Part 27

As I look upon the Italian at home with his many social diseases which have so deeply eaten into his life that one might judge him incurable--I nevertheless say: “Non e vero, Non lo credo.” It is not true, I do not believe it. True, my faith in his healing does not rest with the Pope, in spite of his native piety and his sterling character. The Italian is sick and sore because the Church which has so long been his physician, acknowledges no error, and even its humble Pope will not persuade it that it must radically change its treatment; this not only for the sake of Italy but for the sake of America also. The most dangerous element which can come to us from any country, is that which comes smarting under real or fancied wrongs, committed by those who should have been its helpers and healers. Such an element Italy furnishes in a remarkably great degree, and I have no hesitation in saying that it is our most dangerous element.

XVIII

THE ITALIAN IN AMERICA

It is hard to determine how long it is since the first Savoyard came to our country with his trained bears, making them dance to the squeaky notes of his reed instrument, as he wandered from town to town. He and the man with the monkey and organ were of the same adventurous stock, and they were the vanguard of a vast army of men who were to come; first with a push-cart, later with shovel and pickax. Not to destroy, but to build up and to help in the great conquest of nature’s resources, so abundantly bestowed upon this continent.

While the average Italian immigrant is not regarded by any of us as a public benefactor, it is a question just how far we could have stretched our railways and ditches without him; for he now furnishes the largest percentage of the kind of labour which we call unskilled, and he is found wherever a shovel of earth needs to be turned, or a bed of rock is to be blasted. Hundreds of thousands come each year and each one of them fits into the work awaiting him, moving on to a new task when the old one is finished. The kind of work which they do calls for unattached, migrating labour, and eighty per cent. of those who come have no marriage ties to hinder their movements. When the winter comes and out of door work grows slack, or when the labour market is depressed, these unattached forces return to Italy and bask in its sunshine until conditions for labour on this side of the sea grow brighter. Their quarters, which are as near as possible to their work, are easily recognized; not because they are more slovenly than their neighbours, but because there is such a “helter skelter, I don’t care” sort of atmosphere about their squalor. This comes from the fact that they regard their quarters as purely temporary, and treat them as one might a camping-ground, which to-morrow is to be abandoned for a better site.

Like all foreigners, they prefer to be among their own; not so much from a feeling of clannishness, although that is not absent; but because among their own, they are safe from that ridicule which borders on cruelty, and with which the average American treats nearly every stranger not of his complexion or speech.

In passing through Connecticut, where nearly each large town has its Italian colony, I found one lonely Italian asking the conductor whether this was the train for New York. “Which way want you go?” (Usually the American thinks that the foreigner can understand poor English.) All the Italian knew, he repeated: “New York--New York.” The conductor left the puzzled man standing on the platform and the train moved on. I remained with the Italian and saw him three times treated similarly, if not worse, and I concluded that it is not very safe for the Italian to distribute himself too thinly over this continent.

The Italian usually moves into quarters formerly occupied by the Irish or Jews, whose demands have risen with their better earnings, and who have left the congested districts for the uptown or the suburbs. At present it is no doubt true that the Italian is satisfied by these quarters, and that what nobody wants, he is ready to take. So it is that he comes to the edges of the great Ghetto in New York, to Bleecker Street and beyond, and that his trail leads almost into the heart of it. Jewish and Italian push-cart peddlers stand side by side, the Italian barber shop seeks Semitic customers, the smells from the “Genoese Restaurant” blend with those from the “Kosher Kitchen,” and the air is disturbed by the perfumes of garlic and paprika, a combination not half so bad as it smells.

In Chicago, “Little Italy” hovered around a large district condemned to the sheltering of vice, and when good business sense dictated that it be moved to some less conspicuous portion of the town, it was immediately invaded by Italians. Scarcely a day had passed, yet the change made was as complete as it was revolutionary. Large plate windows were broken and pillows were stuck into the aperture to keep out the lake breeze; the broad stairways which had led to destruction were slippery now, but not so dangerous as before; the large parlours were divided and subdivided, while the gay paper was torn from the walls; it looked as though conquerors had come who were bent upon destruction. A happy change was manifest in the streets, for it was full of children, and the innocent face of a child had not been seen in those streets for years.

Housing conditions among the Italians are as bad as can be imagined and the most crowded quarters in our cities are those inhabited by them. Four hundred and ninety-two families in one block is the record, and it is held by New York, on Prince Street, between Mott and Elizabeth Streets; while Philadelphia can boast of having the most unwholesome tenements, where air is a luxury and daylight unknown. In that city thirty families numbering 123 persons, were living in thirty-four rooms.

Of course the landlord who builds these shacks and the community which tolerates them, are equally to blame. Both commit a crime against society, but a good share of the blame must fall upon the Italian himself for being satisfied with such surroundings. He is of course anxious to save money, and a decent dwelling in our large cities is a luxury; so he who at home used the heavens for the roof of his tenement, and the long street for his parlour, is naturally content with but a small shelter for the night.

Considering the conditions under which the Italians live, their quarters are not nearly so bad as one might expect, and when a period of prosperity has come upon the community, when it can look back upon a year or two of consecutive work, they show in common with other foreign quarters, decided improvement.

Rather characteristic is the tenement district of Hartford, Conn., which has gone through all the stages of such districts in other cities, is no better than they, and in many respects worse. There are buildings occupied which would be condemned elsewhere as unfit for human habitation. There are whole blocks which look damp, dingy and dirty; ancient structures, with filth oozing from every pore.

Jews and Italians are the chief inhabitants of this district, although one comes across a stranded American family here and there, the dregs of New England, the most hopeless people in this new city of ancient tenements. The two nationalities live rather close together, and it is a mixture of Russian and Italian dirt, the Italian article being much the cleaner.

Walk through the streets with me and you will readily forget that you are in America. Here Pietro, the shoemaker, on his three-legged stool, mends boots out on the streets; while Lorenzo shaves his customer upon the pavement in front of his shop. Gossiping groups of swarthy neighbours sit together upon the threshhold of their homes, and Bianca, Lorenzo’s wife, is complaining in a loud voice that Pietro, the shoemaker, has called her a hussy. “And he a low-down Sicilian, a good for nothing, has called me, the barber’s wife, a hussy.” She is rousing the ire of her neighbours, and woe to Pietro, for Lorenzo’s wife has a temper.

They do look so unchanged as yet, nearly all of them--so genuinely homely, as if they had landed but yesterday; and they have not yet gone through the transforming process, except as Francesco, the chief of the hurdy-gurdy grinders, has changed one or two tunes of his repertoire; for he appeases the New England conscience by playing “Nearer, My God to Thee,” with variations, “Rock of Ages,” closely followed by “Tammany,” and airs from Cavaliero Rusticana.

If the Italian in Hartford were less handicapped by the wretched conditions of his dwelling, he would more easily be able to utilize the splendid advantages of that city. As it is, he rises very slowly but perceptibly; although he lives in the worst possible houses, he is growing more and more cleanly; he is gaining in self-respect and when he has had the opportunity and the experience of the Irish people, he will probably not only duplicate their splendid record in New England and elsewhere, but excel it. Slowly but surely he is rising from a tenement dweller to a tenement owner and soon he “will do others as he was done,” and charge exorbitant rent for uninhabitable quarters.

The Italian is regarded as a good asset in the real estate business, for he can be crowded more than any other human being. He is fairly prompt with his rent and he does not make heavy demands in the way of improvements. This he himself appreciates, for he has business sense, and buys real estate as soon as he can invest his small earnings. Usually he acquires a small house with a large mortgage. He moves into the house at once, proceeds to draw revenue from every available corner, and in a few years lifts the mortgage and is on his way to buy more real estate.

The value of the business is proved by the fact that in the Italian quarters in New York 800 Italians are owners of houses, a large proportion of course being tenements of the worst character, which nevertheless, represent the respectable value of $15,000,000. A like large sum lies in the savings banks of that city, deposited by Italian immigrants; while the total value of all the property owned by them in the city of New York alone, is not far from $70,000,000. These figures, I must confess, do not impress me, for the sufferings endured and meted out for the sake of these earnings are terrible, and in the “tit for tat” of our economic order the Italian gives as good as he gets. The narrow quarters he rents are invariably sublet, and he imposes upon the newcomer conditions as hard as, or harder than, those under which he began life in the land of the free. The hardest conditions are those he imposes upon his wife and children; yet he is not a cruel husband or father, and shares their hard labour, often making the children part owners of what they earn. Of course the western and southern cities where the Italians have settled make a better showing, for they are not the men who came but yesterday; they have had a larger opportunity and have made full use of it. Italian clubs, opera houses, and Chambers of Commerce, are being organized in the western and southern cities; and one can judge of the quality of our Italian immigrant best, where the struggle for life is not too keen, the surroundings not so terribly depressing, and where the American spirit has had a chance to be grafted upon the Latin stock. More and more he is leaving the city and in the Southwest especially, colonies of Italians are springing up and are conducted with such eminent success, that with some encouragement, the Italian may be made helpful in reclaiming our arid deserts, even as he is now making the rocky hill farms of Connecticut and Massachusetts to “blossom as the rose.”

Among these settlements, that at Bryan, Texas, is the most notable. It is composed of what we usually call the least desirable Italian element, the Sicilian. Nearly twenty-five hundred people have settled there as renters, although not a few of them are owners of the land they work. Some eighteen miles separate the various families, all of whom come from near Palermo, and have lived together in reasonable harmony, making rapid financial progress. They are as peaceful a community as is found in so turbulent a state as Texas. In Utah and California the progress made is still more marked; and proves that the Italian like the rest of us needs only a fair chance.

I have had good opportunity also to observe him in his migratory state, attached to a construction crew on the railroad, and tenting by a cut in the rock, or by the western fields.

Usually the farmer fears his coming. The word “Dago” has in it an element of dread; it carries the sound of the dagger, and the dynamite bomb. The far away villager who sees the camp approaching fears its proximity. I have watched the Italians coming and going and although there was a heated brawl at times, they quarrelled among themselves, disturbed nobody, left the hen coops of the farmers untouched, did not burn down the village, and paid decently for their food. When they went away a fairly good source of revenue had disappeared and with it a good share of unreasoning prejudice.

Where a shovel of earth is to be turned, or a bed of rock is to be blasted, there the Italian, unattached, migratory, contributes his share to the public welfare.]

As competitors in certain fields of activity they are justly feared by those who have regarded those fields as their own peculiar province; and they are pushing the Russian Jew very hard in his monopoly of the manufacture of clothing. The nimble fingers of the Italian woman, her lesser demands upon life, and the ease with which she carries the burdens of wifehood and motherhood, have enabled her to outdistance the workers of the Ghetto, although the strife is still on and the issue not decided. Yet I believe that the future clothing worker in America will be the Italian and not the Jew; for the Jew loves life and its good things, and moreover he has educational ambitions for his children, which the Italian does not yet feel, he being a sinner above all others in the use of his children’s labour. The Chicago truant officers have had the privilege of arresting nearly all the parents of one “Little Italy” at least once; for almost every child of school age was kept at home and “sweated” for all the strength it possessed.

The Italian is very fertile in inventing excuses for the purpose of evading the law, and his ethical standard in that direction is still extremely low. This comes from his inherited hatred of all governmental restrictions; he still thinks that the state seeks only its own good and his hurt, in its insistence upon the education of his children. Substantially this is the Italian’s attitude towards law in general; and to that in a large measure is due the fact that he rates relatively high in the statistics of crime.

I have thus far refrained from using statistics, largely because they may be juggled with, as has been done very successfully; just as zealots juggle with Bible texts to prove their contentions. I have done something besides gathering figures, and that something may be of importance. I have visited nearly all the penitentiaries in the eastern and western States; not to ask how many foreigners there are in jail, but to ask why and how they were convicted, what their present behaviour is; to look the men and women squarely in the face and to converse with them. Let me say here again, emphatically, that statistics are misleading and that in spite of the large number of Italians in prison, there are by far fewer criminals among them than the statistics indicate. In a large number of cases, the crimes for which the Italian suffers, have grown out of local usage in his old home. None the less are they justly punished here, lest they be permitted to perpetuate themselves in the new home.

Most of the Italians in prison have used the stiletto and the pistol too freely, just as they used them at home when jealousy made them mad, or when they were in pursuit of vengeance for real or fancied wrongs. There are not a few real criminals who have used the weapon for gain, but in the majority of cases the stabbing or shooting was an affair of honour with those concerned, and even the aggrieved parties preferred to suffer in silence and die, bequeathing their grudge to the next generation, rather than bring the affair before a sordid court. Testimony in such cases is very hard to get, and I have seen many a wounded Italian bite his lips, inwardly groaning, and suffering in silence, unwilling to let strange ears hear the proud secret of which he was the keeper and the victim.

Italian burglars have not reached proficiency enough to have a place in the “Hall of Infamy,” and bank robbers and “hold-up” men need not yet fear serious competition from that source. The prisons contain many Italians who transgressed out of ignorance as well as from passion; numbers suffer because they do not know the language of the court, and did not have enough coin of the realm.