Unto the Sons (38 page)

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 adolescent 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.

During his years as a
padrone
, Lobianco had been responsible for shuttling more than five hundred men between Naples and Ambler. But in this period of adverse publicity, the countless responsibilities of that position—greeting the arriving boatloads of workers, escorting them onto trains, lodging and feeding them, tending to their varied needs and requirements, serving as their daily guardian and social consort, and all the other thankless tasks—were no longer worth the aggravation and money to Lobianco. He would subcontract most of the customary chores to his
cousins and friends from Naples, while he moved back to Philadelphia to spend more time in less demanding circumstances.

The last boatload of workers for which he was directly responsible arrived in late April 1888. On board were forty-three men, all of them bachelors. All of them had jobs awaiting them with Keasbey & Mattison Company, either in the quarry or as apprentices to the stonemasons and artisans who had already completed dozens of Gothic buildings that Dr. Mattison himself had redesigned after expressing displeasure with the original plans submitted by his architects.

The forty-three newcomers did not have written contracts with Lobianco specifying the terms of employment—this practice had been banned by American immigration authorities under pressure from the unions; but Lobianco had been assured by his recruiter colleagues in Naples that each and every man had pledged to remain in the United States, under the guidance of the
padrone
, for no less than two years.

One of the workers who had agreed to these terms was Gaetano Talese.

18.

T
he explosions in the quarry roused the birds in the trees, stirred the animals grazing in nearby meadows, and one day blew off part of the left arm of a demolition worker who had climbed too slowly out of an opening in the rocks where he had moments before ignited the fuse on a keg of dynamite. Six months after the accident, when Gaetano Talese arrived in Ambler in the spring of 1888 to begin his job, he saw the victim working behind the grocery counter of the Keasbey & Mattison company store, wearing an artificial arm with a metal hook. Dr. Mattison did not believe in prolonged idleness.

Each morning, six days a week, Gaetano was sent with eighty other Italians into the quarry, where the rocky interior of the earth was hauled up daily after being detonated by kegs of dynamite and gunpowder, and by the shells of a Civil War cannon fired by an Irishman named Michael Herlihy. A gaunt, pugnacious ex-soldier who had fought for the North under Philadelphia’s renowned commander General George (“Little
Mac”) McClellan, Michael Herlihy was now in charge of rock-blasting for Dr. Mattison.

Herlihy appeared each morning at the quarry on horseback wearing a black kepi, overalls with brass-buckled suspenders, boots, and a pearl-handled pistol hanging from his waist. There he was joined by his five-man demolition team, who arrived in wagons from the arsenal carrying the cannon and kegs of explosives. Heavy packs of dynamite were placed in the drilled openings of the quarry where the rock was to be pulverized for Ambler’s new roads, while the less potent gunpowder was used to crack loose larger chunks of rock for the walls and foundations of Dr. Mattison’s buildings. When it was necessary to split these larger chunks for easier hauling by the Italians, Herlihy took aim from behind the cannon, fired a ball at a distance of about ninety feet, and usually broke the rock into two or three parts.