| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Italian-American Vote in Providence, Rhode Island, 1916–1948. By Stefano Luconi. (Cranbury: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004. 191 pp. $42.50, ISBN 0-8386-4047-8.)
John O. Pastore was born to Italian immigrants in Providence in 1907 and raised in poverty. He put himself through school while working on a jewelry press and as a clerk, only to complete his law degree at the lowest point of the Great Depression. Pastore soon found it was easier to find work as a politician than as an attorney. In 1934 he was elected to Rhode Island's General Assembly and began a meteoric career that included becoming the first Italian American in any state to serve as governor (1945) or U.S. senator (1950).	1
Conventional wisdom has it that ethnic politicians such as Pastore were part of a phenomenon that began in 1928. Many newer immigrants began to vote Democratic in that year, attracted first by Alfred E. Smith's presidential candidacy and then by the Democrats' New Deal policies and promotion of ethnic interests. Studies of Rhode Island generally agree that the Italians and French Canadians did not join the Irish in the Democratic party until the late 1920s. Before then those who voted favored the Republican party, despite its poor record on workers' rights, because it controlled state politics and had plenty of patronage to distribute.	. . .

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