Ruling out elections before any of my ancestors got off the boat and assuming I lived where my only family in the US lived at the time, most likely 1936 and perhaps 1928. I can
anecdotally re-affirm this as the WPA took my great pop-pop from a trolley-hopping shoeshine boy to naval shipbuilder.In the pre‑Depression years, Italian‑American voters cast their ballots for the candidates of the party in power at the local level. "Little Italys" in Republican strongholds usually delivered large majorities for the GOP. For instance, on US Secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon's turf in Pittsburgh (Murray), Republican presidential candidate Calvin Coolidge received 70.5 percent of the Italian‑American vote in 1924. Similarly, when Philadelphia's Republican boss William Vare ran for the US Senate two year later (Salter), he carried the local Italian‑American community by a 97.4 landslide ( Pennsylvania State Manual , 1925‑27).
56.9 percent of Philadelphians of Italian descent cast their ballots for Smith in 1928 ( Pennsylvania Manual , 1929). However, a majority of Italian Americans went back to the GOP in 1932 and Hoover obtained 52.5 percent of their vote ( Pennsylvania Manual, 1933). In hard times, many destitute members of the local community relied on the services of the city's Republican organization to cope with the economic crisis. Indeed, boss Vare's henchmen operated relief kitchens to supply the needy with food. They also established welfare committees that offered Republican stalwarts free health care, clothing, and coal besides paying utilities bills on their behalf (Bauman 54‑55). Only the enactment of the social and labor legislation of the New Deal managed to align a majority of the Italian‑American electorate with the Democratic party in federal and state elections in Philadelphia and left Roosevelt with 65.1 percent of the vote in this community in 1936 ( Pennsylvania Manual , 1937).
Moreover, roughly one third of the heads of family in the main area of Philadelphia's Italian‑American settlement were on federal relief in 1936 (Maiale 170). Likewise, Providence's efficiently Italian 13th ward totaled more relief cases than any other ward in the city (Davies 96). Actually, reliance on WPA jobs during the economic crisis is a leitmotif in local Italian Americans' recollections about the Depression (Raponi 3; De Nucci 5). Likewise, Italian‑American WPA applicants in Philadelphia needed a letter of recommendation from their Democratic ward leader ( Evening Bulletin , Apr. 23, 1936).
A comparison of the voting behavior of Philadelphia's Italian Americans in federal and local elections sheds additional light on the pivotal role of political patronage in cementing their participation in the Roosevelt coalition. The Democratic party carried the community in all federal and state contests from 1934 through 1940. Nevertheless a majority of the city's Italian‑American voters retained their pre‑Depression Republican attachment in all county and municipal races except for 1937. Since the Democratic party failed to elect a mayor throughout the interwar years and managed to win only the 1933 county elections, a Republican machine survived thanks to the hold of city and county spoils until the postwar years.
