On the Trail of the Immigrant

by Edward Alfred Steiner

They do look so unchanged as yet, nearly all of them—so genuinely homely, as if they had landed but yesterday; and they have not yet gone through the transforming process, except as Francesco, the chief of the hurdy-gurdy grinders, has changed one or two tunes of his repertoire; for he appeases the New England conscience by playing “Nearer, My God to Thee,” with variations, “Rock of Ages,” closely followed by “Tammany,” and airs from Cavaliero Rusticana.

If the Italian in Hartford were less handicapped by the wretched conditions of his dwelling, he would more easily be able to utilize the splendid advantages of that city. As it is, he rises very slowly but perceptibly; although he lives in the worst possible houses, he is growing more and more cleanly; he is gaining in self-respect and when he has had the opportunity and the experience of the Irish people, he will probably not only duplicate their splendid record in New England and elsewhere, but excel it. Slowly but surely he is rising from a tenement dweller to a tenement owner and soon he “will do others as he was done,” and charge exorbitant rent for uninhabitable quarters.

The Italian is regarded as a good asset in the real estate business, for he can be crowded more than any other human being. He is fairly prompt with his rent and he does not make heavy demands in the way of improvements. This he himself appreciates, for he has business sense, and buys real estate as soon as he can invest his small earnings. Usually he acquires a small house with a large mortgage. He moves into the house at once, proceeds to draw revenue from every available corner, and in a few years lifts the mortgage and is on his way to buy more real estate.

The value of the business is proved by the fact that in the Italian quarters in New York 800 Italians are owners of houses, a large proportion of course being tenements of the worst character, which nevertheless, represent the respectable value of $15,000,000. A like large sum lies in the savings banks of that city, deposited by Italian immigrants; while the total value of all the property owned by them in the city of New York alone, is not far from $70,000,000. These figures, I must confess, do not impress me, for the sufferings endured and meted out for the sake of these earnings are terrible, and in the “tit for tat” of our economic order the Italian gives as good as he gets. The narrow quarters he rents are invariably sublet, and he imposes upon the newcomer conditions as hard as, or harder than, those under which he began life in the land of the free. The hardest conditions are those he imposes upon his wife and children; yet he is not a cruel husband or father, and shares their hard labour, often making the children part owners of what they earn. Of course the western and southern cities where the Italians have settled make a better showing, for they are not the men who came but yesterday; they have had a larger opportunity and have made full use of it. Italian clubs, opera houses, and Chambers of Commerce, are being organized in the western and southern cities; and one can judge of the quality of our Italian immigrant best, where the struggle for life is not too keen, the surroundings not so terribly depressing, and where the American spirit has had a chance to be grafted upon the Latin stock. More and more he is leaving the city and in the Southwest especially, colonies of Italians are springing up and are conducted with such eminent success, that with some encouragement, the Italian may be made helpful in reclaiming our arid deserts, even as he is now making the rocky hill farms of Connecticut and Massachusetts to “blossom as the rose.”

Among these settlements, that at Bryan, Texas, is the most notable. It is composed of what we usually call the least desirable Italian element, the Sicilian. Nearly twenty-five hundred people have settled there as renters, although not a few of them are owners of the land they work. Some eighteen miles separate the various families, all of whom come from near Palermo, and have lived together in reasonable harmony, making rapid financial progress. They are as peaceful a community as is found in so turbulent a state as Texas. In Utah and California the progress made is still more marked; and proves that the Italian like the rest of us needs only a fair chance.

I have had good opportunity also to observe him in his migratory state, attached to a construction crew on the railroad, and tenting by a cut in the rock, or by the western fields.

Usually the farmer fears his coming. The word “Dago” has in it an element of dread; it carries the sound of the dagger, and the dynamite bomb. The far away villager who sees the camp approaching fears its proximity. I have watched the Italians coming and going and although there was a heated brawl at times, they quarrelled among themselves, disturbed nobody, left the hen coops of the farmers untouched, did not burn down the village, and paid decently for their food. When they went away a fairly good source of revenue had disappeared and with it a good share of unreasoning prejudice.

As competitors in certain fields of activity they are justly feared by those who have regarded those fields as their own peculiar province; and they are pushing the Russian Jew very hard in his monopoly of the manufacture of clothing. The nimble fingers of the Italian woman, her lesser demands upon life, and the ease with which she carries the burdens of wifehood and motherhood, have enabled her to outdistance the workers of the Ghetto, although the strife is still on and the issue not decided. Yet I believe that the future clothing worker in America will be the Italian and not the Jew; for the Jew loves life and its good things, and moreover he has educational ambitions for his children, which the Italian does not yet feel, he being a sinner above all others in the use of his children’s labour. The Chicago truant officers have had the privilege of arresting nearly all the parents of one “Little Italy” at least once; for almost every child of school age was kept at home and “sweated” for all the strength it possessed.

The Italian is very fertile in inventing excuses for the purpose of evading the law, and his ethical standard in that direction is still extremely low. This comes from his inherited hatred of all governmental restrictions; he still thinks that the state seeks only its own good and his hurt, in its insistence upon the education of his children. Substantially this is the Italian’s attitude towards law in general; and to that in a large measure is due the fact that he rates relatively high in the statistics of crime.