Madonna Read Online Free PDF

name Diego, but often held to be derived from ‘day laborer.’
    In America between 1874 and 1915, some thirty-nine Italian Americans had been lynched for alleged offenses, and it was not uncommon for the police, faced with a crime, to round up as many Italians as possible. Such was the climate of hatred that Italy at one point broke off diplomatic relations. A comment in the New York Times was typical of the temper of the period. ‘Those sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins … are to us a pest without mitigation.’
    The Ciccones, like millions of other Italians, refused to be cowed by the bellicose and the belligerent. They stayed rather than ran, worked hard, and lived on to fight another day. It is as though Gaetano Ciccone absorbed whole the advice from an immigration guidebook, written in 1891, on how to survive in America – and then passed it on to future generations. ‘Hold fast, this is most necessary in America. Select a goal and pursue it with all your might … You will experience a bad time, but sooner or later you will achieve your goal … Do not take a moment’s rest. Run.’ One view might certainly be espoused by Gaetano’s famous granddaughter: articulating America’s can-do ethic, the guidebook’s author wrote: ‘A final virtue is needed in America – called cheek … Do not say: “I cannot, I do not know.”’
    The rampant racism of the time, coupled with company policy, ensured that Gaetano kept to his own people. By 1925 records show that his young bride Michelina had now joined him and they had started a family. In all they had six boys; first born was Guido, followed by Rocco, Neilo, Pete, Guy, and Silvio, born on June 2, 1931. (Silvio later anglicized his name to Tony.) This large, bustling family of boisterous boys crammed into a modest house at 420 Allegheny Avenue, a stone’s throw from Saint Joseph’s Roman Catholic church, where Gaetano, his wife and boys, as well as the three other Ciccone families who lived on the same street, worshiped.
    Day-to-day life was a struggle, the local women taking in washing and ironing to make ends meet. The Ciccones grew vegetables in their backyard, while Gaetano brewed homemade wine, a skill his son Silvio would one day turn into a business. Whether Michelina was one of the many indomitable Italian wives who met the pay train at the mill for fear that their husbands might drink it away at the local tavern remains a moot point – Madonna has said that her paternal grandparents were alcoholics.
    Not just wine was brewing in the community, however. On the night of May 12, 1937, the workforce finally rebelled against years of ruthless exploitation. In July 1935, the historic National Labor Relations Act was made law. Commonly known as the Wagner Act, its general objective was to guarantee to employees ‘the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid and protection.’ Unsurprisingly, it was resisted by many large companies, and when a landmark Supreme Court ruling ordered J and L to reinstate workers fired for daring to organize a union, the company chairman, Horace E. Lewis, stonewalled in applying it. At this, almost the entire population, including the women and children, gathered in grimly quiet protest at the long tunnel that marked the main entrance to the giant J and L plant. The hissing, clanking, roaring mill was stilled, and for the first time in memory the valley did not glow brilliant red that night.
    It was a short-lived strike. Within forty hours, the company capitulated and the action was called off. It was a moment that changed the lives of everyone in Aliquippa for ever. ‘We were really happy, really happy!’ recalled one elderly woman in a TV documentary commemorating this historic victory.