Monument to the Immigrant

Elevator to Little Palermo

Recently, the United States celebrated its 250^th birthday. I thought it a good time for a tablespoon of introspection.  Not a self-examination of myself, mind you.  Enough of me already seems to leak into what I write.  Rather, I found myself wondering how much America owes to its Italian heritage.  The thought struck me when I saw a picture of Dean Martin placarded inside an elevator, of all places, during a getaway to the “Big Easy” — New Orleans.  

Given our frequent travels, it would seem we have developed a serious inability to commit to a single zip code.  Maybe so. But Dean got me thinking.  Suppose I could press a button beside his picture and when the elevator doors next opened, find myself transported into some event significant to Italian-American involvement during our nascent nation-building years.  Where would I land?  As it happened, I found just the sort of place I was looking for: a museum devoted to devoted to the positive and negative aspects of Italian immigration to this area.  I suspected this particular elevator ride was going to have some very dark floors.

The story of these hyphenated Italian nation-builders, however, begins well before the birth of the United States, with familiar Italian-born Christopher Columbus and his 1492 voyage that opened the Americas to European exploration.  Another stop on another floor might follow Giovanni da Verrazzano, the first to sail into NY Harbor, and on up the ladder of time to Florentine explorer and

Filippo Mazzei

navigator Amerigo Vespucci, whose multiple voyages to the New World eventually gave the Americas their name.  Then there is Filippo Mazzei, a multitalented Tuscan-born physician, philosopher, diplomat, winemaker, merchant, and author.  In London, Mazzei met Benjamin Franklin and shared his idea for importing Tuscan products to the New World.  After arriving in Virginia, he visited Thomas Jefferson at his estate, and the two became good friends.

In 1774, Mazzei published a pamphlet containing the phrase, "All men are by nature equally free and independent."^[5]  His writings on liberty were directly incorporated into the Declaration of Independence in the memorable words, “All men are created equal.”  Clearly, the United States is undeniably shaped by Italian explorers, thinkers, craftsmen, and immigrants at virtually every stage of its development. 

Clearly, my elevator might stop on several other important floors adding further testaments to the list, but a complete conjugation of every Italian contribution, would require an elevator shaft outstretching well beyond the high-wire performances of the Italian steelworkers who later built New York City’s skyscrapers.  To portray the whole story would mean recounting the struggles, successes, and lasting impact of every Italian emigrant who arrived during the Great Immigration between 1890 to 1920 when four million, mostly southern Italians, arrived on Ellis Island alone.  Some accounts are supported by hard facts.  Others survive as little more than glimpses.  And one of the most interesting glimpses, at least to me, led south.

While New York’s Ellis Island served as an enormous national gateway for European immigration, I was surprised to discover that New Orleans, though nowhere near as large an operation as Ellis Island, was another major arrival hub.  New Orleans functioned as an important port of arrival, especially for Sicilian immigration into the South.  Its Italian population was not simply a portion of northeastern Ellis Island émigrés who migrated south after landing in New York.  

More than 80% of Italian immigrants arriving in New Orleans were Sicilian.  I found this interesting particularly after spending time in Sicily and writing at length about our time there.  Sicilian migration to Louisiana was already substantial by the 1870s and 1880s, largely due to a well-established Palermo-to-New Orleans shipping route connected to their citrus and sugar trade.  Passenger manifests document ships sailing directly from Palermo and arriving in New Orleans throughout the period.

The journey was hardly a cruise.  But for thousands of Sicilians, it was a passage toward a life they hoped would be better than the one they were leaving behind.  Garibaldi had foretold a better life following Italy’s unification, but his idealistic vision of political participation, civil rights, and economic fairness collided quickly with political reality.  Northern Italy enjoyed the fruits of modern industrialization while southern Italy and Sicily remained mired in poverty, much of it under absentee landowners.  The peasant was still, in many respects, essentially a serf.  Emigration offered an escape from subsistence living and, perhaps more importantly, the possibility of owning a farm, a shop, or some other small piece of the future. 

New Arrivals

    Many of the newly arrived dreamers concentrated in the Lower French Quarter, better known today for Mardi Gras along Bourbon Street than for the Sicilian immigrants who once crowded its streets.  Soon the shiploads after shiploads of immigrants saw the concentration of Italians in New Orleans climb to the highest in the state.  By 1900, New Orleans had the largest Italian community in the American South, with roughly 20,000 people of Italian background.  The city acquired a nickname that tells you something about the community that had taken root there: Little Palermo.

By the end of the immigration wave stretching from the late 1880s to 1920, more than four million Italians had arrived in America.  Many arriving in New Orleans did not stay.  Some moved North; others scattered throughout Louisiana and the South in search of better paying jobs.  Thousands went to work on sugar and strawberry plantations, other type farms, and other communities, while others remained in New Orleans to gradually grow to become merchants, fruit sellers, grocers, and restaurateurs.  In other words, they began doing what immigrants do: work, adapt, open businesses, raise families, and quietly become part of the place that initially regarded them as outsiders.

But there was a darker side to the welcome.  Louisiana planters looked to Sicily for a solution to their labor needs following emancipation.  With the end of slavery, immigration, in their eyes, offered a replacement for the loss of the black slave population and the possibility of restoring something resembling the antebellum plantation system they previously enjoyed.  By September 1881, three steamships a month were running between New Orleans and Sicily, at a cost of forty dollars per person.  For those without forty dollars, there was another arrangement.

The padrone system, sponsored by plantation owners and labor contractors, employed  recruiters to bring Italians to southern Louisiana.  It was distressingly similar to the centuries-old system many of these immigrants had hoped to escape.  Corrupt, exploitative, and often little more than indentured servitude, it could enslave entire families almost as soon as they arrived.

Others were ensnarled in the human trafficking scheme even before they departed.  Steamship advertisements helped sell the dream.  Brochures promised fine living quarters, the opportunity to purchase land, and a climate that sounded suspiciously Goldilocks-like: not too hot, not too cold, just right for working the fields.  They went so far as to advance funds to those willing to travel to America but lacked the necessary capital.  After arriving they could work off their passage fee - just sign here.  Even though the Foran Act of 1885 prohibited the system, it continued through much of the golden age of Italian immigration.

Life Magazine, 1911 Anti-Italian
Cartoon

        Some of the arrivals found jobs on the city docks unloading citrus and Mississippi River cargo.  Others helped build levees and railroads or worked the farms and plantations.  The area grew denser with Italian immigrants.  The need to work often eliminated any chance for their children’s education who grew to join their fathers in the fields.  Some resorted to thievery to survive, some to prostitution.

As with many immigration tsunamis, the people already there began to get nervous and grew to view the new arrivals as underclass “peasantry.”  Gradually, economic competition, overcrowding, cultural suspicion, and fear began to ferment into something uglier.  There were accusations that immigrants were taking jobs from Americans, that money sent back to Italy was hurting local businesses, that Italians carried diseases such as yellow fever and cholera, and that they were connected to violence and criminal organizations.  The result was a growing political, cultural, and ethnic hostility toward people of Italian ancestry known as Italophobia.  The native population had, conveniently, managed to forget that their own ancestors had once been newcomers trying to build a new life.  

On the evening of October 15, 1890, New Orleans Irish Police Chief, a thirty-four-year-old David Hennessy was assassinated.^[4]  Hennessy’s killers were widely believed to be Italian, which was hardly surprising in a city already simmering with anti-Italian prejudice.  Mayor Joseph A. Shakspeare did little to cool things down.  He declared Hennessy the “victim of Sicilian vengeance” and called upon citizens to “teach these people a lesson they will not forget.” 

American newspapers largely anti-Italian in their coverage, helped to cement the widespread belief that Italian organized crime had been responsible for the killing. Newspaper stories portrayed them as dangerous and a criminal menace.  The Mafia, a criminal organization associated in the public imagination with theft, terror, and murder, became the convenient explanation.

Mass arrests of Italians for the murder followed as anti-Italian sentiment reached a fever pitch fueled by the rhetoric being voiced.  Largely anti-Italian American newspaper accounts added to the widespread belief that Italian-American organized crime was responsible for the killing of the police chief.  The perpetrators were presumed to have been involved with the Mafia and therefore deserving of their fate.  The murder had become something larger than a murder investigation.  And the fuse had been lit.

The Old New Orleans Parish Prison

     Chief Hennessy had a colorful and strong-arm past that provided any number of motives and enemies, other than the Mafia, none of which the police seemed particularly interested in investigating.  It was, in effect, a “round up the usual suspects” operation without regard to the much larger struggle beneath the surface.  In the shocking aftermath that followed, the city passed an ordinance giving control of New Orleans dock work to the newly formed Louisiana Construction and Improvement Corporation, headed by several city leaders entangled with Hennessy.  Had his death been convenient, even arranged, with Italians the convenient scapegoat?  Things certainly changed.  Italian waterfront merchants and workers, who had been making remarkable economic progress, were initially dominated and then eliminated as competitors.

The Italian community had become an easy target for political rivalry, commercial competition, and the racial politics of the era.  Within 24 hours of Hennessy’s death, 45 Italians had been arrested.   By some accounts, as many as 250 Italians were rounded up.  Most were eventually released for lack of evidence.   For several days, Italians were afraid to leave their homes. but eventually the furor died down and they returned to work.  Nineteen Italians, thought involved with the assassination, were arrested and held in the Parish Prison prior to the trial that followed.

Nine went to trial beginning February 16, 1891.  There was only one problem.  The evidence was weak, contradictory, or based on hearsay.  Six men were acquitted and three trials ended in mistrials.  That should have been the end of it.  It wasn't.  The six acquitted men were not released.  Instead, they were returned to prison pending another charge of “lying in wait” with intent to commit murder.^[8]  Prosecutors admitted they would not pursue the additional charges, but the men remained behind bars.  This decision would prove fatal for many of them.  The legal system had reached a peculiar destination where an acquittal apparently did not necessarily include the benefit of being released.

The New Orleans Henry Clay Statue
(Note the Ad for the OPera Il Trovatore by
Italian Giuseppe Verdi)

      The court’s decision infuriated local residents.  The city, already awash in anti-Italian sentiment fueled the belief that Italian organized crime had somehow corrupted the jury.  How much of this was true will never be known but the Italian community was an easy target to blame for political reasons, struggles for commercial dominance, white supremacy issues.

Italian-American voters were also known to favor the city’s political machine over that of the mayor, whose own role in inciting the violence that followed may well have been tied to an attempt to
use government power against political opponents and the strong Italian voting bloc.^[2]  Mayor Joseph A. Shakspeare’s role in inciting what followed may well have gone too far when he complaining that the city had become attractive to "the worst classes of Europe.  Also fueling a desire for vengeance was the misinformation and newspapers articles stating that the jury had been bribed by organized crime thought under Italian control.  Whatever the mixture of motives, the result was combustible.

On the morning of 14 March 1891, one day after the court verdicts, an ad appeared in local newspapers prepared by a group of about 150 people calling themselves the “Committee of Safety” calling a mass meeting at the City’s statue of Henry Clay near the prison.  Citizens were told to "come prepared for action."^[7]  They were.

A mob estimated four to five thousand strong gathered at the statue and included some of the city's most prominent citizens.^[2]  Among them, Attorney William S. Parkerson exhorted the crowd to "set aside the verdict of that infamous jury, every one of whom is a perjurer and a scoundrel."  When the speech ended, the emboldened crowd marched to the prison.  What happened next was not justice

Mob Storms Parish Prison

    Provoked by speakers and city leaders, the enormous mob forced open the prison doors where the men were being held.  A relatively small, disciplined vigilante “execution squad” within the mob carried out what became the largest known mass lynching in Louisiana history.  Eleven of the nineteen Italian men indicted in the Hennessy case were lynched or shot.  None had been convicted.  Some never even tried.  Six reportedly suffered more than one hundred gunshot wounds, many to the head.  They were killed, as one account put it,  "on proof” of being 'dagoes' (Italians). ^[7]  Their only crime was that they were Italian.

The incident reverberated far beyond New Orleans.  The New York Times published a lengthy statement charging city politicians with responsibility for the lynching of the Italians.   The Italian consul Pasquale Corte in New Orleans protested the killings and was himself threatened at gunpoint.  He eventually left the city in May 1891 at his government's direction.  Italy took a further step and recalled its ambassador from Washington sparking rumors of war.  The United States recalled its legation from Rome.  The Italian government demanded that the mob leaders be prosecuted and reparations paid.  When the United States declined to prosecute those responsible, a grand jury was convened to decide whether to bring criminal charges against individuals involved with the lynching. 

The grand jury’s conclusions were, to put it mildly, unsatisfying.  The judge presiding over the grand jury was a longtime friend of several lynch-mob participants.  The report concluded that members of the Hennessy jury had been bribed to acquit the Italians yet offered no proof.  No criminal charges followed.  It also claimed it could not identify the participants in the lynching.  No indictments followed that, either.  Increased anti-Italian sentiment led to calls for immigration restrictions, with the word “Mafia” entering the American lexicon amid claims that had never been substantiated.  Increased anti-Italian sentiment led to calls for restrictions on immigration.

Then, in April 1892, approximately one year following the lynchings, the United States paid $2,211.90 in compensation to each family of the eleven victims.^[10]  Only a few months later, in July 1892, President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed “Columbus Day” as a one-time national celebration marking the 400th anniversary of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World.  At least in part, it was seen as a symbolic gesture intended to ease tensions with Italian-Americans and the Italian government without directly confronting the political forces that had allowed the violence to go unpunished. ^[9].  

History has a strange sense of timing.  We tend to perceive the past steeped in the paradigms of our time.  Conjecture is a convivial pastime but putting ourselves in another person’s shoes is much harder.  Imagine being one of those Italians stepping off a ship in New Orleans.  You have arrived carrying hopes and aspirations shaped by what you were escaping, what you had been promised, and what you imagined the New World might be.  No Statue of Liberty greeted these travelers to the promising new world only 100 plus degree heat, hard labor, and with each boatload the growing antipathy of indigenous nativism.  And there was, increasingly, the hostility of people who had decided that you did not quite belong.  For decades after the events of 1891, New Orleans children taunted Italian-Americans with the question: "Who killa da chief?"^[4]  The words became a cruel echo of a terrible event.  And echoes, like memories, have a curious half-life. They can fade for generations without ever quite disappearing.

While the story remains more widely known in Italy, this incident has largely disappeared from American memory.  I certainly knew nothing about it.  Not until I pressed a few elevator buttons and found myself emerging into a different world.  There, on a wall, tucked low among photographs, memorabilia, and artifacts, I found a framed official document.  The sort of document that can make history suddenly feel less like history and more like something that happened to actual people. 

First, it was a proclamation from President Harrison.  And then, much farther along the elevator shaft of time, came this other document.  One hundred twenty-eight years later, on 12 April 2019, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell issued a Certificate of Recognition at the American Italian Cultural Center in New Orleans, formally apologizing for the 1891 lynching of eleven Italian-American men of the city.  It was of such note that it was attended by the Italian Ambassador to the U.S. and the Italian Consul General in Houston, TX.

This framed certificate acknowledged what had happened and, importantly, acknowledged the complicity of political leadership, the anti-Italian climate in which the crimes occurred, and the fact that no one had ever been indicted or prosecuted for perpetrating them.  It offered the city’s deepest apologies to the victims’ descendants and to New Orleans’ Italian-American community.^[6]

And then it did something else.  It recognized the numerous contributions of Italian-Americans to the cultural and economic life of New Orleans and the nation.  The final sentiment looked forward as much as backward: recognition of the anti-immigrant sentiment of the past, coupled with the hope that New Orleans would remain welcoming to immigrant groups in the future.

Sometimes it takes centuries for justice to rear its head.  Sometimes an apology arrives long after everyone who needed to hear it is gone.  When in the colors of forgiveness, there are no red eyes.  And sometimes recognition of achievement comes only after the people who did the building have disappeared from the scaffolding.

    I began this little journey wondering how much America owes to Italy.  The answer, I suspected, would be impossible to gauge especially in New Orleans, of all places.  But I learned that it began with explorers whose names became geography. In the thinkers whose words found their way into the language of American liberty.  In the immigrants who crossed an ocean seeking asylum because staying home had become untenable.  It is in the dockworkers, farmers, grocers, fruit sellers, restaurateurs, laborers, craftsmen, and steelworkers who helped build a country that did not always welcome them while they were building it.  Perhaps that is the oddest thing about the American story.  We are forever constructing the country and then forgetting who carried the hod full of bricks. 

     Our adventure began with a Dean Martin photograph in an elevator.  It ended with eleven men, a city, an apology, and a much longer view of what it means to become American.  Maybe that is the real lesson of pressing the buttons.  You never quite know what you will find on each floor you reach.  But if you are willing to get off the elevator when the doors open, history, that fervent chronicler of time, may still be standing there, waiting to introduce itself.

From That Rogue Tourist,
Paolo

Refs:

1.  1.  Sicilian Heritage, https://sicilianheritage.com/immigration/passenger-voyages-from-palermo-to-new-orleans-1903/

2.  2.  1891 New Orleans Lynchings, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1891_New_Orleans_lynchings?utm_source=chatgpt.com

3.  3.  David Hennessy, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hennessy#CITEREFGambino2000

4.  4.  The Crescent City Lynchings: The Murder of Chief Hennessy, the New Orleans "Mafia" Trials, and the Parish Prison Mob, Tom Smith, 2007.

5. 5.  Philip Mazzei, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Mazzei

6. 6.  Official Apology of the City of New Orleans, Italian Government, Ambasciata d’Italia a Washington

7. 7.  Vendetta: The True Story of the Largest Lynching in U.S. History (2^nd ed.). Toronto: Guernica, Gambino, Richard, (2000)

8.  8.  Italian Louisiana: History, Heritage & Tradition, Alan Gauthreaux, The History Press, 2014

9.  9.  Columbus Day, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Day

10 10. On This Day in Mob History, https://nationalcrimesyndicate.com