Library of Congress Presentation; Italian Immigration and Relocation in U.S. History

A City of Villages

The Italian immigrants who passed the test of Ellis Island went about transforming the city that they found before them. Many previous immigrant groups, such as those from Germany and Scandinavia, had passed through New York City in decades past, but most had regarded the city merely as a way station, and had continued on to settle elsewhere in the country. This generation of Italian immigrants, however, stopped and made their homes there; one third never got past New York City.

They scattered all over the New York region, settling in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and nearby towns in New Jersey. Perhaps the greatest concentration of all, though, was in Manhattan. The streets of Lower Manhattan, particularly parts of Mulberry Street, quickly became heavily Italian in character, with street vendors, store owners, residents and vagrants alike all speaking the same language--or at least a dialect of it.

In part because of the social and political divisions of the Italian peninsula, southern Italian villages tended to be isolated and insular, and new immigrants tended to preserve this isolation in their new country, clustering together in close enclaves. In some cases, the population of a single Italian village ended up living on the same block in New York, or even the same tenement building, and preserved many of the social institutions, habits of worship, grudges, and hierarchies from the old country. In Italy, this spirit of village cohesion was known as campanilismo—loyalty to those who live within the sound of the village church bells.

Many distinctive events and practices maintained the unity of the village: weddings, feasts, christenings, and funerals. One that often caught the attention of outsiders was the festa—a parade celebrating the feast day of a particular village's patron saint. Hundreds or thousands of residents would follow the image of the saint in a procession through the streets of the neighborhood.

Tenements and Toil

Urban life was often filled with hazards for the new immigrant, and housing could be one of the greatest dangers. At the turn of the century more than half the population of New York City, and most immigrants, lived in tenement houses, narrow, low-rise apartment buildings that were usually grossly overcrowded by their landlords. Cramped, poorly lit, under ventilated, and usually without indoor plumbing, the tenements were hotbeds of vermin and disease, and were frequently swept by cholera, typhus, and tuberculosis. The investigative journalist Jacob Riis, himself a Danish immigrant, launched a public campaign to expose and eradicate the exploitative housing new immigrants were forced to endure.

For additional information about the work of Jacob Riis see the online exhibition: Jacob Riis: Revealing "How the Other Half Lives".

For Italians, this way of living came as an enormous shock. In Italy, many rural families had slept in small, cramped houses; however, they spent most of their waking hours out of the house, working, socializing, and taking their meals in the outdoors. In New York, they found themselves confined to a claustrophobic indoor existence, using the same small room for eating, sleeping, and even working. A substantial percentage of immigrant families worked at home performing piecework—that is, doing work that paid them by the piece, such as stitching together garments or hand-assembling machinery. In a situation like this, an immigrant woman or child might go days without seeing sunlight.

Immigrants' work places could be as unhealthy as their homes. A substantial number of southern Italian immigrants had only worked as farmers, and were thus qualified only for unskilled, and more dangerous, urban labor. Many Italians went to work on the growing city's municipal works projects, digging canals, laying paving and gas lines, building bridges, and tunneling out the New York subway system. In 1890, nearly 90 percent of the laborers in New York's Department of Public Works were Italian immigrants.

By no means was all Italian immigrants' work grim and hazardous. Italians found work throughout the city, in many of the improvised trades that have long been a haven for immigrants, such as shoemaking, masonry, bartending, and barbering. For a time, some observers felt that Italians operated every fruit-vendor's cart in the city. For many immigrants, though, and especially women and children, work could only be found in sweatshops, the dark, unsafe factories that sprang up around New York. When a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in 1911, killing 146 workers, nearly half of the victims were young Italian women.

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  Working Across the Country

  

  As the great surge of immigration continued into the 20th century, Italian communities bloomed across the country. As they did so, the Italian immigrants put their hands to a wide variety of work. In San Francisco, home of a longstanding Italian enclave, the new arrivals found their way to the docks for work as fishermen and stevedores. In Appalachia and the mountain West, they went into the pits and mines, digging for coal and ore. Stonemasons who had learned their trade on the rocks and crags of southern Italy worked in the quarries of New England and Indiana. Meanwhile, Italians labored on farms and ranches in every corner of the country, from the cranberry bogs of the northeast to the strawberry beds of Louisiana to the bean fields of California.

  One stoneworker in Barre, Vermont, told his story to a WPA oral historian in 1940.

  Viuggi, Italy, in the Como district, is where I am born. A good granite center, Viuggi. I am raise' to feel granite, to smell an' know it. My father an' his brother, they work' the stone, too….Funny, here in Barre we got 'bout couple dozen people from my town of Viuggi.

  

  Some Italians seized upon entrepreneurial opportunities in their new home. Italian immigrants in upstate New York formed the Contadina food company in 1918, and Andrea Sbarbaro of Genoa helped establish the California wine industry. In turn-of-the-century San Francisco, an Italian American named A.P. Giannini began offering small loans to his fellow Italians, going door to door to collect interest. Eventually, Giannini's operation grew until he was forced to rent an office in the North Beach neighborhood, then to buy a building. Today, Giannini's Banca D'Italia has become one of the world's largest financial institutions, the Bank of America.

  Many Italian immigrants, however, found themselves toiling for low pay in unhealthy working conditions. At the turn of the 20th century, southern Italian immigrants were among the lowest-paid workers in the United States. Child labor was common, and even small children often went to work in factories, mines, and farms, or sold newspapers on city streets.

  

  Many thousands of Italian immigrants found themselves prisoners of the padrone, or patron, system of labor. The padroni were labor brokers, sometimes immigrants themselves, who recruited Italian immigrants for large employers and then acted as overseers on the work site. In practice, many padroni acted more like slave holders than managers. A padrone often controlled the wages, contracts, and food supply of the immigrants under his authority, and could keep workers on the job for weeks or months beyond their contracts. Some padroni built vast labor empires, keeping thousands of workers confined in locked camps, behind barbed wire fences patrolled by armed guards. The padrone system, despite its many injustices, was not eradicated until the middle of the 20th century.

  Organizing

  

  Italian immigrants fought against unscrupulous management and unsafe conditions by taking organized action. Because several of the major U.S. unions barred foreign workers from membership for many years, many immigrants formed their own unions, such as the Italian Workers union in Houston, or joined the radical International Workers of the World. Italian union organizers fanned out across the nation, often risking arrest or death for their efforts. Italian workers were active in most of the great labor struggles of the 20th century's early decades, leading strikes in the Tampa cigar factories, the granite quarries of Vermont, and the textile mills of New England. In 1912, during a bitter textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the Italian IWW organizers Arturo Giovannitti and Joseph Ettor, along with striker Joseph Caruso, were imprisoned for nearly a year on false murder charges. In the Ludlow Massacre of 1914, when Colorado National Guardsmen attempted to break a miners' strike by burning down the strikers' tent village, the two women and eleven children who died in the fire were all Italian immigrants.  

  Under Attack

  

  Labor struggles were not the only conflicts Italian immigrants faced. During the years of the great Italian immigration, they also had to confront a wave of virulent prejudice and nativist hostility.

  As immigration from Europe and Asia neared its crest in the late 19th century, anti-immigrant sentiment soared along with it. The U.S. was in the grips of an economic depression, and immigrants were blamed for taking American jobs. At the same time, racialist theories circulated in the press, advancing pseudo scientific theories that alleged that "Mediterranean" types were inherently inferior to people of northern European heritage. Drawings and songs caricaturing the new immigrants as childlike, criminal, or subhuman became sadly commonplace. One 1891 cartoon claimed that "If immigration was properly restricted, you would never be troubled with anarchism, socialism, the Mafia and such kindred evils!"

  

  Attacks on Italians were not limited to the printed page, however. From the late 1880s, anti-immigrant societies sprang up around the country, and the Ku Klux Klan saw a spike in membership. Catholic churches and charities were vandalized and burned, and Italians attacked by mobs. In the 1890s alone, more than 20 Italians were lynched.

  One of the bloodiest episodes took place in New Orleans in 1891. When the chief of police was found shot to death on the street one night, the mayor blamed "Sicilian gangsters" and rounded up more than 100 Sicilian Americans. Eventually, 19 were put on trial and, as the nation's Italian Americans watched nervously, were found not guilty for lack of evidence. Before they could be freed, however, a mob of 10,000 people, including many of New Orleans' most prominent citizens, broke into the jail. They dragged 11 Sicilians from their cells and lynched them, including two men jailed on other offenses.

  Anti-immigrant sentiment continued until the 1920s, when severe restrictions on immigration were put into place by the U.S. Congress. When this legislation passed, the great era of Italian immigration came to an end.  

  A Century in the Spotlight

  

  As the 20th century moved forward, Italian immigrants moved steadily into the main currents of U.S. society. By the 1920s and 30s, the immigrant generation had begun to see their children grow up as Americans—a process that many immigrants viewed with some ambivalence. The U.S. public school system provided immigrant children with a new language, a new set of patriotic symbols, a school yard immersion in U.S. popular culture, and sometimes even a new Anglicized name. At the same time, though, this process often created a cultural gap between the second, Americanized, generation and their parents, who would always belong, at least in part, to the old country.

  Over time, Italian Americans achieved advances in the U.S. workforce. The major labor unions soon opened their doors to immigrant workers, and Italians were able to continue their activism on a much larger scale. As they gained more experience, Italian Americans were able to move into a wider range of careers, and became business owners and managers in greater numbers. Works by Italian-American authors began appearing in bookstores, and the Neapolitan tenor Enrico Caruso became a best-selling artist among Italians and non-Italians alike. With prosperity came greater political clout, and candidates began currying favor with Italian-American associations as elections drew near.

  The coming of World War II saw Italian Americans step permanently into the center of U.S. cultural life. Nearly one million Italian Americans served in the armed forces, about 5 percent of the Italian-American population, and millions more worked in war industries. As with many other immigrant groups, national service brought Italian Americans even greater social mobility, more access to education, and a higher profile in the nation's popular imagination. According to one account, an Italian-American aircraft worker, Rose Bonavita, became the inspiration for a 20th-century icon, Rosie the Riveter.

  From the 1940s on, the children of Italian immigrants could be found in all regions of the U.S., in almost every career and nearly every walk of life. This was especially true in New York City, where Italian American culture soon became a major component of the city's personality. For many Americans, the city's longtime mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, served as an energetic and erudite ambassador both for his city and for his national heritage. For a comprehensive collection of photographs of Italian Americans in the war years, and particularly in New York City, visit the collection Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives and search for "Italian American."

  With the explosion of mass media after the war, Italian Americans became ubiquitous. Every aspect of show business, politics, science, and art seemed to have a prominent Italian American in its vanguard. Rocky Marciano revolutionized the sport of boxing. Diane Di Prima pioneered the rough poetry and prose of the Beat movement. Enrico Fermi continued his Nobel Prize-winning work on the mysteries of the atom, becoming arguably the greatest physicist alive.

  Joe DiMaggio, the son of a San Francisco fisherman, led the New York Yankees to nine World Series championships. The crooners Perry Como and Dean Martin ruled the airwaves, and Hoboken, New Jersey's Frank Sinatra was, for a time, the most popular entertainer in the United States.

  Today, Italian Americans are represented throughout U.S. society, from the Supreme Court to the National Academy of Sciences to the National Basketball Association. More than one hundred years after the great era of Italian immigration began, the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the original immigrants continue to celebrate the heritage that their forebears brought to their new home.

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