Lynching Italians: On American Nostalgia

The Mascot Newspaper, Late 19th century

In 1891 the New York Times, echoing the longstanding anti-immigrant sentiment of newspapers like The Mascot, expressed sympathy for a New Orleans mob that lynched nearly a dozen Italian-Americans. The Times immediately and with little evidence caricatured the Italian-Americans as “mafia” deserving of their extrajudicial fate.