Advertisements for candidates such as Charles S. McDowell Jr. and instructions on paying the poll tax and registering to vote made electoral participation a prominent concern of Il Gladiatore. For Italian Americans in the Birmingham District, claiming political influence also meant confronting the suspicion that Catholic allegiance compromised their loyalty to the United States. Alfred E. Smith’s presidential candidacy made this conflict especially visible, bringing the political rights of Catholic Americans into national debate at a time when local candidates were addressing the Italian community as an electorate whose support had to be won.
In Alabama, where the Ku Klux Klan defined Americanism in Protestant terms, participation in electoral politics was closely connected to the defense of religious freedom. Il Gladiatore rejected the claim that Catholic faith implied obedience to a foreign political authority and insisted that Italian voters exercised their own judgment, free from the dictates of ethnic brokers. By 1934, candidates were using the community’s newspaper to solicit support through promises of jobs, educational initiatives and political friendship. The Columbus–Balbo Review later grounded its defense of Catholic citizenship in the separation of church and state: Catholics could recognize the Church’s authority in matters of faith while exercising their political rights as independent American citizens, whose votes remained a matter of individual conscience.
Il Gladiatore placed a Rome-datelined response to Hiram W. Evans, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, before its Alabama readers after the publication of his essay “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism.” The article rejected Evans’s portrayal of Catholicism as a foreign political power, invoked Gibbons, John Ireland and Spalding as Catholic exponents of political Americanism and emphasized that the United States had no Catholic political party. Catholics entered Democratic, Republican, or labor politics according to their own judgment; freedom of political choice thus became evidence of their American standing.
Three days before the presidential election, Il Gladiatore devoted its front page to Alfred E. Smith, urging Alabama’s Italians to support the entire Democratic ticket, headed by New York governor Smith for president and Arkansas senator Joseph T. Robinson for vice president. The newspaper instructed readers to place a cross in the circle marked “Democratic Party”, explaining that Smith’s name did not appear on the ballot, which listed presidential electors instead. In the English-language editorial at right, Elviro Di Laura rejected the suggestion that supporting Smith meant voting for “the Pope and Romanism”: an argument that portrayed the election of a Catholic president as a threat to American political independence. His response defended the right of Catholics to participate in national politics without having their religious faith treated as evidence of disloyalty. Practical instructions on casting a ballot thus accompanied a defense of equal citizenship, affirming that Catholic voters and candidates had the same right as other Americans to shape the country’s political future.
Alfred E. Smith lost the 1928 presidential election to Republican Herbert Hoover. Alabama senator Thomas Heflin, elected as a Democrat, had supported Hoover against his own party’s Catholic nominee and was subsequently barred from the 1930 Democratic primary. Writing in January 1930, Il Gladiatore mocked Heflin’s continuing attacks on the pope, Mussolini and local Fascists, arguing that these campaigns neglected the urgent needs of the people he represented. The newspaper described thousands of unemployed workers and families struggling to survive, alongside rising crime and called on Heflin to promote construction projects that would create jobs and encourage respect for the law. His responsibility was to improve conditions in Alabama; stirring hostility toward Catholics and Italians offered no solution to unemployment or poverty. The editorial thus challenged Heflin’s priorities, measuring his worth as a senator by his service to constituents rather than his declarations of religious and national loyalty.
By 1930, Il Gladiatore had moved beyond explaining how Italians should obtain or cast a ballot and was contesting who had the right to speak for them. “To the Locan Politicians” – the misspelling is the newspaper’s own – attacked self-appointed Italian-American bosses who told candidates that they could deliver the community’s votes “like that the Italian were a chattel.” The paper replied that Italian citizens would vote according to conscience and that no intermediary could dispose of their support, presenting the electorate as independent rather than as a bloc to be traded.
Campaign advertisements addressed Italian Americans as voters whose support mattered in Alabama’s Democratic primaries. L. A. Whetstone, running for county commissioner, explicitly promised that Italians would be employed in his department if he won. His advertisement, sponsored by an Italian American campaign committee, connected a program of administrative reform to a direct offer of employment for members of the community. Forney W. Brandon, seeking election as deputy clerk of the Circuit Court’s Criminal Division, presented himself as a friend of Italian Americans and asked for their votes. These appeals made political recognition concrete through promises of jobs and relationships with officials whom Italian voters could expect to approach and hold accountable.
Oscar S. Causey’s advertisement gave the appeal to Italian voters a specifically educational dimension. Running for state superintendent of education under the slogan A New Deal in Education in Alabama, he supported introducing Italian into the state’s schools. This declaration appeared in Italian beneath a broader program that included a full-length school term and cheaper textbooks; the advertisement was paid for by his Italian American campaign committee. The proposal offered the community something beyond employment or personal friendship: recognition of its language as a subject worthy of inclusion in public education. For Italian families, it suggested that schools could help transmit their cultural inheritance while preparing children for participation in American life.
Other advertisements addressed the community through different interests. Yelverton Cowherd, a candidate for a Jefferson County judgeship, appealed to Italian voters as a defender of workers and the vulnerable, while sheriff candidate Harry E. Smith promised to employ Italians in his office. Together, these notices show candidates seeking support through educational policy, claims of social protection and access to public employment.
In October 1935, the Columbus–Balbo Review made religious freedom its cover subject. Its illustration placed Church and State on opposite sides of a wall, assigning the protection of public order, life and property to civil government and religious worship to individual conscience. The accompanying text insisted that no person could dictate another’s manner of worship and concluded that “complete separation of church and state must be maintained.” For Catholic Americans, this principle offered a defense against the suspicion that allegiance to the Church compromised their citizenship.
The declaration can also be read against the background of the Lateran Pacts of 1929, which settled the conflict between the Italian state and the papacy. The Concordat regulated the Church’s position within Fascist Italy, while the accompanying treaty reaffirmed Catholicism as the state religion. Although the cover does not explicitly mention these agreements, their settlement of religious and political authority provides a relevant context for a newspaper closely engaged with Italian affairs. The Review’s insistence on complete separation expressed a different arrangement for its American readers, grounding religious liberty in limits on government authority and freedom of conscience. Its position shows how sympathy for Fascist Italy could coexist with the defense of an American constitutional principle that protected Catholics as members of a religious minority.
