by Gay Talese
But marriage was far from the minds of most of these pioneer Italian workers, who could as yet ill afford the expense of bringing over a bride. And most of these workers themselves did not intend to stay forever in America. More than fifty percent of this first wave of workers were not settlers but sojourners, birds of passage, young bachelors who intended to toil hard for two or three years, and also sow some wild oats while sweating for American dollars in ditches and tunnels, and then to return to Italy—richer, wiser, and no longer dependent on the padrone.
But for those Italian laborers who did settle down in America, or who returned home temporarily and then came back with a bride (the groom in some instances ensnared by the effusions of his ghostwriter), the padrone continued to play a significant role; and by the early 1880s, when Lobianco began as a padrone under the aegis of Keasbey & Mattison Company, several padroni were already prominent and powerful in New York City and Philadelphia, in New Haven, Syracuse, Utica, and in other eastern industrial cities and towns where large numbers of Italians had been assembled. Thus long before there were Mafia “godfathers” coining money in America—this did not commence until the 1920s, when gangsters from Sicily and southern Italy began to thrive in the bootlegging trade inspired by Prohibition—there was a syndicate of padroni who were prospering legally, if at times exploitatively, as business agents and personal advisers to their usually less astute, less educated countrymen.
Perhaps the most eminent padrone in the United States at this time lived in New York City, which had the largest collection of Italian immigrants in the nation. His name was Luigi Fugazy; he was a diminutive man with a professorial air who dwelled in baronial style in a large house on Bleecker Street in the Little Italy section of Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Born into a well-to-do northern Italian family in Piedmont, where his father was a teacher, Luigi Fugazy served as an officer in the Piedmontese royal army during the Risorgimento and briefly had been assigned to a unit commanded by Garibaldi. After sailing to New York in 1869 with a knowledge of English and a substantial inheritance from his father—whose surname, Fugazzi, Luigi later changed to Fugazy, justifying it as a gesture toward assimilation—he promptly increased his net worth by becoming a travel agent for a steamship company, a labor negotiator for Italian employees, and also the owner of a neighborhood bank and a service company that issued loans, provided translators and letter-writers, and notarized immigrants’ mortgages, licenses, wills, and other documents. Luigi Fugazy also founded several Italian fraternal organizations, social clubs, and mutual aid societies.
A second New York padrone, while not as prominent as Fugazy, was nonetheless very influential because he used part of his earnings as an Italian neighborhood banker and landlord to found the nation’s largest Italian-language newspaper, Il Progresso Italo-Americano. His name was Carlo Barsotti; and, like Fugazy, he had been reared in privileged circumstances in northern Italy. Barsotti had been born and reared in Pisa. The activity for which he would become most identified in the United States, which he achieved through his newspaper’s editorial campaign, would be the inauguration of the commemoration of Columbus Day, beginning in 1892—the four-hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America. Funds were raised for the erection of a statue to Columbus in New York, and this was also done in several other cities that had large gatherings of Italians and persuasive padroni who could influence them.
In New Haven such a man was Paolo Russo, a grocer, banker, and attorney (the first Italian-American graduate of Yale Law School, in 1893); in Syracuse, the leading padrone was Thomas Marnell (born Marinelli in Naples), who began as a railroad laborer and became a banker; and in Philadelphia, the most prominent padrone was a mortician named Charles C. Baldi, a virtuoso consoler of mourning families who also presided over a coal business, a travel agency, a real estate brokerage, and the Italian-language newspaper L’Opinione.
The padroni who guided the Italian workers in the less industrial sections of the country—in the rural South, the Central Plains, and along the Rockies toward the Pacific—were less wealthy than their eastern counterparts partly because most of the immigrants, being predominantly southern Italian escapees from the farmlands of their fathers, resisted settling in the isolated hinterlands of America. They had seen enough of isolation in their own country, and they not only lacked the money to invest in farm equipment and land, but also were unprepared, linguistically and temperamentally, to venture out into the wide open spaces that had already been homesteaded largely by Irish, Germans, and Swedes, and, of course, by native-born American frontiersmen and gunslingers who had little fondness for foreigners in general. The Italians preferred the protective insularity of ghettos, where their dialect could be understood, where they could buy imported Italian sausage and olive oil at the corner grocery store owned by their padrone. And when the imports from Italy included women, they began to nurture their families in towering crowded tenements that in a strange way evoked the mountain village atmosphere that had surrounded them from birth. The fact that few trees lined these city streets was considered a blessing by the women—who, accustomed as they were to the age-old daily habit of sitting at their windows in Italy for hours and spying down on their neighbors, would have become frustrated in America if their view of street life was obscured by leaves casting dark shadows.
And to these city-dwelling Italians there came always enough tales of horror and woe about life in the provinces to convince them that they were better off where they were. One such story concerned a gang of workers who had been escorted by their padrone into the Deep South to pick cotton on a Mississippi plantation: When they visited the town they were treated as miserably as the blacks, and sometimes confronted along the roads at night by men with burning crosses. The small Italian restaurant that had been opened near the plantation by the padrone was destroyed after an Italian cook served a black man. Another tale involved Italians who organized an agricultural commune in Arkansas, enduring not only droughts and tornadoes, but also the attacks of nativists baiting them as “dagos.” The Italians who had been sent into the midwestern wilderness to labor for the Chicago & North Western Railway had been unable to find housing throughout the winter. When they sought shelter and warmth within the haystacks of cattle cars in the railyards, they were awakened by holdup men who stole whatever money the Italians had saved from their nine-dollar-a-week salaries. Many Italians who had been recruited to work in the copper mines of Colorado during a work stoppage were nearly clubbed to death by mobs of laid-off unionists who cursed them as strikebreakers. In Louisiana, after a New Orleans police chief had been killed while investigating reports of extortion and violence among rival gangs of Italian dockworkers, eleven Italians were arrested on charges of murder—but none was found guilty. Outraged by what was regarded as excessive courtroom leniency, a citizens’ group of vigilantes raided the New Orleans prison, captured the Italians who had stood trial, and lynched every one of them.
But such atrocities that made headlines in the American press, and also in the newspapers back in Italy—bringing satisfaction to some Italian landowners burdened by the labor shortage caused by emigration—represented only a partial and often distorted picture of Italian immigrant life as it was being experienced outside the ghettos and mill towns of the Northeast at the turn of the century. Equally relevant, if insufficiently dramatic to warrant circulation through journalism or ghetto gossip, was the slowly evolving yet persevering assimilation of the Italians who generally coexisted peacefully with non-Italians throughout the South, the Midwest, and the Far West, and whose next generation often grew up speaking English with a Dixie drawl or a Texas twang, and learned to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in such places as the fraternal hall of the Italian Society of Victor Emmanuel III in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
The Ogden, Utah, native son of an Italian father and a Mormon mother would become a leading American essayist, Bernard De Voto. At Fort Huachuca, Arizona, growing up among soldiers, Indians, and bronco riders, was the a
dolescent son of an Italian-born U.S. Army bandmaster and a Jewish mother from Trieste; he would one day be elected mayor of New York—Fiorello La Guardia. There was a cowboy born in Texas of an Italian father and an Irish mother who would write best-selling westerns under the name Charles A. Siringo; and an Italian immigrant who ran a small hotel in San Jose, California, had a son, Amadeo Pietro Giannini, who would one day found the Bank of Italy in San Francisco, which would later become the Bank of America, one of the largest private banks in the world.
It is true, the Italians who put down roots west of the Mississippi constituted barely twenty percent of all the Italians who entered the United States before, and slightly after, the turn of the century. But this twenty percent probably arrived at “feeling American” far sooner than did the eighty percent who lived more sheltered lives in industrial towns and ethnic neighborhoods east of the Mississippi, and who continued to rely on a padrone as their primary liaison with the American mainstream. In California, where Italians were quick in gaining social acceptance and material success, there were hardly any padroni.
It was also true, however, that the Italians who moved into California were predominantly of northern Italian stock; and being the beneficiaries of a higher level of education than the southerners, and from less impoverished circumstances, they came better equipped to function in America on their own. Less than twelve percent of the northern arrivals were illiterate, as compared with more than fifty percent of the southerners. While southerners had been held back for centuries by the oppressive, antiintellectual traditions of the Spanish Bourbon crown and the Catholic Church, the northerners’ heritage had been more worldly, if no less spiritual, as they interacted, and intermarried, through the ages with diverse groups of Europeans who dwelled along or near Italy’s northern borders—the French, the Swiss, the Germans, the Austrians: citizens of foreign nations with which Italian authorities had often quarreled, but with whose language and customs many Italian people were at least familiar, and whose religious differences, when such existed, were tolerated in ways that would have been unacceptable to a Bourbon bishop in Naples.
The northern Italian heroes who sparked the Risorgimento—King Victor Emmanuel II, Count Cavour, Mazzini, and Garibaldi—all were lapsed Catholics; and while there was never evidence to indicate that northern Italians were less God-fearing than southern Italians, the northern Italian immigrants in America (unlike their southern compatriots) were not so readily perceived by America’s Protestant majority as peons of the Pope and dregs of the earth.
Their physical appearance alone helped northern Italian immigrants blend in better than southerners. Their body structure and skin tone were closer to that of the angular, ruddy Anglo-Nordic European Protestant colonists, pioneers, and arrivistes who most frequently represented, in physique and physiognomy, the American prototype. Northern Italians tended to be taller and less swarthy than most southerners, often having light-colored hair and eyes and, according to the writer William Dean Howells, United States consul at Venice during the 1860s, a “lightness of temper.” Not only were northerners more formally educated than southerners, and more inclined to master the English language, but they were as a rule more outgoing personally, less guarded around strangers, more entrepreneurial. They were also fortunate in having a significant number of their northern countrymen arriving in the bustling San Francisco Bay area almost simultaneously with most of the native-born settlers, at the time of the 1849 gold rush, when the tenor and tempo of the region were characterized by a mobile, not yet socially stratified, materialist group of individuals with whom the Italians proved to be quite compatible. Among the early prospering Italians of this period was Domenico Ghirardelli, who traveled through California’s mining towns peddling chocolates and harder candy, caramelle. Out of his energies would emerge a sweets and syrups factory that would flourish in San Francisco long after his death.
A contemporary of Ghirardelli’s, and among the first of many Italians to prosper as a vintner of California wines, was Andrea Sbarbaro, a Genoese banker who founded ItalianSwiss Colony in California’s Sonoma Valley. In the waters of San Francisco Bay and beyond, competing with the Chinese fishermen sailing their junks, were immigrant Italian fishermen, mostly from Genoa. But later, in the 1880s, as the Genoese began to advance themselves to more remunerative livelihoods along the shore and in the town, many sold their deep-water feluccas and small crab boats and nets to the most recently arrived Italian fishermen, several of them Sicilian. Among the Sicilians to arrive at the turn of the century was a fisherman born in Isola delle Femmine, an islet off Palermo, where his forebears had earned their living on the sea for generations. His name was DiMaggio. In America he would have five sons, the two oldest of whom would become fishermen. The three younger sons lacked the discipline and temperament for sea life, and as small boys they would often wander away from Fisherman’s Wharf and stroll toward the sandlots, swinging broken oars that they pretended were baseball bats.
Not only in northern California but in the Los Angeles and San Diego areas as well, Italian immigrants would in time contribute significantly to the state’s economic development, some as vintners, others as large-scale vegetable and fruit growers. Almost everything that could be grown in Italy could be grown in the fertile soil and mild climate of California, which of all the American states most resembled the peninsula of Italy. The transported Italians who capitalized most on the California climate were, to be sure, those immigrants born in Italy’s more industrial north, men who eschewed the other side of the country, with its smoky factory towns and ghettos, for a better place in the sun. Ironically, the Italian southerners, who had been toppled by northern invaders during the Risorgimento, in America found themselves still in an inferior position to their northern countrymen—and still ruled by opportunistic men from the north, their padroni.
With few exceptions, the padroni who governed the lives of Italian manual laborers in America were natives of northern Italy. An exception was the protégé of Dr. Mattison in Philadelphia. Carmine Lobianco’s canniness had been cultivated during his youth along the scheming waterfront of Naples, and, as a provider of laborers for Keasbey & Mattison Company of Ambler, he soon attained the prosperity that had been his primary ambition.
But by the mid-1880s there began to appear much negative publicity about padroni in the big-city American newspapers, and there were hints that United States immigration authorities were recommending legislation that would ban many practices of padroni that were deemed exploitative and devious. Many padroni were accused of dishonest dealings with the American employers who advanced the immigrants’ passage fares to the padroni: the latter would exaggerate the actual cost that the steamship company charged to bring laborers from Italy to the United States (pocketing the difference), and then record the higher passage figure on the list of debts that the laborers were later obliged to repay out of their wages.
On payday, some unfortunate workers discovered that they were penniless after they had reimbursed their padrone what he claimed was owed for lodging, food, transportation to and from the job site; such personal services as letter-writing, translating, and notarization; and the interest rates charged on personal loans. Some workers unable to repay the loans were forced to forfeit their small plots of farmland in Italy that the padrone had held as collateral. The loss of such land caused deep bitterness among the workers in America and their kinfolk in Italy; and the resultant protests against these and similar situations brought the whole padrone system under scrutiny by American lawmakers and the press in the mid-1880s, and tarnished the image of many padroni who had long and justifiably enjoyed reputations for being gentlemen of humanity and integrity. Such a gentleman, however, was not Carmine Lobianco.
In the latter part of 1888, Lobianco had gradually drifted into voluntary semi-retirement. With the intensified campaigns waged by American immigration authorities Lobianco became haunted by thoughts of imprisonment. He was now wealthier than he knew he had any
right to be; and while this did not plague his conscience—he had achieved affluence, after all, in a manner not dissimilar from that of the barons of his native land, and of such American prominenti as his patron, the eminent mixer of potions and a fellow profiteer in the market of cheap labor—Lobianco now wished to devote more time to his diversified business interests. From his profits after six years as a padrone, Lobianco owned in the Italian district of South Philadelphia two red-brick rental properties, a neighborhood bank, a travel agency, and a grocery store. He also owned two rambling boardinghouses in the outskirts of Ambler, where work was proceeding on Dr. Mattison’s Gothic community and asbestos-manufacturing center. Supervising the boardinghouse was Carmine Lobianco’s wife, the sister of an anarchist from Naples who, like him, had been slipped into the country illegally.
Living in the boardinghouses, and sleeping on cornhusk mattresses, four bunks to a room, were many Keasbey & Mattison laborers. At dawn each morning they were led by Lobianco’s foreman up the dirt road into the stone quarry to dynamite and haul more rock uphill, to continue building the more than four hundred residences and factory structures that would make up the industrial community in Ambler.