Wikidworld (#57)
Today is It-used-to-be-Columbus-Day Day! So let's talk about Italian-American Catholic Supreme Court Justices from Trenton who grew up in The Fifties!
Today is It-used-to-be-Columbus-Day Day! So let’s do some Italian-American heritage. We can start with this clip from the television show, The Sopranos. You know The Sopranos, right? [Tony Soprano was actually the nephew of my erstwhile neighbor Mr. Soprano.]
Speaking of which, my Mr. Soprano, having survived his (undoubtedly traumatic) encounter with my morally suspect father, died peacefully in 2012, in a hospital outside of Trenton, New Jersey, at the age of 86. Mr. Soprano was born and raised in Trenton (one of 13 children). From ashes to ashes, we return to our origins.
You know who else was born in Trenton? Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito, the only two Italian-Americans to serve as justices of the United States Supreme Court, were also both born in Trenton. Scalia was raised in Queens, New York. Alito was raised in Hamilton Township, a Trenton suburb.
What is it about Trenton, to serve up this feast of Catholic Italian-American Supreme Court justices (along, of course, with the redoubtable Mr. Soprano)?
Trenton is small post-industrial city smack-dab in the middle of New Jersey, mostly known in recent years for its poverty, blight, strained race relations, and reputation as one of the most violent small cities in the nation. But it was not always so.
Between 1880 and 1950, Trenton prospered. Its population increased more than four-fold in this period, from 30,000 to 128,000. This growth was largely fueled by the arrival of Italian immigrants who could easily find work in the city, which was a major manufacturing center for rubber, wire rope, ceramics and cigars.
Trenton Makes. The World Takes. That’s what the iconic Lower Trenton Bridge proclaims to the world. And in the first half of the 20th century, it was true.
Postwar prosperity allowed the children of many of these immigrants to obtain college degrees via the GI Bill — or, like Mr. Soprano, to benefit from the strength of organized industrial labor — and, in turn, move with their own young and growing families to the burgeoning Trenton suburbs of Ewing and Hamilton.
The biographies of our own three Trenton guys trace this arc of upward and outward mobility. Mr. Soprano was a U.S. Marine veteran of World War II. His parents were Italian immigrants. In the 1950s, he had received his training as an RCA electronics technician. Now married and with children in mind, he made the brave leap north to Princeton, some 15 miles away.
Antonin Scalia’s parents were both Italian immigrants who had settled in central New Jersey but subsequently moved to New York City. His mother taught elementary school. His father was a professor of Romance languages at Brooklyn College. Scalia himself attended Xavier High School, a Jesuit military school in Manhattan, Georgetown University, and Harvard Law School.
Samuel Alito's father was an Italian immigrant who earned a master's degree at Rutgers University and was a high school teacher and later the first Director of the New Jersey Office of Legislative Services. Alito's mother, an Italian-American, was a schoolteacher. Alito attended Princeton University and Yale Law School.
These are archetypal narratives, of course, with many dynamics that remain unspoken. But the trends remain clear. Between 1945 and 1963, millions of American Catholics achieved levels of education, income growth, and economic security that allowed them to join the “great American middle — to fit in, to be normal and norm-abiding — with everything that implied.
For a period of time, this was good news for the Catholic Church. More prosperous and educated parishioners were more likely to attend church regularly and fill the pews, even as their ethnic and cultural identities remained vital, and actually strengthened. Strictly enforced Catholic doctrine concerning birth control guaranteed that a steady stream of young voices echoed through the churches.
During the 1950s, nationwide church membership grew at a faster rate than the population, from 57 percent of the U.S. population in 1950 to 63.3 percent in 1960. On a typical Sunday morning, nearly half of all Americans could be found in church – the highest percentage in U.S. history. Atop this cresting wave, Catholics regularly attended church more frequently than other denominations, while also evincing higher degrees of doctrinal conformity.
As historian of American Catholicism Leslie Woodcock Tentler writes about her own childhood growing up in a dense, diverse neighborhood of Catholic and Protestant children:
We were impressed by the Catholics’ unshakeable solidarity and their overweening confidence, [along with] the visible testimony to Catholic distinctiveness: their school uniforms (unfashionable, but bespeaking a people), nuns in full habit, churches filled every Sunday at each of as many as eight Latin Masses, queues for confession on Saturday night, even the closing of local stores on Good Friday afternoon.
Between 1952 and 1957, the remarkable popularity of Bishop Fulton Sheen’s weekly television show, Life is Worth Living, ushered American Catholicism into the media mainstream. Bishop Sheen — a doctrinally conservative Catholic and staunch anti-Communist — was perhaps less benign than he might have seemed. The emergence of Catholicism into the American mainstream heralded by his television show masked the arrival with it of more sinister impulses long coursing through the darker recesses of the Catholic imagination. In the early 1950s, the vector for transmitting this darkness into the American public square was Joseph McCarthy.
What I am reading today.
Mismanagement and ‘Monster Trains’ Have Wrecked American Rail (NY Times)
Spread of Catholic hospitals limits reproductive care across the U.S. (Washington Post)
A Study Finally Shows Just How Much Deadlier COVID Has Been for Republicans (Slate)
Philly Today: Scenes from What Was Once Known as Our Columbus Day Parade (Philadelphia Magazine)
Murder Italian Style (Harpers Magazine)
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Wikidworld. Reimagining Western Civilization.
Season 2: The Catholic Moment
Episode 2: Sexual Politics
Part 2: Trenton, New Jersey
Issue#: S2-E2-P2
Date: October 11, 2022