Paul Vaccarelli: The Lightning Change Artist of Organized Labor

In his 1976 article "Pane e Giustizia," historian Rudolph J. Vecoli asserted that Italian Americans in the labor movement had received minimal attention and he appropriately called for more inquiry into their role in specific industries and in organizing their ethnic group.1 Further examination of this area seems apparent in that the great majority of Italians came to find bread and work, motivated by the anticipation of better economic conditions here than in the land of their birth. Like other immigrant nationalities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Italians experienced their share of hardships and exploitation. Nonetheless, there were numerous instances wherein they organized themselves to improve their lot. In the process a number of colorful individuals, whose talents and ingenuity enabled them to play crucial leadership roles, surfaced. One such person was Antonio F. Paul (Kelly) Vaccarelli, who, his highly unorthodox beginnings notwith? standing, supplied the necessary leadership for organizing thousands of Italian American proletarians. Historian Victor Greene viewed bosses within the ethnic community as indispensable in the group's progression towards "becoming American." Although these notables were barely acknowledged outside their ethnic community, and often not much better known within it, Greene saw such individuals as "vital agents of continuity and change, people who fashioned their community by revealing adjustment devices for the foreign-born." Their leadership brought them "toward essentially forward-looking and accommodationist goals."2 Vaccarelli qualifies as such an individual. Leaving aside famous political personalities such as Fiorello H. LaGuardia, few Italian Americans came to the attention of the United States Congress prior to the 1920s. When they did, the attention was frequently surrounded by contention and controversy. This was the case with Vaccarelli when, in 1919, Illinois Senator Lawrence Y. Sherman inserted a letter into the Congressional Record at the behest of