For
several years, every Saturday evening the entire families of our
Italian neighbors were our guests. These evenings were very
popular during our first winters at Hull-House. Many educated
Italians helped us, and the house became known as a place where
Italians were welcome and where national holidays were observed.
They come to us with their petty lawsuits, sad relics of the
vendetta, with their incorrigible boys, with their hospital
cases, with their aspirations for American clothes, and with
their needs for an interpreter.
An editor of an Italian paper made a genuine connection between
us and the Italian colony, not only with the Neapolitans and the
Sicilians of the immediate neighborhood, but with the educated
connazionali throughout the city, until he went south to start an
agricultural colony in Alabama, in the establishment of which
Hull-House heartily cooperated.
Possibly the South Italians more than any other immigrants
represent the pathetic stupidity of agricultural people crowded
into city tenements, and we were much gratified when thirty
peasant families were induced to move upon the land which they
knew so well how to cultivate. The starting of this colony,
however, was a very expensive affair in spite of the fact that
the colonists purchased the land at two dollars an acre; they
needed much more than raw land, and although it was possible to
collect the small sums necessary to sustain them during the hard
time of the first two years, we were fully convinced that
undertakings of this sort could be conducted properly only by
colonization societies such as England has established, or,
better still, by enlarging the functions of the Federal
Department of Immigration.
Pages:
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252