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On the Trail of The Immigrant

<h2>XVIII THE ITALIAN IN AMERICA</h2> IT is hard to determine how long it is since the first Savoyard came to our country with his trained bears, making them dance to the squeaky notes of his reed instrument, as he wandered from town to town. He and the man with the monkey and organ were of the same adventurous stock, and they were the vanguard of a vast army of men who were to come; first with a push-cart, later with shovel and pickax. Not to destroy, but to build up and to help in the great conquest of nature’s resources, so abundantly bestowed upon this continent. While the average Italian immigrant is not regarded by any of us as a public benefactor, it is a question just how far we could have stretched our railways and ditches without him; for he now furnishes the largest percentage of the kind of labour which we call unskilled, and he is found wherever a shovel of earth needs to be turned, or a bed of rock is to be blasted. Hundreds of thousands come each year and each one of them fits into the work awaiting him, moving on to a new task when the old one is finished. The kind of work which they do calls for unattached, migrating labour, and eighty per cent. of those who come have no marriage ties to hinder their movements. When the winter comes and out of door work grows slack, or when the labour market is depressed, these unattached forces return to Italy and bask in its sunshine until conditions for labour on this side of the sea grow brighter. Their quarters, which are as near as possible to their work, are easily recognized; not because they are more slovenly than their neighbours, but because there is such a “helter skelter, I don’t care” sort of atmosphere about their squalor. This comes from the fact that they regard their quarters as purely temporary, and treat them as one might a camping-ground, which to-morrow is to be abandoned for a better site. Like all foreigners, they prefer to be among their own; not so much from a feeling of clannishness, although that is not absent; but because among their own, they are safe from that ridicule which borders on cruelty, and with which the average American treats nearly every stranger not of his complexion or speech. In passing through Connecticut, where nearly each large town has its Italian colony, I found one lonely Italian asking the conductor whether this was the train for New York. “Which way want you go?” (Usually the American thinks that the foreigner can understand poor English.) All the Italian knew, he repeated: “New York—New York.” The conductor left the puzzled man standing on the platform and the train moved on. I remained with the Italian and saw him three times treated similarly, if not worse, and I concluded that it is not very safe for the Italian to distribute himself too thinly over this continent. The Italian usually moves into quarters formerly occupied by the Irish or Jews, whose demands have risen with their better earnings, and who have left the congested districts for the uptown or the suburbs. At present it is no doubt true that the Italian is satisfied by these quarters, and that what nobody wants, he is ready to take. So it is that he comes to the edges of the great Ghetto in New York, to Bleecker Street and beyond, and that his trail leads almost into the heart of it. Jewish and Italian push-cart peddlers stand side by side, the Italian barber shop seeks Semitic customers, the smells from the “Genoese Restaurant” blend with those from the “Kosher Kitchen,” and the air is disturbed by the perfumes of garlic and paprika, a combination not half so bad as it smells. In Chicago, “Little Italy” hovered around a large district condemned to the sheltering of vice, and when good business sense dictated that it be moved to some less conspicuous portion of the town, it was immediately invaded by Italians. Scarcely a day had passed, yet the change made was as complete as it was revolutionary. Large plate windows were broken and pillows were stuck into the aperture to keep out the lake breeze; the broad stairways which had led to destruction were slippery now, but not so dangerous as before; the large parlours were divided and subdivided, while the gay paper was torn from the walls; it looked as though conquerors had come who were bent upon destruction. A happy change was manifest in the streets, for it was full of children, and the innocent face of a child had not been seen in those streets for years. Housing conditions among the Italians are as bad as can be imagined and the most crowded quarters in our cities are those inhabited by them. Four hundred and ninety-two families in one block is the record, and it is held by New York, on Prince Street, between Mott and Elizabeth Streets; while Philadelphia can boast of having the most unwholesome tenements, where air is a luxury and daylight unknown. In that city thirty families numbering 123 persons, were living in thirty-four rooms. Of course the landlord who builds these shacks and the community which tolerates them, are equally to blame. Both commit a crime against society, but a good share of the blame must fall upon the Italian himself for being satisfied with such surroundings. He is of course anxious to save money, and a decent dwelling in our large cities is a luxury; so he who at home used the heavens for the roof of his tenement, and the long street for his parlour, is naturally content with but a small shelter for the night. Considering the conditions under which the Italians live, their quarters are not nearly so bad as one might expect, and when a period of prosperity has come upon the community, when it can look back upon a year or two of consecutive work, they show in common with other foreign quarters, decided improvement. Rather characteristic is the tenement district of Hartford, Conn., which has gone through all the stages of such districts in other cities, is no better than they, and in many respects worse. There are buildings occupied which would be condemned elsewhere as unfit for human habitation. There are whole blocks which look damp, dingy and dirty; ancient structures, with filth oozing from every pore. Jews and Italians are the chief inhabitants of this district, although one comes across a stranded American family here and there, the dregs of New England, the most hopeless people in this new city of ancient tenements. The two nationalities live rather close together, and it is a mixture of Russian and Italian dirt, the Italian article being much the cleaner. Walk through the streets with me and you will readily forget that you are in America. Here Pietro, the shoemaker, on his three-legged stool, mends boots out on the streets; while Lorenzo shaves his customer upon the pavement in front of his shop. Gossiping groups of swarthy neighbours sit together upon the threshhold of their homes, and Bianca, Lorenzo’s wife, is complaining in a loud voice that Pietro, the shoemaker, has called her a hussy. “And he a low-down Sicilian, a good for nothing, has called me, the barber’s wife, a hussy.” She is rousing the ire of her neighbours, and woe to Pietro, for Lorenzo’s wife has a temper. They do look so unchanged as yet, nearly all of them—so genuinely homely, as if they had landed but yesterday; and they have not yet gone through the transforming process, except as Francesco, the chief of the hurdy-gurdy grinders, has changed one or two tunes of his repertoire; for he appeases the New England conscience by playing “Nearer, My God to Thee,” with variations, “Rock of Ages,” closely followed by “Tammany,” and airs from Cavaliero Rusticana. If the Italian in Hartford were less handicapped by the wretched conditions of his dwelling, he would more easily be able to utilize the splendid advantages of that city. As it is, he rises very slowly but perceptibly; although he lives in the worst possible houses, he is growing more and more cleanly; he is gaining in self-respect and when he has had the opportunity and the experience of the Irish people, he will probably not only duplicate their splendid record in New England and elsewhere, but excel it. Slowly but surely he is rising from a tenement dweller to a tenement owner and soon he “will do others as he was done,” and charge exorbitant rent for uninhabitable quarters. The Italian is regarded as a good asset in the real estate business, for he can be crowded more than any other human being. He is fairly prompt with his rent and he does not make heavy demands in the way of improvements. This he himself appreciates, for he has business sense, and buys real estate as soon as he can invest his small earnings. Usually he acquires a small house with a large mortgage. He moves into the house at once, proceeds to draw revenue from every available corner, and in a few years lifts the mortgage and is on his way to buy more real estate. The value of the business is proved by the fact that in the Italian quarters in New York 800 Italians are owners of houses, a large proportion of course being tenements of the worst character, which nevertheless, represent the respectable value of $15,000,000. A like large sum lies in the savings banks of that city, deposited by Italian immigrants; while the total value of all the property owned by them in the city of New York alone, is not far from $70,000,000. These figures, I must confess, do not impress me, for the sufferings endured and meted out for the sake of these earnings are terrible, and in the “tit for tat” of our economic order the Italian gives as good as he gets. The narrow quarters he rents are invariably sublet, and he imposes upon the newcomer conditions as hard as, or harder than, those under which he began life in the land of the free. The hardest conditions are those he imposes upon his wife and children; yet he is not a cruel husband or father, and shares their hard labour, often making the children part owners of what they earn. Of course the western and southern cities where the Italians have settled make a better showing, for they are not the men who came but yesterday; they have had a larger opportunity and have made full use of it. Italian clubs, opera houses, and Chambers of Commerce, are being organized in the western and southern cities; and one can judge of the quality of our Italian immigrant best, where the struggle for life is not too keen, the surroundings not so terribly depressing, and where the American spirit has had a chance to be grafted upon the Latin stock. More and more he is leaving the city and in the Southwest especially, colonies of Italians are springing up and are conducted with such eminent success, that with some encouragement, the Italian may be made helpful in reclaiming our arid deserts, even as he is now making the rocky hill farms of Connecticut and Massachusetts to “blossom as the rose.” Among these settlements, that at Bryan, Texas, is the most notable. It is composed of what we usually call the least desirable Italian element, the Sicilian. Nearly twenty-five hundred people have settled there as renters, although not a few of them are owners of the land they work. Some eighteen miles separate the various families, all of whom come from near Palermo, and have lived together in reasonable harmony, making rapid financial progress. They are as peaceful a community as is found in so turbulent a state as Texas. In Utah and California the progress made is still more marked; and proves that the Italian like the rest of us needs only a fair chance. I have had good opportunity also to observe him in his migratory state, attached to a construction crew on the railroad, and tenting by a cut in the rock, or by the western fields. Usually the farmer fears his coming. The word “Dago” has in it an element of dread; it carries the sound of the dagger, and the dynamite bomb. The far away villager who sees the camp approaching fears its proximity. I have watched the Italians coming and going and although there was a heated brawl at times, they quarrelled among themselves, disturbed nobody, left the hen coops of the farmers untouched, did not burn down the village, and paid decently for their food. When they went away a fairly good source of revenue had disappeared and with it a good share of unreasoning prejudice. <ANTIMG src="images/ill_pg_270_sml.jpg" width-obs="353" height-obs="500" alt="THE BOSS Where a shovel of earth is to be turned, or a bed of rock is to be blasted, there the Italian, unattached, migratory, contributes his share to the public welfare." title="THE BOSS" /> THE BOSS Where a shovel of earth is to be turned, or a bed of rock is to be blasted, there the Italian, unattached, migratory, contributes his share to the public welfare. As competitors in certain fields of activity they are justly feared by those who have regarded those fields as their own peculiar province; and they are pushing the Russian Jew very hard in his monopoly of the manufacture of clothing. The nimble fingers of the Italian woman, her lesser demands upon life, and the ease with which she carries the burdens of wifehood and motherhood, have enabled her to outdistance the workers of the Ghetto, although the strife is still on and the issue not decided. Yet I believe that the future clothing worker in America will be the Italian and not the Jew; for the Jew loves life and its good things, and moreover he has educational ambitions for his children, which the Italian does not yet feel, he being a sinner above all others in the use of his children’s labour. The Chicago truant officers have had the privilege of arresting nearly all the parents of one “Little Italy” at least once; for almost every child of school age was kept at home and “sweated” for all the strength it possessed. The Italian is very fertile in inventing excuses for the purpose of evading the law, and his ethical standard in that direction is still extremely low. This comes from his inherited hatred of all governmental restrictions; he still thinks that the state seeks only its own good and his hurt, in its insistence upon the education of his children. Substantially this is the Italian’s attitude towards law in general; and to that in a large measure is due the fact that he rates relatively high in the statistics of crime. I have thus far refrained from using statistics, largely because they may be juggled with, as has been done very successfully; just as zealots juggle with Bible texts to prove their contentions. I have done something besides gathering figures, and that something may be of importance. I have visited nearly all the penitentiaries in the eastern and western States; not to ask how many foreigners there are in jail, but to ask why and how they were convicted, what their present behaviour is; to look the men and women squarely in the face and to converse with them. Let me say here again, emphatically, that statistics are misleading and that in spite of the large number of Italians in prison, there are by far fewer criminals among them than the statistics indicate. In a large number of cases, the crimes for which the Italian suffers, have grown out of local usage in his old home. None the less are they justly punished here, lest they be permitted to perpetuate themselves in the new home. Most of the Italians in prison have used the stiletto and the pistol too freely, just as they used them at home when jealousy made them mad, or when they were in pursuit of vengeance for real or fancied wrongs. There are not a few real criminals who have used the weapon for gain, but in the majority of cases the stabbing or shooting was an affair of honour with those concerned, and even the aggrieved parties preferred to suffer in silence and die, bequeathing their grudge to the next generation, rather than bring the affair before a sordid court. Testimony in such cases is very hard to get, and I have seen many a wounded Italian bite his lips, inwardly groaning, and suffering in silence, unwilling to let strange ears hear the proud secret of which he was the keeper and the victim. Italian burglars have not reached proficiency enough to have a place in the “Hall of Infamy,” and bank robbers and “hold-up” men need not yet fear serious competition from that source. The prisons contain many Italians who transgressed out of ignorance as well as from passion; numbers suffer because they do not know the language of the court, and did not have enough coin of the realm. The worst thing about the Italians is that they have no sense of shame or remorse. I have not yet found one of them who was sorry for anything except that he had been caught; and in his own eyes and in the eyes of his friends, he is “unfortunate” when he is in prison and “lucky” when he comes out. “He no bad” his neighbour says: “He good, he just caught,” and when he comes out, he is received like a hero. This is the severest indictment that can be brought against the Italian, and it is severe enough; but it comes largely from his attitude towards the State and from the nature of the crime. Lillian Betts, who knows her foreigners critically and sympathetically, says: “In New York, the streets the Italians live in are the most neglected, the able head of this department claiming that cleanliness is impossible where the Italian lives. The truth is that preparation for cleanliness in our foreign colonies is wholly inadequate. The police despise the Italian except for his voting power. He feels the contempt but with the wisdom of his race he keeps his crimes foreign, and defies this department more successfully than the public generally knows. He is a peaceable citizen in spite of the peculiar race crimes which startle the public. The criminals are as one to a thousand of these people. On Sundays watch these colonies. The streets are literally crowded from house line to house line, as far as the eye can see, but not a policeman in sight, nor occasion for one. Laughter, song, discussion, exchange of epithet, but no disturbance. They mind their own business as no other nation, and carry it to the point of crime when they protect their own criminal. Like every other human being in God’s beautiful world, they have the vices of their virtues. It is for us to learn the last to prevent the first.” In spite of the fact that Italy seems to be the land of beggars, the Italian immigrant is rarely a medicant and (according to Jacob Riis), among the street beggars of New York, the Irish lead with fifteen per cent., the native Americans follow with twelve, the Germans with eight, while the Italian shows but two per cent. In the almshouses of New York the Italian occupies the enviable position of having the smallest representation, with Ireland having 1,617 persons and Italy but nineteen; while the figures for the United States are equally favourable. Considering the congested conditions of the tenements, the Italian retains much of his inherited vigour, but consumption which plays havoc with him in this uncongenial climate is aggravated by his mode of living that is so entirely changed. Especially do the women and children suffer, for they are suddenly transferred from a complete out-of-door life to the prison-like walls of the tenements. In Chicago I visited a family in which I had become interested through a son who was in constant antagonism to the school law and who was the special pet of the truant officers. When I first saw these people they occupied two rear rooms in which the mother had been for three months without once going out of doors. She was coughing constantly although hard at work making vests; and the husband could not understand how her red cheeks could so soon have disappeared, or why her colour was as yellow as the light of the coal oil lamp by which she worked ten of the fourteen working hours of the day. Thomasio, the son, was stunted physically and mentally, and the mark of the tenement was upon him. He was the oldest of eight children and had borne the burden of his seven brothers and sisters as if it were his own. While the other boys were playing on the sidewalk, he had to rock the baby. Through seven years he had rarely seen God’s out of doors, except as it shone upon him through a little spot in the air shaft of the tenement. He and his parents hated the school and the school officers who were after him, and that c-a-t spells cat will be as much as he will know of all the mysteries, in spite of the zealous truant officers and teachers, lay and clerical. The public schools will be unable to work their magic not only upon Thomasio and his family of seven, but upon numbers of the same kind, reared under the same circumstances, for even before they were born they were robbed of their mental and physical background, and their horizon will always be bounded, more or less, by garbage cans, barrels of stale beer, wash-tubs full of soiled clothing, and by cradles full of little bambinos. Nevertheless the Italian is not a degenerate; he usually survives the wretched years of his infancy and then like all people who share his environment, grows up less rugged, perhaps more subtle, and hardened to some things which would prove a very serious handicap to those of us who know the value of pure air and of soap and water. It would seem upon a superficial glance that the large incursion of Italians to America would add strength to the Roman Catholic Church here, and that their coming into a community would be welcomed because of that; but I have found almost the opposite to be true. The Irish priests do not like them; they lack the serious devotion to the Church which characterizes Irish or German parishioners, they care only for the show element in religion and are not willing to pay even for that. They will come to church on great holidays, when many candles are lighted and banners are carried; but they do not bother themselves to come to early mass, nor are they the best attendants at the confessional. They will spend much money upon showy funerals and christenings, but if the Catholic Church were dependent for its support upon the Italian immigrants it would fare badly. This of course may be due to the fact that they are very poor and that in Italy the Church is comparatively rich; but it is most largely due to the fact that, contrary to the common opinion, the Italian is not religious by nature, that as a rule he has no understanding for the serious and ethical side of religion, that he is a heathen still who needs to have his spiritual nature discovered and stirred, after which he should have the alphabet of the gospel preached to him in the simplest possible way. The Italian priest in America is the poorest kind of vehicle for that purpose; in proof of which I quote Lillian W. Betts because she cannot be accused of prejudice in the light of the conclusions which she draws: “To one who knows and appreciates the great spiritual life of the Roman Catholic Church, the relation between that Church and the mass of the Italians in this country is a source of grief, for it does not hold in the lives of this people the place it should. Reluctantly, the writer has to blame the ignorance and bigotry of the immigrant priests who set themselves against American influence; men who too often lend themselves to the purposes of the ward heeler, the district leader in controlling the people; who too often keep silence when the poor are the victims of the shrewd Italians who have grown rich on the ignorance of their countrymen. One man made eight thousand dollars by supplying one thousand labourers to a railroad. He collected five dollars from each man as railroad fare, though transportation was given by the road, and three dollars from each man for the material to build a house. The men supposed it was to be a home for their families. They found as a home the wretched shelters provided by contractors, with which we are all familiar. This transaction, when known, did not disturb the church or social relations of the offender, but it increased his political power, for it showed what he could do. He is recognized to-day as the Mayor of ---- Street; his influence is met everywhere. “The claim is made that the parochial school has the advantage that it gives religious as well as secular instruction. Observing and comparing the children living under the same environment who attended the public and parochial schools, I found that they did equally good work in English, but that the public schools did very much better work in arithmetic. The time given in the public schools to the so-called “fads and frills” was apparently given in the parochial school to religious exercises and instruction, with about an equal degree of comprehension and application on the part of the pupils. There was no difference in the appreciation of truth, honesty or peace. They lied, stole and fought without showing distinction in training. The singing voices of the children in the public schools were far better trained than the voices of children in the parochial schools. “What the Italian needs in New York above all things is his church in the full possession of its great spiritual power; young men born in this country, imbued with a love of and appreciation of its great opportunities, trained for the priesthood, to work and live among the Italians; in the interval before this is accomplished, a novitiate of at least five years for all foreign-born and trained priests before they are put in charge of an American parish; the establishing of music schools in connection with all the Roman Catholic churches in the foreign colonies; the rapid disappearance of the Italian parish because the people have become American. Above all, the immediate suppression of all proselyting among these people. Their Church is in their blood. The veneer, which is all the new church connection is, stifles the vital breath of the soul, and leaves the so-called convert without a Church. The exceptions prove the rule. Remove the temptation of the loaves and fishes in this proselyting endeavour and see how successful the effort is. Let the Catholic Church in America live at her highest among these people, and the political problems they create will disappear.” I do not fully agree with the author of the above; but I join with her heartily in the desire expressed in her last sentence. I would also add: let the Protestant Church live her highest before these people; let her take her share in the responsibilities which these strangers bring, without a thought of proselyting them; and she will find that her efforts are needed, and are not in vain. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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