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An Offer We Can't Refuse
The Mafia in the Mind of America
By George De Stefano Faber and Faber, Inc.
Copyright © 2006 George De Stefano
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-2762-8
CHAPTER 1
Italians to Italian Americans: Escaping the "Southern Problem"
O Mafiosi,
Bad uncles of the barren
Cliffs of Sicily — was it only you
That they transported in barrels
Like pure olive oil
Across the Atlantic?
— Sandra Mortola Gilbert
From the late nineteenth century to the mid-1920s, southern peninsular Italy and Sicily lost so many of its sons and daughters to emigration that their departure has been likened to a hemorrhage. Among the millions of impoverished, landless, often illiterate emigrants were my grandparents, the De Stefanos from Avellino, near Naples, and the Di Pietros from eastern Sicily. They left — no, escaped — a world where they had been politically disenfranchised, oppressed by the latifondisti (big landowners), the central government in faraway Rome, and the Church, whose priests counseled humble acceptance of their plight, in the hopes of better times in paradiso. The lot of my forebears and of so many other Italian Americans was unemployment, famine, disease, and natural disasters like the earthquakes that could devastate entire towns of the Mezzogiorno, as the regions south of Rome are collectively called.
This mass migration was unparalleled in European history, and to this day no other nation, barring outright religious persecution or ethnic pogroms, has lost so many of its inhabitants to emigration as Italy.
Mario Puzo, whose Godfather is perhaps the best-known fictional account of the southern Italian immigration experience, observed, "The main reason for this enormous flood of human beings from a country often called the cradle of Western civilization was a ruling class that for centuries had abused and exploited its southern citizens in the most incredible fashion. And so they fled from sunny Italy, these peasants, as children in fairy tales flee into the dark forest from cruel stepparents."
The exodus of southern Italians began barely twenty years after the unification of Italy in 1861. Before the Risorgimento, Italy had been a patchwork of states ruled by the Vatican and by foreign powers. Southerners were hopeful at first that the new Italian state would end the political tyranny and economic exploitation that had been their lot for centuries. But it quickly became apparent that the new central government, dominated by men from the northern region of Piemonte (Piedmont), would be no more benevolent toward the impoverished peasants, artisans, and urban working poor of the southern regions than had been their foreign rulers.
The newborn Italian state, in fact, turned out to be even tougher on the southern poor than the Spanish and French Bourbons and the other foreigners who had ruled the Mezzogiorno. Giuseppe Garibaldi, who led the insurrection against the Bourbons, won the trust and support of southern Italians eager to throw off Bourbon rule. But Garibaldi was a military figure; he was not adept in either politics or constitutional law. Sicilian landowners pressured him to abandon the promises of land reform that had secured the support of southerners for his revolt. And once the Bourbon army was no longer a threat, Garibaldi's troops fired on peasant rebels, thereby sending the landowning class the clear message that his forces "were defenders of order, not of social revolution."
Before the Risorgimento, southern Italy had low taxes, negligible debt, and inexpensive food. When the South lost its autonomy after 1861, taxes rose steeply. The new national government not only imposed a heavy tax burden on the South but also conscripted its sons into the Italian army. Landowners controlled local elections, since peasants were not allowed to vote. Even the appropriation of the Church's vast land holdings and its wealth by the government worsened the situation of the southern poor, as the new tenancy terms were more onerous and it became increasingly difficult to obtain credit. In the 1880s, when the government imposed new tariffs on imported goods, Italy's trading partners retaliated. The loss of export markets hit the Mezzogiorno particularly hard, as capital was diverted from southern agriculture and invested in northern industry.
Southern Italians quickly discovered the falseness of the Risorgimento's promises of liberal democracy and respect for the human rights of the citizens of the entire Italian nation. The new government's attentions were focused on the interests of the North at the expense of the southern regions. (For example, the Italian government concentrated nearly all of its water control and irrigation projects in the North, even though such assistance was desperately needed in the South.) And in the South, social relations remained oppressive, with landowners exerting near-total power over the landless, in what can only be likened to a master-slave relationship.
The callous injustice of the new order was compounded by the central government's practice of attributing the ills of the Mezzogiorno to a "southern problem." The Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, a Sardinian, described the Italian stereotypes of the North versus the South:
... the South is the ball and chain that prevents a more rapid progress in the civil development of Italy; Southerners are biologically inferior beings, either semi-barbarians or out and out barbarians by natural destiny; if the South is underdeveloped it is not the fault of the capitalist system, or any other historical cause, but of the nature that has made Southerners lazy, incapable, criminal and barbaric.
The antipathy between northern and southern Italy had deep historical roots. The North
was proud of the glorious culture it had produced during the Renaissance. It had entered the industrial age and was dreaming the nineteenth century's dreams of Progress. The South had remained unchanged and clung to its family system and its medieval codes of Byzantines, Normans, and Arabs. These were the cultures that had influenced the Mezzogiorno ... and not the French and German cultures that had influenced the North.
Social scientists elaborated the doctrine of innate southern Italian inferiority in tracts such as Alfredo Niceforo's Contemporary Barbarian Italy (1898), which portrayed the peoples of Sardinia, Sicily, and the southern mainland as primitive, much less evolved than the peoples of central and northern Italy. Niceforo and other "sociologists of positivism," as Gramsci called them, reduced southerners to "alleged facts of positivist sociology (rates of crime, education, birth rate, mortality, suicide rate, and economy)," and grounded their putative scholarship in racist biology — citing, for example, the allegedly different cranial sizes of northerners and southerners.
Given the failures of the new Italian constitutionalism to guarantee the rights of southerners, and the northern racism toward the people of the Mezzogiorno, it is hardly surprising that the main effect of the Risorgimento on the South was to "mangle the life of the people of Southern Italy, who at the time of national unification constituted at least two-fifths of the population of Italy."
There was armed resistance by southerners to the oppressive new order. These rebellions were put down, often with horrific violence, and their adherents invariably were described in the Italian press as bandits and brigands. But, as legal historian David A. J. Richards observes, under the newly created national government,
one aspect of the promises of Italian liberal nationalism was met, the extension to the people of the South of a right they had not enjoyed under previous governments, namely, the basic right of movement (including the right to emigrate). Respect for at least that basic human right enabled the people of the South reasonably to address and make a choice (namely, of political allegiance) that they had not previously been able to make.
That choice was to leave an inhospitable homeland, where they had been abused and denigrated, and told it was their innate inferiority that caused their suffering. Towns and villages were depopulated, as southern Italians fled the grinding poverty, hunger, and political oppression they called la miseria, to seek pane e lavoro — bread and work — in Lamerica. Throughout southern Italy, "Wherever people were leaving for America, there was the cacophony of families separating, crying, entreating, promising, and the din of children shouting and laughing, too young to comprehend the poignancy of the farewells." The emigrants left in overcrowded ships where conditions were hardly fit for cattle, much less humans. Most could only afford to travel in steerage, the section of the ship far below decks and near the rudder. Passengers were packed into compartments holding at least three hundred people. "Women traveled without husbands, men traveled alone, and families were installed in small cubicles, each passenger allotted a berth that served both as bed and storage place." There was only saltwater for washing, and the smell of human waste often permeated the area.
After having endured the hardships of their voyage across the Atlantic, the emigrants found themselves in New York, where they faced an uncertain reception. Being largely unskilled and of rural origin, they were poorly equipped to succeed in the industrializing American economy. Nearly half of those who arrived between 1900 and 1914 were illiterate, the highest rate of the eleven largest ethnic groups arriving at Ellis Island. In addition, many suffered from contagious diseases, such as cholera and tuberculosis; these unfortunates were sent back to Europe. The southern Italian immigrant, then, had only one advantage upon arrival in the strano paese (strange land) of America: a fierce determination to work hard for his family.
Unscrupulous Italians who had already established themselves in America took advantage of the new arrivals' eagerness for work. Waiting on the docks for the emigrants to disembark, these newly minted americani recruited their paesani into packaged labor gangs, a form of contract labor known as the padrone or boss system. "The padrone then sold the gang as a labor package to an American business firm, collecting from both ends [from the workers and employers] for signing away the sweat of his countryman's brow below the market price."
Late in the nineteenth century, the United States enacted legislation meant to eradicate the evils of the padrone system by forbidding the importation of foreign workers under any type of contract. But the law's complexity, and its failure to define what constituted a contract, made enforcement extremely difficult. A padrone could easily circumvent the law by substituting oral agreements for written ones. The padrone system lasted through the peak years of Italian immigration, waning only when the numbers of Italian immigrants in the United States were so high that any newcomer could find assistance in obtaining work, and a place to live, without having to rely on a padrone.
The padrone system wasn't the only instance of Italian American prominenti acting against the interests of the impoverished newcomers. "Italian-language newspapers opposed the formation of labor unions and attacked social reforms that would have aided their less fortunate countrymen," observed Mario Puzo. Puzo overlooks, however, the actual labor organizing and political radicalism of many southern Italian immigrants. The martyred anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti and the labor activist Carlo Tresca — assassinated in 1944 by a mafioso — are some of the most famous of immigrant radicals. But thousands of men and women from the Mezzogiorno established a diverse, vibrant, and militant left-wing movement, comprising the full spectrum of radical ideologies, from anarchism and syndicalism to democratic socialism to communism. In virtually every substantial Italian immigrant community, leftists established Italian-language newspapers with names such as Il Proletario and La Voce del Popolo.
My grandfather, Giuseppe (Joe) Di Pietro, from Ragusa, Sicily, was part of this radical immigrant world. My first exposure to left-wing ideas, in fact, came in conversations we had in the mid-1960s about the Vietnam War and the exploitation of working people under capitalism. Three decades later, when I brought a friend from Sicily to dinner at my parents' home, my mother waxed nostalgic about her father. And the first thing she mentioned to our Sicilian guest was, "Well, Salvo, you know my father was a communist ..."
Fear of foreign-born radicals fueled virulent anti-immigrant sentiment in the years immediately following World War I. Nativists, united under the slogan "America for Americans," demanded new laws to protect the nation from southern and eastern European immigrants, who purportedly would infect America with their dangerous radical ideas and engage in violent subversion. Immigrants were blamed for the labor unrest occurring in industrial America, even though native-born Americans dominated the ranks of labor militants. In 1919 the Department of Justice arrested and deported hundreds of leftists, most of them eastern European Jews and southern Italians. The mass arrests — known as the Palmer raids because they were enacted through the office of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer — heightened the conviction that America was under attack by dangerous foreign radicals, and that more restrictive immigration policies were the answer to the threat.
But for southern Italians, the main obstacle to their acceptance by native-born Americans was the association of people from the Mezzogiorno with organized crime. Americans had read newspaper accounts of brigandage in the South, as well as stories about the sanguinary doings of Neapolitan camorre, the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta, and the Sicilian mafie. Racist stereotypes of southern Italians as having a peculiar, possibly inborn tendency toward criminality followed the immigrants to the Americas, where such images were reinforced in both the popular press and in elite opinion journals. The headline of a New York Times editorial from 1876, "A Natural Inclination Toward Criminality," says it all. There was no question mark in the headline, nor did the editorial entertain any doubt regarding the veracity of this claim. The Times authoritatively informed its readers that the "natural inclination" stemmed from the fact that "the Italian is lazier, more gossiping, and fitter for intrigue than the American."
But to the Times editorialists, "the Italian" did not represent all Italians. The previous year, when some of the first Neapolitan and Sicilian immigrants had begun to arrive in New York, the Times, in an editorial titled "Our Italians," regretted that these southerners were adding their numbers to those of the northern Italians already living in New York, who were "industrious and honest people from Genoa and the towns of the Ligurian coast, with a few emigrants from Piedmont and an occasional Livornese." The new arrivals, however, were "extremely ignorant, and have been reared in the belief that brigandage is a manly occupation, and that assassination is the natural sequence of the most trivial quarrel. They are miserably poor, and it is not strange that they resort to theft and robbery. It is, perhaps, hopeless to think of civilizing them, or of keeping them in order, except by the arm of the law."
In a 1904 essay called "The Immigration Problem," one Robert De C. Ward made a racist distinction between two kinds of immigrants:
A few years ago practically all of our immigrants were from northern and western Europe, that is, they were more or less closely allied to us racially, historically, industrially and politically. They were largely the same elements which had recently made up the English race ... Now, however, the majority of the newcomers are from southern and eastern Europe, and they are coming in rapidly increasing numbers from Asia. These people are alien to us, in race ... in language, in social, political, and industrial ideas and inheritances.
Newspapers, magazines, and opinion journals routinely described southern Italian immigrants as lacking any ethical or moral sense, unassimilable, ineducable, irreducibly foreign. "That the Mediterranean peoples are morally below the races of Northern Europe is as certain as any social fact," declared the sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross. In the racist discourse of the times, the fair coloring of Anglo-Saxons and Nordics was a visible marker of their ethical superiority to the southern Italians. "Even when they were dirty, ferocious barbarians, these blonds were truth-tellers," claimed Alsworth Ross. "Be it pride or awkwardness or lack of imagination or fair-play sense, something has held them back from the nimble lying of the Southern races.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from An Offer We Can't Refuse by George De Stefano. Copyright © 2006 George De Stefano. Excerpted by permission of Faber and Faber, Inc..
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