The Italian Americans

by Maria Laurino

  Far from the New York City nightmare of the Black Hand bombing a store owner who had just discovered the meaning of profit, the established residents helped build a community that provided opportunity, assistance, and education. The story of the Italians in California provides another template for America’s immigration history, one suggesting that an ethnic group can thrive if prejudice doesn’t overwhelm reason and an effective network of government, business, and community encourages immigrants to participate in civic life.

  Once the initial wave of northern Italians had discovered the harsh realities of the search for gold, they left the mining camps in the 1850s and headed to San Francisco to work in agriculture and later in the fishing industry. They originally settled in the Latin Quarter and then moved to Telegraph Hill, whose steep terrain reminded them of home, and soon North Beach and Fisherman’s Wharf filled with Italians. Those who chose to plant large farms settled in the more open space of the Mission District.

  The immigrants pushed food carts and opened grocery stores, stringing salamis and hanging dried pasta by the yard. They became truck farmers, growing artichokes, lettuces, and cabbage. Some left farming to establish themselves in the fruit commission business, acting as go-betweens for the farmers and store and restaurant owners. The most successful of this group of agricultural workers established national canneries for fruits and vegetables.

  An agricultural depression in Italy in the 1880s and ’90s brought more Italians from Genoa to America’s West. Some tried their hand at fishing, adopting methods from Italy for the California waters. They used a traditional small boat called the felucca that could navigate the wind and rough waters and an imported trawling net, a paranzella. Sicilian fishermen arrived later, and their presence created some of the worst tensions and violent conflicts between the northern and southern communities.

  The Sicilians made clear that they wanted to be independent operators instead of working for the northern Italians, and in this battle for dominance, boats were sunk and nets cut. Eventually an agreement, or at least acknowledgment that the Sicilians weren’t leaving, was reached and the spoils divided: the Genovese ran the deepwater and tuna fishing, while the Sicilians were left with the less lucrative inshore fishing. By the beginning of the twentieth century, many of the Genovese had turned to other industries, leaving the Sicilians in charge. In the heart of Little Italy at Fisherman’s Wharf, the Sicilians brought in a wide assortment of daily catch: crab, salmon, sardines, striped bass, lobster, clams, oysters, rock cod, and herring, and they even introduced a new fish to the American palate—calamari, or squid. The Italians provided 90 percent of the fish consumed in San Francisco, and statewide they controlled 80 percent of the fishing industry.

  Crab was among the wide variety of daily catch that Italian fishermen sold on Fisherman’s Wharf.

  It is difficult to piece together the early history of Italian Americans in San Francisco because many records were destroyed after the 1906 earthquake. There were roughly eight thousand Italians in the city by 1900, with twenty thousand more arriving over the next two decades. The community was tiny next to its eastern counterpart—by 1910, over a half million Italians lived in New York City—which probably helped its success. The total number of Italians in San Francisco never reached more than sixty thousand, and northerners always composed the majority of the population, with a mix of roughly 70 to 30 percent. Most of the southern Italians lived in North Beach because the poorly built housing there was cheapest. The temperate weather and nearby Washington Square Park—il giardino as they called it—allowed the immigrants to hold picnics and meet others, reducing the stress of isolation and breaking the pattern of socializing with only other people from one’s own region.

  Italian immigrants used boats and trawling nets from Italy. Their skill on the waters enabled them to control 80 percent of California’s fishing industry.

  The southerners who were not part of the fishing industry searched for any work they could find, and established Italians eventually hired many of them. The northern Italians saw the dangers of an American prejudice that began to spread as the population grew bigger and poorer, and they decided to employ the southerners. Genovese chocolate maker Domenico Ghirardelli hired workers for his store in North Beach. Andrea Sbarboro, another leader in the community, interviewed immigrants to grow vineyard grapes for an agricultural association that he had created. Workers were to be paid thirty to forty dollars a month and given a place to sleep, as well as food and wine. Sbarboro had formed the Italian Swiss Agricultural Association in order to give workers a share in the vineyard, but to his astonishment, they balked at the collective arrangement, wishing only for a daily wage. He dropped his cooperative plan and made the vineyards into commercial enterprises.

  Immigrants opened grocery shops to sell the tastes of Italy that they wished to preserve in America.

  For some Italian employers, the availability of cheap labor motivated their hiring decisions from the start. M. J. Fontana, also from the region of Genoa, discovered that spoiled fruits could be processed for canning but struggled for years to operate his plant successfully. He finally teamed up with Americans already working in the industry, and eventually he helped create the California Fruit Canners Association to produce canned fruits and vegetables under the brand name Del Monte. For his plant in North Beach, Fontana found it convenient to hire dirt-cheap Italian immigrants, paying them between sixty and seventy cents for a thirteen-hour day, instead of employing unionized American workers.

  But perhaps the most famous figure in San Francisco, and the most important to the lives of the immigrants, was the banker Amadeo Peter Giannini. He not only believed in the potential success of the immigrant population, but also helped to rebuild the city when disaster struck in 1906 and one-third of San Francisco was destroyed in the fires of the Great Earthquake.

  Like so many Italians in California, A. P. Giannini’s parents were from the region of Genoa. His father, Luigi, was a peasant farmer who had left his tiny mountain village of Chavari, about forty miles from Genoa, in 1864 to chase dreams of gold. Luigi, too, was fast disillusioned and turned to other work. Wanting to establish a new life, he courted by mail a woman named Virginia from his hometown and went to Italy wearing a money belt with gold pieces tucked inside (to influence the parents) to ask for her hand in marriage. The newlyweds returned to northern California by taking a sailing ship to New York and then the new transcontinental railroad to San Jose.

  One-third of San Francisco was destroyed in the fires of the Great Earthquake.

  Eventually, Luigi saved up enough money to fulfill a peasant farmer’s dream: he purchased a large fruit orchard that grew strawberries, cherries, and apricots. But when Amadeo was six, his peaceful childhood turned upside down with one unimaginable act. He watched a disgruntled worker shoot his father in front of their home over a wage dispute of a couple dollars. Amadeo’s mother, only twenty-two with three young boys, found the inner resources to take over the farm and raise her children. While tending to the business of the farm, she met a produce hauler named Lorenzo Scatena, who befriended and later married her.

  Lorenzo disliked farming and found work instead as a middleman in the fruit commission business. And it was here, watching his stepfather “Pop Scatena,” that the young Amadeo Giannini found his first passion. He loved the 1:00 a.m. negotiations with fruit and vegetable growers, when Lorenzo would choose the best produce to sell on the docks later that day. To the horror of his mother, who wanted her son to go to high school, possibly even college, Amadeo decided that his stepfather’s business best suited his interests and dropped out of school one month before graduating from the eighth grade.

  By the age of fifteen, Amadeo Giannini was more than six feet tall and towered over almost everyone in the community. He thrived in his new work, negotiating consignment contracts with farmers, assessing their motivations and needs, and persuading them to work for Scatena over others in the commission business. He was fierce
ly competitive, single-minded, and extraordinarily successful, building up Scatena’s business, and by the time Giannini was twenty-one, his stepfather had given him a half partnership in the company. Working relentlessly for years and accomplishing the goals he set for himself, by the age of thirty-one Giannini had saved $300,000 and asked his stepfather to buy him out of the business for $100,000 (keeping an equivalent of about $10 million today).

  Giannini then dabbled in politics, with a pragmatic understanding of the importance of political connections to further his business interests. He backed a reform candidate for mayor over the choice of the corrupt political boss “Blind Chris Buckley,” whose cronies took bribes and routinely shook down store owners for money. Giannini also invested in real estate, but his life ambitions changed when his father-in-law died and Giannini became executor of the estate. His father-in-law had been on the board of directors of the Columbus Savings and Loan Association Society. Giannini took his seat and began observing how the banking system operated, not particularly liking what he saw.

  At the time, giants like J. P. Morgan served only a tiny and select population of wealthy Americans. But Giannini had other ideas. He perceived, years before established bankers did, the potential of a huge customer base from the immigrant population. It was the “little fellow,” in Giannini’s words, who could transform the future of banking.

  A. P. Giannini believed in banking for the “little fellow.”

  The capitalist Giannini understood the commercial potential of enrolling thousands of immigrants. He also wanted to help the population, believing that every Italian had the ability to escape poverty and achieve success, as his own family had managed to do in a couple of decades. Immigrants were stuffing their money in mattresses, and he wanted to teach them instead about earning interest in banks. Giannini also wanted to offer loans—what today would be called microcredit. Most immigrants couldn’t afford to seek a loan larger than five hundred dollars, and no bank in town would deal in such low amounts, forcing people to turn to loan sharks. Giannini understood that by reaching out to those who were otherwise ignored, he was not only creating a business opportunity but also earning loyalty for years, perhaps even generations.

  Most of Giannini’s ideas appalled the other bankers, and after a few run-ins he left the board of directors and created his own Banco d’Italia (“Bank of Italy”). The bank was having early success attracting customers when life irrevocably changed for all of San Francisco on April 18, 1906. The night before, many Italians had come to hear their beloved tenor Enrico Caruso sing at the Grand Opera House. Around five o’clock the next morning the first tremors shook. The great earthquake lasted only twenty-eight seconds, but in the next few hours exploding gas and water lines set the city ablaze. Hysterical residents ran screaming through the streets, while others simply watched in horror as the raging inferno ravaged the community that many had just begun to call home. The fires destroyed one-third of San Francisco, and in North Beach and on Telegraph Hill, the Italian communities were devastated, with over twenty thousand residents losing their homes.

  Having moved his family from North Beach to the suburb of San Mateo some years before, Giannini felt the earthquake’s tremors even nineteen miles away. He had to get to San Francisco to see what was happening to the beloved town of his youth and, more practically, to his bank. With chaos spreading, his train crawled into the city, taking five hours to make what was usually a thirty-minute trip. When Giannini finally reached his offices, assessing the damage as he walked, he estimated that within a few hours the Bank of Italy would be engulfed in flames. He also saw that looters were making their way through the city. Desperate to move the bank’s money out undetected, he called his stepfather, still in the fruit commission business, asking for two horses and wagons and some crates of fruits and vegetables.

  Waiting for night’s cover, Giannini took the bank’s records, cash, and about $80,000 in gold and hid them in the bottom of the wagons, piling the crates of fruits and vegetables on top. With another employee he steered the horses and wagons through the clogged streets of San Francisco, hoping to dodge the looters. It was a very long night, the journey beginning around 8:00 p.m. and ending early the next morning, when they finally reached Giannini’s home. Still fearful of looters, he hid the money in his fireplace and slept in front of it for days.

  The plan worked. Other than the money’s smelling like orange juice, as Giannini recalled, he had saved the cash reserves of the Bank of Italy, which burned down as he had predicted.

  In the next few days, the bankers of San Francisco met and collectively concurred that they couldn’t reopen until at least November. They also declared a moratorium on loans. All except Giannini. Understanding the importance of providing psychological assurance to his customers, he was astounded by his peers’ thinking and explained that if they waited over six months to reopen, there would be “no city or people left to serve.” He also knew the ways of Italians—and that their proclivity to stuff meager savings into mattresses and other hiding places in their homes meant they had just lost every penny.

  With the city in ruins, Giannini understood the importance of providing loans for rebuilding.

  With a showmanship that he perfected over the years, the next day Giannini headed to Fisherman’s Wharf with two barrels, a plank, $10,000 in cash, and a sack of gold. Placing the plank on the barrels and a cardboard sign atop his makeshift desk, Giannini sat beside his institution’s assets, now stuffed in a sack, and announced that the Bank of Italy was open again for business. He coaxed the lines of people to borrow smaller amounts of money than they requested, and each day he made spot judgments about who should receive loans. Giannini would shake a worker’s hand, feel the calluses on his palm, and determine from the roughness of the skin that he was hardworking and creditworthy.

  Giannini’s decision to reopen the bank just days after the earthquake and to lend money for reconstruction transformed him in the eyes of the Italian people and created significant attention for the bank that had become his abiding and lifelong passion. He worked quickly to relocate into a new space. His fast and decisive action also helped rebuild the North Beach community faster than anyone had imagined possible.

  His fame and notoriety brought envy and prejudice as well; one slur was that Giannini ran the “pope’s bank.” But his innovations won the lasting affection of the immigrants. He brought people who couldn’t speak or write English to his banks and taught them how to save money. He served plumbers, bakers, fishmongers, grocers, and farmers. He set up a room for consultations with women, encouraging them to become involved in the family’s finances. While other bank leaders insisted that money be kept in one place, Giannini initiated branch banking. Situated where the “little fellow” lived, these branches offered evening and Sunday banking hours, the only times workers had off.

  Giannini also brought the Bank of Italy to schools, collecting the nickels and dimes of forty thousand schoolchildren. He made no money on the idea—the administrative costs overran any potential profit—but his instinct was to teach children to save money for their future education. Wanting to leave a lasting piece of great architecture and engineering in San Francisco, Giannini bought all the bonds (no one else was interested) for a construction project that became the Golden Gate Bridge.

  Similarly, when no one invested in Hollywood, Giannini did, creating a motion picture loan division, which may be why he earned the admiration of the movie director and Sicilian immigrant Frank Capra. Two Capra films are said to have Giannini-inspired characters—the most famous, It’s a Wonderful Life. Jimmy Stewart’s character, George Bailey—modeled on Giannini, according to the filmmaker’s son, Frank Capra Jr.—argues with a monopolist banker named Potter who detests the flexible loan policies of Bailey’s father, Peter. Is it too much, George Bailey asks Potter to have the little fellow “work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn’t think so. People were human beings to him,
but to you, a warped, frustrated old man, they’re cattle.”

  In 1930, Giannini renamed the Bank of Italy, the Bank of America.

  Frank Capra famously erased ethnicity from his films to create a purely assimilated American landscape. And appropriately in this emerging Americana, and growing sophistication of second-generation Italians, Giannini merged his bank with the Los Angeles–based Bank of America in 1928. Two years later he renamed the Bank of Italy the Bank of America.

  It seems a lost opportunity that Capra didn’t give George Bailey, or the Giannini-inspired idealistic bank president in his film American Madness, an Italian surname. The next time a great Italian-American filmmaker, one who established his career in San Francisco, would portray a member of the community, the character would be the fictional antihero Vito Corleone, whose name would penetrate the nation’s collective memory far deeper than that of A. P. Giannini. Francis Ford Coppola taught America that Italian gangsters “leave the gun and take the cannoli.” But what about the Italian banker who inspired Frank Capra, one who had expanded the industry from the privileged to the masses—or in Hollywood parlance, taught them to “leave the mattress (and take the interest)”?

  Giannini embodied some of the most admirable qualities of the immigrant spirit—the desire to imagine big and with unparalleled enthusiasm, using the blank canvas of California to realize his dreams. Yet many of his democratic instincts were achieved by autocratic ways; he also possessed the darker traits of cold-blooded ambition and an unbounded ego. No doubt Giannini’s passion to fight anyone who, in his words, played “the big man’s game” and forgot about “the small man” came from his humble past. At the time of Giannini’s death in 1945, the Bank of America was the largest bank in the world, and it would be naïve to think that the institution created from his imagination could have achieved such dominance without Giannini also acting ruthlessly toward rivals.