I figure it’s time now, about three weeks or so away from the American Presidential Election of 2016, for me to tell a little story.
In the first quarter of the 20th century, American industry was in the throes of the great revolution that changed our country and the world forever. There was an almost insatiable need for cheap labor in American coal mines, steel mills, logging camps, and railroad yards. The demand was so incessant that some companies sent native born recruiters back to their countries, regions and villages of origin to try to entice their countrymen to come to America. Others worked with home grown entrepreneurs who could deliver entire work crews for a price. American industry extended an open and relatively generous hand to the poor of Europe in the early 20th century, and it worked!
At this same time, Italy, which had only been a nation for about 40 or 50 years, was struggling to recover from its war of unification. This was especially true in southern Italy, the region known as il paese di Mezzogiorno, the country of the noonday sun. Southern Italy was full of desperately poor people. About a third of the population of the Mezzogiorno, over 5 million people, passed through the relatively new immigration station at Ellis Island between 1900 and 1918. This is thought to be the largest mass migration in the 20th century. These were typically young, newly married men, and their goal was to strike it rich and go home with a bag of gold to rescue their impoverished families. It rarely worked out that way.
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| Giuseppe DiRado, 1972 |
Among the millions of new arrivals in 1911 were four young men all from the same little village in the Abruzzo who debarked together from a steamship out of Naples: Domenico Rosato, Filippo Marfisi, Giuseppe Dragani, and my grandfather, Giuseppe DiRado. Rosato and Marfisi were a little older than the other two, and had been here before, in 1906. They may have been recruiters, but I can’t say for sure. According to my grandpop, they knew that they could get work if they could get themselves to the Pa Railroad offices in the town of Harrisburg, in Pennsylvania. They also knew that Pennsylvania was right next to New York, so how far could this Harrisburg place be from Ellis Island? When the Ferry from the island dropped them in Jersey City, they discovered that train tickets would eat up most of their thin grubstakes (none of them had more than 20 dollars US). A cold November week later they presented themselves to a foreman at the Harrisburg railroad station. Following a perfunctory interview, he asked them how that got here, since he hadn’t seen them debark from any of the morning trains. They explained that they had walked all 150 miles. He hired them.
As I said, the model most of these immigrants expected to follow was to make some money, and go home with it. In 1914, Giuseppe did just that. It might have worked out for him had he chosen another year, but 1914 was the year that the war to end all wars began. Italy decided to abandon its neutrality and join with the great alliance against the Germans and Austrians. The thought was they could grab territory away from the Austrians in the Julian and Carnic Alps above Trieste. These particular thoughts belonged to the Northern Italians and Romans who ran the army and the National Government. The people who would actually and for the most part involuntarily fight for this new territory would be the children of the Mezzogiorno. Giuseppe’s passport was confiscated in Naples. He was drafted into the Italian Army. For the next four years, this quiet, literate and sensitive man who played the mandolina, cried at hearing I Pagliacci, and composed his own poetry, was sent into some of the most brutal and bloody combat in Europe’s long and sad history. He was in the middle of the savage battles at Caporetto and Vittoria Veneto. At the end of it, over a million Italian, Austrian, Slovenian, and German kids lay dead or hideously maimed in the cold mountains from machine guns, poison gas, artillery, hand grenades, air delivered bombs, and other recent inventions of the military industry. They ran out of places to bury people, and lots of these kids just froze into alpine glaciers, where climate change has begun to reveal them in the last couple summers. When the smoke cleared, the boundary between countries was more or less where it was at the beginning of the war. Aside from the industrial scale slaughter, nothing of any geopolitical consequence actually happened.
In 1918, as a reward for surviving the whole thing physically unscathed, Giuseppe was assigned to “guard” St Mark’s Square in Venice. This meant that he was issued a dress uniform and a carbine with no ammunition, and told to walk in slow dignified circles in front of the Doge’s palazzo for one six hour shift per day. So between down time at Venice’s famous cafés, taking in the opera at la Fenice, attending poetry readings by the likes of Ezra Pound and Gabrielle D’Annunzio, and a furlough home during which my mother was conceived, he had lots of time to read the papers, think and observe. He concluded that the people who ran his country, particularly a young firebrand from the North named Benito Mussolini, were heartless, crazy and murderous bastards. Mussolini and his fascisti sycophants loudly railed against foreigners, and opined that Italy had not gained its rightful territory during the recent war because they just weren’t ruthless enough and didn’t push hard enough. Giuseppe, who had just held a front row seat for the whole thing, recognized this dangerous bullshit for what it was. He thought that the whole country was losing its collective mind. He thought that he had seen and done things so abominable in the last couple years that he could never get over them, and couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to do or see anything like that again. He thought it was time to leave.
In 1920 he returned to the States, to Harrisburg and to the railroad. His game plan was different now. He would move his family, now grown to three kids (the result of two military leaves during the war), to the new world, and he would become an American. But things would not go according to script.
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| My Grandmother and Her Kids, | |
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As I said, the millions of southern and central European immigrants who arrived here in the first two decades of the 20th century were, for the most part, invited, recruited, and cajoled by growing American industries. That said, “native born” Americans from the country’s growing middle class, the children of earlier waves of immigrants from primarily northern Europe, became increasingly uncomfortable with the new arrivals. The newcomers were overwhelmingly Catholic or Jewish, they spoke odd and unintelligible languages, some of them had dark skin, and there were Marxists and Anarchists among them. They were accused of taking jobs away from “real Americans”, of being gangsters and rapists. The roots of this anti-immigrant prejudice stretched back at least to the 1890’s, when 11 Sicilian-Americans were simultaneously lynched in the City of New Orleans. As the 20’s began the fear and suspicion blossomed into an ugly bouquet of very bad behavior. There was a revival of the Ku Klux Klan in northern states where they had never appeared before. The worst kind of bigoted invective appeared in newspapers and political speeches. A string of anti-immigrant legislation was passed including the Quota Law in 1921, and the infamous National Origins or Immigration Act in 1924. Giuseppe’s family was stranded in Italy and was not permitted to come here. After he took his oath of citizenship in 1926, he succeeded in getting the bureaucracy to relent, but there was a Sophie’s choice-type catch. Only three people could come. In May, 1927 Maria Staniscia, my Grandmother, took her children to Naples, entrusted their safety to her eldest daughter and to the wife of a family friend who would ignore them aboard ship, and kissed them a tear soaked goodbye. They were confident she would get a visa the next year, but that didn’t happen. She would not see them or her husband again for a decade, when she was finally granted a visa by the American consulate.
My Mom was only 8. The next time she saw her Mom again, she was 18. She carried the wounds from this abandonment for the rest of her life. She was a kind and decent person who never harmed a fly. She didn’t deserve it.
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| My Mom's Passport Photo |
This leads me to a conversation I had a few years ago with a man who owns one of the large fruit growing operations in Adams County, and whose family has been there since the 18th century. In the course of a tour of his packing plant he introduced me to a Mexican woman and her son who were the third and fourth generations of their family to work for his. The son was born in York Springs, and is an American citizen. The orchard owner explained how completely the fruit business depends on the labor of Mexican and Caribbean workers who work for minimum wage or a bit more, and can put in multiple 10 to 12 hour days staying ahead of ripening fruit. Social Security, Medicare, and all applicable taxes are deducted from their checks, and in many cases they’ll never see any benefits from those programs. Their kids are enlisting in the armed services and there have been lots of them in Afghanistan and Iraq. Without these people, he believes our domestic fruit growing industry will disappear, and fruit will be grown in other countries with plentiful cheap labor and suitable growing conditions, like China, and imported to the United States.
While there is no doubt that many Latin American immigrants came here illegally, I very rarely hear any rational discussion of precisely why they do that amid the cacophony of very angry public discourse that swirls around the issue. The truth of the matter is they come here, at the behest of American agribusiness, construction, and other industries that need cheap labor to continue operating here, and they know they can make a decent wage and pull their families out of poverty if they can just get here, legally or otherwise. The orchard owner I talked with, a lifelong Republican, has been among the folks advocating for a decent guest worker program for at least a decade to eliminate the temptation of crossing the border illegally, but so far all he seems to have gotten for his advocacy is the promise of a wall that the Mexican government is apparently going to pay for.
Near the end of her long life, my Mom, who passed a decade ago, fretted about the fate of these farm workers. She read the invective in the local and national newspapers and heard the vile political speech, some of it coming from people with Italian surnames like Lou Barletta, then the mayor of Hazleton, and it depressed her. It seemed like the 20’s all over again.
And so the cycle repeats. The Irish came in droves in the 19th century to work in the mines and build the first railroads, and they were hated and feared. The turn of the century saw the immigrants who powered the industrial revolution accomplish great things, and laws were passed to keep them out. In the 40’s great waves of southern African Americans came North to work the steel mills and railroads and munitions plants and helped win the war, and were paid for it with racism. And now people come here and provide for their families by butchering chickens and picking apples, and there’s talk of a wall and mass deportations.
The story of Mr. Trump and the cowards and bigots that have rallied around him isn’t anything new. It’s old. It’s not about change, it’s about repeated and regular episodes of narrow-mindedness, fear, cruelty and ignorance that have millennial roots. It springs from the same polluted well that brought us Senator McCarthy, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and so on. There are lots of people who are going to vote for him in a few weeks who don’t know anything about history and don’t want to. They don’t see themselves in these new immigrants, even though they all came here from somewhere else, and have ancestors who suffered at the hands of people who were just as heartless and vicious as they themselves have become. It’s dusty, ancient history for them, but it’s not for me. I saw my mother’s tears with my own eyes.
I see the danger here very clearly, just as my Grandfather did reading the papers along the Canale Grande in 1918. I will be at the polls when they open on the 8th.
