The Italian Americans

by Maria Laurino

  Parkerson and Wickliffe considered themselves reformers trying to fix a corrupt system—and indeed the New Orleans political system was deeply corrupt. But at the time, the “reform” movement also consisted of white separatists, like both of them, working to take away the vote from blacks. These men feared that the underclass would take control, and they were concerned about the Sicilians’ gaining positions in local politics, believing that the Italians would poison the American political system with their nefarious Mafia organization.

  With calls to “hang the dago murderers,” the masses assembled outside the parish prison.

  That Saturday morning they rallied a crowd of over eight thousand people, many of them now armed. The mob marched to the jail, quickly overtook the prison wardens, and stormed the gates. The acquitted Italians tried to hide, crouching under benches and behind posts, but the mob riddled them with bullets while shouting, “Death to the dagos!”

  The crowd waiting outside the prison wanted a piece of the action too, so Parkerson delivered two men to them. Both had been wounded and could now be lynched by the mob. They were hung from a lamppost and tree, their dying bodies dragged, kicked, and beaten with sticks and canes. Men carrying rifles and shotguns continued to pump them full of bullets; some even used their bodies for target practice. At the end of that bloody day, eleven Italians had been murdered and lynched, and the organizers told the cheering crowd that it had done its civic duty by ridding New Orleans of thugs and murderers.

  The next day the New York Times headline announced “Chief Hennessy Avenged.” The paper’s editorial read, “These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cut throat practices and the oathbound societies, are to us as a pest without mitigation.” While it continued that “orderly and lawabiding persons will not pretend that the butchery of the Italians was either ‘justifiable or proper,’” the editorial concluded, “it would be difficult to find any one individual who would confess that privately he deplores it very much.”

  The effect of the lynching on the Italian-American community in New Orleans was profound. Many had been bullied since the start of the trial, leading them to quit their jobs in New Orleans or head back to Italy. When ships from Italy arrived packed with thousands of immigrants, they were taunted and jeered. The Italian government was furious over the treatment of men who had been acquitted by a jury, and diplomatic relations were strained for over a year. The wound festered after a grand-jury report exonerated the actions of the mob, describing its members as “several thousand of the first, best and even the most law-abiding” citizens. The press continued to sensationalize the story and frighten Americans, writing that the United States was on the verge of a naval war with Italy. Diplomatic relations were restored only after the US government agreed to pay a small reparation to some of the families of the murdered men—an action denounced by Congress.

  The trial over the murder of David Hennessy and the New Orleans lynching painted a portrait of Italian-American immigrants not only as poor and downtrodden, but as the dark-skinned “other”—born criminals, violent and primitive in nature. After the New Orleans lynching, the press began to routinely describe any crime committed by Italians as Mafia activity. The Italians of New Orleans, once eager to come to this land to escape the unending cycle of poverty and desperation, were cast together under a net of criminality. They were among the first victims of a troubling and persistent American tendency to target entire immigrant communities for the crimes of the few.

  The parish prison after the lynchings.

  The community never failed to remind Italian Americans of their presumed guilt over the murder of the city’s police chief. One taunt, mimicking the Italians’ broken English, began at the time of the trial and persisted for decades. Whether posed to a schoolchild desperate to assimilate into the mainstream or to a shopkeeper trying to earn a living, the question, designed to keep the ethnic group in its place, was always the same: “Who killa da chief?”

  Mulberry Street, circa 1900.

  In America, Italians rapidly encountered extraordinary difficulties, confined to backbreaking labor, cramped into squalid living, and maligned by accusations of an innate criminality. Yet still, with hope attached to hardship and the steady ache of desperation, they came, the majority leaving Italy from the port of Naples to arrive in New York Harbor. If their village lacked a railroad, the peasants would walk vast distances, with men, by some accounts, packing their belongings into saddlebags tossed atop tiny donkeys to travel over two hundred miles from the hills of Basilicata, then known as Lucania, to Naples. Nearly two million southern Italians came to the United States between 1898 and 1909.

  While the economy in America’s South languished at the end of the nineteenth century, in the Northeast workers were badly needed to fuel what some historians have called the second industrial revolution, the surge of development powered by electricity and fortified by steel. Italians came prepared to serve as the human capital in the undertaking of this immense production. Unlike immigrant groups who fled their countries because of political and religious persecution along with economic hardship, and knew they would never return home, most Italians came purely for economic reasons and hoped to return as soon as possible.

  The men usually arrived first, and wives, children, and other family members would be summoned if the husbands found steady work. Poor and desperate, these men took any jobs available and put themselves in extraordinarily dangerous situations digging the tunnels and erecting the pillars of the subway and rail lines, water systems, sewers, dams, and aqueducts in the Northeast.

  To be successful was to send money home—dollars that could mean the difference between life and death in parts of southern Italy. As one Calabrian peasant remarked, “Without America to send us money, we would now be eating one another.” In America, an Italian laborer could make $1.25 for ten hours of backbreaking work—the equivalent of a little over six lire. In Italy, a standard wage for twelve hours of work was one lira. Despite such deprivation, Italians wanted to return to Italy, convinced they could save enough money to live better there. No other immigrant group repatriated in numbers as high as the Italians; an estimated 50 percent went back permanently.

  For most immigrants, the arrival at Ellis Island followed a treacherous journey traveling in the ship’s steerage.

  Leaving the homeland was a trauma for every family member, and the effects of the departure would shape lives for generations to come. Mothers hung on to trains pulling out from the stations bound for port cities—a futile grasp in the knowledge that they might never see their sons again. Once arriving at the port, the emigrants had to contend with a variety of hucksters offering goods. Men sold rope—an essential item—because few could afford suitcases and most had packed makeshift bags constructed of wooden frames covered in paper and cloth. Along with their belongings, the emigrants would carry favorite foods like chunks of pecorino and sacks of chickpeas that could last the long sea voyage.

  Couples brought colorful balls of yarn, or thread from a favorite garment, to enact a farewell ritual. Once on board, the husband grabbed an end and tossed the yarn to his wife standing onshore. Each clung tightly as the ship slowly pulled out of the harbor and the ball unwound. The string bound the couple until they could hold on no longer; once it snapped from their grip, they watched it sway in the wind and gently descend into the vast sea.

  Sadness, fear, seasickness, scant food, and the smell of vomit defined each journey, along with the pungent disinfectant phenic acid. The peasants often brought their own bowls, attached to their necks by string, because the ones used on board carried thick layers of grime. The voyage itself could take from eleven days to four weeks over rough waters. Everyone packed in steerage, located near the rudder below the ship’s waterline, had the benefit of only a glimmer of light from a porthole. If someone perished during the journey, the body would be tossed into the ocean
.

  Italian mothers expressed their grief and skepticism in popular lullabies. A child asks for a hundred lire to go to America but the mother answers “no, no, no.” Another explains, “Your mother’s house is warm, is safe, is gold / Outside is dark, is black, the wolf is there.”

  At Ellis Island, examiners would inspect each prospective immigrant for any “defects” or health problems that would require them to mark an “X” on the person’s arm. Common illnesses of southern Italy, such as the eye disease trachoma, which was caused by drinking nonpotable water, would lead to deportation. When families began to arrive together in later years, an “X” from the medical exam could mean permanent separation.

  At Ellis Island, examiners would inspect immigrants for any “defects” or health problems.

  The questions asked by immigration officers posed more obstacles: Did you pay for your passage, and is a job waiting for you? A “yes” to the first question and a “no” to the second were the only acceptable answers. The American government was trying to put an end to the padrone system, which thrived among the first wave of immigrants. The padrone was the labor recruiter, the “patron” or boss, who persuaded the peasant farmer to come to America, lending him money for the voyage at a high interest rate—sometimes 100 percent—and expecting a piece of his wages once employed in the New World.

  At the bottom of the labor pool, Italians took whatever job was available.

  Observers compared the system to slave labor, but the worker, while badly treated, was also accustomed to the client-patron relationship of southern Italy and accepted his lot. The padrone did not hold these men as his personal property, and the laborer was dependent on but not completely subservient to his boss. Sometimes a padrone would be a man from the same village in Italy who had gone to America earlier and had the knowledge and contacts to pave the way for the next group of men. Despite the Americans’ interest in stopping the system, it eventually ended not from their efforts, but because enough Italians had arrived in the New World that family and friends could help bring over those who had remained.

  This derogatory sheet music made fun of the Italian peasants’ vowel-laden speech.

  The early immigrants’ back-and-forth pattern of migration gave them the name “birds of passage.” Sometimes they stayed no longer than six months and returned to Italy numerous times. The wives who remained behind, called “white widows,” wore all white to signal their precarious position instead of the traditional black mourning garb. Their social status in the village was a little above that of the wives whose husbands didn’t have the courage to leave. But there was also much gossip about these young women without husbands, and often families insisted that the woman live with the husband’s brother or parents in order to keep a close eye on her behavior.

  Although wages in the New World were extremely low, the few dollars sent back to Italy went a lot further than they did in America. This extra cash enabled mothers to feed their children and sometimes permitted them to buy meat or fish, a luxurious feast compared to a typical meal for impoverished peasants, which might consist solely of acqua sale, stale bread soaked in boiling water with a little salt and trickle of olive oil for some flavor.

  Workers laying out the warp for weaving cloth at a Pennsylvania silk mill.

  Immigrants who came into New York Harbor and decided to remain in the city would most likely live in Lower Manhattan or East Harlem, areas that housed the majority of Italians. Each block tended to attract specific regions from Italy. For example, Sicilians lived mostly on Elizabeth Street, while Mulberry Street tended to be Neapolitan. These immigrants each spoke the dialect of their region and often had a difficult time understanding the other dialects. Their living pattern continued a way of life known as campanilismo (from the word campanile, meaning “bell tower”)—the notion that a village was defined by being within hearing distance of the bell tower’s chime. Its meaning was also metaphoric: campanilismo suggested a parochialism that trailed the southern Italian and found a place among the newly defined boundaries of Manhattan’s narrow streets.

  The Italians may have stayed “with their own,” but they also needed the company of each other to mitigate the utter bleakness and squalor of the boardinghouses and tenements in which they lived. The tenements of New York City were shoddily built and prone to collapse, with sloping floors, improper ventilation, and almost no plumbing or heat (one tap for a floor was common, and toilets would be outside or in the cellar). These dark, narrow, vermin-ridden, severely overcrowded spaces were breeding grounds for diseases like smallpox, tuberculosis, and typhoid. Their horrendous conditions first came to light after the photojournalist Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives in 1890. “If we could see the air breathed by these poor creatures in their tenements,” a prominent doctor told Riis, “it would show the air to be fouler than the mud of the gutters.” Riis’s work helped galvanize attention to the horrendous living conditions, but a deep prejudice toward Italians, Jews, Chinese, and African Americans oozed from the journalist’s pen: “As the Chinaman hides his knife in his sleeve and the Italian hides his stiletto in the bosom, so the negro goes to the ball with a razor in his boot-leg.”

  Conditions in other Italian colonies, such as Boston’s North End and Chicago’s Near West End were similarly bleak: filth, vermin, and overcrowding created dehumanizing environments. As the Italian playwright Giuseppe Giacosa observed, “The only concern of Americans toward Italian immigrants is that of a sordid, degrading and insensible disinterest. The clothes, food and living quarters of the common Italian in New York and Chicago present a spectacle of such supine resignation to poverty.”

  Men assigned by their padrone to work gangs, such as those who built railroad tracks or labored in large factories, experienced some of the worst conditions. These men slept not in tenement slums, but in boxcars with “beds” constructed of boards placed over boxes and bags of straw serving as mattresses. The tiny, confined spaces would often be infested with roaches and bedbugs. Some men wrote of their discouragement—yes, they had come from abject poverty, but at least in southern Italy they had light and air and space, as well as a family to turn to in times of illness or trouble.

  If the southern Italian peasant once had imagined that America’s streets were paved with gold, soon he learned, as the old story goes, that one, they weren’t even paved, and two, he was expected to pave them. Arriving in the Northeast as a giant infrastructure was being put into place, the Italians, at the bottom of the labor pool, known as greenhorns, wops, dagos, and macaroni, took whatever job was available. Even for people accustomed to backbreaking work in the fields, the labor in the New World was exponentially more difficult—and dangerous. Failure on a construction job often led to fatalities, and the unluckiest of these workers suffered horrific deaths—impaled by steel, suffocated by concrete, drowned and trapped by exploding water mains.

  “Work! Sure!” a beleaguered laborer sarcasticially remarked in Pietro Di Donato’s Christ in Concrete, a novel based on the fate of the author’s father, who had been killed on a construction site. “For America beautiful will eat you and spit your bones into the earth’s hole.”

  Digging ditches, collecting garbage, paving roads, picking rags, washing dishes, peddling fruit, chiseling bricks, laying track, excavating tunnels and mines—these men, like each generation of immigrants who have come to America, had chosen to remove themselves from the familiar patterns of the life they had known for difficult and dispiriting work. The journey crushed some, others returned, and the rest built a new life in America, forever changing the course of their family story.

  Workers at a macaroni factory. Those who labored in large factories often experienced some of the worst conditions, sleeping in boxcars on beds made of loose boards and bags of straw.

  DOCUMENTI

  THE ART OF B. AMORE

  So who tells the story now? . . . The people are gone but their “things” are still here. Looking at, touching, holding them, the p
eople become present. Perhaps that is the attachment to existing objects. I am reminded of them and they are present in some way. The past and the present are intertwined. They exist simultaneously . . . The work is not about memory even though memory is a part of it. It’s much more about the questions that are raised—looking into the past for clues to the present. Who were these characters who had so much influence? What in their lives caused them to take the roles they did? Why were they the ways they were which affected me so deeply?

  —B. Amore, Journal

  Following the thread: B. Amore connects the panels documenting the lives of her great-grandparents with a red thread, symbolizing the farewell ritual of bringing a piece of yarn aboard the ship to America and letting it go as the vessel left the Italian port city. Her family’s nineteenth-century artifacts (on table) include a dowry knife, two reliquaries, a Libro di Memorie, passport, wedding cup, weights and measures, handmade tin-and-copper small pan, and handmade brass ravioli cutter.

  A clam vendor sells to customers on Mulberry Street.

  By the first decade of the twentieth century, wives and children were joining their husbands and families and beginning to establish roots in America. Italian enclaves known as Little Italies appeared in cities across the country: Philadelphia, Boston, Providence, Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland, and San Francisco. The largest by far was in New York City, and the area around Mulberry Street beat with the clamor and steady stream of urban life. Each decade, the number of Italians in New York City rose exponentially: while there were well under 100,000 Italians in 1890, by 1900 there were about 220,000, and by 1910 the already overcrowded housing swelled with more than half a million people.