"More Than Ever, We Feel Proud to Be Italians": World War I and the New Haven Colonia, 1917-1918.

ON THE EVE of America's entry into the First World War in March 1917, a young man from New Haven was arrested on charges of espionage. The police of Bristol, Connecticut linked Leopoldo Cobianchi to several pieces of incriminating evidence. In the boarding-house where he was staying, detectives discovered a map of Bristol marked with a drawing of a cannon. Finding calculations of the gun's firing range, they suspected Cobianchi to be one of a pair of men seen prowling about the city's factory district. Also among his possessions were maps of Mexico and a button bearing the cryptic message "One of 1,000." Police were most interested in an essay defending the German policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. To the United States marshall called in to investigate, it looked as though the rising fears of sabotage were now a dangerous reality. [1]

But almost as soon as the affair began, officials realized there had been a terrible misunderstanding. The day after the arrest a New Haven paper announced that the case "promises to turn out to be a huge joke." Cobianchi had been taking night classes to prepare for the Yale Law School entrance exam. His instructor urged him to take a break from his full-time job and studies, which were causing "signs of weariness" and "an approaching breakdown." Cobianchi went to Bristol, but continued to practice physics problems by using features of the local landscape. The mysterious pin, which police thought might have meant "One of 1,000" plotters against the government, was the slogan of the New Haven Young Democratic Club, of which Cobianchi was a member. He had written the paper on German submarines after his father insisted he learn to argue both sides of an issue. With an explanation for each piece of evidence, the case of the United States v. Leopoldo Cobianchi was dismissed before it was ever tried in court. [2]

To most historians of American immigration and labor, this incident sounds familiar even if the particulars are obscure. The arrest of an immigrant by hot-headed authorities--this was certainly not an uncommon event during "the war to make the world safe for democracy" and the Red Scare that followed. The era's repressive treatment of German Americans and foreign-born radicals has long bolstered claims that coercion played and continues to play a definitive role in the acculturation of American immigrants. [3]

But the outcome in Cobianchi's particular case reflects a very different reality for the nation's "new" immigrants from southern and eastern Europe; one that scholarship on the war era has virtually ignored. [4] Rather than weakness, the arrest illustrated the Italian colony's strength in New Haven. The city's Italian newspapers immediately protested the charges and clamored for the young man's release. Cobianchi's father, publisher of the weekly L'Indipendente, was able to meet with the United States district attorney and pay the $5,000 bail bond with a loan from an Italian banker. The young man himself visited the city's daily papers to give his side of the story, and New Haven's city attorney wrote a long, open letter of support. Leopoldo was a rising star in the local Democratic party and would just a few months later be elected as a city alderman. On the eve of the war, the colonia had the means--newspapers, banks, and political connections-to cause quite a stir.

The affair also foreshadowed the new relationship Italians would develop with local and federal authorities during the war effort. The war demanded a new, if temporary, relationship between the individual and the state, whether or not that individual was a citizen. The colonia, which had developed into a large, bustling community with little or no governmental interference, was just beginning to get a sense of Uncle Sam's long, wartime reach. New Haven's enclave was no longer to be ignored as had been true since Italian immigrants began to arrive en masse in the 1880s. [5]

In terms of national consciousness, the Italians held the most direct connection to the Allies of any of America's largest immigrant groups. Repression figured minimally if at all in their lives during the war. They suffered none of the cultural and political persecution that confronted their German immigrant peers, who the federal government labeled an enemy alien population. Italians also lacked the resentments of the nation's Irish, who watched as the United States joined forces with the British Empire. Nor did they share the ambivalence of Eastern European Jewry, whose Russian homeland had only recently liberated itself from Czarist tyranny and was now the loudest proponent of a negotiated peace. As important, the Italians' position on the war was not based on a desire for nationhood, which characterized the dreams of Slavs who had emigrated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the immigrant Greeks, Armenians, Lebanese, and Syrians who longed for the end of Ottoman power. The war America had entered into had been raging in Italy for the past two years. For the overwhelming majority of Italians living in the United States in 1917, there was little doubt of their support for the Allied cause. [6]

Yet the transplanted Italian population was also subject to complicated cultural and political pressures. They faced urgent appeals to their national and group identity on three distinct levels. The war confronted them as Americans, as persons still deeply attached to the Old World, and as ethnic newcomers. It brought out in bold relief the major contradictions of immigrant life. The nation's Italian colonies encountered demands for American unity and cultural separatism, found themselves at times celebrated, patronized, or excluded, and felt the war's fleeting as well as permanent impact on their lives and social status.