Authors: Andrew Morton
At the end of his interview, Gaetano pulled out a grubby wad of bills, as evidence that as well as having paid for his passage he had saved enough to bring with him $40 for board and lodging until he could find work. A skeptical officer, Geder ordered a recount and penciled in the arrival document that Gaetano had in fact only brought $30. In the haste of officialdom, Michelina, his wife who had been left behind, was renamed ‘Michela’ on his entry papers.
Finally, Gaetano was free to leave, after a nerve-racking if unexceptional admission to the nation of hope, enterprise and freedom. Like millions of others, he soon discovered that he had exchanged one kind of servitude for another. His story, at once prosaic yet heroic, was repeated hundreds of thousands of times in dozens of American towns and states during this period.
Aliquippa in 1920 was a classic company town: the steel company, Jones and Laughlin, owned and controlled virtually everything – from the houses, water, gas and electricity, to banks, buses and everyday shops. Its history was recent; in 1907 the company, wanting to expand its operations from Pittsburgh’s South Side, bought the site of the former Woodlawn amusement park and built a huge modern mill and housing for a projected 30,000 people. Eventually the name was changed from Woodlawn to Aliquippa (after a local Native American princess) – although, because of its isolation and the iron rule of the company, the locals knew it by another name: Little Siberia.
Gaetano Ciccone, however, viewing Aliquippa for the first time, could be forgiven for thinking he had arrived not in an Arctic prison camp but in an industrial version of Dante’s Inferno. Once described as ‘hell with the lid off,’ Aliquippa’s burning smokestacks belched out a steady stream of grey and black that shrouded the horizon as far as the eye could see, while the sky directly above the town glowed with fiery oranges, reds and murky yellows from the steel mills. The pervasive rotten-egg smell of sulfur was one Gaetano would soon get used to.
This corruption of the landscape was mirrored by the rawness of daily life. Pittsburgh had the world’s highest mortality rate for typhoid, and tuberculosis was rampant; there was more space for cemeteries in the city than for recreation, while the destitute and immigrants like Gaetano were crowded in a squalor unsurpassed by the Old World.
It is unclear whether Gaetano and others of his clan had been brought over by the notorious
padroni,
or bosses – Italians already in America who acted as employment brokers and operated a form of indentured servitude. It is more likely, though, that he had to bribe the mill foreman with some of his carefully saved dollars to secure a hot and dirty job on the floor of the blast-furnace shed. Certainly, it was not long before he joined the streams of fellow steelmen, metal lunch pail in hand, traveling to the J and L mill, where he was officially described as a ‘wire worker.’ For the first few months he doubtless shared a bed with another worker on an opposite shift in his boarding house in West Aliquippa, where the 4,200 Italian immigrants were clustered. After a while he settled into the mute industrial rhythm of the community, the hardships of the field exchanged for the iron rigors of the foundry.
The local newspaper – controlled, needless to say, by the boss of J and L, Tom Girdler – regularly ran editorials denouncing union organizers as ‘bloodsuckers’ and ‘mad dogs,’ who should be met with violence. During the 1892 ‘battle’ of the Homestead Steel Works (part of the Carnegie Steel Company), near Aliquippa, sixteen people had been killed and hundreds injured when steel bosses sent in 300 Pinkerton detectives to break a strike organized by the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers. As a result of the strike non-union labor was brought in, and the steel industry was not unionized until the mid-1930s. During the national steel strike of 1919, a year before Gaetano arrived, union organizers had been turned away by police waiting at Aliquippa train station, and on one occasion a union organizer was spirited away by the police and committed to a state mental hospital.
The company deliberately sought to recruit immigrants, knowing that they would have arrived with no notions of joining unions, and, partly for that reason, would be easy to control and willing to do the hard, dirty work in the mill. Newly arrived Slovaks, Greeks, Italians, Irish and Eastern Europeans all worked alongside one another, the lack of a common language in this polyglot community a convenient barrier to communication, and thus to fraternization and organization. Furthermore, every ethnic group was assigned to a different housing area and discouraged from straying into other neighborhoods.
Within the cowed immigrant workforce there was a pecking order based on nationality and race. One Italian carpenter, for example, was told he could not have a more skilled job because ‘he had the map of Italy all over his face’. Indeed, the Italians were the bottom of the heap, and Italian peasants like Gaetano the lowest of the low. In the shadow of the Mafia, they faced discrimination not just from the authorities but from other ethnic groups, who referred to them as ‘dagos,’ a corruption of the common Spanish name Diego, but often held to be derived from ‘day laborer.’
In America between 1874 and 1915, some thirty-nine Italian Americans had been lynched for alleged offenses, and it was not uncommon for the police, faced with a crime, to round up as many Italians as possible. Such was the climate of hatred that Italy at one point broke off diplomatic relations. A comment in the
New York Times
was typical of the temper of the period. ‘Those sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins … are to us a pest without mitigation.’
The Ciccones, like millions of other Italians, refused to be cowed by the bellicose and the belligerent. They stayed rather than ran, worked hard, and lived on to fight another day. It is as though Gaetano Ciccone absorbed whole the advice from an immigration guidebook, written in 1891, on how to survive in America – and then passed it on to future generations. ‘Hold fast, this is most necessary in America. Select a goal and pursue it with all your might … You will experience a bad time, but sooner or later you will achieve your goal … Do not take a moment’s rest. Run.’ One view might certainly be espoused by Gaetano’s famous granddaughter: articulating America’s can-do ethic, the guidebook’s author wrote: ‘A final virtue is needed in America – called cheek … Do not say: “I cannot, I do not know.”’
The rampant racism of the time, coupled with company policy, ensured that Gaetano kept to his own people. By 1925 records show that his young bride Michelina had now joined him and they had started a family. In all they had six boys; first born was Guido, followed by Rocco, Neilo, Pete, Guy, and Silvio, born on June 2, 1931. (Silvio later anglicized his name to Tony.) This large, bustling family of boisterous boys crammed into a modest house at 420 Allegheny Avenue, a stone’s throw from Saint Joseph’s Roman Catholic church, where Gaetano, his wife and boys, as well as the three other Ciccone families who lived on the same street, worshiped.
Day-to-day life was a struggle, the local women taking in washing and ironing to make ends meet. The Ciccones grew vegetables in their backyard, while Gaetano brewed homemade wine, a skill his son Silvio would one day turn into a business. Whether Michelina was one of the many indomitable Italian wives who met the pay train at the mill for fear that their husbands might drink it away at the local tavern remains a moot point – Madonna has said that her paternal grandparents were alcoholics.
Not just wine was brewing in the community, however. On the night of May 12, 1937, the workforce finally rebelled against years of ruthless exploitation. In July 1935, the historic National Labor Relations Act was made law. Commonly known as the Wagner Act, its general objective was to guarantee to employees ‘the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid and protection.’ Unsurprisingly, it was resisted by many large companies, and when a landmark Supreme Court ruling ordered J and L to reinstate workers fired for daring to organize a union, the company chairman, Horace E. Lewis, stonewalled in applying it. At this, almost the entire population, including the women and children, gathered in grimly quiet protest at the long tunnel that marked the main entrance to the giant J and L plant. The hissing, clanking, roaring mill was stilled, and for the first time in memory the valley did not glow brilliant red that night.
It was a short-lived strike. Within forty hours, the company capitulated and the action was called off. It was a moment that changed the lives of everyone in Aliquippa for ever. ‘We were really happy, really happy!’ recalled one elderly woman in a TV documentary commemorating this historic victory. ‘We had a parade; I tell you that street was loaded with people, celebrating, hollering and screaming.’ (They were fortunate; a similar union rally in Chicago on Memorial Day 1937 led to the police massacring men, women and children after indiscriminately firing on the unarmed crowd.)
Those fateful hours in Aliquippa genuinely transformed the lives of those who took part, and the story of how the people took on the might of the company, and won, was passed on from generation to generation. A decade after union recognition, the whole town was transformed, the community redefined. As the industrial historian Lynn Vacca, has noted: ‘For the first time, the immigrant workers who made up the majority of Aliquippa’s population began to think of themselves as authentic American citizens, with real recourse to the civil and economic rights they had up until then only heard about.’
Gaetano himself took an active part in the strike, and, young as he was, Silvio is bound to have absorbed, consciously or unconsciously, the change in the communal climate. Like thousands of other children of immigrants, he was imperceptibly and inevitably growing apart from his parents. Born in America, he spoke Italian at home but learned English at school; he took part in the traditional Italian festival celebrating San Rocco’s feast day in August, but he played baseball in the street with his friends.
A devout Catholic boy, bright, studious yet conformist, Silvio went to Saint Joseph’s church every day and, with his brothers, attended the Catholic school on the church grounds. Like many sons of steelworkers, Silvio had an aptitude for sciences, mathematics and engineering. Yet within the close-knit Italian community, education was seen as a curse as well as a blessing. While few steelworkers wished for their sons to follow in their own footsteps, they felt that education was a dangerous source of cosmopolitan ideas threatening traditions and ethnic values, and it was with reluctance that they recognized that only through education could their offspring escape the iron demands of the foundry floor.
Indeed, it is an extraordinary achievement in men like Gaetano Ciccone that they triumphed against all the odds. Most learned English after a fashion, they worked hard, taught their children, nourished their churches, helped to build the labor movement and kept faith in the American dream, which eventually most realized in the careers of their children and grandchildren. How far Silvio’s ambition to stay in school, rather than work full-time, created conflict within the family is difficult to judge. Madonna has articulated her father’s dreams and desires. ‘It’s not that he was ashamed, really, but he wanted to be better,’ she has said. ‘I think he wanted us to have a better life than he did when he was growing up.’
The reality was not quite so sharply defined. With the Korean War looming, and with it the promise that the military would take care of a young man’s education, Silvio signed up to the Air Force Reserve. As a teenager living through the Second World War and seeing his brothers go off to fight – his brother Peter served with the US Navy – he was eager to do his bit. He rose through the ranks to become a sergeant and, after a short period stationed in Alaska, was sent to the huge Goodfellow airbase outside San Angelo in Texas, where he worked in the control tower overseeing pilots learning to fly jet fighters. He used his time wisely, and while waiting for his discharge studied at the nearby San Angelo Junior College. After completing his military service in 1952 he returned to his hometown in Pennsylvania, commuting from his parents’ home to Geneva College, a Christian institution founded in 1848, located not far away in Beaver Falls.
Earnest and steadfast, he remained deeply committed to his Catholic faith, going to church every day and attending Bible classes as he actively integrated his Christian faith and values with the more practical demands of a three-year degree course in physics. He and the other five physics majors were a rather anonymous bunch, contributing little to extra-curricular activities at the college. It was entirely understandable. In those days the college catered to young men and women who were working their way through school. Silvio was no exception, taking on a variety of jobs in Aliquippa to pay his college fees. His graduation photograph, taken in June 1955, reveals a young man, just twenty-four, with a cool, steady, intelligent stare, a downturned, rather cruel, mouth, and the dark, brooding good looks of a 1950s matinee idol.
A little over three weeks after the photograph was taken he traveled north to Bay City in Michigan, where he married a girl three years his junior, Madonna Louise Fortin.
The Fortins were one of the pioneering families of North America, boasting a pedigree that went back three centuries. In 1650 Julien Fortin, then twenty-nine, went on a great adventure, sailing from Le Havre in his native France for a new life in what was then known as New France. Three months after setting out he arrived in the small port of Quebec, where he quickly found work and went on to become a butcher and a prosperous businessman. His wife, Geneviève Gamache, whom he married on February 11, 1652, had twelve children by him, four girls and eight boys. Their offspring settled throughout Canada, these sturdy folk becoming the solid working backbone of the fledgling nation. Stoical, tenacious and resolute, the Fortins have a name for the family’s dominant characteristic. They call it ‘Fortintude.’ ‘It’s a combination of determination and stubbornness to get to where they want to go,’ says Claire Narbonne-Fortin. ‘In essence, to achieve their dreams. So nothing Madonna Junior does ever surprises us.’