After Garibaldi failed to take back Rome from papal domination in 1849, he fled north, pursued by the French, who had helped to protect the pope, and then by the Austrians. With hostile forces surrounding him, Garibaldi had to escape Italy, but his pregnant wife, Anita, who had left their other children with relatives so that she could fight with Garibaldi, became mortally ill as they marched through Tuscany and over the Apennines. Garibaldi’s eventual exile to America—where friends had urged him to go—followed a huge military defeat, a perilous lengthy escape, and the sudden death of his wife.
Garibaldi’s friend Antonio Meucci gave him lodging in his Staten Island cottage, but the great military hero of Italian unification could not stand to be idle or a freeloader. Instead, he persuaded Meucci to open a sausage factory that could employ him and other poor Italian refugees. (Imagine an unemployed General Ulysses Grant flipping hamburgers.) The enterprise was a financial failure, however. Meucci, a better businessman than Garibaldi, soon closed the sausage factory, starting instead a candle factory on his property. Garibaldi was also quite useless at the task of making candles, which required a particular agility in dipping the wick into the tallow. And Meucci, appalled that the famous freedom fighter was performing menial labor along with the impoverished refugees, tried to stop him from working—a move that drove Garibaldi deeper into despair.
Garibaldi found some satisfaction in helping poor refugees, and one day an Italian man came by and asked Garibaldi for a shirt, explaining that he was penniless. Garibaldi told the man that he had only two shirts: the one he was wearing and another in the laundry. Then he remembered that his trunk held the red shirt he had worn in the battle for Rome. At this point Meucci protested, saying that Garibaldi should not give away such a valuable item. Meucci gave the man one of his shirts instead and preserved Garibaldi’s, which, according to local lore, is the shirt that hangs in the museum today.
After his astounding victory in Sicily, Garibaldi wore the red shirt for the rest of his life, cementing it as a lasting symbol of a unified Italy. In 1881, eleven months before his death, Garibaldi amended his will to request that he be cremated in a red shirt.
DOCUMENTI
FROM CARLO LEVI’S
CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI
Carlo Levi was an Italian Jewish writer, doctor, and painter. Levi’s book Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli) described the time he spent in exile for his anti-Fascist beliefs. The Italian government sent Levi to the town of Aliano, called Gagliano in the book, in the province of Lucania (now known as Basilicata), once the poorest region in Italy. The book was a wake-up call to northerners about the centuries-long plight of southern Italian peasants. The town of Matera—described in the following excerpt by Levi’s sister, a physician who came from Turin to visit him—was so poor that many of its residents lived in caves carved into the mountains. Today the area has been declared a World Heritage Site, and some of the grotto homes have been converted into luxury hotels. About twenty-five miles south of Matera, in the town of Bernaldo, the Italian-American filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola opened a luxury hotel in 2011 in honor of his paternal grandfather’s birthplace.
The houses were open on account of the heat, and as I went by I could see into the caves, whose only light came in through the front doors. Some of them had no entrance but a trapdoor and ladder. In these dark holes with walls cut out of the earth I saw a few pieces of miserable furniture, beds, and some ragged clothes hanging up to dry. On the floor lay dogs, sheep, goats, and pigs. Most families have just one cave to live in and there they sleep all together; men, women, children, and animals. This is how twenty thousand people live.
Of children I saw an infinite number. They appeared from everywhere, in the dust and heat, amid the flies, stark naked or clothed in rags; I have never in all my life seen such a picture of poverty. My profession has brought me in daily contact with dozens of poor, sick, ill-kempt children, but I never even dreamed of seeing a sight like this. I saw children sitting on the doorsteps, in the dirt, while the sun beat down on them, with their eyes half-closed and their eyelids red and swollen; flies crawled across the lids, but the children stayed quite still, without raising a hand to brush them away. Yes, flies crawled across their eyelids, and they seemed not even to feel them. They had trachoma. I knew that it existed in the South, but to see it against this background of poverty and dirt was something else again. I saw other children with the wizened faces of old men, their bodies reduced by starvation almost to skeletons, their heads crawling with lice and covered with scabs. Most of them had enormous, dilated stomachs and faces yellow and worn with malaria.
The peasants described the south of Italy to Carlo Levi as the place where Christ forgot to stop.
A mob lynching of Italians in Tampa, Florida.
After Garibaldi’s astonishing military success in Sicily, word of his skills traveled across the Atlantic, and President Lincoln tried to recruit the Italian general for a major post in the Union army. The State Department sent an envoy to Garibaldi’s home on the island of Caprera, but the encounter proved fruitless when Garibaldi insisted that he be appointed commander in chief with the power to immediately abolish slavery. Never mind that the president of the United States was commander in chief of the army. As Garibaldi knew, Lincoln was a moderate who didn’t initially advocate the full abolition of slavery, but only opposed the extension of slavery into new territory. Lincoln needed the continued support of several southern states, and he had been arguing that the war was about preserving the union, not abolishing slavery. The envoy spent the night on Caprera and tried again the next morning to convince Garibaldi to fight for the North’s commitment to democracy and constitutional government, but Garibaldi remained absolute in his position and the offer was rescinded.
After the Civil War ended in 1865 and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation could be fully implemented, the people replacing the freed African-American slaves who had toiled on sugar and cotton plantations were—ironically, given Garibaldi’s lecture in Caprera—southern Italian immigrants, mostly Sicilians. They began arriving in the port city of New Orleans looking, in their words, for pane e lavoro, “bread and work.”
There were two entry points for European immigrants coming to America—New York and New Orleans—and the state of Louisiana worked hard to recruit Sicilians to its port, then the second largest in the nation. The plantation owners were desperate to replace the slaves and unhappy with the demands of some African Americans who stayed on as tenant farmers. At first they tried, but failed, to attract white American farmers, as well as Chinese immigrants, who were more interested in working in the fishing industry. In 1866, the state of Louisiana formed a Bureau of Immigration and sent propaganda-filled pamphlets to Europe about opportunities on plantations. They already had some experience working with Sicilians because New Orleans imported citrus from Palermo, and Sicilians were also the only group that responded en masse to their efforts.
By successfully recruiting Sicilians, the state and plantation owners found the right match: southern Italians were used to the cyclical nature of planting, tilling, and reaping under a burning sun and willing to work around the clock. The immigrants were desperate to earn enough money to send home or, in their biggest dreams, to own a small piece of land. Here they would find better conditions than in Italy, despite the brutal nature of the work.
Even the leading advocate for disenfranchised former slaves, Booker T. Washington, noted that conditions for the southern Italian peasant were worse than for the African-American tenant farmer. After visiting southern Italy, he wrote, “I have described at some length the condition of the farm labourers in Italy because it seems to me that it is important that those who are inclined to be discouraged about the Negro in the South should know that his case is by no means as hopeless as that of some others. The Negro is not the man farthest down. The condition of the coloured farmer in the most backward parts of Southern States in America, even where he has the least edu
cation and the least encouragement, is incomparably better than the condition and opportunity of the agricultural population in Sicily.”
From planting, to harvesting, to cutting and then grinding the cane, the work in Louisiana was backbreaking, but the Italians were up to the task. Growing the cane was a laborious process because the fields needed continuous irrigation and drainage to ensure that the roots wouldn’t get too wet and rot. Cutting the cane later in the season meant working sixteen to eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. The Italians often labored side by side with black tenant farmers—and to the surprise and anger of southern whites—also socialized with them. They received the same wages as blacks: seventy-five cents to a dollar a day. Because the peasants had always managed to miraculously grow crops on arid land, the plantation owners were both astonished and delighted by their tireless labor and productivity working on more fertile soil.
Thousands of Sicilians began to head to Louisiana, and from the late 1800s to 1924, over a hundred thousand Italians arrived in the Port of New Orleans. Many worked seasonally and headed north for the rest of the year, but an estimated thirty thousand made New Orleans or the Louisiana parishes their home.
Plantation owners hoped that this cheap labor supply would last forever, but Italians, believing in the promise of America to improve their lot, resented working so hard for so little. They discovered that New Orleans and the Louisiana delta offered more opportunity, and they found jobs there peddling fruits and vegetables, handling cargo on the docks, and working in the fishing industry.
The Italians who settled in Louisiana found opportunities in New Orleans peddling fruits and vegetables.
Many settled in the historic market section of New Orleans. The French Quarter began to be called Piccolo Palermo. While Sicilians represented a quarter of all Italians who came to United States, in Louisiana they made up approximately 90 percent of the Italian population. The immigrants lived in appallingly crowded conditions and tended to stick together, displaying in the New World their historic distrust of outsiders. Meanwhile, the southern establishment was both disturbed by the onslaught of poor, olive-skinned Sicilians and resentful of the success of a few. Southerners in positions of power were also concerned about the newcomers’ growing influence in local politics.
In this climate of suspicion, a crime took place that would alter and damage the community’s relationship with Italians well into the middle of the twentieth century.
On the night of October 15, 1890, the popular police chief of New Orleans, thirty-two-year-old David Hennessy, was returning home late at night with a former colleague. They stopped at a saloon for a snack of oysters, and the two parted ways as Hennessy headed to the home that he shared with his mother. A few minutes later a group of men opened fire on the police chief. Hennessy pulled out his gun and fired back, but his efforts were in vain. His friend, hearing the barrage of gunfire, ran back to the dying Hennessy, who allegedly told him, “The dagos shot me.”
The next day, the mayor of the town, Joseph A. Shakespeare, issued this order to his police department: “Scour the whole neighborhood. Arrest every Italian you come across if necessary, and scour it again tomorrow morning as soon as there is daylight enough. Get all the men you need.”
New Orleans’s popular police chief, David Hennessy.
The crime story would never be solved. Its interpretation over the years depended on who told the tale. The court documents have been lost, so the only records are the media reports that reflect the bias of the time. To the white establishment, the crime was about the growing influence of the Sicilians and a shadowy organization called “the Mafia” that they were establishing in New Orleans. Most media outlets mimicked this thinking, and it wasn’t until many decades later that criminal justice experts and journalists revisited the material and put forth other theories.
A persistent American myth, with roots in this New Orleans crime, is that the Mafia is an ancient Italian organization, highly unified and dating back to as early as the twelfth century. Scholars who have studied the Mafia explain that the word mafia, in existence probably as far back as the seventeenth century, originally connoted a form of criminal behavior, not an organized group. In the anarchy after unification, a mafioso was considered an uomo di rispetto (“man of respect”) who, in the absence of law and order, upheld honor, tradition, and peasant interests and resorted to violence in order to do so. Eventually, one man would achieve dominance in a village and then form associations with family and friends, who composed a cosche (literally, “the leaves of an artichoke”) for their territory. In this agricultural society, latifundia were the large estates throughout Sicily owned primarily by absentee landlords and run by gabellotti, estate managers exploiting the peasants who toiled the land. The gabellotti hired members of a mafia (or sometimes themselves were mafiosi) for a twofold purpose: to keep the peasants in line, and to acquire more lenient terms from the absentee landlord to rent the properties.
The local Mafia was involved in a range of both legal and illegal activity, and it wielded power by making clear that brutal violence would be used to achieve its ends. The Mafia’s presence created a kind of alternative society, parallel to the feeble government; and eventually, the Mafia controlled elections, installing its own people and determining affairs—or at least calling for favors—not only in Sicily but also in Rome. The Mafia also managed the roads and water—charging taxes on these essential aspects of life—and took over the town’s commerce, dominating fruit and vegetable markets. While flourishing in lawless Palermo and western Sicily, the Mafia was virtually absent from eastern cities such as Messina and Catania, where industry provided better opportunities and landlords tended to live on their estates rather than renting to unscrupulous gabellotti.
The word mafia was added to the American lexicon after the New Orleans murder of David Hennessy.
Since Italian immigrants first came in great numbers to the United States, Americans have imagined that what in Italy was a loose-knit organization, composed of about a dozen members in each town, was transformed here into a highly unified criminal society. This bias immediately became clear after the shooting of David Hennessy. Town people linked the murder to his involvement in a fight between Italian stevedores, two rivals named Provenzano and Matranga, who handled fruit cargo. Each wanted control of the lucrative docks, but while the stevedores were certainly thuggish characters, it’s unclear whether they had any ties to Mafia criminals in Sicily. The bitter rivalry led to a shootout in which Matranga was wounded, and members of the Italian business community immediately went to the police both to press charges and to testify in court (a response typically considered “American,” not the actions of Mafia men bound by a code of honor and distrusting the government). During that trial, people accused the police and Hennessy of protecting the Provenzano clan, and because of his involvement, some claimed later that Hennessy had been shot in revenge.
The rosy portrait of Hennessy after his death was that of a man of uncompromising ethics and civic virtue, but this, too, seems to be a myth in a sordid New Orleans tale. The city was a cesspool of vice and corruption, and even David Hennessy had landed in jail before becoming police chief. He and his cousin Mike had had an ongoing feud with a rival officer competing for promotions and, after being arrested for shooting and murdering the officer, they served prison time until a jury decided that they had acted in self-defense. It was also unclear why, if the white establishment considered both the Provenzanos and the Matrangas “mafiosi,” David Hennessy had testified on behalf of the Provenzanos in court.
After Mayor Shakespeare’s call to “arrest every Italian,” 120 were rounded up—cobblers, fruit sellers, laborers, night watchmen, even a twelve-year-old student—and some were badly beaten. Ultimately, nineteen men, mostly associates of the Matrangas, were arrested, and nine were brought to trial. During the hysteria of the next four months, the press routinely publicized the prosecution theory that these men were part of a secret Italia
n society known as the Mafia. New Orleans’s Daily Picayune reported that the trial was a “war between American law and order and Italian assassination.” The case received national attention, and as far away as Chicago, Italian Americans contributed to a defense fund.
Finally, following much conflicting evidence and testimony, the jury cast a verdict of “not guilty” for six of the men and failed to reach one for the other three. The shocked judge refused to let the men go free and ordered them to return to the parish prison that night. Outraged community leaders didn’t believe the jury’s explanation of reasonable doubt about a crime committed in the dark without eyewitnesses and alleged that the jury had been paid off. They quickly organized a mass meeting calling all citizens “to take steps to remedy the failure of justice in the Hennessy case. Come prepared for action.”
The next morning, thousands of people headed to the square, and a lawyer and rally leader named William S. Parkerson exhorted, “When the courts fail, the people must act! What protection, or assurance of protection, is there left us, when the very head of our police department, our chief of police, is assassinated in our very midst by the Mafia Society, and his assassins are again turned loose on the community.”
The masses were furious and whipped into action. When another meeting leader, John Wickliffe, asked whether the crowds would follow him to the jail to vindicate this crime, they shouted back, “Yes! Hang the dago murderers!” The crowd asked if they should get their guns, and Parkerson told them to do so immediately.
The Italian Americans Page 3
