The late 1800s, into the early 1900s were a very pivotal era for European immigrants, whether they be Irish, Jewish, or Italian nationals.
They each came to America seeking a better life than the poverty and famine they’d known all their lives that they left behind in their beloved homelands. Mostly destitute lives that they now hoped to scratch and claw their way out of.
Their arduous journey would require enduring the worst possible conditions imaginable. Fathers and mothers with their infants and young children. Elderly grandparents, young and old single people alike traveling alone, all stuffed in the bowels of a damp freighter, amid their own excrements, with little food except for hard bread and water, while sailing the vast expanse of the deep blue Atlantic Ocean, in route to the “New World.”
The harshest of conditions: minimal food and provisions, embarrassingly being forced to go to the bathroom in front of each other in a smelly bucket that was passed around. Sickness and disease all around them, loneliness, famine, and more.
Often hundreds would be jammed into cramped quarters like so many heads of cattle. They sometimes had to pile on top of one another or jammed shoulder to shoulder with hardly enough room to stretch their legs and arms in the damp, dark hull of the ship.
They were treated as “freight” or cattle, as opposed to human beings with feelings, dignity, and respect. Cramped quarters with no sunlight or fresh air to breath for weeks on end.
There were many who didn’t survive that journey. And of the ones that did, who were lucky enough to even reach America’s shores, sailing through New York’s Ellis Island to view Lady Liberty proudly holding her torch of freedom in her raised hand, many were so exhausted and beaten down by the time they arrived, that they could hardly form a smile on their sunken, impoverished faces.
For although they had now arrived to the New World, where the streets were said to be “paved with gold”, most were more frightened than excited by the prospect of starting anew in a strange land, where they couldn’t speak the language and had no idea of its customs or what may lay ahead.
The Italian immigration experience accounted for a huge influx of these early newcomers. They would disembark at New York’s Ellis Island and undergo a rigorous, and often embarrassing, lonely experience, which served as their first contact with “la americani.”
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