Imported Americans / The Story of the Experiences of a Disguised American and His Wife Studying the Immigration Question

by Broughton Brandenburg

The greatest positive influence in Italy to-day is the Church; the greatest potentiality, the army and the military party; the greatest question, the condition of the peasantry of Italia Meridionale; the greatest danger to the nation as a nation, the bitterness between the people of the great and prosperous provinces of the north and the less favored ones of the south.

As the centre of the world-wide Catholic Church, of the political and military interests of the kingdom, of art, education and literature, modern Rome is a city of institutions, and her citizens are parasites in precisely the same way that a majority of the population of Washington is parasitical. I have not at hand the figures to show which city has the greater proportion of industries, but I think there is little difference.

All through the region are quarries from which are taken the material consumed in the thousands of studios that produce the enormous volume of copies of noted pieces of statuary and the slenderer stream of new creations which pours out of Rome and disperses to other parts of the Continent, Great Britain and the United States. The amount of art copies bought in Rome by American tourists each season is very large, much larger than is generally known, and forms the most important source of revenue to the people of the Roman zone, aside from the dispersion of government funds, church funds and the compensation for the maintenance of the hosts of tourists and art, musical and theological students. Next in industrial importance to the stone-workers come the operations that pertain to silk and to the making of imitation jewelry, of which latter pursuit Rome is certainly the incomparable centre. Hundreds of shops in Italy display Roman imitations that are nowhere excelled, and thousands of workmen in imitation flowers, jewels, etc., are coming into the United States, establishing themselves in the New World in their old vocations and finding things very prosperous indeed. In the vicinity of the tenement house in which we lived on Houston Street, down West Broadway and elsewhere in New York, are scores of establishments engaged in this very business, and all the workmen are Italians, from the zone of Rome for the most part. All over the United States the industry of designing, cutting and establishing marble and granite pieces of all sorts for cemeteries is rapidly passing into the hands of Italians, and in questioning many of them, in various parts of the country, as to their native provinces, they have replied uniformly, the Roman Campania or Tuscany.

The silk-weavers and hat-makers have centred in New Jersey, and in Newark vie with the Jews, while in Paterson they have the lists more nearly to themselves. In Italy the class of workmen so engaged forms a ready field for the operations of socialistic and anarchistic agitators; and though the fruit of their labors is rendered comparatively harmless in Italy owing to the vigilance of the police and secret service, in the United States, where there is freedom of speech, the fuller harvest is reaped and the greatest danger exists.

Back of these conditions lies the contempt which these people have come to hold, in the Roman zone, for both Church and State, and the reason is that to them both St. Peter’s and the Quirinal and all they represent are things far more ordinary and less impressive than to the populace of the remoter provinces. Political and religious skepticism is growing to be as dangerously common among the poor people in and about Rome as it was in France early last century. Many social conditions are accurately reproduced, and there are wise patriots who dread a repetition in Italy of what followed the 14th of July, 1789, in France.

These things really concern the people of the great northern provinces but little. They are busy and prosperous, educated and advanced, and, though within the boundaries of the same nation, they are very distinctly apart.

I can easily understand the attitude of the common people in the Roman zone toward the aristocracy. The representatives of this class were returning in full force to Rome only about the time we left it, but we had abundant opportunity in both Naples and Rome for getting something near the proper measure of these idling, pleasure-seeking, self-sufficient landholders. Having their position by right of birth, and given every advantage of the European civilization as a result of rent-rolls from huge inherited estates, we found them to be, nevertheless, insolent, shallow, degenerate physically, vicious and so thoroughly unfit as a class for the responsibilities of the rich and high-placed that, if I had the choice between admitting to the United States a wealthy educated Roman nobleman and a poor Calabrese contract laborer unable to read or write, I should choose the laborer every time.

Though the numbers of the middle class are lamentably small even in Rome, there is a greater and more deplorable paucity farther south. In the agricultural districts a man is either a laboring tenant or a landholder, except for those few who are village artisans, tradesmen, or are in the liberal professions. It requires well-divided ownership of land or diversified industries, as in the United States, to create that sturdy enlightened and independent middle class which is the strength of any nation. The army of returned emigrants are the nearest approach to a middle class to be found in many of the southern communes.

A man should certainly be able, under nearly all circumstances, to find a better use for his pen than in uttering derogatory statements concerning any other man or class of men engaged in the service of God, no matter what their beliefs or his own convictions may be; but the relation of the Italian priests to the millions of emigrants that have come or will come to the United States is of such importance that it would be cowardly not to give an honest expression concerning them. In a general sort of way the poor provinces are referred to, just as is Spain, as “priest-ridden”; but to the average American that is a term of indefiniteness.