He got two or three days’ work for an Italian carpenter who was doing some roof-repairing, and the $4 he made paid one week’s expenses at least; then he was commissioned to make a cabinet for filing papers, and Tommaso arranged with an Irish carpenter named Delaney, who had a shop at 147 West Thirtieth Street, for Nicola to work there while making the cabinet, paying Delaney a dollar a day for the use of tools and shop. There was no fire in the shop during Christmas week, and Nicola caught a heavy cold. New Year fell on Friday, and there was no work of course. He spent the day resting and doctoring himself. Saturday morning a terrible blizzard was blowing, and he walked through it from the East Side to the shop, arriving at seven o’clock, but no one had appeared to unlock the place. If he could have spoken English he could have inquired where to find Delaney or where to telephone him, but all he could do was to wait or go home, so he waited there on the step in the driving storm until one o’clock that afternoon, when he appeared at my house hardly in his senses, nearly dead from exposure and on the verge of pneumonia. Only by his friends taking extreme care of him was he able to go back in a few days and finish his work. During this time Tommaso Figaro, acting on my advice, went with Nicola to both the Carpenters’ and Cabinetmakers’ locals, and endeavored to get him admitted to the unions. At first the difficulty seemed to be that there was no union man to sign Nicola’s application, but this was obviated. Why the matter was delayed thereafter I do not know. Two excellent opportunities for employment at the union rate of $18.50 a week were offered to Nicola in the last week of January, but he could not begin work until he got his union card. He did not get it then, nor has he even got it yet.

On the 1st of March he must send home the money to lift the debt on his father’s property, or the family’s little all would go. He was not yet caught up with his own debts in this country, and so he abandoned all hope for the time being of trying to get employment at his trade, and began to look for employment as an unskilled laborer. At the end of a black week he found this in Charles Schweinler’s printing establishment in the Lexington Building on East Twenty-fifth Street, and at this writing he is still laboring there, carrying bundles of paper from press to table and such tasks. He is receiving about $8 a week, adding in his pay for extra time. When the 1st of March came he had just $7 instead of the needed $60, and when every ray of hope seemed gone and he was nearly wild with worry a way was opened and the debt was paid.

So far both boys have been so intent on their own struggles and their own work that neither has given much thought to the country in which he now lives, and less to the rights as a citizen which he may come to enjoy legally in five years, or illegally at any time he wishes by purchasing fraudulent naturalization papers. The night we landed in New York from Ellis Island there were signs everywhere of the bitter battle between Low and McClellan and their respective supporters. I explained it all carefully to our people, and they were greatly interested, for they thoroughly understood the electoral form of government, as communal and legislative officials are elected by popular vote in Italy. Two days later Nunzio told me that an Italian friend of his had asked him if he did not want to make a couple of dollars voting at the election two weeks hence.

“Why, I cannot vote; I have not been here long enough,” said Nunzio.

“Huh, you are a greenhorn. I have only been here two years, and I have voted twice and belong to a political club. You come around to the club with me, and I will introduce you to a man who will give you naturalization papers. We will register you, and you will never need think of it after that. You will be just as much of a citizen as any of us.”

When I explained to the boys how illegal this procedure would have been, Nunzio said:

“Well, if that is the sort of thing being a citizen is, I don’t believe I want to be one.”

CHAPTER XXI
LEGISLATION AND EVASION

It is exasperating to any patriotic American to have brought convincingly before him the proofs of a wholesale evasion of a very carefully planned code of laws which he fain would think is a sufficient protection of his civic rights and his country’s best interests. It is more annoying to realize that the successful evaders are for the most part foreigners, and those, too, of commonly despised races.

The severity of our laws in the matter of counterfeiting is well known, but they have no terrors whatsoever for the gangs of Italian counterfeiters who are giving the Secret Service Department more trouble than it has ever had with native criminals of this order.