I hope you'll consider a small donation in memory of my mom and I hope everyone will continue to educate themselves on the contributions immigrants have made to this country and dedicate themselves to the defense of basic human rights.
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“Yo no soy d’aquí, pero tampoco tú” Jorge Drexler
The three kids; Nicky aged 16, Tony age 10 and Giulia, 8, stood wide-eyed on the deck of the steamer, holding their ears, transfixed by the cascade of fireworks above the great statue of the woman with the torch. They had arrived after a ten-day passage from Naples, unaccompanied by their mother who couldn’t get a visa, on May 26th, Memorial Day, 1927. They didn’t know what Memorial Day was.
The passage had been horrific. They were all sea-sick. Little Giulia had bawled the whole way across the Atlantic, and Nicky had to manage both her and her brother as she fought her own illness and terror. But now they had slipped into the lee of Ellis Island in New York Harbor, and the ship had stopped bucking and pitching, and the showers and flashes of red, green, blue and white bedazzled the sky above them. The two younger children were smiling from ear-to-ear. They assumed the occasion for the fireworks was to welcome them to their new country.
The oldest girl knew better.
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The three unaccompanied children arrived in a country focused inward, a country wrestling with what it was.
The enormous economic and infrastructure expansion of the late 19th and early 20th century had created the world’s first real economic and military superpower in America. This creation was built with cheap immigrant labor. Starting with the immense waves of Irish in the mid-19th century and swelling through the immigration stations at Ellis Island and at Angel Island in California at the turn of the century, immigrants from Europe, the Caribbean and Asia changed the country permanently. Roughly a third of modern Americans are descendants of the Ellis Island arrivals alone.
The wealth of the famous men who owned the railroads, coal mines, timber operations, steel mills, ship yards, ports and manufactories of the United States was incalculable, and was almost entirely the product of immigrants. The demand for their labor led late 19th and early 20th century industries, aided by the American government, to actively recruit immigrants in Italy and many other countries. At the time, many countries in Europe and Asia were mired in economic difficulties and ruled by corrupt and oppressive regimes. People were willing to risk everything to provide for their families. They would tear out their lives at the roots and work hard at low wages for a chance at a better life. There was a poem welcoming them at the base of the statue of liberty.
The father of the three kids on that steamer, 36-year-old Giuseppe DiRado, had been recruited in his small village in the Abruzzo by the Pennsylvania Railroad. He was invited here. He was at the docks in Jersey City waiting for them. While he was happy to see them, there were plenty of people who weren’t.
Resentment and repression of recent immigrants wasn’t anything new in the 1920’s. Each successive wave of immigrants depressed the wages of those who had arrived earlier. To a large extent, that’s why American industries recruited them: they kept the costs of production low and the profits high. It also didn’t help that their languages, religions, food, and appearances seemed alien. Anti-immigrant fervor was a favorite weapon of politicians reaching back to before the Civil War. It was an easy way to get supporters to the polls in support of candidates who promised to protect the jobs and rights of the native born against the depravity of the recent arrivals. It carried practically no political downside since the recent immigrants couldn’t vote. It could and did boil over into violence, the largest mass lynching in American history (11 men) was carried out by a New Orleans mob against Italian immigrants in March of 1891.
Anti-immigrant fervor in America reached an ugly peak in the 1920’s for a number of reasons. The end of the First World War brought a recession and layoffs. Assembly lines and automation brought upheaval in many traditional kinds of employment and led to job insecurity. America’s involvement in the war, and the many casualties it produced, engendered a nativist and isolationist movement that sought to limit trade, foreign entanglements, and immigration. A reaction against Reconstruction in the post-Civil War South created the myth of a noble “lost cause”, a resurgence of the Klan, the rise of Jim Crow, and horrific racial violence. By the early1920’s, the Klan and similar organizations were establishing chapters in northern states like Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania, and the hatred they felt for African Americans was extended to immigrants, particularly Catholics and Jews. Immigrants were depicted as criminals, vectors for disease, and labor or anarchist extremists prone to violence. They were accused of taking good American jobs away from the more deserving. There were populist calls to curtail or eliminate immigration, especially immigrants from China, Japan, and Southern and Eastern Europe, and American politicians were only too happy to oblige.
Three years to the day before those three kids arrived in New York harbor, Memorial Day of 1924, the Immigration Act, or Johnson-Reed, took effect. The new law imposed a total quota on immigration of 165,000—less than 20 percent of the pre-World War I average. It imposed limits on the number of immigrants from any particular nation on the percentage of each nationality recorded in the 1890 census—a directed effort to limit immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, which mostly occurred after that date. In the first decade of the 20th century, an average of 200,000 Italians had entered the United States annually. With the 1924 Act, the annual quota for Italians was set at about 3,800.
Immigration from Italy, Poland, Russia, China and Japan plummeted. Since these immigrants were primarily employed in unskilled, low wage jobs, the predicted improvement in wages and job availability occurred only at the very bottom of the pay scale. Millions of people, especially Eastern European Jews, were now trapped in countries ruled by repressive, violent and populist regimes, and many of them perished.
The most monstrous burden of this new law was its effect on families, a burden set squarely on the backs of the three kids on the steamer.
Their parents had planned to request a visa for their mother the following year. The request was denied. They tried again in 29, with the same result. Maria Staniscia DiRado was not permitted to enter this country until 1937, ten years after her children.
Giulia, the 8-year-old, was my mother.
She did not see her own mother again until she was 18. She had nightmares and fits of depression from this separation until her death at the age of 88. I saw this with my own eyes. My mom was a kind soul who never hurt a fly. Children do not really ever recover from trauma like that. When she came here she was just a little kid, an innocent, and she didn’t deserve it.
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Our story, my story, had a happy ending. Despite the suspicion and bigotry and small mindedness of some of their neighbors, and through the kindness and generosity of others, the little family from the Abruzzo proved very tough and held firm.
People from the mountainous backbone of Italy have something of a reputation:
Siamo Abruzzese, abbiamo teste dure! (We’re from the Abruzzo, we have hard heads!)
The kids all grew and married. My Aunt had two sons, my Uncle Tony had three kids, as did my Mom. We married into descendant families from every corner of the world, and we are now doctors and scholars and trades-people and artists and teachers. We live in towns and cities from coast-to-coast. We have made something of ourselves, and we have made something of our communities and of our country. This place is better for our being here.
My Aunt Nicky remained the matriarch of our family throughout her long life. An immigrant woman with little formal education who spoke accented English her whole life, she taught us all to never allow ourselves to be looked down on, and to stand up for ourselves, for the truth, and for the less fortunate. While never boastful, she was proud and insisted that we should be as well.
Diceva la mia Zia: Sono qualcuno! (My Aunt used to say: I am somebody!)
So, as I watch my country now try to repeat the dreadful, ugly and disastrous experiment of the 1920’s, turning inward and hostile toward people like my own, I find that I’m not full of fear, but full of resolve and hope. I think we’re going to be alright. I believe that, because like Lincoln, I believe in the better angels of our nature. I also believe that because I and millions of my fellow citizens, all of us descendants of immigrants, aren’t going to allow darkness to snuff out Liberty’s torch. I will meet hatred with compassion, ignorance with truth, bigotry with resolve, and misery with kindness. I won’t back off, and I won’t stay silent. Maybe I should be frightened, but I’m not.
I come by it honestly.
Ho una testa dura, Sono qualcuno...
Grazie Mamma...ti amo...
