A Great Conspiracy against Our Race. Peter G. Vellon
did so in the United States, and a 1917 study found that 82 percent of Italian-born immigrants in New York City were employed in industry.18 Although Italians were employed in skilled work, most prominently in the garment industry, masonry, stonework, and the building trades, by far the largest concentration of jobs fell into the category of unskilled.19 An overwhelming majority of Italians found employment as workers in construction, railroad gangs, mines, quarries, silk mills, machine shops, subways, and waterworks. Given New York City’s rapid expansion, Italians were well represented as laborers digging tunnels for the subway system, in the Sanitation Department, and working on projects such as the Jerome Park Reservoir and many other railroad and building projects around the city.
Informed by the same factors pushing Italians to settle among their own paesani (countrymen), immigrants started mutual aid and fraternal organizations to provide crucial services such as unemployment insurance, employment assistance, and death benefits. Men from specific towns of origin organized the clubs and offered Italians, among other things, a chance to speak in their regional dialects and in many tangible ways eased the process of dislocation. Most often, leadership reflected the larger community’s bifurcated social structure as club leaders came from the upper class. Prominenti took great pride in, and exerted much energy in, attaining titles and honors befitting men of such self-importance. These societies played a vital role in easing the transition of Italians to a new environment by reestablishing and transplanting traditions and customs from the paesi. They were incalculably more popular and relevant among first-generation immigrants than among their American-born offspring, who did not have one foot in Italy and another in the United States.20 According to the president of the Bargolino Benefit Association, a club derived from Italians from the same part of Sicily, these organizations “provided a suitable meeting place in order to avoid having members stand on street corners and about saloons; to develop socially and to be prepared to mutually assist one another in every way.”21
Early on in the immigrant experience, mutual aid societies and fraternal organizations did little to lessen the regional differences and rivalries that existed within Italian immigrant enclaves. Performing important psychological and social roles, these organizations assumed immense importance and indirectly hindered widespread collective organization, often to the chagrin of labor organizers.22 However, as immigrant colonies matured, especially after 1900, attempts at collective organization around a larger consciousness as Italians began to take hold. For example, the National Order of the Sons of Italy, created in 1905, was the first organization that began to subsume local fraternal or regional societies under a larger umbrella of federated societies and lodges. By World War I, the Sons of Italy began to wield significant power within Italian communities on the local and state levels.23 The emergence of the Sons of Italy did not replace local mutual aid societies germane to particular villages or towns, but it did coincide with the creation of an image of Italianness that did not exist in Italy. Society banquets, dinner dances, and annual religious feasts celebrated regional ties through the lens of a minority population reviled by many as unwelcome others. As such, organizations often focused on the merits of Italian culture and civilization as a means of community uplift and survival, thereby promulgating a nascent Italian patriotism. And, although by 1921 some contemporary observers such as John Mariano believed mutual aid societies and fraternal clubs prolonged a fractured Italian identity and sustained anti-Americanization sentiment, these organizations actually accelerated the emergence of a collective Italian racial identity.24
Religious observation and practice proved to be an arena where Italian immigrants did not have an easy transition. Although predominantly Roman Catholic, Italian immigrants did not blend smoothly into New York’s Irish American–dominated Catholic community. There were several levels of dissonance between the Irish hierarchy and their new communicants that for some time posed severe barriers to immigrants’ full incorporation into the Catholic parishes. Clearly, priests and upper-level church hierarchy were not immune from the prejudice and discrimination that targeted southern Italian immigrants in their new home. Italian attitudes toward priests, church attendance, doctrinal tenets, and the personal manner in which Italians worshipped God and saints were wildly dissimilar to Irish American Catholic norms and principles. During the first two decades of mass immigration, Italians remained resentful of Irish arrogance and domination, symbolized by the practice of relegating Italian parishioners to church basements for their masses. As more immigrants arrived, Italians began to form their own parishes, with some of the most notable located in the most densely populated Italian colonies: Our Lady of Mount Carmel on 115th Street in East Harlem, formed in 1885, and Our Lady of Loretto on Elizabeth Street in Little Italy, started in 1892.
By 1911, an expanding population numbering more than 500,000 had established roughly fifty Italian churches in New York City. These churches hosted the traditional religious feasts, or feste, held throughout the year, especially during the summer months, which honored local or regional patron saints and Madonnas. Although these feasts were religious in nature, Italian mutual aid societies elaborately planned and directed them under the umbrella of the clergy. During these spectacles Italians paraded ornately attired religious statues throughout the neighborhood as devotees followed along in procession. Street vendors selling Italian ice cream and roasted peanuts, musical bands playing traditional music, and firework displays earmarked the day’s events. Perhaps New York City’s most famous and well-attended feast was held at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in East Harlem, although others such as the Feast of Saint Rocco on Mulberry, Mott, and Baxter Streets in Little Italy also remained prominent. However, Italian demonstrations of folk religious beliefs did not go unnoticed by critics. Startled and dismayed by what they viewed as uncivilized and ignorant revelry, American onlookers were also stunned by how an impoverished community could afford such lavish displays.
The Italian Language Press and Its Influence
The Italian language press played a significant role in providing immigrants with the tools to navigate their new environment, and its explosive growth and fluidity mirrored the development of the Italian immigrant community of New York City between 1880 and 1920. For example, from 1884 to 1920 the number of Italian language newspapers nationally increased from a total of 7 to 98, with New York City being home to more than any other city by 1920 with 12.25 However, this did not capture the full breadth of the press’s impact as 267 additional newspapers, both radical and mainstream, were published and circulated at various times throughout this period.26 In addition to being the largest Italian colony, New York City offered advantages to the news industry not available in most other cities. With respect to successful commercial dailies such as Il Progresso, New York’s geographic location allowed the paper to tap into efficient news-gathering resources and dissemination facilities, as well as obtain the latest news from the colony or from Italy in the shortest amount of time. Published daily, Il Progresso and Bolletino della Sera became a vital source of immediate information not only for Italians living in New York but also for those outside the city and state.27
Italian language newspapers reflected the heterogeneity and fluidity of the community itself. Newspapers frequently went in and out of existence, and a majority of newspapers could not maintain a lasting circulation in order to remain financially solvent. Reflecting the community it served, the press varied in its political orientation, ranging from mainstream political identification as Republican or independent to more radical ideologies such as socialist and anarchist. The mainstream, or commercial, press enjoyed larger circulations than the Italian radical press and by virtue of subscriptions and advertising revenue usually experienced a longer life span. Some of this owed to the serious obstacles socialist and anarchist papers faced, such as fierce governmental repression that severely hampered their print operations. However, radical newspapers were no less important, often beyond what was reflected in their circulation numbers, and some maintained publication for decades.
The era of mass Italian immigration coincided with the emergence of what historian Rudolph Vecoli termed the “prominenti phase of Italian journalism” in the United States.28 The prominenti, or prominent ones, were generally Italians who had arrived early on in the migration process, knew some level of English, and established businesses that served the immigrants. Men such as Carlo Barsotti and Louis V. Fugazy owned and operated boardinghouses,