Transcript
Speaker: Hi everyone, thank you for listening to our new podcast. It is a labor of love on behalf of my brother and I. If you have any feedback for us, please email me at chloeadamo at gmail .com and I will make sure that it either gets fixed then and there or later in the future, if not next episode. Thank you.
Speaker: Hello everyone and welcome to All in Love with Mia, a family history podcast. I'm Chloe. And I am Guy.
Speaker: We are siblings and this is the first episode in what, as I said before, is supposed to be a family history podcast. We are taking our family history that I learned from our father and we are both putting it in the historical context of the time in which our family came over and all the stories that they apparently experienced and so on and so forth.
Speaker: This first episode is going to focus on our two great, great uncles. They are the first recorded members of the Sicilian side of our family who came over from Sicily to work on the transcontinental railroad. And oh boy, this is a very interesting story. So shall we get started? I believe so. So how should we start this?
Speaker: We should probably start in Sicily, I believe. Yes, we should. Yeah, let's start with the context, the historical context. All right. So I have a quote from a writer named Luigi Strumbrini. He lived in northern Italy at the time around 1855, I believe. And he said this of the then kingdom of two Sicilies, which was the
Speaker: minor kingdom that was set up like hundreds of years ago and went through many different changes. But he says this on the Southern Italian peninsula and the island. Foreigners who come to our country seeing the serene beauty of our laws, hearing talk of progress of civilization and of religion might believe that the Italians of the two Sicilies enjoying enviable happiness, yet no state in Europe
Speaker: is in a worse condition than ours, not accepting even the Turks. The Kingdom of Two Sicilies, the country which is said to be the Garden of Europe, people die of hunger, are in state worse than beasts, and the only law is capriciousness. So. That's bad. It's bad. That's the, I believe that's the best thing you can describe, uh, the Southern Italian peninsula at this time. Okay.
Speaker: So this all starts in the French with the French Revolution and the spread of the ideals of liberalism and anti -feudal or anti absolutist monarchy type of things, you know, Republicanship. Yeah. So but with the but the Kingdom of Two Sicilies was basically at this point was a
Speaker: Weird holdover stuck in time feudal society That I'm pretty sure without the guns the new dress codes or the new styles of dress and the language they spoke I you probably wouldn't find much difference between like 700 southern Italy and 1700 southern Italy there's
Speaker: Not much difference between them, except like who ruled and the level of technology. The kingdom at this point was ruled by a guy named Ferdinand II. He's described as never read a book, couldn't spell, and hid by the peasants. He was an anti -intellectual, and he despised the middle class and Naples that was starting to grow.
Speaker: you know, starting to, they'll spread their ideals of an anti -feudal society type of thing. Yeah. And just to interject here. Sorry, guy. Just to interject here. The Kingdom of Two Sicilies is basically like this island of Sicily plus like the area around Naples. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. It's it's like where Naples is. That's like the most northern tip, I think, goes all the way down to the boot and then the island of Sicily. That is the
Speaker: land of the two Sicilies. Yeah. Really bad place to live. Very. Because it was because there was two types of people that lived in Sicily and the kingdom of two Sicilies. It was either inhabited by great lords or very, very poor peasants. And that is how it was since the in the late 1700s when all other
Speaker: European states were going through like a change of a rising middle class, intellectual class that were opposed to the feudal lords. This didn't really happen that much in the kingdom of Sicily. And to make things worse, there was a big cholera outbreak that killed at least a tenth of the population of the kingdom. So at some point the people got
Speaker: fed up with this and at first like it started as like these small groups of like revolutionary liberal like inspired by the French revolution type of groups start popping up around the place. They try they managed to expel for an end the second during the Napoleonic Wars but but I think but a cardinal managed to
Speaker: rally a bunch of peasants and then stormed the city and sacked it and then stormed Naples and Naples and sacked it. There were a few other attempts, but most were unsuccessful due to like geopolitical machinations, basically like the Fernando II had the support of the British Empire. Well, at the time they had he had the support of the British Empire, even though, by all accounts, nobody in
Speaker: the guy, the British liaison that worked with him did not like him whatsoever. It was very hesitant to put him in power, but you know, he's anti Napoleon, he's anti France. So you got to do what you got to do. By around the 1840s. There was a bunch of Italian nationalist groups that started popping up all around Italy, not just in Southern
Speaker: not just in the two cities, it started in like Piedmont, there was nationalist groups in Rome and Tuscany, all the other just really small states that just wanted to make a united Italy. After fewer vaults and a few failures, Italy was united in 1861 and most famously Giuseppe Garibaldi who brought in the
Speaker: Katum of the two of Sicily's to the new Piedmontese Italian state by just having 1000 volunteers roughly sail into the island of Sicily and just started rallying peasants to come to his cause and like overthrowing the divided landed feudal class. And by 1861,
Speaker: Kingdom of Two Sicilies was no more, and after a year of a dictatorship, Garibaldi managed to give over the Two Sicilies to the new Italian state. But by 1865, things were not all happy. There was extremely high taxes, and the island of Sicily and the southern Italian coast there was
Speaker: High taxes, and since the entire country was a feudal state until the time Garibaldi conquered it, the entire site had suffered societal and economic collapse. And, ostensibly, Garibaldi invaded the island in the southern Italy
Speaker: with the promise that the peasants would have like their own like land to call their own. But at some point, a bunch of Italian northern Italian businessmen and Italian businessmen and other middle class types of people, they started buying up land and the peasants didn't get any. They were kicked off their land or or they just couldn't grow enough food. There wasn't a central government at all.
Speaker: in any of this part of Italy and Sicily. So at some point, people just sort of started going into organized crime, like they became brigands, basically. And there wasn't enough police officers either to like, keep the population in line to like, keep the peace. So there was just some people just started like going to bands of these brigands and they started raiding each other's villages, they started
Speaker: creating protection rackets. They start smuggling stuff. Really, this is the beginning of the Sicilian Mafia when there was absolutely no central government and people just sort of did what they needed to or did what they want. They took what they want. So with all of this, with the declining agrarian state, the violence,
Speaker: lack of hope, most a lot of Southern Italian peasants just left and went to America. They booked it. Like they, yeah, by between like 1876 and 1976, 26 million Italian Southern Italians left Italy for good. Well, but there was also ones that would just migrate over to America or other places.
Speaker: I worked there for a few years and go back to Sicily to bring back the money to the families. Really, this is the start of Italian immigration to the United States. Yeah. Hemorrhage peasants, according to historian Eric Amfitteratroph. Amfitteratroph? I don't know. That's such a weird
Speaker: Okay, you're not a good historian if your name is half way pronounceable by a normal person. That's my - Fair enough. Well, the last wave of Italian immigrants, Southern Italian immigrants came to the United States in the 1920s, not because everything was hunky dory in Italy, but because they wanted to limit immigration in general, especially groups of people they considered less than such as Eastern Europeans, Irish, Irish immigrants, Chinese immigrants, etc, etc, etc. But
Speaker: This is not the 1920s. We are talking about the 1860s. Now, in the late 19th century, when the Sicilians made their way to the States, they were able to help each other out to grab jobs. They had a very intelligent system as the Historical Society of Pennsylvania recounts in one article.
Speaker: Newly arriving Italian immigrants in the late 19th century typically obtained jobs with the railroads through the Padroni system. During the early years of Italian immigration to Pennsylvania, Padroni, or labor agents, were a vital part of the settlement process.
Speaker: In addition to securing employment, Petroni sometimes paid for passage, provided food, and obtained housing accommodations for the worker. In turn, the Italian laborer paid a portion of his wages to the Petroni as a fee for his services. By the early 20th century, as more Italians settled in Pennsylvania and Italian community strengthened, Caesani, or fellow townspeople, influenced the employment the newly arriving Italian immigrants sought.
Speaker: Italians viewed work on the railroad as a stepping stone towards more specialized industrial jobs or public works projects. It was not uncommon for Pesani to quote -unquote hold spots for their fellow countrymen. As one Italian laborer moved into a semi -skilled position or into another industry, his position was filled by someone he recruited. These methods were continually satisfied the railroad industry's demand for labor while also providing Italian immigrants with ready employment.
Speaker: So basically it sort of ties into modern day employment where it's like a lot of people will get jobs mostly because of who they know and get good stable jobs because of who they know. So this was probably the method in which our great great uncles ended up getting railway jobs. Speaking of how they got the jobs, let's talk a little bit about how they ended up here in the States.
Speaker: So obviously with the decline of the agrarian states and the total political chaos happening, the whole mass migration thing, they were probably like the rest of everyone else in southern Italy at this time looking for jobs. And they, according to dad, our father who told us this story,
Speaker: He mentioned that they had seen a poster that said, come to America, we have food and we have work. So they hopped about to New York. They got through and they were shipped on a train to the middle of the Great Plains.
Speaker: Now, this method, as I just described as written down by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, is probably the method in which our great -great -uncles end up getting railway jobs, like I mentioned. There were a couple of issues with this, however.
Speaker: Many immigrants, many Sicilian immigrants didn't speak English, including our great -great -uncles, and the high turnover meant most laborers had less experience making them more prone to railway construction accidents. In order to help improve safety communication in Americanize the Italians, they ended up offering English classes to the Italian workers. Now speaking of the transcontinental railroad, let's talk about it for a moment.
Speaker: The need for a westward railroad became a hot -button issue during the mid -1800s due to the westward expansion and the amount of people settling farther and farther west. Asa Whitney, a New York merchant who traded heavily with China, was particularly obsessed with a westward railroad, petitioning Congress to have the charter a 60 -mile strip through the public domain to help raise money for the railroad.
Speaker: It didn't work, but he ended up creating a booklet called Project For A Railway to the Pacific, lining out the possible westbound routes. An engineer by the name of Theodore Judah eventually came up with the plan to have a train go through Donner's Pass. Yes, that's Donner's Pass.
Speaker: the cannibal daughter's pass, and he gathered some investors in Sacramento to help fund the railroad. After some land acquisitions, particularly from Mexico, and President Lincoln's realization that railroads were good for making war, and because of the need for better postal service out West, plans for the railroad started to get put into action. Serving was started and eventually it would start to get built. This was
Speaker: This is a very simple oversimplification of the backstory behind the transcontinental railroad, but we want to focus on the workers, particularly our great -great uncles, who were carted out to the middle of the Great Plains to work on this railroad. We should also mention that these Great Plains were not empty. They were inhabited by a bunch of Native American tribes that lived in that area for thousands of years, even before
Speaker: President Lincoln decided that he wanted to build a big railroad to connect the two coasts of the United States. Oh yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Well, we'll talk about that on hold. Oh, we will talk about that. There's some juicy shit in there. But anywho, actually, speaking of that, this area would have probably the United States would have probably been the most diverse location that our great great uncles would have ever been to in their entire lives.
Speaker: Early on in the railroad's construction, they used Irish and German and other white European immigrants to build the railways. After a time, they were having difficulties with worker turnover and finding labor to work on the brutal conditions of the transcontinental railroad.
Speaker: Because of that, they ended up hiring more and more Chinese Americans, many of whom had come to California in order to escape the poverty and politically unstable environment of southern China. And they would try to strike it rich in the gold rush. Many of these people ended up staying and ended up working other jobs. Railroad director Charles Crocker first suggested hiring more Chinese Americans, and while it initially met backlash from its colleagues because of prejudice and racism,
Speaker: They eventually caved because there were just not enough white people signing up for the labor positions. These laborers had it worse than laborers of other races, often dealing with racial slurs, physical abuse from supervisors, and having to provide their own food and shelter while their white counterparts were fed and bed on the company's dime.
Speaker: Many of them worked for the Central Pacific Railroad, which started in California and later met with the Union Pacific Railroad, in which many more Irish white people and most likely our great great uncles were employed at. Now, railroad construction was dangerous work. And I did want to bring up the Chinese American railroad workers mostly because I think they give a good insight into how horrible working conditions was for most of these people.
Speaker: And because it was so terrible, they literally did like a giant strike to try and be like, hey, can you not try and kill us while building the railroad?
Speaker: Anywho, it was dangerous work. About 20 ,000 Chinese people alone died in accidents, explosions, and due to disease while working on the railroad. It was also grueling work. The laborers worked from sunrise to sunset, clearing the path for the railroad, as well as building the track six days a week through grueling heat and frigid snow. And as somebody who lives in the Midwest, working six hours, six days a week, and like,
Speaker: multiple like 12 ungodly amount of hours per day in this extreme ass weather. Oh my god, they're literally torturing them. Anywho, there are also some accusations of Chinese American immigrants being murdered and thrown into Lake Tahoe because the Central Pacific Railroad couldn't afford to pay all of them.
Speaker: because fuck brown people, I guess, and fuck paying for workers, I guess. Obviously, because of all this, the 19th century's largest strike involved the Chinese -American rail workers. Due to their long hours, dangerous conditions, and lack of equal pay to their white counterparts, they held an eight -day strike in 1867.
Speaker: although the strike ended without pay parity because the company had cut off food, transportation, and supplies to the workers, conditions did become better for them. Now, I think this gives a good insight as to what it would have been like to work on the railroad.
Speaker: And with these absolutely horrific conditions, you can imagine how much our great uncles. Real like you can imagine that they believe that they made a huge mistake the minute that they got to where they were supposed to be working on the railroad. Allegedly, they did. Yeah, they were like they were there for what they took. They took one look at the camp.
Speaker: and they decided that they were not gonna stay there anymore. Oh yeah, oh yeah. After only two days of being worked to the bone and eating bad food, if they could get food at all, they came up with a plan to escape the railhead. That night, one of them went up to the guard standing in front of the bridge to confront him, while the other went around the bridge to sneak up behind the guard. While the confrontation was happening, the other brothers let the guard's throat, allowing both of them to escape the encampment.
Speaker: Now it was time for them to walk all the way across the United States from the middle of the Midwest to New York. And we only know of like two events that happened in between the murder of the guard and
Speaker: Well, maybe not murder more like assassination, assassination, forever sleep. You know, you just come to sleep. He put him to sleep permanently with a knife. Well, yes. Yeah. But yeah, we don't know much what happened in between like going from like
Speaker: in the middle of fucking nowhere to New York. But we do know of a couple things that did happen. Oh, yeah. And it was and honestly, the fact that it was technically the Wild West at the time was rapidly changing. And it was
Speaker: quote, unquote, industrializing with the construction of the transcontinental railroad. And it was particularly devastating to the local indigenous American population. Now, I there are a lot of terms for the indigenous American people in Canada, they call themselves First Nations, the government calls them American Indians, which a lot of people say is outdated. And I
Speaker: agree with that term. Some academics will call them Native Americans. I'm going to be using the term Indigenous American because that is what's the most amount of people who are actually Indigenous American call themselves, at least from what I've noticed, just being Facebook friends with someone who is actually Indigenous American and also like just going online and reading blogs and so forth. So that's the term I'm using for this
Speaker: I just, I just switched between the two. Yeah, that's the name of American and indigenous. That's fair. Yeah. I mean, they're both like the least defensive terms and probably the best terms. I have, again, that I'm sticking with indigenous American because that's the term that the community at large themselves seems to be using or communities because there's a lot of them. I just like variety in my life. Fair. Like Italian, Sicilian, right?
Speaker: Yeah, sure. Nobody knows what the fuck a Sicilian is. Yeah. Well, that's why we're here. Well, anyway. It's all right. We're fake Italians. Don't worry about it.
Speaker: Anywho, Indigenous Americans in the Midwest were very mobile, often moving their camps to follow the bison herds and relocate depending on the season. Not all of Indigenous Americans across the country were like this. Some of them like on the Pacific Northwest and like the western part of Washington or whatever. Some of them were a little bit more stationary, but a lot of Indigenous Americans would move depending on the season.
Speaker: The onset of the transcontinental railroad completely disrupted their way of life as well as the livelihoods of the bison. The transcontinental railroad has been credited for completely decimating the bison population in North America. Needless to say, the majority of the indigenous American groups of the Midwest were very much not fans of the transcontinental railroad.
Speaker: The transcontinental railroad is responsible for endangering bison, species that they were heavily dependent on for the survival and way of life. Many of them were so against the building of this gigantic railroad that they ended up attempting to sabotage as much of the construction as possible, including completely leveling parts of the tracks in order to prevent their homeland and way of life from being taken from them.
Speaker: Sabotage was done by destroying the iron bars needed to create the railroad, creating blockades that would occasionally kill rail workers and shooting out rail workers while taking their livestock across the tracks. Multiple wars were fought over the building of the railroad.
Speaker: only one, one of the only groups of indigenous Americans that didn't try to destroy the transcontinental railroad were the Pawnee and that was due more to the fact that they really hated the Sioux and they even went out of their way with rail workers to, they would even go out with rail workers to protect them as they were working to make sure they didn't get attacked. So that being said, how did indigenous Americans react to immigrants?
Speaker: Well, as you can tell, they didn't always like them. And relations with them were always kind of tense. Not only were they trying to literally kill people who were working on the railroad and trying to literally destroy their way of life, but there were some Irish Americans who ended up taking part in some of the imperial campaigns of the 1800s to 1900s, such as General Sherman. Yes, that General Sherman.
Speaker: you know, the one who burned down the self. But the Choctaw also sent money over to the Irish during the Great Hunger in order for them to buy food leading to a very nice statue on the Emerald Isle and leading the Irish back in 2020 to send money back to the Choctaw nation during COVID to help them with their issues during COVID. Other than that, yeah. Surprisingly, there was a lot of
Speaker: European immigrants that were part of the US army at the time, especially the cavalry. There was a, I believe like at least a Custer's, like, you know, Custer's unit was at least 40 % European immigrants that were just fresh off the boat.
Speaker: Yeah, but if I remember correctly, a lot of those were less of like, oh, I want to fight for the country and more of like, ah, a nice paycheck. I love a nice paycheck. Money is good. I also, yeah. That turned out very well for them, I think. Oh, with Custer, definitely nothing bad ever happened. Never.
Speaker: They definitely didn't get completely destroyed by the nation, the indigenous nation that they are fighting. Anywho, besides that, I couldn't really find any detailed interactions between like any of the indigenous American nations and like regular old immigrants. And because of this lack of recorded interaction, this might make this next part make a little bit more sense.
Speaker: Now the uncles went out on foot across the Great Plains. No food, no water, just their own determination to get the fuck out of the United States. Along the way, they met a variety of indigenous tribes. Although they couldn't speak each other's language, we do know that every single indigenous person's reaction to seeing these two Sicilian men probably covered in blood on foot with no supplies was something along the lines of, who the fuck are you and why the fuck are you here?
Speaker: They were nice enough to give them both food and supplies before sending them out on their way to continue their journey on foot towards Albany. Such a strange little interaction. Could you imagine? You are a Potawatomi. Potawatomi, I live in Chicago, so Potawatomi for the, and still are the indigenous, predominant indigenous people who were out here for the longest time. And you're chilling by Lake Michigan, or Michigami.
Speaker: as known in the language, and you're just living life trying to fish or whatever when all of a sudden these two blood -covered men
Speaker: with no any nothing literally nothing comes up to you and they're just they're speaking in like a very strange language it's not the language that most white people think they don't know English and they're like and they look really ragged like I would I don't know
Speaker: That's pretty, that's a weird, that's such a funny scenario, you know? It's like, hmm, we're fighting these white people, we hate these white people, but also who the fuck are you? You clearly aren't on their side, who are you, you know? Yep, it is a very weird interaction. Then again, anything in the 1800s is just gonna be a weird fucking interaction.
Speaker: Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's such a politically rife period. Like it's just so interesting. Well, anyway, they were nice enough to give them food and supplies. And I believe horses, I think they got horses as well. But they ended up going towards Albany.
Speaker: And in Albany, they ended up finding somebody who spoke Sicilian. After explaining their situation, they were able to hitch a boat back to Sicily. Considering that, as you mentioned before, that there was a chunk of the Sicilian population that went to the U .S. solely for work purposes, you can imagine that some of them would come back after a while.
Speaker: And some of them did. About 30 to 50 percent of Italians who immigrated from their homeland did eventually come back within about five years. They were known as the Rittornati. I'm assuming that means something like the returned or whatever.
Speaker: Those who stayed kept in contact with their families back home and sent them money or took home with them anywhere between $4 million and $30 million a year. Some parts of Italian wealth can be traced directly back to money earned within the United States and that's just fucking crazy.
Speaker: like, this is the whole point of the EU, right? Like, like, oh, you go to work somebody else, eventually you send enough wealth back to, I don't know, what's a country that has like no jobs right now, Spain, Spain, you live in Turkey. Yeah, Turkey, you go to different parts of the EU, you make a fuck ton of money, you send it back to your family, eventually, like, the economy there grows and makes everything better. But
Speaker: I don't know. But no, that's just so interesting that like some parts of Italy are literally directly traced back to like some parts of Italian weather literally directly traced directly back to the United States. Like that's insane to me. Yep. Yeah.
Speaker: And something that Dad told me was that even though our ancestors faced a lot of obstacles here in the states, they were given the freedom to make money. And that was something they couldn't really do back in Sicily, not in the late 1800s, certainly. And it's a story that makes me think of US -bound immigrants today who keep in touch with their families back home and support them with money earned through the United States.
Speaker: It's really interesting to see how these patterns continue. Like, like you see this a lot with like Latina people or Latin American people. It's really interesting how like I know several people who like, oh, they'll go to study in the States or they'll go to the States and work in the States and like send a bunch of money back to their family. So I just, it's like, oh, it's just history is a flat circle.
Speaker: History is a giant flat circle. Well, that's it for this episode of Anla Flemigia, a family history podcast. Feel free to leave us a rating wherever you're listening to this. My name is Chloe. You can find my website. I do acting stuff and choreography stuff. You can find out more about that on my website, ChloeAdamo .com. Guy, you got anything you want to plug?
Speaker: I got nothing. I'm a ghost at this point, so... Well, that sucks. Anywho, have a good one, everyone.
