Italians Swindled to New York: False Promises at the Dawn of Immigration

Abstract

As Italian authorities on migration studies Lorenzo Prencipe and Matteo Sanfilippo have recently remarked, the history of early Italian migrations to the Americas in the 1870s and 1880s is still a largely uncharted territory (Studi emigrazione. 2019. “Per una storia dell'emigrazione italiana ai tempi di Scalabrini,” LVI:355–79). Thus, this book is a particularly welcome addition to the literature. Tucciarone, an illustrator and the author of astronomical animations that have appeared in dozens of TV documentaries, and Lariccia, a retired teacher and writer, are regular contributors to La Gazzetta Italiana. Their previous book, Coal War in the Mahoning Valley: The Origins of Greater Youngstown's Italians (2019), laid the groundwork for this one. While researching, they came across a series of frauds committed against thousands of Italians in the waning months of 1872 and into the following year. The “swindle” referred to in the title concerns nearly three thousand Italians who entered New York between November 1872 and January 1873 who were defrauded through the fabrications of freelance speculators, ticket brokers, and aggressive steamship lines. Also to blame are the administrative failures of the Italian and American governments, local and national, which were not to be remedied for another quarter of a century (see Sebastiano Marco Cicciò, Il porto di imbarco di Messina: L'ispettorato e i servizi di emigrazione [1904–1929]; rev. in Italian Americana 2017, 35n2:248–52). Long neglected, this story is now rescued from oblivion thanks to painstaking research conducted mostly on obscure and forgotten contemporary local newspapers on both sides of the ocean.Tucciarone and Lariccia present a succinct “Prelude” to the main story through a quick overview of the push (privatization of commons and other feudal properties, heavy taxation, and overpopulation) and pull (the attraction exerted by booming U.S. cities) factors that help explain mass migrations across the Atlantic. The second chapter, comprising almost half the book, provides great detail about the swindle, its perpetrators, and its victims. The latter include about 280 peasants from Campania and Basilicata who in 1872, after being persuaded by unscrupulous shipping dealers from Naples and Turin to leave for Buenos Aires where they had been assured gainful employment in a land of milk and honey, found themselves utterly stranded in New York, with neither money nor assistance and the prospect of being deported due to lack of documentation. The third chapter shows how the techniques of exploitation by which the swindlers carried on their “experiments” in the 1870s were applied on a larger scale in the following decade to meet the American businesses’ desperate search for cheap labor.The rich anecdotal narrative provided by Tucciarone and Lariccia is unfortunately not matched by an adequate command of the vast literature on the larger picture of migration and of the relations between Italy and the United States in the nineteenth century. This serious limitation affects the book, whose bibliography does not exceed a dozen monographs, in terms of context and interpretations. Yet the authors are to be commended for unearthing and putting at our disposal such a treasure trove of materials, which should be further explored in a more scholarly manner.