anne Trasciatti, September 2005
Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel
Nunzio Pernicone, October 2005
Italy in the Age of Pinocchio: Children and Danger in the Liberal Era
Carl Ipsen, April 2006
The Empire of Stereotypes: Germaine de Staël and the Idea of Italy
Robert Casillo, May 2006
Race and the Nation in Liberal Italy, 1861– 1911: Meridionalism, Empire, and Diaspora
Aliza S. Wong, October 2006
Women in Italy, 1945– 1960: An Interdisciplinary Study
edited by Penelope Morris, October 2006
Debating Divorce in Italy: Marriage and the Making of Modern Italians, 1860– 1974
Mark Seymour, December 2006
A New Guide to Italian Cinema
Carlo Celli and Marga Cottino- Jones, January 2007
Human Nature in Rural Tuscany: An Early Modern History
Gregory Hanlon, March 2007
The Missing Italian Nuremberg: Cultural Amnesia and Postwar Politics
Michele Battini, September 2007
Assassinations and Murder in Modern Italy: Transformations in Society and Culture
edited by Stephen Gundle and Lucia Rinaldi, October 2007
Piero Gobetti and the Politics of Liberal Revolution
James Martin, December 2008
Primo Levi and Humanism after Auschwitz: Posthumanist Reflections
Jonathan Druker, June 2009
Oral History, Oral Culture, and Italian Americans
edited by Luisa Del Giudice, November 2009
Italy’s Divided Memory
John Foot, January 2010
Women, Desire, and Power in Italian Cinema
Marga Cottino- Jones, March 2010
The Failure of Italian Nationhood: The Geopolitics of a Troubled Identity
Manlio Graziano, September 2010
Women and the Great War: Femininity under Fire in Italy
Allison Scardino Belzer, October 2010
Italian Jews from Emancipation to the Racial Laws
Cristina M. Bettin, November 2010
Anti-I talianism: Essays on a Prejudice
edited by William J. Connell and Fred Gardaphé, January 2011
Murder and Media in the New Rome: The Fadda Affair
Thomas Simpson, January 2011
Mohamed Fekini and the Fight to Free Libya
Angelo Del Boca; translated by Antony Shugaar, January 2011
City and Nation in the Italian Unification: The National Festivals of Dante Alighieri
Mahnaz Yousefzadeh, April 2011
The Legacy of the Italian Resistance
Philip Cooke, May 2011
New Reflections on Primo Levi: Before and After Auschwitz
edited by Risa Sodi and Millicent Marcus, July 2011
Italy on the Pacific: San Francisco’s Italian Americans
Sebastian Fichera, December 2011
Italy on the Pacific
San Francisco’s Italian Americans
Sebastian Fichera
italy on the pacific
Copyright © Sebastian Fichera, 2011.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-33878-4
All rights reserved.
First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United
States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,
NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe, and the rest of the
world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers
Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-34188-7 ISBN 978-1-137-00206-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137002068
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the
Library of Congress
Fichera, Sebastian, 1947–
Italy on the Pacific : San Francisco’s Italian Americans / Sebastian Fichera.
p. cm.—(Italian & Italian American studies series)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Italian Americans—California—San Francisco—History.
2. Immigrants—California—San Francisco—History. 3. San Francisco
(Calif.)—History. I. Title.
F869.S39I826 2011
979.4’6100451—dc23 2011019613
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Scribe Inc.
First edition: December 2011
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 Pioneers: Kindling an Italian Group Consciousness
in Early San Francisco 11
2 The Emigration: Creating Italy without Italians 31
3 The Immigrant Economy: Making Assets out of Liabilities 51
4 Their Signature Calling:
Italian American Winemaking Comes of Age 79
5 North Beach: A Community- Building Thrust
Achieves Critical Mass 101
6 Day of Reckoning: Fasces versus Stars and Stripes
and the Road to World War II 129
7 Long Journey Home: Opening out into the Mainstream 155
Epilogue: Creating Americans 177
Notes 189
Bibliography 205
Index 217
Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form
associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies,
in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kids, religious,
moral, serious, futile, general and restrictive, enormous and diminutive. The
Americans make associations to give entertainment, to found seminaries,
to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries
to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools.
(Tocqueville 1945, 114)
It is unfortunate that so many who have escaped from the bondage and tra-
vail of European labor, and become citizens of the United States, should so
soon forget the wages, food, and condition from which they sought release
through emigration, and show such small appreciation of their new and
superior surroundings and condition as to seek, by strikes and organized
violence— European methods of remedying European evils, and totally for-
eign to and subversive of republican institutions—t o introduce strife, where
none of old existed, between employers and employees . . . It is equally deplor-
able . . . that so many native-b orn Americans should accept the teachings of
the very worst school of Europe by countenancing or abetting strikes and
communism. (Neufeld 1961, 162–63, quoting Secretary of State William M.
Evarts in 1878)
Will Rome Romanize the Vandals or will the Vandals Vandalize Rome?
Acknowledgments
A number of people have assisted in completing this work, and remember-
ing them all is a labor of love. My book began as a doctoral dissertation in
history at the University of California, Los Angeles, a lifetime ago under
the mentorship of Professor Theodore Saloutos. Since his passing before
I had finished left me in limbo, however, most welcome was professors’
Norris Hundley and the late Eric Monkkonen’s agreement to step into the
breach. They made it possible for the dissertation to be born under their
care. Though she never saw it, I cannot help but mention that Sharon V.
Salinger also had a hand in bringing this dissertation to life. In our years on
the UCLA campus together, she had a way of parachuting onto the scene at
critical points to help keep my graduate studies afloat. Perhaps it was just a
coincidence that she was able to do this as often as she did, but to me it was
a definite case of celestial intervention.
In San Francisco, the American Italian Historical Association provided
me with a group of kindred spirits sharing my love of this kind of history.
Among them was the late Rose Scherini, who read and advised me on three
of my chapters; Deanna P. Gumina, who did the pioneering work on the
topic and whose bibliography got me started off on the right foot; Vin-
cenza Scarpaci, Phylis Martinelli, Phil Montesano, and Joe Giovinco have
also over the years done work that I have found extremely useful. Professor
Andrew Rolle encouraged me at various times and kindly read an early
draft of Chapter 4.
A Shell Oil Fellowship financed the better part of a trip to Rome, where
the late Gianfausto Rosoli of the Centro Studi Emigrazione pointed my
studies in the right direction. In Arbizzano, near Verona, my stay at Anna
and Franco Amenta’s house enabled me to forget research and concentrate
on the good life in Verona for a brief but shining moment. Back in the days
when people still used typewriters and my Olivetti expired of old age, my
late sister and brother, Rose F. McAloon and Paul McAloon, rescued me
from this predicament by presenting me with their own new Studio 44.
More recently, Sarah Schott compiled the index for me in a cost-effective
and timely fashion.
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In the person of Andrew M. Canepa and the late Professor Rudolph J.
Vecoli, celestial interventions became a regular occurrence in my post-
UCLA life as well. At a time when I could certainly use the moral support,
Rudy reached out to me from the University of Minnesota and encouraged
me to develop the dissertation into the book form it has taken today. Unbe-
knownst to me at the time, he was frequently busy opening doors for me
and everything I have published up to now has doubtless benefited from
his behind- the- scenes help. Andrew M. Canepa, who suggested doing this
topic in the first place, has been feeding me source material for the better
part of 30 years in hopes of seeing this book come to fruition. Every histo-
rian should have silent partners like Andy and Rudy to sustain him in his
research and writing.
Introduction
Who but a handful of Italian- speaking old- timers would want to read
about the Italians of San Francisco? Although the immediate topic,
narrowly defined, may be of limited interest, from the early Puritans down
to the Hispanic Americans of our day, immigrant populations have played
a key and often controversial role in U.S. history. Such questions as “under
what circumstances do newcomers become part of the mainstream?” or
“how does a country avoid falling prey to an immigrant- style Trojan horse?”
have been of concern to people since time immemorial. Indeed, what soci-
ety in the world has not been forced to deal with some sort of emigration
or immigration issues of its own nowadays? The present work on San Fran-
cisco’s Italian Americans has been written as a microcosm of this universal
phenomenon, making sure to keep these larger questions in mind.
Up until World War II, Italians were among the least skilled and most
exploited of white immigrant populations in the United States. As seen
from studies of such cities as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago,
theirs was a story of slums, poverty, and social dysfunction. Yet the part of
the group settling west of the Mississippi had long been absent from this
picture. In his pioneer work The Immigrant Upraised (1968), Andrew Rolle
rejected the notion that a narrative coming largely out of the East Coast
would have much to say about the group’s experience in the West. On the
Pacific side of the Mississippi, he contended, Italian immigrants remained
mostly free of the troubles besetting their cousins in the East. The West—
where distance and the unsettled condition of the land screened out the
timid but drew in the hardy—w as still a place of opportunity as compared
with the rest.
Inspired by a somewhat romanticized view of life in that region, The
Immigrant Upraised drew a rather rough sketch of the group’s experience
there and left it to others to fill in the details. One who found Rolle’s work
entirely convincing was Kenneth Scambray, who, in his Queen Calafia’s Par-
adise (2007), seized on that view as the basis of a critique of Italian American
fictional characters to be found in novels. Scambray’s point was that such
characters were portrayed as having escaped the stifling atmosphere of the
East’s immigrant ghettos and entered a freer and more opportunity-l aden
