7 - More than just a people of opera singers

Italian immigrants flocked to San Francisco during and after the Gold Rush of 1849

New Yorkers still jog along Central Park's paths. They don't smile at strangers any more, though; they stare into space.
September 11 robbed the smiles from this city. The people here have wrinkles cutting across their foreheads as signs of great loneliness and unspeakable anguish. And yet they don't give up, so that their desire for normalcy is an act of courage in itself.
After that day of infamy, and the repeated alarms over new threats, Americans suddenly discovered their own vulnerability, and became oppressed by a dizzying feeling of helplessness. The same happened after Pearl Harbor, to which they reacted. They reacted this time also, but today things are different. After December 7, 1941 they knew who and where the enemies were; they went after them and beat them. Today, who can tell whether the man with Middle Eastern eyes sitting on a bench in Central Park, browsing a bunch of newspapers, is a timid professor of NY University, an innocuous librarian, or a ruthless terrorist?
These questions are often brushed aside by John Ashcroft's men, the U.S. Attorney General who obtained from Congress the approval for measures restricting civil liberties. The stated objective is preventing, or foiling, other terrorist attacks. So, people can now be arrested without explicitly stating the reason - neither to the arrested nor to their families; conversations between arrested and counsel can be recorded; detention can be prolonged indefinitely; and trials will take place in front of secret military courts without juries. Extreme measures for extreme times; that's how the USA defends itself.
They did so in the past as well, following the attack on Pearl Harbor. But then the enemies were clear: Rome, Berlin and Tokyo, the capitals of the Axis that was the "evil empire" of the time. The United States was then full of Italians, but there were also Japanese and Germans. Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared them "alien enemies". That declaration entailed widespread arrests and internment. Civil liberties were congealed, with a sequence of dramatic, and occasionally grotesque stories.
One such story happened to Enzo Pinza, a singer and star of the Metropolitan Opera Company during the Thirties. One day two men knocked at his door: "In the name of the President of the United States, you are under arrest," they told him. Then they handcuffed him and brought him to Ellis Island detention centre. He was jailed for three months, astonished at the allegations by the investigators: they were convinced that he had been sending coded messages to Mussolini by changing the tone of his voice while he sang.
Recently, Congress recognized "the violations of civil liberties of Italian-Americans during World War II." It took 60 years. One such instance concerned the Di Maggio brothers; while Joe was becoming a legend in baseball and Domenic was fighting for the States on the European front, the government seized their father's boat, his only source of income. He was also forbidden from leaving home between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m.; and by day he could not go farther than five miles. If he had gone anywhere near the pier he would have been jailed. He wasn't the only one; the same fate befell thousands of other Italian-American fishermen of the West Coast.
Germans and Japanese had to wait until the end of the war to rid themselves of the declaration of being alien enemies. Italians were luckier; they lost that qualification on October 12, 1942, Columbus Day. Fiorello La Guardia and Angelo Rossi, mayors of New York City and San Francisco, and the whole Democratic and union movement managed to convince Roosevelt that he couldn't imprison the largest ethnic community in the United States just because their country of origin had declared war on the USA. Roosevelt accepted, but did not hide his contempt: "Well, why worry about the Italians? They aren't dangerous, just a people of opera singers."
Can an Italian surname be sufficient to reveal how many Italians of five, six, or seven generations or in the U.S.? Maybe 150 years ago such a census could be done. But now?
Over the course of 70 years (from 1880 to 1950) almost five million Italians passed through Ellis Island, the gateway to the United States. That was the age of the "great emigration". But many had come even before, crossing the ocean on big sailing ships or on the early steamships. Around 1870, following the gold rush years, half the population of San Francisco was Italian. From the late 19th to the early 20th century, in California, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming and the Indian territories of Oklahoma, northern Italians were the largest group of foreigners entering those states in the past decade; in Colorado, on the other hand, southern Italians held that distinction.
"Still today," says Robert F. Harney, the famous historian of Italian emigration, "the small stores of the eastern Oklahoma coal basin sell Fernet Branca, the bitter drink that Italian miners drank a century ago despite that state's fundamentalist doctrine and laws prohibiting alcoholic beverages."
Labourers were not the only kind of Italians coming to the USA. In the latter half of the 19th century, an enterprising nun from Genoa, Sister Blandina Segale, met Billy the Kid, already famous for his criminal deeds. She wasn't frightened, and a few months later she published a tale about that encounter: At the End of the Santa Fe Trail. In 1885, Angelo Siringo wrote A Texas Cowboy, which historians of the West still regard as the earliest first-hand account of the life of the cowboys.
In addition to labourers looking for a present and a future, and to intellectuals fascinated by Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show that toured Italy in 1890 - one of the most successful propaganda of the States ever done - other people came. Political exiles (Giuseppe Garibaldi, to mention but one), controversial characters, gentlemen, gamblers escaping their creditors, artists, priests, and drifters. Most of them did excellent things; others did not hesitate to soil their hands. The hosts of angels can only be found in Heaven. Those who reached high often did so from very low. Many Italians, writes historian Emilio Franzina, lived with or married coloured women not because of any particular sexual attraction, "but because they embodied a significant economic worth, that could help them in their early struggles as poor immigrants."
At present, official data taken from the Consular registries count 214,677 Italians as residents of the United States. Italians do not line up for enrolling in those lists. "But the real number is much higher," says Andrea Mantineo, editor-in-chief of America Oggi, New York's Italian-language daily newspaper. "There's no way to quantify it with precision, but according to the latest census taken in the USA, Italian-Americans are over 13 million. Most of them have lost the language and the familiarity with Italian traditions; some do not even identify with the country of origin of their grandparents. Anyway, in the metropolitan area of New York City alone, including parts of the states of New Jersey and Connecticut, out of 20 million people, at least 1.5 million speak Italian."
Why? "The charm of Italy," says Mantineo. "It can survive time and men alike."

Publication Date: 2002-09-08
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=1731