Gossip one day told me that a certain editor of an Italian newspaper of some standing had written a scathing article directed against Mr. Frank Munsey, at that time the new owner of the News, and William Randolph Hearst of the American and Journal. He had said things which he felt sure would make both of those gentlemen get down their rapiers and do battle either editorially or in person. He hoped it would be both, as he felt he had a righteous cause and needed the advertising. The day his editorial was published he stayed close to the telephone all day in his office expecting a telephone message from one or the other. When the papers of both attacked editors appeared next day without even a one-line hint of the deadly blow which had been dealt them, the Italian editor very nearly fell to the floor in a frothing rage. For an hour he raved like a wild man and was only calmed by the assurance from a cool-headed friend that both were preparing overwhelming answers for their print next day, so he settled himself to write what he thought would be an anticipation of their replies. Not a sign did the two smitten ones give, and it was not long before some one found out through friends in the offices of both papers that in neither had either the first or second assaults in the Italian journal even been so much as heard of.
One of the men at the table had his father in this country with him, and the father, having been here two years and saved $600 working in a piano factory for $1.40 per day, wished to return to Italy to spend his last days and, desiring to save his passage money, had followed the example of another old man and arranged to get himself deported. I listened closely and heard the son telling with great amusement how “feeble” the old man became when he went to make his application for deportation as an alien who was unable to support himself in America because of age and ill health.
At another time a newcomer at the table related to an interested audience what had been told him of the very wild condition of the country even so far east as Kentucky. He gave some instances of a feud, that had been generally printed a short time before, as if they were the actual doings of hordes of savages in the mountains. He may not have been as far wrong as it seems at first glance, of course, but the incident aptly illustrated how little conception the mass of otherwise well-informed aliens have of the great country which is giving them more of comfort, liberty and opportunity than they have ever had before.
Our landlord and his wife represented a class which is taken all too slightly into account by those Americans who are interested in the immigration question; for it has an influence which, while positive in few things and negative in many, is nevertheless very strong and powerfully affects the destinies of Italians in America.
The Chevalier Celestin Tonella is a man of striking presence. He is large and heavy and has the erect bearing of a soldier. He has the dominant nose and the composed air of one accustomed to command. The time was when he stood well up in the army. His exact rank I never learned.
His wife is a small, slender, gray-haired woman with the unmistakable stamp of the gentlewoman upon her, and she speaks a number of languages as well as having the deft-finger gift of making, painting, broidering and sewing, as is the way with Italian women of position.
Of their story I know nothing, except that once she was in the patronage of a duchess and was at court, and he was also in favor with the high and mighty; but now they are running Nos. 141, 145 and 147 Houston Street for a living and are here in America with no plans for going back to Italy. How or why they came, who knows? So far as the interests of this work are concerned I do not care, and have introduced them in so personal a fashion only because they are so typical a family of better-class Italians emigrated to America. Last year the number of alien immigrants landed in the United States who were able to come in the cabin instead of in the steerage was 64,269 and the year previous 82,055. Of this number more than one third were Italians.
In my personal acquaintance among Italians in New York there is a man who was formerly a priest in Rome and is now a saloon-keeper and banker on the East Side; another man who has four titles and an unenviable record in Genoa, Milan, Venice, Paris and Vienna, who owns three barber-shops up-town and two resorts in Elizabeth Street capitalized with the patrimony of a young gentlewoman of Udine who followed him to America when his family had cast him off and it was too hot for him to remain in Italy, France or Austria; a third man who is a banker not far from where we lived who is conducting a flourishing “padrone” business founded on funds which he abstracted while an official in Naples before that city was bankrupted by its rulers.
There are three. I could give a number more, but those will suffice. The point in the whole consideration is that the lower class Italians in this country continue to pay the respect and homage to those of their race who have been born to position, without regard to the changed and democratic conditions under which both gentleman and peasant are now living.
An Italian of humble birth who may have prospered in this country and have risen to a position of commercial and political eminence among New Yorkers will cringe unhesitatingly to some worthless scamp who chances to be well born. I have seen this instanced many times and in various ways. Twenty years of residence and fifteen of citizenship in the United States will change the average Italian into a very American sort of person, but I know to a certainty that he will suffer silently at the hands of a countryman of superior birth what he would not submit to for one minute from an American no matter what might be the latter’s station in life. It is certainly a curious fact.