Tony: On Being Italian
- vinvoyager
- Aug 18
- 3 min read
Updated: Aug 19
In Blood and Soil, it might seem implausible that Tony Marsala’s Italian identity makes him an outsider. Yet at college and in the mountains of Appalachia, he is seen, in Jake’s words, as “the wrong kind of white.” In the time of the novel, Italians were still on their century-long journey from pariahs to full parity as Americans.
In 21st-century America, it’s not unusual to call white people European Americans, as if their differences of heritage and history are as inconsequential as having blue or brown eyes. But in reality, millions of Italian immigrants like Tony’s family were vilified by other European Americans from the dawn of the Great Wave of Immigration in the 1870s.
Consider this fact: From the 1870s to 1940, Italians were second only to Blacks in numbers lynched in America, including eleven Italians murdered in 1870 New Orleans, still the largest mass lynching in U.S. history.
When Tony’s grandparents and their real-life compatriots arrived at Ellis Island at the turn of the 20th century, many among America’s supermajority of Northern Europeans viewed them as peasants, Papists, and bandits. They were shut out of mainstream American life. Italians like Tony’s grandparents would have confronted notices declaring, “No Negroes or Italians.”
While most of these immigrants worked hard and obeyed the law, others, radicalized by the conditions they’d fled, committed bombings and assassinations against symbols of American power and authority. These Italian anarchists were blamed for the Wall Street bombing of 1920, then the worst act of terrorism in US history.
When many of the first American-born Italians, like Tony’s dad, were growing up in 1920s New York, pseudo-scientists and the press popularized the notion that Italians were a separate race, inherently inferior to Anglo-Americans. Those inclined to agree only had to look at the headlines to confirm these eugenicists’ claims.
From the Roaring Twenties to the Great Depression, bootlegging and gang warfare exploded, personified by Al Capone. The trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti stayed in the public eye for 7 years, and the 1933 attempt to assassinate FDR by the anarchist Giuseppe Zangara kept the trope of the lawless Italian alive. These sensational events cemented the dark narrative that people like the Marsalas were innately degraded and violent.
The ground had been laid for the paranoia and xenophobia that followed Pearl Harbor, when all 600,000 Italian noncitizen US residents were deemed enemy aliens, and lost their Constitutional rights. The FBI raided and confiscated property, homes, and businesses, and interned hundreds of Italians in detention camps, alongside Japanese and Germans.
By the 1950s, the families of Italian teenagers like Tony began moving out of their city ethnic bubbles, to find that they were not always welcomed, and sometimes violently targeted, in other white communities, as Tony’s family experienced at Lake Mennepequa.
In the late fifties, a decade of extreme Cold War intolerance and conformity, Tony and his Italian peers might have felt like red-blooded Americans, but their heritage was still rare in the halls of privilege and power—including at elite colleges like Tony’s, where Italians were subjected by their Wasp peers to the same ethnic slurs and stereotypes that had greeted their own forebears half a century before them.
It would take a generation beyond Tony’s, and the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and 70s, before Italian Americans would take their place among the privileged and powerful. Tony Marsala, who’d be 85 now, would find to his chagrin that in the 65 years since he met Jake in Blood and Soil, America’s fascination with the Italian American mobster has remained unabated, from Don Corleone to Tony Montana and Tony Soprano.
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