“It is a matter of so much a head with them,” said Grace. “They prey upon the new arrivals as soon as they land.” She argued that there should be an immigration employment exchange like they had in Berlin, with a separate department for women. Above all, Grace argued that the immigrants be moved out of the cities they were so magnetically attracted to.
“They don’t know that in the rural districts farmers are crying for help,” Grace said. “In the meantime tenements multiply, congestion ensues, there is no work for the alien and he either becomes vicious, an undesirable citizen, or ekes out a miserable existence amid the mazes of a city that is full of lures for his unsophisticated rural soul.” Dr. Stella, a government advisor on disease, agreed that Grace’s plan would also help alleviate the specter of tuberculosis in the tenements.
For those who thought she was merely agreeing with the Sunny Side experiment, Grace shook her head. “The point is that we Americans are exploiting the aliens,” she explained. “For while our Federal laws are excellent for keeping them out of the country, we show a noticeable lack of interest in them after they are admitted.”
Grace fished around in her folders and held up the card of an employment agent. She read from it: “Any number or nationality of skilled or unskilled laborers furnished. Newly landed foreigners always on hand. New arrivals every week. Kindly call at my office and engage a gang of shortly landed foreigners (Not spoiled from city life).”
Grace ended her testimony with a story that she said was important for the committee to hear. She was in Aquila in late June 1909, in the Abruzzi Mountains of Italy, traveling with Esther Boise van Deman, an American professor of Latin and archaeology with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. It was June 30, 1909. They were just an hour away from Palermo, from where Joe Petrosino was killed a few months before.
While waiting at the Hotel d’Italia for a train leaving Aquila, Grace looked across the way and saw a large poster that read AVISO near the door of an Italian barbershop. Grace walked over and looked at the fine type that mentioned a bank at 60 Mulberry Street in New York.
The sign itself was hard to miss. It was three-by-two feet in dimension and had large words with pink and black lettering. On the other side of the shop window was posted a huge billboard advertising the steerage and second-class passage rates of steamers from Naples to New York on the Hamburg-American Line. That sign was eight feet high and colored red, white, and blue. Both signs were in Italian, though Grace could make out words like “bankers” and “jobs.” She went inside the barbershop.
Grace and Esther entered the shop and saw the barber sweeping up. The man said he spoke no English and Grace said she spoke no Italian. But Esther spoke both. She told the barber that her friend Grace had a friend in the United States—in Arkansas—who was looking for some imported labor.
“Do many of them go over?” Grace asked.
“For a long while, no; but business is picking up again,” the barber said. After a pause where he stared at her, he continued.
“The signora wants to know how it is done—wants to talk with someone who helps laborers to go over.” He patted his barrel chest. “I’m the representante.”
“Are you the representante for the steamship company or for the people who go over?”
“Of the steamship company, but I help the people go over. See here,” he said, walking toward the back.
The barber stepped to the back of the shop and removed a second eight-foot billboard of the Hamburg-American sailings, just like the red, white, and blue sign out on the street. He showed Grace that completely hidden behind it was one of the edicts issued by the Italian government that warned against trusting employment agencies.
“What kind of a thing is that?” asked Grace.
“Oh, that comes from the government people,” the barber said.
The barber then went over to a cabinet and took out a yellow-covered book of about 250 to 300 pages. The entire book contained, page after page, alphabetical lists of all the small towns in the United States, with their respective counties and states, together with six or seven columns of figures placed opposite the names of the towns extending across the entire page. They could not look too closely because they knew he was going to take it away in an instant.
“If people want to get laborers to work for them in the United States,” asked Grace, “how would they go about it?”
“They could send over the tickets,” the barber said.
“How?”
“Go to the bank. You pay the money, send me the tickets, and I would send over the people.”
Grace told a lie, that a “Mr. Frank” wanted contract laborers to work on his cotton plantation and that, in traveling through the mountains, she and Esther had seen what good workers the Italians were.
“But I don’t see how you agents send them over,” Grace fished.
“A little money for my expenses to find the people.” The barber smiled.
“Do you send women?” asked Grace.
“Yes.”
“I forgot to ask about children. What about them?”
“Oh yes. One can always use them somehow, and they won’t cost much, they’re just trifles, we’ll throw them in for nothing.” He paused. “Very little children,” he said.
Piccoli bambini.
“Oh yes,” he said, “you can use them for a good many things.”
*
When Grace was done with her story and the silence gave way to mumbling and paper pushing, she may have looked over to the long table of old men—most of them white-haired and suited—and seen the newly installed senator from Arkansas looking right at her. LeRoy Percy himself had just been elected as a Democrat in 1910. Sunny Side’s boss, who had undercut her with the president of the United States and buried her report, was about to serve on the United States Joint Immigration Commission that would decide whether or not to act on her hard-won testimony. They did not act, at least not in the way that Grace had hoped. At the end of the hearings, Grace returned to New York. She would retreat into her life again. She had done enough. She couldn’t imagine the life of a crime fighter calling her back.