A Political Bridge over the Atlantic? Italian Americans and Italy’s 1976 Parliamentary Elections

The home to a powerful Communist Party, Italy was under Washington’s special surveillance during the Cold War. The United States intervened repeatedly to influence the Italian vote and prevent the Communist Party from rising to power by legal means. For instance, as the 1948 Parliamentary elections were key to define Italy’s international alignment, the U.S. State Department supported a letter-writing campaign by which American citizens from Italian background advised relatives and friends living in their motherland not to cast their ballots for the Communist-dominated Popular Democratic Front. More than one million of such letters were mailed, contributing to the Communist defeat. The strategy was so successful that Washington encouraged a replica in 1976. This time, however, few Italian Americans joined the anti-Communist mobilization. A new U.S.-born generation with loose ties to the ancestral nation had come of age, causing a decline in the involvement in Italy’s politics. Furthermore, the previous anti-communism was mainly an expedient by which many Italian Americans legitimized their lobbying activities to pressure Washington into letting Italy regain its pre-World War II standing as a mid-sized Mediterranean power, Their ancestral country had regained that status by the mid-1970s and there was no need for further action.