Noel Bon Tempo TAH September 27, 2012 The life of Frank Sinatra spans the majority of the 20th Century. He entered the world in Hoboken, New Jersey, on December 12, 1915. He died on May 14, 1998. His cultural impact is the subject of Pete Hamill’s extended essay, “Why Sinatra Matters.” Hamill knew Sinatra. He spoke with Hamill on numerous occasions in the 1970’s and 1980’s in anticipation of writing a biography of the singer. Frank Sinatra was the son of immigrants. He was a high school dropout who worked dead-end jobs while dreaming of becoming a singer. He never learned to read music and became, arguably, the most accomplished and famous musician of the 20th Century. Hamill’s work is “. an unusually thoughtful contribution to the growing body of literature of appreciation of Sinatra as an artist, a supreme interpreter of the great American popular song.” (Kirkus Review) Hamill focuses his investigation of Sinatra’s life on his rise to stardom from his hard-scrabble days in Hoboken to his fall from grace in the late 1940’s to his stunning comeback in the 1950’s. As such, this is a story of redemption and reinvention. This type of story strikes a particular chord in the American psyche. Begun by Benjamin Franklin’s “Autobiography”, affirmed by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sinatra’s story of redemption is modeled by his contemporaries such as Malcolm X and Richard Nixon, and in contemporary society by Bill Clinton and Oprah Winfrey. (Redemptiveself) Sinatra’s life exemplifies some of the major cultural and social movements of the 20th Century. Hamill’s volume is valuable in that it distills these themes and presents them through the prism of Sinatra’s career. However, Sinatra is not merely representative, he also affected American culture. He did so in three distinct ways: (1) his triumphs as a validation of the immigrant; (2) his personification of the “tender tough guy”; and (3) the theme of loneliness that runs through his best work. (Entertainment Weekly) “The life and career of Frank Sinatra are inseparable from the most powerful of all modern American myths: the saga of immigration.” (Hamill, 37) The America that Sinatra grew up in produced an Italian-American culture that differed significantly from the one that his parents had left back in Italy when they immigrated in the late 19th Century. The Italy that Sinatra’s parents left had only been unified since 1860. There was no Italian national identity and in many regards such a national identity remains, at best, illusive to this day. Italians in Italia show first allegiance to their town, city, or region. They are Calabrians, Sicilians, Tuscans, or Romagnoli and only rarely Italians. This parochial attitude would be breached (but never entirely disappear) in the face of the virulent anti-Italian prejudice of American society. The hatred and discrimination encountered by Italians forged a unique American identity. As Hamill notes, “it took American bigotry to make them all feel like Italians.” (Hamill, 54) This identity was strengthened by some horrific violence experienced by Italians in America. Sinatra recounts to Hamill that he and “[g]uys my age, one reason they didn’t pay much attention to school was the schools didn’t tell stories we knew. (Emphasis in original) We heard what had happened in different places. We didn’t get it from school.” (Hamill, 43) The quote is informative as it reveals the cynicism displayed by immigrants in the face of the assimilatory pressures encountered in the public schools. One story in particular resonated with Sinatra. It was the lynching of eleven Italians that occurred in New Orleans in 1891. After the killing of a corrupt police superintendent, nineteen Italians were arrested and eleven charged with murder. Local newspapers wrote about the story and introduced a new and terrible word into the American consciousness: mafia. The existence of a criminal underworld among Italian immigrants would haunt their experience and those of their progeny. It would directly affect Frank Sinatra and the public’s perception of him throughout his career. (Hamill, 43) The Italians were tried by jury and, amazingly, eight were found not guilty and the jury would reach no verdict on the remaining three. There was insufficient evidence to tie the accused to a murder or to establish a link with the sinister Mafia. This result did not sit well with the respectable citizens of New Orleans. A large crowd gathered at the parish jail, broke in and executed nine of the Italians by firing squad. Two others were dragged out and hung from lampposts in the single worst lynching in American history. Sinatra was asked why he sent contributions to the NAACP and he replied, “[b]ecause we’ve been there too, man. It wasn’t just black people hanging from the end of those fucking ropes.” (Hamill, 45) Sinatra would have been aware of other instances of violence against Italian immigrants. Between 1885 and 1915 fifty Italians were lynched in incidents in Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Colorado, Kentucky, Illinois, Washington, and New York. In regard to the New Orleans atrocity, a local paper referred to the Italians thusly: "The little jail was crowded with Sicilians," the paper reported, "whose low, receding foreheads, repulsive countenances and slovenly attire proclaimed their brutal nature." (Research Penn State) The up and coming Republican political figure, Theodore Roosevelt, stated that the lynchings were “a rather good things” and claimed to have said so at a party attended by “various dago diplomats.” (Hamill, 46) With this dehumanized view, it is small wonder the natives were willing to inflict violence on these immigrants. Hamill notes that this language of ethnic inferiority followed and affected Sinatra, even at the height of his fame. “Every once in a while,” he told me, “I’d be at a party somewhere, in Hollywood or New York or wherever, and it would be very civilized, you know, black tie, the best crystal, all of that. And I’d see a guy staring at me from the corner of the room, and I knew what word was in his head. The word was guinea.” (Emphasis in original) (Hamill, 42) The marginalization of Italians in America resulted in the phenomenon of the Mafia. Betrayed by the soil in their native land, the bulk of Italian immigrants came from the impoverished south of the peninsula, the Mezzogiorno (Land of the Midday Sun), and sought solace in American cities. Sneered at and derided at public schools, denied loans from banks, unprotected by the law, and looked down upon by the dominant culture, Italians sought their own means of protection in the family and its extension, the ghetto. The Mafia was created by an American failure. (Hamill, 48) The Mafia was a local phenomenon and would probably have remained so but for the successful amending of the US Constitution in 1919. The amendment came into operation on January 17, 1920. Frank Sinatra was four years old. Sinatra’s childhood was the age of Prohibition. The 18th Amendment was a reaction by the dominant culture against the perceived evils of urban America and its swarms of immigrants. It was regarded by those same immigrants as a measure consciously directed against them. Italian immigrants responded to the clarion call of the Wilson Administration and fought in the Great War for the cause of liberty. They returned to an America that was less free then when they had shipped overseas to fight the Kaiser. (Hamill, 76). Immigrants were being targeted by the first Red Scare, the forces of prohibition also favored restrictive immigration policies, and the Ku Klux Klan was about to have its second incarnation. With the African-American population sufficiently cowed, the KKK directed its venom against Catholics, Jews, and immigrants. Sinatra called Prohibition “. the dumbest law in American history. It was never gonna work, not ever. But what it did was create the Mob. I know what I’m talking about on this one. I was there.” (Hamill, 74) The environment of Prohibition America created a level of cynicism about the law that was palpable to Sinatra. He remembered that everyone was believed to be “on the take.” (Hamill, 80) The disregard for the law that was engendered by Prohibition also had the effect of glamorizing the bootlegger, the loner and tough guy. This figure was the descendant of the cowboy, personally unknown to Sinatra, glorified by the new medium of the movie. Sinatra was more able to relate to the image of the loner because of his upbringing as an only child. On the streets of Prohibition and then Depression America, Sinatra cultivated the image of the wise guy, the tough guy, an act to insulate himself from a dangerous world. On the inside, he was lonely. He would attempt to relieve this loneliness throughout his life with women, drinking buddies (the Rat Pack), action and anger. According to Hamill, the only thing that worked was the music. (Hamill, 88-89) Hamill argues that nothing else about Frank Sinatra truly matters except the music. Hamill waxes rhapsodic about the sound of Sinatra: His finest accomplishment, of course, was the sound. The voice itself would evolve over the years from a violin to a viola to a cello, with a rich middle register and dark bottom tones. But it was a combination of voice, diction, attitude, and taste in music that produced the Sinatra sound. It remains unique. Sinatra created something that was not there before he arrived: an urban American voice. (Hamill, 93) His voice resonated among the immigrants of urban America. His diction was perfect and his fans wanted to express themselves in the way that Sinatra did when he sang.