American Experiment (197 page)

In many respects, the experiences of Italian immigrants paralleled those of Jews and other newcomers, especially those from southern and Eastern Europe. The heaviest waves of Italians came from western Sicily and from rural provinces south of Rome—Aguila, Reggio, Bari, and others—that were almost as separated from one another in geography, history, and even language as were some of the nations of Europe. They brought with them powerful loyalties to native town and village, high expectations aroused by the advertisements of steamship lines and by agents shilling for cheap foreign labor, and the rural folkways of the “Italian shtetl.”

Like the Jews and others, their goal in America was mainly economic betterment, but some Italians too left to find greater freedom—especially religious liberty—or to evade military service, or to break away from political oligarchies. Like other immigrants, but perhaps to an even greater extent, Italian immigrants settled into the dingiest tenements and took the most menial jobs in the stockyards of Kansas City and Chicago, the mines and steel mills of Pennsylvania, the construction gangs of Schenectady and Utica, in the “Little Italies” of Kansas City and Cleveland, in “Dago Hill” near the clay pits and brickyards of St. Louis. Even more than many other immigrants, Italians were slow to conquer the urban American language, as they converted street into “streetu,” factory “fattoria,” shop “shoppa,” store “storu.”

The most distinctive aspect of Italian immigration, however, was the manner in which the newcomers from southern Italy and Sicily coped with culture shock and economic need. This was to accept a leadership and authority system represented by the
padrone.
Italians arriving on the docks of American ports or in the terminals of great cities needed not sermons or patriotic speeches but
help
—help with officious immigration officials, help with the American language, help in finding jobs and housing. The
padrone,
or labor boss, was the man who met him when he arrived, took him and his family around to Little Italy, put him into some kind of flat, and knew where to find work. The
padrone
was essentially an agent for employers seeking low-paid labor, but in the process he often became an intermediary too; he “collected wages, wrote letters, acted as banker, supplied room and board, and handled dealings between workers and employers,” in Humbert Nelli’s description.

Because
padroni
recruited Italian labor not only for city jobs but for all parts of the country, Chicago as a railroad center became a stronghold for these bosses. And bosses they were, with their power to offer jobs or to withhold them, to overcharge for food, rent, and railroad tickets to construction centers, to collect fees for jobs that they then failed to produce. A United States government report in 1897 showed that prices charged by the
padroni
were often far greater than “those charged in Chicago markets for similar articles of food at the same quality”—almost twice as much for bread, over 50 percent extra for macaroni, two-thirds extra for tomatoes, sausages, bacon, and lard.

So Italian immigrants paid a steep price for help in acculturation at the hands of the labor bosses of Chicago. The price could be even steeper, for the
padroni
tied in with the criminal element that emigrated in large part from Sicily and would have a profound influence on Chicago’s—and the nation’s—urban life. But, above all, the
padroni,
performing their essential function of uniting labor and capital, testified to the desperate need of immigrants for help, understanding, communication, shelter, and jobs, in a nation that offered virtually no planned and comprehensive assistance or protection to the millions of newcomers flocking into its industrializing cities.

Would factory work serve as the great homogenizer? If the newcomers were bringing their cultures and subcultures with them, if they were implanting their old ways, their costumes, their pushcarts, their languages, their churches, and their family and ethnic loyalties into the heart of the industrializing city, could they carry their diverse ways of life past the factory gate? Man in all his diversity, Adam Smith had said, “is, of all sorts of luggage, the most difficult to be transported.” But the factory had its own exactions, imperatives, disciplines.

Factories had power. Factories, whether second-floor sweatshop or huge steel works, commanded that workers arrive and leave at set times—usually many hours apart—and work in prescribed conditions. The capitalist work ethic and capitalist efficiency barred loitering, absenteeism, malingering,
visiting around the floor, perhaps even talking on the job. “Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist,” the
Communist Manifesto
had charged. “Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.” Marx and Engels had looked to the future. With the development of industry, “the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level.”

Yet immigrants and migrants found countless ways to thwart the discipline of the industrialists, the slavery of the machine. Used to their holidays in the “old country,” Poles would spend several days celebrating a wedding in a far-off mill town. Accustomed to more than eighty festivals a year, Greeks were not prepared to give up these happy occasions in the New World. The Irish celebrated some of their old patriotic and religious days, such as St. Patrick’s Day,
and
their new ones, like Independence Day. Nor could employers integrate holidays so that their plants would close only once, for all concerned; no one would dare synchronize Labor Day and Columbus Day. Even the nonreligious might follow the slower working-day tempo of their earlier peasant lives.

And one could seek to flee the machine. On the Lower East Side, Bernard Weinryb noted, a worker might open a candy store or grocery, or become a jobber and then a factory owner himself; the carpenter might become a builder or contractor; the peddler might become a storekeeper. A man or a woman might marry “up” and escape the factory. Others might lose themselves in radicalism or religion, or study evenings in order to take up a profession. Upward mobility often meant lateral motion as well. New York Jews were moving their stores from 14th Street to 23rd Street and then up to 34th, while some moved their families to the upper East Side. Italians, Poles, Slovaks, French Canadians often found the going harder, but they too pursued the American dream.

The Irish, after all, had long since shown that hod carriers and ditchdiggers—or at least their children or grandchildren—could rise from rags to riches. Particularly in less hierarchically structured societies, such as San Francisco during and after the gold strike, Irish immigrants like Peter
Donahue and James Phelan had founded businesses and banks, prospered, and ended up among the city’s richest men. Tom Maguire built the Jenny Lind Theater, seating 2,000 persons—the biggest theater on the West Coast. There were countless success stories in other cities. To be sure, the “lace curtain Irish” were vulnerable to scornful remarks about their alleged social pretensions; a San Francisco weekly imagined the “MacShinnegan coat of arms” as a “spalpeen rampant on a field of gold.” The successful Irish, for their part, had a tendency to look down on later waves of immigrants—the Poles, the Jews, the Italians—almost as much as they despised blacks. But virtually all the nationality groups tended to decry the others, in large part because they were thrown into competition for jobs. Even co-religionists tended to divide: witness the separation of American Catholicism into Irish, French, Italian, and Polish churches that often kept their distance from one another on their local turfs.

For the few thousands who found room at the top, hundreds of thousands remained at the bottom of the social heap in the industrializing cities of America. Yet there remained a paradox. On the one hand, rarely in industrializing societies had the “objective” physical and economic nature of workers’ existence seemed more conducive to proletarianization—the forcing of masses of men and women into a homogeneous and poverty-stricken collectivity. “Big industry,” Marx and Engels asserted in
The German Ideology,
“destroyed as far as possible ideology, religion, morality, etc., … resolved all natural relationships into money relationships ... in place of naturally grown towns created the modern, large industrial cities … created everywhere the same relations between the classes of society and thus destroyed the peculiar individuality of the various nationalities … makes labor itself, unbearable.”

On the other hand, a proletariat in the social-psychological-political sense did not develop. For the American industrializing city seemed to inspire opposite tendencies—a huge and continuous flow of labor into and out of the cities; the recruitment of workers off farms, whether European or American, where pay and hours were far worse than even the factories would offer; tensions between native-born Americans and immigrants, and conflict among immigrants from diverse national and regional backgrounds; the relatively open access for some workers to middle-class occupations and status, if not to the top. Marx did not assume that class existence automatically meant class consciousness. But Marxist theory was drawn more from the European and British experience of relatively stable working-class populations, common language, lack of mobility—in Stephan Thernstrom’s words, “some continuity of class membership
in one setting
so that workers come to know each other and to
develop bonds of solidarity and common opposition to the ruling group above them.” The Americans did not—at least, not yet—fit the Marxist model.

Nor were the lower strata of the middle class— “the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants”—sinking into the proletariat, as the
Communist Manifesto
predicted. Most of the urban lower middle class, at least, changed its white-collar jobs rather than donning overalls. Many moved into the thousands of positions that were opening up in the towering new office buildings, banks, department stores, in the expanding corporate, educational, and government bureaucracies. The industrializing city required armies of technicians to staff the busy headquarters of communications and transport.

Middle-class women were finding more and more job opportunities in the industrial city, at the same time that industrialization was liberating them from some of their old household drudgery. Aluminum utensils were now taking the place of the old cast-iron pans, seasoned with beeswax and hard to clean. Refrigeration and faster shipping were bringing tomatoes into middle-class kitchens year-round, and oranges, lemons, plums, and grapes in season. Housewives were still baking bread at home, but now could more easily send out for baked goods. Still firmly entrenched as a housebound chore, however, was laundry, in part because of the intensive development and promotion of washing machines.

Some women found jobs teaching the home skills they had learned as daughters and mothers. The domestic science movement, led by Ellen Swallow Richards, gave birth to a host of training centers. Thus the Armour Institute in Chicago schooled Annie Thompson in sewing and nutrition, enabling her to clothe and feed her younger siblings after her mother’s death; later, she became a dietitian and teacher of domestic science herself. A multitude of women found teaching jobs as school systems expanded to meet the spurt in city populations.

Other women, however, wanted to move out of home and classroom. Perhaps they remembered Louisa May Alcott writing to her father: “I can’t do much with my hands, so I will make a battering-ram of my head and make a way through this rough-and-tumble world.” Sometimes a battering ram seemed necessary. When Myra Bradwell, publisher of the Chicago
Legal News,
sought admission to the Illinois state bar in 1869, the Illinois supreme court rejected her because she was a married woman and not an independent agent. Her appeal to the United States Supreme Court failed. “The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother,” a justice pontificated in a concurring
opinion. “This is the law of the Creator.” Bradwell was finally admitted to the bar in 1890.

In cities big and small, middle-class women were joining the swelling women’s club movement. Although this movement brought cultural enlightenment and good works, perhaps even more it fostered solidarity among women otherwise isolated in separate households and attached to men competing in the business world. A dawning awareness of female identity and autonomy and a heightened sense of social effectiveness transformed some of these clubwomen’s lives. Still, the movement was by no means radical: the clubs adhered to accepted views of “woman’s sphere.” Few openly supported woman’s suffrage until after the turn of the century.

Indeed, the Federation of Women’s Clubs, launched in 1890, soon became associated in the public mind with exclusive, fashionable society, for its membership included many of the wives of the nation’s best-known business magnates—Phoebe Hearst in San Francisco, Mrs. George Pullman, Mrs. Cyrus McCormick, Mrs. Potter Palmer in Chicago. “The women were gowned to the Queen’s taste,” wrote a disconsolate delegate from Maine about the 1894 biennial convention in Philadelphia. “The president of the club was one blaze of diamonds.….”

The wealthy husbands—the Vanderbilts and Morgans and Rockefellers and the rest—continued to flourish and to prosper in the great economic boom after the turn of the century. Concentration and trustification brought them into closer collaboration, if not harmony. A powerful intercity class of business elites was intensifying in unity and purpose, communicating through the business press, Pullman car talk, rich men’s clubs, corporate board meetings, and their increasing use of the telephone. All in all, the industrial cities were potent forces in fortifying the class system.