THE ITALIAN IN NEW YORK.
Certainly a picturesque, if not very tidy, element has been added to
the population in the "assisted" Italian immigrant who claims so large
a share of public attention, partly because he keeps coming at such a
tremendous rate, but chiefly because he elects to stay in New York,
or near enough for it to serve as his base of operations, and here
promptly reproduces conditions of destitution and disorder which, set
in the frame-work of Mediterranean exuberance, are the delight of the
artist, but in a matter-of-fact American community become its danger
and reproach. The reproduction is made easier in New York because he
finds the material ready to hand in the worst of the slum tenements;
but even where it is not he soon reduces what he does find to his own
level, if allowed to follow his natural bent.[7] The Italian comes in
at the bottom, and in the generation that came over the sea he stays
there. In the slums he is welcomed as a tenant who "makes less trouble"
than the contentious Irishman or the order-loving German, that is to
say: is content to live in a pig-sty and submits to robbery at the
hands of the rent-collector without murmur. Yet this very tractability
makes of him in good hands, when firmly and intelligently managed, a
really desirable tenant. But it is not his good fortune often to fall
in with other hospitality upon his coming than that which brought him
here for its own profit, and has no idea of letting go its grip upon
him as long as there is a cent to be made out of him.
[Footnote 7: The process can be observed in the Italian tenements in
Harlem (Little Italy), which, since their occupation by these people,
have been gradually sinking to the slum level.]
Recent Congressional inquiries have shown the nature of the
"assistance" he receives from greedy steamship agents and "bankers,"
who persuade him by false promises to mortgage his home, his few
belongings, and his wages for months to come for a ticket to the land
where plenty of work is to be had at princely wages. The padrone--the
"banker," is nothing else--having made his ten per cent. out of him
en route, receives him at the landing and turns him to double account
as a wage-earner and a rent-payer. In each of these rôles he is made
to yield a profit to his unscrupulous countryman, whom he trusts
implicitly with the instinct of utter helplessness. The man is so
ignorant that, as one of the sharpers who prey upon him put it once,
it "would be downright sinful not to take him in." His ignorance and
unconquerable suspicion of strangers dig the pit into which he falls.
He not only knows no word of English, but he does not know enough to
learn. Rarely only can he write his own language. Unlike the German,
who begins learning English the day he lands as a matter of duty, or
the Polish Jew, who takes it up as soon as he is able as an investment,
the Italian learns slowly, if at all. Even his boy, born here, often
speaks his native tongue indifferently. He is forced, therefore, to
have constant recourse to the middle-man, who makes him pay handsomely
at every turn. He hires him out to the railroad contractor, receiving a
commission from the employer as well as from the laborer, and repeats
the performance monthly, or as often as he can have him dismissed. In
the city he contracts for his lodging, subletting to him space in the
vilest tenements at extortionate rents, and sets an example that does
not lack imitators. The "princely wages" have vanished with his coming,
and in their place hardships and a dollar a day, beheft with the
padrone's merciless mortgage, confront him. Bred to even worse fare, he
takes both as a matter of course, and, applying the maxim that it is
not what one makes but what he saves that makes him rich, manages to
turn the very dirt of the streets into a hoard of gold, with which he
either returns to his Southern home, or brings over his family to join
in his work and in his fortunes the next season.
[Illustration: IN THE HOME OF AN ITALIAN RAG-PICKER, JERSEY STREET.]
The discovery was made by earlier explorers that there is money in New
York's ash-barrel, but it was left to the genius of the padrone to
develop the full resources of the mine that has become the exclusive
preserve of the Italian immigrant. Only a few years ago, when
rag-picking was carried on in a desultory and irresponsible sort of
way, the city hired gangs of men to trim the ash-scows before they were
sent out to sea. The trimming consisted in levelling out the dirt as
it was dumped from the carts, so that the scow might be evenly loaded.
The men were paid a dollar and a half a day, kept what they found
that was worth having, and allowed the swarms of Italians who hung
about the dumps to do the heavy work for them, letting them have their
pick of the loads for their trouble. To-day Italians contract for the
work, paying large sums to be permitted to do it. The city received
not less than $80,000 last year for the sale of this privilege to the
contractors, who in addition have to pay gangs of their countrymen for
sorting out the bones, rags, tin cans and other waste that are found
in the ashes and form the staples of their trade and their sources of
revenue. The effect has been vastly to increase the power of the
padrone, or his ally, the contractor, by giving him exclusive control
of the one industry in which the Italian was formerly an independent
"dealer," and reducing him literally to the plane of the dump. Whenever
the back of the sanitary police is turned, he will make his home in the
filthy burrows where he works by day, sleeping and eating his meals
under the dump, on the edge of slimy depths and amid surroundings full
of unutterable horror. The city did not bargain to house, though it
is content to board, him so long as he can make the ash-barrels yield
the food to keep him alive, and a vigorous campaign is carried on at
intervals against these unlicensed dump settlements; but the temptation
of having to pay no rent is too strong, and they are driven from one
dump only to find lodgement under another a few blocks farther up or
down the river. The fiercest warfare is waged over the patronage of the
dumps by rival factions represented by opposing contractors, and it has
happened that the defeated party has endeavored to capture by strategy
what he failed to carry by assault. It augurs unsuspected adaptability
in the Italian to our system of self-government that these rivalries
have more than once been suspected of being behind the sharpening of
city ordinances, that were apparently made in good faith to prevent
meddling with the refuse in the ash-barrels or in transit.
Did the Italian always adapt himself as readily to the operation of the
civil law as to the manipulation of political "pull" on occasion, he
would save himself a good deal of unnecessary trouble. Ordinarily he is
easily enough governed by authority--always excepting Sunday, when he
settles down to a game of cards and lets loose all his bad passions.
Like the Chinese, the Italian is a born gambler. His soul is in the
game from the moment the cards are on the table, and very frequently
his knife is in it too before the game is ended. No Sunday has passed
in New York since "the Bend" became a suburb of Naples without one or
more of these murderous affrays coming to the notice of the police. As
a rule that happens only when the man the game went against is either
dead or so badly wounded as to require instant surgical help. As to the
other, unless he be caught red-handed, the chances that the police will
ever get him are slim indeed. The wounded man can seldom be persuaded
to betray him. He wards off all inquiries with a wicked "I fix him
myself," and there the matter rests until he either dies or recovers.
If the latter, the community hears after a while of another Italian
affray, a man stabbed in a quarrel, dead or dying, and the police know
that "he" has been fixed, and the account squared.
With all his conspicuous faults, the swarthy Italian immigrant has
his redeeming traits. He is as honest as he is hot-headed. There are
no Italian burglars in the Rogues' Gallery; the ex-brigand toils
peacefully with pickaxe and shovel on American ground. His boy
occasionally shows, as a pick-pocket, the results of his training with
the toughs of the Sixth Ward slums. The only criminal business to which
the father occasionally lends his hand, outside of murder, is a bunco
game, of which his confiding countrymen, returning with their hoard to
their native land, are the victims. The women are faithful wives and
devoted mothers. Their vivid and picturesque costumes lend a tinge of
color to the otherwise dull monotony of the slums they inhabit. The
Italian is gay, light-hearted and, if his fur is not stroked the wrong
way, inoffensive as a child. His worst offence is that he keeps the
stale-beer dives. Where his headquarters is, in the Mulberry Street
Bend, these vile dens flourish and gather about them all the wrecks,
the utterly wretched, the hopelessly lost, on the lowest slope of
depraved humanity. And out of their misery he makes a profit.
[Illustration]