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CERTAINLY a picturesque, if not very tidy, element has been added to the population is 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
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bent.[1] 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. |
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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 roles 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 |
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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.
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 ragpicking
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 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. |
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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 |
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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. |
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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, lighthearted
and, if his fur is not stroked the wrong way,
inoffensive as a child. His worst offense 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 |
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wretched, the hopelessly lost, on
the lowest slope of depraved humanity. And out
of their misery he makes a profit. |
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Go to Chapter
6 |
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[1] 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. |
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