Italians to America

In the United States on March 3, 1891, the Immigration Act of 1891, passed by Congress and signed by President Benjamin Harrison, became law. While Carmine and Cristina were preparing for their journey to Antwerp, this law, an expansion of the 1882 law already on the books, defined what conditions would make an immigrant not only excludable but also deportable – “idiots,” as it was put, the insane, paupers, polygamists, persons who might become a public charge, and those convicted of a crime. If an immigrant was found to be suffering from a “loathsome or dangerous” contagious disease, he would be quarantined until better or sent back to his port of origin at the expense of the shipping company which brought him. If immigrants were caught entering the country illegally, the shipping company would not only have to pay for their return but also pay a $300 fine for each offense.

Just over a month later, on April 9, 1891, The New York Times published an editorial entitled “Rejected Immigrants” which begins, “Our new immigration laws will do us no good if we continue to endure with meekness, as we have in the past, the defiant attempts of the steamship lines to unload their human refuse and leave it here.” The editorial cites the case of the Iniziativa – this ship’s name translating to English as “initiative” or “venture” – from which three Italian immigrants who had been refused entry escaped from the ship. Agents of the Florio Line, which operated the Iniziativa, claimed they could not return these passengers or others who had been refused entry because the ship wasn’t returning to Italy. The writer blames the indifference of the officers of the immigrant steamers for the influx to America of “paralytics, beggars, and criminals,” as well as the local and national authorities of several unnamed foreign governments who “have cheerfully connived at the illegal deportation of their human trash to our quite too hospitable shores.” The writer then laments the leniency of our government which fails to punish the steamship lines, leaving America to ultimately accept these “diseased and stiletto-bearing individuals.”

Just four days before, on April 5, a previous editorial in the Times entitled “Sifting Immigrants” takes the position that the murdering of eleven Italians in New Orleans by vigilantes the previous month was the result of Italy’s dumping of these “stiletto-bearing individuals” on America, that if they had not been here, they would not have been murdered. The crime the murdered Italians were accused of committing was the murder of New Orleans Chief of Police David Hennessy on the night of October 15, 1890, when a group of men assassinated him with shotguns on Basin Street. Hennessy collapsed in the street. Those who ran to help him asked him who had done this. The story was that he managed to whisper a single word, “Dagoes.”

The community of New Orleans was outraged. The police rounded up suspects considered likely, all Italian. The newspapers not only in New Orleans but across the country ran editorials about the threat of the Italian Mafia and Italian immigrants in general. Finally, nine men were charged with the murder and tried in February, 1891. The men were presumed guilty by the public and the press, but the defense was able to show that the men had alibis. On March 13, the jury acquitted six of the men and deadlocked on the others. Though acquitted of the murder, all the men were still held in the parish prison on Marais Street on other charges.

Illustration of the rally at the Henry Clay Statue
from Harper's Weekly, 1891.

In all the New Orleans papers the following morning, a call to action appeared: “All good citizens are invited to attend a mass meeting on Saturday, March 14, at 10 o’clock A.M., at Clay Statue, to take steps to remedy the failure of justice in the Hennessy case. Come prepared for action.” This notice was signed by over sixty-two citizens, some leaders of the movement in favor of immigration reform. Men such as John C. Wickliffe, Walter Denegre, and William S. Parkerson – all signatories of the call to action – addressed the crowd. Parkerson climbed onto the pedestal of the statue of Henry Clay which then stood at the intersection of Canal Street and St. Charles Avenue. He began by speaking to the “people of New Orleans,” stating that “when courts fail, the people must act.” He shouted to be heard, “Will every man here follow me and see the murder of Hennessy avenged? Are there men enough here to set aside the verdict of that infamous jury, every one of whom is a perjurer and a scoundrel?”

Walter Denegre was next. While allowing that “perhaps not all of the twelve jurors accepted a bribe, some of them did.” He ended with “Let everyone here now follow us with the intention of doing his full duty.”

The mob storming the prison where the
prisoners are held.

Finally, J.C. Wyckliffe climbed onto the statue to shout, “If such action as the acquittal of these assassins is to be further tolerated, if nothing is done to forcibly portray the disapproval of the public of this infamous verdict, not one man can expect to carry his life safe in the face of the organized assassination that so powerfully exists in our midst as to openly set law and order at defiance.”

The account on March 15th in the Times of what followed would detail how the “miserable Sicilians trembled in terror” in the women's prison where they had been moved to try to fool the mob. The deaths of each of the eleven men  – the nine who were tried and two others who weren't – is described:

Gerachi, the closest man, was struck in the back of the head, and his body pitched forward and lay immovable on the stone pavement.

Romero fell to his knees, with his face in his hands, and in that position was shot to death.

Montastero and James Caruso fell together under the fire of a half a dozen guns, the leaden pellets entering their bodies and heads, and the blood gushing from the wounds. . . .

Scoffedi, one of the most villainous of the assassins, dropped like a log when a bullet hit him in the eye. . . .

Pollize, the crazy man, was locked up in a cell upstairs. The doors were flung open and one of the avengers, taking aim, shot him through the body. He was not killed outright and in order to satisfy the people on the outside who were crazy to know what was going on within, he was dragged down the stairs and through the doorway by which the crowd had entered. A rope was provided and tied around his neck and the people pulled him up to the crossbars. Not satisfied that he was dead, a score of men took aim and poured a volley of shot into him, and for several hours the body was left dangling in the air.

And so it went on. When it was done, the crowd carried Parkerson on their shoulders with loud cheering back to the Clay statue before departing. Two days later, on March 17th, in another editorial the Times would make this statement: “There was no longer any question of maintaining public respect for the law, for it was the acquittal of guilty men rather than the lynching of them that brought the law into contempt.”

The Italian community in New Orleans protested as they did in other cities both in America and in Italy. The Italian government protested and threatened to boycott the World Columbian Exposition then under construction in Chicago. There was a rumor the Italian navy was going to bombard cities on the American East Coast. The Times assured “decent and law-abiding Italians” that they “have nothing to fear from the operations even of lynch law in the country. They may suffer by being confounded in the public estimation with indecent and lawless Italians, but this injury they can avert. If the Italians throughout the country had taken pains to express their detestation of the murder of Hennessy and to disclaim all sympathy with his murderers, they would have secured themselves much more effectually against being classed with those murderers than they can now do by expressing indignation over the fate which these men justly incurred.”

From Judge magazine, 1906.

These were the weeks and days which preceded the arrival in New York of Carmine and Cristina with their children Emiddio, Vincenzo, and Maria Assunta. In 1906, after Emiddio’s return to America, when he was twenty-two, the magazine Judge would publish during the height of the Italian immigration a cartoon depicting rats with human heads carrying knives in their mouths climbing onto a dock beneath a flag-holding Uncle Sam. Other “rats” are swimming toward the dock or jumping from a ship named Directly from the Slums of Europe Daily. Many years later, as a man in his prime, Emiddio, thinking of France, would write in his poetry of “la belle mise de la douce paix,” or “the beautiful setting of sweet peace,” and “la protectrice de la liberté,” “the protector of liberty.” For the immigrants going through America's “Golden Door” in 1891, acceptance as Americans would elude them.The “beautiful setting of sweet peace” would come, at least for some, but only after a struggle, and not for decades.