A Great Conspiracy against Our Race. Peter G. Vellon
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or acted as notary publics, sometimes combining all of these functions. Their practices did not come without a price. For example, in addition to providing overcrowded rooms, boardinghouse owners charged exorbitant fees to hold a transient immigrant’s baggage, and labor agents, or padrones, as they were known, often sent unwitting Italian laborers into precarious situations as strikebreakers or contract laborers. However, for many immigrants who arrived without friends or relatives in the United States, and did not speak English, access to a countryman with some knowledge of the city and how it worked was a vital resource. Whether it was finding employment, transferring money to Italy, writing letters for an illiterate immigrant, or settling legal disputes among quarrelling immigrants, these middlemen became indispensable within the Italian immigrant colonies. Their capacity to render vital services and dispense patronage earned them a level of prestige and acclaim throughout the colonies that only buttressed their importance, wealth, and prominence.
For prominenti, newspaper ownership became extremely attractive as a means to advance their personal agenda and further extend and widen their influence throughout a community desperate for direction.29 Before mass immigration, G. P. Secchi di Casali, a Mazzinian exile, and Felice Tocci, an Italian financier and banker, founded L’Eco d’Italia (the Echo of Italy) in 1849. The first Italian language newspaper to appear in New York City, L’Eco d’Italia operated ideologically within an “exile mentality” and catered to a smaller, more integrated northern Italian community.30 Although the paper covered events within the scattered Italian communities, it focused primarily on news and events from Italy. Followers of Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi, the paper’s editors intensely debated political and military struggles within Italy. This focus would change drastically as waves of southern Italian immigrants began arriving in New York.
By starting Il Progresso Italo-Americano in 1880, Carlo Barsotti cast the mold for big-city Italian immigrant prominenti and Italian language daily newspapers. With the help of his partner, Vincenzo Polidori, who was born in Rome in 1843, Barsotti started with a staff of two and a minuscule budget. Its office was located in the rear of the New York Herald offices on Ann Street in lower Manhattan, not far from the heart of what would soon become New York’s Little Italy. Given that neither employee could translate English stories into Italian, the paper initially resorted to clipping news stories from a Bologna newspaper and changing the dates to suit their purposes. In 1882, Barsotti hired Adolfo Rossi as editor, and the circulation increased steadily to 6,500 by 1890 and 7,500 by 1892. By the early 1890s, the paper’s masthead already proclaimed in English that Il Progresso was the most “influential Italian daily newspaper in New York and in the United States” and “had the largest circulation of any Italian paper in America.”31 During the 1890s, Barsotti would merge a smaller Italian language newspaper in New York titled Cristofero Colombo with Il Progresso.32 The paper’s circulation dramatically increased after 1900, but circulation reached its height of 175,000 copies during World War I. Its former editor Alfredo Bosi credited the success to Carlo Barsotti’s tireless work and many popular patriotic initiatives.33 By 1920, Il Progresso had expanded to eight pages and boasted a circulation reaching 108,137. A sixteen-page illustrated Sunday supplement enjoyed a circulation of 96,186. According to Bosi, the Sunday supplement was “a publication without equal … it is printed on the best machines that produce 40 copies per hour so the paper can get out quickly to anxious Italian readers across the City.”34
Attempting to build on the success of Il Progresso, Vincenzo Polidori, along with Giovani Vicario, a Naples-born attorney, established L’Araldo Italiano (the Italian Herald) in 1889. L’Araldo was published every day except Mondays and was soon accompanied by an evening newspaper, Il Telegrafo.35 The paper employed “valorous journalists” such as Luciano Paris, Giuseppe Gulino, Luigi Roversi, Paolo Parisi, Ernesto Valentine, and Agostino DiBiasi and at various times was listed as a Republican paper and other years identified as independent.36 Some historians described the paper as more balanced in its reporting than Il Progresso and more friendly to labor than its chief rival, especially after 1910.37 However, despite having a larger circulation than Il Progresso in the early part of the twentieth century, L’Araldo could not keep up with Il Progresso’s explosive growth and reached its circulation zenith at 18,000 in 1916.38 By 1917, both L’Araldo and Il Telegrafo were sold by Vicario to Il Giornale Italiano, edited by Ercole Cantelmo and part of Frank Frugone’s publishing consortium. By 1920, the paper’s circulation narrowed to 12,454 copies.39
At the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, a new daily Italian language evening newspaper added to the increasing competition among New York’s mainstream newspapers. In 1898, Frank Frugone founded Bolletino della Sera (the Evening Bulletin), and his story mirrored Barsotti’s in several ways. Frugone came to the United States from northern Italy (Chiavara, Genoa) with limited means and attended night school as he worked as a printer’s apprentice. Entrenched in the prominent class by 1898, Frugone, along with Agostino Balletto, founded and edited Bolletino. According to the New York Times, Frugone’s editorials aided many Italians by advocating for immigrant protection laws, and in 1912 he offered his testimony to the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization in an effort to prevent passage of a literacy test for immigrants. Frugone was active within the Italian immigrant colony as treasurer of the Italian American Educational League, president of the Italian Vigilance Protective Association and Dante Alighieri Society, as well as participating in political and cultural associations and organizations in New York such as the National Republican Club and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Frugone remained active in politics and tried unsuccessfully to parlay his influence into a congressional seat in 1904 and 1906.40 Running as a Republican in 1906, Frugone received the endorsement of the New York Times over his Tammany opponent. “Although he is of Italian birth,” the Times stated, “Mr. Frugone has spent most of his life in this country, where by his own industry, his talents, and his good character, he has risen to a position of influence as the editor of a prominent Italian newspaper, and as a man who is respected and esteemed and listened to by men of his own race in this country.”41
Bolletino published daily, except for Sundays, and used a four-page format. The paper featured journalist Bernardino Ciambelli, who Alfredo Bosi called “one of the most popular colonial journalists.”42 By 1911, the newspaper had increased to eight pages and had a circulation of 42,000 copies.43 Bolletino della Sera was part of the Italian commercial press and advertised itself as Republican in political orientation. Historian Edwin Fenton remarked that, unlike Il Progresso, Bolletino gave extensive coverage and support not only to socialists but also to the American Federation of Labor in its fight against syndicalists, especially from 1908 through 1920.44 By the early 1920s, Bolletino della Sera had a circulation of approximately 75,472 and catered to a readership of “workers in various industries, laborers, miners, farmers and business men.”45
Throughout the period, many mainstream newspapers came in and out of existence that did not possess the circulation numbers of Il Progresso or Bolletino yet were influential nonetheless. In 1910, Italian scholar and author Alberto Pecorini founded and edited Il Cittadino (the Citizen), a newspaper issued by the Civic League Publishing Association. The paper was published every Thursday and was identified as having an independent political orientation.46 Pecorini published prominently in Il Cittadino, often using the front page to inform Italians, as well as English-speaking Americans, of issues and events important to both. In a section titled “To Our American Readers,” Pecorini offered substantive discussions and editorials on topics such as Americanization, citizenship, immigration restriction, and literacy.47 These topics were well represented in books he authored such as Gli Americani nella vita moderna osservati da un italiano (The Americans in modern life observed by an Italian), published in 1909, and La Storia dell’America (The history of America), a concise history of the United States intended for use in Americanizing Italian immigrants, which he published for the Massachusetts Society of the Colonial Dames in 1920.48 Il Cittadino was published for ten years and was widely respected by American readers as well