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s As Ron DeSantis purrs and growls into the Iowa caucuses that have become a make-or-break situation for his campaign, it’s worth taking a moment to look at the dog that didn’t bark during his presidential campaign. Yes: His identity, especially if elected, he would be the first Italian-American president.
There are multiple reasons why there has been relatively little comment on some of the identity politics aspects of this primary. The biggest reason was simply Donald Trump’s lead in media coverage and public opinion polls. The second reason is that media coverage of DeSantis in particular has been so hostile that a large portion of his biography has gotten lost in the shuffle. Republican voters aren’t as interested in this as Democratic voters either (even a history of sympathetic hearings for black conservatives in key districts wasn’t enough to sway Tim Scott). And DeSantis doesn’t really like to talk about it.
There are several aspects of DeSantis’ biography that are not groundbreaking but are noteworthy.
- He served in a combat zone (Iraq), but not as a fighter but as a Navy attorney advising SEAL teams. After the defeats in the general election campaigns of Bob Dole, John Kerry, and John McCain, veterans became fewer in presidential politics (Al Gore also went to Vietnam in the Army as a military journalist).
- He is 45 years old. If elected, he would be younger than any president other than Teddy Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Besides Teddy, the only other Republican presidents under the age of 50 were Ulysses S. Grant (46) and James Garfield (49). DeSantis was born in 1978. Barack Obama (1961) is the only major party presidential candidate born after 1949 and the only president born after 1946.
- he is a catholic. To date, we have had two Catholic presidents (Kennedy and Joe Biden), and a number of Catholics in Congressional leadership and the Supreme Court. However, the Republican Party has never fielded a Catholic candidate. Two Catholics have been the party’s vice presidential candidates: William Miller in 1964 and Paul Ryan in 2012.
- He is a lifelong Floridian. Many presidents have made Florida their winter home (Warren Harding, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Donald Trump, etc.), and President Trump currently calls Florida his year-round home. But they were all born and raised in other states and had pre-presidential political and business careers. Never before had a Floridian earned a national ticket.
- he is a lawyer Richard Nixon is the only Republican lawyer to be elected president since Calvin Coolidge (Gerald Ford was also a lawyer). Since 1980, only two Republican candidates have held law degrees, Dole and Mitt Romney, and Romney has never practiced law.
But what makes DeSantis a breakthrough is his ethnic origins. All of his great-grandparents immigrated from Italy, including his great-grandfather, who arrived in 1904, and his great-grandmother, who arrived just before the Immigration Restriction Act of 1917. Most of his family was from the Italian regions of Abruzzo and L’Aquila. Central Italy, originally settled in Pennsylvania and Ohio. DeSantis wasn’t the only Italian American in the race. Chris Christie’s mother’s family is Sicilian. He’s also not the first Italian-American Republican candidate. Rudy Giuliani was even the front-runner for much of the 2008 primary season. But for now, he’s the only one standing.
It used to be difficult to be Italian in America. Italians faced much suspicion and considerable discrimination, especially in the early decades of her 20th century. Sometimes it manifested itself in fear of political radicalism, as exemplified by the execution of immigrant anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1927. In the decades that followed, suspicions emerged that prominent Italian-American figures had ties to the Mafia.
There was a time when celebrities of Italian descent always expected to be noticed for being Italian. In the 1970s, the mob itself supported the Italian American Civil Rights Alliance, which aimed to identify suspected organized crime due to anti-Italian bias (Instinct is hilariously disguised) the sopranos).
The desire to acquire true American legitimacy was famously godfather, when Vito Corleone told Michael, “I always knew that when your turn came, you would hold the strings. Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone, something…time.” I didn’t have enough, Michael. I just didn’t have enough time.” Michael, still an optimist, answered, “I just didn’t have enough time.” we will get there. ”
The first, and so far only, major party presidential candidate of Italian descent was New York Governor Al Smith, the Democratic nominee in 1928. Smith’s paternal grandfather (originally named Ferraro) was an Italian immigrant who came to Italy. Before Italy, America was a unified, independent nation, and he fought for the Union in the Civil War. Al Smith faced significant prejudice while running for president for being a Catholic, which cost Democrats Texas, Florida, Virginia, Oklahoma, North Carolina, and Tennessee that same year. , which helped reorganize Massachusetts and Rhode Island toward the Democratic Party. But the fact that the half-Irish “Wet” with the surname “Smith” and the political base of Tammany Hall, and less than a quarter of his Italian descent, made people especially Italian at the time. He didn’t impress me as a person.
In the 1980s, it still mattered whether a politician was Italian. Mario Cuomo became a darling of liberals in the 1988 and 1992 presidential cycles since his impassioned keynote speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention. But Mr. Cuomo, who has never run for office, has been dogged by suspicions that he has ties to the mob, or at least is unduly sympathetic to them. In 1985, he slammed the topic of the mafia. “You’re saying the Mafia is an organization, and I’m saying that’s very stupid!” Cuomo said, “If you go to Rikers Island, you conclude that 94 percent of the people are black. Why don’t you think of a name that evokes such an association in your mind?”
Rudy Giuliani’s father was in prison for robbing a milkman at gunpoint and was suspected of being a loan shark. Giuliani took the opposite lesson from Cuomo and pioneered the federal RICO prosecution to bring down the heads of the five major families of the New York Mafia. Mr. Rudy was furious at Mr. Cuomo’s denials, saying at the time, “I’m not going to say the Mafia doesn’t exist.”What Rudy and Cuomo shared was the fact that they were expected to talk. as an italian About the mafia.
In 1984, the first and only Italian-American vice presidential candidate, Queens Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro, was elected. The big news about Ferraro is that she became the first woman to earn her international ticket. But when the media investigated the finances of her husband, real estate investor John Zaccaro (who balked at releasing his tax returns and later pled guilty to bank fraud), he discovered that he had roomed with members of the Gambino crime family. The topic of the loan became a hot topic in the media.of new york post It also published an article about Ferraro’s father’s arrest in 1944 for missing numbers.
Against this backdrop, a lot happened in 1986 when President Ronald Reagan nominated Antonin Scalia to become the first Italian-American Supreme Court justice. Mr. Scalia was in a tailspin. His credentials as a judge and scholar were impeccable, President Reagan was popular, Republicans controlled the Senate, and Democrats decided to focus instead on promoting William Rehnquist to the chief justice position. Still, it was widely understood at the time that Scalia’s status as Italy’s trailblazer contributed to his unanimous 98-0 confirmation vote in the Senate.
In the 1992 New York Senate election, the Democratic Party (Attorney General Robert Abrams) called the incumbent Alphonse D’Amato a “fascist,” and D’Amato, in tears, played it up to the fullest, calling Abrams “malicious and weighty remarks.” he accused. It has so many implications that it goes beyond the disgusting stereotype of the Italian politician as Mussolini. He was just one of many fault lines in identity and politics in that campaign. Mr. Abrams left a trail of bad blood in the general election, winning a brutal primary against Mr. Ferraro, Al Sharpton and Liz Holtzman. Accused of accepting mob money, Ferraro bellowed, “If I wasn’t Italian-American, this would never have been brought up.”
In the two decades since Scalia’s ascension to the court, the salience of Italianness has changed. When Samuel Alito was nominated to the Supreme Court, his Italian heritage was not an issue, except for some short-sighted comparisons with Scalia. When Nancy Pelosi (née D’Alessandro) became the first Italian-American speaker of the House of Representatives, her ethnic background was completely drowned out in the coverage of her status as the first woman to hold the office. Her key cabinet positions went largely unnoticed when they were filled by Leon Panetta and Mike Pompeo.
why? Italian American families gained more distance and time from immigrant generations and became more assimilated, just as other European immigrant groups had done before and since. Undoubtedly, the campaign launched by Giuliani to break the Mafia’s power in the New York area also erased the image of the Mafia from many people’s minds. In politics, Italians are no longer seen as a distinct voting group. Outside of Pennsylvania, Italian Americans are most concentrated in states with less competitive national elections, such as Rhode Island and New Jersey.
Marriages and name changes, as is currently being done for Hispanic families in the United States, are also having an effect. No one thinks Kevin McCarthy or Jill Biden are Italian.
Perhaps we’ll hear more about DeSantis’ Italian heritage if he overcomes the challenges in Iowa and puts up a serious fight late in the primary, or if he advances to the general election. But the fact that we haven’t actually shows how far Italian-Americans have come.