Memories fade E-Book

Sara Carbone

• Herausgeber: Mazzanti Libri
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

For many years the inhabitants of Olevano Sul Tusciano, an inland village in the province of Salerno, have replaced the expression “Do not think that I am rich”, with the sentence “Don’t think I am coming from Wilmington”.
During the years of the Great Migration, a good many Olevanese left their village to emigrate to the United States, and chose Wilmington, a wealthy town in Delaware, as their favourite destination. Not far from Philadelphia, in the early years of 20th century, Wilmington cornered Italian low cost labor. Its Little Italy hosted unskilled laborers mainly
from the South of Italy, poor but highly motivated by a strong desire of redemption. Many of them did succeed. This book was born from the collaboration and enthusiasm of their descendants, who still live in Wilmington, and of their relatives who live in Olevano. Its aim is to insert the migratory experience of their families into the wider context
of the Diaspora of the Italians all over the world at the beginning of 20th century, and to make it the paradigm of some migratory phenomena which recur over and over again, the same as yesterday and today.

Leseprobe

PREFACE

Toni Ricciardi, Université de Genève

Campania, unlike other regions of the South, has significantly experienced both the great migratory phases of the Italian diaspora: the one between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries mainly directed overseas and the Fordist one, from the second post-war period up to the mid-seventies.1 A third phase must be added, roughly starting from the second half of the 1990s and ongoing.

From 1876 to the outbreak of the Great War, Campania recorded over one and a half million departures. The peak was reached during the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, exceeding 900,000 persons, with an average of over 64,000 departures per year2, attesting the flows from Campania with those of the northern regions, predominant in this phase. If in the last decades of the nineteenth century the destinations were mainly France and Switzerland, where the large construction sites and tunnels required great labour3, at the dawn of the new century the transatlantic lines (Brazil, Argentina and the United States) absorbed the bulk of the departures.

The economic investment that the unitary State made to increase the structural capacity of the main ports of the Italian emigration was among the elements of the increase: between 1862 and 1924 the State invested 244 million in the ports of Genoa and Naples4, almost concurrently with the first legislative interventions on emigration. In this first wave of migration, as well as in the second postwar period, the exodus areas were the hinterland and its Apennine belt more than the former capital of the kingdom and its province: Matese, the mountainous areas of the Sabato, Sele and Calore, Irpinia, the Benevento and the upper Caserta areas and parts of the Salerno area that had their nodal point in Cilento.

To a varied extent, this territory was for nearly two centuries the epicentre of the agrarian malaise of the continental South: here "the desolation of the desert mountain from the deforestation, the extensive cultivation, the pulverized and dispersed property, the precariousness combine"5. Analyzing the data between 1876-1901 and 1902-1913, one finds that the internal provinces were those that contributed the most to the exodus from Campania and that the Neapolitan province never reached a particularly significant incidence rate, which was however below the national average. In this period, the province of Avellino passed from just over 27 % to over 41 % in the first decade of the twentieth century, Benevento from 24.6 % to 37 %, Caserta from 15.9 % to 34 % and Salerno from 37.8 % to 31.5 %, while Naples from 8.8 % to 9.6 % keeping almost 3 points below the national average6.

Ships depart

When I arrived, towards evening, the embarkation of the emigrants had already begun for an hour, and the Galileo, joined to the quay by a small moveable loading deck, continued to pack misery: an endless procession of people coming out in groups from the adjacent building, where a representative from the police station examined the passports. [...] Workers, peasants, women nursing, little boys passed by who had still attached to their chests the tin [identification] plate of the nursery school almost everyone was carrying a folding chair under their arms, bags and suitcases of all shapes by hand or atop their heads, armfuls of mattresses and blankets, and the ticket displaying the assigned berth number held tightly between their lips.

Some poor women, holding a child by each hand, held their big bundles with their teeth;

some old peasant women in clogs, raising their skirts so as not to stumble over the sleepers of the loading deck, showed their bare and scrawny legs; many were barefoot, and wore their shoes hung from their necks.

[... ] Then, suddenly, the human procession was interrupted, and a herd of cattle and rams came forward under a storm of beatings and swearing [...] After that the parade of emigrants began again: faces and clothing from every part of Italy, robust workers with sad eyes, ragged and filthy old men, pregnant women, cheerful girls, bright young men, ill-mannered men in wearing short-sleeved shirts and many boys who barely put their foot on the deck, in the midst of that confusion of passengers, waiters, officers, Company employees and customs agents, were astonished or they got lost [as in] a crowded square7.

In the imbarkation of emigrants, incipit of On Blue Water (1889), De Amicis described one of the many scenes that - starting from the last decades of the nineteenth century and up to the fifties of the twentieth century, with the last mass departures to the Americas -, became the almost daily representation of what occurred in the ports of Genoa and Naples and more generally in the ports of half of Europe. This work, less famous than Cuore (1886), was the direct testimony of his different experiences of the ocean crossings, and it influenced the movement that led to the first complete Act on emigration. With the new century, the then Kingdom of Italy, by establishing the General Committee for Emigration, adopted the first organic law on emigration, which defined the emigrant as “ the one who goes to a country located beyond the Suez Canal, excluding the Italian colonies and protectorates or to a country beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, excluding the coasts of Europe, traveling in the third class or in a class that the General Commissioner for Emigration declares equivalent to the current third"8. The legislative system, while undergoing adjustments and modifications9, remained in force for 25 years, before being abolished by fascism.

False and forced cancellation of emigration

«We can recognize, as I recognize, that emigration is bad, because it impoverishes our people of active elements that make up the red blood cells of anemic foreign countries»10

The above quote - part of Benito Mussolini's preface to the "Report on emigration services presented by the General Commissariat" in the years 1925-26 - represented the announced change on the migration issue by the regime. Thus, just a year later, in 1927, with the cuts to the functional budget of the General Committee of Emigration - which between 1901 and 1926 had recorded allocations of 147 million -, what the Liberal Italian government had built was dismantled11.

This change of course outlined and conveyed the belief - on which much historiography has misleadingly built - that the regime had wanted to solve, for ideological reasons, one of the greatest problems of Italy at the time. In reality, more than the Weltanschauung, Mussolini made a virtue of necessity. In other words, he turned the U.S. closure and the growing loss of international credibility into a political belief.

Already a few months after the March on Rome, it was Mussolini himself who recommended to his ambassador in Washington to plead the cause of fascist Italy in the "hope that the United States will create a wider opening to our qualified emigration"12. The aim of the Italian government was to gain credibility amongst the Americans, hoping to limit the ethnic-based restrictions that seriously affected emigration from the Mediterranean region and, especially Italy. The objective of the Americans, in force of the ius soli, was to prefer nationalities that historically, as we shall see, had a more relevant presence on the American soil and had reached a higher average level of education than the thousands of Italian women and men who arrived with the infamous red passport.

It was since the end of the nineteenth century that the U.S. public was trying to solve the problem of the invasion of the illiterate immigrants, mostly from the European countries of the Mediterranean region. Among these, the Italian quota represented the highest number, nearly 90%. After three unsuccessful attempts due to vetoes imposed by the President of the United States - a result of pressure from shipping companies and industrial lobbies - the Quota Act passed in 1921. With the law, the goal of the American Congress was to define the entry quotas according to the percentages registered by nationality, benefitting from the many statistical loopholes. In fact, instead of considering the data of the last available census, the calculation was based on the surveys of 1890. The result was that Italians, Spaniards, Turks, Portuguese and Greeks, who would have been entitled, according to the findings of the time, to a quota of 44 % (154,000 persons), saw it reduced to 15 %. While the two communities that weighed the most demographically and politically in the United States - the British and the Germans - were recognized more than 60 %13.

It should be noted that Rome's concerns were not addressed only to the U.S.-bound route. After the Great War, the doors of the European destinations closed at different stages, even towards the places where during the fifty years before 1914, 40% of Italian emigration had been directed14, thanks to the growth of the industrial setups and the emerging economic globalization that had strengthened the migrations inside the Old Continent. When we talk about migration in Europe, during the phase of the so called "New Thirty Years War"15, we also talk about migration to the European colonies of Africa.

One could identify the breakthrough of the process in 1924, which was the watershed year for the policies of fascism, during which everything began and in which the questions that, in 1927, led to the change of direction can be traced. On the internal side, on 10th June 1924, the Matteotti crime caused the authoritarian turn of the regime. In terms of migration policies, in the same year, the "discriminatory" tightening of the new U.S. Quota Act (Johnson-Reed Act) reduced the annual quota for Italian immigration to 3845 persons16, resulting in just over 3,600 new arrivals to Ellis Island17.

As usual, I have visited the President of the United States today before going on leave. The President asked me about the Italian situation that I explained it to him fully [...]. It seemed to me that the President had not followed the Matteotti incident closely and so he listened to it with interest. Speaking of immigration he then told me that he was sorry that he could do little in favour of Italy for which he had an affinity, I mentioned that Italians had remained sore for the unjust discriminatory character of the law since our emigrants had proven to be better workers when allied with the American communities in contrast to the Irish and others who were more welcomed18.

Once the door was closed to the Italian emigration to the United States, and given the limited reception capacity of South America, the Italian government was vehemently pushed to find outlets in the Mediterranean perimeter whereto the emigration flux could be redirected. The Mussolini government stance on emigration, rather than by choice, was made out of necessity and represented a strain imposed more by the changed international context than a conviction.

These hints clearly show us how fascism had tried to hold emigration as an instrument to trigger internal social conflicts, notwithstanding the fact that for a long time the prevailing idea had been that it considered as degrading that Italy was deemed the place of departure for desperate masses19. This shows how the ideas circulating in the second half of the 19th century had played a decisive role. Probably, the explanation behind Mussolini’s change of direction is to be found in the tightening of U.S. quotas in 1924: "If the United States had not imposed this quota, the fascist position on emigration would have been different"20. And reasonably, it should also be reviewed, if not more nuanced, the position that perhaps it was fascism that subordinated migration policy to the general aims of the foreign policy21. A subordination already present in liberal times, which had been expanded during Fascism and consecrated, eventually, by the republican governments.

Briefly, the evolution of how emigration was imagined, managed and represented is useful to contextualize it on a global scale. In other words, the Italian diaspora was nothing more than a piece of the great European migration between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which had assumed its own greater and different spatial-temporal specificity.

In 1800 Europe was relatively scarcely populated. It did not exceed 195 million people overall (there are no univocal and reliable surveys for the time). Only half a century later, the European population had increased by almost half, counting about 290 million inhabitants, which grew to more than 420 million by 1900. This demographic boom, which affected all European countries, was markedly more significant in Great Britain, where the population more than tripled during the 19th century. However, it is interesting to note that, although well-being and life span were constantly increasing, in the second half of the nineteenth century Europe they did not grow as fast as in the previous half century. Yet, there were no real wars and epidemics were consistently less frequent compared to previous centuries. The weakening of this growth was the direct consequence of the birth control and mass migration. While in the eighteenth century the largest mass migration was a forced process - that is, the slave trade - between 1851 and 1914, 41 million Europeans voluntarily moved to the Americas and Australia. Initially, at least until the mid-1860s, nearly 70 % of them came from the United Kingdom and 20 percent from Germany22.

From the mid-seventies, the "great Italian emigration" began - over 14 million people - which, numerically speaking was the most impressive migratory phenomenon in Western history23. The Italian migratory flow headed towards Mediterranean Africa, as well as to the Americas and Australia. It is estimated that between 1876 - the year of the first official Italian statistical survey - and 1914, more than 230,000 Italians moved, temporarily or for a few years, to the African coastal areas, especially to Tunisia, Egypt and Algeria24.

Paradigm shift

The concept of migration, right from the middle of the nineteenth century was inextricably linked - as it still happens today - to the concept of poverty and to state economic strategies. In other words, from that moment on, the conviction grew that the State should carry out welfare functions as the Church had done for centuries. The perception of a growing social threat, a direct consequence of the changes in production processes introduced by the industrial revolutions, there developed the notion that the social problems should and could also be exported first to the foundation of colonies, and then through migration.

At this stage, we are still very far from what is today one of the priorities of Europe, and more generally of the West: how to continue to guarantee a welfare state and, above all, full employment25.

Rightly, the greatest concerns,arose in England, where pauperism, the fear of revolutionary tensions imbued with the affirmation of socialist ideas and the strong Irish immigration exasperated the anxiety beyond measure26. This potentially explosive mixture increased the fear of a dramatic and inevitable reduction in foodstuffs, due to“a geometric progression of population growth” compared to the "growth of the means of subsistence in arithmetic progression". In other words, while the population was multiplying, the means of subsistence (foodstuffs) were simply growing incrementally and, therefore, progressing much more slowly. This thesis, which appeared at the end of the sixteenth century, was taken up two centuries later by Thomas Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population, universally becoming one of the basic components of the reflections on the migratory phenomena.

The search for possible solutions to the growing social tensions led to two great tendencies of thought. The first, predominant until the 1930s, advocated the "disposal of the poor", that is to say the export of poverty to the colonies. The second, on the other hand, saw the possible solution in the "systematic colonization". In this case, it was a matter of exporting not only goods and capital to the colonies, but also women and men of any social class.

Even in France, along with England, the undisputed protagonist of this phase of European history, the idea of social imperialism, was affirmed as a tool for a new and more complex colonial policy which was to act as a "safety valve for the industrial steam engine"27. They have held that the colonial settlements could absorb the demographic increase and that, under control, they would have been able to supply the raw materials and become active markets in all respects. As a result, the new markets could have partially solved the social issue by stimulating domestic production so as to reduce unemployment. Finally, the concerned regions, especially those on the border of the empire, could have welcomed the agitators and discontents who threatened to tear the social fabric apart and, therefore, the internal stability fictitiously achieved. Nevertheless it would be enough to re-read Emile Zola's Germinal (1885) - which will become the political manifesto of the future working class - to realize the state of tension that crossed Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century.

In this context, for the recently unified Italy, finding a space within the process of partitioning the African continent meant promoting internal unity and, at the same time, trying to establish itself as an international power. According to the national rhetoric, the peninsula was destined to recreate the ancient Roman Empire in North Africa and the Mediterranean. With the arrival of Francesco Crispi in the government, the imperialist ideas had taken a clearer form. In fact, his creed was based on economic and demographic reasons: "Italy had to have its colonies, the past required it and the future made it necessary"28. This is one of the key points. It was necessary, like the great colonial powers, to utilize emigration.

As we have seen, there was the regulatory framework and the bureaucratic organization, but a system of assistance and protection was completely missing. This will recur, in different forms, even in post-World War II emigration, which in numerical terms equalled the flow at this phase. Probably for this reason too, the Italian emigration will be recognized for its worldwide collaborative network. If on the one hand - and still today - the work of the Church played a role of the highest order with its organization that grew extensively along with the Italian emigration to the world; its principles, together with the orientations of the nineteenth-century European liberalism, gave a great impulse to the development of the Mutual Aid Societies. After all, if the management of poverty has its roots in ancient times and develops in the modern era, the harbingers of its management, as we know it today, arise, both from a theoretical and practical point of view, right in the middle of the nineteenth century.

The social state would arrive approximately one century later, while concurrently the systems of production change, and the nineteenth century states struggle to find adequate solutions to the new poverty.

How do they organize themselves? Within which regulatory framework? Which links extend between the opposite shores of the Atlantic, between the communities in the communities of Cilento and that of Olevano sul Tusciano - the center of Sara Carbone’s extraordinary work, and between those transplanted in the United States?

Again, what was the role of women in this story that we could define as being epic, without falling into nationalistic paternalism.

One of the many merits of the author is the emphasis on more aspects, mostly masculine, dismantling one of the assorted stereotypes that have defined the migration phenomenon, even within the scope of historiography. It was not this way, and especially for neither the Campania region nor the Cilento communities.

However, as previously seen, Campania was the only southern region to immediately contribute to this diaspora, and it did so also by recording a female participation well above the national average. In fact, in the Statistical Yearbook of the Italian Emigration from 1876 to 1925 is stressed that departures of women from Campania are equivalent to those of men and well above the national average, including the northern regions from which there was a more consistent rate of departure at the time. That was the last book published by the then General Emigration Commissioner, which we could define, from the formal point of view - the substantive one we have already mentioned previously -, the turning point in fascism’s migration policies.

How much did the relationship with a second overseas Olevano affect the collective imagination of a small Cilento community? Wilmington, Delaware, became the favourite destination of this route between Cilento and the United States: for what reason? Why does half a village leave for an unknown place and above all how do they do it? When the people from Olevano return home, how are they perceived? As members of that community who left long ago, or as the “the uncles from America” who can no longer find their bearings in the changed context of a town that no longer exists? Moreover, Delaware is not Cilento and, at the same time, even Italy of the sixties is changing, at least in its cities compared to that province that struggles to savour the splendor of the economic miracle.

These are some of the questions that the attentive reader will be able to find answers to in the pages of Sara Carbone’s research. What at a first sight looks like a micro-history, a local history, is actually something much larger. The following pages are a valuable contribution to take forward-facing steps and shed light on a global phenomenon, namely Italian migration. From this point of view the author makes an effort perfectly in line with the Global History approach. The originality of such an approach, which is becoming an increasingly privileged interpretative key for historical reconstructions, and more generally for interpreting social phenomena and experiences, lies in the fact that broad transactional themes, as in this case, are considered to be real research topics, read in their moving character - Olevano / United States - with the historian who moves following the objects of their study. On the other hand, migration is a continuum in the history of the historical processes, which justifies its use as a global reading key.

Despite the fact that the great summaries on the history of Europe do not dwell and do not at all deepen the migratory events that are relegated to the background, the history of human mobility is in recent years, assuming an increasing role in the historiographical debate.

For these reasons, along with considering the quality of the writing and the historiographical references, this book deserves all the attention in the case which, we are sure, will go far beyond the local history, to the extent that it will be used as a further piece of the rich and variegated mosaic of the history of Italian migration. A mosaic made up of many small segments, such as Olevano sul Tusciano which, as in this case, reconnecting them in the perishing of a global history, are able to give centrality and priority to the phenomenon that, most of all has marked - and will mark - the future of humanity: migration.

e

INTRODUCTION



It was a chance encounter. Perhaps a year ago, I was browsing among the shelves of the history section in a book shop, when I laid my hands on a very bulky book entitled Verso l'America [Towards America], and edited by Salvatore Lupo. Its backcover reads as follows:

America did welcome them, but for a long time left them on the bottom steps of a social and ethnic ladder. It was ready to introduce them into a world of wealth and freedom, but in return it expected them to conform their strange customs to the Anglo-Saxon norm, and when they did not succeed in complying, they were considered to be unredeemable barbarians. The first generation of immigrants lived secluded; the second gave up its identity in the attempt to become Americanized. A minority would show off an ethnic pride not always appropriate. Only later would someone claim the force of the hybrid “Italian American”, that “esperienza terza” [literally experience third] which was to enrich the symbolical dialectics between the cultures of the peoples from the North and those from the South.

It was love at first sight. For many reasons.

The words on that backcover which most impressed me were epitomized by the phrase esperienza terza.

For many generations the inhabitants of Olevano sul Tusciano, a small village in the province of Salerno, have replaced the expression “Do not think I am rich”, with the expression “Do not think I have come back from Wilmington”. During the years of the Great Migration, about half the inhabitants of Olevano left their village to emigrate to the United States, and chose Wilmington, a rich town in Delaware, as their favourite destination. Not far from New York, but above all a short way from Philadelphia, at the beginning of the 20th century Wilmington used to recruit low cost Italian labour: its Little Italy hosted unskilled labourers, mostly from Olevano, who cherished yearnings of redemption. Many of them succeeded. Thus the phrase fare la 'Merica which meant “to have got rich” after a more or less long experience as emigrant, was replaced by the inhabitants of Olevano with the expression “to come back from Wilmington”, which meant “to come back overloaded with money”.