Craniums, Criminals, and the ‘Cursed Race': Italian Anthropology in American Racial Thought, 1861–1924

Comparative Studies in Society and History

Volumn 44, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 319-343

  D'Agostino, Peter ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; CRIMINOLOGY; ETHNOLOGY; HISTORY; HUMAN; HUMAN DEVELOPMENT; ITALY; LEGAL ASPECT; MEDICAL GENETICS; METHODOLOGY; MIGRATION; PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; SOCIAL PROBLEM; SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY; UNITED STATES;

ANTHROPOLOGY, PHYSICAL; CRIMINOLOGY; EMIGRATION AND IMMIGRATION; EUGENICS; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMAN DEVELOPMENT; HUMANS; ITALY; PREJUDICE; RACE RELATIONS; STEREOTYPING; UNITED STATES;

EID: 33744942657     PISSN: 00104175     EISSN: 14752999     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0010417502000154     Document Type: Article

References (148)

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7. Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘But a Local Phase of a World Problem’: Black History's Global Vision,”
8. and Donna R. Gabaccia, “Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads, Nations and the Immigrant Paradigm of United States History,” The Journal of American History 86, 3 (Dec. 1999): 1045–78, 1115–34
9. David A. Hollinger, In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).
10. Particularly germane to this essay are George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968, 1982)
11. James K. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)
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14. Nicole Hahn Rafter, “Criminal Anthropology in the United States,” Criminology 30 (Nov. 1992): 525–545
15. Nicole Hahn Rafter, Creating Born Criminals (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 110–132
16. On Lombroso's impact in France and England, see Piers Beirne, Inventing Criminology: Essays on the Rise of ‘Homo Criminalis’ (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 147–55, 187–224.
17. An anthology of writings that explores “The Lombrosian Paradigm,” is Paul Rock, ed., History of Criminology (Brookfield, Vt.: Dartmouth, 1994), 201–334.
18. On “Bedouins,” see Christopher Duggan, Fascism and the Mafia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 20.
19. On context see Lucy Riall, Sicily and the Unification of Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)
20. Salvatore Cafiero, Questione meridionale e unità nazionale, 1861–1995 (Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1996), 11–50
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22. Duggan, Fascism and the Mafia, 27–38
23. Riall, Sicily and the Unification of Italy, 198–221
24. John Dickie, “Stereotypes of the Italian South, 1860–1900,” in Robert Lum-ley and Jonathan Morris, eds., The New History of the Italian South: The Mezzogiorno Revisited (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), 114–147
25. Nelson Moe, “The Emergence of the Southern Question in Villari, Franchetti, and Sonnino,” in Jane Schneider, ed., Italy's ‘Southern Question’: Orientalism in One Country (New York: Berg, 1998), 51–76.
26. Norberto Bobbio, Ideological Profile of Twentieth-Century Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990, 1995), 5
27. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (New York: Vintage Books, 1961, revised 1977), 36–42
28. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 21–25.
29. On the Italian context, see Salvadori, Il mito del buongoverno, 184–236
30. Alberto Asor Rosa, “La cultura,” Storia d'Italia vol. 4, pt. 2 (Turin: Einuadi, 1975), 878–899
31. Pietro Corsi and Paul J. Weindling, “Darwinism in Germany, France and Italy,” in David Kohn, ed., The Darwinian Heritage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 683–729
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33. Renzo Villa, Il deviante e i suoi segni: Lombroso e la nascita dell'anthropologia criminale (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1985)
34. John A. Davis, Conflict and Control: Law and Order in Nineteenth Century Italy (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1988), 326–342
35. Mary Gibson, “Biology or Environment? Race and Southern ‘Deviancy’ in the Writings of Italian Criminologists, 1880–1900,” in Italy's ‘Southern Question,’ 99–104.
36. The quote is from Lombroso's daughter, Gina Lombroso Ferrero, Criminal Man According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso (Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1911, 1972), xxii
37. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848-c.1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 109–152
38. Teti, La razza maledetta, 11–14, 151–66
39. Rafter, “Criminal Anthropology,” 221–241
40. Cesare Lombroso, “Criminal Anthropology: Its Origin and Application,” The Forum 20 (1895): 37, 38.
41. Lombroso, “Criminal Anthropology,” 41–45
42. Rafter, Creating Born Criminals, 120–123
43. Pick, Faces of Degeneration, 122.
44. Cesare Lombroso, In Calabria (1862–1897) (Catania: Giannotta editore, 1898)
45. Salvadori, Il mito del buongoverno, 197–198
46. The quote is from Antonio Renda, La questione meridionale (Milan-Palermo: Remo Sandron, 1900), 31.
47. Cesare Lombroso, L'uomo bianco e l'uomo di colore: Letture su l'origine e la varie-tà della razze umane (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1871, 1892), 179, 181.
48. On anti-Semitism, see Gibson, “Biology or Environment?”, 104–105
49. Teti, La Razza Maledetta, 175–178
50. Gibson, “Biology or Environment?”, 109–111
51. Giuseppe Sergi, “Relazione al Congresso di Antropologia e Archeologia preistorica di Mosca,” Archivo per l'Antropologia, l'Etnologia e la Psicologia comparata 23 (1893): 65–82
52. Giuseppe Sergi, The Varieties of the Human Species: Principles and Method of Classification (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute, 1894), 8, 9, 12, 18.
53. Giuseppe Sergi, The Mediterranean Race: A Study of the Origin of European Peoples (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901), v, vi.
54. Sergi, The Mediterranean Race, 29, 314.
55. The Mediterranean Race., 258, 250, 252.
56. The Mediterranean Race., 242, 244.
57. Giuseppe Sergi, Arii e Italici. Attorno all'Italia preistorica (Turin: Bocca, 1898), 192
58. Giuseppe Sergi, “La mescolanza delle stirpe,” in Teti, La Razza Maledetta, 179–83, 182
59. J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman, Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
60. Gibson, “Biology or Environment?” 105–9
61. Alfredo Niceforo, La delinquenza in Sardegna (Cagliari: Edizioni della Torre, 1897, 1977), 70–71.
62. Alfredo Niceforo, L'Italia barbara contemporanea (Milano-Palermo: Remo Sandron, 1898), quotes on pp. 287, 293, and 45.
63. L'Italia barbara contemporanea., 297, 298.
64. Alfredo Niceforo, Italiani del Nord e Italiani del Sud (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1901), 8, 269.
65. The quote is from Salvadori, Il mito del buongoverno, 199.
66. On Ferri see Pick, Faces of Degeneration, 145–148
67. Gibson, “Biology or Environment?”, 105–7
68. Pittenger, American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 124–127
69. Pittenger, American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 126.
70. Mary Gibson, “On the Insensitivity of Women: Science and the Woman Question in Liberal Italy, 1890–1910,” Journal of Women's History 2, 2 (Fall 1990): 11–41, quote from p. 16
71. Mary Gibson, “The ‘Female Offender’ and the Italian School of Criminal Anthropology,” Journal of European Studies 12 (Sept. 1982): 155–166
72. Lucia Zedner, “Women, Crime, and Penal Responses: A Historical Account,” in Michael Tonry, ed., Crime and Justice: A Review of Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 337–342
73. Pick, Faces of Degeneration, 147–149
74. Hughes, Consciousness and Society, 200–229
75. Bobbio, Ideological Profile of Twentieth-Century Italy, 3–14, 69–80
76. Giovanni Gentile, “Cesare Lombroso e la scuola italiana di antropologia criminale,” La Critica 7, 4 (20 July 1909): 262–274
77. Agostino Gemelli, Le dottrine moderne della delinquenza. Critica delle dottrine criminali positiviste (Florence: Libreria editrice fiorentina, 1908)
78. Agostino Gemelli, Cesare Lombroso. I funerali di un uomo e di una dottrina (Florence: Libreria editrice fiorentina, 1911, 3d ed.)
79. Gibson, “On the Insensitivity of Women,” 26–33.
80. Teti, La Razza Maledetta, 11–68, 83–88, 103–31
81. Napoleone Colajanni, Per la razza maledetta (Palermo: Sandron, 1898)
82. Salvadori, Il mito del buongoverno, 206–266
83. Cafiero, Questione Meridionale, 79–98.
84. The quote is from Leonard D. Savitz's introduction to Lombroso-Ferrero, Criminal Man, xix. For Lombroso's articles in America see, Cesare Lombroso, “Criminal Anthropology”; Cesare Lombroso, “Why Homicide has Increased in the United States-II.,” North American Review 494 (Jan. 1898): 1–11
85. Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 13. One can trace Lombroso's legacy in the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology's Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, which published ten articles relating to the Italian school from 1910 to 1926.
86. Rafter, “Criminal Anthropology,” 237
87. Zedner, “Women, Crime, and Penal Responses,” 341.
88. Appleton Morgan, “What Shall We Do With the ‘Dago’?” The Popular Science Monthly 38 (Dec. 1890), 177, 173, 172, 173, 174. On the anxiety over challenges to the doctrines of individual moral responsibility
89. see Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: An-timodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 32–47.
90. Frances A. Kellor, “Criminal Sociology: The American vs. The Latin School,” The Arena 23, 3 (March 1900): 301–304, quotes on pp. 301, 302.
91. Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1899), 5
92. Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1901), 9
93. Rudolph J. Vecoli, “Chicago's Italians Prior to World War I: A Study of Their Social and Economic Adjustment,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1963), 78–79.
94. Oscar Handlin, Race and Nationality in American Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1950), 80–81
95. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955, 1988).
96. 61st Congress, 3d. Session, Senate Document no. 662, Reports of the Immigration Commission: Dictionary of Races or People vol. 5 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1911), 3, 8.
97. Daniel G. Brinton, Races and Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography (New York: N. D. C. Hodges, 1890), 79–172, quotes on pp. 93, 155.
98. Dictionary of Races or People, 57, 81, 3, 81–82.
99. Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick, Progressivism (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1983), 67–104
100. Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 147.
101. Ross, The Origins of American Social Science
102. Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence: The First Years of Our Own Times, 1912–1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959)
103. Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 329–368
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105. Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, 229–240
106. Julius Weinberg, Edward Alsworth Ross and the Sociology of Progressivism (Madison: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1972)
107. Edward Alsworth Ross, Seventy Years of It: An Autobiography (New York: Arno Press, 1977, 1936).
108. Ross, Seventy Years of It, 87–100
109. Weinberg, Edward Alsworth Ross, 76–105.
110. Edward Alsworth Ross, Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order (New York: Macmillan, 1901), 432.
111. Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order., 438
112. Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1963, 1965), 168–175
113. Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution, 234–269
114. Edward Alsworth Ross, “The Causes of Race Superiority,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 18 (July 1901): 67–89
115. Edward Alsworth Ross, “The Value Rank of American People,” Independent 57 (Nov. 1904): 1061–1064.
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117. Ross, Seventy Years of It, 223–26, quote from p. 223.
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120. Weinberg, Edward Alsworth Ross, 163.
121. Pittenger, American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 124–127, 167–98
122. Robert Hunter, Poverty (New York: Macmillan, 1904), Chapter VI
123. “The Immigrant;” Morris Hillquit, “Immigration in the United States,” The International Socialist Review 8, 2 (Aug. 1907): 65–75.
124. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race or the Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916, 4th ed. 1932)
125. quote from Higham, Strangers in the Land, 156
126. Gossett, Race, 353–364, 390–98
127. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 80–88.
128. Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution, 287–307
129. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 82–90.
130. Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, 282, 151
131. on Mediterranean race, 148–166
132. on Mediterranean race., 167–179
133. on Mediterranean race., 153, 154, 162, 167.
134. Quote from Robert T. Handy, A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984, 2d ed.), 65
135. Matteo Sanfi-lippo, “La Questione Romana negli scritti degli viaggiatori nord americani (1848–1870),” Il Veltro 38, 3–4 (May-Aug. 1994): 185–195
136. Lothrop Stoddard, Racial Realities in Europe (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1924), 112
137. John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973)
138. David F. Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988)
139. Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 46–91.
140. William Adams Brown, A Teacher and His Times: A Story of Two Worlds (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940), 141.
141. James R. Barrett and David Roediger, “Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality and the ‘New Immigrant’Working Class,” Journal of American Ethnic History 16, 3 (Spring 1997): 28–29. The quote, from p. 28, is from a letter of David Montgomery to Jim Barrett, 30 May 1995.
142. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color
143. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London-New York: Verso, 1991), 115–131
144. Mae M. Ngai, “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924,” The Journal of American History 86, 1 (June 1999): 67–92.
145. I limit the reference to studies of Italians. The classic in this genre is Robert F. Foerster's The Italian Emigration of Our Times (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1919).
146. John W. Briggs, An Italian Passage: Immigrants to Three American Cities, 1890–1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978)
147. Dino Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1982)
148. Donna Gabaccia, Militants and Migrants: Rural Sicilians Become American Workers (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988).