In the 1860s and '70s, hundreds--maybe thousands--of Italian children migrated to New York to make money as street musicians. They worked for bosses known as padroni, living in squalor and suffering abuse at the hands of their employers. In 1873, their plight unleashed moral outrage in New York and neighboring states, which prompted the federal government to pass new laws criminalizing the exploitative practices of padroni.
Above: John Thompson, “Italian Street Musicians” (1877). Thompson’s photograph depicts child street performers in London, which—like New York—attracted Italian musicians in large numbers in the 1860s and '70s.
SHOW NOTES
Oscar Gustave Rejlander, “The Organ Grinder” (1860s). This intimate photograph shows an Italian youth, possibly blind, with a crank-operated organ. The Italian children who performed in cities such as New York played a number of instruments, including harps, accordions, triangles, violins, hurdy-gurdies, and various types of organ.
John Henry Bufford, “The Organ Grinder” (1860s). Based in Boston, Bufford made a series of images of street life in that city. Among them was this colorful depiction of an adult organ grinder, accompanied by a monkey and a little girl dressed in Old-World costume. Many Italian performers arrived to the U.S. in New York, only to fan out across the country to several other cities, including Boston.
Constantin Meunier, “The Organ Grinder” (1873). This oil painting is a rare, tranquil glimpse into the life of am Italian street performer. Meunier paints the youth in a private, tender moment, smiling at his dog. (Dogs frequently performed as dancers alongside organ grinders).
James Tissot, “The Organ Grinder” (1872)—By contrast, this drawing by French painter James Tissot offers up a far more stereotypical rendition of the Italian street musician, this time accompanied by a performing monkey.
Lewis W. Hine, “Gizzi Family, New York City, Making Roses” (1930). Though New York passed several important pieces of legislation to regulate child labor from the 1870s through the interwar period, Italian immigrant children continued to perform jobs in various settings well into the 20th century. Here, the Gizzi children help their mother make artificial flowers, one of the many small-scale manufacturing jobs that could be done in the family home.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
---Anbinder, Tyler. Five Points: The 19th Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum. New York, NY: Free Press, 2012.
---Burrows, Edwin G. and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
---Coraggioso, Cagliardo. Wandering Minstrel: A New Edition by Carlo Pirozzi. 2018. Originally published by Oxford University Press, 1938.
---Fox, Margalit. The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized Crime Boss. New York: Random House, 2024.
---Homberger, Eric. The Historical Atlas of New York City: A Visual Celebration of 400 Years of New York City’s History. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998.
---Zucchi, John E. The Little Slaves of the Harp. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992.
---Various historical newspaper articles, particularly from The New York Times.
TRANSCRIPT
Just a heads-up before we dive in: this episode describes the labor exploitation and physical abuse of children.
The boy’s name was Giuseppe, but in 1873, all New York came to know him as Joseph. He had been living in Central Park for a couple weeks when he told his story to the New York Times. Three years earlier, Joseph recounted, he was a resident of Calvello, a sun-soaked village in the southern Italian province of Basilicata. Then, one day, he awoke to the news that he would be emigrating to New York City, where he would perform as a street musician. Joseph had no say in the matter. His parents had agreed to this arrangement by singing a contract with a “padrone,” or “master,” who would act as Joseph’s boss and guardian overseas. And so Joseph, along with eight other Italian boys whose parents had signed similar contracts, traveled to Naples and boarded a ship that was bound for New York. Once he and his companions had stepped off the vessel, their padrone led them to an uninviting building at 45 Crosby Street, an address to become infamous in a few years’ time. (Today, Number 45 is located near the Spring Street stop of the 6 train.) Joseph’s first night on American soil was miserable—he slept in the cellar of 45 Crosby Street, huddled on a straw mat without any covers.
The next morning, Joseph commenced his musical career. It made no difference that he had no musical skill. It was his job to play whatever instrument was given him and make money by soliciting donations in the street. His padrone produced a triangle, tapped it with a tiny metallic beater by way of demonstration, and handed it to Joseph. This was all the training Joseph received. His padrone commanded him to come home with at least a dollar that evening. When Joseph reappeared after a long day’s work, he confessed that he had come up short. As punishment, his master beat him and locked him in the cellar.
Over the next few weeks, Joseph learned violin and bowed its strings in the open air. His padrone made clear that if he failed to meet his daily quota, he need not bother coming home that night. Joseph slept outdoors when he fell short and suffered frequent abuse at the hands of his padrone when he finally went back to 45 Crosby Street. During one scuffle, his master bit his ear, leaving a scar. During another, he tied Joseph’s hands and feet with rope and abandoned him, writhing, in the cellar overnight.
Escape seemed impossible. Alone in an alien country where he could hardly speak the language, Joseph lived in constant fear of angering his padrone and believed that no matter how far he ran, his tormentor would find him. He endured this wretched existence for two full years. But then one day, after a particularly brutal thrashing, he demanded that his master set him free or at least end the abuse. His padrone responded by threatening to kill him if he tried to escape, boxing him about the ears and binding his hands so tightly that the rope to cut his wrists. Finally, in June 1873, Joseph ran away. Rather than return to 45 Crosby Street, he sought refuge in Central Park, hiding for a couple days until a groundskeeper happened upon him. The park employee offered food and even lined up a home for the waif, arranging for a woman who lived in a nearby cottage to adopt him.
Joseph was one of hundreds—maybe thousands—of Italian immigrant children who came to New York to work as street musicians in the mid-nineteenth century. They plucked harps, bowed violins, grinded barrel-organs, and tinkled triangles. Despite the variety of instruments they played, these underage laborers were often referred to as “little slaves of the harp.” In the early-to-mid 1870s, their plight ignited moral outrage in New York and neighboring states, ultimately motivating the federal government to intervene. Today, we’ll hear how countless juvenile street musicians traveled from Italy to New York, how reformers and journalists exposed their abuse to the public, and how the forces of the law took action against their padroni. This is The Art of Crime, and I’m your host, Gavin Whitehead. Welcome to another episode of Crimes of Old New York . . .
The Child Musicians of Crosby Street
The “Little Slaves” of New York
The streets of mid-nineteenth-century New York were not a pretty sight. Between 1840 and 1860, the city’s population mushroomed by 250 per-cent, putting serious strain on existing infrastructure and posing even more serious challenges to public hygiene. In the rougher parts of town, such as the Lower East Side, where many immigrants settled, the unpaved roads were littered with filth: garbage, sewage, dung, and animal carcasses. And yet, as unpleasant as they were, the streets vibrated with never-ending activity. The sidewalks teemed with foot-traffic. An array of horse-drawn vehicles—carriages, hearses, wagons, omnibuses—trundled this way and that. All manner of peddlers hawked their wares—lace, cheap jewelry, combs, buttons, ribbons, oysters, clams, baked potatoes, apple pie, pots, pans, newspapers, brooms, fiddle strings, and more. Among the multitude were countless beggars and performers. An 1852 guidebook to the city saw the downtown stretch of Broadway as the humming, chaotic heart of New York: “There is always something new to be seen in Broadway; something is sure to turn up that has never occurred before. A horse will fall down and break his neck by way of variety if nothing else. Stand here when you will, and you are sure to witness a new and novel sight.” Seventeen years later, another book for tourists characterized Broadway as “cosmoramic and cosmopolitan. In its vast throng, individuality is lost…All nations, all conditions, all phases of life are represented there.”
Italian children had been playing music in the streets of New York for decades before Joseph appeared in the pages of the Times. In some cases, they did so at the behest of a mother, father, or other guardian who lived in the city. However, many had relocated to Gotham under conditions more or less identical to Joseph’s. Their parents signed contracts with padroni, whereby the children would busk in New York. Each day, they were expected to bring a certain amount of money to their master, who mailed a portion of their overall earnings to their parents in Italy. In accordance with the contract, padroni fed, clothed, and sheltered their wards. After an agreed-upon duration—say, five years—the contract expired, and the children were free to return to their homeland or travel elsewhere to carry on with their lives. (Many Italian immigrants—both juvenile and adult—came to New York because of the padrone system. For this reason, they tended to stay in the city temporarily, especially compared to migrants from other countries.) In theory, the padrone system qualified as a form of indentured servitude, a lawful apprenticeship like any number of others that young tradesmen pursued. To certain observers, though, it resembled enslavement. Whether this system qualified as slavery would give rise to copious courtroom wrangling, as we’ll see later.
It might sound shocking that parents would agree to send their children to another continent for work. But in the mid-nineteenth century, it was taken for granted that kids would contribute to household income, and when they hailed from tiny rural Italian communities, they had little choice but to emigrate for employment. In the words of historian John E. Zucchi, author of the book, Little Slaves of the Harp, “It was no more cruel for their parents to send them off with a padrone than it is for today’s parents to send their high-school-aged children off to plant trees in the summer.” Zucchi perhaps understates the enormous emotional and physical strain this system placed on minors, but he rightly points out that attitudes toward children and child labor are historically and culturally specific.
Once they arrived in Gotham, the little buskers took up residence with their padroni. Many dwelled together in what were known as “children’s dens,” the most notorious of which stood on Crosby Street. They awoke early and made a meal of runny gruel, black bread, or macaroni. Then, it was off to the streets. Like Joseph, most of these musicians had never studied music and could not have even made it through “Hot Cross Buns.” Those who never mastered their instruments did not earn their pennies because their music brought pleasure to the neighborhood. Poorly attired and underfed, they pocketed money because passersby took pity on them. Yet, with practice, other musicians improved, and when they did, they filled the air with an array of melodies—folk songs, polkas, waltzes, and passages from opera, especially from the works of Rossini, Jommelli, and Cinnarosa.
The buskers were unmistakable as outsiders. Sometimes, their “swarthy” skin tone betrayed their Italian origins. Other times, it was their dark hair and hazel-brown eyes. They also dressed like they would have back home. A boy named Joseph (not the same Joseph who was found in Central Park) wore a black corduroy jacket, an outdoor cape, a white vest, and gray trousers. Another called John sported a black jacket, a black-and-white vest, and a white cap. Journalists often described or depicted girls as wearing colorful peasant garb, a tambourine in hand.
The most detailed description of a street musicians apparel no doubt comes from Wandering Minstrel, the only known memoir written by an author who had previously worked for a padrone as a child performer. This memoirist, Cagliardo Coraggioso, was based in London, not New York, but it’s worth hearing what he has to say about the clothing provided to him by his master: I looked into a mirror in a shop window. I took a good look at myself…I got a great shock. No wonder everybody made a fool of me. There was a boy of about ten and a half years of age, wearing a man's bowler hat, about three sizes too large and almost covering my ears. My hair was very long. My suit was one which fit a big man; the sleeves of the jacket and the legs of the trousers had been cut; the vest was as large as the jacket. My boots had been picked out of a bucket. They were large navvy's boots, full of huge nails; there was a large cut on the top of the toes, and…they were at least size elevens. I wore pieces of toe rags round my feet and a pair of thick stockings, full of holes, to keep them in shape. A big greasy muffler was wound round my neck, tied in a knot, and to complete the disaster, I wore in my ears a pair of ear-rings with three tiny balls hanging [to] each ... Every shop window I came to I had a look at myself and was ashamed of what I saw.”
Though exotic to New Yorkers, the children’s garments—often dirty and oversized—also furnished proof of poor hygiene. According to one reporter, “The immigrants wear the costumes of their native localities, which agrees well with the general filth of their surroundings. They all look romantic but very dirty.” On another occasion, a writer for the New York Times interviewed three boys who talked about their bathing habits. They washed once a month, never changing their clothes in the interim. After thirty days had passed, their padrone burned their shirts and provided fresh ones.
It’s impossible to say how many Italian street musicians passed through New York in the mid-nineteenth century because many stayed there temporarily. An adolescent busker might have grinded an organ or plucked a harp for a few months in the Empire City before walking along the railroad tracks to Philadelphia or Boston, where they would spend a few weeks or months before changing locations again. This peripatetic lifestyle took some musicians as far as south as Louisiana and as far west as California.
Reform
In the 1850s, a handful of New Yorkers went out of their way to reduce the number of Italian street performers, whether they were working for their biological parents or for a padrone. By this time, the stereotypical image of grubby Italian organ grinders accompanied by monkeys had already taken root in the public imagination. This stereotype echoed in the language of the Reformers, who did not object to child labor in the abstract. Instead, they critiqued street music as a profession that was of little value to society at large—and one that involved an unhygienic lifestyle. (They might have dismissed the worth of street music, in part, because many child performers had little to no training on their instruments.) It would be more beneficial, reformers argued, to train the buskers in more practical lines of work.
Perhaps the most important exponent of this reform was A.E. Cerqua. He worked as a teacher at the Italian School, an institution operated under the auspices of the Children’s Aid Society, a charitable organization, and situated in the crime-ridden slum of Five Points. Cerqua taught night classes at the School for two decades, training Italian immigrants in a variety of trades. In the first year of the School’s existence, some fifty children enrolled, nearly all of whom followed what Cerqua called “the organ-grinding vocation.” Cerqua’s pupils gave up the organ and procured other jobs, shining shoes at city hall, hawking soap or flowers, and rolling barrels of flour to and from the dockyards. Though hardly prestigious, this labor was seen as more “useful” to society.
Initially, the Italian School seemed to have accomplished its mission. In February 1860, Cerqua reported “a considerable reduction of organists and monkeys in [the street musicians’] apartments, usually filled with such instruments and beasts. The vile traffic of hiring children is also almost extinct . . . while in former years a boy was invariably attached to an organ-grinder, now never, or very seldom, is one seen in that trade. A girl may be seen now and then, but generally, their gender travels alone. Of the boys, many are learning trades, the most favourite of which with them is the jewellers.” By the mid-1860s, the school had virtually eliminated organ-grinding from the streets. In 1868, however, the downward trend reversed. That year, New Yorkers noticed a growing number of harpists and violinists making music in the daytime and wandering the streets at night, half-frozen. While he was able to convert child organ-grinders of the 1850s into “productive” members of society, he was unable to reach this new generation of child musicians.
Outrage
It was not until the events of late spring and early summer 1873 that the struggles of child street performers burst into public consciousness. In May of that year, Italian-born soldier of fortune Celso Caesar Moreno published a letter in San Francisco’s Italian-language newspaper, La Voce del Popolo, in which he blamed the Italian consul in New York, Ferdinando De Luca, for allowing the exploitation of migrant children to thrive under his watch. The missive came to the attention of the New York Times editorial board, who reprinted it in full. The publication of Moreno’s accusations in New York ignited a debate about who bore responsibility for the increasing abundance of juvenile street musicians.
In June, the New York Times dispatched a reporter to investigate the notorious “children’s dens” of Crosby Street. The journalist’s inquiries led him to A.E. Cerqua, who shared heartbreaking stories about juvenile buskers in the area. One young fiddler had died of consumption in the arms of his friend, fondly remembering his mother to the end. Another Times reporter went looking for immigrant children who would tell their own stories. But getting them to talk often proved difficult. Many padroni told boys what they could and could not say to strangers. Some children made no response whatsoever to sensitive questions—where had they come from? Where were their parents? When they did answer, they simply recited pre-scripted answers supplied by their masters. Others, however, were more forthcoming and unfiltered in their responses. One journalist spoke with three filthy, malodorous boys who had laid aside their instruments while gnawing at a “semi-petrified beef bone,” clawed from an upper-Fifth-Avenue trash receptacle. One of these three, a six-year-old triangle player, maintained that his mother had “sold” him to his padrone for sixty ducats. This same boy had forgotten not just his father’s name but also his own. His master expected him to net eighty cents per day and beat him if he came home with less. The trio described a daily routine that became wrenchingly familiar to New Yorkers that summer. The children rose at daybreak, ate a meager breakfast of macaroni and bread, practiced their instruments for an hour or two, then hit the streets. At around this time, a writer for the Times discovered Joseph in Central Park. His story caught the public imagination more than any other account of migrant street performers.
In an editorial, the Times likened the traffic in juvenile street musicians to the African slave trade. “It seemed impossible that the world has given up stealing men from the African coast, only to kidnap children from Italy, and that the auction-block for negroes had been overturned in the Southern States only to be set up again for white infants in New York” The newspaper laid blame at the feet of the Italian consul, Ferdinando De Luca, as well as at the church. “These boys all reside in a neighborhood where churches abound, but no minister of religion has ever visited them, and as far as Christian precept or example is concerned, they might as well live in the centre of Africa.”
The New York Times chased the story. Before, reporters had interviewed child street performers on the street. Now, they wanted to see their living conditions firsthand. To that end, they dispatched a reporter and plain-clothes detective to Crosby Street, home to the notorious “children’s dens.” Inquiring at a saloon, they learned from the owner, a man named Luigi, that more than one hundred children resided on the floors above his establishment. The detectives staked out the street, watching as children traipsed into various buildings, their harps and organs and violins in hand. Finally, they decided to venture inside one. Turning into a back alley, they took a rickety staircase up to a doorway that led into a rundown tenement. Gaining entry, they stood in a room where the stink “was almost suffocating.” Four men were sleeping on straw mats that were laid about the floor. An adjacent room measured just five feet by seven. Most of the space was given over to a platform, strewn with moldy straw pallets and rags. Seven boys, none of them older than eleven, were crammed together on this makeshift bed. An additional back room housed two men, three women, and a little girl. In total, seventeen people were occupying an apartment that was designed to fit two.
A night or two later, the reporter and policemen took another tour of Crosby Street, this time inspecting a different edifice. As the two ascended a stairway to the entrance, one of them stumbled over a ten-year-old boy who had fallen asleep, clutching a harp. After a hours of busking, he had arrived home to find the door bolted—he was locked out. Climbing the flight of stairs to the top, the investigators came to an entryway and were able to gain access. They stepped into a ten-by-twelve-foot room, in which four men had bedded down, drenched in sweat partly because they were fully dressed and partly because the windows were shut. Pushing past a padrone who tried to block their path, they made their way into a rear room, where ten boys slumbered, surrounded by harps. “Their arms were twined about each other as though they were seeking companionship in their misery,” the journalist wrote. An eight-year-old boy bore telltale signs of abuse: scars on his back from a vicious lashing as well as on his wrists from ligatures. Confronted about the injuries, the padrone explained that the boy had misbehaved.
These “midnight visits,” as they came to be known, horrified the public. Publications other than the New York Times added fuel to the fire. Harper’s Weekly printed a full-page illustration depicting the abominable conditions at the children’s dens: in it, a monkey lies sprawled on top of an organ, surrounded by little Italian boys clutching assorted instruments. A wicked padrone lashes one of the children with a whip. Propelled by the febrile press coverage, rumors spread that a ship was about to dock at New York with no fewer than fifty “little slaves” aboard.
Despite calls for the authorities to take action against the padroni, a month or so passed without any major developments. Frustrated by inaction at home, New Yorkers urged officials in other cities to slow the spread of migrant street musicians.
Finally, some good news came from the nearby town of New Haven, Connecticut. There, authorities arrested a padrone named Giovanni Glionna, who had lived at 45 Crosby Street before taken up residence in the city of elms. Two years earlier, in November 1871, Glionna sailed to the United States with four children in tow. The contract that the boys’ parents had signed stipulated that each boy would work for him for a four-year period. In return, he would send their parents twenty dollars per year. In June 1873, Glionna sent his apprentices to New Haven to play their instruments and shine shoes on the street, joining them soon after. Together, the district attorney and police chief dispatched officers to a “children’s den” on Oak Street, where Glionna and company were living. Police arrested him, specifically for holding the children as slaves, invoking Connecticut’s Personal Liberty Bill of 1854. That year, Connecticut became the first of several northern states to pass such a law as a way of resisting the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The Personal Liberty Bill had never before been used to detain a padrone and therefore represented a significant victory for children’s rights activists in and around New York.
The arrest led to some weighty legal considerations: did these children qualify as slaves in the eyes of the law? As in the case of other Italian street musicians, contracts bound these boys to Glionna for a predetermined duration in exchange for food, water, and shelter. The defense could plausibly argue that these boys were apprentices, and if the court accepted this argument, Glionna could not be convicted of keeping them as slaves. The defense did indeed make this claim, but the judge rejected it. Under Connecticut state law, apprentices were required to sign a contract in their own hand, and masters were obligated to train them in a trade. Glionna’s children could neither read nor write and therefore could not have signed their contracts, and Glionna had done nothing to make musicians of these children. It was determined that the padrone must stand trial. The judge set bail at $4,000, a sum that Glionna could never hope to pay. In early September, though, a friend of the Italian’s persuaded the judge to lower the figure to $1,000, a more affordable amount. Glionna posted bail and promptly decamped to Toronto, eluding punishment.
Though the story came to a disappointing end, New Yorkers had followed it with enormous excitement. Eager as ever to sell papers and not entirely beholden to the truth, journalists falsely linked Glionna with the celebrated Joseph, claiming that he had acted as the boy’s padrone. (Efforts were made to put Joseph’s actual master on trial, but these proved fruitless.)
In the absence of meaningful legal action, ordinary citizens took it upon themselves to protect the “little slaves.” A week or two after Glionna’s arrest, two indentured street musicians—one thirteen, the other eighteen—escaped from their padrone, Joseph Macino, taking their harp and fiddle with them. Sometime later, they plodded into Spring Valley, a village in Rockland County, in southern New York. By now, Macino had run newspaper advertisements promising a reward of fifty dollars to anyone who captured the runaway musicians. Spotting one of Macino’s notices and recognizing the newcomers in town as the fugitives, a Spring Valley resident had them detained. Other townspeople became aware of the boys’ plight and—infuriated—petitioned the squire for their release. The squire obliged, and the boys went free. When Macino came to retrieve the two youths, villagers were waiting. These two boys were no longer his to order around, they declared, and warned him to leave if he valued his own safety. He heeded their warning and slunk back to New York.
New Crime, New Laws
However effective it had proved in Spring Valley, vigilantism would never put an end to the woes of Italian street musicians. New laws were needed, laws that specifically targeted this kind of exploitation.
Answering the call to action, in February 1874, New York State Senator George Scherman introduced a bill addressing the dilemma. Per the proposed law, anyone who recruited children under the age of sixteen to perform music in public could face a prison sentence ranging from thirty days to a year as well as a fine of up to $250. The bill passed on April 3, and came into effect on the twenty-third of that month. (The passage of this law inspired state congressmen in Pennsylvania, also concerned about the welfare of juvenile street musicians, to draft similar legislation.)
On April 24, the Italian consul in New York, Ferdinando De Luca, went to see the mayor, accompanied by the counsel of the Children’s Aid Society, Charles Whitehead. De Luca made recommendations as to how police should enforce the new law, which the mayor heartily approved. The next day, equipped with a letter of introduction from the mayor, De Luca hand-delivered a proposal to New York police commissioners. It was De Luca’s recommendation that police arrest any and all street performers younger than sixteen and bring them before the consul so he could question them about their activities. For the next few days, the police would keep these minors in custody at the consulate’s expense while police waited to see if anybody would claim them. If a padrone came forward, the state would charge him with a misdemeanor under the new law. If nobody took responsibility for the children, they would be repatriated to Italy. Much like the mayor, the police commissioners embraced the consul’s proposal.
For the next week or two, De Luca spent two to three hours a day assisting investigators as they patrolled the streets for underage musicians. By the end of the first week, law enforcement had rounded up twenty-nine children and eight adults. (Five were detained simply for begging rather than playing music.) Surprisingly, only six of the minors appeared to have been contractually bound to padroni. The remaining twenty-three were working for their biological parents, who lived in or near New York. Without exception, the padroni were prosecuted but got off easy—the judge imposed the minimum punishment, a fifty-dollar fine and a thirty-day prison sentence. Parents, by contrast, were given a stern warning that their kids could be entrusted to the Children’s Aid Society if they were caught grinding an organ or bowing a fiddle in public again. The relatively high number of parents who had set their children to work as street musicians suggests that the media may have exaggerated the number of padroni operating in the city.
The results of these enforcement efforts were satisfactory in the short run. A Washington politician wrote to the British Foreign Office to inform them that “the streets of New York had been cleared of this scandal, that [De Luca] had sent a considerable number of boys back to Italy . . . and that [De Luca] believed that a large proportion of the ‘padroni’ and their victims, who had been dislodged and deprived of their livelihood, . . . had betaken themselves to England.” However, the 1874 law in itself would not suffice to curtail the immigration of Italian child street musicians, largely because it did nothing to penalize parents who indentured their offspring to padroni or put them to work themselves, without a middle-man. However, legislation was passed to correct these shortfalls in 1876. We’ll hear how the issue reached the halls of Congress after a quick break.
The Problem With the Padrone Act
While New York lawmakers were taking steps to clear the streets of foreign street musicians, national legislators were doing the same. Celso Caesar Moreno, the soldier of fortune who raised awareness of the issue with his letter to the editor of a San Francisco newspaper, appealed to renowned U.S. Senator Charles Sumner, an outspoken abolitionist from Massachusetts. (If you know his name, it’s probably because of what happened to him in 1856. That year, Congressmen passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which created the new states of Kansas and Nebraska. However, violence broke out in the former territory as politicians wrangled over whether it would enter the Union as a free state or a slave state—in other words, a state where slavery was legal. In an impassioned speech, Sumner denounced the institution of slavery and attacked the bill’s authors. Two days later, a relative of one of the maligned authors, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, strode onto the Senate floor and bludgeoned Sumner with a cane. Sumner staggered away his attacker, blinded by his own blood, and eventually fell to the ground, unconscious. The assailant continued clubbing the lifeless Sumner, even after the cane snapped in two, as other senators looked on, horrified. Sumner narrowly survived the incident, emerging as a champion of the abolitionist movement, particularly in the north. He still enjoyed that reputation almost two decades later, which is why Moreno contacted him, urging “the Moses of the late slaves in the Southern States” to “raise your powerful voice in behalf of oppressed and defenseless infantile humanity.” Sumner wasted little time in drafting a law meant to outlaw the enslavement of children.
Though well-intentioned, Sumner rushed forward without taking the time to learn the relevant facts. In early 1874, just two months before he died, Sumner pur forward a bill prohibiting “the inveigling, forcible kidnap and involuntary service of children.” The New York Times criticized this language. As the newspaper took pains to explain, Sumner misunderstood how this system of indentured servitude worked. According to the Times, “The so-called little ‘Italian slaves’ are, in fact, neither ‘inveigled,’ not ‘forciblhy kidnapped,’ nor held in ‘involuntary confinement,’ nor ‘involuntary service’ . . . they are not ‘sold to a condition of involuntary servitude’ . . . Moreover, the padrone always has the free ‘consent’ of the child, not obtained ‘by force or duress’ . . . The fact is, the padrone’s nefarious business is legal apprenticeship and contract, made with the full consent of the child. It becomes in its abuse a slavery, but it doubtful whether it could legally come under any of the terms of Mr. Sumner’s act.”
Despite its flaws, Sumner’s bill was passed by Congress. Its official title was the Act to Protect Persons of Foreign Birth against Forcible Constraint or Involuntary Servitude, but many simply called it the Padrone Act. Those found guilty of breaking the law could face a sentence of up to five years and a maximum fine of $1,000. The New York Times remained silent on its passage, but other journalists praised Moreno for setting the legislative process in motion. In his newspaper, the New National Era, former slave and racial justice advocate Frederick Douglass commended the Italian mercenary, likening him to “the Abolitionists of other days –John Brown, Lloyd Garrison, or Charles Sumner.” However, it still remained to be seen whether the state could successfully prosecute padroni under Sumner’s ill-conceived law.
Four years later, in 1878, prosecutors put it to the test. Enter the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the SPCC for short. The SPCC was a charitable organization that sought the prosecution of padroni in New York, honed in on a forty-two-year-old Italian named Rafaelo Di Grazia. The New York Times described the padrone in xenophobic terms as “a swarthy, beetle-browed fellow, with an undercurrent of savagery.” Di Grazia was believed to have brought twenty children buskers to America in November 1876 before returning to Italy to recruit another batch. In November 1878, the authorities caught wind of Di Grazia’s expected arrival in New York City that month. Within a week or two, Edward Chiardi, a member of the SPCC, received a communication from Castle Garden, the immigrant depot situated on an island off the southern coast Manhattan: “Our friends have arrived. Come immediately.” Chiardi sprang into action, joined by two officers from the New Street Police Station. A steamship known as the City of Montreal had just pulled into harbor, and two padroni had disembarked. One was Luigi Di Biase, aged thirty-five, and the other was Luigi Di Grazia. The two Luigis had journeyed to New York with four boys in their care, but by the time law enforcement arrived on the scene, two of those four boys had given their masters the slip. The remaining two were brothers and were taken into custody.
The authorities charged Di Grazia with cruelty to children and hauled him before a judge at the Tombs Police Court. However, the jurist released Di Grazia, citing a lack of evidence against him. The padrone would not be celebrating for long. As he walked down the steps of the storied police court, a U.S. marshal accosted him and placed him under arrest, invoking Sumner’s Padrone Act. It fast became clear that prosecutors could not mount a slam-dunk case. Investigators interviewed the two adolescent brothers and learned that they had neither been kidnapped or forced to work for Di Grazia. Their father, a charcoal-burner, had shipped the boys off to with money he had borrowed from relatives. He had personally accompanied his sons to Naples, where he placed them in the care of Di Grazia and his associate. Presented with this testimony, the judge asserted that “there could be no moral doubt of the prisoner’s guilt.” But morality and legality were two separate matters, and there was simply no proof that Di Grazia had violated the Padrone Act. The judge let Di Grazia go with a warning, and within two months, the brothers were on a boat back to Italy. Just as skeptics of Sumner’s legislation had feared, the law had failed to stem the influx of immigrant children.
Prosecutors scored a second opportunity to try a padrone under the act in 1879. In September 1879, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was alerted by Italian officials that a padrone by the name of Antonio Giovanni Ancarola was about to arrive on American soil with a passel of children. The SPCC sounded the alarm and monitored numerous U.S. ports, ready to pounce as soon as Ancarola walked down the gangway. Several weeks passed without any news until an Italian consul-general stationed in Marseilles reported that Ancarola had left a French port with seven children in tow, ranging in age from nine to thirteen. That November, when the group disembarked in New York, the authorities swooped in, taking the children into protective custody. Ancarola, meanwhile, was allowed to remain at liberty. This padrone had drilled a cover story into the heads of the boys who traveled in his company, all of whom claimed to have made the trans-Atlantic voyage to visit an uncle in Montreal. However, when pressed about this doubtworthy Canadian relative, they told the truth, however. The investigators confiscated the children’s harps and violins and secured them in the customs house, hoping that Ancarola would come to collect them. Ancarola never took the bait, unfortunately, so a warrant for his arrest was issued. Five days later, he was found in a saloon at the back of 87 Crosby Street. He was detained and his trial scheduled for mid-December.
As before, the case posed challenges for the prosecution. To find Ancarola guilty under the Padrone Act, the jury needed to reach the following conclusions based on the evidence: First, he had found the boys in Italy and inveigled them into accompanying him to the United States where they would labor as street musicians. Second, he booked passage from a foreign port to New York and personally conveyed them to their final destination. Third, once he arrived in the Big Apple, it was his intention to hold the children against their will. This last point was of grave concern to prosecutors because, per usual, parents had signed contracts permitting their children to travel to New York.
The prosecution could only hope to win the case if they were allowed to admit two key pieces of evidence. First, one boy testified that Ancarola had led him to believe that he would reap riches if he emigrated to America. If allowed in court, this testimony would enable prosecutors to establish that Ancarola had inveigled the children into the journey. Second, the prosecution wished to call attention to an 1873 Italian law that made it illegal for children to emigrate for street trades like busking. This legislation rendered null and void any contract that parents signed with padroni. If prosecutors could discuss this law, they could argue powerfully that no legal contract bound the minors to Ancarola, which in turn made it possible to contend that he was holding them against their volition. The defense mounted a forceful argument against including this act as evidence, maintaining that a confused jury might misunderstand what it was supposed to prove. The biggest danger was that they might convict the defendant for violating a foreign stature and not the U.S. law for which he was being tried. The judge shared this concern, but in the end he allowed it. After minimal deliberation, the jury returned with a guilty verdict in a landmark victory for children’s rights advocates. The judge imposed the maximum penalty—a five-year prison sentence—in addition to a small fine. The judge explained that he wished “to inflict a punishment that will tend to prevent vioolations of this law in the future, and, it may be, make this, the first conviction, also the last.”
Ancarola proved both the first and last offender to be convicted under the Padrone Act. The number of juvenile street musicians had steadily declined over the latter half of the 1870s, and by the time of Ancarola’s sentencing, they had vanished almost entirely. As Zucchi notes, this turn of events may have had more to do with the economy than the law courts. A depression had plagued the nation from 1873-78, but the hard times had eased, and a wave of American nativism broke. More than before, railroads and mines were prepared to employ foreign laborers, preferably able-bodied men. Padroni kept bringing indentured workers to the U.S., but these were overwhelmingly adults.
The Padrone Act marked an important chapter in the longer historical struggle to end child labor in the Big Apple. The “little slaves of the harp” constituted a tiny percentage of the children who worked in 19th-century New York. Some worked in factories, others in the streets as messengers, Newsies, and shoeshines (among other professions). Many Italian children worked at home, helping their mothers do piece work, making clothing, brushes, and silk flowers. It took decades of incremental progress to ensure that children spent their days in schoolrooms and not workplaces. New York state legislation in slowly chipped away at the market for child labor, with significant advances occurring in 1868, 1913, and throughout the interwar period. Elsewhere in the country, children toiled in hazardous conditions in factories and even mines. Then, in 1938, the federal government stopped leaving this issue to the discretion of individual states, asserting its prerogative to regulate and outlaw the practice of employing children. Of course, the protest against child street musicians was never just about labor issues. It was also an emotionally charged response to a city transformed by an ever-increasing tide of immigration. Even so, the activism that culminated in the Padrone Act taught New Yorkers that public pressure, persistently applied, could overturn even the most deeply rooted forms of labor exploitation.
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