The Universal Exposition - Robert Viscusi*
Thirty-three years ago, I was just beginning to do research in Italian American literature. Visiting the library at the Center for Migration Studies in Staten Island, I came upon an enormous book, a guide to Italian American life, published in 1906. It was called Gli italiani negli Stati Uniti d’America, and it was produced on a scale that dwarfed all the other books by and about Italian immigrants I was finding that day.
The first half of the book was full of prose that I ignored, because my Italian was almost non-existent in those days. But the entire second half of the folio was filled with photos, and these fixed my attention. It was like touring the imaginations of my forebears. My grandfather, my godfather, and many friends of theirs were small-to-middling proprietors in and around New York City. These men lived to produce things. Even today, I can never think of them without those things all around them. My grandfather had a small machine shop and gave piecework jobs to all the housewives in the neighborhood. My godfather had a small “art-novelty” factory that baked liquid latex in plaster moulds to produce mannequins and other display items that he would drive around the city and deliver to his many clients in the advertising and window-dressing trades.
Such entrepreneurs were common in the Italian-American world of the 1940s and 50s. Back in 1906, many of their most successful antecedents had bought their own pages in Gli italiani negli Stati Uniti d’America, where they could see themselves in large portrait photographs, dressed as prosperous burghers, right next to photos of the plants, the shops, the machines, the furniture, the villas, the whatever-it-was that had made them important. Ever since the day I first turned the heavy pages of this book, it has remained for me a reminder that, for many of these new Americans, as Matthew Frye Jacobson has put it, “immigration was a capitalist strategy.”1 Some Italian American novelists, Helen Barolini and Mario Puzo more than most, have understood this fact of life and have made the family romance of capitalism the armature of their fictions. but very few have given the flavor, even the aroma, of small production the way these photographs did — at least for me that day, who had a memory bank on this topic ready to stir at the slightest suggestion.
Thus, when I recognized this elephant folio looming among the smaller, and often ephemeral, publications in James Periconi’s stunning collection, in 2011, I thought, “Yes, I’d like to write about this!” And I have done so. But something had happened to me in the past thirty-three years that had changed the book for me and would consequently alter the essay I was about to write. I had learned to speak, read, and write in Italian. In the process, I had spent a good deal of time in Italy and among Italian speakers in the United States as well. I had learned to think like an Italian. So this huge book, when I returned to it, had become larger yet. The Italian agenda that produced it, to which I will turn in a moment, was suddenly vivid to me. And the capitalist imaginaries of my grandfather, my godfather, and their predecessors in the Italian colony of New York looked very different when seen against that background.
It turns out that this work was produced for the universal exposition in Milan in 1906, for a pavilion called "Italians Abroad.” The Milanese view of the subject startled me when I first began to look at it, but the more I thought about it, the more interesting it became.
And that is the theme of this essay. The books in the Periconi collection all have the organic character of an onion or a peach pit. Substantial, firm, complete, but containing at the center a vacant space. Between the words Italian and American, some emptiness subsists. What is this void? Does it represent the language barrier, formidable in 1906, the year I want to talk about? Does it represent the cold Atlantic, more fearsome then than now? Does it speak for the social no-man’s-land between the Italian immigrants and the American natives in the United States?
All of the above, to be sure. indeed, the space between two such words as Italian and American in the naming of a sub-national minority is the theme of a very large literature. Psychology, sociology, political science, international economics, immigration history, ecclesiastical geography, intergroup dynamics, women’s studies, and criminal conspiracy are only a few of the discursive arenas that have contributed to the study of compound identities in sub-national minority studies.
And each one of these fields requires its own theoretical dynamics of desire, disconnection, and displacement. Gli italiani negli Stati Uniti d’America occupies a place in this entire geography of dissatisfaction. It was published in the year of the exposition in Milan. Its editors chose as a publisher one who knew how to get Italian Americans to subscribe to a book about themselves and their enterprises. The Italian American Directory Company had just issued, in 1905, a more conventional listing of the names and addresses of a great number of Italian Americans who were prospering in major cities in the U.S. (A copy of this work is also in the Periconi collection.) Gli italiani negli Stati Uniti d’America was supported by similar subscriptions, but it had a more ambitious cultural goal: indeed, we may say that it was a dossier of the petit-bourgeois reality that filled the vacant space in the expression Italian American.
That may seem a fanciful description. It is not. Spectacle, like any complex construction, requires parts that remain invisible. The spectacular event to which the book specifically belonged was that same universal exposition of Milan in 1906. This book was produced to serve the occasion. This exposition, the first international fair in Italian history, was staged to mark the completion of the Simplon tunnel that connected Switzerland with Domodossola in Italy. On average, 3,000 workers per day, mostly poor Italians, had worked on this tunnel for seven and a half years. At 20 miles, the completed passage was, and for seventy-six years would remain, the longest tunnel in the world. A marvel of engineering, as well: trains traveled through it on electric power. Transport, suitably enough, was a major theme at this Milan expo: visitors could fly in balloons and ride on an elevated railroad; there were airplanes, and the entrance to the exposition in Parco Sempione (Italian for Simplon) was built to replicate the Domodossola entrance to the great tunnel.
The Milan exposition, in retrospect, appears a preparation for the Futurist Manifesto of 1909, with its praise of speed, flight, electricity, and machines. Surrounding the celebration of the announced theme in 1906 was the universal exposition’s development of what had by now come to be the given theme of any such exposition in those days: the naturalization of imperial ambitions.2
Beginning with London’s Crystal Palace in 1851, universal expositions had become the favored means of drawing large portions of a population into a single place, and of their accustoming visitors to the notion that the growth of sovereignty and of captive markets belonged to an ordinary, inevitable, ideologically taken-for-granted form of “progress.” Such expositions moved forward on a double track: first, they continually celebrated “progress” (each such exposition featured new industrial innovations that were making industrial and territorial expansion plausible); and, second, they represented the peoples of the world as chapters in a vast catalogue of the dominant and the dominated.
Gli italiani negli Stati Uniti d’America reflects the second part of this agenda. In doing so it presents the Italians of the United States in a double optic, first showing them as seen in the eyes of the Italian bankers, bureaucrats, and politicians who had the most practical use for information about their enterprise, and then displaying these colonials as they themselves wished to appear to those same metropolitan worthies. The effect is both dramatic and intimate.
The late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu divides the social world into the dominant and the dominated. Then he divides the dominant half into its own dominant and dominated parts.3 This upper half and its inner chambers are what we see here. We look through the eyes of Italy’s global captains in the first half of this book, and then, familiar with that point of view, we look at the local captains of the United States Italian colony. The relations between these two parts are complex. but, after I had read the first part of the book, now that I was able to do so, I realized that the second part would never look the same to me again: its heroes faded against the background of their more dominant metropolitan cousins. The more these Italian Americans resembled the economically dominant Milanesi, the less acceptable, indeed, the less visible, they became.
We at least can examine these photos. It is not clear how many people ever did so at the fair in Milan. The bankers and economists in Italy were interested in Italian America as a market for Italian exports, and they were attentive to its labor power and to its economic advance. From the preface: "The authorizing committee of the Milan exposition for the exhibit “The Italians Abroad,” by the circular of 20 June 1905 sent to Presidents of Chambers of Commerce established in our most important centers of emigration, announced a collective graphic exposition, in a publication on the model of the volume The Italians in the Argentine Republic (Buenos Aires, 1898), one that would give a picture of the conditions and possibilities of the individual colonies, showing how much Italian labor can produce in them."4
“Individual colonies,” never “individual colonials.” The point of view is relentlessly ministerial, metropolitan, and cosmopolitan. The visitor comes away interested in the worldwide network of Italian technical ambitions, trade relationships, artistic influences, its capacities for labor and artisanal production. The volume, following the model and the idea of the Authorizing Committee, should consist of two parts: the first, general, composed of monographs which treat the various questions that might pertain to Italian emigration and the development of commerce and of exchanges of every sort between the Mother-Fatherland and the individual regions; the second, composed of monographs that would present the most eminent persons and the most important companies and industrial, commercial, and agricultural firms of our communities. “The most eminent persons and the most important companies and industrial, commercial, and agricultural firms of our communities.”
This is no doubt how the worthies in those photographs would sometimes see themselves, at one with their firms and their eminences. It also hints that these prominenti, since they had in effect paid for the volume, would form its one secure readership. The key to understanding this work is that it represents and reinforces the imperial/colonial view of the “Italians of the United States of America.” Those American Italians inhabit a vacancy in the prospect. They are interesting to businessmen, but only as trading partners — not for any other reason, and not especially to anyone else. “The Italians of the United States” did not excite much attention, though people admired the pavilion “Italians Abroad” where it shared space with other global Italians.
A reading of the volume suggests why people did not find its subjects enormously exciting. The essays in the first part include a fairly complete, and remarkably sober, survey of the ways that Italians were prospering in the United States. Under the rubric of “immigration,” Luigi Aldrovandi gives a mixed picture of the flow of population, always balancing the pluses and minuses not really of immigration, but rather of emigration: very concerned about what this movement means to Italy, whether it can be judged a net gain or loss. The prominent journalist Adolfo Rossi provides a general survey of where Italian laborers (“la mano d’opera italiana”) were working in the United States: in large cities; on railroads, farms, and orchards; in coal mines — expressing the opinion that it would be better were the Italians settling in a wider range of situations.
Guido Rossati provides an amply detailed list of notable agricultural settlements and initiatives undertaken by Italians from New Jersey to California. There are surveys of maritime trade between the U.S. and Italy, of the commerce in Italian value-added exports such as silks, fruits, foods, mineral and chemical products, manufactures, works of art, and automobiles, as well as a brief survey of American exports to Italy.
The most vivid passages in this part of the volume are the Homeric catalogs of what Italians were doing in the United States. They built businesses in macaroni, rag-picking, plaster figures, furniture, artificial flowers, flags, uniforms, gloves, hats, carts and wagons, sweets (ice creams and candies); printing, lithography, and binding; cigars and tobaccos; and musical instruments. The roll-call of artisans is possibly more suggestive to us than it would have been to citizens of a metropolis in early-twentieth-century Italy, where this Shakespearean cast was a normal assortment: shoemakers, weavers, stonecutters, bricklayers, bread bakers, pasta makers, waiters, cooks, pastry cooks, carpenters, cabinetmakers, decorators, figurine makers, mosaicists, typographers, printers, florists, colorists, plasterers, house painters, hat makers, glove makers, instrument makers, mechanics, pressers of shirts.
All this might have excited the interest of prospective contractors, who were thinking of doing business in New York or Boston, and needed to know what artisanal resources were available. The chances are, again, that very few people ever reviewed this material.
There are comprehensive discussions of Italo-Americans in politics, of churches and parochial schools, of settlement houses in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Antonio Stella provides a very detailed report on the hygienic conditions under which Italians were living in North America. His essay is grimly subtitled, “The Deterioration of the Race.” There are studies of the teaching of Italian in American colleges and universities and in the Italian schools of New York, studies of the instruction in New York City’s public schools.
There is a very brief survey of the colonial press, and a similarly cursory survey of artists and professionals, and, surely of interest to prospective investors and emigrants, an ample conspectus of Italian American real estate holdings.
This leads the way to the most specifically colonialist part of the book. First, Bernardino Ciambelli, the “Homer of the migration," several of whose works are in the collection, offers an essay entitled “Columbus Day,” about the national effort, begun and consummated in Pueblo, Colorado, to have October 12 declared a national holiday. Ciambelli specifically links this campaign to the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. Next comes an ethnographic essay on the usages, customs, and feasts of the Italians in the United States. An essay on sport in the Italian colonies. Two essays by the noted scholar Amy Bernardy on the Italians of Boston, and surveys on the “colonies” of Rhode Island and of Buffalo.
This massive folio is itself an exhibit. The first part of it might belong to a library of reports, fit company for the Bollettino dell’Emigrazione, published every year from 1901 through 1927 by the Commissariato Generale dell’Emigrazione of the Ministero degli Affari Esteri. Only in the later essays — Ciambelli on Columbus Day, Amy Bernardy on the North End of Boston — does the tone reflect something of the intense social passions of life in the Italian colonies of the United States. Compared, however, with the steady outpouring of radical literature in the colonies that constitutes a significant part of this collection, this is still polite writing, very respectful of the established order of things.
Good manners, even to excess, provide the overwhelming tone of the second half of the book. The prominenti who advertise themselves here clearly want to be regarded as the equals of the people who are going to be looking at their photographs in Milan. The book’s introduction frankly ex- plains that the expenses of publication were borne by selling space for these ambitious exercises in personal display. These many pages are something like a Who’s Who of the colonies: one meets the people who owned the furniture stores and bakeries; the people who supplied American drawing rooms with ornamental plaster and furnished them with occasional tables in parti-colored marble, standing on legs carved in the shapes of gryphons.
One grows tired of the doctors and big-bellied eminences in every variety who have themselves photographed wearing ornamental moustaches as big as walrus tusks. They advertise their dwellings, edifices that seem to look out at passersby from corner plots in small cities and practically cry out, “Internist!” “Undertaker!” While such portraits of mansions and artists’ studios were important to their proprietors, their competitors, and their clients, and were even putatively useful to the Milanese merchants who may have used the book to seek out business contacts in the United States, these photographs did not make much of an impression in Milan, not even inside the pavilion of “Italians Abroad.”
In a recent essay, Patrizia Audenino conducts a thorough analysis of that pavilion, and reports that some people complained that it “was not a success,” adding that the only part of it the public really liked was the Eritrean exhibit, where there were free peanuts they could grasp. There was also a presentation of a wide selection of Eritrean goods aimed at lucrative trade with Italy. The pavilion’s jury gave the Eritrean exhibit its grand prize.5 Indeed, as she suggests elsewhere, the only exhibit based upon such books as this (there were volumes submitted by other colonies as well) was the quiet display of the books themselves, sitting demurely in showcases or lying on tables for visitors to peruse, it being tacitly understood that it made sense to leave the contents as taken for granted, but unseen. It apparently did not even interest the Milanesi to dramatize in some way, let’s say, the dozens of crafts that were practiced in Italian America.
Nowadays, we would love to see those pastry cooks and cabinetmakers and mosaicists at work. In Milan in 1906, no doubt, one could see such things at the corner of any street. Even in photographic reminiscences of the universal exposition, one encounters many photo essays based upon the Eritrean exhibit in “Italians Abroad.” The Eritreans made for a popular attraction, practically a sideshow of racist exoticism, thick with high grass and enlivened by plenty of witch doctors, half-naked dancers, big cats, masks and spears and drums.
While it was easy to see that the Comitato Ordinatore had sober economic and social concerns in mind when it sent out its request to Chambers of Commerce in Italian colonies asking for reports on public hygiene and the state of education in the colonies, it is also easy to see that the people who promoted and actually frequented the fair were neither convinced by, nor even aware of, any spectacle that might have accompanied those reports: earnest portrait-photos of the leading attorneys and surgeons in small Pennsylvania cities did not excite attention or comment, nor did they in all probability appear outside the covers of their tomb-like albums. These undramatic colonials with their Savoyard moustaches in effect occupied a structurally vital vacancy at the heart of the system of international trade, a system that was and would continue to be a main support of Italy’s rising economic status among nations.
But it is clear that the worldly Milanesi who frequented the fair were not impressed by the diplomas and suburban machine shops of successful Italians in Yonkers and Newark. These well-to-do emigrants — who could not escape being colonials, who could not help appearing to belong to the dominated half of the dominant class — clearly put all their efforts into looking like their superiors, who, alas, were not much interested in that spectacle. Italians in Italy preferred a more dramatic exhibition of their imperial victories and prospects. They preferred the equivocal glories of what were called “state colonies” (Eritrea, Benadir) to the less-splendid assets of what were called “free colonies” (as Audenino points out, these were the innumerable places in the world where the Italian exodus actually settled and, more often than not, made good).6
The dominant class of Italians in 1906 did not, perhaps, foresee what an international victory it would be for Italy when the children of Italian emigrants became high school principals and successful architects in the United States. Despite Italy’s already disastrous history in Africa, most Italians would go on for a long while thinking that their nation’s real imperial future was destined to fulfill itself among the exotics in the phenotypically subaltern settlements south of the Sahara.
It is perhaps the case that the dominant parts of dominant classes have little taste for the dominated parts of those same dominant classes — their lesser cousins, as it were — but instead prefer the truly dominated: the illiterate, the distant, the strangely dressed, the racially excluded, the stylistically exciting. The Milan expo took place in the decade known for the vogue of African masks and drums in Paris and Milan.
Spectacle is a convenient way of organizing a panoramic view of a complex reality. but it has this weakness, that it may appeal more to the viewers’ narcissism than to their realism. With the superior wisdom of another century to reflect upon events, we might conclude that upper-class Italians gradually and reluctantly would come to see that their real international respectability would owe more to their successes selling macaroni in the Bronx and high-end leather goods in Manhattan than it would ever gain from their adventures subjecting darker peoples and then photographing them alongside giraffes and zebras. It is clear to us now that the prosperity of Italians had a firmer basis when it rested upon trade and cooperation with Italians Abroad in free colonies than it ever could in state colonies, where it rested upon forceful oppression of peoples whom the Italians might find picturesque but could scarcely begin to understand.
The great economist Luigi Einaudi, later the second president of the Italian Republic, as early as 1900 rejected ideas of “expanding Italy through military conquest rather than through the peaceful expansion of trade and commerce,” and he accused militarist colonialists of “insane visions of colonial adventures in sterile places that would bring forth nothing but blood and shame.”7
Oddly, though, when Italy’s would-be African empire disappeared after the Second World War, the steady and reliable Italians Abroad still did not come into the spotlight. instead, Italy’s worldwide Mafia rose to prominence as a theme for film and other forms of popular fantasy.8 The appeal of the exotic and the shameful, it may be, is so central to the dynamics of international spectacle, that the dominant classes of Italians and of Americans as well, have persisted in disavowing the reality of boring Italian Americans who wear three-piece suits and live in prosperous respectability. in their places, the Italian American demiurges of the international spectacle have come to occupy a permanent pavilion in the imaginary universal exposition. There, they populate a violent conspiracy, stylish, dramatic, and illicit forever. Who wants accountants when you can have consiglieri?
Are the earnest Italian Americans forgotten? Are the memories of their colonial achievements lost in a cold void where no sympathy can ever find them? Not for me. And i had hoped to write an essay that could share that sympathy with others. but I have not managed it. I have kept seeing Milan around the edges of the photographs. I could not take my eyes off that gleam of trams and turbines and Leonardo’s engines of war. I could hear the profits from abroad, money Italians had earned in the copper mines of Colorado and in the twenty-mile electrified tunnel of Simplon, flowing like underground rivers into the foundations of this city’s monumental banks. And when I look at Gli italiani negli Stati Uniti d’America, I see those moustachioed grandfathers and godfathers under the pitiless gaze of Milan’s Futurists and, indeed, of all its fashion police. The old Italian Americans are wearing double-breasted suits that fade in the glamour of this city, its mirrors, its glittering mastery of style. I want to speak of their achievements, their dreams, but I cannot get them back into New York City and Cleveland, where they were somebodies, cannot separate them from Milan, from the minor, very minor, but apparently permanent places it has assigned them in the Universal Exposition.
*Reprinted from Strangers in a Strange Land · Italian-Language American Imprints: The Periconi Collection (omeka.net)
Notes
1. I heard him say this at a seminar at Brooklyn College on the work of Oscar Handlin. Jacobson has told me he was paraphrasing John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987).
2. See Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), pp. 52–112.
3. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard U. P., 1984) uses this geometry of relative power positions to explain the social forces that produce and predict the judgments of taste.
4. Luigi Aldrovandi, “Prefazione,” Gli italiani negli Stati Uniti d’America (New York: Italian American Directory Co., 1906), p. iii [translation mine].
5. Patrizia Audenino, “La mostra degli italiani all’estero: prove di nazionalismo,” in P. Audenino et al., eds., Milano e l’Esposizione internationale del 1906: La rappresentazione della modernità (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2008), p.119.
6. Patrizia Audenino, “Il lavoro degli italiani all’estero nell’esposizione internazionale di Torino del 1911,” in Archivio storico dell’emigrazione italiana (Asei), numero monografico, Il Cinquantenario dell’unità d’Italia (1911) e L’emigrazione, edited by Giovanni Pizzorusso, vol. 7 (2011), pp. 11–17.
7. Cited by Audenino, “Il lavoro degli italiani all’estero.”
8. Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (London: Verso, 1998), p. 67, introduces the idea of the necessity of the Mafia to the international spectacle.
Robert Viscusi (1940-2020) was for many years the Executive Officer of the Wolfe institute for the humanities and Professor of English at Brooklyn College. He was the editor-in-chief of the translation of Francesco Durante’s collection of writings of virtually all of the authors in the collection, Italoamericana: History and Literature of the Italians in the United States: 1880–1943 (Fordham U. Press, 2014). A poet, he was also the author of Ellis Island, published by Bordighera Press in 2012. The author thanked Patrizia Audenino, Ombretta Diaferia, and Linda Lentini for their assistance in preparing this essay.