Following the Civil War, a small trickle of Italian immigrants began to arrive in the largest American cities. Often from Italy’s northern provinces, they typically established themselves in small businesses that earned them the grudging respect of native-born Americans. But in the 1870s Italians became more and more visible on city streets, as many newcomers gravitated to work as itinerant street musicians. And the presence of children, playing and begging under the brutal supervision of padrones who had virtually bought them from their parents, aroused public opinion over the fate of these "little slaves of the harp."

Back in Italy, families with too many mouths to feed were happy to make arrangements to send a child to America with the hope of a better future. Padrones would pay the families a lump sum, as well as annual payments, promising to provide the children with musical instruction. But once in America, the children were subjected to ruthless exploitation-their earnings expropriated, their food and lodgings miserable. Those with little musical aptitude entertained crowds as dancers or acrobats, while others were sent out to work as boot-blacks or newsies. The reformist furor over Italian "slave children" was encouraged by details like the fact that padrones routinely marked the children on their ears, like sheep, to keep track of them.

Now conspicuous on city streets, Italian musicians-which included the ubiquitous organ grinder as well-were occasionally seen as colorful and picturesque, but increasingly reviled as lazy beggars. Henry Mayhew’s monumental study on London Labor and the London Poor noted how "Italians lived on the line between legitimate street entertaining and importuning mendicancy." The widespread knowledge of the stereotype of the Italian street musician is seen by the description on an 1870 advertising card for the Arbuckle Coffee Company, one of fifty that commemorated "Sports and Pastimes of All Nations":

Music is to the Italians as the breath of their nostrils; even their children

evoke from the violin, the harp and the flute melody to thrill the most

unsentimental, and their voices in song are pathetic and sweet. Who

could believe that owing to the wonderful susceptibility to music by

Italian children, a society was formed, known as the Padrone, for the

purpose of teaching children music and then making mendicants of them.

Italians who arrived in the United States during the 1870s timed their migration badly. With the country in the grip of its worst economic downturn, the demand for unskilled labor was low. For many immigrants at this time, scavenging became a means of survival, and a diligent search of garbage cans and dumps could yield items like rags that could be sold to local junk dealers. Newspapers created the stereotype of the Italian "rag-picker" or "garbage-picker"; the Chicago Tribune condemned them in an 1874 article as "invincibly ignorant and low in their instincts." Invisible to their detractors was how many of the rag-pickers were managing to save money out of their meager earnings, to pay off debts for their passage or to enable other family members to join them. Images of Italians as rag-pickers, organ grinders, or street musicians possessed great staying power. By the early 1890s, as Italian immigration from southern Italy swelled and new stereotypes took hold, the earlier images did not fade.

The images, however, took new forms. With the spread of photography, Victorian reformers now had the means to startle their audiences with visual depictions of the wretchedness of life in the immigrant slums. City missionary Helen Campbell collaborated with others in 1895 to produce Darkness and Daylight; or, Lights and Shadows of New York Life. A Pictorial Record of Personal Experiences by Day and Night in the Great Metropolis. This "pictorial record" of New York City life was based on 250 images, engravings drawn from over 1000 photographs taken by Bellevue Hospital photographer O. G. Mason. The virtues of photographic images are spelled out in the book’s preface, where quick sketches are dismissed as a means of illustration:

Such pictures can only approximate the reality; they may be-and often

are-very wide of the truth…..Here the modern camera came to their

aid….The dark side of life is presented without any attempt to tone

it down, and foul places are shown just as they exist…..It is said that

figures do not lie. Neither does the camera. In looking on these

pages the reader is brought face-to-face with real life as it is in

New York.

Campbell’s tour of "real life" New York included a chapter titled "Italian Life in New York-Scenes in the Great Bend in Mulberry Street-Homes of Filth and Squalor." Its illustrations and text emphasize a way of life that is dark and subterranean, with people huddled together like packs of animals. The dissipated are seen congregating in an underground beer dive, while a series of images of rag-pickers show them congregating in filthy cellars.

Pictures of tenement housing and its residents are more positive, revealing the communal life carried out in back courtyards. Children, neighbors, wooden laundry tubs where the women could perform this onerous labor with friends, lines of laundry, and faces at the courtyard windows all suggest a deeply inter-connected social universe. The accompanying text alludes to the menace of the Italians’ increasing numbers as well as their distinctive ethnic exoticism:

Here one finds them swarming in the great tenement-houses, grouping

on doorsteps and sidewalks, and forming, with their vivid coloring,

their flashing eyes, and gay-colored raiment, one of the most

picturesque scenes New York has to offer.

Market scenes, featuring fruit and vegetable vendors, also feature prominently. While the images suggest a lively commercial area and good plentiful food, Campbell’s text is far more negative, dwelling on the typical reformer’s revulsion from filth and bad smells:

The open-air market is going on, and trucks and barrows of every

description line the sidewalk….Tainted meat, poultry blue with age and

skinny beyond belief; vegetables in every stage of wiltedness; fruit

half rotten or moldy; butter so rancid that it poisons the air; eggs

broken in transit, sold by the spoonful for omelets; fish that long ago

left the water-all contribute their share to the unbearable odor that

even in the open air proves almost too much for endurance.

Campbell stresses the spontaneity, hence "reality," of the images, describing how the photographer often crept in at night, silently set up his camera, and then surprised his subjects with his flash. In sharp contrast are the images of Italian street people captured by Chicago photographer Sigmund Krausz and published in his 1892 book Street Types of Chicago. Krausz took a series of stylized, posed studio shots which included seven images of Italians, images which conformed to both earlier and contemporary stereotypes.

The photo of "Rag-pickers" shows the persistence of this image of poor Italians, as two women cluster around a garbage barrel from which hangs a shredded rag. Four images follow of Italian street musicians, from an organ-grinder with a sad, uneasy-looking boy beside him (implying a padrone/slave relationship) to "a musical family" whose two young girls are obviously being sent out to the streets by their exhausted-looking mother. By the 1890s the Fagin-like padrone with his captive children was a thing of the past; now it was the parents who hoped their children could earn some money playing music on the streets.

Krausz’s last two photographs reflect new images of Italian workers. No longer organ-grinders or pushcart vendors, they are laboring men sporting the typical Italian mustache and dark fedora. Despite Chicago’s industrial prowess, few Italian men worked in factories, due to a combination of prejudice against Italian workers and their deep antipathy to factory labor. Gravitating toward outdoor manual labor, they performed "pick-and-shovel work" of every variety, from ditch-digging to street repairs and sweeping. Despite the brutal rigors of this kind of labor, Krausz chose to present his Italian street-sweeper as slothful and drunk, broom over his shoulder and swilling wine from a bottle.