Being new-comers, the Italians are doing the heavy, unskilled work which was once the prerogative of the Irish. The shovel is now as firmly associated in our minds with 'Tonio as formerly with Barney. The North Italians go much into mine and quarry and silk-mill, but the others stick close to railroad, street, and construction work. Of our railroads it has been said that "Italians build them, Irish run them, and Jews own them." Nearer to the truth, perhaps, is the New York mot, "Houses nowadays are built by Italians, owned by Jews, and paid for by Irish tenants." Being small and vegetarian, the Italians are not preferred in earthwork for their physical strength, but because of their endurance of heat, cold, wet, and muck. As one contractor puts it, "they can stand the gaff."
Although the South Italians are numerous in the manufacture of boots and shoes, cigars, glass, woolen goods, and clothing, some employers refuse the males for "inside work" because they have the reputation of being turbulent. Their noteworthy absence from the rolling-mills is attributed to the fact that they lack the nervous stability needed for seizing a white-hot piece of iron with a pair of tongs. The phlegmatic Slav stands up to such work.
In the trades, the Italians crop up numerously as bakers, barbers, cobblers, confectioners, tailors, street musicians, scissors-grinders and marble-cutters. A great number become hucksters and peddlers of such characteristic wares as fruits and plaster casts. It is the Italian from the North, especially the Genoese, who brings native commercial capacity and becomes a wholesale or commission merchant in fruits and vegetables, while the Neapolitan is still fussing with his banana-stand. Thanks to their race genius, the Italian musicians and teachers of music among us bid fair to break the musical monopoly of the German-Americans.
In one province of southern Italy not a plow exists, and the women wield the hand implements beside the men. It is not strange that immigrants with such experience do well here in truck-farming and market-gardening. Those who engage in real agriculture settle chiefly in colonies, for the voluble, gregarious Italians cannot endure the chill loneliness of the American homestead. They follow their bent for intensive farming, and would hardly know how to handle more than fifteen or twenty acres. Few of them are up to ordinary extensive farming. As one observer says, "They haven't the head for it."
Although Italians are making a living on the cut-over pine-lands of northern Wisconsin, the rocky hills of New England, the sandy barrens of New Jersey, and the muck soil of western New York, their love of sunshine is not dead. The cane, cotton, and tobacco fields of the South attract them. More than half of the Italians in Louisiana are on the plantations. Half of the sixty thousand in California are in vineyard and orchard. The famed Italian-Swiss colony at Asti employs a thousand men to help it make wine under a cielo sereno like that of Italy. Many a fisherman who has cast his net in the Gulf of Genoa now strains the waters of San Francisco Bay.
There are two-score rural colonies of Italians in the South, and the settlements at Bryan, Texas, and Sunnyside and Tontitown, Arkansas, are well known. Italians have been welcomed to the South by planters dissatisfied with negro labor or desirous of deriving a return from their raw land. As a cotton raiser, the Italian has excelled the negro at every point. When it was found, however, that thrifty Pietro insisted on buying land after his second crop as tenant, whereas the black tenant will go on forever letting his superintending white landlord draw an income from him, the enthusiasm of the planters cooled. Then, too, a fear has sprung up lest the Italians, being without the southern white man's strong race feeling, should mix with the negroes and create a hybrid. The South, therefore, is less eager for Italian immigrants than it was, and the legislatures of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia have recorded their sense of the undesirableness of this element.
CHARACTERISTIC VICES
The peoples from the Azores to Armenia are well-nigh immune to the seduction of alcohol; so that if this be the test of desirableness, it will be easy to part the sheep from the goats. Certain American sentimentalists go into raptures over the "sobriety" of the new immigrants, and to such we may as well concede first as last that there would be no liquor problem here if abstemious Portuguese had landed at Jamestown instead of hard-drinking English; if temperate Rumanians had settled the colonies instead of thirsty Germans and Scotch-Irish; and if sober, coffee-drinking Turks had peopled the West instead of bibulous Hibernians and Scandinavians. The proportion of Italian charity cases due to drink is only a sixth of that for foreign-born cases, and a seventh of that for cases among native Americans. Alcoholics occur among the Italians in the charity hospitals from a tenth to a twentieth as often as among North Europeans. Still, American example and American strain are telling on the habits of the Italians, and in the Italian home the bottle of "rock and rye" is seen with increasing frequency by the side of the bottle of Chianti.
Bachelors in the pick-and-shovel brigade will have their diversions, so it is not surprising that the Italians, like the abstemious Chinese, are addicted to gambling. Games of chance flourish in their saloons, and many a knife-thrust has come out of a game of cards. At home the state lottery has whetted the taste for gambling. In the Neapolitan the intoxication of the lottery takes the place occupied by alcoholic intoxication in the Anglo-Saxon. When one learns that on an average the Neapolitan risks $3.15 a year in the lottery, six times as much as the average Italian, one does not wonder that the immigrant hankers to put his money on something.