Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [889]
Irish and German workingmen were slow to take Jewish unionists into their councils. To be sure, Yiddish speakers like Cahan were now invited to take a place alongside German and Irish orators at May Day parades, and the United German Trades helped promote the fledgling United Hebrew Trades. But it was hard to gainsay the fact that Jews were steadily if indirectly pushing German tailors and Irish dressmakers out of work. The older unionsts were even less happy with the Italians.
MEZZOGIORNO MISERIA
Steaming into New York harbor alongside vessels bearing Jewish immigrants were boats from Naples carrying refugees from southern Italy. In crucial respects their immigrant cargoes could not have been less alike. The Eastern Europeans were predominantly families, Jewish, and urban; the Italians mainly bachelors, Catholic, and rural. But both populations had been shaken out of entrenched situations by the economic and political storms sweeping across the European landscape.
Where the Jews had been trapped in the shtetls, southern Italians were mired in the isolated valleys and lowlands formed by the mountain chains into which the mezzogiorno was divided. Within these provincial pockets, society was frozen in a quasi-feudal mode. A handful of aristocrats owned the bulk of the land and exacted profit and prestige from peasant tenants as their forebears had done for centuries. With the higher clergy and professionals, they formed a tiny ruling elite, utterly uninterested in agricultural improvements. As a result, the contadini (peasants who leased land or owned small plots) and the giornalieri (day laborers) worked the soil essentially as their Roman ancestors had, with wooden plows.
The area also suffered from primitive housing conditions, illiteracy (perhaps the highest rate in Europe), microdivision of farm plots, an absence of public welfare programs, limited diet, earthquakes, deforestation, soil erosion, malaria, and harsh sirocco winds blowing up from North Africa. The result was La Miseria—a miserable, impoverished way of life.
To survive, local communities hunkered down into tight defensive units whose loyalties and interests traveled no farther than the sound of the village church bell. The bedrock institution was the intensely patriarchal family, whose members, with good reason, distrusted all outside and higher powers, ecclesiastical as well as secular. The southern Italians were dug into the baked soil as deeply as their olive and chestnut trees. As with the shtetl Jews, it took a powerful confluence of outside events to dislodge them.
Italian unification provided much of the impetus. The northerners dominating the new nation considered southerners little better than African barbarians, and just as available for colonial plundering. The authorities failed to provide roads or schools, which could help eliminate backward conditions, but siphoned off in taxes what capital and resources existed. Unification also abolished customs barriers and thus opened up the mezzogiorno to northern and European economic penetration.
Exposure to developed capitalism proved disastrous. Free trade destroyed fledgling industries. Commercial agriculture foundered too, as the inefficient orange and lemon growers of Calabria, Sicily, and Basilicata faced ruinous competition from growers in Florida and California.
Meanwhile—as in Eastern Europe—the population mounted steadily, rising 25 percent from the 1870s to the 1890s. Overpopulation, like unemployment, disease, oppression, and neglect, contributed to the growing realization that the region had been sentenced to lingering death. Beginning slowly in the 1870s, therefore, and picking up steam in the 1880s and 1890s, southern Italian cultivators and laborers and a smaller number of artisans began making their way to the United States. Overwhelmingly—between 75 and 90 percent depending on the