Read 56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports for Free Online Page B

guys who had come to work at the Italian Pavilion at the World’s Fair and never left, illegally overstaying their permits. These men were not U.S. citizens—any more than DiMaggio’s father and mother were—and in these times America did not want them. 1
    More than one and a half million Italian-born immigrants lived in the United States, more than half a million in New York, packed closely in neighborhoods in each of the city’s five boroughs. Those numbers quadrupled when you added in the next generation, all those—like DiMaggio and his brothers—who had been born on U.S. soil to one of the millions who had left Italy in the first 15 years of the century.
    For years, through the 1920s and ’30s, many Italian-Americans, especially among the older generation, had approved of Mussolini and of fascism. From afar, Il Duce gave to some of them feelings of pride and dignity. Italy, long seen as inept and bumbling, suddenly had a strong and seemingly competent government that was regarded seriously, if warily, by other nations. Italy wasn’t going to be a pushover anymore.
    And if that affection for the new Italy had dissipated in recent years as many thousands of Italians began to flee their home country expressly to get away from Mussolini’s brutal intolerance and heavy fist, and if for many Italian-Americans Il Duce’s embracing of Nazism and anti-Semitism was now not a source of pride but rather of shame and anger—a betrayal that led them to enlist in the U.S. Army and prove their Americanism by joining the fight against their homeland—well, even still some of the old sentiments, along with that strange begrudging sense of respect that a bully like Il Duce can inspire, lingered on. Now, a flood of antifascist Italians might rally in New York City one day, but a gathering of profascist Italians might parade on the streets in New Jersey the next. The scores of Italian-language newspapers across the U.S. split themselves by necessity for their readers: A paper was either in support of fascism or against it. Black and white.
    Being an Italian in America meant having to “overcome more handicaps than a pure Anglo-Saxon. Therefore he has to run twice as fast, or else he will be treated forever as a Wop … an alien,” wrote an Italian immigrant in The Atlantic Monthly in 1940. And yes, that prejudice was there, evident in the things people said, and read and did. An editorial in Collier’s decried the discrimination and mocked it: “You would think that from some of the talk in circulation that our Italians were getting ready to carve up our government and hand it to Mussolini on a spaghetti-with-meatballs platter.” In this climate many Italians changed their names to hide, as the writer Giuseppe Fappiano had done upon taking a job in sports at The New York Times some years before. He went by Joseph Nichols now.
    In the World-Telegram , the same newspaper in which Dan Daniel tirelessly, passionately and sometimes eloquently covered DiMaggio and the Yankees, the popular news columnist Westbrook Pegler went on a kind of crusade, chastising not only those Italian immigrants who would congregate loudly in the city and cheer for the fascist cause, but also those who simply felt a fondness for their heritage, who dared to look homeward. Their country was a scourge, Pegler declared, and he wrote indignantly, “The Americans of Italian birth or blood have no reason to love Italy.”
    Yet no break could ever be that clean. There was an affinity for the homeland and a kinship among Italian-Americans that crossed political lines; their bonds were sustained in part by the way Italians were so often lumped together in the jaundiced public eye, lampooned in songs and cartoons as good-for-nothing wine swillers and macaroni eaters. And now the Italian military, even under the tough-talking Mussolini, was being roasted anew for its ineptitude in battle, which had been made plain by Italy’s botched attempt to take Greece in