IT IS COMMON TO THINK OF ITALIANS in America as big-city folk. Yet in the smaller communities and suburbs, richly detailed and continuous information about Italians and other ethnic groups is often most available. The stability of the suburban population, the coverage afforded by local newspapers, and the higher quality of local oral history data can help to provide a relatively complete picture of one part of the Italian-American experience. A comparison of the suburban with the big-city experience of Italian immigrants might also shed new light on the nature of the ethnic frontier and group survival in America.
What is now the suburb of Chicago Heights is an old community. Four Scots-Irish families first settled in the area near the crossing of the Sauk Trail and the Vincennes Trail, thirty miles south of Chicago, in the 1830’s. The small community was first known as Thorn Grove. After an influx of German Forty-Eighters, it became Bloom (1849) and finally, in 1892, the village of Chicago Heights; a decade later it was incorporated as a city. In the early 1890s a syndicate of Chicago businessmen headed by Charles Wacker and Martin Kilgallen formed the Chicago Heights Land Association and aggressively promoted the manufacturing potential of this satellite suburb, which already boasted excellent railroad service lily the Chicago and Eastern Illinois, the Elgin, Joliet, and Eastern, the Baltimore and Ohio, the Michigan Central railroads, and a terminal transfer line. Their efforts were rewarded with the decision of Inland Steel, Canedy-Otto (machine tool), and other large manufacturers to locate in the city, eventually making it one of the liveliest industrial centers of its size.
The land association, led by Scots-Irish settler William Donovan, set out to sell 25-foot homesites to workers moving into Chicago Heights from rural America and overseas. Donovan went on to build a real estate, insurance, and savings and loan empire, and he claimed he never lost a penny in mortgages extended to Italians. The city grew rapidly, attaining a population of 20,000 in 1920 and supporting a large downtown shopping district. Encouraged by the boosterism of the local semi-weekly paper, The Star, Chicago Heights residents proudly proclaimed their town the best manufacturing city its size in the country. But the 1920s saw the rise of Prohibition-related crime, lending a shady reputation to the town, a development whiz The Star and civic leaders strongly resented. After limping through the depressed 1930s, the industrial satellite city boomed during the war years and looked forward to great advances thereafter. The post-World War II period saw the expansion of suburban areas, the development of regional shopping centers, and a decline community identity. Today, after the proliferation of suburbia, the viral demise of the once-bustling downtown business district, the decline of the railroads, and the shift away from the glamour of heavy industry, Chicago Heights is no longer a community of rapid growth, and much of the optimism of the turn-of-the-century community boosters is gone. Though it maintains a population of over 40,000, Chicago Heights has; experienced what planners call "socioeconomic obsolescence". It is in the bottom fifty of Pierre De Vise’s ranking of Chicago’s 200 suburbs.
During the period from the 1890s to the present, political and social leadership has also changed. Though there is still some evidence of the Scots-Irish business establishment which dominated the community at the turn of the century, political and business leadership is now largely in the hands of descendants of the ethnic migrants, most notably the Italians. The 1970 census showed 3,092 of its residents of Italian birth and 8,783 claiming Italian as their mother tongue. If third and fourth generations are included, the number would easily doubled Italians are also the best-organized and most powerful political force in the community, dominating the city council, the school board, and the park board.
How did Italians achieve this local dominance? Generally, the early migrants from Italy to America were mostly male, and so it was in Chicago Heights. Many, probably most, of these international immigrant workers began as "birds of passage", with a sojourner mentality like the golondrina of Argentina and elsewhere. In the period before World War I, there is evidence that few intended to stay permanently, most hoped only to earn enough to purchase a small plot of land back in Italy. Naturalization papers and Census records reveal a good deal of internal movement within the United States on the part of the earliest immigrants, but less wandering by the later Italians, who were obviously part of a chain migrations.
A study of 1,448 applications for Citizenship filed by Italians is Chicago Heights between 1907 and 1954 reveals that the earliest Italians who came to Chicago Heights arrived in the 1890s, but only 3 percent of them came prior to 1900. Most of these migrants moved between 1900 and 1914. After 1900 the pace quickened to almost 1 per year until 1908, when it dipped to 11, presumably in response the financial panic of that year. Though the national peak for Italian immigration was 1907, the Chicago Heights migration peaked in 1913 when 218, or 15 percent of the people in the sample arrived. Some 71 percent had migrated to the United States by the outbreak of World War I. The war years saw a marked decline, with only one recorded migrant to the cite in 1918. However, there was a postwar rush in 1920 when 127 arrived. Some 90 percent of this population had arrived by 1924, the year that quota restrictions went into effect. Thus the impact of the quota on the Chicago Heights Italian community is clear, as shown by the accompanying chart.
Migration of the 1,448 Italians Who Applied for Citizenship in Chicago Heights, 1889-1954
1889 - 1 1899 - 11
1907 - 91 1915 - 10
1923 - 24 1931 - 4
1939 - 3
1891 - 3 1900 - 40
1908 - 11 1916 - 30
1924 - 7 1932 - 2
1940 - 0
1892 - 1 1901 - 34
1909 - 59 1917 -
3 1925 - 8
1933 - 1 1941 - 0
1893 - 3 1902 - 41
1910 - 79 1918 -
1 1926 - 0
1934 - 2 1942 - 0
1894 - 6 1903 - 48
1911 - 34 1919 - 12
1927 - 13 1935 - 0
1944 - 0
1895 - 3 1904 - 40
1912 - 125 1920 - 127
1928 - 10 1936 - 0
1945 - 0
1896 - 7 1905 - 82
1913 - 218 1921 - 63
1929 - 8 1937 - 2
1946 - 1
1898 - 6 1906 - 80
1914 - 50 1922 - 20
1930 - 10 1938 - 0
1947 - 1
The age factor is always significant in defining the nature of a community - and in determining many decisions concerning migration. Among the Chicago Heights Italians, 46 percent were born before 1890, 82 percent by 1900. Thus a very high percentage were adults by the time World War I began. They produced a large second generation of Italian Americans, who came to adulthood at about the time of World War II. The pattern that emerges from the sample of 1,346 cases for which accurate data is available, holds few surprises.
Age at time of migration (Chicago Heights Italians, 1907-1954)
Under 12...............................................................11%
13-21.......…….....................................................40%
22-31...............…….............................................38%
over 31.....................…........................................11%
Thus the traditional image of the immigrants as vital young people contributing the best work years of their lives to their new land is borne out in Chicago Heights. In nearly all the literature concerning Italian-Americans, much is made of the concept of campanilismo, the parochialism or sense of place that made an Italian’s town or region of birth the most important factor in the relationship among immigrants in this country. The regionalism of Italy, the dialects and different customs, helped to shape the occupational and residential patterns adopted by the newcomers. And town and region of origin continued to shape the attitudes and values of Italians in Chicago Heights for many years after the initial migration. Six major towns in Italy contributed 701 (48%) of the persons who applied for U.S. citizenship: San Benedetto del Tronto, which claimed 216 (15%); Montepradone, a nearby town, which was listed as the birthplace of 143 (10%) of the sample; Amaseno, a sleepy village near Rome, which contributed an even 100 (7%); the Sicilian town of Caccamo near Termini Imerese, which sent 97 of its finest to Chicago Heights; Villetta Barrea, the town of origin of 78 (5%); and Castel del Sangro, which sent 67 (5%). These last two are located in the Abruzzi. Five other towns contributed twenty or more to the survey.
The breakdown by regions is as follows: Marche, 640 (44%); Sicily, 172 (12%); Abruzzi, 159 (11%); Lazio, 147 (10%); and Campagnia, 52 (3%). These five regions contributed 1,170, or 81 percent, of those applying for citizenship. Thus Chicago Heights Italians were strongly Marchegiana, from the San Benedetto area, with an admixture of Sicilians, Abruzzese, and Lazioni. Towns and regions which one might have expected to be strongly represented in Chicago Heights, but which were not, include Naples (6 people) and Calabria (11 people). More surprisingly, few if any came from places in northern Italy, such as Genoa or Venice.
Italians moved into several neighborhoods in Chicago Heights, with 53 percent settling on the East Side, a multiethnic and biracial section convenient to the factories and steel mills. Since the 1950s, however, the East Side has lost most of its Italian population and has become heavily black and Chicano. Some 38 percent of the Italians lived in the Hill area, often called "Hungry Hill" because of the one- time poverty of its residents and the steep nature of the terrain. The highest hill in the neighborhood was chosen as the site for the Italian Catholic Church, San Rocco. This area was multiethnic but contained a heavier percentage of Italians than did the East Side, and virtually no blacks. Today the Hill continues to have a heavy Italian population, a strong contingent of Chicanos (who rent from Italian landlords), and a negligible number of blacks. The East Side is directly north of the Hill, encompassing 11th through 17th streets. South of 17th Street are railroad tracks and factories that separate the East Side from the Hill. The Hill takes up the area from 21st Street through 26th Street, but is considerably smaller in area, population, and density than the East Side. It contained smaller manufacturing establishments and, though less convenient to larger factories than the East Side, was within a half-hour’s walk of every factory in town. However, one major factory, the Inland Steel Company, was directly adjacent to the Hill.
Italians in Chicago Heights stuck together according to their towns of origin. Ninety-four of the 100 Amasenese lived in the Hill area, with 88 of them on the western end of the Hill. Only 2 percent of the 97 immigrants from Caccamo lived on the Hill, preferring instead the East Side. The same was true of the former residents of Villetta Barrea, of whom 74 percent chose the East Side; 17 percent of this group of 78 lived on the West Side. Perhaps because they were the most numerous, the progeny of San Benedetto seemed to distribute themselves more evenly than did any of the other groups, with 35 percent on the Hill, 57 percent on the East Side, and 8 percent on the West Side. Curiously, those from Monteprandone, a town quite close to San Benedetto, had a close 89 percent concentration of their members living on the East Side. The contingent that had the highest proportion of its people living among the Scots-Irish and Germans on the West Side at the time of petition was the group from Sulmona. Some 21 percent of their rather modest total of 29 claimed West Side addresses. Town of birth also seemed to influence or correlate with the rate at which respondents went into business. While former residents of Caccamo accounted for only 10 percent of the sample from the major Italian towns, they represented 36 percent of the saloonkeepers in the sample, 23 percent of the grocers, and 20 percent of the merchants. The San Benedettans were proportionally represented in most occupations, and the Amasenesi were not represented at all among saloon keepers. The continued influence of campanilismo on subsequent generations suggests the strong influence of very localized ethnic, as well as class, factors on the culture of Chicago Heights Italians. For the most part, early immigrants were listed as "day laborers" in the 1900 U.S. manuscript census. A cluster of Italians in Steger, three miles south of Chicago Heights, worked as furniture finishers in a piano factory. A dozen residents of Hanover Street (East Side), several of whom had come to the United States before 1890, were employed in the Heroy and Marrener Glass Works, apparently at skilled jobs. Many others were railroad workers and steelworkers. A large number including women and children, worked as field hands in the onion fields of South Holland (five miles to the north), where they were hired by Dutch farmers to plant, weed, and pick the pungent bulb. The Italian workers reached their workplace by taking the Chicago and Eastern Illinois Railroad train, sharing the cars with white-collar commuters who often turned up their noses at the sight and smells of the transplanted peasant field workers. Only one Italian woman was listed by the 1900 census as employed (a washer woman), but many more worked hard each day to care for boarders, of whom there were approximately seventy-five in a population of three hundred. Others did needle work for Ederheimer Stein Pants Factory at 12th and Washington, where it was not unusual for a twelve-year-old girl to work as a seamstress and function as an interpreter for the adult Italian female employees. Old-timers also remember Pasquarella, a gutsy widow who worked side by side with the men laying track during World War 1.
After 1910, with the establishment of a half-dozen country clubs in the Flossmoor area ( two miles to the north), Italian boys and young men had the option of working as caddies at Flossmoor Country Club, Olympia Fields, Idlewild, and others. Idlewild is a Jewish club, and for many years the members had second- and third-generation Italian American caddies. The most important employers of Italians in the pre-1920 period were Inland Steel Company, the National Brick Company, and Canedy-Otto Machine Tools. As one observer wrote:
They worked under brutalizing conditions. Chicago Heights had steel mills, chemical factories, foundries, dye factories, very dusty wood-working factories, etc. Every place was a place of heat, grime, flirt, chest, Stench, harsh glares, overtime, piece work, pollution, no safety gadgets, sweat, etc. The workers were, as the Italians called them, "Bestie da Soma," beasts of burden. Emphysema, stomach ailments, heart ailments booze drinking to make the harsh conditions tolerable were what could be expected from such a context. Many men became morose and intolerant toward their wives. They yelled at them, beat them up at the least provocation and were cruel and indifferent to their children.
By 1900 the few Italian foremen were finding jobs for their friends and relatives at Inland, where the work routine even as late as 1923 was described as follows:
I started at 6:30 p.m. and quit 6:00 in the morning. I worked on the straightening machines. It was eleven and one half-hours of deafening noise. The bars going through the straightening machine, the noise of the machine itself, those huge monstrous shear machines cutting a dozen one-inch bars at a time, the bars falling into the receiving bins, the noisy crane continuously passing over head carrying bars to be straightened and taking away bundles of bars that had been straightened. One could not hear his partner talk, unless the partner, who was only six feet away, spoke at the top of his voice. We were five men on the machine. Four men worked as one rested. Each man worked two hours and rested a half-hour. The machine worked continuously because there were always four men at their place by the machine. I was surprised to see men eat a sandwich, eating it with dirty, greasy, oily hands, I was surprised to see men curled up in a wheel barrow sleeping so restfully as though they were sleeping in a soft downy bed.... When I saw the bathroom I was horrified. It took me several years to get courage to use it. They called it by its appropriate name, the Shit House. I usually jumped the fence and went behind the bushes.
Industrial accidents were not uncommon. Oral history sources have no trouble recalling and accounts in The Star confirm frequent deaths of Italian workers in construction, at the brickyards, and on the railroad. Of the 300 or so Italians listed in the 1900 census, some half-dozen corner saloonkeepers, possibly serving as padroni as well. Dominic and Victor Pandolfi, Tony Long, Leo Vellino, and Rocco Castabello (Castabile) had places on 22nd Street, while Peter Cassaza and Mike Rich ran taverns on the East Side’s 17th Street. A handful of Italian-born people were listed as barbers. Dominick Napoli of the Marchegiani neighborhood on Hanover Street, reputed to be one of the first Marchegiani immigrants (1894) to the city, owned a grocery store. A Cacamesi, Nick Pagoria, had a similar establishment on Lowe Avenue. Joseph Sinopoli, a Calabrian, began his grocery business in 1900 near Portland Avenue and 16th Street, next door to his residence. He mixed sausage-making with Republican precinct work; both paid off, since he established a sound business (still run today by his descendants) and attained the office of city sealer in 1914. He also taught many young men the art of meat-cutting.
Another early success story was that of Gaetano D’Amico, who arrived in the United States in 1889 from Abruzzi. After working on the railroad in Missouri, he moved to Chicago in 1892, then to Chicago Heights in 1895. Seven years later, his family opened up a grocery store in the heart of the 22nd Street commercial district, while he continued to work at Inland Steel. The success of this business brought capital, which the family invested in a macaroni business at 17th and Lowe. "Mamma Mia" brand spaghetti products, bearing the picture of D’Amico’s wife, Giacinta, sold well, and the company expanded into a larger factory in Steger. Although this side of the business was eventually sold to a large corporation, the original grocery store is still operated by a distant relative in the original location, where it now serves a mostly Spanish-speaking clientele. Thus the Italian community already had some small and growing business people among its numbers by 1914.
Oral history sources credit these early immigrants with encouraging their fellow townspeople to migrate to Chicago Heights. These sources cannot recall the existence of padroni (labor agents) in Chicago Heights. The term itself had a different meaning for them, connoting ownership of a business or a property. They remembered Tom Cellini, the railroad "boss" who hired numerous workers for his crew from among his neighbors in the period during and after World War I. Sources also recalled that grocers and saloonkeepers often helped loyal customers get jobs, but it was not done for a direct cash profit or commission. Another source relates that workers and their wives were often expected to do household favors and chores for their foremen and bosses.
By 1910 the number of Italian people in the city had increased from about 300 to 3,224, more than 20 percent of the town’s 15,000 populations. This increase set the stage for the development of ethnic social institutions. Most prominent was the founding of San Rocco Church in 1906 under the pastorship of Pasquale Renzullo. Newspapers credited the land association with helping in the construction of the $15,000 church. Joseph Cercone, then city alderman, is listed as the contractor. Dedication ceremonies included participation by Chicago archdiocesan officials, the Italian band, and several Italian societies, all of which points to a considerable degree of development within the ethnic community.
Renzullo (pastor from 1906 to 1922) had to battle apathy, anti-clerical outbursts by Italian socialists, and competition from the Presbyterian Italian mission, the Church of Our Savior. Despite setbacks, however, the pastor succeeded in establishing the Mt. Carmel School in 1912, staffed by the Sisters of St. Joseph, and the Mt. Carmel Social and Athletic Club in 1919, two institutions that played an important role in the community for years to come. The school taught some Italian, and the club taught leadership and discipline, also providing an entree for Italian youth into the very important amateur sports scene in Chicago Heights. The Italian community also looked to Renzullo for solace during World War I, when the Italian army suffered defeat at Capporetto. It was he who led the joyous parade when Austria surrendered to Italy in 1918. He also served as an informal defense attorney for boys who got into trouble with the law. Despite his efforts, Fr. Renzullo was not able to erase the heavy parish debts, and when he was transferred in 1922, Cardinal Mundelein deeded the parish and its debts to the Franciscans. Thus Chicago Heights Italians were ministered to neither by the Scalabrini Fathers (whose special mission it was to serve Italian immigrants) nor the archdiocese. The San Rocco Church and Mt. Carmel School, however, continued to be important forces in the community. In 1926, Father Pacifico Bonanni, who was to serve there for twenty-five years, was named pastor. Father Pacifico guided the parish through the difficult Depression years, setting up such services as soup kitchens, and in the 1930s he was successful in getting consistent financial support for church from Italian businessmen. He was so popular that when he transferred in the early 1950s, parishioners circulated an unsuccessful petition to keep him on.
Protestantism also played an important role in the Chicago Heights Italian Community. In 1910 the First Presbyterian Church appointed Rev. Eugenio De Luca to make a pitch for support within the Italian community by founding the Church of Our Savior (eventually located at 24th and Wallace in the Hill neighborhood). Under the leaders of Rev. De Luca, the Bible-oriented church used a combination of Social services, social functions, and help in finding jobs to pull together a close-knit group of up to 200 Protestant Italian-Americans who participated in a dizzying whirl of Bible readings, choir practices, drama performances, youth activities, picnics, parties, and sporting events. Whether these activities were a cause or effect, Protestant Italians Chicago Heights seemed to Americanize faster and to move into business positions and the professions at a slightly faster rate than did Catholic Italians. A possible explanation of this may be that the ehureh, lit the early Puritans, stressed English literacy so that its members could read the Bible. This opportunity to increase their English fluency and the exposure to American culture afforded by church activities speeded up the assimilation process. Although it was accorded a good deal of favorable publicity by The Star, however, the Church of Our Savior never represented more than 7 percent of the Italians in the city. Harsh feelings and name-calling between Catholics and Protestants seemed to characterize the relationship between the two in the early days. Old-timers remember an incident in the early 1920s in which Catholic rowdies led "Svaboda’s blind horse" into the sacristy of the little Protestant church. In more recent times feelings have softened considerably. The third generation of the original families is now the mainstay of the Church of Our Savior at its new location on the northern end of Chicago Heights (the original building on the old site has be come a Spanish Protestant Church). Also founded in 1915 by Reverend Eugenio De Luca, pastor of the Church of Our Savior, was the Jones Community Center. Located on the East Side, it was a religiously oriented settlement-house operation aimed at the needs of all the ethnic groups in the neighborhood - Poles, Greeks, Italians, and blacks. Classes in citizenship and literacy, a vacation Bible School, and boys’ clubs were part of its program. The center’s well-equipped gym was a major draw for generations of East Side youngsters as another avenue for the development of athletic talent, a later key to social mobility. The Jones Center received financial support from the well-established Protestant business community in the city.
However, for most Chicago Heights Italians in the pre-1920 period, the most meaningful social unit remained the family. Sociologist Edward Banfield has proposed the theory that South Italian backwardness can be explained by inability "to act together for their common good or ... any end transcending the immediate, material interest of the nuclear family." In his 1958 study Banfield criticizes this overemphasis on Emily to the exclusion of other societal institutions. However, Banfield s "amoral familism" is an exaggeration when applied to Chicago Heights Italians. The churches, mutual benefit societies, comparaggio (godparenthood), and the individual immigrant’s need to depend on someone other than immediate family in his search for jobs and security in the new land argue against Banfield’s concept, as does the rich associative life of Italian-American’s in Chicago Heights.
Yet the fact remains that in Italian and Italian-American culture the family is the strongest social institution. The vast majority of the immigrants were from young families: only 15 percent of the children of citizenship applicants were born in Italy. Eighty-one percent were born in Chicago Heights, as American-born received citizenship at birth, and were likely to be easily assimilated. Of the 4 percent born elsewhere, only 1.7% were born in Chicago, indicating only a small degree of movement from Chicago to Chicago Heights. The practice of comparaggio continued in the new country, thus expanding the biological family. The divorce rate was less than 1% in the Chicago Heights sample, and family size averaged 2.8 children at the time of application for citizenship.
In addition to family and the church, Chicago Heights Italians, like many American ethnics, relied on mutual benefit societies. In the early days, trusted community members went from door to door to collect contributions for people in need. In the years before New Deal social security, unemployment, and disability benefits, these organizations played an important role in softening the impact of hardship in a new land. The Amasenese Society was established in 1906, the Marchegiani Society a few years earlier, and the Unione Siciliana just prior to World War I. They provided visits by a doctor who was on retainer from the society, as well as sick benefits and death benefits. At the wake of a deceased member, the society’s standard and badge were displayed. From the money assessed each member at the death of a comrade the societies provided the survivors with funeral expenses, including an Italian band. Wakes were held in people’s homes until the 1950s, but Italians also patronized the Gerardi Funeral Home from the mid-1930s. Often the members attended the funeral as a group.
With membership at times of 200-300 people, these mutual benefit organizations spawned women’s auxiliaries and sponsored social functions such as dinner dances and picnics. Political candidates appeared at their meetings, typically held once each month on Sunday mornings. One reason for the regional identification of these societies is that membership and benefits were transferable, for instance, between the Amasenese society in Chicago Heights and in Amaseno, Italy, should the widow be a resident of Italy or if the beneficiary returned to live in Italy. Ethnic societies provided leadership experience and social recognition for their officers, and they reinforced feelings of companilismo.
Although major offices seem to have been passed around within family clans, mutual benefit societies had little appeal beyond the second generation. Sometimes actuarially unsound, these organizations have dissolved or reorganized in other areas. Currently, the Amaseno Lodge in Chicago Heights is very healthy, benefiting from a sizable post-World War II migration and the institution of the feast of San Lorenzo (August 12th), patron Saint of Amaseno, as a weekend street festival and procession. The smaller Marchegiana Society maintains interest by sponsoring charter trips to Italy. The Sicilian groups seem to have been absorbed into the Italo-American National Union.
Harder to pin down are the Italian radical groups. For example, one small group organized a radical protest in the midst of World Star I and had its meeting broken up and four of its leaders arrested by the police for violation of the Espionage Act. The Star linked the Italian group and its leader, Dominick Mormile, with the radical-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The Abruzzesi and the Marchegiani were predominant in this group, which had ties with Chicago radicals and even sponsored a visit during World War I of the Italian philosophical anarchist Carlo Tresca, editor of Il Martello (New York). However, strategic placement of a policeman who was taking names near the entrance of the meeting hall ensured a small audience for this dynamic speaker. After World War I, the group seems to have faded out of existence, not even surfacing during the Sacco-Vanzetti controversy, which dragged out until 1927. This lack of involvement was probably the result of pressures by both the authorities and fellow Italian- Americans. Naturalization papers show that several of these radicals, including Mormile, had difficulty obtaining United States citizenship. Surprisingly, oral history sources uniformly testify to the absence of labor radicalism and violence in this rather rough industrial town even in the depressed 1930s.
There is no doubt that Italian immigrants to Chicago Heights suffered their share of hardships and discrimination, the "uprooting" of earlier immigrants described by Oscar Handlin and other scholars. On the other hand, by 1914 we have some impressive evidence of the ways that Italians were gaining a foothold in business and politics. A 1914 advertising book boosting Chicago Heights listed Rocco Nicosia as the official professional photographer. Italians were listed as owners of five restaurants (possibly saloons) and six groceries. Three ran construction firms, two were in the transport business, and two in the liquor business. Within a few years the Union Cooperative Italiana was founded as a partnership grocery store in a large building on the East Side. Designed to provide lower prices and Italian specialties for its customers, the cooperative also contained a large upstairs meeting hall, which became the site of many social and political functions in the years to come.
How did Italians fare in local government in the early years? Orazio Ricchiuto, Michael Costabile, and Vigliotti were members of the police department , but no Italian names appeared on the 1914 roster of local fire department. Nevertheless, Italians had been represented as alderman in the city since 1904, when Tony Long was elected from the 3rd Ward (Hill). By 1907, three out of ten aldermen were Italian: Sam Zona, Michael Costabile, and Joseph Cercone. Though local government was officially nonpartisan, Italians tended to cooperate with the Republican machine organization of John Mackler and Craig Hood, which actively courted Italians by helping them file for citizenship and by finding them jobs in local industries. The number of wards dropped to seven in 1911, and Italians continued to hold at least one seat, and sometimes two, until the institution of the commission form of government in 1921. For the decade following 1921, no Italian was elected as mayor or as one of the four commissioners.
Newspaper accounts reveal the change from the aldermanic system to the commission form of city government as a progressive effort to eliminate corruption and the influences of liquor and gambling interests. Whether or not this was true in Chicago Heights, the result was a loss of Italian ethnic representation for a lengthy period. In any case, the initiative and apparent success of a number of Italians in business and politics would lend some support to the contention of Humbert Nelli that the history of Italians in Chicago was a history of early social mobility. Their success also illustrates the new opportunities for modest advancement and the middle-class values of the immigrants stressed by John Briggs in Italian Passage.
An indigenous organization reflecting the middle-class business orientation of the second generation was the Dante Club. Founded in January 1922 by Pasquale Luongo, Joseph Tintari, Louis Ursitti, Michael Costabile, and John P. Mancini, the club’s purposes were to "disseminate American principles . . . to promote the spirit of fraternal life, and to promote social intercourse." Their bimonthly meetings took place in the warehouse of the General Chemical Company on 22nd Street. The Dante Club began with forty-five members, but by 1929 had eighty-five, mostly from the Hill neighborhood. In the 1930s the club built its own headquarters on 24th Street. They sponsored patriotic functions, dramatic presentations, and (in the 1930s) spectacular blackface minstrel shows. Proceeds from these events supported the construction of the club building, the paving of the Garfield School grounds, the purchase of stereopticon equipment, the support of a milk program at the school, and other activities. The group also sponsored baseball teams, a boy scout troop, and the distribution of Christmas food baskets. Speakers at Dante Club banquets, held at the Union Cooperative Italiana, included the political and business elite of Chicago Heights, and The Star showered this civic organization with good publicity. When the organization made an outright gift of $200 and pledged to buy $35,000 worth of war bonds shortly after Pearl Harbor, The Star referred to the club as "in the vanguard of patriots in this community." Such American patriotism, absence of Italian cultural programming and insistence on the use of the English language at meetings, would seem to characterize the Dante Club as an agent of Americanization rather than as a force for ethnic survival.
Dante Club leadership seemed to rotate among young men whose families were politically active. Infighting among these elements in the late 1930s and early 1940s is said by most observers to have "ruined" the organization. In fact, at the height of the scramble, one faction of the club scheduled a political dinner on the same night as the regular club dinner dance. Nevertheless, the ethnic identification combined with the middle-class aspirations of the Dante Club members is in sharp contrast to the working-class subculture described in Gans’s study of Boston Italians. Though not college boys, the Dante Club members seem more like an upwardly mobile Chick Morelli group than the corner boys of Whyte’s Streetcorner Society.
What was the role of Italians in the Chicago Heights schools? The school system’s success at instilling Americanism and perhaps a degree of self-depreciation is illustrated in the following essay by a thirteen year-old girl at Garfield School in 1925:
I was born in sunny Italy and came to America when I was nine years old, and I never will go back to Italy again because my father was in America twenty-six years, and after three years he made me come to America. Now he is an American citizen and I thank him very much because he did so many good things for me.
The best thing he did is that he made me learn to read and write American. He said that we should all know the American language. The first when I came it was in the joyful month of May and he made me go to school to learn. I am so happy that I came to this dear country that I want to be a teacher when I grow up, so I can help other boys and girls learn our language. I am going to be like Miss Peters.
The trend among Italians on the Hill was simply to attend the school nearest them, whether public or Catholic. Perusal of the 1962 Mt. Carmel Golden Jubilee Book suggests that its eighth-grade graduates tended to reside in the eastern portion of the Hill. Convenience, economy, and a male-oriented anticlericalism made for high enrollments at Garfield Public School. When tuition fees for parochial education made Mt. Carmel less attractive to parents, Fr. Renzullo threatened that he would refuse to administer first communion to children not attending Catholic school. Parents sometimes responded by pulling their children out of Mt. Carmel immediately after they had received their communion. Though the Mt. Carmel school staff compromised by offering Sunday morning catechism classes to prepare public school children for the sacraments, antagonism on this subject continued well into the 1950s. As might be expected, this public-catholic split on the issue of education also served to divide the Italian community from itself.
Governance and control of the public schools remained beyond the grasp of Italians. Until well into the 1930s, few Italian children went beyond the eighth grade; there were no Italian teachers, and no Italians served on the school board. This is in sharp contrast to conditions in the 1950s, when the school board president, most of the board, and many of the teachers were Italian.
How people spend their non-working hours gives us some picture of their values, lifestyle, and the texture of their existence. Oral history sources stress that in the period before mass media and under circumstances of relatively high population density, ethnic life was filled with the intense and constant interaction of people: relatives, paesani, playmates. Chickens, goats, pigs, and horses were also part of the neighborhood scene, as were the comer stores, pharmacies, bakeries, and taverns.
As Albert La Morticella remembered the late teens:
... Chicago Heights was similar to one of the Western towns one sees in the old Western cowboy movies. The streets were unpaved, Twenty-Second Street had twenty-six saloons. Card playing, booze drinking and pool shooting were the only recreation these foreigners would have. Automobiles were very scarce. Everything was horse-drawn. When Twenty-Second Street became paved with cobblestones, the curbs had iron rings imbedded in them to allow horses to be strapped and parked there. The fire engine was drawn by three pairs of horses. It was very thrilling to see the fire engine come thundering down the street to the scene of a fire. The brewery wagons were everyday sights; they were drawn by four horses. Men used to sport around with revolvers in their hip pockets. The ambitious men got special police stars, which were pinned to their suspenders....
Families did for themselves: they canned tomatoes for sauce, made wine, beer, and root beer, baked bread, made macaroni, picked cicoria in the open fields for both salad and boiled greens, made sausage from the meat of freshly slaughtered pigs, kept goats and made cheese from goat’s milk, picked mushrooms, prepared delicacies from burdock stalks, made soap from leftover animal fat, and even prepared natural and "supernatural" cures for broken bones and severe headaches. Old- timers remember "Doctor" Generoso, the herb healer, whose garland of garlic, red peppers, and a magic coin (which supposedly came down from heaven) was used to cure minor ailments. Each neighborhood had a woman who set broken bones. Cicetta Papitto, a midwife, assisted at most births in the Italian community until the mid-1930s, when American-born and educated Dr. Hugo Long began bringing his patients to St. James Hospital. A Marchegiana woman on the East Side also gained recognition in the community as a fortune-teller.
As members of a self-sufficient community, Italian neighbors freely exchanged food and favors. Family and campari visited each other on the slightest pretext, exchanging small money gifts (baste) on such occasions as birthdays, baptisms, confirmations, and even the removal of one’s tonsils. Close records were kept of these gifts for future reference when the time would come for reciprocation. Weddings, often arranged in the picture-bride mode in the early years, were the highlighted social events in the community. They were often elaborate affairs with a large wedding party and a long list of guests, many of whom received personally hand-carried invitations from the parents of the bride and groom. Because of the importance attached to the proceedings, weddings were often a stressful time: an aunt, a cousin, or an in-law might take umbrage at real or imagined slights or lapses in the demonstration of proper rispetto in seating arrangements or the choice of the compari (best man) and other members of the wedding party. These events were paid for with the money gifts (buste) brought by each family, which sometimes resulted in a valuable nest egg for the couple lucky enough to make a profit on their wedding.
Oral history respondents tell of untutored peasants (first generation) - who would regularly make the long trip to Chicago to see the opera and then return home to heated discussion at the barbershops and saloons over the merits of the performance. Further evidence of Italian- American identification with cultural things were the theatrical productions. First- and second-generation young people joined Panteleone Laurino, an East Side (Neapolitan) jeweler, in producing Italian plays and operettas at the Masonic Hall and the Washington Junior High School auditorium in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1925, Laurino’s Italian Dramatic Club presented I Dui Sergenti and Romeo and Juliet (with music). In February 1933 the Eleanora Duse Dramatic Club, under the leadership of Cristoforo Di Sanzo, performed Italian-language radio plays from WJKS (Gary, Indiana) and mounted a production of I Cieci at the Washington auditorium on February 3, 1933. During that same month the Dante Club presented its annual lavish blackface minstrel show to a large audience. In April 1933, Attillio Carducci’s Italian Presbyterian dramatic group presented Attorney for the Damned. A few months later, the Laurino Company presented La Cieca di Sorrento, also in Italian. Each production had a sizable cast, and there seems to have been little overlapping of cast members; the audiences were also reportedly large and enthusiastic. This flurry of dramatic presentations reflects elements of cultural retention and assimilation.
It also reflects the energetic talent of the young people and (perhaps) the high unemployment rates of the Depression era. But again, it seems inconceivable that Gans’s Urban Villagers would be engaging in the above activities.
For summer recreation there was the "Tombola," a Sunday evening festival held at Ceroni’s Grove or the San Rocco Church grounds, featuring band music and food and climaxed by the "Tombola", an abbreviated bingo game with ten numbers in two horizontal rows of five. Tickets sold for one dollar each, and these weekly events were sponsored by clubs and the church itself as moneymaking ventures. Prizes of $200 for the first five numbers in a horizontal row (Cinquina), $700 for the first full ticket (Tombola), and $100 for the second full ticket (Tombolina) were standard. Fireworks capped off the evening.
Young men hung around at the gas stations, barber shops, pool halls, and taverns playing morra, a finger game, passatella, a vicious drinking game, mozzaferrata, an Italian version of cricket, and bocce. Adjacent open fields and the brickyard swimming hole were the scenes of countless boyhood adventures for generations. OBI history testimony indicates that peer-group influence was strongest among the second- generation cohort, youngsters who entered their teens in the 1920s. The Silver Tavern group and the Dozenettes (both still active) were formed during that era. Later groups appear to have dissipated because of the greater economic and geographic mobility their members experienced.
Second-generation youths also fell prey to the lures of American sports. Many complained that coaches in the 1920s did not give Italian kids a fair break; but impressive percentages of future political and business leaders gained their first community-wide recognition on high school and semiprofessional sports teams. Cases in point are the careers of Hap Bruno and Dominic Pandolfi. Mario "Hap" Bruno moved from the Mt. Carmel teams in the twenties to become manager of the Chicago Heights Athletic Association semipro baseball team in the thirties and one of the first Italians elected to township office in the forties. Young Dominic Pandolfi’s stellar performance on the Bloom Township High School basketball team in the 1920s paved the way for his appointment in the early 1930s as the first Italian-American public school teacher in the city. Sonny Talamonte, a race car driver, was probably the best-known Chicago Heights Italian until his death in the mid-1920s. The success of Chuck Panici as captain of the high school basketball team in the late 1940s and early 1950s laid the groundwork for his successful bid for the mayoralty in 1975.
Italians participated vigorously in another "sport": interethnic conflict. Into the 1950s Italian youths felt alienated from Waspish middle-class West Siders, referring to them as "Mangia Cakes" (cake-eaters or sissies). Gang fights were not infrequent, and in 1925 the conflict be- came so serious that police moved in and arrested five Italian boys and charged them with harassing the captain of the football team, the son of the fire chief, and other high school athletes. The Star reported that the Italian boys protested in court that "everybody had it in for them because of their nationality." The paper advocated a get-tough policy against "gang conceit" and complained about "peanut politician’s" making excuses for "poor parents." Nevertheless, delinquency in Chicago Heights was never defined as a serious enough problem to warrant the kind of delinquency prevention program that Clifford Shaw and his associates established in Chicago’s Taylor Street Italian neighborhoods. The Ku Klux Klan was reportedly strong during the 1920s, and it claimed an attendance of over 3,000 at a 1923 organizational meeting at the Chicago Heights Masonic Lodge. It is quite likely that Italian-Americans were involved in the burning of a "Klantauqua" tent near downtown Chicago Heights in July of 1924. Another incident that possibly indicates interethnic unrest occurred in June of that same year, when a traveling carnival complained to police that "a gang of wops" had plundered their booths.
Community tensions were also reflected in the newspaper, as it felt free to run such anti-immigration material as a cartoon captioned: "This is Not a Dumping Ground: Signed Uncle Sam." The cartoon appeared on the front page of The Star in May of l924. Another insensitive example was the headline "Calabrians Carve" that appeared above a story dealing with Italians involved in an East Side street brawl.
Much of this antagonism on the part of Italian-Americans undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that early Italian political successes under the aldermanic system had been wiped out when Chicago Heights switched to the commission (at large) form of municipal government in 1921. After that, the political commentators repeatedly spoke of the East Side-West Side split. Another gauge of inter-group feelings was job discrimination. Motives are difficult to document, but it was not until 1933 that the school board grudgingly hired Dominic Pandolfi, the first Italian teacher, in a district with so percent Italian enrollment. Oral history sources have alleged that the telephone company and other large companies refused to hire people with Italian names for white collar jobs. Prestigious women’s clubs also barred Italian Women frolic their ranks.
Thus, in the 1920s at any rate, there are strong indications of intergroup conflict and the nonpassive reaction of some Italian Americans to the situation. Yet group identity was never strong enough even to support the establishment of an Italian or Italian-American newspaper.
Probably the matter that irked the Chicago Heights establishment most about the Italian presence was the explosion of Prohibition related crime in the community during the 1920s and early 1930s. While The Star had been apathetic about the murder of "another Italian" before 1920, it was incensed about the negative reputation the city acquired as a result of the activities of Capone-connected bootleggers, which was bad for business. Dozens of gangland murders (including that of former Alderman Tony Sanfilippo), occurring mostly in the East Side neighborhood, shocked the people of metropolitan Chicago. Two major raids,one on the lavish Milano Club in 1925, the other on a variety of booze and slot-machine holdings in 1929, brought national and even international attention to Chicago Heights. In addition, during the late twenties there were sixty-five murders in two years. A federal agent was quoted as saying that Chicago Heights was one huge distillery and that there is nothing in the United States to equal it. Many residents remember Capone’s frequent visits to the city, especially his Robin Hood-like performance at a 1931 baptismal reception in the Mt. Carmel School Hall. As "well-wishers" filed past, Capone peeled off one-, five-, ten-, and twenty-dollar bills from random stacks of cash on the front table. Local underworld leaders conducted "Supreme Court," from a bakery on 22nd and Butler, adjudicating everything from domestic squabbles to territorial disputes between "liquor distributors." The bakery was the scene of a spectacular murder in the early 1930s. One observer has suggested that bootleggers were major employers of runners, sugar buyers, and plumbers (to construct stills), and that the industry brought a measure of prosperity to the community during the Prohibition years. Chicago Heights bootleggers dabbled in both Democratic and Republican politics to protect their illegitimate activities, just as Humbert Nelli has described the phenomenon in Chicago. Oral history narrators suggest that the classic elements for organized crime were all there: an unpopular law, a corrupt municipal government, and a desire for quick economic mobility. Even grandmothers and favorite aunts got into the act, making a little moonshine for a niece's wedding or for a little extra money to pay for piano lessons.
The legacy of this plague of lawlessness has been extensive. Former and surviving bootleggers made nest eggs for legitimate businesses or to send their children to college and into the professions. Hundreds of innocent neighborhood people of all ages were terrorized into distorted and cynical attitudes about law and order. Most important has been the criminal image of Italians. which non-Italians have held and which non-Sicilians developed of Sicilians within the City. This situation. moreover, added to the burden of young Italians in the Depression era and after in their quest for social mobility and status.
By the mid-1930s there was at least one Italian-American doctor in Chicago Heights, a half-dozen lawyers, a family of successful macaroni manufacturers, the manager of the semiprofessional baseball team, a city commissioner, and a handful of political appointees in mid-level positions. For the majority however, the 1930s spelled hard times. Along with other groups, Italians appeared on the relief rolls, waiting in line for WPA. Many enrolled in night-school Citizenship Classes because they feared that non-citizens would be fired from jobs to make room for citizens. Thus applications for naturalization increased in the middle and late thirties. To cope with matters during the difficult winter months, some people resorted to stealing coal from slowly passing railroad hoppers. They formed what the papers called a "moonlight coal company," selling the stolen fuel at bargain prices to friends and neighbors. Others, less creatively but more legally, bartered their work unloading coal ears in return for a small supply for their families.
World War II changed everything. This was no less true for Chicago Heights Italians than it was for other American ethnic groups. War orders brought prosperity to the heavy industries of the city, erasing the ravages of the Depression. The war also brought alien registration and draft registration, and in both categories Chicago Heights Italians were prominent. By March 1942 some 611 people had registered as enemy aliens. While the vast majority were Italians, a considerable number were Germans from the rural periphery of the city. Though there had been thought of relocating Italians, such as was done with the West Coast Japanese, the federal government settled for a photo-identification and registration process. Demographically, second- generation Italian-Americans of Chicago Heights were probably over-represented among draft-age men. The years of birth of the Children of Citizenship applicants clustered in the late teens and the twenties. An early 1942 monthly draft Call included thirteen Italians of the thirty white men called up. A photo of departing inductees in downtown Chicago Heights at about this time also reveals a heavy representation of Italians.
Toward the end of the War, The Star regularly featured Italian American war heroes, war dead, and even champion war bond buyers. The patriotism of the wartime period, the traveling and education that the war entailed, the Americanization involved in the military service as well as the GI benefits for postwar education and home purchases, had a strong impact on Italian-Americans as on all Americans. In the post-World War II period, Italian-American Gigs went to college and into the professions in significant numbers for the first time, formed new families, and moved during the late forties and early fifties into new housing to the north and west of the old neighborhoods, but housing that was often well within Chicago Heights city limits. The East Side seems to have emptied out the most quickly, partly as a result of the pressures of a new black migration to the neighborhood during the On the other side of the ocean, the war had brought destruction and still greater poverty to southern Italy. This seemed to spark a new exodus from Amaseno of everyone who had any claim whatsoever to American citizenship. They were from a different Italy and were more aggressive, better educated, and better equipped to move ahead than were their predecessors. This was a matter of no little resentment between the old and new immigrants. A new Chain of immigrants, including the large Planera family, settled on the western end of the Hill neighborhoods thus preserving it as an ethnic enclave until today, a shot in the arm for Italian retention unparalleled among other ethnic groups in Chicago Heights. There seems to have been no sizable post-war influx from the other major Italian towns, which had provided stock earlier to Chicago Heights.
During their own in local elective politics. Though one Italian had been named commissioner in 1927 (one term) and another, Maurino Ricchiuto, in 1935 (he was reelected in 1939), it was not until 1947 that an Italian became mayor. This was Ricchiuto, who had changed his name to Richton. Though Chicago Heights Italians voted Republican on the national and local levels in the 1920s, they joined the Roosevelt coalition in l932 and stayed in the national Democratic camp through the 1948 presidential election. However, they supported Republican Richton and others on his ticket in the nominally nonpartisan municipal elections in 1935, 1939, and 1947. A liberal arts graduate of Northwestern University and the son of a Republican grocer, the American-born Richton was drawn into political ties in 1935 by an audience’s enthusiastic response to his speech in Italian condemning crooked politicians in both parties. His education, youth, and polished speaking style made him the first Italian politician acceptable to West Side voters. However, though he was a hero in the Italian community, Richton did not make much of an effort at a grassroots organizations. He was denied the re-nomination by the Mackler faction of the Republican party in 1951; but he returned as mayor in 1963 in alliance with Democratic (and Italian) township committeeman John Maloni, who himself was elected commissioner that year. Elected for the third time in 1967, Richton shifted again toward the Republicans. In ethnic terms, the 1967-1971 city commission had three Italian-American commissioners out of five. Further indication that Italians were voting on the basis of ethnicity is the success of Democrat Anthony Scariano, who was returned to the state legislature with consistently heavy majorities from 1958 until the early 1970s. A liberal protégé of Senator Paul Douglas, Scariano was fiercely independent of the pressures of the Richard J. Daley machine in Chicago.
In 1975, Chuck Panici, the son of an Amasenese saloonkeeper on 22nd Street, put together a tightly organized Republican-oriented political machine based on ethnic ties and a reformist desire to make Chicago Heights an "All-American City." Though resisted by The Star, Panici won easily in 1975 and again in 1979. He was, by the beginning of the 1980s, the leader of one of the most successful local Republican organizations in the state. And although his group was often accused of nepotism, Panici pointed out somewhat justly that almost everyone in town (especially among Italians) was related anyway. Politick Italians in Chicago Heights had arrived. On the other hand, there, seemed to be a trend of Italian candidates running against each other thus negating the ethnic factor.
It had not, however, been a clean sweep. Though Italians donated the grade school board of education and the park boards in 1960s and 1970s they were forced to share power in the state legislature, the high school board, and the township board, and they remain underrepresented on the newly created community college board. A last point may be explained by the fact that the district is much tat than the city boundaries. The banks, savings and loan associations newspaper, and top management positions in national corporations thus far resisted heavy Italian penetration. But the professions; small businesses are today very heavily Italian.
The second- and third-generation children of the Italian immigrants have "made it." Their ethnicity, however, is not the ethnicity their forebears. The Italian language is not spoken much in these I generations. The East Side Italian neighborhood is no more. Bile and ranch house dwellers express nostalgia for the cooperative neighborliness of previous generations and for the time when downtown Chicago Heights was alive; but it is only nostalgia. However, interns in San Rocco Church remained high in the post-World War II peers. A new school and a refurbished church were financed and paid within a few years. The parochial school’s enrollment remained and Italians from all over the city look forward to the church's festival each June, even though the present pastor is not Italian and there, no regular Italian-language masses.
The Marchegiana Society, in cooperation with the city govemme has worked out a goodwill, sister-city relationship between Chicago Heights and San Benedetto del Tronto. This has resulted in many visits by large delegations in both directions. More than 300 Chicago Heights residents have traveled to Italy to see the birthplace of their parents under the auspices of this sister-city program. Clan-sized family picnics and the Amasenese Society's five-year-old Feast of San Lorenzo celebration are other indications of a continuing but changing ethnic identity in the city.
Thus, the historical movement of Italians into Chicago Height one drawn from several Italian regional sources, chain-migration stay. In the early part of this century, when the labor needs of then industrial Chicago Heights coincided with the stagnant economic conditions of a half-dozen Italian towns, a significant transfer of people and culture took place. Though they gained some economic and political success almost from the beginning, the major Italian-American experience was hard work and slow progress. Discrimination and prejudice at the newcomers was heightened by Italian involvement in illicit bootlegging and Prohibition-related activities. The group’s quest for economic betterment was interrupted, to say the least, by the Depression but was speeded up through the assimilative aspects of sports and their strong participation in World War II. The growth and persistence of the Italian population, as well as the general postwar prosperity, propelled the Italians of Chicago Heights into a dominant role in the community.
Their progress is colored, however, by the dynamics of ethnicity, which makes their success story an Italian-American one rather than an Italian one. The culture has shifted from an immigrant one to an ethnic one. Although this culture of Chicago Heights Italians has changed over the past century, theirs remains distinct in many ways from the general American culture. They have moved up in the world without having melted completely. Moreover, the small-town suburban setting, immune from the harsher forces of change in the urban immigrant experience, has allowed for a higher degree of continuity, group identity, and visible social mobility among Italians than might have been the case in the big city. They were apparently spared the widespread practice of this padrone system and the frequent residential changes of Chicago’s Italians chronicled by Nelli; but they were not spared the discrimination and the identification with criminal elements that occurred in the big city. Because of continuity and the relatively limited number of Italian cities of their origin, the rich texture of their associative life was probably greater than that of big-city Italians.