PART EIGHT

TESTIMONIES ON

ITALIAN IMMIGRATION

Adolfo Rossi

Mayor Des Planches

Dario Papa and Ferdinando Fontana

Giuseppe Giacosa

Amy. A. Bernardy

Irene di Robilant

THE HUMANIST WHO SOLD FANS

We have only few testimonies on the Great Migration, one of the great tragedies of modern times but a silent one. Its protagonists and victims could not write and could barely express themselves: today, the survivors do not want to remember. When someone tries to interview them they hide behind a wall of reticence often covered with a plaster coat of pride or shame. The success that some of them finally achieved, has become a screen for all the others, a screen behind which so many heart-wrenching stories are hidden away. This situation makes my recent discovery of a precious and rare little book even more important. On a library’s shelf I found the story written by a certain Adolfo Rossi[1] about his adventure in the United States. Rossi was from Lendinara, a small town in the province of Rovigo, a place where he felt unhappy and irritable “like a caged bird.” Entrepreneurial, full of dreams and eager to discover new things, he boarded a ship in 1870 with 400 lira[2] in his pocket. The money didn’t last long. One night, on the ship, soon after the journey had started, his money was stolen and he arrived in New York with only three and a half lira for himself and his companion. Rossi had attended high school, which, in those days, was considered a high level of education. His first job in Italy was as a postal clerk but he was too smart to stop there and venture further, eventually becoming the author of some novellas that were published in literary journals. He even founded a periodical, Il grillo del focolare.[3] In the course of years of traveling to many countries, he published several books, some of which are still precious testimonies of the emigrant conditions. In 1906 he was appointed emigration inspector with the unanimous vote of a commission composed of notable members of the Italian parliament, among which were Senator Giorgio Arcoleo[4] and Representative Francesco Saverio Nitti.[5] He later became vice-commissioner.

Rossi’s personality is optimistic, creative and good natured. He writes in a style similar to Edmondo De Amicis’s: simple, direct, cordially open, with little depth, with the ability to observe a situation with clarity, but always skimming the surface. It’s the style of a person without preconceived ideas, without vanity, without deep passions but with a vague desire to experience the world. He didn’t leave Italy with his heart full of rancor toward the motherland, unlike the subversives of those days (who were actually quite right in their feelings); nor with total ignorance about Italian history and what it had taken to unify the country (unlike the majority of the unschooled emigrants). He didn’t even feel the contempt for manual labor typical of the Italian bourgeoisie of those times. He wasn’t a genius: his cultural horizon wasn’t particularly broad and his style doesn’t have much color or warmth, yet it is captivating. At least he hadn’t been spoiled and corrupted by D’Annunzio’s style,[6] a fate that plagued many journalists that came after him. He was kind-hearted but wasn’t aware he was an amiable person, and wasn’t a show off. His cultural limitations and these other qualities made him an unbiased, humane and honest observer and, therefore, a reliable and uncommon witness. When I first read his book, a long time ago, I wasn’t able to compare his work to those of immigrants that left Italy after World War II, but now I have a more solid and better defined understanding of this kind of literature and, therefore, I have a more precise impression.

It would be impossible to find a man like him today because he would be tainted by bitter disillusionment hidden under humanitarian sugar coating. Rossi was a natural as a man and as a writer. He didn’t write for sensationalism. He was just looking for a place bigger than Lendinara and for a horizon wider than the one offered by a post office window in a small town in the Veneto region. He read Jules Verne,[7] not Emilio Salgari.[8] He read Gil Blas,[9] and remembered well the hero who “arrived to a new city penniless, knowing no one, knowing not what he would do.” His adventures have a bit the same flavor and humanitarian tone of Gil Blas.

When he first arrived in New York, Rossi didn’t know English. On the ship, even before being robbed, he realized he had already been scammed by the travel agency that put him on a much worse vessel than he had paid for. In those days immigrants were at the mercy of scammers, thieves and swindlers who latched on any prey like bloodsucking leeches. His passage took place in a huge room where he slept on the bare floor without even a mattress (cautious travelers knew better to bring their own.) There was no point in protesting as there was no one to protest with. Indeed, if someone became too strident in his protests, he would ran the risk of being thrown overboard. As soon as he landed in America, Rossi was cheated once again, this time not by an Italian shipping agent but by leeches hanging out at the port. He ended up sleeping on park benches where he was robbed again. Everything would cost him ten times more than the fair price because he could not argue and didn’t know how to bargain. But he never lost his optimism and confidence. In New York he was endlessly amused by the traffic of people coming and going; by the kaleidoscope of peoples; by the stupendous panorama of the bay crisscrossed by white steam ships with counterweights; by the elevated railroads and the views from their windows; by the jungle of spears and tall buildings. Even the sun seemed new every day and every beautiful day made him forget the fog of the day before. With determination he focuses on learning the language of the new country because he realized how important that was. He was living on bread, cheese and water but with the first money earned at his first job he bought a grammar book. Like all other adventurers, sometimes he had to resort to audacity rather than sincerity. When he was offered a position as ice cream maker in a big hotel he accepted, despite the fact he had only a few days of experience on a similar job. I was really pleased to see how the son of petty bourgeoisie didn’t put up airs and, despite his high school diploma, took various menial jobs where physical strength counted more than smarts and culture. He sold Japanese fans on Coney Island in the summer; worked as a waiter in a hotel; tried to open a boarding house; became a servant in the house of rich Americans; and finally the destiny brought him into the orbit of Carlo Barsotti,[10] another adventurer with a broader reach and fewer scruples who, despite the fact that he could barely write anything beyond his signature, had founded a little Italian newspaper. That newspaper is still alive today and is called the Progresso Italo-Americano.  All the details of his story are true and demonstrable, at least based on what I can surmise from comparing Rossi’s to other testimonies and with reports about people and places.

In his book he talks about meeting rich Americans and their stunned reactions at discovering an Italian who didn’t play mandolin, didn’t sing and was properly mannered (probably even more than they were). He tells stories of usurers with a sign with three balls hanging above the door (they can still be seen in New York, although they no longer strangle people); of work-shifts of twelve-plus hours a day; of prices that compared to those of today seem incredible (one could eat with 25 cents); of the simple life of a president of the United States whom Rossi waited on in the hotel where he was working; where that personage would stay without a personal servant; eating alone and perfectly content with a steak, a glass of milk and coffee. All these brushstrokes paint a large canvas of the customs of those days, a time that few can recall now due to the incredibly rapid transformation of the United States in the past century.

Rossi met personally Antonio Meucci,[11]the inventor of the telephone and a personal friend of General Giuseppe Garibaldi. He even devoted a chapter to the general’s memories. There is nothing new or particularly fancy in it, but it helps get closer to that heroic figure. Rossi, propelled by his crave for discovering new worlds, took a trip to the interior of the United States, in the regions recently abandoned by the Indians and, even more recently, colonized by pioneers. These were the areas that attracted adventurers in search of gold and silver in the Rocky Mountains. With just a verbal contract as assurance, Rossi with some other twenty Italian workers found himself traveling for days by train until they reached a most remote mountainous area at more than 6,000 feet in altitude. Here there was absolutely nothing to house them: they had to build a shelter and he ended up doing pick-and-shovel manual labor and work in the kitchen. Often poor European immigrants ended up in situations similar to slavery: they didn’t know the language and could not rely on help from American authorities or from consular representatives of their native countries, too distant from those desolate areas and most likely ineffective and uninterested in the fate of manual laborers. These were truly circumstances where only the strongest in body and, above all, in spirit would be able to survive over time; save a bit of money and eventually run away to start a new life elsewhere. Confronted with the same dire choices, while other Italians workers became discouraged and prone to rebellion or flight; he acted pragmatically and with political savvy: he understood perfectly well what kind of injustice he was victim to, but also understood how self-damaging it would be to react or run away. Despite all these terrible experiences of hardship, Rossi never lost faith in and admiration for the United States.  

The description he left about the neighborhood where many Italian immigrants first settled in New York (a place that no longer exists) is a classic.

Murders and assaults are unfortunately rather frequent in the Italian neighborhood, first of all because it is infested with lots of criminals escaped from justice in their country after they had killed, stolen and committed all sorts of crimes; and also because even the honest peasant- worker born in a peaceful village who decided to migrate to flee hunger and lured by the mirage of money or influenced by the example of other people, once he arrives in America often becomes morally worse. Nostalgia; the longing for his relatives so far away; life in a filthy neighborhood; the greed of the boss who cheats him out of his salary; crime gangs that dominate among and extort from the workers from the south, all this embitters the character of the poor devil. Add to all this a lifestyle that is completely different; the change in climate; the population density; the difficulties posed by the foreign language; the greed; the envy he feels toward the paesani who stroke it rich. In these conditions the immigrant becomes irritable, irascible; lives in constant fear of being cheated, swindled, betrayed; and, even if he never did before, he starts carrying some kind of weapon. A large part of the sad scenes of blood are caused by alcohol and cheating among spouses. It’s strange: the peasants who live in tenement houses [sic] are mostly illiterate; uncouth; thrown off- balance by hunger; bled to death by bosses; exhausted by work. However, passion is always burning in their chest. They live horrible lives; endure physical efforts so hard it stuns their brains; in jobs like cleaning sewers… They live in dark and black rooms, filthy, unhealthy, where it seems impossible the ray of love could penetrate. Women are often ugly, with busted shoes and dirty clothes: it seems that males and females should vegetate insensitive to anything that concerns the heart; but, to the contrary, those unfortunate people love with incredible intensity and when they are betrayed they become savagely vindictive and blood-thirsty.

 

I could go on for ever with passages like this that show the author’s uncanny ability to analyze customs and social dynamics. I will confine my comment to saying that in this book we find one of the very first descriptions of the Italian American lingo, preceding by at least ten years the observations by Linvingston’s little study America Sanemagogna [America Son-of-a-gun].[12] Some of the expressions reported by Rossi must have disappeared, such as friloncio [free lunch]. This was a marketing technique of the time when the patrons of a bar who ordered a beer would also get all-you-can-eat sandwiches. Today no bar or restaurant offers the same deal and pretty soon, I am afraid, we will have to pay for peanuts and potato chips that some bars still have on the counter. And soon bars and restaurants will also charge for the air we breathe.

Besides the historical relevance of Rossi’s memoirs, I confess that the reason I was so captured by this book was the author’s personality. It was as if I could hear him talk, with a kind tone full of common sense. I wish all Italian politicians who visited immigrants in those days had the same insight. Instead, they did not have a clue about the real circumstance of those lives, and they started worrying about the best way to assist those poor people only after the phenomenon was already receding and was nearing its end. We are not talking about the end of the emigration era, rather the end of the kind of emigrant described by Rossi: a man capable of enduring the abandonment of the motherland and the abandonment by the motherland. I couldn’t put down this book for it describes the true tragedies of emigration; so unlike the stories filtered through the rose-tinted glasses of the search for freedom and success; celebrated in today’s official banquets in honor of high ranking politicians from Italy; senator or ministers who have the same understanding of this phenomenon as those of 1880—meaning, no understanding at all.

Emigration was a national failure along a road strewn with dead bodies, tragedies, destitution, madness and enslavement. The survivors and their children deserve our admiration, but not those who want to transform it into a triumph by means of cheap and schlocky rhetoric. Their words inevitably sound like the communiqués of the supreme commands of armed forces when they want to hide a rout.

New York, January 17, 1960