Italian schoolchildren ate crusty bread, like the loaves sold at this Mulberry Street bakery, distinguishing their lunches from their classmates’ “American” food.
Becoming American meant rejecting one of the two worlds. It meant trying to hide the grease stains saturating the paper in which your school lunch of a fried potato and egg sandwich on crusty bread was wrapped, while the rest of your classmates ate ham on white bread with mayonnaise. Becoming American might mean dumping this sandwich in the garbage if you were too embarrassed to actually eat it in school—the act itself a blasphemy against the golden Italian rule of never throwing away good food. Becoming American meant speaking the dialect of your southern Italian region only at home, or listening to your parents but answering in English because that was your official language. Becoming American meant hearing slurs that now defined you and your people: dago, wop, guinea, spaghetti bender. And it also meant hearing your own parents and relatives reproachfully refer to you as the “Americano.” At the heart of being a second-generation American meant feeling the shame of your heritage and the sting of family betrayal, creating an inner turmoil from which one never fully escaped.
Rudolph Valentino
As a child, Rodolfo Guglielmi wanted to escape the boredom of his village in the province of Apulia. With a little luck, a magnetic stare, and a great pair of dancing legs, the restless boy from the village of Castellaneta would transform himself into Rudolph Valentino, Latin lover. Throughout his short life, Valentino faced both anti-Italian sentiment and the wrath of men who couldn’t believe that a swarthy southern European could steal the hearts of America’s wives and mothers.
Rodolfo’s family was a little better off than the rest of his village because his father, along with being a farmer, served as the local veterinarian. But a few years after his father’s death, Rodolfo, like most immigrants, crossed the ocean in a ship’s steerage.
After reaching New York and settling with relatives in Brooklyn, in 1913, he found a job as a landscaper on a Long Island estate. Always dreaming big, Rodolfo Guglielmi, like Jay Gatsby with rolling vowels, began to studiously imitate the mannerisms of the rich. The lessons were short-lived because he was quickly fired. He then supported himself through odd jobs like waiting tables, and he spent his free time in nightclubs, perfecting his tango and attracting the swoons of women wanting to be his partner. Beginning to make decent money dancing in cabarets and traveling for vaudeville tours, Rodolfo headed to Hollywood and changed his name to Rudolph Valentino.
His big career break came the next year when the influential screenwriter June Mathis insisted that he be cast as the lead in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the movie became a huge box office hit. There were few roles for Italians in Hollywood at the time other than villains and peasants, but Valentino carved a new niche as the romantic lead from faraway places. Soon he was living the life he dreamed of—with all the accoutrements of wealth, including limousines, paisley smoking jackets, and fawning beautiful women. When he was cast as an Arab prince in The Sheik, the frenzy—hysterical women begged for autographs and grabbed at his garments—was unlike any ever seen in America.
Valentino became a fantasy figure, who attracted millions of mature women, married with children, not the teenyboppers of later decades screaming first for crooners and then for rock stars. His presence on the big screen gave women in puritanical America permission to indulge sexual fantasies of the Mediterranean lover. His profile was even emblazoned on packages of “Sheik” condoms released in 1931.
But the backlash was almost as powerful as the craze. Valentino’s second wife (people believed the marriage to his first dance partner had never been consummated) was badly managing his career, choosing roles that made him look more and more effeminate. His preference for European styles and silks only made matters worse. Men so detested Valentino and his pomaded, slicked-back hair—nicknamed the “Vaseline-o”—that the Chicago Tribune wrote an editorial called “Pink Powder Puff” blasting his mannerisms. “When will we be rid of all these effeminate youths,” read the editorial, “pomaded, powdered, bejeweled and bedizened, in the image of Rudy—that painted pansy?” As early-twentieth-century Americans were articulating or subconsciously registering their contempt for dark southern Europeans arriving en masse, Valentino’s stratospheric rise, fame, and riches made him a magnet for this vitriol.
Shortly after the Tribune incident, Valentino collapsed in a New York hotel room from an acute gastric ulcer. The world watched as his health deteriorated, and several days later he died from a severe infection at the age of thirty-one. Nearly seventy-five thousand people waited for hours outside the funeral home to see the star in a casket covered in gold cloth. Women swayed, screamed, and fainted. Across the country, fans waited for the arrival of the funeral train, kneeling in prayer when it passed.
DOCUMENTI
FROM JOHN FANTE’S “THE ODYSSEY OF A WOP”
John Fante was born in Denver, Colorado, on April 8, 1909. He was the son of a bricklayer who had emigrated to the West from the region of Abruzzi in southern Italy. Fante created a deeply personal and confessional fiction about his first-generation parents, describing the conflict between trying to assimilate and retaining the values of their southern Italian village. In 1933, Fante’s short story “The Odyssey of a Wop” was published in the American Mercury, edited by his mentor, H. L. Mencken.
During a ball game on the school grounds, a boy who plays on the opposing team begins to ridicule my playing. It is the ninth inning, and I ignore his taunts. We are losing the game, but if I can knock out a hit our chances of winning are pretty strong. I am determined to come through, and I face the pitcher confidently. The tormentor sees me at the plate.
“Ho! Ho!” he shouts. “Look who’s up! The Wop’s up. Let’s get rid of the Wop!”
This is the first time anyone at school has ever flung the word at me, and I am so angry that I strike out foolishly. We fight after the game, this boy and I, and I make him take it back.
Now school days become fighting days. Nearly every afternoon at 3:15 a crowd gathers to watch me make some guy take it back. This is fun; I am getting somewhere now, so come on, you guys, I dare you to call me a Wop! When at length there are no more boys who challenge me, insults come to me by hearsay, and I seek out the culprits. I strut down the corridors . . .
I am nervous when I bring friends to my house; the place looks so Italian. Here hangs a picture of Victor Emmanuel, and over there is one of the cathedral of Milan, and next to it one of St. Peter’s, and on the buffet stands a wine pitcher of medieval design; it’s forever brimming, forever red and brilliant with wine. These things are heirlooms belonging to my father, and no matter who may come to our house, he likes to stand under them and brag.
So I begin to shout to him. I tell him to cut out being a Wop and be an American once in a while. Immediately he gets his razor strop and whales hell out of me, clouting me from room to room and finally out the back door. I go into the woodshed and pull down my pants and stretch my neck to examine the blue slices across my rump. A Wop, that’s what my father is! Nowhere is there an American father who beats his son this way. Well, he’s not going to get away with it; some day I’ll get even with him.
I begin to think that my grandmother is hopelessly a Wop. She’s a small, stocky peasant who walks with her wrists crisscrossed over her belly, a simple old lady fond of boys. She comes into the room and tries to talk to my friends. She speaks English with a bad accent, her vowels rolling out like hoops. When, in her simple way, she confronts a friend of mine and says, her old eyes smiling: “You lika go the Seester scola?” my heart roars. Mannaggia! I’m disgraced; now they all know that I’m an Italian.
Italian workers led the Lawrence millworkers’ strike after their wages were cut by thirty-two cents a week, the cost of four loaves of bread.
The America of 1912, plump with excess and inequalities created by the Gilded Age, was a society in which the richest 1 percent contro
lled half of the nation’s wealth—an even heftier proportion than today’s 1 percent, who hold roughly a 35 percent share. With the wheels of industrialization spinning faster each year, and few laws to protect them, workers were expected to toil for whatever pittance a boss saw fit to offer.
Lawrence, Massachusetts, housed the nation’s biggest textile mills, employing about twenty-eight thousand workers. The average wage varied slightly among the myriad ethnic groups working in Lawrence, with southern Italians earning on the lower end, about $6.50 a week. Among all of the textile mills, the American Woolen Company was the behemoth—a six-floor building comprising thirty acres that extended for a quarter of a mile along the Merrimack River.
The company’s owner, William Madison Wood, bought an island for himself off of Martha’s Vineyard, along with yachts, servants, and a vast collection of cars. Wood, whose changed name belies his ancestry as the son of Portuguese immigrants, seemed to believe that the luckiest few who make it need not look back. Had he just craned his neck, he would have seen that the vast majority of workers lived in housing so cramped, dilapidated, and disease ridden that the term “huddle fever” coined to describe the anxiety these conditions produced was quite apt.
The Italians who settled in Lawrence felt fooled, betrayed, and for a usually cynical people, hopelessly naïve. How could they have believed the posters the American Woolen Company had put up throughout villages and towns in southern Italy about this New England town? One poster declared, “No one goes hungry in Lawrence. Here all can work, all can eat”; it pictured a ten-member family marching into a mill, the father hugging a bag of gold. Once in Lawrence, they could barely afford to feed their families, many surviving on bread and molasses. Before they decided to take action, conditions were so bad that a typical millworker could expect to live only to the age of thirty-nine.
The spark that would lead to the conflagration—and to one of the most significant strikes in American labor history—was caused, ironically, by a progressive action. The Massachusetts legislature, recognizing the workers’ untenable conditions, passed a law that reduced the workweek from fifty-six to fifty-four hours. They had passed similar legislation a few years earlier, and the mill owners had accepted its consequences; but this time, in January 1912, when the new law was to take effect, the owners refused to lose any more money and responded in marketplace fashion, cutting the workers’ pay by two hours, or thirty-two cents, a week.
For the workers, any cut in pay would be catastrophic. Although they crowded into some of the most dilapidated housing stock in the nation, developers scooped up the land and rented it for high prices, charging around three dollars a week for a cold-water flat. With these meager wages it was nearly impossible to save any money and feed and clothe their families. The cut would cost them four loaves of bread. Rumors swirled for months, but once the actual deduction appeared in their checks, a group of workers entered the mills shouting, “Short pay! All out!” This call began a walkout that would last over two months and fundamentally change the way many first-generation Italians in Lawrence saw their place in American society.
In earlier strikes, Italians, the lowest on the rung and in desperate need of work, had crossed picket lines as scabs. But this time Italians led the strike, acting from a nascent understanding that they were fighting for economic and social justice. One mill worker, a twenty-eight-year-old Italian immigrant named Angelo Rocco who had come to America in 1902, recognized that twenty-eight thousand strikers, who collectively spoke over forty-five languages, needed a strong union to keep them united after their first spontaneous walkout.
Rocco sent a telegram to the offices of the Industrial Workers of the World, the union that was nicknamed the “Wobblies” and was known for its radicalism. The IWW had formed in response to the American Federation of Labor, which at the time represented only skilled workers, not immigrant laborers. An IWW organizer and second-generation Italian American named Joseph Ettor saw Rocco’s entreaty and, after discussing the situation with his colleagues, boarded a train to Lawrence. He would also recruit a fellow paesano to Lawrence, his friend Arturo Giovannitti, a poet and editor of a Socialist weekly newspaper called Il Proletario.
In the following days, the mood of the strike reflected the river’s ebb and flow: the heightened joy of morning solidarity often was depleted by the terror of chance events later in the afternoon. The mayor organized a state militia (which included student volunteers from Harvard, who were given credit on their midterm exams if they helped), armed with guns and bayonets to block access to the mills and canals. The strikers responded to the blockade by marching in a moving picket line, gathering by the thousands in the town’s center and singing and chanting in English, as well as their native languages of Italian, French, Polish, Russian, Portuguese, Greek, and German. The Italians waved the flags of the United States and Italy, declaring their heritage while acknowledging they were now American and would fight for the rights promised in this new land.
But as the weeks drew on, the workers’ jubilant voices thinned as violent clashes between the strikers and militia intensified. Having no clear sight of an endgame, the strikers were in danger of losing their stamina and resolve. Angelo Rocco’s hunch had been right: the organizers of the IWW provided the glue holding together this motley coalition of millworkers.
Unified, the striking millworkers sang and chanted in their many native languages.
Ettor, known as “Smiling Joe,” was a charismatic organizer and skilled orator who beseeched the strikers not to separate by ethnicity but to work collectively, and who enforced a strict policy of no violence, telling workers to always keep “their hands in their pockets” to escape any accusations. Ettor was fluent in several languages, which helped his ability to communicate with the workers, but it was his friend Arturo Giovannitti who proved the greatest inspiration to the crowd.
Arturo Giovannitti had come to the New World not to escape poverty, but to find a more just society than the monarchy he had left behind in Italy. He was the son of a pharmacist from the town of Ripabottoni in Molise and had received a classical high school education there. Both of his parents were inspired by the Republican values of Mazzini and encouraged their son to board a ship to Canada to study theology at McGill University. After graduating, Giovannitti had come to the United States, first working as an assistant pastor in a mining village in Pennsylvania.
Giovannitti’s theological training, which later evolved into an agnostic socialism, served him well in Lawrence. Just a few days after his arrival, he mesmerized a large crowd gathered at the Lawrence Commons with his “Sermon on the Commons,” a peroration that echoed the language of the Gospel’s Sermon on the Mount and applied its principles of social justice to the millworkers’ struggle.
“Blessed are the strong in freedom’s spirit,” Giovannitti exhorted, “for theirs is the kingdom of the earth. Blessed are the rebels: for they shall reconquer the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after equality: for they shall eat the fruit of their labor. Blessed are the strong: for they shall not taste the bitterness of pity. Blessed are the sincere in heart: for they shall see the truth. And blessed are they that do battle against wrong: for they shall be called the children of Liberty.”
Giovannitti’s words captivated the workers, crystallizing their inchoate feelings into a rallying cry for justice and a belief that victory was in reach. Yet the exuberance of that day would be short lived. On January 29, 1912, seventeen days after the strike began and several days after the Sermon on the Commons, someone fired a shot during a mass demonstration. Police blamed the strikers; the strikers blamed the police. Whoever fired, the untraceable bullet struck and killed a thirty-three-year-old millworker named Anna LoPizzo.
Although the police acknowledged that Ettor and Giovannitti were miles from the demonstration, they nevertheless arrested them, along with a millworker and strike leader named Joseph Caruso, and charged all three with murder by “inciting and provoking the vi
olence,” which would lead to the death penalty if they were convicted. (The prior year, a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City had killed 146 workers. The management’s standard practice of locking the factory doors to stop workers from taking breaks proved catastrophic. Yet the owners were charged merely with manslaughter, of which they were acquitted; they had only to pay a fine.)
The police arrested union organizers Arturo Giovannitti and Joseph Ettor for a murder committed at a demonstration miles from where they were that day.
By putting the men in jail without bail, the mayor and prosecutors conveniently removed Ettor and Giovannitti from the streets and organizing halls. The IWW filled this void by sending their noted leader “Big” Bill Haywood to Lawrence. His commanding presence, and the attention created from the leaders’ arrests, brought national reporters to the scene. Haywood proved to be equally skilled, but he also had trepidation about the uphill battle the union faced with its resolute position that only a 15 percent wage increase would settle the strike. With no clear end in sight, they needed, in today’s parlance, a game changer, and a few Italian labor activists whom Haywood encountered in New York City’s Union Square gave him one.
The activists told Haywood that in some Italian towns, strikers employed a strategy of sending their children to families in other cities to keep them out of danger and to free up workers to meet the rigorous demands of conducting a strike. Haywood liked the idea and the attention it would receive, but he recognized the tremendous potential for something to go wrong if children were involved.
The Italian Americans Page 8
