Italian Immigrants and Their Children

WHILE it was an Italian who first set foot on American soil and Italian names are both frequent and prominent in American history, the Italian is a comparative stranger in our midst. He does not belong to the pioneer era of America, but to Ellis Island and the great caravan of latterday immigration. The Italian came after the English, the Germans, and the Irish, at a time when America was changing from a rural to a modern industrial nation. Fewer than five thousand Italians entered the United States in all the years preceding the Civil War. They were not immigrants in Webster's definition of an immigrant, but refugees, tradesmen, scholars, and sheer soldiers of fortune. When the census of 1850 first distinguished the national composition of America's melting pot, the Italians were a mere 3,645. In 1880, on the eve of the great mass movement that was to follow, the Italian population in the United States was a little more than 50,000. Italian immigrants those days were mostly from the north of Italy, from the Ligurian coast, Tuscany, and the Valley of the Po. The later immigrant was from the south, from sun-scorched Sicily and the exhausted, overpopulated areas of Calabria, Abruzzi, and Basilicata. His coming coincided with a period of great depression in Italy and one of vast expansion in the United States. He literally poured through our gates. In one year alone, in 1907, more than 300,000 Italians entered the port of New York. In 1910 our Italian population had risen to 2,104,309.