The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American PeopleRoss, Edward Alsworth
History
The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People
Ross, Edward Alsworth
Immigrants -- United States; Noncitizens -- United States; United States -- Emigration and immigration
Although the South Italians are numerous in the manufacture of boots
and shoes, cigars, glass, woolen goods, and clothing, some employers
refuse the males for "inside work" because they have the reputation
of being turbulent. Their noteworthy absence from the rolling-mills
is attributed to the fact that they lack the nervous stability
needed for seizing a white-hot piece of iron with a pair of tongs.
The phlegmatic Slav stands up to such work.
In the trades, the Italians crop up numerously as bakers,
barbers, cobblers, confectioners, tailors, street musicians,
scissors-grinders and marble-cutters. A great number become
hucksters and peddlers of such characteristic wares as fruits
and plaster casts. It is the Italian from the North, especially
the Genoese, who brings native commercial capacity and becomes a
wholesale or commission merchant in fruits and vegetables, while the
Neapolitan is still fussing with his banana-stand. Thanks to their
race genius, the Italian musicians and teachers of music among us
bid fair to break the musical monopoly of the German-Americans.
In one province of southern Italy not a plow exists, and the women
wield the hand implements beside the men. It is not strange that
immigrants with such experience do well here in truck-farming and
market-gardening. Those who engage in real agriculture settle
chiefly in colonies, for the voluble, gregarious Italians cannot
endure the chill loneliness of the American homestead. They follow
their bent for intensive farming, and would hardly know how to
handle more than fifteen or twenty acres. Few of them are up to
ordinary extensive farming. As one observer says, "They haven't the
head for it."
Although Italians are making a living on the cut-over pine-lands
of northern Wisconsin, the rocky hills of New England, the sandy
barrens of New Jersey, and the muck soil of western New York,
their love of sunshine is not dead. The cane, cotton, and tobacco
fields of the South attract them. More than half of the Italians
in Louisiana are on the plantations. Half of the sixty thousand
in California are in vineyard and orchard. The famed Italian-Swiss
colony at Asti employs a thousand men to help it make wine under a
_cielo sereno_ like that of Italy. Many a fisherman who has cast his
net in the Gulf of Genoa now strains the waters of San Francisco Bay.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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