The records of immigrants who have gone insane either on shipboard or in Ellis Island, or have broken down as soon as ever they were safely landed in the United States, are striking proof of how persons entirely within the bounds of the laws worry over the chance of exclusion.
One day after we had changed into our third-floor room we heard a frightful row among the neighbors below. A moment’s listening showed that some woman was berating a little girl, and some man was interposing in the child’s behalf. I suppose it was a man and his wife and the eldest of their three girls, who lived on that floor. I cannot give the entire conversation, but the following extract will tell the story:
Said the mother in very forcible Tuscan:
“You shall speak Italian and nothing else, if I must kill you; for what will your grandmother say when you go back to the old country, if you talk this pig’s English?”
“Aw, gwan! Youse tink I’m goin’ to talk dago ‘n’ be called a guinea! Not on your life. I’m 'n American, I am, ‘n’ you go way back ‘n’ sit down.”
The mother evidently understood the reply well enough, for she poured forth a torrent of Italian mixed with strange misplaced American oaths, and then the father ended matters by saying in mixed Italian and English:
“Shut up, both of you. I wish I spoke English like the children do.”
A very sensible German whom I know, a man of good education and holding an important position in the Ward line, has often told me that he was compelled to learn to speak good English in order to keep from being laughed at by his children, who contrived to escape correction whenever he used broken English in arraigning them.
One of our methods of investigation was to go from one place of business to another in the quarter and, if possible, buy some trifle, meanwhile asking questions. We found that it is usually the children who do the reading, writing, interpreting and accounting in English for their parents, and an extremely bright and quick lot of youngsters they seemed to be. In some places we saw startling contrasts between the two generations: one rooted in all that is Italian and absolutely unable to allow themselves to be absorbed and assimilated and the other intensely and thoroughly American in every idea and mannerism. It would be easy to understand how this could be so had these same children been well mixed with native-born children, but in all that community and in the schools they attended the percentage of Italians was so great that one would have thought it was the native-born children who would have been swallowed up in Italianism. It is a remarkable fact that the Italian children insist on learning and speaking English alone, though it is not the native tongue of more than one in ten persons about them.
One of the general conditions, to the true significance of which our attention was called by the conversation of the midday gathering around the table in the Houston Street basement, is the pernicious system of Italian “banks.” They are scattered everywhere through the Italian colonies of New York, Boston, Buffalo, Pittsburg, Philadelphia, etc., and, being ultra-parasitical in their nature, their harmful agencies may be imagined.