Jerry's Ideas

IAs disproportionately working-class and disproportionately beneficiaries of welfare

Italian Harlem closed community, which invested in its own social capital, to which “socialism made sense”

New Deal coalition of ethnics

Social policies (material help) and cultural pluralism (recognition)

New Deal = Reform + Relief

The First and especially the Second New Deal (WPA, Home Relief, Social Security, NYCHA etc.) gave Italians concrete reasons for political participation

Results: unionization, mobilization, activation of community-oriented, rather than family oriented, involvement

Importance of voting behavior to assess the response of Italian Americans to New Deal programs

How the New Deal affected the outlook and meaning of public and private spaces: working-class life in old law tenements (no privacy) and New Deal model working-class houses (projects), masculine spaces of "civil society" (cafes, bars, etc.), ritualization and the home as a feminized place, "upgrade" of peddlers into modern merchants (closed municipal markets), etc.

Topics:

1) The integration of ethnicity and race in New Deal social policies programs

2) Changing ideas of citizenship and entitlement; the nation-state making sense

3) The "whitening" effect of New Deal programs on Italian Americans

4) LaGuardia's modern city vs. the ethnic neighborhood (pushcarts, markets, housing projects); rationalism and pluralism in New Deal urban planning and its reception

5) Cultural pluralism, "honoring labor"

Primary Sources

--- ARCHIVAL MATERIAL ---
Leonard Covello Papers, 1907-1974, Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies
Vito Marcantonio Papers, 1935-1953, New York Public Library
Federal Writers' Project, The Italians of New York, Municipal Archives of New York City
Frederick Thrasher, Final Report on the Jefferson Park Branch of the Boys’ Club of New York, 1931, New York University Library

--- GOVERNMENT PUBLICATIONS ---
Citizens' Housing Council of New York, Harlem Housing, New York, August 1939
D'Alesandre, J.J., Occupational Trends of Italians in New York, Bulletin n. 8, Casa Italiana Educational Bureau, 1934
New York City, Department of Health, Committee on Neighborhood Health Development, Health, Social and Economic Conditions in Health Area 20, East Harlem Health District, New York, 1942
New York, City, Mayor's Committee on City Planning, East Harlem Community Study, New York, 1937
Shedd, W.B., Italian Population in New York, Bulletin n. 7, Casa Italian Education Bureau, 1934
Welfare Council of New York City Research Bureau, Heads of Family by Color, Nativity and Country of Birth of Foreign Born Head, by Health Areas, New York City 1930, Studies n. 41, 1934
Welfare Council of New York City Research Bureau, Population in Health Areas by Color, Nativity, Parentage, Sex, and Age, New York City 1930, Studies n. 38, 1931

--- DISSERTATIONS ---
Concistre, Marie Jospehine, Adult Education in a Local Area: A Study of a Decade in the Life and Education of the Dult Italian Immigrant in East Harlem, Ph.D., New York University, 1944
Tilley, Margaret Campbell, The Boy Scout Movement in East Harlem, Educat. D., New York University, 1935
Anderson, Nels, The Social Antecedents of a Slum: A Developmental Study of the East Harlem Area of Manhattan Island, New York City, Ph.D., New York University, 1930
Guglielmo, Jennifer Mary, Negotiating Gender, Race, and Coalition: Italian Women and Working-Class Politics in New York City, 1880--1945, Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 2003
Sollins, Irving, A Socio-Statistical Analysis of Boys’ Club Membership, Ph.D., New York University, 1936
Friedman, Edwin, East Harlem Community Study: 1940-1950, M.A., New York University, 1954
Freeman, Robert Charles, Exploring the path of community change in East Harlem, 1870-1970: A multifactor approach, Ph.D., Fordham University, 1994
Marsh, May Case, The Life and Work of the Churches in an Interstitial Area, Ph.D., New York University, 1932

--- PUBLISHED BOOKS AND ARTICLES ---
Reed, D., Lesiure Time of Girls in a Little Italy, Portland, OR, 1932

Published Works

--- BOOKS ---
Alter, Jonathan, The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2006
Blumberg, Barbara, The New Deal and the Unemployed: The View from New York City, New York, Associated University Press, 1979
Schierup, Carl-Ulrik, Peo Hansen, Stephen Castles, Migration, Citizenship, and the European Welfare State: A European Dilemma, New York, Oxford University Press, 2006
Wilder, Craig Steven, A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn, New York, 2000
Roediger, David R., Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs, New York, Basic Books, 2005
Cohen, Lizabeth, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, Cambridge University Press, 1991
Cannistraro, Philip and Gerald Meyer (eds.), The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism, Westport, CT, Praeger, 2003
Greenberg, Cheryl, Or Does It Explode?: Black Harlem in the Great Depression, New York, Oxford University Press, 1997
Denning, Michael, Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, New York, Verso, 1996
Ward, David and Oliver Zunz, The Landscape of Modernity: New York City, 1900-1940, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992
Plunz, Richard, A History of Housing in New York City, New York, Columbia University Press, 1990
Jackson, Anthony, A Place Called Home: A History of Low-Cost Housing in Manhattan, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1976
Brodsky, Alyn, The Great Mayor: Fiorello La Guardia and the Making of the City of New York, New York, Truman Talley Books, 2003
Gelfand, Mark, A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America, 1933-1965, New York, Oxford University Press, 1975
Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America
Alyn Brodsky, The Great Mayor: Fiorello La Guardia and the Making of the City of New York
Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II
Jared N. Day, Urban Castles: Tenement Housing and Landlord Activism in New York City, 1890-1943
Woody Klein, Let in the sun
Eric C. Schneider, Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York
Russell Leigh Sharman, The Tenants of East Harlem
Anthony LaRuffa, Monte Carmelo: An Italian-America​n Community in the Bronx
Jim Sleeper, Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York
Michael C. Johanek, John L. Puckett, Leonard Covello and the Making of Benjamin Franklin High School: Education As If Citizenship Mattered

--- ARTICLES, BOOK CHAPTERS, AND ONLINE RESOURCES ---
Kessner, Thomas, New York and the New Deal - Session One: The Old New Deal
Wasserman, Suzanne, “'Our Alien Neighbors': Coping with the Depression on the Lower East Side," American Jewish History, June, 2000, 209-232
The Architecture and Development of New York City
Schwartz , Joel, "Tenement Renewal in New York City in the 1930s: The District-Improvement Ideas of Arthur C. Holden," Journal of Planning History, Vol. 1, No. 4, 290-310 (2002)
Lower East Side Museum, The Great Depression of the 1930s