Dark Tide (7 page)

Maria sat at the kitchen table now, the infant unmoving in her arms. The child was so still that he was alarmed at first.

“Josie?” he said, unsure.

“Asleep,” Maria smiled and nodded to the child. Giuseppe stepped over to them, reached down, stroked his wife’s cheek, and then the baby’s, with palms rough as sandpaper, hewn from years of pick-and-shovel labor. Maria’s face was pale and drawn; she was exhausted from the rigors of childbirth on Monday. She had delivered Josephine with the help of Carmela Distasio, who lived upstairs, but since then Carmela had been able to provide Maria with only limited help. Carmela had four children of her own that needed care. The two Iantosca boys, Pasquale, seven—whom they called Pasqualeno or “Little Pasquale”—and Vincenzo, five, often played together with Maria Distasio, eight, and her six-year-old brother, Antonio.

Giuseppe bent, pain clawing his back, and kissed his wife softly so the baby would not awaken.

“The other children?”

“Asleep,” she answered. “Pasqualeno had a busy day.” She thrust her chin toward the ceiling to refer to the upstairs apartment. “With Maria.” Giuseppe stood silent, waiting for more of the story. “Look over there,” his wife said, nodding to the kitchen counter.

Giuseppe saw three large cans standing uncovered on the dingy countertop. He shuffled over and peered inside. All three were filled with thick, brown molasses.

“They went over to the tank after school,” Maria Iantosca said. “Pasqualeno, and Maria and Antonio. They bring the cans. The molasses leaks from that tank all day long and they go there and scoop it up. We can use it. Otherwise it goes to waste.”

“Can the kids get in trouble?” Giuseppe asked. “Can they get hurt?”

“If the railroad men see them they just chase the kids away, so there’s no trouble,” Maria said. “I don’t see how they can get hurt.”

“No, I guess not,” Giuseppe said. He dipped his finger in one of the cans, tasted the molasses, turned to his wife and smiled.

In her mother’s arms, Josephine stirred, scrunched her face, yawned, and continued to sleep.

Giuseppe was ready to do the same.

The North End in which Martin Clougherty, George Layhe, and Giuseppe Iantosca lived and worked was one of America’s oldest, most historic, colorful, and crowded neighborhoods.

In the early years of the country, the North End had been Boston’s most fashionable address, home to colonial governor Thomas Hutchinson and the city’s most famous midnight-rider, Paul Revere. It was a springboard for the settlement of Boston in Puritan and colonial years, it was the nexus of activity during the American Revolution, and later it became a center of shipping and commerce in a growing city.

By the mid-1800s, however, the economic condition of the North End had deteriorated, as successive waves of German and then Irish poor had settled there. The Irish potato famine of the mid-1840s provided the impetus for this flood of poor immigrants, and by 1850, the North End had become Boston’s first slum neighborhood. John F. Fitzgerald, “Honey Fitz,” a future mayor of Boston and grandfather of a president of the United States, was born in 1863 in a small wooden North End tenement, the son of a grocery store owner. (John’s daughter, Rose, who would one day become the mother of President John F. Kennedy, was born twenty-seven years later on Garden Court Street in the North End.) In 1880, there were about twenty-six thousand people in the neighborhood, and the Irish still made up the vast majority of the population—about sixteen thousand. The combined Jewish, Portuguese, and Italian populations numbered only about four thousand.

Those numbers changed dramatically over the next forty years. More than 4 million Italians came to America between 1880 and 1920, 80 percent of them from southern Italy and Sicily, a great influx that altered the ethnic makeup of American cities in general, and the North End population in particular.

Like the Iantoscas, who hailed from the town of Montefalcione in the province of Avellino, most Italians settled in urban neighborhoods in tight-knit enclaves with others from their particular region, or
paese,
in Italy. These became not so much
Italian
neighborhoods as a collection of individual enclaves of immigrants from Sicily, Abruzzi, Calabria, Avellino, and Genoa. Giuseppe Iantosca and Vincenzo Distasio were
paesani
, as were their families. They lived in the same building, kept an eye on each other’s children, socialized together, and often shared meals. Like Giuseppe, Vincenzo worked to support his family as a laborer, the most common occupation among Southern Italians, who had high rates of illiteracy and were largely unskilled.

As Irish and Jews assimilated and earned more money, both ethnic groups moved out of the North End to better areas of the city, although small enclaves remained in the neighborhood well into the 1930s. The Cloughertys were among the few Irish families that still lived in the North End by the First World War. Most other Irish had moved to South Boston, across the Charles River to Charlestown, or to East Boston, where George Layhe settled after he moved to Boston from New York. The Italian population in the North End continued to soar—by 1910, after a decade of unprecedented immigration, the neighborhood’s population approached thirty thousand people, of whom more than twenty-eight thousand were Italians.

The North End became the center of Italian life in the Boston area. The narrow streets pulsed with vitality, as hacks, pushcarts, delivery trucks, and people competed for right of way. Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale, authors of
La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian-American Experience,
described the general Italian neighborhood in America: “Above the streets, the fire escapes of tenements were festooned with lines of drying laundry, while housewives exchanged news and gossip with any neighbor within shouting distance. The roofs became the remembered fields of Italy where residents could visit one another on summer Sundays while the young played in the tar-filled air.”

But the colorful culture of the neighborhood belied the mostly miserable housing conditions endured by thousands who lived in the congested sections. Tenements were cold and dark. City investigators found the buildings adjoined so closely together that sufficient air and light could not enter inside rooms, except for those on the top floors. Crowding in the North End had become horrific. The inhabitable portion of the neighborhood is only about a half-mile square—only about eighty acres. In 1910, the neighborhood rivaled Calcutta, India, in population density, according to historian William DeMarco.

Arthur P. Jell’s decision to build one of America’s largest molasses tanks in one of its most congested neighborhoods was not due solely to the North End’s prime geographic location. Yes, the tank’s proximity to the inner harbor and to railroad routes
were
major factors. But other waterfront locations in the city had rail access, including the nearby Irish strongholds of South Boston and Charlestown, and there is no evidence that USIA discussed or even considered these areas to build an aboveground receptacle capable of holding more than 2 million gallons of molasses.

Instead, Jell and USIA saw an opportunity to travel down the road of least resistance with their selection of the Commercial Street site.

Two overriding realities no doubt played a part in their thought process and ultimate decision—social attitudes toward Italians and a lack of political participation among Italian immigrants to control events in their own North End neighborhood.

One of the lesser known and most unseemly aspects of the Great Immigration period is that Italians, especially those from southern Italy, and including those who settled in Boston and the North End like Giuseppe Iantosca and Vincenzo Distasio, were among the most vilified immigrant groups ever to arrive on America’s shores.

The scope and breadth of discrimination against Italian immigrants was remarkable, ranging from physical mob violence in the early years to less overt, yet extremely damaging anti-Italian pronouncements and writings from politicians and journalists. Italian immigrants were lynched more frequently in America than any other group except African-Americans.

The worst single day of lynchings in American history took place in New Orleans in 1891, when eleven Sicilian immigrants, nine of whom had been acquitted and two of whom were awaiting trial, were killed by a mob in retribution for the murder of nationally prominent police chief David Hennessy. The killing of the Italians produced enormously serious repercussions, leading to the near-impeachment of President Benjamin Harrison and bringing the United States to the brink of war with Italy. It also began a period of more than thirty years—bracketed by the trial, conviction, and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti—of systemic discrimination against Italian immigrants and Italian-Americans.

Leading “respectable” voices often led the way. Shortly after the New Orleans incident, Henry Cabot Lodge said: “Southern Italians are apt to be ignorant, lazy, destitute, and superstitious. In addition, a considerable percentage of those from cities are criminal.” In 1902, the five-volume
History of the American People,
written by Woodrow Wilson, who would later become president, gave his bias against southern Italians the status of a scholar’s judgment. These immigrants, he wrote, came from the “lowest class of Italy … They have neither the skill, nor energy, nor initiative, nor quick intelligence. The Chinese were more to be desired.”

At the heart of the discrimination against southern Italians and Sicilians, considered inferior to their countrymen from the north, was the widespread view that immigrants from southern Italy belonged to a different race entirely. This perception was prevalent for many reasons: their darker complexions, their tendency not to speak English, and their tendency to be illiterate in their own language. Discrimination against southern Italians during this time was as much racism as xenophobia. The Bureau of Immigration reinforced these entrenched biases, classifying Italian immigrants as two different “races”—northern and southern. One official U.S. immigration report stated: “While industrious, Southern Italians … and Sicilians are less steady and less inclined to stick to a job, day in and day out, than other races.” There were other reasons for discrimination against southern Italians, the ethnic group who made up about 80 percent of the North End’s population by 1915. Most were not citizens, and many traveled seasonally between Italy and the United States, a migratory pattern that earned them the disparaging label “birds of passage” from other Americans, many of whom perceived Italian immigrants as uncommitted to the United States.

The net result of this discrimination angered, frustrated, and discouraged Italians, especially during the first decade of the twentieth century, causing some to return to Italy and others to insulate themselves more tightly within their own ethnic enclave. Italians focused on working hard, supporting their families, creating a support network of
paesani,
opening small businesses, and avoiding conflict whenever they could. They dedicated themselves to their immediate and extended families, and in most cases,
la famiglia
was the sole social unit to which they belonged and, together with
paesani
, the only people they felt they could trust. Italian immigrants created thriving neighborhoods, in Boston and other urban areas, but most were neither community activists nor particularly civic-minded. Quite simply, Italians paid little attention to what was happening outside of their immediate families and circle of friends.

The exception to this rule, of course, were the anarchists, whose violent preachings and activities contributed to the negative perceptions of Italians. Years of poverty and government oppression in Italy fueled the passions of Italian anarchists, shaped their revolutionary philosophy, and drove them to be among the most radical of all ethnic anarchists. Italian anarchists, more fervently than any other group, believed that capitalism and government were responsible for the plight of the working class and the poor, for the “poverty and squalor in the midst of plenty,” in the words of Nicola Sacco years before his arrest. Historian Paul Avrich pointed out that Italian anarchists like Sacco were sure that, “in the end, truth, justice, and freedom would triumph over falsehood, tyranny, and oppression. To accomplish this, however, would require a social revolution, for only the complete overthrow of the existing order, the abolition of property and the destruction of the state, could bring the final emancipation of the workers.”