La bell'America: From La Rivoluzione to the Great Depression: An Italian Immigrant Family Remembered

By Anthony M. Graziano

• “A celebration of immigrants” • A book for both casual readers and those interested in sociology and history • A mix of scholarly analysis and personal reminiscence, written in a way that is very accessible to the average reader but also informative for those who study history • Will appeal to all Americans whose families immigrated to America in the last 150 years • Italian history and culture • Early 20th century American history, including World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, and the political environments of both America and Italy • For readers interested in the mass emigration of Europeans to America in the late 19th and early 20th century • Describes the causes of major historical events and their effects on ordinary, individual people • Analyses the phenomenon of the poor, uneducated European immigrant landing in the bottom of society, ridiculed and exploited, plunged into the Depression with no resources, and yet succeeding in ways that would have been unimaginable in his former country • Includes index and sources • Describes how the decade leading to the Great Depression holds lessons for us today • Author is a well-known scholar in the field of psychology who has written chapters and articles on the history of psychology, science, and certain groups of people • Known author in the worlds of psychology and sociology, with 15 previous books

• Language: English
• Publisher: Leapfrog Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781935248569

Book preview

La bell’ America

From La Rivoluzione to the Great Depression:

An Italian Immigrant Family Remembered

Anthony M. Graziano

Image4061.tif

A LeapSci Book

Leapfrog Science and History

Leapfrog Press

Teaticket, Massachusetts

La bell’America © 2009 by Anthony M. Graziano

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

Copyright Conventions

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a data base

or other retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including

mechanical, electronic, photocopy, recording

or otherwise, without the prior written

permission of the publisher.

A LeapSci Book

Leapfrog Science and History

Published in 2009 in the United States by

Leapfrog Press LLC

PO Box 2110

Teaticket, MA 02536

www.leapfrogpress.com

Distributed in the United States and Canada by

Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

St. Paul, Minnesota 55114

www.cbsd.com

First Edition

E-ISBN: 978-1-935248-56-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Graziano, Anthony M., 1932-

La bell’America : from la rivoluzione to the Great

Depression : an Italian immigrant family remembered /

Anthony M. Graziano. -- 1st ed.

p. cm.

A LeapSci Book.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-935248-01-9

1. Italian Americans--New York (State)--History. 2.

Italian Americans--New York (State)--Social

conditions. 3. Italian Americans--New York

(State)--Biography. 4. United States--Emigration and immigration--History. 5. Calabria (Italy)--Emigration and immigration. 6. Calabria (Italy)--Biography. 7. Graziano, Anthony M., 1932---Family. 8. Graziano, Anthony M., 1932---Childhood and youth. I. Title.

F130.I8G73 2009

974.7’00451--dc22

2009036972

To the memories of

Michele, Teresa,

and

Ferdinando,

and to the futures of

Tegenya, Benjamin, and Aaron Lucas

Contents

Preface

I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

II

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

III

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

IV

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

V

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

References

References

The Author

Preface

From the 1880s through the 1920s, European immigrants flowed from their homes in poverty, oppression, and distress, bringing little more than hope and determination. It was a massive migration of 70 million people tossed by 19th-century Europe’s monumental disruptions—overpopulation, disease, revolutions, and wars. They were pushed from Europe and pulled to the Americas. Half of them came to the United States, where few warm welcomes greeted them. Poor, ignorant of America’s language and customs, uneducated, dressed in antiquated, often shabby clothing, they were easy targets for ridicule, exploitation, and blatant American xenophobia.

They landed at the bottom of the social heap, with few resources. However, millions succeeded in ways that were impossible to achieve in their original countries. In this book, I will remember a group of Southern Italians who came to the United States in the 1920s and settled into the small town of Nyack, just north of New York City. They drew from their personal strengths and from the opportunities offered by their new country. They brought a magnificent capacity for sustained, hard work, even at the meanest of labors, and a guiding idea that each person is responsible for his or her success or failure. They found in the United States a country of contrasts. Despite its brutal prejudice and barriers, America offered unimagined opportunities to work and earn a portion of the country’s rich resources, including freedom and respect, neither of which had been available in the oppressive feudal society of their old country.

Their new country was generous—but it was also unforgiving, dangerous, and viciously rejecting of foreigners. Here are wealth, freedom, and respect, it whispered to the immigrants. They are all around you. Earn them, if you can, but be careful, because if you let us, we will destroy you in a minute! The immigrants heard that voice and took their chances. They came to fear America for its cruelty, to love it for its generosity, and to wrestle with it for its opportunities. They adapted, survived, and succeeded.

But not all succeeded. Many were ground up by America’s unforgiving nature and by paths ill chosen. In those who overcame the odds, personal strength combined well with a society that made room for them and offered its resources. They recognized and appreciated that, despite its hard surfaces and sharp edges, la bell’America offered a collective generosity not found anywhere else in the world. "Dove c’è pane, c’è patria (where there is bread, there is my country)," they said, and gave their allegiance to their adopted home. It is interesting how readily so many Italian immigrants developed a powerful sense of patriotism for the United States and rejected their commitment to the Italian nation while keeping strong ties with their Italian culture.

Those who immigrated in the 1920s, like my parents, found themselves at the bottom of the deep and destructive depression that wiped out so much for millions of Americans. But the immigrants whom I knew survived that decade of desperation, while so many other Americans, with many more resources, did not. How did they do it? I hope, in telling their stories, to shed some light on this.

Our small group of relatives and friends in the 1930s bore the family names Asaro, Barone, Biancinni, Cervodoro, Conace, Dattilo, D’Auria, Dellolio, Delpizzo, Fatale, Fiola, Gallo, Graziano, Lanzana, Maiorano, Paone, Pugliese, Raso, Renella, Serratore, Scheno, Sutera, and many others that I did not know of until much later. At times, I thought they were simply materialistic, migrating in order to share in America’s wealth. But I came to understand that the United States allowed something far more important, the exercise of a deeply spiritual life, though not in the sense of religious faith. Most of the men I knew were not religious, although the women were. Men were spiritual in the sense of defining and maintaining life’s most important task: nurturing those whom one loves. One gave thanks to those who earned them, our parents, in recognition that their hard labors in the factories, farms, road gangs, and sweatshops had brought it all about. A raised glass, "a salute" in chorus, the brief touch and light tinkling of glasses—musical notes floating over the table. What more is needed? The father sat proudly in his honored seat at the head of the table. Were his arms long enough, he would have encircled everyone there, and that is what it was all about—la famiglia, the circle of love that transcended everything else, crafted by those immigrants and celebrated each day. In today’s more sophisticated, perhaps cynical world, theirs seems a naive philosophy:

"Protect, enjoy, and be loyal to your family above all, because nothing, not even God, is more important than your family.

"Work hard and succeed, because this great country, la bell’America, like no other in the world, will give you the chance to do that.

Tend to your own business and take care of your family and yourself, because no one else—no God, church, union, or government—is going to do it for you.

My discussions of Italian history are not objective treatments of historical facts, and they might not fare well under the scrutiny of historians. I consulted historical sources for contexts that support the memories, attitudes, and opinions that were passed on to me by my parents and their Italian compatriots. My version of historical events has been informed by their experiences, by the modifying process of time passing in my life, and, undoubtedly, by some self-serving and unexamined needs of my own. My versions of history, such as the long Italian Revolution or events surrounding World War I, are as those people understood them, or, rather, as I recall and reconstruct what they passed on to me. There is also a good bit of editorializing throughout this work; I do not claim dispassionate objectivity.

Italian immigrants viewed l’America as an overpowering colossus of a country. Everything seemed big: the buildings, the streets, the noise, the frenzy, and even the American people, jabbering in their foreign tongue. New arrivals stepping onto the New York pavement must have felt the difference in size between themselves and everything else. For some, that sense of a vast, overbearing country would never be shed. We might appreciate the more abstract, perhaps fanciful, representation shown in Figure 1.

I have tried to present some phrases in the Calabrese dialect as it was spoken in my parents’ time as best as I can remember them. My neighbor, Joseph Vircillo of Buffalo, helped me to recapture the Calabrese idiom. Professor Julia Cozzarelli of Ithaca College and my cousin Michael Bartolotti helped to correct Italian phrases. I thank them all for their generous assistance. However, responsibility for the final renditions—errors, inconsistencies, and all—is mine.

Relatives and friends have shared their memories and other mementos of our families in Italy and in Nyack. I thank Anthony Colistra, Maria Colistra Rosado, Elaine Conace, Theresa Lanzana Serratore, and Joseph Dattilo. A special note of gratitude goes to my cousins Elisabetta, Benedetta, and Michael Bartolotti; Anna Dattilo Ottaiano, Michael Dattilo, Theresa Dattilo Fiola, and Fred J. Graziano; to my niece Anne Graziano Keane, and to my lifelong virtual cousins, Theresa Conace, Mary Serratore Lynch, and Laura Serratore Ciliberto. They shared family photographs, newspaper clippings, old books, and stories of earlier times, wrote letters to me, filled out family questionnaires, tolerated my tape recorder, and patiently carried on late-night telephone conversations over the miles between us. Thank you.

I have not discussed my younger cousins, nieces, and nephews, not because I have forgotten them, but because they did not enter the story until much later. Perhaps someday one of them will pick up the tale and tell us more.

As I recounted the 1930s depression, I saw a disquieting familiarity, a resurrection of events that led to the Great Depression. They are with us again: a heavy national debt incurred by war, looting of the nation’s resources by well-positioned businessmen, and a failure to share the country’s wealth among the general population. We again have huge tax breaks for the wealthy but increased fees, taxes, and prices for everyone else. New laws give advantages to well-placed investors, big business is evermore entwined with big government and the burgeoning war machine. Our schools, hospitals, bridges, and roads deteriorate as our wealth flies overseas. Americans’ consumer debt is skyrocketing, home mortgage foreclosures are rapidly escalating, and we see a general failure to save. There is, too, a disturbing similarity of the vicious anti-immigration surge following World War I and our current obsession with Mexican illegal immigration. These are cause for concern. We would be wise to pay attention.

I have written about many people and events, but this work is primarily the story of Michele Graziano, Teresa Dattilo Graziano, and their son, my brother, Ferdinando.

A.M.G.

Time Hill Farm

Chautauqua County, New York

figure1%20crop.tif

Figure 1.

The relative land areas of the Continental United States

and Italy (including Sicily and Sardinia).

I

Revolution and Promise

Chapter 1

The Turquoise Room (Nyack, 1935)

1. 1935

Dark turquoise paint covers the walls and woodwork, making the room gloomy despite the sunshine outside. Whatever is out there is yet unknown, featureless, like luminous fog. The world is here, in this room. A little boy, three years old, wears short pants and a shirt with four buttons at the waist to which the shorts are attached. His face is round, smooth, his expression troubled. Ruffled hair pokes down his forehead like little fingers. His short legs are sturdily rounded, and his feet press up on their toes, urgently leveraging him higher. Linoleum stretches away in all directions like a yellow desert.

He is leaning, glued to his mother’s leg. She sits, silent, in an old wooden chair that has a rounded back with five spindles. One is broken, taped together, and can be moved back and forth inside its bandage. The old chair is scratched and rough and is missing a rung. One leg is too short, so the chair wobbles like an old man trying to keep his balance. It once had legs of equal length and glossy white paint with stenciled yellow and orange flowers, but now it is faded and chipped. It looks like it has been kicked around a lot; a poor, sad chair, like the room.

I remember dull yellow linoleum with worn spots that blossomed from the underside like flat red mushrooms. Black squares were outlined on it, and if you looked closely, you could see faded flowers in each. Carefully, I placed a foot on a square, but not my full weight, because you might sink in, down to that red stuff (and who could tell what that was and what it might do to you if it grabbed your foot).

The black squares marched away from me like a desert of bottomless black boxes. They marched to the far side of the room and smacked up against the distant walls that imprisoned them, frustrating their escape. When I bent down and squinted along the marching squares, I saw straight rows, but with a blink of my eyes, they shifted to diagonal rows and diamond shapes. With each blink, they changed from one to the other and back again, and after a while it made me dizzy and I had to stop staring.

The big floor was treacherous, unstable. How could you trust anything that could change its shape? I huddled tightly against Mom, warm, safe. She had a round, full face, soft and kind, and shining black hair pulled back into a neat bun. I leaned against her, embraced by her protective arm. Her summer dress reached to her ankles, almost touching the narrow straps of her shoes. The dress, like the floor, was decorated with flowers, but these were colorful and bright, rippling as in a summer breeze whenever Mom moved, dancing, it seemed, to silent music. Mom’s black shoes rested solidly against the floor. Each shoe had a shiny little buckle that looked just like a regular belt buckle, as if it belonged to a doll.

My life began in that room, in those moments. I am not aware of anything having preceded that scene, or how or why we arrived there. We just were; it just was. I knew who I was, who Mom was, but all without a personal history, without preamble. As far as I knew, we had been created at that moment, in that corner of the oppressive turquoise room.

The opposite wall held a closed door, far across that uncertain desert. It was shadowy over there, so far from the small, dingy window. Muted sunlight seeped through and struggled across the floor trying to reach the door, but was forced to flow down and disappear into those black squares. I wondered where it went, that sunlight. Did that dark red stuff in the floor soak it all up? Perhaps it was spilling into some secret place down below us, the glorious opposite of this dark room—a place with a waterfall of sunlight. It must be a beautiful place, and someday I would go down there and explore and try to find those cascading rays. For now, I knew only this dingy room, and it was best to hold tightly to Mom and make sure my foot did not stray into the center of a black square.

That shadowy door was chipped and gray, matching the mood. I wanted to see what was on the other side, but that would require venturing onto the floor and maneuvering around the treacherous black squares, and possibly even stepping into them. I clung to Mom and stayed safe.

Mom sat still in the battered chair. I stood leaning my weight against her. She was quiet, subdued perhaps by the room, as I was. Or is my memory faulty? Was the turquoise room generating the oppressiveness and darkening our mood, or was Mom the source of the darkness, her shadowed emotions filling the room and dominating us? Is this what I was feeling—not the power of the room, but the power of Mom’s emotions? She was uneasy, uncertain, sad.

2. Come to l’America

For Mom, emotion drove life, and what one felt at any moment was the essence of being alive. She had been taught to respect emotional honesty—one expresses what one feels; to suppress emotion is to tell a lie. Mom was an Italian 19th-century romantic trapped in this American 20th-century town. She was saddened at being miles from her home in Southern Italy, having joined my father in 1927 in this big, new country where she knew neither language nor custom. Coming to America for a better life for her family was a smart move, but the cost was great. Abandoned in that now distant warm and hilly region of Southern Italy were her mother and siblings, and everyone and everything else in the world that had mattered to her. She sighed and looked inward, seeing not only the distance of the great ocean, but also the fear that she would never see her family again.

Into that mix of emotion appeared a new anxiety. Not only had she come to an unfamiliar country, but just two years later she had found her family sliding into the worst economic depression that this huge and noisy new country had ever experienced. Mom had traded life in the European economic depression for life in the American economic depression. In Italy it had been said that America hummed with good jobs and fat pay envelopes, even more money than one family could use. Living would be good, children healthy, families happy, and life would have no economic cares. La bell’America offered a life brighter than any life possible in the many lovely but poor villages throughout Southern Italy, like her own Maida.

Come to America, the voices urged. But the Great Depression had followed the stock market crash of 1929, and good living had danced away from them. Making one’s way through life in a strange land with its unknown language, customs, and people, without the support of one’s family, would be difficult enough. But trying to do so when men were being thrown out of work and sent wandering the country to beg in the streets was frightening. What was to become of them? One could pray and that always made her feel better, but prayers, no matter how passionately offered, were not always answered. Sometimes, it seemed, even God has other things to do.

Where was God? Throughout her long life Mom would maintain her religious devotion, but she would never understand God’s vagueness and stark absences, often when He was most needed. My father had been made cynical by Godless poverty, a Godless war, and his family’s Godless confrontations between 1927 and 1931 with soulless visitations of death, even for tiny babies. From such experience he concluded that God’s absence was reality and God’s existence was delusion.

I am aware of a shadowy sadness. At one time I had a sister and another brother, but they were not here any more. It was confusing—both were older than I, but neither succeeded in becoming as old as I. How could that be? I felt puzzled, disappointed, and sometimes even resentful that they were not here for me to know, and that I had not been there to know them. It would be years before I was able to understand those cloudy images of Mom and my unknown sister and brother and the feelings of loss. In time, I saw shadowed images of a baby who did not survive birth, a fat and happy 10-month-old who turned hot with raging fever, and a doctor whose instructions were too impatient for the immigrant woman who knew no English. I saw a church and priests who looked to heaven and thanked God even for this blasphemy, grim, silent men and sobbing women, and tiny white caskets.

If those were the realities that pressed hard on Mom, forcing her emotions, then those were what she expressed through her mood, dominating our world in the turquoise room. While I believed that life began in that room, at that moment Mom knew better. She, of course, had a past, and it was that past colliding with this present that generated the gloom of her distress. Mom sat in that dark room in the deep depression summer of 1935, filling the space with anxiety and sadness. I clung to her, a three-year-old, sensing the oppression, but blaming it all on the dark color of the walls.

3. The Red-and-Black Man

Shuffling footsteps approached from the other side of the gray door. I pressed closer to Mom, hiding my face so I wouldn’t be seen. I was watcher and watched. She hugged and reassured me, but the gray door opened, and The Red-and-Black Man entered. I buried my face in the folds of Mom’s dress, clutching the safety of its fabric, crushing the bright flowers. I turned just enough to peek out with the corner of my right eye. Only that would I allow. If I revealed no more than that, then perhaps he would not see me at all.

The Red-and-Black Man was huge, nearly to the ceiling, or so it seemed to me. His shoes were big, workingman’s shoes, scuffed dull black and thick-soled, rising past his ankles like leather armor. They were powerful shoes, bringing him toward us with loud pounding steps that overwhelmed the dangerous black squares. With those shoes, he could never fall in. That was reassuring—the black squares, against those shoes, could do no harm. A powerful man, he strode across the linoleum and, with those armored shoes, had no fear of the black squares. I wanted shoes like that, big, strong, tough shoes, so that I too could stomp across the floor and not even worry about the black squares.

A round, flat leather cap with a narrow brim in front and stains around the edges topped his head. Black hair, rough-cut, escaped from under his cap and curled over his ears and collar. His broad, red face was wet and heavily peppered with black stubble. Tracks of sweat rolled down his face and disappeared under a large red-and-black bandana tied around his neck, the two ends hanging down at his open collar like a small, careless necktie. His shirt was checkered, red and black, not at all like the familiar blue shirts my father wore to work. His sleeves were rolled up. The muscles in his heavy arms bulged, and I could see a blue dragon sliding out from under his rolled-up sleeve and crawling down his arm. It had claws, wings, and a huge mouth with two tongues. Its eyes had not yet found me, but might at any moment. There were other things on his arms: a sword with words wrapped around it, an eagle with sharp talons, a flag, and a lady in a long dress holding up a torch; pictures in blue ink all over his arms. How did he do that, draw pictures on his arms?

A heavy brown leather apron was tied around his waist. My gaze was pulled to a matchstick in his mouth. When he talked, it moved up and down. Every now and then it skittered to a corner of his mouth, as if trying to escape, quivered for a while, like a frightened little mouse, and then scurried back into the other corner. The bobbing matchstick made you stare at it. How did it do that, march back and forth?

The Red-and-Black Man strode across the room, stopped at our corner, and looked down at us. Ovah der? he rumbled, as if accusing us of something, and pointed his thumb over his shoulder to the far wall.

I pressed closer to Mom, as far away from him as I could get. Yeh, Mom said, nodding, pleased at her successful, if limited, conversation in americano.

The Red-and-Black Man leaned down and reached huge hands toward me. Hey, yer a big boy, he thundered. The matchstick trembled in his mouth. Ya gonna come in da truck and work wid me?

I was terrified. I did not want to go in his truck! I squeezed against Mom. The Red-and-Black Man seemed surprised. Then he straightened up, smiled, and gently touched my hair with his rough hand.

OK, big boy, he said, softly. You stay here en’ take care a’ yer ma.

He smiled at me and left the room, and soon returned with another man, carrying a table. Six wooden chairs, a corner cabinet, and boxes of dishes, pots, and pans were also brought in. The men carried furniture to other rooms, stopping now and then to drink the cold water that Mom kept in a milk bottle in the icebox, up against the big block of ice.

4. La Famiglia

In time the turquoise was banished from the room. Over many years my parents transformed that old house. I had no understanding of how difficult it must have been to buy and maintain a house deep in those depression years, especially for penniless immigrants. It was a risky thing to do, with the economy as poor as it was, but they did it. All around us, Americans were losing their jobs and homes. On our street there were three abandoned houses, sad victims of the depression. One house was already decaying. Its dark and crumbling interior, where children once played and slept safely and mothers prepared family meals, had become a hollow husk of shadows and creaking floors where neighborhood boys dared to seek adventure, treasure, even ghosts. It is now, many years later, that I ask, How could my parents have possibly succeeded under those desperate economic conditions when so many other people, Americans who were accustomed to the culture and had so many advantages, were losing everything they owned?

The men in those immigrant families had brought with them independence and confidence in the power of their personal labor. Labor was their currency, their medium of exchange, their resource pool, through which they bargained with this American society. Their strength in labor was what they had to offer to l’America in exchange for shelter, food, and clothing. They had no savings and investments; no properties, stocks, or bonds; no commodities to sell, no great ideas to market, no advanced technical expertise or high levels of education to offer. They had no helpful contacts in the business or professional worlds to smooth their way, no favors due to them, and no influence with politicians. There were no strings they could pull on their own behalf, no deep economic political or social resources at their command, no palette of social services to sustain them in rough times. What they had was their labor. Labor was their route to survival and to better lives for their families, but in the depression years it was a route littered with obstacles.

I remember one man raising his hands, as if to heaven, and saying, "Con queste due mani posso fare il mondo! (With these two hands I can build the world!) I thought the man was praying. That was a strange place to pray, in the cellar with my father and a few other men who were talking and enjoying Pop’s wine. I had seldom seen Italian men pray. Women prayed, even kids did. But except for priests, most of whom were Irish anyway, Italian men did not pray in my world, at least not obviously so. What he had said was a plea, driven by frustration. I was too young to understand the unstated corollary: I’m strong. I can do any work they give me. But where is the work? Where is the work?"

These immigrants knew well the value of personal work, had the physical strength to do it, and understood that whatever they were to accomplish in l’America had to be achieved through their own efforts. Here was one of the most unfair ironies that plagued these Italian men and women, one that I did not recognize for many years—in the face of their enormous capacity for sustained, hard physical work, some Americans would still characterize them as those damned lazy foreigners!

My sense of family developed early, before I reached school age. In the mid-1930s, Mom, Pop, Fred, and I lived on the ground floor of our two-family house at 79 Elysian Avenue in Nyack. Around us, orbiting like satellites, were three other households, those of Aunt Macrina, Uncle Joe, and Aunt Nancy, and, far away in Ocean City, New Jersey, Aunt Annie and my second Uncle Joe. I had three aunts, two uncles, and six cousins, la famiglia, which also included many more people at various distances of genetics and geography.

Our homes were not near each other. Our visits to Ocean City required an arduous all-day journey in my father’s high, squared-off 1929 Packard, which swayed alarmingly from side to side whenever he exceeded 40 miles an hour, causing Mom to start mumbling into her rosary beads and Aunt Macrina to complain, "Ai, Michele, che fai? (Ay, Michele, what are you doing?)"

Our home was theirs, and theirs ours. No need to knock on doors and wait for permission to enter. Relatives and anyone within the circle of Italian friends had the right to rap on the never-locked door, call out a bright Allo! and let themselves in.

I knew each corner of those houses. More than 70 years later, when I close my eyes and seek images of the 1930s, I can see Mom’s kitchen and my little bedroom corner of the dining room. There, too, is the sunny south porch and glowing oak woodwork of Aunt Macrina’s house up on the hill. My image then roams to the beautifully varied brown and gray stones that had been selected and carried one by one, arranged, and cemented together by Aunt Nancy’s father. And there is Uncle Joe’s Ocean City home with its tiny back yard and the bountiful fig tree that he had brought from Italy and raised lovingly from a small seedling. I roam in memory through time and space, stepping easily through my composite house, from one welcoming home to the other. They are all mine. They are all ours.

My self-centered child’s view placed Mom, Pop, Fred, and me at the family core. I, the youngest, saw myself as the center of our household, with the entire family revolving around me. It did not occur to me that my cousins might have considered themselves and their own households as central, while we were the satellites.

It was Mom who talked about the family and the relationships among the four households. Aunts and uncles, she explained, were my parents’ sisters and brothers—related to each other just like my brother Fred and I. That sisterhood and brotherhood, Mom said, defined la famiglia, the single most important group of people "in tut’ il mundo (in the whole world)."

Our family was in three places—Nyack, Ocean City, and Maida, Italy. Most of Mom’s family, including her mother, remained in Maida, distant but made real for me by their letters, spidery strokes on thin paper that was almost like the dry skins of onions. Overseas mail was slow, often taking weeks and occasionally months, but it was magical to hold the letters composed so carefully by people who lived so far across the ocean.

5. A Hundred Grinning Demons

Political and geographic divisions were unimportant; wherever we lived defined our home. We were a family of a larger world, not of a specific place. The spaces between, like oceans, were highways from one to the other. The idea that those highways could be traveled, although often with difficulty, was part of the Italian character.

I recognized that my parents were immigrants who spoke with heavy accents and looked and behaved differently from the parents of my neighborhood friends, those Real Americans who, despite their Irish, German, Dutch, or English origins, resided in one world only. In my earliest view people were divided into two groups, Italians and Real Americans.

Years later I would learn that in the half-century from the 1880s to the 1920s, one-quarter of Southern Italy’s population left for other places. It was a massive migration; half of those people came to the United States, and a pattern soon emerged of plying back and forth between countries, of living in two worlds. They brought their Italian influence to their new cultures and took new influences back to the old, weaving patterns that bound one culture with the other.

Home was in both places. This was not the rootless wandering of dispossessed people, but the enlargement of one’s private world, the setting of new roots by choice. They viewed crossing oceans as their natural right to bind together and, in a sense, to conquer places and people through their personal occupation of small spots on the globe.

Italy is approximately twice the size of New York State, a little larger than Arizona. A long peninsula with a coastline of 7,600 kilometers, it is nearly surrounded by the sea. Living in Italy means one cannot be too far from an ocean. The peninsula is attached to the rest of Europe at its northern end with a mountainous border of 1,900 kilometers, separating it from France on the west, Switzerland to the north, and Austria, Slovenia, and Croatia on the east. Italy includes the peninsula, the major islands of Elba, Sardinia, and Sicily, and another 70 smaller islands, adding still more coastline. Italians have historically been seafarers, and many traditional Italian heroes were sailors.¹ Hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, Romans voyaged to other lands and admitted others into their federation. They journeyed across water and land, to England, Africa, and the East, conquering the world. They were among the world’s earliest cosmopolitans, and some of this has become part of the Italian character.

Southern Italians also held a conflicting parochial view, campanilismo, a small-world attachment to a locale, a group, and codes of behavior. They are contradictory attitudes, cosmopolitanism and campanilismo, both linked to la famiglia, which is the core idea around which the others revolve. La famiglia was organized around the oldest blood relative in the patronymic line, the matriarch or patriarch, in accord with the Italian traditions of respect for elders and primacy of the father’s lineage. My father’s definition of our family was clear: his sister, Macrina, was the oldest family member living in the United States. But she had married, thus losing the primacy of their father’s name. This made my father, the next oldest, our family head.

For my father, the importance of the past had long ago evaporated in his passage to l’America. The past was of little importance for him in his New World in Nyack. My father’s country was now the United States, not Italy; he now respected an elected president, not a king. La famiglia was still paramount, but campanilismo had faded. This was not his rejection of Italy but a new allegiance to the United States. As he defined himself in 1935, my father was an American, a naturalized citizen, having been in the country for 15 consecutive years, and for an earlier five years prior to World War I. His transition from Italian to American was complete, and he was at ease with it.

For Mom, however, past and present flowed together in a seamless stream of time, and she accepted without question the presence of the past. The matriarch of her family, Nonna Elisabetta, my maternal grandmother, lived in Italy, and the traditional age-based respect flowed from Nyack to Maida. Unlike my father, Mom still defined herself as Italian, with her identity still across the Atlantic, planted firmly in Southern Italy. Mom adjusted to Nyack, learned the language and customs, developed friendships, haggled with vendors, chatted with neighbors, consulted doctors, joined the Holy Name Society at St. Ann’s Church, and successfully managed the family. Emotionally, however, Mom lived in Maida as much as she lived in Nyack.

It was not until my grandmother’s death in Maida in 1969, at the age of 94, that our family center was transferred to Nyack. Mom became the family matriarch at the age of 67. It had taken her 40 years to make a full transition from Italian to American, to feel comfortable in her American identity and to feel that she lived in one world. In 1995, in her 95th year, Mom would explain to her grandchildren, Italia is beautiful. I was born there and I grow up there. But Italy is no my country no more. Now, this is my country, the United States. America. I love this country.

I found considerable tension in self-definition. Are we Italian or are we American? The pressures were strong in each direction, and it would be many years, well into adulthood, before I resolved this. My definitional dilemma is a common experience of second-generation Italians born in the 1920s and 1930s who lived through World War II, in which Italy and the United States had become enemies.

Mom’s world extended across continents and time. When I was a child, her reality reached back from the 1930s to the 1830s, through her grandparents, among the most important people in her life. One hundred years, Mom explained. "Cent’anni!"

To me, a hundred of anything was an infinite amount. I was shown the carefully penned words at the close of letters from Italy: "Cento baci, Antonio (a hundred kisses, Anthony)—probably the first written words that I learned to recognize. Per cent’anni (for a hundred years) was added to wishes for a happy birthday or anniversary. To offer buona fortuna per cent’anni (good fortune for a hundred years)" was a sincere gift of good fortune and a long life.

"Prego che trovi cento dollari in strada! (May you find a hundred dollars in the street!)" was voiced when the immigrants learned the importance of the US dollar. Workingmen in the depression, those who had any jobs at all, might earn 12 cents an hour, so to have cento dollari was to be rich. I had never seen a hundred dollars. Indeed, I supposed that no one in the world had ever seen so much money. If such an amount existed, it must have been an enormous pile of green bills that would fill a room as large as our entire kitchen.

Such easy giving of things in the hundreds was not always benign. I remember Zia Angelina² sitting in our kitchen. With her powerful voice, her arms crossed defiantly, her face pulled into an impressive Italian scowl, she complained that an Italian butcher had tried to cheat her on the weight of some bracciole.³³ Had the butcher been German or Jewish, she would have been just as cheated, but not nearly as angry. For an Italian to do it—one whose own mother knelt and prayed so piously in St. Ann’s Church right beside Zia Angelina—was intolerable. But, she added, with a dismissive toss of her arm, they’re from Abruzzi, so what can you expect? Still, that did not excuse him. He had insulted her. Shaking her fist, she declared "a hundred curses on him and on his whole store, too! Cent’anni in Purgatorio!"

It seemed a harsh penalty, a hundred years in Purgatory, for erring a few pennies on the price of bracciole. But some things, like everyday expressions of respect, are very important.

Another curse was so chilling that it froze in my memory, never to thaw. It created in me dark images so frightening that, with tightened fists, I had to hold my arms straight out in front of me, clench my teeth, and shake the images away.

To him I send a hundred grinning demons to blacken his dreams and make him scream in the night for a hundred nights!

I do not remember who said that or why. I do recall being frightened when I pictured those grinning demons flying on leathery wings through the black night and into the bedroom window, and I wondered what could have justified wishing such terror on anyone. Most frightening was the question that arose in my mind: What were they grinning about? What horrors had those demons in mind for their poor victim, shaking with the blankets pulled over his head? I was glad the lady had not been mad at me.

Such dark sentiments were accompanied by a gesture of no mercy—a gnashing of teeth on the side of the hand, accompanied by a menacing growl that would frighten anyone. That was the exclamation point of the curse, and it sealed the victim’s fate. The wrong was righted and the world was again on its proper path. A curse was a useful way to settle accounts while safely stirring coffee. Cento problemi could be resolved in an afternoon’s coffee session.

At that age I had no precise sense of numbers, but cento meant a very great amount. A family going back a hundred years was, to me, very old, and I did not consider who might have come before my great grandfather, Giuseppe Dattilo. One hundred years, or approximately three generations,⁴ was the standard time span adopted by the people whom I knew. It included our own lifetime and our personal experiences with parents and grandparents.

This short-term view is understandable in a culture where written records, literacy, and a tradition of study from documents were not well developed. Well into Mom’s generation, Southern Italian peasants were mostly illiterate, uneducated in any formal sense. The local church and municipalities had long kept records of births, deaths, and marriages, but most people lacked the skills to keep family diaries or other written records. The technology for creating a family record of photographs was not available to them until well into the 20th century, and even then, few people could afford cameras, film, or family portraits.

Family history was transmitted orally. When the elders died, their memories were only partly carried on. What remained was what the living remembered of what the recent dead had told them. Mom remembered her childhood, her parents, grandparents, and many of their stories about their own lives. Beyond that, the details of the everyday lives of real people in the early 19th century and before were impossible to maintain without written records.

One day in 1935, Mom sat with me on that old wooden chair in the turquoise room, silently asking, How have we come to be here, struggling in a great depression in the midst of strangers, separated from our family? Were Mom alive now to help answer that question, we would have to begin with her paternal grandfather, my great grandfather Giuseppe Dattilo, born in 1830. By my great grandfather’s time, foreign invaders and popes had owned the peninsula for 1,000 years. Some were Italian kings, as in Sardinia. Some were the popes’ minions in the Central states. Some were French, some Spanish, some Prussian. Mainly, there were the Austrians. They had stolen the Italians’ homeland and the people grew angry. Whatever the origins of their rulers, the people said, "U guvernu ladru! (Government is a thief!)" and a powerful movement gathered to drive them out.

The 19th century was a time of European revolution, and my great grandfather’s life was largely shaped by that turmoil. Living in the midst of it, he did not understand the scope of events rolling across Europe. Like everyone else, he lived day to day in his small bit of the world. He had no formal education and knew little about the history that rushed at him and the millions, like my parents, who would leave their homes to cross the ocean to America. To understand those voyagers, we must review that history. As it unfolds in the succeeding chapters, I will introduce, in chronological sequence, the members of my family. They were ordinary people; no world shakers, no history makers, just people trying to live decent lives.

1 For example: Giovanni Caboto, Alvise da Cadamosto, Cristoforo Colombo, Amerigo Vespucci, Giovanni Verrazano.

2 Zia means aunt. Zia Angelina was my aunt because she was my father’s sister’s husband’s brother’s wife. La famiglia could be extensive.

3 Bracciole or bresaola is thin-sliced beef

4 A generation, according to Webster’s Dictionary, is the average span of time between the birth of parents and that of their offspring—approximately 32 years.

Chapter 2

Invaders and Popes (475–1700)

Napoleon’s Italy (1792–1815)

1. Invaders and Popes

The Italian Peninsula, with its long coastline of 7,600 kilometers, had fine harbors, plains, a long mountain range, and, in the time of the Roman Empire, lush forests and gardens. The peninsula was a Mediterranean crossroads. People of many cultures and genetics came to trade, to live, to conquer or be conquered, and they acquired a rich and varied character.

A thousand years before Christ, the Etruscans—intriguing, brilliant, charming, delightful, and highly humanistic people¹—had created a high civilization in the north before being nearly destroyed in the fifth century BC by invading Gauls. The Etruscans—it is not clear if they were indigenous or from another place—were absorbed by the powerful Roman State, one of hundreds in the peninsula. The Romans’ humanistic philosophy, government, concepts of citizenship and liberty, art, science, and technology were drawn largely from the rich culture of the talented and peace-loving Etruscans. African, Byzantine, Etruscan, Greek, Phoenician, Saracen, and Roman civilization flowed together into the Roman Empire, further enriching the people’s heritage. By 300 BC, the Roman Federation had incorporated the peninsula’s 250 autonomous states into a unified Roman Empire that stood for the next 800 years.

Latin was the common language, and the right of Roman citizenship was extended throughout the Republic. Rome was the world, spreading westward to civilize Spain and the British Isles, southward into Africa, and eastward beyond Greece and Egypt. As explorers, travelers, traders, teachers, ambassadors, and conquerors, Romans ranged the world. Rome’s language, laws, commerce, literature, arts, armies, and technology flowed along the Mediterranean Sea—the Roman Lake—connecting the world and shaping civilization. The Roman Empire was one of the contributions to civilization by the peoples of Italy. Another, the Italian Renaissance, would occur 1,000 years later.

Empires are not eternal. Rome fell in 475 AD, worn down after eight centuries and picked over by waves of invaders. Fractured, weak, and isolated, the cities that had been unified for a millennium under Rome were easy targets for the Austrian, Spanish, French, and German kings, and the Catholic popes. For the next 1,400 years the peninsula remained a feudal land, with a few lightly populated cities in constant rivalry. The popes and foreign monarchs, and their sycophantic hangers-on, owned everything and kept most people in poverty.

By the Roman Empire’s end, Christianity had become the dominant religion. Roman popes fought and colluded with a succession of Germanic tribes—Astrogoths, Lombards, Franks, and Ottonians—for control over the Empire’s remains. Invasions, alliances, intrigues, and rivalries fueled the centuries; feudal dynasties grew and collapsed. The peninsula was again a collection of separate small states. The Roman Church, however, remained a constant presence.

The Church provided a unifying sense of Italian identity and heritage. Even those who opposed the Church defined themselves with reference to it. The Roman Church preserved a rich Italian culture of art, scholarship, and science through the 1,400 years following Rome’s collapse.²,³

In the 10th century, a political union of the papacy and the German king Otto I created the Holy Roman Empire. The Church and a succession of 50 royal dynasties, including the Habsburg, Hohenstaufen, Nassau, Luxemburg, and Wittelsbach families, owned the peninsula.⁴

By the 12th century, the European feudal order was changing. New commercial classes gained economic power in cities like Venice, Milan, Genoa, Florence, and Pisa. The rulers became dependent on the new bankers and businessmen. Italian city-states flourished as rich centers of business, arts, science, and politics, fueling the Renaissance, the outpouring of Italians’ creative genius, from the 14th to the 17th centuries. The feudal societies of Northern and Central Italy were replaced by a resurrection of urbane, artistically brilliant cultures. Florence, the center of the Renaissance, was bathed in Etruscan heritage. Southern Italy, controlled by the Spanish Habsburgs and later by the Spanish Bourbons (borboni), remained a repressive feudal monarchy and contributed little to the Renaissance.⁵

The Italian Renaissance flourished for nearly 300 years, after which Spain occupied much of the peninsula for two centuries. The Austrians drove the Spanish out in 1706, and began their 150-year occupation that lasted into the 19th century. The peninsula remained divided into small monarchies and dukedoms. The spoken dialects further separated one region from another. Nevertheless, by the mid-1700s, commerce and travel between the regions had grown. People began to realize that, despite the political separateness, their religion, literature, and history were shared. They grew resentful of the divisiveness that was forced on them by the foreigners and popes, preventing ordinary people from joining in common cause and threatening the rulers. From the gathering recognition of their common culture came a desire for national unity and freedom from foreign rule, fueling Italy’s revolution.

By the end of the 18th century, Austrian monarchs had been in control of most of the peninsula for nearly 100 years, since they had ousted the Spanish. The Church, tied to the Austrians, owned the peninsula’s center. The cultural mix, however, was churning—not only in Europe, but also in the American Colonies—and revolution against Europe’s monarchies was under way.

By 1750, Europe’s great powers, France and England, had reached into Africa, India, and North America, and soon after fought each other in the Seven Years’ War to determine who would rule their world. One part of that war, known as the French and Indian War,⁶ was over control of North America. From 1754 to 1763, some 30 battles were fought in Quebec, Newfoundland, Ontario, Nova Scotia, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. With the aid of Prussia, England finally defeated the French navy and stripped away French colonies in India and Canada, gaining control over the Indian continent and also protecting the American Colonies from the French.

King George III then levied taxes on the American Colonies to help pay for the war that had saved them from the French. The Colonists objected. In the 15-year escalating controversy, the colonists demanded a greater voice in their own governance and the monarchy insisted on its right to control its colonies. By mid-1775, the American Revolutionary War was on.

On July 4, 1776, having had enough of King George and his taxes, the 13 American Colonies unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration asserted that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that all people have unalienable rights, and that when a government destroys those rights it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute a new government. These were powerful revolutionary statements completely opposed to the European monarchs’ assertion that they rule by divine right. Those ideas of rights, revolution, and budding democracy guided the creation of the United States of America and flowed into the great antimonarchy, revolutionary wave that was to come in 19th-century Europe.

France saw an opportunity in the American Revolution (1760–1783) to strike back at England. Benjamin Franklin’s years of diplomacy in Paris led to the colonists’ 1778 alliance with France. It was an extraordinarily complicated business. France became the colonists’ major ally, giving massive financial assistance, supplies, and troops, helping the Americans match the British military strength.

Here lay one of the great ironies of history: the French monarchy, driven by its hatred of England, helped to destroy itself by abetting the most severe threat against all monarchies—a successful democratic revolution. The court of Louis XVI—the time of Marie Antoinette⁷—was arguably the most corrupt, vain, foppish, egregiously selfish collection of royalty and useless hangers-on the world had ever seen. Franklin’s pose as a simple homespun colonial (he was actually an urbane, brilliant, and sophisticated man), plus the Americans’ revolutionary sentiments and later military successes, found a responsive antimonarchy dimension among the French people. The American Declaration of Independence fueled the brilliant French Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789), defining the natural, unalienable and sacred rights of man. The American Revolution and its huge financial drain on France spurred the French Revolution (1789–1792) and the downfall of the monarchy that had supported the Americans.⁸The French Revolution transformed the government from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional republic, abolishing—at least in principle—feudalism and serfdom. It weakened the Roman Church and the hereditary privileges of the nobility, and established new freedoms for the people. With the sweeping popularity of its slogan "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!" it threatened Europe’s monarchies and signaled the rise of formerly powerless subjects.

The revolution and the monarchies’ attempts to stop the spread of seditious ideas about self-determination would dominate Europe for the next century. It was a stunning victory, a pivotal event in the world’s move toward democratic governments. It deposed the French autocrats in a bloody and, as seen by revolutionaries in other countries, impressively effective manner. No wonder it caused such fear in other autocrats and emboldened revolutionaries throughout Europe. After the successes of the American and French revolutions, the Italians, like other Europeans, were caught up in the 19th-century flow of humanitarian, revolutionary, liberal ideas. The monarchies fought back, suppressing every liberal thrust, and Europe’s next 100 years would be filled with the struggles of democratic liberals against the old order of conservative monarchists.⁹

The 18th- and 19th-century middle classes, growing larger, more educated, and prosperous, provided the revolutions’ leadership and philosophies.¹⁰People were gaining knowledge of history, liberal ideas, and the concepts needed to create political philosophies. They realized the value of written constitutions and examined how states relate—or ought to relate—to their citizens.

In Italy, the early 19th-century revolutionaries were filled with American and French revolutionary enthusiasm. They fought against the autocratic rule of popes and kings, and demanded the separation of church and state in the tradition of the Roman Republic. Italians, they said, had too long been un popolo senza patria, a people without a country. Now, they urged, like America, like France, with the Roman Republic’s political philosophy and law, it is time to overthrow the autocrats, unite the people, and create an independent nation of Italy.

Secret revolutionary societies spread throughout the peninsula. One, i carbonari, was named for the charcoal-makers who lived in the forests, hiding from the troops. The name symbolized coal (carbone), . . . which, black and lifeless, burns brightly when it is kindled.¹¹ Members of i carbonari knew that, if caught, their next appointment would be with the hangman. But they persisted. The most influential group was Giuseppe Mazzini’s giovani italiani (Young Italians).

In Italy, the middle class was small, northern, and urban, indebted to French culture. The leadership of the Italian Revolution, despite the southern men who fought and died in the campaigns, became primarily a Northern Italian undertaking. It is not surprising that its eventual benefits would be kept primarily by the northerners.

However, the contadini and giornalieri¹² of Southern Italy, like the peasants of all countries, had little time or energy to sustain revolutions. Repressed for generations by French and Spanish royalty, without the guidance of education and with little knowledge of history and political philosophies, they had few skills to understand relationships of people and their governments, or to create guiding constitutions. They knew that their lives were intolerable and their futures bleak, and that their rulers lived far better than they. These people rose periodically in rebellion over local issues and won some skirmishes, but lacked the intellectual and social tools to define complex issues and guide the long-term rebuilding of society.

The Italian Revolution had been gathering for decades, following much the same path as those of the American and French revolutions. By the early 1800s, many in Italy believed that their revolution was on the verge of destroying Austria’s rule and the independence and unification of Italy were near, and that equal treatment of all Italians by a government of constitutional laws would soon begin. What happened next helped direct Italy’s development over the next 150 years, through revolution, colonialism, militarism, world wars, Fascism, and national disaster.

2. The Liberator 1796–1815

Into the flood of the Italians’ rising expectations in 1796 marched Napoleone Buonaparte¹³ (1769–1821), who forced a complicated twist of history that still pervades Italian-French relations. Napoleon was a lieutenant at age 16, a captain at 23, and a brigadier general at 24. In 1796 he invaded the Italian Peninsula, defeated the Sardinians, drove out the Austrians, and became commander-in-chief of the French armies in Italy. For reasons of history and ties with French culture, Savoy and Nice at the northern French-Italian border were Napoleon’s first targets. By 1799, he controlled nearly half of the peninsula, except for the kingdoms of Sardinia and the Spanish-Bourbon kingdom of Sicily-Naples. Sardinia had been conquered, but through treaties was allowed to retain its own monarchy, the Royal House of Savoy. In the south, Napoleon soon displaced the Spanish Bourbon monarchy.

Napoleon drove the Austrians from most of the peninsula, interrupted two centuries of Spanish Bourbon control of the south, and displaced the Church as the virtual monarchy of the peninsula’s center. He was in control of the French government by 1801, and in 1804 he created the hereditary Empire of France, declaring himself Emperor of France and King of All Italy. The French approved his transformation of their republic into a hereditary empire, and hailed Emperor Napoleon’s family as the new ruling dynasty. He appointed his son king of Rome, a brother king of Spain, and two other brothers kings of Holland and Westphalia. One brother-in-law was made king of Naples and another king of Sweden, and his stepson became the viceroy of Italy.

By 1809, Napoleon’s armies had overrun the peninsula and annexed Rome and the Papal States, and had briefly imprisoned the pope in order to reduce the Church’s political power and replenish France’s treasury. Napoleon’s looters swarmed through the Roman galleries, cathedrals, and palaces, stripping them of their jewels and Renaissance paintings, sculptures and tapestries, even furniture. Masterpieces by Raphael, Caravaggio, and Bernini, hundreds of valuable manuscripts, and thousands of diamonds, emeralds, and rubies were loaded into wagons and trundled to Paris. It was said that one train included 500 wagons filled with stolen Roman treasure, protected by armed soldiers. Powerless citizens seethed as more than 1,500 Roman horses were led away to their new French owners.¹⁴Every hoofbeat in that long procession on the cobbled streets was another stab of hatred for the French into Italians’ hearts.

The French occupation of Rome (1796–1814) devastated the people. Not stopping at outright plunder, the French also imposed disastrous taxes, appropriated choice buildings for themselves, and paraded arrogantly in their plumed hats emblazoned with the French tricolor. The Roman economy was ruined, and the number of destitute citizens tripled in three years. Romans were routed from their homes and deported. Opposition was crushed by merciless French troops, whom the Romans named the Assassins of Paris. Twice driven from Rome by Italian revolutionaries, the French armies regrouped, attacked, and reoccupied the city.

French rule was harsh. Soldiers and officials were arrogant and cruel looters of Italian treasures. They were dismissive of Italian people and their traditions and scornful of everything that was Italian, including the country’s food and wine, even as they hungrily consumed both. When some men spoke of the French, they spat three times on the ground in contempt for that race of dogs. The old men told the young, "Se voi siete attaccati da un francese ed un lupo, spara prima il francese, perché lui è il più vizioso dei due. (If you are attacked by a Frenchman and a wolf, shoot first the Frenchmen, for he is the more vicious of the two.)"

Napoleon the liberator had become the peninsula’s despised new