Working across the Country

Healthcare on Federal Hill

This episode is titled: Healthcare on Federal Hill. When my sisters were about six or seven years old, one of them fell seriously ill with a throat infection. In those days, doctors still made house calls, and so our family physician, Doctor Romano, was summoned to our home. After examining my sister, he diagnosed an infected tonsils and announced they needed to be removed immediately. While he was there, he checked my other sister’s throat and recommended she have her tonsils out as well. He offered my parents a deal: the operation was $15 for one child, but he would perform both for $25. My parents agreed, and our kitchen was promptly converted into an operating room. Two chairs were placed in the center of the room. To assist him, the doctor called upon our family friend, Mrs. Cerce, whom we considered an amateur nurse because she volunteered at the Federal Hill House clinic. A anesthetic cone was fashioned from newspaper and lined with cloth. A can of ether was prepared with two holes punched in the top. My sisters were seated in the chairs, their heads tilted back, and the makeshift operating theater was ready. Everyone was sent out of the kitchen, though we managed to peek from the bedrooms and pantry, witnessing the entire procedure. Doctor Romano dripped ether from the can into the cone, placed it over the first patient’s nose and mouth, and once the anesthetic began to take effect, he handed this duty to Mrs. Cerce. She continued to administer a few drops at a time at his command while also helping to hold the girls still. The doctor swiftly operated, placing the removed tonsils in a glass, and then tended to his groggy patients. Afterward, my sisters, who looked like two limp rag dolls, were put to bed. They recovered with no ill effects, and our family was profoundly grateful to Mrs. Cerce. Our mother’s prayers had been answered. In a bizarre epilogue, the used ether can was retrieved from the trash by a neighborhood character we called Tatono (Sal) Mattera. He used the residual fumes to intoxicate his pet cat, turning the creature into a stumbling, drunken cartoon character. This was typical behavior for him; on another occasion, he captured a rat, tied a string around its neck, and walked it around the neighborhood—needless to say, he walked alone. Rats were a common nuisance in our community, largely because garbage and trash were never wrapped. We had a bin and several 50-gallon drums enclosed in chicken wire in the backyard for garbage, plus a cement ashbin for stove ashes, cans, bottles, and other refuse. The most exciting—and hazardous—time was when the ashbin needed emptying. My father would contact Mr. Zinni, the ash man. We children would watch, wide-eyed, as he opened the bin door, pitchfork in hand, ready to strike at the rats that would leap out when their nests were disturbed. He hauled the waste away in his horse-drawn wagon. The weekly garbage collectors faced similar perils, and we knew exactly what had happened whenever we heard one of them scream. This podcast aims to explain Italian characters and behavior. A full-length portrait of my compatriots may occasionally be witty, grave, cynical, compassionate, melancholy, glittering, scholarly, and stimulating. What is important is that we share these emotions. Italians have discovered America for the Americans; taught poetry, statesmanship, and the ruses of trade to the English; military art to the Germans; cuisine to the French; acting and ballet dancing to the Russians; music to everybody. Suppose someday this world of ours should be turned into a cloud of radioactive dust in space. In that case, it will be by nuclear contrivances developed with the decisive aid of Italian scientists—{Luigi Barzini, in the Italians}. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Crime and Punishments

Crime and Punishments (By Antonio Fantetti) During my youth in Federal Hill, the local crime scene was a small-time, underground economy built on bookmaking, craps games, the sale of stolen goods, the Italian lottery, Irish sweepstakes, and the daily numbers racket we called "black pool." It was the press and the police, through their sensationalism and attention, who inflated this humble operation into a legendary, million-dollar enterprise. From my perspective, those involved were merely playing a part—a role influenced by movie depictions of charismatic criminal heroes. Their tough personas were often just an act, divorced from their true personalities. While a few hardened thieves operated in the neighborhood, they typically practiced their trade elsewhere. On The Hill itself, their demeanor was consistently friendly, generous, and respectful. Regardless of the hour, it was always a safe and welcoming place to stroll, shop, or hang out—a fact any former resident from that era will gladly confirm. The press invariably exaggerated events in our community. I recall a bank robbery committed in broad daylight by a local boy known to the tellers—a harmless soul who never hurt a fly. He was quickly caught with only a small amount of cash, yet the papers ran stories highlighting an "undetermined amount taken." We always suspected the banks used such claims as a convenient way to balance their books. The young men involved in this world never harmed anyone outside of their business dealings. When violence did occur, the older generation universally sympathized with the parents of those who met tragic ends. These individuals had chosen their path and paid the ultimate price when things went wrong. As kids, we shared this sentiment, though we were blissfully unaware of how easily the street could have consumed any one of us. In the end, most of us turned out well, and in later life, we could only feel a profound sadness for those who ultimately fell victim to their own choices, to crime and punishment. This podcast aims to explain Italian characters and behavior. A full-length portrait of my compatriots may occasionally be witty, grave, cynical, compassionate, melancholy, glittering, scholarly, and stimulating. What is important is that we share these emotions. Italians have discovered America for the Americans; taught poetry, statesmanship, and the ruses of trade to the English; military art to the Germans; cuisine to the French; acting and ballet dancing to the Russians; music to everybody. Suppose someday this world of ours should be turned into a cloud of radioactive dust in space. In that case, it will be by nuclear contrivances developed with the decisive aid of Italian scientists—{Luigi Barzini, in the Italians}. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

A Century in the Spotligh

A Century in the Spotlight As the 20th century progressed, Italian immigrants steadily entered the mainstream of U.S. society. By the 1920s and 30s, the immigrant generation had begun to see their children grow up as Americans—a process that many immigrants viewed with some ambivalence. The U.S. public school system provided immigrant children with a new language, a new set of patriotic symbols, schoolyard immersion in U.S. popular culture, and sometimes even a new Anglicized name. At the same time, though, this process often created a cultural gap between the second, Americanized, generation and their parents, who would always belong, at least in part, to the old country. Over time, Italian Americans achieved advances in the U.S. workforce. The major labor unions soon opened their doors to immigrant workers, and Italians were able to continue their activism on a much larger scale. As they gained more experience, Italian Americans were able to move into a wider range of careers and became business owners and managers in greater numbers. Works by Italian-American authors began appearing in bookstores, and the Neapolitan tenor Enrico Caruso became a best-selling artist among Italians and non-Italians alike. With prosperity came greater political clout, and candidates began currying favor with Italian-American associations as elections drew near. The coming of World War II saw Italian Americans step permanently into the center of U.S. cultural life. Nearly one million Italian Americans served in the armed forces, about 5 percent of the Italian-American population, and millions more worked in war industries. As with many other immigrant groups, national service brought Italian Americans even greater social mobility, more access to education, and a higher profile in the nation's popular imagination. According to one account, an Italian-American aircraft worker, Rose Bonavita, inspired a 20th-century icon, Rosie the Riveter. From the 1940s on, the children of Italian immigrants could be found in all regions of the U.S., in almost every career and nearly every walk of life. This was especially true in New York City, where Italian American culture soon became a major component of the city's personality. For many Americans, the city's longtime mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, served as an energetic and erudite ambassador both for his city and for his national heritage. For a comprehensive collection of photographs of Italian Americans in the war years, and particularly in New York City, visit the collection Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives and search for "Italian American." With the explosion of mass media after the war, Italian Americans became ubiquitous. Every aspect of show business, politics, science, and art seemed to have a prominent Italian American in its vanguard. Rocky Marciano revolutionized the sport of boxing. Diane Di Prima pioneered the rough poetry and prose of the Beat movement. Enrico Fermi continued his Nobel Prize-winning work on the mysteries of the atom, becoming arguably the greatest physicist alive. Joe DiMaggio, the son of a San Francisco fisherman, led the New York Yankees to nine World Series championships. The crooners Perry Como and Dean Martin ruled the airwaves, and Hoboken, New Jersey's Frank Sinatra was, for a time, the most popular entertainer in the United States. Today, Italian Americans are represented throughout U.S. society, from the Supreme Court to the National Academy of Sciences to the National Basketball Association. More than 100 years after the great era of Italian immigration began, the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the original immigrants continue to celebrate the heritage their forebears brought to their new home. This podcast aims to explain Italian characters and behavior. A full-length portrait of my compatriots may occasionally be witty, grave, cynical, compassionate, melancholy, glittering, scholarly, and stimulating. What is important is that we share these emotions. Italians have discovered America for the Americans; taught poetry, statesmanship, and the ruses of trade to the English; military art to the Germans; cuisine to the French; acting and ballet dancing to the Russians; music to everybody. Suppose someday this world of ours should be turned into a cloud of radioactive dust in space. In that case, it will be by nuclear contrivances developed with the decisive aid of Italian scientists—{Luigi Barzini, in the Italians}. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Under Attack

Under Attack: "Where the Blame Lies" Labor struggles were not the only conflicts Italian immigrants faced. During the years of the great Italian immigration, they also had to confront a wave of virulent prejudice and nativist hostility. As immigration from Europe and Asia neared its crest in the late 19th century, anti-immigrant sentiment soared along with it. The U.S. was in the grips of an economic depression, and immigrants were blamed for taking American jobs. At the same time, racialist theories circulated in the press, advancing pseudoscientific theories that alleged that "Mediterranean" types were inherently inferior to people of northern European heritage. Drawings and songs caricaturing the new immigrants as childlike, criminal, or subhuman became sadly commonplace. One 1891 cartoon claimed that "If immigration were properly restricted, you would never be troubled with anarchism, socialism, the Mafia, and such kindred evils!" Attacks on Italians were not limited to the printed page, however. From the late 1880s, anti-immigrant societies sprang up around the country, and the Ku Klux Klan saw a spike in membership. Catholic churches and charities were vandalized and burned, and Italians were attacked by mobs. In the 1890s alone, more than 20 Italians were lynched. One of the bloodiest episodes took place in New Orleans in 1891. When the chief of police was found shot to death on the street one night, the mayor blamed "Sicilian gangsters" and rounded up more than 100 Sicilian Americans. Eventually, 19 were put on trial and, as the nation's Italian Americans watched nervously, were found not guilty for lack of evidence. Before they could be freed, however, a mob of 10,000 people, including many of New Orleans' most prominent citizens, broke into the jail. They dragged 11 Sicilians from their cells and lynched them, including two men jailed on other offenses. Anti-immigrant sentiment continued until the 1920s, when severe restrictions on immigration were put into place by the U.S. Congress. When this legislation passed, the great era of Italian immigration came to an end. This podcast aims to explain Italian characters and behavior. A full-length portrait of my compatriots may occasionally be witty, grave, cynical, compassionate, melancholy, glittering, scholarly, and stimulating. What is important is that we share these emotions. Italians have discovered America for the Americans; taught poetry, statesmanship, and the ruses of trade to the English; military art to the Germans; cuisine to the French; acting and ballet dancing to the Russians; music to everybody. Suppose someday this world of ours should be turned into a cloud of radioactive dust in space. In that case, it will be by nuclear contrivances developed with the decisive aid of Italian scientists—{Luigi Barzini, in the Italians}. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Working across the Country

Working Across the Country As the great surge of immigration continued into the 20th century, Italian communities bloomed across the country. As they did so, the Italian immigrants put their hands to a wide variety of work. In San Francisco, home of a longstanding Italian enclave, the new arrivals found their way to the docks for work as fishermen and stevedores. In Appalachia and the mountain West, they went into the pits and mines to dig for coal and ore. Stonemasons who had learned their trade on the rocks and crags of southern Italy worked in the quarries of New England and Indiana. Meanwhile, Italians labored on farms and ranches in every corner of the country, from the cranberry bogs of the northeast to the strawberry beds of Louisiana to the bean fields of California. Some Italians seized upon entrepreneurial opportunities in their new home. Italian immigrants in upstate New York formed the Contadina food company in 1918, and Andrea Sbarbaro of Genoa helped establish the California wine industry. In turn-of-the-century San Francisco, an Italian American named A.P. Giannini began offering small loans to his fellow Italians, going door to door to collect interest. Eventually, Giannini's operation grew until he was forced to rent an office in North Beach, then to buy a building. Today, Giannini's Banca d'Italia has become one of the world's largest financial institutions: Bank of America. Many Italian immigrants, however, found themselves toiling for low pay in unhealthy working conditions. At the turn of the 20th century, southern Italian immigrants were among the lowest-paid workers in the United States. Child labor was common, and even small children often worked in factories, mines, and on farms, or sold newspapers on city streets. Many thousands of Italian immigrants found themselves prisoners of the padrone, or patron, system of labor. The padroni were labor brokers, sometimes immigrants themselves, who recruited Italian immigrants for large employers and then acted as overseers on the work site. In practice, many padroni acted more like slave holders than managers. A padrone often controlled the wages, contracts, and food supply of the immigrants under his authority, and could keep workers on the job for weeks or months beyond their contracts. Some padroni built vast labor empires, keeping thousands of workers confined in locked camps, behind barbed wire fences patrolled by armed guards. The padrone system, despite its many injustices, was not eradicated until the middle of the 20th century. Italian immigrants fought against unscrupulous management and unsafe conditions by taking organized action. Because several of the major U.S. unions barred foreign workers from membership for many years, many immigrants formed their own unions, such as the Italian Workers union in Houston, or joined the radical International Workers of the World. Italian union organizers fanned out across the nation, often risking arrest or death for their efforts. Italian workers were active in most of the great labor struggles of the early 20th century, leading strikes in the Tampa cigar factories, the granite quarries of Vermont, and the textile mills of New England. In 1912, during a bitter textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the Italian IWW organizers Arturo Giovannitti and Joseph Ettor, along with striker Joseph Caruso, were imprisoned for nearly a year on false murder charges. In the Ludlow Massacre of 1914, when Colorado National Guardsmen attempted to break a miners' strike by burning down the strikers' tent village, the two women and eleven children who died in the fire were all Italian immigrants. This podcast aims to explain Italian characters and behavior. A full-length portrait of my compatriots may occasionally be witty, grave, cynical, compassionate, melancholy, glittering, scholarly, and stimulating. What is important is that we share these emotions. Italians have discovered America for the Americans; taught poetry, statesmanship, and the ruses of trade to the English; military art to the Germans; cuisine to the French; acting and ballet dancing to the Russians; music to everybody. Suppose someday this world of ours should be turned into a cloud of radioactive dust in space. In that case, it will be by nuclear contrivances developed with the decisive aid of Italian scientists—{Luigi Barzini, in the Italians}. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.