Unto the Sons (37 page)

As for the workers who would first build Dr. Mattison’s Gothic town, and then be employed in the factories that would manufacture his products, he had already arranged for the arrival of a trainload of men from southern Italy. He had advanced the cost of their Atlantic crossing through a New York steamship company that docked at Naples, and he had been assisted in recruiting these workers by an Italian immigrant in Philadelphia who had earlier been a custodian and general factotum in Dr. Mattison’s pharmaceutical laboratory. The man’s name was Carmine Lobianco. He had arrived in Philadelphia from Naples in the mid-1870s, initially as a construction worker on a riverfront road-building project that extended past the Keasbey-Mattison property on Front Street. During Dr. Mattison’s early-morning strolls, which constituted his only exercise, he had often paused to watch the Italian workers, to listen to their strange language, and, although they tended to be short and more wiry than muscular, to admire how robustly they swung their sledgehammers and pickaxes, and hurled the heavy chains around the boulders and beams that were then hoisted high in the air by the cables of a steel crane powered by a team of sweating horses. Dr. Mattison observed this activity with keen interest while wondering about these dark-skinned exotic workmen, their origins, their motivations, their dreams of the future. He was a man of incorrigible curiosity—this characteristic traceable in part to his intrinsically laboratorial nature, his training as a dissector and an experimenter, and in part to his intemperate personal nosiness. He could not walk down a street without staring at people, analyzing their faces and body movements, even eavesdropping whenever possible. His propensity for prying would bring him severe pain during his final year in Philadelphia, 1882, when—while peeking into the windows of a competitive pharmaceutical factory one night in an attempt to learn why its employees were working so late—his large, two-hundred-twenty-pound body fell through a trap door on the sidewalk and his jaw was fractured in three places. His jaw would never be reset properly; and for the rest of his life he would have to avoid eating heavy meat, such as steak, and the lower
part of his face would display the scars of his misadventure—and this was why, at the age of thirty-one, Dr. Mattison began to grow a beard.

But he was an unscarred, beardless man of twenty-nine when he first caught sight of the Italian road gang during his morning constitutionals; and he was particularly drawn to a spirited, snub-nosed crane operator wearing a helmetlike hat and lashing the horses with a long whip, while calling persistently down to his dust-covered colleagues swinging their axes—evoking for Dr. Mattison the image of a Roman chariot driver engaged in a heated skirmish. As the doctor stepped forward on the dirt road to get a closer look, he felt an empathy with this vigorous man in the crane, this high-riding ruffian seated determinedly above the obscurity of pick-and-shovel enterprise; and at the first opportune moment, after the men had paused to share a bucket of water, the doctor approached the man and doffed his bowler.

“Good morning,” he said, “I am Dr. Mattison.”

“Good morning,” the crane operator replied, in surprisingly good English and with a lively smile. “I am Carmine Lobianco. And I am at your service.”

Dr. Mattison reached inside his jacket for the small prescription pad on which he never wrote prescriptions, scribbled down his name and address, tore off the page, and handed it to the crane operator. Two months later, when the road project was completed and the Italians were laid off, Lobianco appeared at Dr. Mattison’s office in search of a job. The only position available was that of a janitor. Lobianco accepted it with alacrity.

But in his eagerness to become more useful he was soon doing other work as well. He stood on the assembly line with the laboratory technicians filling the unending procession of bottles with Dr. Mattison’s various cures. Twice a week he delivered carefully packed boxloads of these by wagon to apothecaries throughout the city, as well as to the train depot for distribution around the nation and overseas. On weekends, after Dr. Mattison and Keasbey had decided to expand their business in the countryside and leave Philadelphia—soon after Dr. Mattison had fallen through the trap door—Lobianco drove their carriage as they scouted locations; and he was with them during their first visit to Ambler. When they began to make inquiries for architects to design the new factories and Gothic community, Lobianco was given permission to bring in his Italian workers from Philadelphia to begin unearthing stone from the quarry and digging ditches for water pipes; and when Dr. Mattison said that many more laborers were needed, in addition to some highly skilled stone artisans,
Lobianco announced that he knew just where to find them. The best stone artisans in the world, Lobianco said, came from the mountains of southern Italy, near his home village, where centuries of building and rebuilding villas and monasteries amid rock slides and earthquakes had provided such men with abundant opportunities to practice their craft. Lobianco also told Dr. Mattison that he had cousins and friends employed in and around the Naples seaport who could quickly recruit excellent artisans and hardworking laborers at reasonable rates if the doctor would advance payment for their passage. Lobianco did not tell Dr. Mattison that his cousins and friends were revolutionary Socialists and anarchists wanted by the Italian police. He assumed that what mattered most to Dr. Mattison was getting the job done quickly and well. And what mattered most to Lobianco was getting his share of the proceeds that the steamship company kicked back to recruiters, as well as the considerable profits to be earned from the incoming Italian workers for his efforts as their
padrone
.

Lobianco had long aspired to become a
padrone
, which was a somewhat exalted title given to those opportunistic Italian immigrants who functioned as ethnic middlemen during the first years of the mass movement of Italian workers into America. The
padrone
was enriched both by the American employer, to whom he delivered cheap labor, and by the laborers themselves, who surrendered to him a percentage of their salaries. In addition to providing jobs and shelter, the
padrone
in the beginning was the guiding influence, if not the outright enforcer, of all that the newcomer did during almost every hour of every day into the night. Lacking a family or friends in America, and not speaking the language, the average worker was totally dependent on his
padrone
. Since at least half of the workers were illiterate even in their own language, the
padrone
handled all their postal correspondence between Italy and America. Having never before been away from home, these workers were now involved for the first time with composing letters, including love letters, which were not only written but sometimes embellished by
padroni
with florid prose styles. Much of the exaggerated operatic longing expressed in some of these letters was more indicative of the
padrone
’s amorous fantasies, or his devil-may-care roguishness, than of what actually existed within the heart of the worker. In their helpless state of dependence on
padroni
many workers remained nonetheless aware that a single sentence of overstated affection in a letter to a village maiden might be interpreted by her—and also by her family, who were never remiss in learning the content of such letters—as a vow of eternal love, and an irrevocable proposal of marriage.

But marriage was far from the minds of most of these pioneer Italian workers, who could as yet ill afford the expense of bringing over a bride. And most of these workers themselves did not intend to stay forever in America. More than fifty percent of this first wave of workers were not settlers but sojourners, birds of passage, young bachelors who intended to toil hard for two or three years, and also sow some wild oats while sweating for American dollars in ditches and tunnels, and then to return to Italy—richer, wiser, and no longer dependent on the
padrone
.

But for those Italian laborers who did settle down in America, or who returned home temporarily and then came back with a bride (the groom in some instances ensnared by the effusions of his ghostwriter), the
padrone
continued to play a significant role; and by the early 1880s, when Lobianco began as a
padrone
under the aegis of Keasbey & Mattison Company, several
padroni
were already prominent and powerful in New York City and Philadelphia, in New Haven, Syracuse, Utica, and in other eastern industrial cities and towns where large numbers of Italians had been assembled. Thus long before there were Mafia “godfathers” coining money in America—this did not commence until the 1920s, when gangsters from Sicily and southern Italy began to thrive in the bootlegging trade inspired by Prohibition—there was a syndicate of
padroni
who were prospering legally, if at times exploitatively, as business agents and personal advisers to their usually less astute, less educated countrymen.

Perhaps the most eminent
padrone
in the United States at this time lived in New York City, which had the largest collection of Italian immigrants in the nation. His name was Luigi Fugazy; he was a diminutive man with a professorial air who dwelled in baronial style in a large house on Bleecker Street in the Little Italy section of Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Born into a well-to-do northern Italian family in Piedmont, where his father was a teacher, Luigi Fugazy served as an officer in the Piedmontese royal army during the Risorgimento and briefly had been assigned to a unit commanded by Garibaldi. After sailing to New York in 1869 with a knowledge of English and a substantial inheritance from his father—whose surname, Fugazzi, Luigi later changed to Fugazy, justifying it as a gesture toward assimilation—he promptly increased his net worth by becoming a travel agent for a steamship company, a labor negotiator for Italian employees, and also the owner of a neighborhood bank and a service company that issued loans, provided translators and letter-writers, and notarized immigrants’ mortgages, licenses, wills, and other documents. Luigi Fugazy also founded several Italian fraternal organizations, social clubs, and mutual aid societies.

A second New York
padrone
, while not as prominent as Fugazy, was nonetheless very influential because he used part of his earnings as an Italian neighborhood banker and landlord to found the nation’s largest Italian-language newspaper,
Il Progresso Italo-Americano
. His name was Carlo Barsotti; and, like Fugazy, he had been reared in privileged circumstances in northern Italy. Barsotti had been born and reared in Pisa. The activity for which he would become most identified in the United States, which he achieved through his newspaper’s editorial campaign, would be the inauguration of the commemoration of Columbus Day, beginning in 1892—the four-hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America. Funds were raised for the erection of a statue to Columbus in New York, and this was also done in several other cities that had large gatherings of Italians and persuasive
padroni
who could influence them.

In New Haven such a man was Paolo Russo, a grocer, banker, and attorney (the first Italian-American graduate of Yale Law School, in 1893); in Syracuse, the leading
padrone
was Thomas Marnell (born Marinelli in Naples), who began as a railroad laborer and became a banker; and in Philadelphia, the most prominent
padrone
was a mortician named Charles C. Baldi, a virtuoso consoler of mourning families who also presided over a coal business, a travel agency, a real estate brokerage, and the Italian-language newspaper
L’Opinione
.

The
padroni
who guided the Italian workers in the less industrial sections of the country—in the rural South, the Central Plains, and along the Rockies toward the Pacific—were less wealthy than their eastern counterparts partly because most of the immigrants, being predominantly southern Italian escapees from the farmlands of their fathers, resisted settling in the isolated hinterlands of America. They had seen enough of isolation in their own country, and they not only lacked the money to invest in farm equipment and land, but also were unprepared, linguistically and temperamentally, to venture out into the wide open spaces that had already been homesteaded largely by Irish, Germans, and Swedes, and, of course, by native-born American frontiersmen and gunslingers who had little fondness for foreigners in general. The Italians preferred the protective insularity of ghettos, where their dialect could be understood, where they could buy imported Italian sausage and olive oil at the corner grocery store owned by their
padrone
. And when the imports from Italy included women, they began to nurture their families in towering crowded tenements that in a strange way evoked the mountain village atmosphere that had surrounded them from birth. The fact that few trees lined these city streets was considered a blessing by the women—who, accustomed as
they were to the age-old daily habit of sitting at their windows in Italy for hours and spying down on their neighbors, would have become frustrated in America if their view of street life was obscured by leaves casting dark shadows.

And to these city-dwelling Italians there came always enough tales of horror and woe about life in the provinces to convince them that they were better off where they were. One such story concerned a gang of workers who had been escorted by their
padrone
into the Deep South to pick cotton on a Mississippi plantation: When they visited the town they were treated as miserably as the blacks, and sometimes confronted along the roads at night by men with burning crosses. The small Italian restaurant that had been opened near the plantation by the
padrone
was destroyed after an Italian cook served a black man. Another tale involved Italians who organized an agricultural commune in Arkansas, enduring not only droughts and tornadoes, but also the attacks of nativists baiting them as “dagos.” The Italians who had been sent into the midwestern wilderness to labor for the Chicago & North Western Railway had been unable to find housing throughout the winter. When they sought shelter and warmth within the haystacks of cattle cars in the railyards, they were awakened by holdup men who stole whatever money the Italians had saved from their nine-dollar-a-week salaries. Many Italians who had been recruited to work in the copper mines of Colorado during a work stoppage were nearly clubbed to death by mobs of laid-off unionists who cursed them as strikebreakers. In Louisiana, after a New Orleans police chief had been killed while investigating reports of extortion and violence among rival gangs of Italian dockworkers, eleven Italians were arrested on charges of murder—but none was found guilty. Outraged by what was regarded as excessive courtroom leniency, a citizens’ group of vigilantes raided the New Orleans prison, captured the Italians who had stood trial, and lynched every one of them.