THE ITALIAN AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION TO AMERICA

Foreign words tend to appear in a literary text and even more in poetry primarily to render the local color or the national identity of a given character. It is a touch of realism. It is true, though, that Manzoni does not let Renzo[1] speak dialect and Petrarch does not need French words to add local color to Laura.[2] Many other artists took other routes. Dante, for instance, used Latin and Provençal. Manzoni himself made the Spanish governor of Milan speak in his native tongue in addressing his driver. In the nineteenth century the use of foreign words increased. Sixty years ago Antonio Fogazzaro[3] used Venetian dialect to better define some of his characters, and today, novelists like Pier Paolo Pasolini[4] and Emilio Gadda,[5] think directly in dialect even before they make their characters speak it. At times artists with a satirical bent enjoy themselves with difficult rhymes, like Luigi Pulci[6] who rhymed salamelec[7] with Melchisedec[8](Morgante, XVIII, 194). In this case the excitement for this ingenious trick must have surpassed the intention to create local color. A tepid example of this local color is in Giuseppe Parini’s Il giorno[9] where the terms monsieur and toilette appear. Franco Sacchetti,[10] who usually loved crazy and weird rhymes, never used foreign words, although he was well aware of many borrowings from French used by Florentine merchants who traded with Lyon, France. Machiavelli in his reports from France seemed to forget Italian and threw in several words taken from French, although he never used them in poetry. Verses with a mix of Italian and Spanish are in Ludovico Ariosto’s[11] Satira II:

Ajora no se puede; etse mejore

que vos torneis a la mañana; almeno

fate ch’io sappia, ch’io son qui di fuore.

[Right now it can’t be done; it’s best/ that you return tomorrow morning; at least/ make sure that I know, since I am right outside.]

Each artist took a different approach. In examining Italian American writers who used the lingo of their families, it seems to me there are no conscious traces of the aesthetic value of those words. They used them only for the sake of realism to reproduce local color and, sometimes, for scorn of the uneducated. The same disdain and ridicule toward the ignorant peasant is present in the Italian theatrical tradition from its origin. The comical effect is emphasized by a poor sap’s attempt to use difficult words to show off, as does a shepherd from Dalmatia in Poliziano’s[12]  Orfeo[13]. Giovanni Berchet[14] mixed French and Italian for comical effect: ma chère amie/io crepo qui [My dear girl friend/I will croak right here].

In all the fiction books in English by Italian Americans there was never sufficient artistic power to really penetrate the mainstream of American taste. I would submit that the authors didn’t even try. The most important works of narrative, in terms of artistic merit and success (meaning, accepted by the American public) are Son of Italy by Pascal D’Angelo; The Grand Gennaro, by Garibaldi Lapolla[15]; Dago Red,[16] by John Fante[17]; Mount Allegro, by Jerre Mangione and Maria, by Michael De Capite.[18]

All of these books are out of print and they can be simply considered as documentation.[19] More or less, they all dealt with poverty and the poor according to the norms of Verismo [20]. Except for Lapolla, none of them tried to create grand characters. They give the impression that the authors realized they had in their hands folkloric material that was both physically close and potentially interesting to the American public, although the same public was very distant in spiritual terms. Thus, they rendered this reality with nostalgic affection toward the past but also with rancor toward the present, using a tone that became more and more similar to that of a tour guide. “Here are the Italians” they seem to tell the American public, pointing to them as if they were animals in a zoo. “See..? They are not so bad… or stupid… at least not as much as they look. Really. Actually, you were a bit mean and a bit arrogant when you judged them.” In the books of these pseudo-novelists the story basically does not exist. The structure is based on a series of scenes that follow sequentially and where autobiographical elements prevail. Often there is one canonic chapter dedicated to the pranzo,[21] which takes on an almost ideological dimension. The meal is always based on spaghetti and flasks of Chianti wrapped in straw. The abundance of the culinary feasts in these folkloric novels obviously has to do with the poverty endured by the families before the present success. One observation I read that can be applied to all of them is that hunger is always the main character. Hunger, first suffered then conquered, is defeated again and again by eating and drinking more than necessary.

Beside hunger, the most common theme of these novels is the conflict between the immigrants and America. This makes sense since the autobiographical nature of the texts leans toward the sociological essay. Conflicts abound: the first generation that came from Italy clashes with the second that grew up in America; person-to-person loans and unpaid debts; expenditures to bring relatives from the old country; rivalries between northerners and southerners; the dominance of family interest to which everything else must be subordinated; the patriarchal system imported from Italy; the festive spirit of social gatherings for funerals, weddings and baptisms. There are no real Christian feelings but there is a lot of superstition. No priest appears, similarly to Italian novels of the Verismo period, although it must be said that Italian American writers learned their lesson more from Theodore Dreiser[22] than Giovanni Verga.[23] The Verismo of these writers feels dry, conventional and detached. It’s like reading a list of items in an inventory. Conflicts between immigrants and America are not represented by means of characters with a symbolic function. America appears as a sort of test tube, closed and immense; where a little colony of Italian insects is placed, destined to undergo mutations. At times America is embodied in the figures of a policeman, a judge or a teacher. Yet, they are fleeting apparitions that never manage to become symbols. The Italian groups described in these novels fall apart in a couple of generations without even becoming aware of it. In order to be absorbed they have to renounce what they were. What else is assimilation? It is not the product of a law. It is not an exchange. It is not a federation of forces that remain intact while cooperating (like the French speaking community of Canada.) The notion of the contribution that Italians gave to America can only be heard in the in the speeches of those who made American assimilation a sort of profession, like Leonard Covello,[24] for instance. I am not denying that this contribution exists, but it resembles the sharp joke I heard from an Italian fruit merchant, who, by the way, was much smarter than the above-mentioned professional. The green grocer obtained the permit to position his cart in front of the house of a millionaire banker: “The banker and I signed an agreement. I will not compete with his bank and he promised he won’t sell apples in this spot.” The individual work of Italians has certainly contributed to America’s success. In turn, America’s economic progress and its imperial size and structure have elevated and multiplied the individual energies of Italian Americans. The Italian banker Giannini gave America a novel concept of a bank’s national function. But this was not an Italian cultural contribution. It was his personal genius, awakened and magnified by American dynamism. Thousands of Italian Americans have become rich simply by buying a parcel of land to cultivate as a vegetable garden at the edge of the city. As cities expanded, the land would be rezoned for development and the value increased. Hundreds of Italian American doctors today have rich patients due to the fact that America got richer and distributed wealth among the middle and working classes. When in the course of the colonial banquets I hear that American railroads were made by Italians, I inevitably think that in reality the railroads were conceived, planned and designed—thus they were made—by engineers who were not Italian. Italians at most brought a contribution as beasts of burden, working here and there, without really understanding what they were working for. Until the latest generations—that is until the time students of Italian descent started coming out of medical schools or architecture schools—Italians had been only patients in hospitals and exploited tenants. They were not scientists, researchers, architects, designers or engineers. And, please, let’s not talk about the arts, a field where we would expect Italians to bring a contribution. Suffices to say that about five million people came to America from Italy, more or less the entire population of Lombardy.[25] And what have they produced in terms of art? Let’s make a comparison with that region between 1880 and 1940.[26] Unfortunately, the majority of monuments that people with taste would like to destroy in New York and other places were built by able Italian artisans with zero genius who had worked in the quarries of Carrara[27] or graduated from the Fine Arts academies of provincial Italian towns. In the field of music, in particular opera, things are a little different. However, we must remember that it wasn’t Italian Americans who gave America the best singers, soloists and orchestra conductors. It was Italy. Toscanini, who in the colonial banquets is often mentioned with other great names in the list of debts America owes to Italians, never learned English well and never applied for American citizenship. He was the purest product of Italy’s nineteenth century musical culture and technique. He resided in the United States for a few months a year for financial reasons, inside a cyst of Italian culture. The same thing can be said about the only other important Italian name in the contemporary music world, Gian Carlo Menotti,[28] with the difference that Menotti’s English is as good as his Italian.

And now, back to our Italian American writers. First of all there aren’t that many, they aren’t great, and they haven’t become part of the American literary tradition. For example, none of them has achieved the same relevance as the German Dreiser or the Swedish Sandburg. They are decent, average American writers who looked at their families and wrote about those environments with some detachment, sometimes with humor, sometimes treating them as anthropological specimens. The process of assimilation never encountered a resistance grounded in culture and consciousness, only in traditions and habits. Although the immigrants were in the large majority ignorant, they did have a moral and social structure based on centuries-old habits centered on the family; on religious rituals followed with reverence albeit with no profundity; and on a capital of common notions made of folkloric traditions and superstitions. The immigrants had to go from a culture limited in scope but sedimented over centuries of experience to the American culture, more complex and more volatile. It was a difficult transition. The reaction of first-generation immigrants was to insulate themselves inside the family and small groups of fellow paesani in the local Little Italies or in the countryside. The second generation created a rip: they felt American and even a bit anti-Italian. The rip took place right in the middle of an even more radical and faster transformation that took America from a predominantly agricultural country to a fully industrial one. This revolution had gigantic consequences at every level, with profoundly alienating effects on the human masses that had to endure it. All social relations that had existed up to that point were scrambled, and at the same time it became extremely difficult to create new ones. It was like jumping on a moving train to find out that all the seats were taken by passengers that barely bother to look up, and being forced to travel the entire distance standing up hanging from a strap. Starting from the crucial aspect of the difference between the languages of the two generations of Italian American immigrants, in her thesis at Columbia University, Fiorella Forti, wrote:

 

In the majority of Italian households, children were forced to speak Italian at home[29] and to follow traditions and ideas even when they were openly in conflict with the outside world. Like all other parents, and even more than the majority of parents, Italian immigrants forced their children to adopt the habits and social customs they had inherited. However, the children, due primarily to the education and the social environment in which they were present and active, and to the knowledge of English, wanted to act and be American. They realized that their parents’ culture was not American and started sharing the opinion that the outside world had toward them. They also learned that their parents’ behavior was considered inferior and, as a consequence, even [the children] were being kept at the margin because of their origin. For a certain period the children of Italian American immigrants went through hard times marked by severe internal conflicts. On the one hand they loved and respected their parents, yet they had no choice but to resist their authority if they wanted to become American, although they didn’t really have a clear notion of what being American meant. On the other hand, they longed for acceptance as Americans by those who considered themselves such. Sadly, these attempts were not always successful.

 

When we look at individual achievements, Italian American immigrants were unquestionably successful. Millions of people from the peasant class improved their economic condition and saw their children become doctors, businesspeople, lawyers, builders, magistrates, politicians and more. Had they not come to the United States their children probably would still be fighting poverty. In contrast, here they now belong to the lower middle class, some to the solid middle class, and some to the upper middle class. [In the footnote: A list of economic and political successes of Italians, particularly those of the second and third generations, would be too long. I recommend two publications: The Italians in Contemporary America,[30] by Harold Lord Varney.[31] This pamphlet contains a directory of Italian Americans with important positions in politics and education in the United States. It also contains numerous entries for businesspeople.

The second is The Italian in America: A Social Study and History, by Lawrence Frank Pisani[32] (New York: Exposition Press, 1957). Initially this was a dissertation defended at Yale University. A more recent revision contains many names, but it also contains errors, some of which concerns me directly. The author in a letter acknowledged them and accepted the corrections. I should also add the many biographical repertories, such as the Who’s Who published in several volumes by Giovanni Schiavo or Ario Flamma. Both works are inspired by the wish to please

their readership.]

The contribution of Italian Americans to America was exclusively in terms of size and energy, rarely of quality, at least in proportion to the size of the community. When we give the word contribution the specific meaning of influence on American life style, we come up with very little. Millions of Italian American basically didn’t bring anything Italian that has remained significantly so. The majority of immigrants had no distinct Italian taste and no Italian culture: they did not own a national patrimony but only local traditions.

No matter how we cut it, all we can say concretely about the contribution of Italians to their adoptive country is that it was physically important but with very limited intellectual value. It can be reduced to growing vegetables and the fact that they now appear on American tables. This was definitely a contribution and a merit of Italians: they taught Americans the vital force of artichokes, zucchini, salads and string beans even before dieticians discovered the importance of vitamins. These were real Italian novelties and imports. If the American diet changed from the traditional boiled-meat-with-cabbage; pork-and-beans; roast beef and steaks; and fish and oysters to make room for fruits and vegetables, it was because of the influence of Italians. It isn’t much but it’s a real contribution. All the rest is rhetoric good for the colonial banquets or political speeches.

The crowning achievement of Italian culinary influence in America was the word spaghetti that acquired the meaning of pasta. More recently we had the introduction of pizza. However, the American influence can be seen in dishes like spaghetti with meat balls, which is pasta with tomato sauce mixed with small globs of meat, an obvious derivation from German or Swedish cuisines. This hybrid dish surprises all the Italians who sit down in run-of-the-mill Italian restaurants in New York. Not even with wine were Italian immigrants able to impose their taste. Wine drinkers in America generally are descendants of Europeans, not Americans converted to wine. Or, if they converted, it’s because they visited Italy or France; not because they tasted California wines.

One thing Italians contributed to was the growth of Catholicism in the United States. But even here their contribution was in terms of numbers, not quality. The Italian clergy had very little to do with it. The high echelons of Church hierarchy are inhabited by the Irish clergy. The literary and theological production in the United States does not have a single Italian name. There is an influence through Catholicism, but not by means of Italian Americans. Rome is filtered by way Dublin and Munich, not Calabria or Sicily; nor by way of Italian seminaries in Naples and Palermo.