THE ITALIANS
The immigration from Italy has shot up like Jonah's gourd. During
the last decade a fourth of our immigrants have been Italians, and
from being a twentieth part of our foreign-born, they have risen
to be a tenth. This freshet is not born of religious or political
oppression, for Italy enjoys a government on modern lines, created
by the efforts of patriots like Mazzini, Cavour, and Garibaldi.
The impulse that every year prompts from a quarter to a half of a
million Italians to wander oversea is purely economic. Ignorance and
the subjection of women cause blind multiplication, with the result
that the Italians are wresting their food from narrower plots than
any other European people. A population approximating that of all
our Atlantic States is trying to live from a space little greater
than the combined areas of New York and Georgia. Although Argentina
seconds the United States in absorbing the overflow, still, Italy's
population continually swells, her birth-rate is not sinking so
rapidly as her death-rate, and one sees no reason why the Italian
dusk should not in time quench what of the Celto-Teutonic flush
lingers in the cheek of the native American.
DISTRIBUTION THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES
Of our one and one-third million of Italians, the Northeast down
to Washington holds about three-fourths, while south and southwest
of the Capitol there are only three and a half per cent. The
middle West has sixteen per cent., and the quota of the Far West
is seven and a half per cent. For the most part, they are greatly
concentrated in cities. Roughly speaking, five-sixths of the
Italians in Delaware are in Wilmington; in Maryland, three-sevenths
are in Baltimore; in Illinois, three-eights are in Chicago; in
Nebraska, two-thirds are in Omaha; in Missouri, three-fifths are in
St. Louis; in Oregon, one-half are in Portland; in Pennsylvania,
one-half are in Philadelphia; in Louisiana, two-fifths are in
New Orleans; in Michigan, a third are in Detroit; and in Ohio, a
quarter are in Cleveland. In New York city are massed a third of a
million of Italians, one-fourth of all in the country. Although a
slow percolation into the rural districts is going on, this current
distributes immigrants very differently from the older streams that
debouched on the advancing frontier.
SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS
Migratory job-hunters rather than home-seekers, the Italians are
loath to encumber themselves with their women. The women are only a
little more than one-fifth of the whole, nor do they come here more
freely as time goes on. A natural consequence of leaving families
behind is a huge return current _to_ Italy, amounting to a third of
the arrivals _from_ Italy.
More than half of our British immigrants are skilled. Of the
Italian arrivals, one out of eight is skilled, one out of four is
a farm-laborer, one out of three is a common laborer, and one in
two hundred and fifty has a profession. In a word, two-thirds are
of rural origin. The illiteracy of the Italian immigrants more than
fourteen years of age is forty-seven per cent.; so that of the two
million illiterates admitted to this country 1899-1909, nearly
one-half hailed from Italy.
NORTH ITALIANS AND SOUTH ITALIANS
The fact that the emigrants from the north of Italy wander chiefly
to South America, where industrially they dominate, while the
emigrants from central and southern Italy come to this country,
where they are dominated, makes it important to remember that in
race advancement the North Italians differ from the rest of their
fellow-countrymen. In the veins of the broadhead people of Piedmont,
Lombardy, and Venetia runs much Northern blood--Celtic, Gothic,
Lombard, and German. The other Italians are of the long-head, dark,
Mediterranean race, with no small infusion of Greek, Saracen, and
African blood in the Calabrians and Sicilians. Rarely is there so
wide an ethnic gulf between the geographical extremes of a nation as
there is between Milan and Palermo.
The Italians themselves have set forth these contrasts in the
sharpest relief. In an elaborate treatise, Professor Niceforo shows
that blue eyes and fair hair occur twice as often among the North
Italians as among the people south of Rome; that their understatured
are eight per cent. of the whole as against twenty per cent. for
the South Italians; and that they show a greater frequency of
high foreheads and a smaller frequency of low brows. They have a
third of the illiteracy of the South, twice the school attendance,
thrice the number of higher students; and while a clear third of
the southern students fail in their examinations, less than a
quarter of the northerners fail. Northern Italy is twice as well
off in teachers and libraries, five times as productive in book
publishing, has twice as many voters to the hundred inhabitants,
and buys half as many lottery-tickets as the South. The astonishing
dearth of literary and artistic production in the South ought to
confound those optimists who, identifying "Italian" with "Venetian"
and "Tuscan," anticipate that the Italian infusion will one day
make the American stock bloom with poets and painters. The figures
of Niceforo show that the provinces that contribute most to our
immigration _have been utterly sterile in creators of beauty_.
In nothing are the two peoples so unlike as in their crimes. While
northern Italy leads in fraud and chicane, southern Italy reveals
a rank growth of the ferocious crimes that go with a primitive
stage of civilization. The contrast is between force and fraud,
violence and cunning. The South produces five times as much homicide
as the North, four times as much brigandage, three times as many
assaults, and five times as many seizures or destructions of
property. On the whole, it has from three to four times the violence
of the North, while its obscene crimes, which constitute an index
of sensuality, are thrice as numerous. As for Sicilians, they are
scourged by seven times the homicide, four times the brigandage, and
four times the obscene crime suffered by an equal number of North
Italians.
[Illustration: Photograph by Hine
Italian Gypsy Mother and Child]
[Illustration: Photograph by Hine
Italian Woman of Greek or Albanian Ancestry]
Although less advanced, the Italians from the valley of the Po are
racially akin to the Swiss and the South Germans. As immigrants,
their superiority to other Italians is generally recognized. I have
yet to meet an observer who does not rate the North Italian among
us as more intelligent, reliable, and progressive than the South
Italian. We know from statistics that he is less turbulent, less
criminal, less transient; he earns more, rises higher, and acquires
citizenship sooner. Yet only a fifth of our Italians are from the
North. It is the backward and benighted provinces from Naples to
Sicily that send us the flood of "gross little aliens" who gave
Henry James, on revisiting Boston, the melancholy vision "of a huge
applied sponge--a sponge saturated with the foreign mixture and
passed over almost everything I remembered and might still have
recovered."
VARIETY OF OCCUPATIONS
Being new-comers, the Italians are doing the heavy, unskilled work
which was once the prerogative of the Irish. The shovel is now as
firmly associated in our minds with 'Tonio as formerly with Barney.
The North Italians go much into mine and quarry and silk-mill, but
the others stick close to railroad, street, and construction work.
Of our railroads it has been said that "Italians build them, Irish
run them, and Jews own them." Nearer to the truth, perhaps, is the
New York _mot_, "Houses nowadays are built by Italians, owned by
Jews, and paid for by Irish tenants." Being small and vegetarian,
the Italians are not preferred in earthwork for their physical
strength, but because of their endurance of heat, cold, wet, and
muck. As one contractor puts it, "they can stand the gaff."
Although the South Italians are numerous in the manufacture of boots
and shoes, cigars, glass, woolen goods, and clothing, some employers
refuse the males for "inside work" because they have the reputation
of being turbulent. Their noteworthy absence from the rolling-mills
is attributed to the fact that they lack the nervous stability
needed for seizing a white-hot piece of iron with a pair of tongs.
The phlegmatic Slav stands up to such work.
In the trades, the Italians crop up numerously as bakers,
barbers, cobblers, confectioners, tailors, street musicians,
scissors-grinders and marble-cutters. A great number become
hucksters and peddlers of such characteristic wares as fruits
and plaster casts. It is the Italian from the North, especially
the Genoese, who brings native commercial capacity and becomes a
wholesale or commission merchant in fruits and vegetables, while the
Neapolitan is still fussing with his banana-stand. Thanks to their
race genius, the Italian musicians and teachers of music among us
bid fair to break the musical monopoly of the German-Americans.
In one province of southern Italy not a plow exists, and the women
wield the hand implements beside the men. It is not strange that
immigrants with such experience do well here in truck-farming and
market-gardening. Those who engage in real agriculture settle
chiefly in colonies, for the voluble, gregarious Italians cannot
endure the chill loneliness of the American homestead. They follow
their bent for intensive farming, and would hardly know how to
handle more than fifteen or twenty acres. Few of them are up to
ordinary extensive farming. As one observer says, "They haven't the
head for it."
Although Italians are making a living on the cut-over pine-lands
of northern Wisconsin, the rocky hills of New England, the sandy
barrens of New Jersey, and the muck soil of western New York,
their love of sunshine is not dead. The cane, cotton, and tobacco
fields of the South attract them. More than half of the Italians
in Louisiana are on the plantations. Half of the sixty thousand
in California are in vineyard and orchard. The famed Italian-Swiss
colony at Asti employs a thousand men to help it make wine under a
_cielo sereno_ like that of Italy. Many a fisherman who has cast his
net in the Gulf of Genoa now strains the waters of San Francisco Bay.
There are two-score rural colonies of Italians in the South, and
the settlements at Bryan, Texas, and Sunnyside and Tontitown,
Arkansas, are well known. Italians have been welcomed to the South
by planters dissatisfied with negro labor or desirous of deriving
a return from their raw land. As a cotton raiser, the Italian has
excelled the negro at every point. When it was found, however,
that thrifty Pietro insisted on buying land after his second crop
as tenant, whereas the black tenant will go on forever letting
his superintending white landlord draw an income from him, the
enthusiasm of the planters cooled. Then, too, a fear has sprung up
lest the Italians, being without the southern white man's strong
race feeling, should mix with the negroes and create a hybrid. The
South, therefore, is less eager for Italian immigrants than it was,
and the legislatures of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia
have recorded their sense of the undesirableness of this element.
CHARACTERISTIC VICES
The peoples from the Azores to Armenia are well-nigh immune to the
seduction of alcohol; so that if this be the test of desirableness,
it will be easy to part the sheep from the goats. Certain American
sentimentalists go into raptures over the "sobriety" of the new
immigrants, and to such we may as well concede first as last that
there would be no liquor problem here if abstemious Portuguese had
landed at Jamestown instead of hard-drinking English; if temperate
Rumanians had settled the colonies instead of thirsty Germans and
Scotch-Irish; and if sober, coffee-drinking Turks had peopled
the West instead of bibulous Hibernians and Scandinavians. The
proportion of Italian charity cases due to drink is only a sixth of
that for foreign-born cases, and a seventh of that for cases among
native Americans. Alcoholics occur among the Italians in the charity
hospitals from a tenth to a twentieth as often as among North
Europeans. Still, American example and American strain are telling
on the habits of the Italians, and in the Italian home the bottle of
"rock and rye" is seen with increasing frequency by the side of the
bottle of Chianti.
Bachelors in the pick-and-shovel brigade will have their diversions,
so it is not surprising that the Italians, like the abstemious
Chinese, are addicted to gambling. Games of chance flourish in their
saloons, and many a knife-thrust has come out of a game of cards. At
home the state lottery has whetted the taste for gambling. In the
Neapolitan the intoxication of the lottery takes the place occupied
by alcoholic intoxication in the Anglo-Saxon. When one learns that
on an average the Neapolitan risks $3.15 a year in the lottery, six
times as much as the average Italian, one does not wonder that the
immigrant hankers to put his money on something.
VIOLENCE IN CRIME
For all the great majority of the Italian immigrants are peaceable
and industrious, no other element matches them in propensity for
personal violence. In homicide, rape, blackmail, and kidnapping they
lead the foreign-born. Says the Immigration Commission: "The Italian
criminals are largest in numbers and create most alarm by the
violent character of their offenses in this country." Among moderns,
gainful offenses occur from three to seven times as frequently as
crimes of violence. The medievalism of the South Italians appears
from the fact that they commit more deeds of personal violence than
gainful offenses.
Browning, who knew the Italians, expresses this cheerful alacrity
in murder when, in "The Ring and the Book," the _Pope_ tells of the
four "bright-eyed, black-haired boys" _Count Guido_ hired for his
bloody work:
Murder me some three people, old and young,
Ye never heard the names of--and be paid
So much. And the whole four accede at once.
Demur? Do cattle bidden march or halt?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
All is done purely for the pay--which earned,
And not forthcoming at the instant, makes
Religion heresy, and the lord o' the land
Fit subject for a murder in his turn.
The patron with cut throat and rifled purse,
Deposited i' the roadside ditch, his due,
Naught hinders each good fellow trudging home
The heavier by a piece or two in poke,
And so with new zest to the common life,
Mattock and spade, plow-tail and wagon-shaft
Till some such other piece of luck betide.
It was frequently stated to the members of the Immigration
Commission in southern Italy that crime had greatly diminished
in many communities because most of the criminals had gone to
America. One Italian official at Messina stated that several years
ago southern Italy was a hot-bed of crime, but that now very
few criminals were left. When asked as to their whereabouts, he
replied, "Why, they are all in the United States." From the Camorra,
that vast spider-web of thieves and prostitutes by whom life and
politics in Naples are controlled, have come thousands who find
the hard-working Italian immigrants a richer field of exploitation
than any field open at home. Still more harassing is the Mafia, by
means of which Sicilians contrive to ignore police and courts and
to secure justice in their own way. A legacy of Spanish domination
and Spanish arrogance is the sense of _omertà_, or manliness, which
holds it dastardly to betray to justice even one's deadliest foe. To
avenge one's wrongs oneself, and never to appeal to law, is a part
of Sicilian honor.
In an Italian quarter are men who never work, yet who have
plenty of money. "No," they say, "we do not work. Work does not
agree with us. We have friends who work and give us money. Why
not?" It is these parasites who commit most of the crime. Their
honest fellow-countrymen shrink from them, yet, if one of them is
arrested, some make it a point of honor to swear him off, while all
scrupulously forget anything against him. Thanks to this perverse
idea of "honor," an Italian murder may be committed in the street
in broad daylight, with dozens looking on, yet a few minutes
later every spectator will deny to the police that he has seen
anything. This highbinder contempt for law is reinforced by sheer
terrorism. It is said that often in our courts the sudden wilting
of a promising Italian witness has been brought about by the secret
giving of the "death-sign," a quick passing of the hand across the
throat as if cutting.
The American, with his ready resort to the vigilance committee, is
amazed that a whole community should let itself thus be bullied by
a few miscreants known to all. Nothing of the sort has ever been
tolerated by North European immigrants. The secret lies in the
inaptness of the South Italians for good team work. Individualistic
to the marrow, they lack the gift of pulling together, and have
never achieved an efficient cooperating unit larger than the family.
General Theodore E. Bingham, former Police Commissioner of New
York, estimated that there are in that city not less than 3000
desperadoes from southern Italy, "among them as many ferocious
and desperate men as ever gathered in a modern city in time of
peace--medieval criminals who must be dealt with under modern law."
In 1908 he stated: "Crimes of blackmailing, blowing up of shops and
houses, and kidnapping of their countrymen have become prevalent
among Italian residents of the city to an extent that cannot be much
longer tolerated." It is obvious that if our legal system is called
upon to cope with a great volume of such crime for a long time, it
will slough off certain Anglo-Saxon features and adopt the methods
which alone avail in Italy, namely, state police, registry system,
"special surveillance" and "admonition."
[Illustration: Photograph by Hine
Group of Italian Immigrants Lunching in Old Railroad Waiting-Room,
Ellis Island]
ASSIMILATION WITH AMERICANS
Not being transients, the North Italians do not resist Americanizing
influences. The Genoese, for example, come not to earn wages, but
to engage in business. They shun the Italian "quarter," mix with
Americans, and Anglicize their names. Mariani becomes Merriam; Abata
turns to Abbey; Garberino softens to Gilbert; while Campana suffers
a "sea change" into Bell. In the produce-markets they deal with
Americans, and as high-class saloon-keepers they are forging past
Michael and Gustaf.
But the South Italians remain nearly as aloof as did the Cantonese
who built the Central Pacific Railway. Navvies who leave for Naples
when the ground freezes, and return in April, who huddle in a
"camp" or a box-car, or herd on some "Dago Flat," are not really
_in_ America. In a memorial to the acting mayor of New York, the
Italian-American Civic League speaks of the "great civically inert
mass" of their countrymen in New York, and declares, "By far the
largest part of the Italians of this city have lived a life of
their own, almost entirely apart from the American environment."
"In one street," writes Signor Pecorini, "will be found peasants
from one Italian village; in the next street the place of origin is
different, and distinct are manners, customs, and sympathies. Entire
villages have been transplanted from Italy to one New York street,
and with the others have come the doctor, the grocer, the priest,
and the annual celebration of the local patron saint."
Among the foreign-born, the Italians rank lowest in adhesion
to trade-unions, lowest in ability to speak English, lowest in
proportion naturalized after ten years' residence, lowest in
proportion of children in school, and highest in proportion of
children at work. Taking into account the innumerable "birds of
passage" without family or future in this country, it would be safe
to say that half, perhaps two-thirds, of our Italian immigrants are
_under_ America, not _of_ it. Far from being borne along with our
onward life, they drift round and round in a "Little Italy" eddy, or
lie motionless in some industrial pocket or crevice at the bottom of
the national current.
LACK OF MENTAL ABILITY
Steerage passengers from a Naples boat show a distressing frequency
of low foreheads, open mouths, weak chins, poor features, skew
faces, small or knobby crania, and backless heads. Such people
lack the power to take rational care of themselves; hence their
death-rate in New York is twice the general death-rate and thrice
that of the Germans. No other immigrants from Europe, unless it be
the Portuguese or the half-African Bravas of the Azores, show so low
an earning power as the South Italians. In our cities the head of
the household earns on an average $390 a year, as against $449 for
the North Italian, $552 for the Bohemian, and $630 for the German.
In silk-mill and wollen-mill, in iron-ore mining and the clothing
trade, no other nationality has so many low-pay workers; nor does
this industrial inferiority fade out in the least with the lapse of
time.
Their want of mechanical aptitude is often noticed. For example, in
a New England mill manned solely by South Italians only one out of
fifteen of the extra hands taken on during the "rush" season shows
sufficient aptitude to be worth keeping. The operatives require
closer supervision than Americans, and each is given only one thing
to do, so as to put the least possible strain on his attention.
If it be demurred that the ignorant, superstitious Neapolitan or
Sicilian, heir to centuries of Bourbon misgovernment, cannot be
expected to prove us his race mettle, there are his children, born
in America. What showing do they make? Teachers agree that the
children of the South Italians rank below the children of the North
Italians. They hate study, make slow progress, and quit school
at the first opportunity. While they take to drawing and music,
they are poor in spelling and language and very weak in abstract
mathematics. In the words of one superintendent, "they lack the
conveniences for thinking." More than any other children, they
fall behind their grade. They are below even the Portuguese and
the Poles, while at the other extremity stand the children of the
Scandinavians and the Hebrews. The explanation of the difference is
not irregularity of attendance, for among pupils attending three
fourths of the time, or more, the percentage of South Italians
retarded is fifty-six as against thirty-seven and a half per cent.
for the Russian-Hebrew children and twenty-nine per cent. for the
German. Nor is it due to the father's lack of American experience,
for of the children of South Italians who have been in this
country ten or more years sixty per cent. are backward, as against
about half that proportion among the Hebrews and the Germans.
After allowing for every disturbing factor, it appears that these
children, with the dusk of Saracenic or Berber ancestors showing
in their cheeks, are twice as apt to drop behind other pupils
of their age as are the children of the non-English-speaking
immigrants from northern Europe.
[Illustration: Photograph by Hine
Board of Special Inquiry, Ellis Island]
[Illustration: Photograph by Hine. Courtesy of The Survey
Utter Weariness
Bohemian Woman on East Side, New York, after the Day's Work]
TRAITS OF ITALIAN CHARACTER
The South Italian is volatile, unstable, soon hot, soon cool. Says
one observer, "The Italian vote here is a joke. Every candidate
claims it because they were 'for' him when he saw them. But the man
who talks last to them gets their vote." A charity worker declares
that they change their minds "three steps after they have left you."
It is not surprising that such people are unreliable. Credit men
pronounce them "very slippery," and say that the Italian merchants
themselves do not extend credit to them. It is generally agreed
that the South Italians lie more easily than North Europeans, and
utter untruth without that self-consciousness which makes us awkward
liars. "Most of my countrymen," says an educated Italian in the
consular service of his country, "disregard their promises unless it
is to their advantage to keep them." The man who "sweareth to his
own hurt and changeth not" is likely to be a German with his ideal
of _Treue_, an Englishman with his ideal of _truth_, or an American
with his ideal of _squareness_.
The Italians are sociable. Who can forget the joyous, shameless
gregariousness of Naples? As farmers they cluster, and seem to covet
the intimacies of the tenement-house. The streets of an Italian
quarter are lively with chatter and stir and folks sitting out in
front and calling to one another. In their family life they are
much less reserved than many other nationalities. With instinctive
courtesy they make the visitor welcome, and their quick and
demonstrative response to kindly advances makes them many friends.
Visiting nurses comment on the warm expressions of gratitude they
receive from the children of Italians whom they have helped.
Before the boards of inquiry at Ellis Island their emotional
instability stands out in the sharpest contrast to the self-control
of the Hebrew and the stolidity of the Slav. They gesticulate much,
and usually tears stand in their eyes. When two witnesses are being
examined, both talk at once, and their hands will be moving all the
time. Their glances flit quickly from one questioner to another,
and their eyes are the restless, uncomprehending eyes of the desert
Bedouin between walls. Yet for all this eager attention, they are
slow to catch the meaning of a simple question, and often it must be
repeated.
Mindful of these darting eyes and hands, one does not wonder that
the Sicilian will stab his best friend in a sudden quarrel over a
game of cards. The Slavs are ferocious in their cups, but none is so
ready with his knife when sober as the South Italian. In railroad
work other nationalities shun camps with many Italians. Contractors
are afraid of them because the whole force will impulsively quit
work, perhaps flare into riot, if they imagine one of their number
has suffered a wrong.
The principal of a school with four hundred Sicilian pupils observes
that on the playground they are at once more passionate and more
vindictive than other children. Elsewhere, once discipline has been
established, "the school will run itself"; but in this school the
teacher "has to sit on the lid all the time." Their restlessness
keeps the truant officer busy, and their darting, flickering
attention denies them concentration and the steady, telling stroke.
For all their apparent brightness, when at fourteen they quit
school, they are rarely beyond the third or fourth grade.
As grinding rusty iron reveals the bright metal, so American
competition brings to light the race stuff in poverty-crushed
immigrants. But not all this stuff is of value in a democracy like
ours. Only a people endowed with a steady attention, a slow-fuse
temper, and a persistent will can organize itself for success in
the international rivalries to come. So far as the American people
consents to incorporate with itself great numbers of wavering,
excitable, impulsive persons who cannot organize themselves, it must
in the end resign itself to lower efficiency, to less democracy, or
to both.
[Illustration:
1866-70 8300
1871-75 27100
1876-80 28700
1881-85 109500
1886-90 197800
1891-95 289200
1896-1900 369300
1901-05 959800
1906-10 1186100
Immigration from Italy, 1866-1910]