The Italian Americans

by Maria Laurino

  In America, Italians continued the practice of bringing their faith to public spaces, especially their devotion to the Madonna.

  As the years went by, the celebration grew larger, attracting five hundred thousand by the 1930s, as did the spectacle in the streets. Thousands upon thousands marched, carrying votive candles in the night. Fireworks exploded, and the smells of sautéing sausages and crispy zeppole, fried dough sprinkled with sugar or honey, infused the thick summer air. There were games, rides, and gambling in a Fellini-like spectacle that, as the Irish clergy saw it, mixed the sacred and profane.

  But for the Italians, while the festa offered gaiety, it was profoundly serious, their sacrifice announced by every blistered foot and pound of wax hefted and lit at the altar. They were worshipping their most revered figure, next to Jesus: the mother who protected them and their children, and who served as a purity figure for the girls. The women were the main standard bearers of this faith during the year, although the men participated in the annual celebration. Who better than she—they said of their Madonna, witness to and carrier of the world’s suffering—could understand the pain of their sacrifice and hardship in Italy and America?

  She helped them as they adapted to a new land and culture, and she continued to respond to their needs as the decades marched on. During World War II, Italian mothers came to her, desperate for a sign that their sons would be safe. Those sons wore her image on scapulars as they entered battle, and the wounded would pray to her for healing. Families wrote petitions to the Madonna that were published in the parish’s newsletter.

  By the 1950s, the East Harlem community had begun to adopt more of the established structures of the American Catholic Church, hosting Holy Name Society and PTA meetings. They still celebrated the grand festa, but many social activities now took place inside the church and preoccupied them during the year. The power of the Madonna over the community began to wane by the 1960s and ’70s, as Italian Americans moved out of their urban apartments to buy homes in the suburbs. Yet often they would come back for the July celebration, thousands marching, both to proclaim the form of Catholicism Italians felt most comfortable practicing and to remember the East Harlem of their parents’ or grandparents’ youth. The festa became as much about memory and nostalgia—in its most traditional meaning of a longing for one’s former homeland—as a religious celebration.

  The devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel continues today.

  Today, over 130 years later, the celebration continues, and families return to East Harlem to join a small Italian-American population. The majority of pilgrims who go to Our Lady of Mount Carmel for the annual festa are Haitian Americans. The Haitians share the same patron saint, adding the sounds of French Creole to the chants and susurrations. Inside the church, the Madonna from Polla presides on her altar, but the Haitians pray to another statue of the Madonna, whose skin coloring is a shade darker. Crowding their Madonna, they place petitions in her hands, along with small change, worshipping, like the Italian pilgrims before them, a spirit who listens quietly and takes heed of their suffering and sacrifices.

  After the anarchist bombings, the government raided the headquarters of the IWW in New York.

  The mystical faith of Italian Americans, passionately expressed in an outreach to saints and outpouring into the streets, offered solace and guidance to millions finding their way in a newly adopted country. In the early twentieth century, however, a small group of Italian Americans practiced a secular idea with a fervor normally associated with religious devotion. This group venerated the philosophy of anarchism.

  While anarchism took root in other European countries, particularly Russia, France, and Germany, in Italy the movement was abetted by a deep-seated suspicion of the government, military, and church, all of which were believed to have turned a blind eye throughout history to the desperate plight of the people. The anarchist movement was a means, its devotees believed, to restore human dignity stripped away by conquerors, monarchs, and corrupt clergy.

  Anarchism established sturdier roots among Italians in America than it did in Italy, where socialist thinking was more popular. In the New World, the immigrants arrived with dreams of a just and fair American system to replace the broken one they had left behind. As those dreams turned to ash in the furnace of a newly industrialized America, the radical anarchist ideology took hold.

  The anarchists held a Utopian belief that a world without rules and laws would bring out the best, not the worst, in human nature. Opposite to the Hobbesian notion that a central government was necessary to combat the “nasty, brutish, and short” life of man, the Italian anarchist leader Luigi Galleani believed that a world without government would be one of cooperation, collectivism, and liberty. By eliminating laws, private property, and the profit motive, men and women could act as creative individuals and live fulfilling and ethical lives without the constrictions of church or state.

  La Cronaca Sovversiva (“Subversive Chronicle”) was the anarchist newspaper of Luigi Galleani, who wanted to abolish all civic and religious institutions. Sacco and Vanzetti developed their views about anarchism from this publication.

  Anarchist circles also provided a sense of community for isolated immigrants overwhelmed by the harsh demands of daily life. They gathered for picnics and weekly meetings, formed theatrical groups, and put on plays to express their ideas and imagine a life beyond the grinding workplace conditions they faced. They clung tenaciously to this “ism,” the most radical challenge to capitalism, proclaiming that human beings were not machines and that the system perpetuating their mistreatment had to be abolished.

  Two men, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, would come to represent the idea of Italian anarchism in this country, and ultimately would be put to death for a crime they vehemently denied committing. Throughout the twentieth century, their dolorous faces, like a Rorschach test, would be sanctified or vilified, their piercing stares reflecting the plea of martyrs or the sneer of militants, the interpretation dependent on one’s political leanings and worldview.

  An anarchist movement developed in the United States in the early 1900s with the intent of improving worker conditions.

  Ironically, these men who, in America, had abandoned religion for atheism would be remembered as Christ-like figures sacrificed on the cross of a venal and corrupt judicial system. In one of Vanzetti’s prison letters, he described the seven excruciating years awaiting the promise of a new trial or the finality of death as his “ascension to the Golgotha.” He wrote, “It is good for them if they succeed to loosen me . . . crushed in flesh and in spirit—a shadow of a man, a human rag—and still better to them if they will turn me out well nailed amongst six cheap planks.”

  Sacco and Vanzetti both emigrated to America in 1908. Sacco was from the village of Torremaggiore in southern Italy; Vanzetti, from the town of Villafalletto in the northern Piedmont region. While neither family was wealthy, both men had fared much better in Italy than the average peasant. From the beginning of their journey to America, these two men, who would be forever linked in history, possessed different dreams and dispositions. Sacco wanted to fulfill the desire of many Italian boys—to come to a new land of promise and opportunity—and after arriving in America, he soon married and had a child. Vanzetti was a loner who never married. He left Italy in deep grief over his mother, who had died in his arms from cancer. His father begged him to stay with the family and help care for his toddler siblings, but Vanzetti saw the ocean as perhaps the only vessel that could contain his vast grief.

  Sacco’s father owned vineyards and olive orchards, and the son would bring his inherited passion for outdoor life and gardening to the New World, even taking note in his prison cell of “the beautiful cloves and the red black beauty vivid roses” friends brought. After working in a series of construction jobs, he decided to apprentice in a shoe factory and eventually mastered the skill, becoming an edge trimmer and earning the excellent salary, for an immigrant, of roughly eighty dollars a
week.

  While he did not share the economic plight of his fellow Italians, Sacco deeply sympathized with them and became angered by the exploitation he saw. Living near Boston, Sacco read about the Lawrence strike and the arrests of Ettor and Giovannitti, and he committed himself to helping the strikers and their cause. He wrote to his daughter, his second child, whom he would come to know only through prison bars, that “the nightmare of the lower classes saddened very badly your father’s soul.”

  Bartolomeo Vanzetti had a much more difficult time adjusting to life in America. Lonely, miserable, and needing work, he was horrified by the poverty and deprivation that he witnessed in New York. He found a job as a dishwasher but struggled to live on the paltry sum of six dollars a week for seventy hours of labor. The tiny steaming spaces in which he worked irritated his lungs, already damaged by pleurisy. He traveled to other states, but life remained just as bleak, digging ditches and building railroads. He returned to New York to try to find work as a pastry chef, a trade he had practiced in Italy, but employment was sporadic, and for stretches of time he ended up homeless. Eventually, Vanzetti settled in Massachusetts and seemed most content working outdoors as a fish peddler.

  A pamphlet published by Luigi Galleani’s radical Gruppo Autonomo urged the electorate not to vote.

  Vanzetti was raised Roman Catholic, played priest in childhood games with his sister, and staunchly defended the religion in adolescence. But his mother’s illness and death began to destroy his faith, and as a teenager he abandoned it. Waiting in the New World for Vanzetti was the new belief system of anarchism, and he passionately embraced it. In his letters he described anarchism “as beauty as a woman for me, perhaps even more . . . Calm, serene, honest, natural, viril, muddy and celestial at once.”

  Some anarchists, like Carlo Tresca, advocated working with labor unions to effect change, but Sacco and Vanzetti followed the most radical strain of the movement put forth by Luigi Galleani, who Vanzetti referred to as “our master.” Galleani, a prolific writer and mesmerizing speaker, believed that if the monarchies of Europe were inherently corrupt and capitalism devoured the possibilities of fair democracy in America, then all of these systems had to be abolished. According to intellectual historian Paul Avrich, the Galleanisti saw themselves as “slayers of tyrants, wreakers of vengeance, fighters for freedom.”

  Galleani sought “the Ideal”—a world free of government, law, and property—but this Ideal would have to be achieved by violent insurrection. He published a manual called La salute è in voi! (“Health is in you!”), which detailed the ingredients and recipe for bomb making. Galleani believed that bombings and assassinations were justified because the victims were capitalists and government officials. Sacco and Vanzetti were not pacifists or naïfs, as many have portrayed them. They were faithful members of Galleani’s Gruppo Autonomo and planning a world that could match their anarchist dreams. The ethical ideas and whimsical musings portrayed in the hundreds of letters they wrote in prison contradict the affiliations and friendships they both kept with violent bombers, or perhaps reveal the darkest conflicts of the human soul.

  As April drew to a close in 1919, thirty bombs were sent in packages labeled “Gimbel Brothers, New York” to capitalists, jurists, and political figures who had suppressed radical action and union strikes, including John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, William Madison Wood, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Civil liberties had been severely restricted since the country’s 1917 entry into World War I. Even speaking against the war could land someone in prison, and radicals under assault were determined to strike back.

  Stamped on each package wrapped in brown paper were the words “novelty” and “sample,” with the logo of an alpine mountain climber and the return address of the Gimbel Brothers’ department store. The cardboard box contained a glass bottle filled with powerful homemade explosives. Intricately constructed and requiring significant skills to assemble, the explosives suggested that the bomb makers possessed technical acumen but lacked sophistication: they naïvely assumed that a figure like John D. Rockefeller opened his own mail.

  The first person gravely injured was a black maid who lost her hands opening the deadly container. The package had been sent to an ex-senator from Georgia who had cosponsored deportation legislation. A New York City postal worker reading about the crime on his subway ride home remembered seeing packages similarly addressed. He immediately returned to the post office and discovered sixteen boxes with Gimbel Brothers labels sitting undelivered because of “insufficient postage.” The anarchists’ scheme and dream—to have all the bombs explode on May Day—failed because someone neglected to lick enough stamps. (This wasn’t the first time the Galleanisti erred in attempting to carry out their revolutionary plots: In 1916, a follower tried to assassinate the new Roman Catholic cardinal of Chicago at a banquet honoring him by putting arsenic in the soup. The poisoned stock sickened the two hundred guests, but no one died. The anarchist chef, heavy-handed with the arsenic, had poured so much into the steaming pot that everyone merely vomited it up.)

  By early June, the anarchists had regrouped and decided to carry out their mission personally. Across the street from where Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt lived in Washington, DC, in front of the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, a handsome, nattily dressed man held a suitcase containing a powerful bomb. Echoing the macabre slapstick of “insufficient postage” and arsenic-laced soup, the assailant either tripped or improperly timed the fuse. The bomb blew him to pieces, and its powerful force shattered Palmer’s windows and tossed people from their beds a few houses away. That same evening in other parts of the country—Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Boston, New York, and New Jersey—bombs went off, timed like tolling bells to create maximum chaos and confusion. The carefully picked destinations for the deadly devices included the rectory of a Catholic church and the homes of those who had suppressed radicals.

  Anarchist followers of Luigi Galleani attempted to blow up the house of US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer.

  Flyers titled “Plain Words” that denounced capitalist abuses and declared future bloodshed and destruction blew in the wind at the scenes of the crimes. The literature eventually was traced to members of Luigi Galleani’s Gruppo Autonomo in Boston. The dead man outside Palmer’s house, Carlo Valdinoci, was a friend of Sacco and Vanzetti’s, and his sister came to live with the Saccos after her brother’s death. Another Gruppo Autonomo member and good friend of both men, Mario Buda, was tied to several of these bombings and believed responsible for the Wall Street explosions set off five days after the indictment of Sacco and Vanzetti—most likely in protest—that killed over thirty people and wounded hundreds. Buda is believed to have placed one hundred pounds of dynamite in a horse-drawn wagon along with five hundred pounds of cast-iron weights, detonating it across the street from J. P. Morgan bank and causing America’s greatest terrorist disaster of the time.

  Throughout its history, the US government has never taken kindly to, or sat passively before, acts of terrorism. Anarchism was outlawed in 1901, after a Polish anarchist shot President William McKinley, and Attorney General Palmer responded to the 1919 incidents with a broad sweep known as “the Palmer raids,” in which he deported over four thousand people, many without due process, thought to be involved in radical activity. At the time, the country was also reeling from the Red Scare; the Bolsheviks had taken control in Russia, and people feared the revolution would spread to America.

  It was under these circumstances that police arrested Sacco and Vanzetti for a robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1920 with little credible evidence connecting the men, particularly Vanzetti, to the crime. Two men had been murdered in a payroll robbery, and a police chief decided that anarchists trying to finance their activities—not previously suspected local thugs—had committed the crime. The police chief linked a stolen car in a repair shop to the robbery and told the mechanic to inform him of anyone who came looking for it. When Sacco
and Vanzetti arrived to claim the car of their friend, Mario Buda, the mechanic’s wife called the police, who eventually caught up with the men after they had boarded a trolley car.

  At the time of their arrest, Sacco and Vanzetti were both armed, probably because of their growing fear that the feds were closing in on Gruppo Autonomo. One recently arrested member had jumped to his death from the window of a federal office building after breaking the anarchists’ code by revealing the names of coconspirators. Sacco and Vanzetti later said they had intended to gather and hide anarchist literature that evening (Upton Sinclair, who researched the case, argued that “literature” was merely a euphemism for explosives). After being arrested, and not knowing what crime they had been accused of, both men repeatedly lied when questioned about their evening activities. Their responses and evasions would be held against them during the course of the trial.

  The presiding judge, Webster Thayer, declared that the conviction of both men would rest not on a positive identification—indeed there were far too many conflicting testimonies—but on a “consciousness of guilt” to the South Braintree crime, which the prosecution argued the men had displayed upon arrest. Yet Sacco and Vanzetti lied probably to avoid being linked to their anarchist circle and activities that evening, not, as the judge implied, to distance themselves from the payroll crime.