THE STRUGGLES OF THE GUALTIERI BOYS IN NEW YORK
Few immigrants come to America these days who have not some relative
already here, who has prepared some sort of foothold for them, and all
have friends who will look out for their interests to a certain extent.
This explains nicely the mystery of why immigrants will mass in the four
States of the East which lie nearest New York, when the South is
offering inducements for Italian and Austrian labor, and the West never
has enough farm hands. I am in receipt of letters from large landholders
in several parts of the West who want immigrants to come and settle on
their lands, and do not understand why, no matter how much publicity is
given to the advantages in the West, the immigrants persist in clinging
to the East. The reason is that they wish to stay where their friends
and relatives are, and their friends and relatives are already situated
in the industrial centres of the East, where they in their turn had been
detained by the first comers.
The two Gualtieri boys came “raccomended” to Ferruchio Vazzana and
Tommaso Figaro, neither of them relatives, but merely friends, and both
with enough to do in looking after their own family circles’ interests,
so that the two were thrown very largely on their own resources; and
their adventures in New York, on which I have kept a very careful eye
without too much interference, form a very typical story of what befalls
the “greenhorn.”
Both had a small amount of money, and, if necessary, Nunzio could have
sent home for more, but his pride forbade. With Nicola it was different;
the entire family fortunes depended on this venture, though I did not
know it for some months: the bit of property his father owns is worth
about $300, and represents the toil of a lifetime. This had been
mortgaged for $60 at twenty per cent for six months, in order that
Nicola might come to America. His wages as a cabinet-maker and finished
carpenter in the village had been a most important factor in the family
support. The family consists of his father and mother, his wife a girl
not yet eighteen, and their year-old baby. To make up for the lack of
this, the three adults all engaged in work of some sort until the time
when Nicola could begin to send home the splendid earnings to which he
looked forward in America.
He had received a good education in the academic and technical schools
of Messina, and in addition to being a first-class cabinet-maker is an
excellent trombonist. He had served his term in the Guardia di Finanza,
and had at one time been awarded a prize of 100 lire for bravery and
efficiency in trapping some west-coast smugglers.
With Nunzio the case was different. Though big and strong, he had no
technical training whatever, the five years of his life which he had
spent in the Carabineers precluding all opportunities for that. He could
be only an unskilled laborer.
The first thing to do was to find them living quarters, and this was
done by their friends. Nicola got a room which he shared with four other
men, and his board and washing, for $3.20 per week, and Nunzio got a
tiny single room, in another house, with board, for $3.50 per week. A
part of Nicola’s slender store went at once to buy him a cheap overcoat.
The very next day after being settled, they began the hunt for work,
accompanied by Tommaso or Ferruchio. Wherever Nunzio went, bosses,
superintendents, managers looked at his massive frame and seemed
inclined to hire him until they found he could speak no English, and
then they turned away, saying they had no time to bother in teaching him
how to take orders. All of the contractors for gangs of Italians seemed
to have all the men they wished, and as day after day went by, tramping
the city, going to as many as forty places in one afternoon, and meeting
with a refusal everywhere, Nunzio began to get very discouraged, and
Ferruchio to protest that he could not afford the time from his own
business to go about and interpret, and Nunzio tried to go alone one
morning. It was late in the afternoon before he even found his way back
home, and he was very badly frightened. In a little while his money was
entirely gone, and he was on the verge of despair.
When things were the blackest, he heard that a number of Italians were
being employed to clean out a big store in some place where the “L”
trains ran by, and reported it to Ferruchio, who followed up this
slender clew and found that Siegel & Cooper were taking on all Italians
for their night porter’s staff, as they found them much better workmen
than the mixed Germans, Irish, and negroes they had had. In brief,
Nunzio secured a place in the big department store, going to work at
seven in the evening and working until seven in the morning for $7.50
per week, and good pay for overtime. He had Italians all about him, and
the work, though heavy, was not unbearable. I photographed him and his
associates one night, and the pictures tell the story very well. The
great disadvantage was that he could not hear any English spoken, and at
the end of six weeks in this country could say nothing but
“Good-morning” and a few bits of profanity. Meanwhile he was sleeping
all day, working all night, and saving every cent he earned. His hands
were growing calloused in the spots that had been sore the first few
days, and he was much happier than he had been at any time. But
misfortune came. He was detailed to work with a Calabrese who had charge
of the day work in the room where the store’s waste paper is baled.
There was $17 profit for the company on the saving and selling of each
day’s waste paper. The Calabrese spoke English and took the orders from
the superintendent, translating them to Nunzio and another “greenhorn.”
Shortly after Nunzio had been promoted to day work and his pay raised a
dollar, a cousin of the Calabrese arrived in New York, and the Calabrese
wanted Nunzio’s place for the cousin, so he began systematically to
undermine Nunzio. If the superintendent ordered one thing, the Calabrese
told Nunzio it was another, and when the superintendent kicked because
the work was improperly done, the Calabrese laid the blame on Nunzio. At
last one night the superintendent asked all hands to work a part of the
night, and the Calabrese informed him that Nunzio refused to do so,
something which Nunzio had not the slightest idea of doing, and in ten
more seconds Nunzio found himself being suddenly and inexplicably
ushered outside.
Of course it was not difficult to reinstate him in a day or two, but
after the holiday rush was over scores of people were discharged, and
Nunzio went among the rest. Once again he began the task of finding a
place, and tramped the streets in the bitter cold, going about asking
every place where there was work going on, “You wan-sa man?”—and when it
was found that that was about all the English he knew, the boss would
always shake his head. For weeks he lived on the money which he had
saved while working in the department store, and then one day he
accosted Mr. Tolman, the superintendent in _McCall’s Bazar_
establishment in Thirty-First Street, and, as it happened that a man was
needed that very minute to handle the huge piles of printed matter in
the shop, Nunzio was put to work at $1.25 per day. I saw him the evening
of the second day, and he was unable to sit up straight from soreness
caused by the heavy lifting and carrying he had to do, but he clung
desperately to his employment, and now his reward has come. All about
him are English-speaking people with the exception of a large group of
Austrians, and so he is picking up the language rapidly, and he has been
promoted to the running of one of the big machines in the plant and is
averaging $10 a week. His face shines with his prosperity and he wants
to get married.
There were many opportunities for work for a skilled cabinet-maker in
October and November, but there were three huge obstacles in the way of
Nicola’s embracing one of the many,—lack of English, lack of tools, lack
of a union card.
[Illustration: Night-porter’s Staff at Siegel-Cooper Company’s (_Nunzio
Giunta in front of post_)]
The matter of the tools was not insurmountable, but the others seemed to
be. After a week’s hunt for work in some small shop where he could have
tools supplied him and a union card was not required, he seized a chance
to go to work for the United States Biscuit Company, hustling boxes of
biscuits, etc., and for his work received pay at the rate of $4 a week,
which he calculated would pay his expenses while he was waiting an
opportunity to engage in his trade. Four days of this work saw him
exhausted physically, his hand mashed, and his wrist strained so that he
was unfit for work of any kind. Before he was well again he was in debt
so deeply that he was nearly distracted. Just at the time when his
family was expecting he should be sending home some fine sums of money,
he was unable to make even his own living, through lack not of
capability but of opportunity.
He got two or three days’ work for an Italian carpenter who was doing
some roof-repairing, and the $4 he made paid one week’s expenses at
least; then he was commissioned to make a cabinet for filing papers, and
Tommaso arranged with an Irish carpenter named Delaney, who had a shop
at 147 West Thirtieth Street, for Nicola to work there while making the
cabinet, paying Delaney a dollar a day for the use of tools and shop.
There was no fire in the shop during Christmas week, and Nicola caught a
heavy cold. New Year fell on Friday, and there was no work of course. He
spent the day resting and doctoring himself. Saturday morning a terrible
blizzard was blowing, and he walked through it from the East Side to the
shop, arriving at seven o’clock, but no one had appeared to unlock the
place. If he could have spoken English he could have inquired where to
find Delaney or where to telephone him, but all he could do was to wait
or go home, so he waited there on the step in the driving storm until
one o’clock that afternoon, when he appeared at my house hardly in his
senses, nearly dead from exposure and on the verge of pneumonia. Only by
his friends taking extreme care of him was he able to go back in a few
days and finish his work. During this time Tommaso Figaro, acting on my
advice, went with Nicola to both the Carpenters’ and Cabinetmakers’
locals, and endeavored to get him admitted to the unions. At first the
difficulty seemed to be that there was no union man to sign Nicola’s
application, but this was obviated. Why the matter was delayed
thereafter I do not know. Two excellent opportunities for employment at
the union rate of $18.50 a week were offered to Nicola in the last week
of January, but he could not begin work until he got his union card. He
did not get it then, nor has he even got it yet.
On the 1st of March he must send home the money to lift the debt on his
father’s property, or the family’s little all would go. He was not yet
caught up with his own debts in this country, and so he abandoned all
hope for the time being of trying to get employment at his trade, and
began to look for employment as an unskilled laborer. At the end of a
black week he found this in Charles Schweinler’s printing establishment
in the Lexington Building on East Twenty-fifth Street, and at this
writing he is still laboring there, carrying bundles of paper from press
to table and such tasks. He is receiving about $8 a week, adding in his
pay for extra time. When the 1st of March came he had just $7 instead of
the needed $60, and when every ray of hope seemed gone and he was nearly
wild with worry a way was opened and the debt was paid.
So far both boys have been so intent on their own struggles and their
own work that neither has given much thought to the country in which he
now lives, and less to the rights as a citizen which he may come to
enjoy legally in five years, or illegally at any time he wishes by
purchasing fraudulent naturalization papers. The night we landed in New
York from Ellis Island there were signs everywhere of the bitter battle
between Low and McClellan and their respective supporters. I explained
it all carefully to our people, and they were greatly interested, for
they thoroughly understood the electoral form of government, as communal
and legislative officials are elected by popular vote in Italy. Two days
later Nunzio told me that an Italian friend of his had asked him if he
did not want to make a couple of dollars voting at the election two
weeks hence.
“Why, I cannot vote; I have not been here long enough,” said Nunzio.
“Huh, you _are_ a greenhorn. I have only been here two years, and I have
voted twice and belong to a political club. You come around to the club
with me, and I will introduce you to a man who will give you
naturalization papers. We will register you, and you will never need
think of it after that. You will be just as much of a citizen as any of
us.”
When I explained to the boys how illegal this procedure would have been,
Nunzio said:
“Well, if that is the sort of thing being a citizen is, I don’t believe
I want to be one.”