Events
From the Depression to The Sopranos, Alito reflects on life as an Italian American in New Jersey
Times were much different in 1914, when Maria Alati arrived in Philadelphia aboard the SS Ancona from Naples, bearing her six-month-old son, Salvatore.
“There was no calling back home, no internet,” said U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito Jr., Maria Alati’s grandson. “I’m sure they realized that they would never see these people again. They would never hear their voices. This was a permanent break, and irreparable.” Now, the small village where his grandmother came from has its own website, Alito said.
Alito spoke in honor of the fifth anniversary of Italian Studies at Rutgers and the program’s Italian Hours lecture series. His talk, “Reflections on Growing up as an Italian American in New Jersey,” took place February 13 at the Rutgers Student Center.
T. Corey Brennan, professor of classics and director of Italian Studies, said that despite Alito’s characterizations of his talk as “amateurish,” it was anything but.
“It was a very inspiring talk. I thought that it spoke not just to the Italian-American experience, it spoke to the immigrant experience of any sort,” Brennan said. “It was a very warm occasion.”
Alito, confirmed as a Supreme Court justice in January 2006, was born in Trenton and grew up in Hamilton.
“In the future, the suburbs will probably be portrayed as a soulless place of ticky-tack houses with restless and alienated people,” Alito said. “That was not my experience.”
Alito rode bikes in quiet streets and played in the yards of neighborhood kids whose parents came from Germany, Ireland, England, and Poland. “But we didn’t think of ourselves in those terms ... an indication of how Americanized we had become in a relatively short time.”
Alito’s father, Salvatore Alati (his name was changed when he started school to Samuel Alito, a common immigrant experience at the time), refused to check his ethnicity on documents. “He resented having to put down any ethnicity on a form. He would put down just plain American,” Alito told the audience of more than 300. “He had earned the right through hard work to be simply called American.”
Life during the Great Depression was difficult for Samuel Alito Sr. His family was poor, his mother died when he was a teenager, there wasn’t always enough coal to heat the home, and at times the family didn’t have any place to sleep.
Despite those challenges, he excelled in school and earned a $50 scholarship to Trenton State Teachers College (now the College of New Jersey). He purchased a suit to wear to class and fashioned a top that was really just the front of a shirt. It was all he could afford.
Samuel Alito Sr. worked a variety of jobs: park ranger, reform school teacher, public school educator, and eventually a researcher for the New Jersey Legislature. He became the first director of the Office of Legislative Services in Trenton.
Samuel Alito Jr. went to Princeton University and then Yale Law School. He was appointed in 1990 to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and worked at its court house in Philadelphia, not far from where both his parents disembarked as new immigrants.
“Most Italian Americans who came here were laborers. They worked with their hands,” Alito said. His maternal grandfather worked at the Roebling Steel Mill in Trenton.
Later, when he moved to his newest job in Washington, D.C., Alito inquired about the men who built the Supreme Court building. The curator produced the names of the firms who constructed the building, but did not have names of the laborers. Alito suspected many were Italian Americans, and his conversations with some elderly men indicated as much.
“These are uneducated people who worked with their hands, and they left behind for us enduring monuments,” Alito said. “But in many cases, they did not leave their names.”
History’s representations of Italian Americans are mostly overshadowed by popular culture depictions, Alito lamented. He said is no fan of The Sopranos or The Godfather movies.
“In the famous opening scene of The Sopranos, you not only see quintessential Italian scenes, you see New Jersey. You’ve got a trifecta – gangsters, Italians, and New Jersey, wedded in the imagination of the popular culture,” Alito said.
Similarly, tourism obscures some of the history of the Italians who immigrated to the United States. For Americans, Italy is one of the top three tourist destinations outside of North America. “They see a land of culture and art ... When Americans go on a trip like that, do they see something of the land of the Italian immigrants who came to America?”
Rutgers senior Donald Burke is not Italian American, but he is Roman Catholic. “I thought it was nice to see more [Roman] Catholic representation on the bench,” said Burke, who has been “a big fan” of Alito since he served on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. “In what other country can you have an experience like [Alito’s]? You don’t have to be Italian to have an experience like that.”