TWO GREAT JOURNALISTS WITNESSED

THE TERRIFYING BEGINNNINGS OF ITALIAN IMMIGRATION

Two Italian journalists were able to observe from the very beginning the effects of the sudden, improvised, unplanned collective migration of peasant masses from southern Italy to an English-speaking world that was undergoing rapid industrialization whose consequences fell both on the migrants themselves and on the American people. Their names are Dario Papa and Ferdinando Fontana.[1] The first one occupies a position of great relevance in the history of Italian journalism. The journey to America marked an important moment in his life as he was prompted to change his political ideas from pro-monarchy to pro-republic. The second one, Fontana, was a well regarded poet of the Scapigliatura[2] movement. Both were fluid and transparent writers with the sharp eye and the good memory of good reporters. Their journey through the country from New York to San Francisco took place around 1881 and lasted two years. Both were struck by the most obvious aspects of American life and many of their observations would be worth quoting, if this were the object of my interest. But I am interested instead in their insight into the lives Italian immigrants. Fontana devoted two long chapters to the conditions of immigrants in New York.[3] The first chapter concerns the facilities they found when they first arrived. This was before the world-famous Ellis Island. The entry point was Castle-Garden, “a huge building where all immigrants are gathered as soon as they disembark in New York. The majority of the building is occupied by an immense hall that can easily accommodate a thousand people. Along its perimeter runs a ledge, about thirty feet up.” From that ledge Fontana was able to look down into the hall. The impression was so strong that he stated: “I will never forget it, should I live as long as Methuselah.”[4] In that hall the immigrants were sleeping all together, men and women, old and young, healthy and sick, living and moribund. And

they were all cooking their national dishes.

 

When I climbed up on the ledge the hall was half empty. It was around nine in the morning. A few small groups of immigrants that had arrived a few days earlier were gathering near the heaters in the corners. Some were sleeping on mattresses lain on the floor, wrapped in raggedy blankets. They were speaking softly; once in awhile I could hear someone cough, or a child’s cry followed by the monotonous sound of peasant baby cribs rocking on the floor. Together with the noises, a dull and nauseating smell was wafting upwards toward me. It’s the typical smell of hospitals, insane asylums, prisons and all those places where people are segregated in large numbers. It’s a smell like a miasma; of stagnant air; of foul breath and putrefying organic substances; rendered sharper by a faint odor of dust (…) Slowly, the huge hall filled up. Some ships had docked. A crowd, a true crowd of people from all nations, squeezed in. A noise like the flux of a tide was rising, followed by wafts of hot and miasmatic air. I could feel it on my face. A thin fog was condensing above the crowd. In the middle of the noise, at intervals, the voice of a young man with an official hat with golden insignia would shout. He was an interpreter who repeated in all the European languages: “We are looking for Such-and-Such from Such-and-Such country.”

Scenes like these don’t exist anymore, but we certainly remember seeing them during and after World War II. Isn’t what Fontana described in 1881 the atmosphere of concentration camps and prison camps? Isn’t this proof that emigration was born in poverty, despair, torment and anguish? This must be what was left in the adults and even more in the children: a sense of fear and anxiety that would last their entire life and would be passed on to the next generation. Isn’t this the atmosphere of a catastrophic rout?

Fontana observed all the various groups, from Jews to Germans to Irish. The biggest and most destitute were the Irish and the Italians. Fontana noticed that, unlike the Irish, even the most brutish Italians, even the filthiest among them, at least were not victim to the curse of alcoholism. He noticed a swift Italian man trying to hide from view of the police, with whom probably he had some pending business. He saw a little old lady from Calabria who could not explain why she was there and whom she had come to visit. He heard the bad-grammar propaganda of Protestant charitable societies. Some immigrants who heard Fontana speak Italian asked him to read a letter they were carrying. It turned out they had been swindled by a hustler who had promised them jobs as soon as they landed, working for some person who had no idea what they were talking about. In a few lines there he collected a sample of the garden variety of indignities endured by the immigrants, abandoned to themselves, ignorant, surrounded by a swarm of hustlers and swindlers from their own country. Another chapter is devoted to the shame for the jobs they had to take, first of all, shoeshine. Fontana, a bit rhetorically, describes the tears of wounded pride from the eyes of the scion of a noble family in whose veins “ran the most gentile blood, the purest, the most generous that a human creature could vaunt,” and who had to kneel in front of a... black person, “in front of the representative of the lowest

 of all races.” Fontana describes him in realistic terms:

 

This guy (…) with his large chest pushed up high, in a pose of cloying arrogance, dressed charlatan-esquely à la fashionable [sic], with his ramshackle mouth open in a wide smile to display to the passersby two thick rows of milky white teeth that held a big Avana cigar; that black guy was there, stretching his neck, with his smug face, triumphant; puffing out clouds of aromatic smoke; twirling a walking cane of rare wood with gold inlays in his right hand gloved in a yellow glove, paradoxically yellow.

 

Luckily, Fontana wrote this racial [sic] passage fifty years before Fascism caved in to Nazism: I reported it here (only a small part of it, as it goes on and on!) only because I thought that it represents the attitude of Italians. I can only imagine what would have been the attitude of a rich American, someone who made his own fortune; or maybe a former slave owner from the south; or even an American from the north that did free black people from slavery but would never allow them into his house. The direct effect of the docility of Italians in taking those vile jobs was the contemptuous opinion that Americans in general harbored towards them. Fontana moves from the analysis of this particular job to garbage pickers.

To see hundreds of Italians prostrated at the feet of people to shine their shoes is cause for heartbreak. But to see thousands of them bending their backs in front of mountains of garbage; rummaging through it like famished dogs; that really hurts deeply. In New York garbage is collected in busted barrels placed on the sidewalk in front of every house (…) Next to the barrels, full to the brim with all sorts of filth, there is always some bum picking through them. If he is not Irish, the bum is Italian, but not some old Italian man in poor health who could justify that vile activity with the excuse of old age and his unsuitability to a less humiliating job. No: a young Italian, strong and healthy, sometimes even with a spark of intelligence that transpires from behind the brutishness that covers him

from head to toes.

 

Today the patriotic Fontana would be happier: Italians don’t pick up garbage anymore: it is mostly black people. Indeed, Italians own many of those companies and they hire blacks for these jobs; and, as if this weren’t enough, this industry is involved in a racket [sic] that is, at least according the local press, primarily Italian. They are probably the grand sons of the people that Fontana saw sifting through the garbage and that Giacosa, later, will see do the same in Chicago. Fontana continues:

The rag traders in New York receive their supplies almost exclusively from the Italian colony that lives in the Five Points[5] section of town, a neighborhood in a very central location in the city; not far from the down town [sic] and with a very sad reputation. Here the houses are only three-storey high; with walls dripping with humidity and the plaster disintegrating; with busted windows and no glass panes. The narrow streets are in horrendous conditions, paved and perennially covered with layers of muck and trash. To walk through Five Points at night, they say, is an act of courage (…) Almost every week some kind of bloody incident or aggression or street fight ends up in the newspapers and focuses the attention of the city on the terrible Five Points. It is true that the most horrendous crimes in New York are caused with the same frequency by people of other groups. However, the desperate and deranged look of our co-nationals; their miserable and despicable jobs; the quickness in pulling a knife; the filth where they live; plus the aggravating factor of legendary, melodramatic brigandage; all contribute to placing them, for the right or the wrong reasons, among the most likely to commit crimes; and, therefore, to being always the first suspects when crime is an issue.

Fontana also noticed the merciless attitude against Italian immigrants, from the American press to street urchins. But, intelligently, he understands that part of the blame goes to the motherland that allowed the peasant masses to languish in a state of brutishness; and part of the blame also goes to America that let the landlords of those hovels make gigantic amounts of money by allowing the buildings to decay into the state of primitive caves. Even today, despite the fact that the conditions are better, the same complaints are raised against the owners of slums.. Today Italians don’t live there anymore; now it’s the turn of blacks and Puerto Ricans. Fontana was also one of the first ones, in the face of the hostility of the press and the public opinion, to take the risk of declaring that one could understand, albeit not justify, the use of knives by Italians; the only weapons they could use against aggressive and threatening mobs.

How can the poor Italians defend themselves against this huge enemy mob; without deadly weapons; and, moreover, with their hot temper rendered even harsher by centuries of suffering? The only defense they have is terror: the knife… And they use knives the way the meekest animal would use its teeth when pushed to the extreme limit.

At the end Fontana goes through the Italians who managed to climb into relevant positions in business; the owner of luxury restaurants or the celebrities of the cultivated society. He observed that the conditions of the Italian community were already improving and he had words of praise for the Italian consul and for a journalist named Adolfo Rossi. I noticed that none of the names of the prominent Italians was known to me, and neither were their restaurants. None of them, it seems, was able to get established long enough to be passed on to the next generation and stay in business for at least thirty years. Maybe many went back to Italy after making their fortune. Maybe their children, educated in American schools, didn’t want to or didn’t know how to continue. Maybe their descendants were chewed up by American life. Fontana’s reportage is an important document. It is a pleasant reading even to this day. And it shows that Italian immigration began in the midst of fear, anguish and contempt.