I was bored last night, so a flipped the disc on, and was watching the scene where the dons (of the NYC “Five Families”) get together to discuss the new burgeoning narcotics business (and bury the hatchet between Don Corleone and the other guy whose people whacked Sonny).
One of the biqwigs stated his (kind opposition to hooking children on dope):
“…an I don’t want it sold to children…sell it to the dark people…they are animals anyway…”
Of course, this was a business meeting-or was the overt racism expressed commonly the attitude of Mafia gangsters in 1947?
This part of the GF is not historically inacurate-heroin use was widespread in the USA, by the 1900’s-but maybe the Mafia pioneered the distribution of heroin?
I hardly think that the Mafia had any scruples about selling anything to anybody, as long as it netted them a profit.
Anyway, Don Corleone’s pious speech…“the judges and policemen who are our friends…won’t be our friends anymore, after this”-mostly unrealistic?
If you go down the section labeled “History of heroin traffic” in this Wikipedia entry, you will see the statement that the Mafia got into the business in a big way at exactly the point that the film claims and that during World War II there was little heroin reaching the U.S.:
Yes, of course that sort of casual racism was common many places in the U.S. at that point. Yes, it would be unrealistic for Don Corleone to try to resist selling heroin. The most unrealistic past of the movie is the nobility of that character. Nobody in the Mafia was that honorable.
Racism was a common attitude of many Americans in 1947. And it certainly manifested itself most overtly in private gathering where there were no Blacks to overhear.
You probably shouldn’t use The Godfather as a historical reference, anyway. It was entertainment, not a documentary. But IIRC, organized crime started with things like gambling, prohibition, and protection. Drugs were a sidelight, if that. After the end of prohibition, though, the gangs started looking for things to replace the income and started moving into drugs. There were some people within organized crime that didn’t like that direction. (A lot of the early organized crime figures used it as a type of social mobility and wanted their children to be respectable. Drug dealing was going to make that harder.)
Don Corelone’s speech is just the truth: people were willing to accept gambling and the like, but once you started selling drugs to kids, you crossed a line (see how it is now).
There’s plenty of overt racism in TV and movies up through the 70’s at least.
If the Sopranos is any guide, it seems that racism is still prevalent among mob figures. Check out the episode where Tony’s daughter is dating a black guy.
That guy wasn’t black – he was Jewish? 
How do you know that?
My God, it was commonly the attitude of everyone in 1947, especially among non-WASP immigrants who viewed black people as competition for jobs, and as the only people on the socioeconomic ladder who were lower than they were. (Trust me, I’m half-Polish, and the things I heard from my Polish relatives growing up in the 1960’s would have made Lester Maddox’s skin crawl.)
The racism is discussed in a lot more detail in the book. The other Dons scorn the Don who even mentions not caring about black people doing smack, as they are so obviously sub-human that their concerns shouldn’t even be mentioned. One Corleone underling is denied promotion because he’s too friendly with his black clients, which “hints at some character flaw” on his part. Al Neri gains respect (while a policeman), and entree into the family, by crushing the skull of a black dope addict.
It isn’t pretty, but I have no reason to doubt that it’s realistic.
Although Warren Delano established the family fortune by selling opium to the Chinese, and it didn’t prevent his grandson from becoming president
“Chinese - the other dark people”
Since we’re talking about a work of fiction, the reason why DC didn’t want to sell heroin wasn’t because he had moral qualms about it, he was concerned it would negatively impact both the mafia as a whole* and his own relationships with politicians and judges.
*There’s a line in the book (and possibly the movie) where DC says (paraphrased) “Gambling and prostitution… those are vices a man can understand. But not drugs.”
According to the IMDB, the quote in the movie is:
Nothing to do with honorable. As has been pointed out Don Corleone was more concerned about the political/business fallout from getting involved in trafficking and this wasn’t as unusual as you might suspect. A number of real-life Mafia leaders disliked having there subordinates involved in drug-dealing for a variety of reasons.
One example was Angelo Bruno. Of course Bruno de facto did take a deal similar to what the Godfather was offered, but still kept his own people from dealing.
I wrote a pretty extensive paper on the mafia when I was in college. Racism was and is still very prevalent amongst the mafia. Remember they are, at least in theory, an an organization that only allows people of one particular ethnic identity to join. The mafia have been selling drugs for as long as there was money to be made selling drugs. Lucky Luciano got busted with heroin thirty years before the events of the Godfather are supposed to take place, and Vito Genovese sold a lot of cocaine in Fascist Italy. There were a few mobsters who tried to keep their underlings from selling drugs because it was a risky business, but they were very much the exception, not the rule.
Illegal drugs have been a risky proposition for the Mafia. You can make a lot of money doing it, but the fairly harsh sentences and high level of interest by the police tend to make arrests common and increase the risk of flipping on higher ups. Plus, drugs tend to be a fairly violent type of game.
It’s even more restrictive than that; in Cosa Nostra, the majority of “made” members are actually Sicilian; virtually all have Sicilian ancestry. Scorsese’s Goodfellas (which is a far more accurate depiction of actual Mafia life than The Godfather) makes a point of this, with Tommy DeVito complaining about his trouble in dating: “In this day and age, what the fuck is this world coming to? I can’t believe this, prejudice against - a Jew broad - prejudice against Italians.”
As for selling drugs, it is like any other profitable vice for the Mafia as a whole; fair game as long as it doesn’t screw up other business. However, it is important to understand two things; first of all, The Godfather films are really Greek tragedies in the guise of Mafia films, and create an artificial moral standard to which the protagonist, Michael, attempts to live up to and ultimately fails because of things beyond his control. Second, Don Corleone desperately wants to make the Corleone family “legitimate”; he wants to get away from criminal enterprises and into legal endeavors like legalized gambling, and he realizes that getting involved in the drug business–and the resulting effects upon the middle class white community that he seeks to become a part of–will drive away his legitimate judicial and political contacts.
As for racism in 1947, remember that the Army was still segregated (desegregation started by executive order in 1948, though widespread integration didn’t start occurring until the Korean War), Jackie Robinson broke into Major League baseball that year, and the “separate but equal” doctrine established by Plessey v. Ferguson was still in force until Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka made it illegal to segregate any publicly-funded school. Blacks (and other ethnicities, including Italians) were regarded as subhuman by a significant portion of the population, and of course, as such things go, disenfranchised minorities end up pecking at each other as well.
Stranger
Stranger
It’s true that the American mafia is heavily Sicilian, but there were plenty of mafioso in America who weren’t Sicilian. John Gotti and Vito Genovese were Neapolitan, and Frank Costello was Calabrian, just off the top of my head. In Italy the Mafia is in Sicily, the Comorra is in Naples, and the 'Ndrangheta is in Calabria. And lets not forget the Corsican mafia, of French Connection fame, who are French by nationality but ethnically Italian (well, sort of, it’s complicated). And of course in the United States there were several gangsters of non-Italian descent who worked with the mafia and despite not being nominally “made men” because of their ancestry, still wielded a fair amount of power within the crime family.
Unease by “upper management” at drug selling was also a plot point in Goodfellas as well.
More than that, in the book, it’s stated that the other bosses will see him as weak for even bringing up selling to black people. It hurt his standing in the group to even mention them.
The Godfather movies are great as films but they are about as close to reality as Lord of the Rings.
I think other posters hit it right on the head when they said that as an ethno-centric group the mob is going to particularly one-sided racially so to speak.