AN ITALIAN WOMAN IN AMERICA

AN EDUCATED NATIONALIST

Since I started reading and re-reading books about the United States written sixty, seventy or eighty years ago by Italians, I have had the impression I am leafing through a family album full of daguerreotypes and old  faded photographs; but also the collection of a photo magazine, with sharp snapshots of old and obsolete customs. Since the United States was born after a revolution against England—indeed, against Europe—it has attracted the attention of many observers and millions of readers. There are now hundreds of books about this nation; and the crescendo of publications is not abating. Books are available in all languages. There are reports, investigations, impressions, studies, paeans, criticisms, invectives, diaries, memoires; with illustrations, drawings, photographs in black and white and in color; statistics; books sporting a white beard and books that contain poison ivy. Books by Italian writers are not very numerous and none of them achieved world fame like the essays by Alexis De Tocqueville.[1]  Most recently I re-read a book published just before World War I. This event marked America’s entry into European politics and a fatal milestone in the relations between America and Italy. It was also the sign that modern communication technology had shrunk the distance between the two continents, with the result that Europe’s war and peace now also concern America. It was a fatal date for Europe and also for the United States in that it marked the end of the American period of isolationism from the European world. The author of this book,[2] America vissuta, was Amy A. Bernardy. I normally don’t pay much attention to the biographies of individuals. Italy does not have a very good library reference system for biographical and bibliographical information; thus, I could only surmise that the author was probably a student of Pasquale Villari,[3] in love with classical studies and with the nationalist ideology that had sprung up around that time. It was published under the aegis of the Florence Institute of Higher Studies.[4]  If we go by her last name we can also guess that she was a foreigner, an impression confirmed by the first name. None of this matters much. Apparently she was well off and could count on solid introductions as shown by the fact that she was received by the Italian ambassador and by President Theodore Roosevelt.[5] She collaborated with the journal Il Marzocco[6] and authored books on the history of the relations between Venice and the Turkish empire and other powers in the seventeenth century. I bet my head (metaphorically) that she was wearing eye glasses. (See note at the end of the chapter.) She wasn’t a very compelling writer, although she was a rather apt observer and an eager researcher. She also enjoyed hyperboles. Here is the portrait of the United States found in the opening pages:

[T]his great Republic is like a Harlequin costume in the positive sense of the term: thousands of pieces are stitched together into a dress; fraying and patched up; in bits and pieces; and yet able to endear itself to the public more than old clunky armors of antique paladins. Beautiful and horrible; infantile and generous; skeptical with a tragic and scary cynicism; obsessed with a grotesque fanaticism worse than the medieval kind; the result of mixing heroic and rebellious bloodlines; depraved and chaste; uncontaminated and filthy; descendant from puritanical ancestors and daughter of outlaw fathers. This bastard, cosmopolitan race is the American race, the race that more than any other one should have in itself the seeds—and more than just the seeds—of all the virtues and all the vices from the North and the South; from the Orient and the Occident; all gathered here by ways of immigration; transmitted by foreign medleys; generated by indigenous hybridization; determined by hereditary tendencies; excited by climate and nature. All this could turn this race into the only race in the world from which we could expect all that the world can give, magnificent or unbearable. “Nisi imperasset” [If it didn’t already rule the world].[7]

I reported this short passage because it is a nice piece. We can see here the culture and taste of those days; and we can see the watermark of the author’s erudition that, as she does frequently in the book, culminates in a Latin quotation. It also illustrates a sententious spirit that shows no shame in proffering moral judgments that are tautologically indisputable. However, this nice piece is based on the wrong pre-supposition that in those times an American race actually existed (it doesn’t exist even in the present); and that it was the result of many European, Asian and African races. This is not the case today and was even less so back then.

In America there are certainly off-springs of the mixture of different races, generally northern races, because they were the first ones to colonize this country. Yet, a true American race does not exist. In its place we have the Anglo-Saxon concept of social life, that is, the social model that all the other races adopt and that constitutes the form, the structure of this country. This country is not dominated by an Anglo-Saxon race; rather by Anglo-Saxon concepts. The constitution, with its preoccupation for individual liberty, state rights and private education, is Anglo-Saxon. The justice system, based on open debate in court, is based on the criterion of case by case jurisprudence and not that of statutes. The role of police; and the freedom of assembly and freedom of the press are Anglo-Saxon. The form of marriage and divorce; and the position of women in society are of Anglo-Saxon origin. Even non-Protestant religions conform to the criteria of Anglo-Saxon churches. Any Catholic who seriously analyzes the structure of his Church in the United States will agree that, in many respects, it resembles Protestant churches; more than the southern European Catholic churches that were not directly influenced by Protestantism.

This book was composed in a rather uninhibited way and without an agenda (which makes for captivating reading); mixing together interviews with presidents, personal diaries, gossip columns, art notes, discussions on theories, quick sketches about Greek and Chinese communities etc. At the foundation is the concept of race.  Ms. Bernardy maintains that Americans and Italians had nothing in common and, therefore, there was no chance they could fuse into one entity. This is rather questionable if one takes the word fuse literally: of the two elements required for a fusion, the Italian supplied the moldable matter; while the Anglo-Saxon provided the die. One gave it the body; the other, the soul. Up until now America is an operation performed by the Anglo-Saxon race on the masses that did not have a distinct national identity. And here we come to the other mistake made by Ms. Bernardy. She believes that Italian paesani from the south were Italian. At most, if they had a collective identity at all, this was the Catholic identity; but they lacked a national consciousness, education, language and affection (they loved their little native hamlets, but not Italy as a nation and state.) On the good side, Ms. Bernardy shows she had a very sharp eye and independent judgment toward our co-nationals who, she believed, could never become fused with America. (Indeed they fused, did they ever! In general they were reduced to the bare minimum, like a denominator.) Her book contains two chapters on Boston’s Little Italy that constitute one of the most important testimonies on the quality of life of Italian immigrants in America.

Here is a passage about two characters of the colonial world that have disappeared: the paesano and the banchista [banker] of our Little Italies.

In this Little Italy we basically find a series of small villages, gathered around a couple of bell towers. The immigrant mass at this time is all concentrated around different nuclei; polarized around as many leaders as there are villages, bell towers and small churches in Italy. They came from places identifiable by those landmarks and—on the other side of the Atlantic— paesani and compari rebuilt the same places repeating the echo of the names. The concept of paesano is the fertile creator of colonial nuclei. Any attempt to embrace wider concepts and ideas of renewal and moral changes among the masses fails against this bastion. An example comes from the banking business. Immigrants blindly trust only the paesani and for this reason they end up losing everything to the bankruptcies—alas, real ones—of so many apocryphal banks that exist only because the paesani trust and support them. And, for the same reason, larger impersonal institutions encounter resistance and distrust when they try to open up branches in Little Italy. If you ask an immigrant where he keeps his money, he will tell you that lu paesano has it. Try to persuade him there is a better way: impossible. The paesano who keeps his money is also his confidant, his lawyer, his personal adviser, his protector, his federal agent. When lu paesano goes belly up or runs away with the money, the poor victim cries, curses or resigns, depending on the individual personality. Then, he goes back to working and saving. And he hands his savings to the next paesano. If this one happens to be honest, all is well. If not... This explains the tremendous power of the little retail banks in comparison to institutional banks; and the enormous difficulty in the form of passive resistance encountered by the Banco di Napoli[8] with immigrants who do not want to use its services for commercial operations. In effect the Banco di Napoli is an impersonal financial institution. That’s it. For the cosmopolitans among us that is enough: indeed, that’s what makes it more secure. But for the immigrant it is unquestionably inferior to the typical traditional bank which, like at the time of Dante, is located in the neighborhood’s drug store; the emporium de omnibus rebus [of all possible things] and related quibusdam aliis [and all kinds of other things]. Sure, it is more than a bank. It is a bookstore, a newsstand; often with a printing shop (culture and finance are fused in one civilizing trust [sic].) The colonial bank is also notary office, travel agency, shipping company, navigation; express agency, pharmacy and employment bureau. Often it includes a grosseria [grocery store], a warehouse for imported foodstuff, even a pasta factory and sometimes a bakery oven. The banker is also a landlord who owns lots of buildings rented to great profit thanks to his extensive connections. His name, in the colony, is banchista. All this is traditional, legitimate, familiar, smart, profitable, very respectable and honest… when it is an honest arrangement. When it is not honest, he uses his client’s money to buy foodstuff for his own grosseria and will sell at double the price to the flattered client. Not only, but he sells to him on credit with an interest; or he mortgages the salary that the client earns working for an allied contractor, from whom he has already received a percentage that is inversely proportional to the wage the client is earning after the banchista himself convinced him to take a job at a lower pay. This way the banchista receives a cut from everyone he has helped earn money by using his clients. He also lends money to show off how his generosity; but he will do so only when he is already sure he has under his nails enough profit generated by the employment of his client; and enough profit to cover possible losses. In the financial contracts with his employees, he inserts a clause requiring that they drag into his net all the paesani. He is also involved in murky deals about putting up bail money for people in trouble with the law. He rents or sublets homes that he reports as assets worth $10,000 in real estate, while in reality 70 or 80% of it is mortgaged. He accepts deposits of $10,000 although he knows full well that he only has reserves to cover a minimal part of it. And nobody will be surprised if the home sublet to a boarder is put to a different use by an entrepreneurial Madame… It is a fatal closed circle, a diabolical net that imprisons the immigrant who cannot rebel. If he rebels, the organization comes down on him and he ends up being blacklisted. The blacklisting of workers reaches the level of atrocity. It is painful to admit it but the worst enemy of an Italian is usually another Italian.

I would also like to quote another nice passage by Bernardy, full of interesting

observations and passion:

 

To be happy in America one needs an aptitude for mechanical things; an opportunistic and entrepreneurial spirit, sharp about business and dull and primitive in everything else. One needs to be conventional and follow all approved standards like a sheep. One must show great interest for everything American and superior contempt for everything Latin, even the things that made Latin life great and beautiful. The Italian immigrant, to the contrary, is full of rural vitality, individualism and regionalism. His business sense is rudimentary. Although he doesn’t know and cannot express it, his soul is burdened by the ancestral traditions of his bloodline. This soul, tenacious and constantly challenged, impalpable but omnipresent, is what we feel in Little Italy (the nickname given by Americans to the neighborhoods where Italian immigrants live). You are moving across American life and then, suddenly, you feel that something is going through your spirit, and penetrates it, and bares it under the attacks of hyper-civilized barbarism. You feel a little tear in the fabric of your being: a regret, a longing for everything that was, for everything that is and that maybe will be. It is the waft of exile, cold and thin; it is a moment of void, loneliness and pain. Everything around you seems to break up into smithereens, collapse, suddenly fall down, in the incurable nostalgia of your lonely heart. Then, with its boredom, with its travails, American life takes over again. What was it? It is the soul of Italy that passed you by.

 

This piece describes both a period and a woman writer with her illusions and her acute perceptions. But also with blind spots. Forty years later I visited the same neighborhood in Boston. There is no longer any trace of the Italy she describes, except for a few faded restaurants. All the Italians who found success adapting to industrial society and the opportunistic and entrepreneurial spirit; to the business acumen, limitations, conventionalism and acceptance of approved Americans standards; they all fled to try to make a new face for themselves in upper-middle-class suburbs. In general they are caught in mid-air, no longer Italian and not yet American. “Color che son sospesi…”[9]

Bernardy didn’t see the responsibility of the Italian ruling class for this state of affairs. Italian leadership gave to these adaptable neither a national consciousness nor a technical education. Undoubtedly these were wonderful people: suffice it to say that they survived and solved their economical problems. Here the original stock helped: by that I mean the southern peasant stock that for centuries fought against an impoverished land, against an unfertile land and the barons.[10] Perhaps, despite her ideas about race and stock, Ms. Bernardy didn't realize that there were differences in the patterns of Italian immigration to America. Maybe these were due to race and stock, or maybe to history. Let’s take Tuscans and Ligurians on one side and southern Italians on the other. The Tuscan-Ligurian immigration to California created different outcomes than that of southerners to Boston. Tuscans emerged as contractors, builders and entrepreneurs (though not architects); Ligurians as bankers and wine makers.

It would be unreasonable to expect correct prophesies from a writer motivated by a patriotic spirit with great observation skills and style—a bit frondose, yes, but still a style. She left us a couple of books that are important testimonies. Due to the unusual circumstances of her life, she was one of the few Italians, and certainly the only Italian woman of her time; who understood the phenomenon of Italian immigration unknown and ignored by all with the exception of a handful of politicians and journalists of that period. The visits of politicians to the United States began when the immigration phenomenon was about to end. Today lots and lots of them, now that immigration is over, keep coming. The Italian ruling class is always late.

New York, September 4, 1960

[Endnote in the original] Amy A. Bernardy, a valiant scholar of popular traditions, died quietly in Rome on October 25, 1959. She was born in Florence where her family, originally from Savoy, had moved. She graduated from the University of Florence in the Faculty of Letters with a thesis on Venetian–Turkish relations in the XVII and XVII centuries. The thesis was published with an introduction by Pasquale Villari.

A very erudite woman with a vast culture and a polyglot with a reserved but enthusiastic personality, she traveled frequently in particular to North America where for several years she was a lecturer at Smith College in North Hampton [sic], Massachusetts. She became interested in Italian immigrants and produced investigations, reports, publications and broadcasts. She was particularly interested in women and children living in industrial centers, and participated actively to the activities of the Dante Alighieri Society and other similar institutions that tried to assert the values of Italianness.

Giovanna Dompè, Commemoration of Amy. A. Bernardy

June 15, 1960, Università di Roma