giorgio bertellini; ducedivo - masculinity, racial identity, and politics among italian americans in 1920 new york city.pdf - Emigranci - MKTK

Journal of Urban History

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Duce/Divo: Masculinity, Racial Identity, and Politics among Italian Americans in 1920s New York City

Giorgio Bertellini

Journal of Urban History

2005; 31; 685

DOI: 10.1177/0096144205275981

http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/31/5/685

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ARTICLE

10.1177/0096144205275981

JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / July 2005

Bertellini / DUCE/DIVO

DUCE/DIVO

Masculinity, Racial Identity, and Politics

among Italian Americans in 1920s New York City

GIORGIO BERTELLINI

University of Michigan

This article compares the politics and masculinity of two Italian men—political leader Benito Mussolini and

immigrant film star Rodolfo Valentino—who in the early 1920s arguably became the first important media

“stars” for New York’s growing Italian American population. Rather than mere icons of a predetermined and

“given” Italianness, the two men’s simultaneous popularity, representing such differing political beliefs and

embodying such starkly different masculine ideals, points to the complexity of the “Americanization” of ur-

ban Italian Americans in the 1920s. Mussolini’s new, heroic manhood offered immigrants an opportunity to

celebrate stereotypically male and American values in a self-consciously Italian form. Despite the totalitari-

anism and racism of the Fascist regime, the Duce’s iconic modernity contributed to his depoliticization.

Likewise, Valentino’s exotic, sophisticated, and explicitly vulnerable masculinity participated in the restruc-

turing of gender relationships in the United States. American and Italian American commentators were ap-

parently more nervous about the gender-bending and apolitical yet also vaguely anti-Fascist divo than they

were about the Fascist dictator.

Keywords: Valentino; Mussolini; film stardom; Italian Americans; masculinity

The most applauded men in the current world are Valentino and Mussolini. In

Rome we witnessed the Fascisti revolution and cheered for Mussolini and

Vittorio Emanuele. In London we witnessed Blood and Sand and cheered for

Valentino.

Herbert Howe, Photoplay , February 1923

Even though Mussolini had forbidden the showing of Valentino’s pictures in his

fatherland, there were plenty of Italian-Americans around to patronize his films.

Brad Steiger and Chaw Mank, Valentino:

An Intimate and Shocking Exposé (1966)

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This article is part of a larger study on the relationships between Italian Americans

and popular and political culture in 1920s New York City. I would like to thank the participants of Fascism,

Gender, and Sexuality Conference (Berkeley, CA, 2001) and the Urban History Association Conference

(Pittsburgh, PA, 2002) for their response, in particular Luisa Passerini, Claudio Fogu, Philip J. Ethington,

and Mary Odem. Special thanks to Barbara Spackman and Donna R. Gabaccia for inviting me to the confer-

ences, for their critical readings, and for their long-standing support of my work. I am also particularly

grateful to Gaylyn Studlar for generously making available to me her collection of Valentino images. Feed-

back from Franca Iacovetta, from E. Summerson Carr, and from my fellows at the Michigan Society of Fel-

lows at the University of Michigan greatly improved my argument and my prose. This is for Barbara

Spackman.

JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY, Vol. 31 No. 5, July 2005 685-726

DOI: 10.1177/0096144205275981

685

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686

JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / July 2005

Figure 1: Fascist Guards Posing outside Campbell’s Funeral Church

SOURCE: Il Grido della Stirpe (“The Roar of the Race”), August 28, 1926, 1.

That evening a group of Ital-

ian American Fascists set out to place an honor guard around the film star’s

flowered bier (see Figure 1). They gained access to the Funeral Church by

declaring that Mussolini in person had given such instructions—a claim that

was soon challenged. Italian American members of the Anti-Fascist League,

who claimed to know the thirty-one-year-old divo’s personal opposition to the

regime, tried to prevent the Black Shirts’ physical and ideological appropria-

tion of his body and fame.

A fight erupted. Eventually, Fascist representatives

were able to stand guard, in an official, military fashion, over the corpse of the

Italian actor, to lay a wreath at his side with the inscription “From Benito Mus-

solini,” and thus, to salute Valentino as one of them. At midnight, they were

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New York City, August 24, 1926. Outside Campbell’s Funeral Church,

between Broadway and Sixty-sixth Street, thirty thousand people tried all day

to have a chance to pay a last homage to the dead body of the popular film star

Rodolfo Valentino. On foot or horseback, the police charged into the crowd:

dozens of injured had to be brought to the nearby hospital. Official reports

noted that “the rioting was without precedent in New York, both in the num-

bers concerned and in the behavior of the crowd.”

Bertellini / DUCE/DIVO 687

Figure 2: Example of American Press Coverage of Valentino’s Conflicts with the Fascist

Government

SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle, July 16, 1926, 1.

asked to leave. As expected, the morning papers spread images of the startling

display.

Before Valentino’s death of peritonitis and septic endocarditis, Fascist and

anti-Fascist groups in the United States and particularly in Italy had showed

little interest in his fame, prestige, or body. At first, the divo Valentino and the

Duce Mussolini had peacefully coexisted. In the mid-1920s, however, they

came into conflict (see Figure 2). The clash had begun the year before

Valentino’s death, in 1925, with the news that the divo’s decision to acquire

American citizenship meant taking an oath that renounced his allegiance and

fidelity to Italy—not welcome news in Fascist Italy. Hailed as traitor, his films

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688

JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / July 2005

The same year, Valentino

sent a public letter to Mussolini explaining his intention to obtain American

citizenship but also pledging his supreme loyalty to Italy. He even posed for a

photograph with the Italian ambassador in Washington. Apparently, Musso-

lini then lifted the ban on his films.

Only after Valentino’s death, however,

were his films released in Italy, possibly due to popular demand.

The obvious friction between the two public figures was both ideological

and personal and based on starkly different notions of masculinity and sexual-

ity. In Italy, the dictator’s antiegalitarian manliness and ideological virilization—

molded on the political and discursive repression of the feminine—was hardly

compatible with Valentino’s sexually transgressive and ambiguous masculin-

ity, which more resembled the androgynous decadence of another contempo-

rary male political icon, Gabriele D’Annunzio. Apparently, in America—and

specifically in New York City’s modern and highly consumerist urban culture

and within the racialized and urban Italian American culture developing

there—things were different.

As port of entry and preferred settlement for

hundreds of thousand of Italian immigrants, as heart of the ever-growing pub-

lishing and advertising industries, and as an important center of film produc-

tion before 1915, New York is the ideal place to examine new social practices,

media reports, political debates, and film narratives about the fast-changing

American race, gender, and sexual relationships that shaped Italian American

urban culture.

In this article, I shall limit my discussion to a short period of time, from

1921, the year Valentino emerged as a major film star with The Four Horses of

the Apocalypse , to 1926, the year of his death. In this period, Mussolini

ascended to power and fame through the March of Rome (October 1922) and

the consolidation of his influence in American and Italian American media

and politics.

Although it is commonly believed that both Mussolini and Valentino were

quite popular among Italian Americans (because, as Italians , they fostered a

sense of national pride), I see their popularity as an open historiographical

question, to be explored and interpreted as part of the dynamics of Italian

Americans’ adaptation in America. With what desires, cultural resources, and

rhetorical positions did Italian Americans address Valentino’s decadent mas-

culinity and Mussolini’s austere virility? Rather than formulate both mascu-

linities as “Italian,” I suggest how actual experiences of immigration,

urbanization, and displacement allowed the coexistence and, at times, a dialec-

tical appeasement between divergent models of Latin virility and heroism.

More than in Italy, New York saw the emergence of a rhetorical space of mod-

ern and transnational Italianness ( italianità ) that the two stars differently

addressed.

The conventional and rather intuitive claim that Italian Americans from

Italy’s rural South could appreciate the two stars because they were Italians is

both too simple and misleading. First of all, it flattens the two stars’remarkable

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were initially boycotted and later officially banned.

giorgio bertellini; ducedivo - masculinity, racial identity, and politics among italian americans in 1920 new york city.pdf

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