You could still imagine that books debunking the Cosa Nostra, revealing a truth less glamorous if not more virtuous than what has been peddled, would be plentiful. But mobsters come pre-disgraced, as jeans come pre-distressed what bad thing can you say about the Mob that hasn’t been said already? So residual virtues, if any, shine bright. Cowboys turn out to be racist and settlers genocidal, and even astronauts have flaws. Quite apart from the overwhelming positives of the Italian presence-the usual parade of professional eminences, from attorneys to zoologists, along with many of the best ballplayers, most of the passionate actors, all the great rhapsodic movie directors, and nearly all the (white) singers worth hearing-the existence of those bad guys, far from being seen as an excrescence, has become another positive: it has supplied our only reliable, weatherproof American mythology, one sturdy enough to sustain and resist debunking or revisionism. The oddity is that something like this happened, and, on the whole, no one seems to mind. If some nativist in this country had warned in 1900 that mass Italian immigration would bring us vendetta-obsessed crime clans, capable of getting their tentacles on the public life (and budgets) of major American cities while also corrupting the American labor movement for most of the coming century, he would have been dismissed, correctly, as a bigot.
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