Contidini in The New World Paese

(This is the third of three articles on the major immigrant groups which came to Mechanicville: the Irish, Lithuanians and Poles, and the Italians)

Contadini in the New World Paese

By Dr. Paul Loatman
City Historian

 

An Italian resident of Saratoga Avenue responded somewhat blithely to the recent tornado that tore the roof off of her home by saying that she had survived worse things than this. She probably exaggerated only a little. The "old country" her family left behind when coming to Mechanicville early in this century was indifferent, if not hostile, to their survival. The picture-postcard villages (paesi) carved out of mountainsides in southern Italy that visitors see today mask the levels of misery and exploitation which were common throughout the region only a couple of generations ago. For these reasons, millions of peasants left their homes in the Mezzogiorno (as the region is called) and came to America, settling in communities large and small, not the least of which was Mechanicville. Here they found something denied them at home - an opportunity to raise and support a family, far from the ravages of disease, war, and social exploitation. In doing so, they would have to overcome many obstacles.

The overwhelming majority of Italians who migrated during the peak period, 18951925, came from small villages east of Naples like Bagnoli Irpina and Coreno, located in the provinces of Benevento and Caserta. There, the Mountainside villages are cut out of the rock, not to enjoy the scenic views of the valleys below, but to escape the ravages of malaria, a disease which killed more people in the Italian lowlands at the turn of the century than anywhere in Europe.

Another "plague" which devastated the area was one of human origin, that of the absentee landlords who exploited the peasants (contadini) in much the same manner that Southern barons exploited sharecroppers in post-Civil War America. An American writer who toured the Mezzogiorno just before the outbreak of World War I called the peasants "a passive element in the agricultural economy, determining little, the victims of much; socially despised, a residuum of the population." Ignazio Silone, a 20th century Italian novelist, captured the plight of the peasants in describing their world in blank verse:

At the head of everything is God...

After Him comes Lord Torlonia...

Then comes Prince Torlonia's armed guards

Then the Prince's armed guards' dogs

Then nothing at all. Then nothing at all.

Then nothing at all.

Then come the peasants. And that's all.

It is largely the "nothing at alls" who came by the millions, to America in general, and by the thousands, to Mechanicville in particular; and that's where we come into the story.

In studying local history, it is usually impossible to discover who the "first" settler was because migration patterns are often unplanned and undocumented. However, it is obvious who the first Italian immigrant to Mechanicville was because he came here much earlier and under entirely different circumstances than did the rest of his compatriots. Fr. Philip Izzo was assigned by his Augustinian provincial to what was later described as "the old time country mission" of St. Paul's in the late 1860's. How and why he arrived in America are unclear, but he was nothing like the later "immigrant priests" who would play a large role here after 1906. Ironically, in his decade-long service here, Fr. Izzo would minister to the needs of first and second-generation Irish immigrants, a role-reversal of what his fellow Augustinians would play thirty years later. Beyond his pastoral duties, Fr. Izzo left behind large grape arbors as his signature which grew behind the rectory until Assumption Hall was built in the 1960's.

The first significant number of immigrants from southern Italy arrived here in 1882 as part of track gang laying rail to hook up the Boston, Hoosick Tunnel, and Western Railway with the D & H yards in Rotterdam. These workers moved on with the progress of the rails, but by the middle of the next decade, Mechanicville had become a regular stopping point for many immigrants. Like their Irish predecessors, the Italians were engaged primarily in "pick and shovel" labor, building street railways, laying track, digging sewer and water systems, or rebuilding and relocating the Champlain Canal which ran down what is now Central Avenue until locks were built in the Hudson River in 1915. So many immigrants were in demand for the canal work that the Utica Supply Company opened offices here for a number of months, doing what its name implied, selling "Italian labor" the way other businesses sold commodities.

Unlike their Irish predecessors, the vast majority (80%) of Italian migrants were males between 18 and 45 years of age who worked here part of the year, returning to their families during the winter in Italy. These annual departures became so routine that local banks booked round-trip passages to Naples from Mechanicville, earning the ticket-purchasers the title, "birds of passage." The large number of brickyards in the area, as well as building construction and railway maintenance, all lent themselves to seasonal work patterns which permitted men to return home annually. By 1907, an Italian bank was opened on Saratoga Avenue, not only selling round-trip tickets, but also exchanging American dollars into lira to be sent back home as remittances to support the immigrants' families. More than half of the Italian males residing here in 1915 were boarding with families, a practice which allowed them to save much money despite being relegated to low-paying day-laborer jobs. Their living pattern also helps explain how the city's population could be much larger then than now (8700 to 5200) despite the fact that there were fewer houses here in 1915 than there are today. Immigrants created their own subculture in other ways. So many of them, for instance, were paesans from the same villages of Coreno and Ausonia that they formed a mutual aid society, the Fratellenza, to "uplift the civil, moral, and social status" of its members in 1899.

The presence of so many foreigners, primarily males speaking a different language and practicing a folk-religion strange to other Catholics as well as to Protestants, raised fears of the unknown in the minds of many natives. Keep in mind that anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant groups had been waging campaigns for over two decades in Congress to keep such people out of the United States and they were coming close to achieving their goal in the World War I era. The local Village Board expressed similar sentiments when it began hiring four extra constables to patrol the Italian North End each weekend. Whether or not they accomplished much is debatable because, as the local press reported, "none of the foreigners in the vicinity...would disclose anything of importance" to police when questioned about crime. Editor Farrington Mead may have been a little paranoid about the large influx of Italians and he often claimed the Black Hand controlled the immigrant community for more than ten years. In fact, when the group's supposed leader was arrested in 1919, Mead claimed that it would bring an end to the "murder, arson, dynamiting, shooting, and stabbing" which had been going on for so long. If all of these acts of mayhem actually took place, they never saw the light of day in Mead's columns on any regular basis. He may have been reflecting the increasingly anti-Italian bias so prevalent throughout the United States during the post-war Big Red Scare and tradition holds that Ku Kluxers were active in trying to intimidate local Italians at the time with night-time cross burnings. How out of touch Mead and many of his readers were with the Italian community is best revealed by the press reports of local industrial accidents, where the niceties of including peoples' names was dispensed with by noting merely that "Italian number 486 was killed yesterday at the paper mill," or that "a Neapolitan died at the B & M yards when struck by a freight train."

Other signs of mutual mistrust between the immigrants and the host society were evident. In 1908, the Italian residents of the North End formed their own unofficial wing of the volunteer fire department. To demonstrate the need for such a company on "the wrong side of the tracks" they set fire to a small abandoned building in the neighborhood when B & M freight trains cut off the North End from the rest of the community for nearly an hour. This was a common occurrence which persisted until the mid-1970s when the Saratoga Avenue overpass was finally opened. The Village Board was unmoved by the 1908 demonstration and, in response, it offered a $100 reward to the capture of "the culprits" who set the blaze. Four years later, however, the Board relented and permitted the Italian residents to maintain a hose cart and use hydrants "unofficially" without being recognized as a legal arm of the volunteers, This would not be the end of the story, however. The Board revoked its permission when confronted with the unanimous resignation of all volunteer firemen protesting the Italian hose cart. Despite repeated requests from the immigrant community and their reminders that more than once, the fire department laid hose across railroad tracks in the wake of on-coming freight trains, city fathers turned a deaf ear until it allowed the Neilson Company to relocate itself on "the wrong side of the tracks" in 1965.

The recognition that the Italian community was made up of more than "birds of passage" became evident in a number of ways. The Fratellenza began sponsoring the three-day feste to commemorate the Feast of the Assumption in 1904, an event which has taken place almost continuously since then despite the efforts by the Catholic Bishop of Albany to suppress all Italian street processions throughout the diocese in 1924. Local immigrant pastor Fr. Serafino Aurigemma hoist the Bishop on his own petard, however, when he insisted that for consistency's sake, May Processions should also be included in the ban. Somewhat abashed, the Bishop reluctantly applied the ban to all processions in order to avoid appearing biased against the Italians.

Coming from a different religious ethos and from a society where the institutional Church numbered itself among the absentee landlords who exploited the peasants, the cold shoulder the immigrants got in the "Irish church" inspired few of them to actively participate in parish life. The Augustinians responded, beginning in 1906, by assigning Italian priests here to say a native-language Mass each Sunday and to administer the sacraments to the immigrants. One of these missionaries, Fr. Daniel Scalabrella, hoped to change things by organizing an Italian ethnic parish with a church to be located on Saratoga Avenue. However, the priest became one of the many victims of the "Spanish influenza" in 1918. This local version of what was a world-wide pandemic claimed forty eight lives among local Catholics between mid-August and December of that year. Despite the fact that fourteen of the victims were Italians, paesans from Piana di Caiazzo donated a statue of St. Rocco to the church in thanksgiving for being spared from the deadly disease.

Father Scalabrefla's hopes were realized by Fr. Serafino Aurigemma, who agreed to head the local ethnic parish if the plans for a new church building were scrapped. The St. Paul's congregation, having abandoned its original William Street church in 1916 in favor of the newly-built enlarged building on North Main, then sold the empty church to the Italian parish for $7500 which began operations in 1919. Fr. Aurigemma, who had previously served in Mechanicville early in the century, remained Pastor or Pastor Emeritus until his death in 1972.

The rapid growth of the Italian community continued with the expansion of the local economy fueled by the railroad, paper-making, and textile industries. Many of the men who commuted annually between Naples and Mechanicville began to settle their families here, especially after the outbreak of World War I but prior to the passage of racist-inspired anti-immigrant legislation in the 1920's. More than 25% of local Italians settled here between 1915 and 1925 and it is likely that the war and its aftermath played a large role in this. The already fragile Italian economy was shattered by the war, and when a desperate government began drafting 12 year-olds in 1917, many families migrated to America. For some local families who were so motivated, the most vivid memories they have are of the numerous submarine warnings issued as they crossed the Atlantic while Germany adhered to a policy of "unrestricted submarine warfare" which included sinking passenger ships without warning.

In 1918, partly in response to the "Americanization fever" which swept the U. S. upon our entry into the Great War, the second American chapter of the Young Men's Italian Association was founded in Mechanicville, as was a Sons of Italy lodge. The Sons secured a permanent home in 1922 and the YMIA was absorbed by the older brotherhood. Women's auxiliaries, Senior and Junior Dante Clubs, were also founded and although the Sons group has disbanded, the Junior Dante Club is as active as it has ever been in its history. One important activity undertaken by the Sons of Italy was the sponsorship of house calls by an Italian doctor to local residents who could not afford medical care. The physician, Dr. Anthony Mauro ' later established his practice here and he was elected to the Mechanicville School Board in 1938. How the focus of the Italian community shifted after World War I from consisting largely of temporary migrants making annual passages to the "old country" to permanent settlers establishing roots here is demonstrated by the fact that the Sons of Italy in the 1920's began holding annual banquets honoring members of the ethnic group who had graduated from local colleges, universities, and professional schools. Frank Tate, a local lawyer and later City Judge, was instrumental in promoting the recognition of the achievements of the local immigrant community.

Another local ethnic institution which thrived for a time was the previously-noted "Banco della Vigna." Besides selling round-trip passages, making currency exchanges for remittances to Italy, and investing in some local immigrant businesses, the bank also housed the "Venetian Theater" upstairs at its building on William Street and Saratoga Avenue and became the center of many immigrant entertainment touring companies. Perhaps because of the decline in immigration following the passage of restrictive legislation and the souring of the local economy in the early 1920's, the bank suspended operations in 1924 and the State Banking, Commissioner liquidated its assets in 1929. Thereafter, the facility housed the Sons of Italy lodge until it was tom down in the 1970's to make way for the railroad overpass. Located nearby in a newer facility is the Peters Purcell Italian-American War Veterans Post, a local chapter of which has been active since the World War I[[ era, Along with the Fratellenza and the Junior Dante Society, this organization provides the greatest continuity of ethnic institutionalism in the community. The Assumption Italian National Parish was merged with St. Paul's in 1976, and although the Assumption building continues to be used for services, all vestiges of its ethnic identity were eradicated in a "modernization" program shortly after the merger.

The wane of "new immigrants" which washed across American shores was ended over seventy years ago by Congressional legislation based upon discriminatory ethnic prejudices and stereotypes long since discredited by Congress and the public alike. However, the lack of a strong industrial base to attract workers ceased to exist decades ago and a revival of any major immigration here is unlikely. In the interim, Mechanicville has evolved from being a self-contained milltown with a plentiful supply of jobs in brickmaking, textiles, railroads, paper-making and construction to become a bedroom community whose labor force migrates to jobs outside of town. That labor force also happens to be about one-half the size it was at the height of the immigration era. Yet, what continues to make Mechanicville a vibrant community is the dynamic interplay of the heritages of the its various ethnic groups whose history has been reviewed in these columns in recent months. Over the course of the century, immigrants came from all over Europe and New England, settled and worked in Mechanicville, intermarried, and exchanged folklore and recipes, all the while building a community with a unique sense of warmth and friendliness as well as a strong sense of place and community pride. In no small way, this ethnic-immigrant settlement has been a microcosm of the American 4 9 mixing pot" where diverse traditions, identities, and values peaceably coexist in harmony while complementing each other. This is as much of a "success story" on a human level as would be the revival of heavy industry on an economic level and it is that strong sense of community which will help us rebuild in the coming months.