Italian Americans
Based on Wikipedia: Italian Americans
The Continent Named After an Italian
Before there was a single Italian American, Italians had already named the place. Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine explorer, figured out around 1501 what Christopher Columbus never quite accepted: this wasn't Asia. It was something entirely new. Two continents now bear his name.
Columbus himself was Genoese. So was John Cabot, who explored the eastern seaboard for England's Henry VII. Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine, became the first European to map the Atlantic coast from Florida to New Brunswick in 1524. The Italian connection to the Americas predates the existence of the United States by centuries.
But here's where the story gets interesting. The massive wave of Italian immigration—the one that shaped American cities, cuisine, and culture—came from a completely different Italy, and for completely different reasons.
Five and a Half Million People
Between 1820 and 2004, approximately five and a half million Italians came to America. The numbers tell a dramatic story of acceleration: a trickle in the early decades, then a flood. More Italians arrived in the 1880s alone than in the previous five decades combined. From 1880 to 1914, over four million came. Three million of those arrived in just fourteen years, between 1900 and the outbreak of World War I.
Most came from southern Italy and Sicily.
This distinction matters enormously. Northern and southern Italy might as well have been different countries in many ways. The south had been ground down by centuries of foreign rule—Spanish, then Bourbon, then a unified Italian government that taxed heavily and invested little. The land was exhausted. The feudal agricultural system persisted long past its usefulness. Young men faced seven years of mandatory military service.
America offered something simple: jobs that paid.
Birds of Passage
Here's something that surprises many people: nearly half of the Italian immigrants who came between 1899 and 1924 went back home. Forty-six percent, to be precise.
The original plan for most was never permanent relocation. These were "birds of passage"—young men who came to work, saved their wages, sent money home to their families, and then returned to Italy with enough capital to buy land or start a business. Marriage, family, and permanent life in America were often afterthoughts that developed when circumstances changed.
The Italian immigrants earned well below average wages. They worked the jobs that required strong backs and little English: digging subway tunnels, laying railroad tracks, constructing bridges and sewers, building the first skyscrapers. By 1890, an estimated ninety percent of New York City's public works employees were Italian. In Chicago, the figure was ninety-nine percent.
They lived in overcrowded tenements in neighborhoods that became known as Little Italys. The housing was substandard—poorly lit, inadequately heated, with ventilation so bad that tuberculosis spread easily. But within these cramped quarters, something remarkable happened: civil and social life flourished.
The Padrone System
Most immigrants didn't find work on their own. They used the padrone system—a kind of labor brokerage unique to the Italian immigrant experience. A padrone was a middleman who found jobs for groups of men and, for a fee, controlled their wages, transportation, and living conditions.
The system had an ugly reputation. Critics called padroni slave traders who exploited bewildered peasants. And some were exactly that—landlords who rented out boxcars as housing, storekeepers who extended credit at predatory rates, bosses who took cuts from every paycheck.
But the reality was more complicated. Many padroni functioned essentially as travel agents, with their fees reimbursed from later earnings. For immigrants who spoke no English and had no connections in a strange country, the padrone offered something valuable: a path to employment. As one historian put it, Italian immigrants saw them as either godsends or necessary evils.
Some reformers fought back. Sarah Wool Moore became so concerned about grifters exploiting new arrivals that she founded the Society for the Protection of Italian Immigrants. The organization published lists of approved housing and employers. Later, they established schools in work camps to teach adult immigrants the English phrases they needed for their jobs.
When the War Changed Everything
The outbreak of World War I in August 1914 ended large-scale Italian immigration almost overnight. Ships stopped crossing the Atlantic. The birds of passage couldn't fly home.
But something unexpected happened. Wages shot up. The war economy needed workers desperately, and suddenly the Italian immigrants who had planned temporary stays found themselves making real money. Most decided to stay permanently.
Women and children joined the men. The temporary labor camps became permanent communities. The Little Italys transformed from way stations into neighborhoods with deep roots.
Explorers, Founders, and Firsts
While the massive wave of immigration came in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Italians had been trickling into North America for centuries before.
Pietro Cesare Alberti, a Venetian seaman, became the first Italian registered as residing in what is now the United States when he settled in Dutch New Amsterdam in 1635. The Waldensians—Italian Protestants—immigrated in small numbers during the 1650s and 1660s, spreading across what would become New York, New Jersey, and the Delaware River region.
Enrico Tonti partnered with the French explorer La Salle to explore the Great Lakes. Tonti founded the first European settlement in Illinois in 1679 and in Arkansas in 1683—earning him the title "Father of Arkansas." He co-founded New Orleans and governed the Louisiana Territory for twenty years. His brother Alphonse co-founded Detroit in 1701 and served as its acting colonial governor for twelve years.
The Taliaferro family, believed to have Venetian roots, was among the First Families of Virginia. Richard Taliaferro designed much of Colonial Williamsburg. Filippo Mazzei, a close friend of Thomas Jefferson, published a pamphlet containing the phrase "All men are by nature equally free and independent"—words Jefferson incorporated almost verbatim into the Declaration of Independence.
Building American Institutions
Italian Jesuits and Franciscans left an extraordinary institutional legacy. Giovanni Nobili founded Santa Clara College—now Santa Clara University—in 1851. Anthony Maraschi established St. Ignatius Academy, which became the University of San Francisco, in 1855. Pamfilo da Magliano founded St. Bonaventure College in 1858. Giuseppe Cataldo founded Gonzaga College in 1887. A group of exiled Italian Jesuits established what is now Regis University in 1877.
The Italian Jesuits in California did something else: they laid the foundation for the state's winemaking industry.
In 1801, Philip Trajetta established the nation's first conservatory of music in Boston. In 1805, Thomas Jefferson recruited a group of Sicilian musicians to form a military band that would later become the nucleus of the United States Marine Band. Lorenzo Da Ponte—Mozart's former librettist, now a naturalized American citizen—founded the first opera house in the United States in 1833. The Italian Opera House in New York was the predecessor of both the New York Academy of Music and the Metropolitan Opera.
The Civil War and Columbus Day
Between five thousand and ten thousand Italian Americans fought in the Civil War. The vast majority served in the Union Army—both for demographic reasons (most lived in the North) and ideological ones. Francis Spinola, who served as a Union general, later became the first Italian American elected to the House of Representatives.
Some fought for the Confederacy. William Taliaferro and P. G. T. Beauregard were Confederate generals of Italian descent. Six Italian Americans received the Medal of Honor during the war, including Colonel Luigi Palma di Cesnola, who later became the first director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The 39th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment, nicknamed the Garibaldi Guard, had 350 Italian members and recruited volunteers from Italy and other European countries. Giuseppe Garibaldi himself—the great Italian unification hero—volunteered his services to President Lincoln in 1861 and was offered a major general's commission.
Five years after the war ended, in 1866, Italian Americans in New York City organized the first Columbus Day celebration.
Beyond the Cities
Not all Italian immigrants settled in the crowded tenements of northeastern cities. Many went to more remote regions—Florida, California, the Deep South—drawn by opportunities in agriculture, fishing, mining, railroad construction, and lumbering.
It was not uncommon, especially in the South, for these immigrants to face economic exploitation, hostility, and violence. But many persisted. Italian laborers were later joined by wives and children, creating permanent settlements. Entire towns were founded by Italian immigrants: Roseto, Pennsylvania; Tontitown, Arkansas; Valdese, North Carolina.
Beginning in 1863, Italian immigrants were among the principal groups of unskilled laborers who built the Transcontinental Railroad west from Omaha, working alongside Irish immigrants to connect the nation.
The Festa and the Neighborhood
Despite the hardship—the overcrowded housing, the dangerous work, the exploitation, the discrimination—Italian American neighborhoods developed rich social lives. The festa street festival became for many immigrants an important connection to the traditions of their ancestral villages. These celebrations helped create a sense of unity and common identity among people who had come from different regions of Italy and who, in many cases, had never thought of themselves as "Italian" before arriving in America.
Women worked as seamstresses in the garment industry or did piecework in their homes. Many families established small businesses. The Little Italys became self-contained worlds with their own economies, their own social hierarchies, their own ways of doing things.
The Businesses That Became Household Names
Amadeo Giannini pioneered the concept of branch banking to serve the Italian American community in San Francisco. He founded the Bank of Italy, which later became Bank of America. His bank financed the Golden Gate Bridge. It also financed the first American animated feature film—Walt Disney's Snow White—helping establish Hollywood as the capital of American film production.
Other Italian Americans founded companies that became nationally known brands: Ghirardelli Chocolate Company, Progresso, Planters Peanuts, Contadina, Chef Boyardee, and Jacuzzi.
Opera, Jazz, and the Movies
Italian conductors contributed to the early success of the Metropolitan Opera, but it was the arrival of impresario Giulio Gatti-Casazza in 1908, along with conductor Arturo Toscanini, that made the Met internationally famous. The premiere of Puccini's La Fanciulla del West on December 10, 1910—with Toscanini conducting and Enrico Caruso singing the lead—was both a major international success and an historic moment for Italian Americans.
Caruso became one of the most famous tenors in history, and his success symbolized something larger: Italian Americans were no longer just laborers building the nation's infrastructure. They were becoming part of its cultural life.
Rudolph Valentino became one of the first great film icons. Italian Americans made crucial contributions to the development of Dixieland jazz. The children and grandchildren of those impoverished southern Italian immigrants would go on to shape American entertainment, sports, politics, literature, and visual arts.
The Quota System
The Immigration Act of 1924 dramatically restricted the flow of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The quotas were explicitly designed to favor northern Europeans and limit Italians, Jews, and Slavs. In the 1920s, only 455,315 Italian immigrants arrived—a fraction of the previous decade's numbers.
But by then, the Italian American community had already reached critical mass. The great wave was over, but its effects were permanent. The neighborhoods, the traditions, the institutions, the businesses, the families—all of this would continue to grow and evolve long after the ships stopped coming.
A Sense of Alienation
For the early immigrants, there was often a sense of alienation from mainstream American culture. Many had little interest in learning English or otherwise assimilating. They had come to work, not to become American. Their world was the Little Italy, the padrone, the festa, the remittance sent home to the family in the old country.
This changed gradually, and then rapidly. World War I trapped them in America and made them prosperous. Their children grew up speaking English in American schools. The second and third generations moved to the suburbs, went to college, entered professions their grandparents could never have imagined.
Today, Italian Americans are among the largest ethnic groups in the United States, concentrated heavily in the urban Northeast and industrial Midwest but present in significant numbers in every major metropolitan area. The journey from impoverished southern Italian villages to full participation in American life took about three generations—roughly the same trajectory followed by most immigrant groups.
What remains distinctive is the scale of the contribution. Italian Americans didn't just build the physical infrastructure of American cities. They helped create American culture itself—its food, its music, its movies, its styles of doing business. The continent named after an Italian was shaped, in no small part, by the descendants of those five and a half million who crossed the ocean looking for work.