Italian Americans – Flashcards

During 1848, Italy was separated into many states. Cavour worked to unify the North then helped Giuseppe Garibaldi unify the South staring with Sicily. Garibaldi eventually stepped aside and handed over all of Southern Italy to Victor Emmanuel II (King of Sardinia) rule all of the now unified Italy.
Italian Unification was the political and social movement that annexed different states of the Italian peninsula into the single state of Italy in the 19th century.
By 1870, all Italy unified—1st time since Roman days, Italy industrialized and developed economically by the early 1900s, Came out of this as a very powerful country

More Italians have migrated to the United States than any other Europeans. Poverty, overpopulation, and natural disaster all spurred Italian emigration. Beginning in the 1870s, Italian birthrates rose and death rates fell. Population pressure became severe, especially in Il Mezzogiorno, the southern and poorest provinces of Italy. As late as 1900, the illiteracy rate in southern Italy was 70 percent, ten times the rate in England, France, or Germany. The Italian government was dominated by northerners, and southerners were hurt by high taxes and high protective tariffs on northern industrial goods. Southerners also suffered from a scarcity of cultivatable land, soil erosion and deforestation, and a lack of coal and iron ore needed by industry.
Unlike the Irish Catholics, southern Italians suffered from exploitation by people of the same nationality and religion. Rather than leading to group solidarity, this situation led to a reliance on family, kin, and village ties. Life in the South revolved around la famiglia (the family) and l'ordine della famiglia (the rules of family behavior and responsibility).
Natural disasters rocked southern Italy during the early 20th century. Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried a town near Naples. Then Mount Etna erupted. Then in 1908 an earthquake and tidal wave swept through the Strait of Messina between Sicily and the Italian mainland, killing more than 100,000 people in the city of Messina alone.
The earliest Italian immigrants to the United States were northern Italians, who became prominent as fruit merchants in New York and wine growers in California. Later, more and more migrants came from the south and the communities and institutions they formed reflected the region's fragmentation.

The greatest surge of immigration, 1880-1914, brought 4 million Italians to cities in the Northeast. About eighty percent of these were from the Mezzogiorno, or southern Italy, including Sicily; the region that once comprised the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. This region was chronically poor, especially after Italian unification, when the Savoy emptied the treasury of the southern Kingdom and moved the industries from the Naples region to the northwest of the country. The Italian government encouraged emigration of underskilled peasants, to reduce the "Sicilian problem".

see Northern v. Southern Italy

Peasants
Many Southern Italians were considered to be peasants…see Northern v. Southern Italy

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Issues of masculinity in Italian men who migrated during the period 1880-1930. At issue is the conflict that resulted when the rural Sicilian conception of masculinity, based on a system of honor, encountered a more modern and less hierarchical value system. The American conception of masculinity and manliness was based exclusively on the values of market capitalism not the familial and social relations that were the basis of honor in Italy.

A prolonged feud, often between two families, characterized by retaliatory acts of revenge; any act motivated by vengeance

The traditional Italian family was “father-headed, but mother-centered.” In public, the father was the uncontested authority figure and wives were expected to defer to their husbands. At home, however, females exercised considerable authority as wives and mothers, and played central roles in sustaining familial networks. Still, male children occupied a favored position of superiority over females, and strong family mores governed female behavior. Women’s activities were largely confined to the home, and strict rules limited their public behavior, including access to education and outside employment. Formal rituals of courting, chaperonage, and arranged marriages strictly governed relations between the sexes. Above all, protection of female chastity was critical to maintaining family honor.

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Chastity
Traditional Italian notions of proper behavior, stressing collective responsibilities toward the family, strict chastity and domestic roles for females, rigid chaperonage and courting codes, and male dominance, clashed with the more individualist, consumer-driven American values.

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Many Italian immigrants are superstitious and many were convinced, for example, of the existence of the evil eye ( malocchio or jettatura ), and believed that wearing certain symbols, the most potent of which were associated with horns or garlic amulets, provided protection from its power.

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In the United States, Italians settled in cities and often dominated specific neighborhoods, called “Little Italies”, where they could interact with one another, establish a familiar cultural presence, and find favorite foods. Most arrived with little cash or education; since most had been peasant farmers in Italy, they lacked craft skills and, therefore, generally performed manual labor. With a strong interest in food, they became fruit peddlers and gardeners, and opened neighborhood groceries and restaurants that catered to fellow Italians.

Many Italian immigrants never planned to stay in the United States permanently. The proportion returning to Italy varied between 11 percent and 73 percent. Unlike most earlier immigrants to America, they did not want to farm, which implied a permanence that did not figure in their plans. Instead, they headed for cities, where labor was needed and wages were relatively high. Expecting their stay in America to be brief, Italian immigrants lived as inexpensively as possible under conditions that native-born families considered intolerable.
Historians use the phrase “birds of passage” to describe immigrants who never intended to make the United States their permanent home. Unable to earn a livelihood in their home countries, they were migratory laborers. Most were young men in their teens and twenties, who planned to work, save money, and return home. They left behind their parents, young wives, and children, indications that their absence would not be long. Before 1900 an estimated 78 percent of Italian immigrants were men.
There were large colonies of Itallian immigrants in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore and Detroit. From 1900 to 1910 over 2,100,00 arrived. Of these, around 40 per cent eventually returned to Italy.

Civic and social life flourished in Italian-American neighborhoods, with many people belonging to hometown societies. Most identified with their old villages or provinces; few thought in terms of the newly formed nation of Italy. The language they spoke was not the official Italian, developed from the Tuscan dialect, but regional dialects, or in the case of Sicilians, the Sicilian language, making it hard for an immigrant to understand one from another region; few could read or write either Italian or English. Chain migration brought friends and relatives from a particular town to the same destination as previous migrants; this meant that new arrivals immediately had a social network which helped in finding jobs and living space, as well as the adjustment to America. Many Italians arrived in the United States hoping to earn enough money to return home and buy land. Among immigrant groups to America, Italians had the highest rate of returning to the old country.

Padrones were labor agents who greeted immigrants and often exploited them.
Italian immigrants were particularly likely to take heavy construction jobs. About half of all late 19th century Italian immigrants were manual laborers, compared to a third of their Irish and a seventh of their German counterparts. Contracted out by a professional labor broker known as a padrone, Italians dug tunnels, laid railroad tracks, constructed bridges and roads, and erected the first skyscrapers.

Willing to work long hours on low wages, the Italians now began to rival the Irish for much of the unskilled work available in industrial areas. This sometimes led to hostilities breaking out between the two groups of workers. The Italians were also recruited into the garment industry and by the outbreak of the First World War had replaced the Jews as the main group in the sweated trades.

The Italian immigrant’s children often left school before graduating to help their families earn money. They went to work at an early age to help raise money to send back to other members of their family and also to save so that they could go back sooner and have a good life in Italy.
Economically and socially, the family functioned as a collective enterprise, an “all-inclusive social world” in which the individual was subordinated to the larger entity. Parents expected children to assist them at an early age by providing gainful labor, and family values stressed respect for the elderly, obedience to parents, hard work, and deference to authority.

Nonprofit organizations designed to provide their members with financial and social benefits, often including medical aid, life insurance, funeral costs, and disaster relief.
Italian immigrants established hundreds of mutual aid societies, based on kinship and place of birth.

Criminal society that originated in Sicily, Italy, and is believed to control racketeering in the United States.
The Mafia (also known as "Cosa Nostra") is a criminal brotherhood that emerged in the mid 19th century Sicily. It is a loose association of criminal groups that share a common organizational structure and code of conduct. Each group, known as a "family", "association", "clan" or "cosca", claims sovereignty over a territory in which it operates its rackets – usually a town or village or a neighbourhood (borgata) of a larger city.
Offshoots of the Mafia emerged in the United States, during the late 19th century, following waves of Italian emigration.
The term "Mafia" is also employed to name Mafia-type organizations operating under a similar structure, whether Sicilian or not.

The period from 1920 to 1933 when the sale of alcoholic beverages was prohibited in the United States by a constitutional amendment.

In the 1890-1920 period—before Prohibition—Italian neighborhoods were often stereotyped as being “violent” and “controlled by the Mafia”. In 1891, eleven Italian immigrants in New Orleans were lynched due to their supposed Mafia role in murdering the police chief David Hennessy. This was the largest mass lynching in US history. In the 1920s, many Americans used the Sacco and Vanzetti episode, in which two Italian anarchists were sentenced to death for murder, to denounce Italian support for anarchism and crime.

After the First World War Italians developed a reputation for becoming criminals. This was mainly due to high-profile criminals such as Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Joe Masseria, Albert Anastasia, Salvadore Marazano, Vito Genovese and Frank Costello. However, a study in Massachusetts revealed that the Italian-born, who comprised 8.0 per cent of the population of the state, made up only 4.2 per cent of those confined in penal institutions. The US Department of Justice also estimates that less than .0025 percent of Italian Americans have anything to do with organized crime.

Also called yellow journalism, a term used to describe the sensationalist newspaper writings of the time of the Spanish American war. They were written on cheap yellow paper. The most famous yellow journalist was William Randolph Hearst. Yellow journalism was considered tainted journalism – omissions and half-truths.

A chicago booze distributor, who began six years of gang warfare that netted him millions of dollars, he was branded “Public Enemy Number One.” Although he could not be convicted of the cold-blooded massacre on St. Valentines day in 1929 he served most of an eleven year sentence for income-tax evasion before being released as a syphilitic wreck.
Top mobster in Chicago during the 1920s, worth $100 million (?), and responsible for hundreds of murders (includes St. Valentine’s Day massacre). Went to jail for tax evasion (Alcatraz). Brought down by the famous FBI agent, Elliot Ness.

Someone who performs manual labor, often in a manufacturing job, and who earns an hourly wage.
Factory worker or day laborer (working class). Willing to work long hours on low wages, the Italians now began to rival the Irish for much of the unskilled work available in industrial areas. This sometimes led to hostilities breaking out between the two groups of workers.