Ron DeSantis and the Progress of Italian Americans

A s Ron DeSantis rumbles toward the Iowa caucus that has taken on make-or-break status for his campaign, it is worth taking a moment to notice a dog that hasn’t barked in his presidential bid: his identity, in particular the fact that, if elected, he would become the first Italian-American president.

There’s more than one reason why there has been comparatively little comment on some of the identity-politics aspects of this primary. The biggest reason is simply that Donald Trump has predominated in the media coverage and the polls. A second reason is that press coverage of DeSantis in particular has been so hostile that a good deal of his biography has gotten lost in the shuffle. Republican voters are also just not as interested in this stuff as Democratic voters are (even the primary electorate’s history of sympathetic hearings for black conservatives wasn’t enough to keep Tim Scott afloat). And DeSantis doesn’t much like to talk about it.

A few aspects of DeSantis’s biography are notable without being groundbreaking:

• He served in the military in a war zone (Iraq), albeit as a Navy lawyer advising a SEAL team rather than as a warrior. Combat veterans have become scarcer in presidential politics after the losing general-election campaigns of Bob Dole, John Kerry, and John McCain (Al Gore also went to Vietnam in the Army, as a military journalist).
• He’s 45 years old; if elected, he’d be younger than any president but Teddy Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Other than Teddy, the only two Republican presidents under age 50 were Ulysses S. Grant (46) and James Garfield (49). DeSantis was born in 1978; Barack Obama (1961) is the only major-party presidential nominee born after 1949, and the only president born after 1946.
• He’s Catholic. We’ve had two Catholic presidents (Kennedy and Joe Biden) and a bunch of Catholics in congressional leadership and the Supreme Court. Republicans, however, have never had a Catholic nominee. Two Catholics have been the party’s vice-presidential nominee: William Miller in 1964 and Paul Ryan in 2012.
• He’s a lifelong Floridian. A number of presidents have had part-time winter residences in Florida (including Warren Harding, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump), and Trump now makes it his year-round home. But they were all born and raised and had their pre-presidential political and business careers in other states. There’s never been a Floridian on a national ticket.
• He’s a lawyer. Richard Nixon is the only Republican lawyer elected president since Calvin Coolidge (Gerald Ford was also a lawyer). Since 1980, only two Republican nominees had law degrees (Dole and Mitt Romney), and Romney never practiced law.

Where DeSantis would represent a milestone, however, is his ethnic origin. All of his great-grandparents emigrated from Italy, including a great-grandfather who arrived in 1904 and a great-grandmother who got in just ahead of a restrictive immigration law in 1917. The bulk of his family came from Abruzzo and L’Aquila in central Italy and originally settled in Pennsylvania and Ohio. DeSantis wasn’t the only Italian American in the race; Chris Christie’s mother’s family is Sicilian. Nor is he the first major Italian-American Republican contender; Rudy Giuliani was even the front-runner for much of the 2008 primary season. But for now, he’s the only one standing.

Once upon a time in America, to be Italian was a big deal. Italians faced a lot of suspicion and a good deal of discrimination, especially in the early decades of the 20th century. Sometimes, that manifested itself as fear of political radicalism, as exemplified by the 1927 execution of immigrant anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. In later decades, it took the form of suspicion that Italian-American public figures might be connected to the Mafia.

There was a time when a public figure of Italian heritage would expect it to be always noted that he or she was Italian. In the 1970s, the mob itself helped back an “Italian-American Civil Rights League” aimed at identifying any suspicion of organized crime with anti-Italian bigotry (an instinct hilariously spoofed in The Sopranos).

The aspiration to attain real American legitimacy was famously captured in The Godfather, when Vito Corleone tells Michael: “I always thought that when it was your time, that you would be the one to hold the strings. Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone, something. . . . Well, there wasn’t enough time, Michael. There just wasn’t enough time.” Michael, still the optimist, replies “We’ll get there, Pop. We’ll get there.”

The first and thus far only major-party presidential nominee of significant Italian descent was Al Smith, the governor of New York who was the Democrats’ nominee in 1928. Smith’s paternal grandfather (originally surnamed Ferraro) was a part-Italian immigrant who came to America before Italy was a unified, independent nation, and he fought for the Union in the Civil War. Al Smith faced significant bigotry during his presidential bid for being Catholic, a fact that helped cost the Democrats Texas, Florida, Virginia, Oklahoma, North Carolina, and Tennessee that year while realigning Massachusetts and Rhode Island in their direction. But a half-Irish “wet” with the surname “Smith,” a Tammany Hall political base, and less than a quarter Italian heritage didn’t strike people as particularly Italian at the time.

As recently as the 1980s, it still mattered if politicians were Italian. Mario Cuomo was a favorite of liberals in the 1988 and 1992 presidential cycles after his impassioned keynote address at the 1984 Democratic convention. But Cuomo, who never ran, was dogged by suspicions that he was either connected to the mob or at least unduly sympathetic to it. In 1985, he railed against talk about the Mafia: “You’re telling me that the Mafia is an organization, and I’m telling you that’s a lot of baloney!” “Why don’t you go to Rikers Island,” Cuomo asked, “conclude that 94 percent of them are black, and think up a name that would create that association in people’s minds?”

Rudy Giuliani’s father served prison time for robbing a milkman at gunpoint and was suspected of being an enforcer for a loan-sharking operation. Giuliani took from this the opposite lesson of Cuomo and went out of his way to pioneer the use of federal RICO prosecutions to take down the heads of the Five Families of the New York Mafia. Rudy bristled at Cuomo’s denial: “You can’t go so far as to suggest the Mafia doesn’t exist,” he said at the time. What Rudy and Cuomo shared was the fact that they were expected to speak as Italians about the Mafia.

In 1984, the first and only Italian-American vice-presidential candidate was selected: Queens congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro. The big news about Ferraro was that she was the first woman on a national ticket. But as the media dug into the finances of her husband, real-estate investor John Zaccaro — he balked at releasing his tax returns and later pleaded guilty to bank fraud — there was media buzz about him renting space to a Gambino crime-family figure. The New York Post also ran a story about Ferraro’s father being arrested in 1944 for numbers-running.

Against that backdrop, much was made in 1986 when Ronald Reagan nominated Antonin Scalia to be the first Italian American on the Supreme Court. Scalia faced favorable tailwinds: His credentials as a judge and scholar were impeccable, Reagan was popular, Republicans controlled the Senate, and Democrats decided to focus their fire instead on the elevation of William Rehnquist to chief justice. Even so, it was widely understood at the time that Scalia’s status as an Italian pathbreaker contributed to the unanimity of the Senate’s 98–0 vote to confirm him.

In the 1992 New York Senate race, the Democrat (attorney general Robert Abrams) called incumbent Alfonse D’Amato a “fascist,” and a weepy D’Amato played it for all it was worth, accusing Abrams of “a vicious, laden remark with so many connotations to it, it goes beyond abhorrent stereotyping” of an Italian politician as a Mussolini. That was just one of many identity-politics fault lines in that campaign. Abrams emerged from a brutal primary against Ferraro, Al Sharpton, and Liz Holtzman, which left a trail of bad blood into the general election. Ferraro was accused of taking mob money and howled that “if I were not Italian American, this whole thing would never have been brought up.”

Over the two decades after Scalia’s elevation to the Court, the salience of Italian-ness changed. When Samuel Alito was nominated for the Supreme Court, his Italian heritage was a nonissue except to the extent that it made for shorthand comparisons to Scalia. When Nancy Pelosi (maiden name D’Alesandro) became the first Italian-American speaker of the House, her ethnic background was completely drowned out by coverage of her status as the first woman in the job. There was little attention paid when major cabinet posts were filled by Leon Panetta and Mike Pompeo.

Why? Italian-American families have gained more distance and time from the immigrant generations and become more assimilated, just as other groups of European immigrants have done before and since. Undoubtedly, the campaign begun by Giuliani to break the power of the Mafia in the New York area has also eliminated that association from the front of a lot of minds. In politics, Italians aren’t really seen any more as a distinct voting bloc. Outside of Pennsylvania, Italian Americans are most heavily concentrated in states such as Rhode Island and New Jersey that aren’t that competitive in national elections.

Intermarriage and surname changes have done their work, too, as they are currently doing with America’s Hispanic families. Nobody much thinks of Kevin McCarthy or Jill Biden as Italians.

Maybe, if DeSantis gets over the Iowa hump and stages a real fight deep into the primaries, or makes it to the general election, we’ll hear more about his Italian heritage. But the fact that we haven’t is actually a sign of how far Italian Americans have come.