A PIEDMONTESE IN THE FAR WEST

Emigration was, without a doubt, the most important demographic phenomenon in Italy after unification on the wake of Risorgimento; and yet personal accounts of their experience remain rare and mostly indirect. The emigrants’ sweat and tears left no memoirs and their fate was ignored because nobody wanted to look. In short, it was a mass escape of rural masses from Italy. In the previous chapter I examined the testimony of Adolfo Rossi, a middle-class man from the Veneto region who became an emigrant and took a hard look at the phenomenon of emigration, looking from down up.

I would like to examine now the work of another person whose perspective was from high up looking down. Edmondo Mayor des Planches[1] was the first Italian ambassador ever to tour the United States, fully aware of the national and international problems created by migrations. He was of aristocratic origin; with a profound sense of duty; cultivated and well endowed with common sense; inimical to rhetoric and knowledgeable about the history of the United States. He spoke English and was a fearless observer, capable of understanding the phenomena of the social and political world without biases, tears and false outrage. His is a first-rate testimony by a first-rate observer. Born in Savoy,[2] I presume his family had followed the fortunes of the royal house of Italy first to Turin then to Rome. He was one thousand percent Piedmontese. I didn’t spend time researching his personal history because his writings speak for themselves. His travelogue was first published in the Nuova Antologia and later reprinted in the volume Attraverso gli Stati Uniti per l’emigrazione italiana  published in 1912[3] [sic]. It is an important document. Mayor des Planches journeyed through the United States, from New York to New Orleans, on to Texas and California and returned East through Chicago and Detroit. In the course of his journey he ventured into side trips, particularly in the southern states. He wrote a direct, precise and incisive prose without wasting words: he truly belonged to the Italy that existed before D’Annunzio (whose great success spoiled the modest but honest language of Italian newspapers). Upon visiting a new city or locality he would report tersely what he could observe directly, describing houses and people; taking notes on the cost of rent and other basic necessities, salaries, social behaviors and on the relations among races and classes. He also wrote succinct biographies of individual Italian immigrants thus creating a small gallery of portraits made of the humble stories of people nobody else had bothered to notice. He did not penetrate too deeply, he didn’t take a chance with hypotheses and he totally lacked in empathy and poetry. His ambition was to be like a camera, not a probe, with a style more like Julius Caesar‘s than Cicero’s.[4] That’s why I like his book so much. His best pieces describe American trains, cars, churches and the meeting places of Italian Americans. Anecdotes are very rare; however, I found a very good one about how clueless many immigrants were in those days.

A functionary of the Italian consulate in New York finds in the elevator of the consular house, on Broadway, a fellow Italian crouching on the floor in a corner. The elevator operator, an English speaker, says: “They found him in the street and they brought him here to be taken in by the consulate. But now he doesn’t want to get off. He has been going up and down for an hour.” The poor man doesn’t understand and doesn’t respond. What to do? The functionary asks him questions. The poor devil was on his way to Philadelphia to visit some relatives. He had no idea what an elevator was and believed he was in a special kind of train that was supposed to take

him to destination.

 

I believe this is the only anecdote told by Des Planches. Humor wasn’t his strong suit: his best quality was his imperturbability in front of different customs and emotions. A major example of this is his coolness about lynching (it should be noticed that he visited several localities where Italians had been lynched.)

 

Lynchings in general are acts of summary and exemplary justice executed—either with cool determination or under an emotional surge—by the masses against individuals who are either factually or presumably guilty of crimes. They follow certain procedures that by now have become ritualized: hanging, shooting the hanging bodies etc. Lynchings are ordinarily carried out against blacks with the goal of an immediate exemplarity, either as punishment or vengeance for the rape of white women. In the lands on the frontier and in remote areas lynching is practiced to this very day also against white people as punishment for

serious crimes.

 

One can sense that behind these words is a man with great legal education and training who knows how to describe a phenomenon with precision but without indignation, not even repressed, as we would expect in a person educated in a society with the moral cult of the law. To him lynching was a natural fact that in certain conditions was bound to happen, like a solar eclipse or a flooding. There is beauty in this kind of style.

I should also add that when he had to deal with cases of lynching of Italians, he was relieved he didn’t have to shake hands with the authorities of the localities where those events took place. At the same time when he tells those stories and recounts how the events developed, he clearly signals that the Italian victims had some degree of responsibility; at least to the extent that they used threats of violence or otherwise violated local norms. At the same time we have beautiful descriptions of the towns where these crimes took place. They are a pleasure to

read, after seeing so many fake western movies. Here is a piece about the

boomtown of MacGehee[5] [sic] in its boom years.

 

For the time being, the population is a mix of males from every corner of the world and from every walk of life. There are manual laborers who work for the railroad and the repair shops for two dollars a day, a few storekeepers, railroad clerks; and then land speculators, adventurers, gamblers and worse. It is sunset: they hang out along the soft, muddy street with deep tracks made by car wheels, the only street in town; or on the sidewalks made with wobbly wooden planks, in shirt sleeves, with dirty hats, smoking, chewing, spitting large wads, somber, angry. The majority looks tough, suspicious. Some talk softly with one another like conspirators. This is social anarchy. Everyone does whatever he pleases. There is only one right that is recognized and respected: personal and private property. It is in the common interest to respect it. Every other aspect of life is dominated by unrestrained freedom, lack of laws and the

rule of force.

 

In this portrait all that’s missing is the image of some Loretta Young[6] strolling along, with a long skirt, a hat with improbable white feathers and incredible lace on the protruding breast. Add that and we would be straight inside a movie. However, women barely appear in Mayor des Planches’ reports. In his relations with American authorities and the clergy he was affable and friendly, but he became inflexible when the rights of Italians were at stake. He denied that Italians were brought to the south to replace black labor, but when he reflected on the subject he recognized that unfortunately southern Italians did not have the kind of sense of dignity that would prevent them from mixing with blacks. He felt very proud when he heard from local authorities and the clergy that Italians were honest, hard-working and thrifty. Almost all the biographies he left us described Italians who brought honor to themselves, were successful and ended up with important positions in society (more in California than anywhere else).

The central goal of his book was to convince Italian immigrants not to get stuck in the big cities of the Atlantic coast and the industrial north. He thought they should spread out to the countryside in the west and most of all in the south where land was cheap and where black labor was not very productive. (He described blacks as lazy, hand-to-mouth and easy prey of vice: a rather traditional albeit correct perspective.) In these regions the climate is also closer to

that of southern Italy. Here is, in his own words, his dream:

 

My goal is to favor the settlement on the entire territory of the United States of Italians that are now concentrated in the large Eastern cities, particularly New York, Boston and Philadelphia; where the majority lives in segregated neighborhoods in conditions that are morally unhealthy, physically unsanitary and economically depressed. Too many of them share very limited space in a state of promiscuity; always among themselves; isolated from the society that surrounds them. Here they hang on tight to the habits, traditions and superstitions of their native towns. They give a dismal spectacle of themselves, taking care only of the most basic needs with the lowest salaries. They cause damage to themselves and others with cheap competition and criminality; and they look like parasites living off the American society of which they are not an organic part and which is tempted to reject them as it cannot absorb them. In the meantime they are treated like alien beings, inferior often object of disdain and condescendence, of hatred and ridicule; like the Jews in their medieval ghettos, or like the pariah cast in Indian cities. For many of those who end up living in those cities, city life is not a normal condition. It has been calculated that forty eight percent of Italians who migrated to the United States were originally peasants. They adapt to the cities with too much ease because they can get some material things they never had before; because other folks from their hometowns live there and they cling to them to feel less lost; because they don’t know where else to go; because in order to get here they spent all the money and all the emotional energy they could muster and now they are overwhelmed by inertia. They happen to end up in a certain place and they stay put. They crowd the places, on top of each other like sheep in a sheepfold; the newcomers are jammed into the small space already occupied by those who arrived earlier, dozens per room, hundreds per floor, thousand per building; in dangerous agglomerations where the human ferments of destitution, vice, disease and crime develop.

Isn’t this a beautiful piece? After reading this, I thought that he could have been a great journalist, had he not been a diplomat. Not even the pages written by Rossi, who was a professional journalist, reached this level of clarity. Italian immigrants, as Mayor des Planches says, were illiterate. They followed what relatives told them (in the best case) or what they were told by immigration agents (the slave drivers of the new era, who would deliver the bodies to the masters). As to the problem of directing Italian immigration, Mayor des Planches had moderate ideas. Like everyone else, he thought it made sense to have more consuls with smaller areas of jurisdiction and more resources to assist the needy. At the same time, he proposed to develop welfare agencies that combined joint initiatives of Italians and Americans: a very smart idea that went nowhere. He also reports the failure of some colonies organized for Italian farmers, such as Sunny Side, Del Rio[7] etc. He probably did not understand that nobody could be better at figuring out the best place to settle than the immigrants themselves. After all, their motivation was self interest and they knew what they were good at. It is also rather dubious that if Italy had sent more immigration agents, even if more capable and less corrupt, (where could they be found in those days?) they would have changed the situation. One of the forces that kept Italian immigrants inside the cities was their sheer hatred for farming and it would have been very difficult to convince them otherwise. Despite the fact that this pragmatic gentleman, Piedmontese bureaucrat, faithful servant of the house of Savoy, was sometimes a dreamer and was looking down from up high, he left us a prime collection of observations and data and a very precious testimony. We can see this, for instance, when we compare his observations with the attention Rossi gave to certain phenomena, thus revealing different experiences. Rossi was the first one (as far as I know) to annotate with precision the new words that immigrants created by fusing Italian and English together. Des Planches, instead, didn’t even register the phenomenon. Yet some of the immigrants he interviewed (and indeed did he interview them…) must have answered with the new lingo. Only once, in the south, where he found Italians who had replaced blacks as cotton pickers, he noticed that cotton processing was called ginnatura (from gin, namely the operation of extracting seeds from the cotton). Nothing else grabbed his attention.

I have always maintained that the witnesses to history have only seen, heard and noticed what they could. Mayor des Planches was a scrupulous writer who never failed to use double ii as a plural for the word studio and to mark with an accent the word sèguito [continuation] to avoid confusion with seguìto [followed: past participle of seguire]. But the Italian American language was not important to him, nor was it worthy of his attention.

New York, March 27, 1960