The Roseto Story: An Anatomy of Health

by John G. Bruhn, Stewart Wolf, Remsen Wolff

Overview

Roseto is a small Italian-American community in east-central Pennsylvania. This fifteen-year study drawing on medical histories, physical examinations, and laboratory tests, compared a large sample of Rosetans to inhabitants of two neighboring communities, Bangor and Nazareth, and followed up this research with a sociological study of the three communities.

Despite a greater prevalence of obesity in Roseto, and despite similar dietary, smoking, and exercise habits and similar ethnic and genetic background, the inhabitants of Roseto were relatively immune to heart disease at the beginning of the research in 1963. They were also strikingly tenacious in adhering to Old World values and customs. When these traditional values and relationship were abandoned by the rising generation, the death rate from heart disease climbed toward the American norm. The study concluded that unconditional interpersonal support counteracts life stress and thus preserves life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806136134
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	01/08/2004
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

John G. Bruhn is Adjunct Professor of Sociology at Northern Arizona University and Adjunct Professor of Health Sciences at New State University. He is a U.S. Fulbright Scholar, a World Health Organization Fellow, and a John E. Fogarty Health Sciences Fellow.

Stewart Wolf is Professor of Medicine at Temple University and Director of the Totts Gap Institute for Medical Research in Bangor, Pennsylvania.

Read an Excerpt

The Roseto Story

An Anatomy of Health

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By John G. Bruhn, Stewart Wolf, Remsen Wolff

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS

Copyright © 1979 University of Oklahoma Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-8963-5

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CHAPTER 1

Roseto in Historical Perspective

Cose e' l'America? Un massettino di fiori. (What is America? A bunch of flowers.) From a popular song in southern Italy in the 1880's.

In the 1800's southern Italy was in the throes of emigration fever, and some of the small villages were literally decimated. The landowners maintained a feudal hold over the villagers and tried to oppose emigration, but with little success. By the turn of the century approximately half a million southern Italians had traded their poverty for the uncertainty of America and settled mainly in the mid-Atlantic region—New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

One community eager to supply emigrants to the United States was Roseto Valfortore, a village of twenty-five hundred on the Adriatic side of southern Italy in the province of Foggia. The town is perched on a steeply slanting hillside near the top of a small mountain that rises abruptly from the coastal plain. The maximum elevation is 1,150 meters, but the center of town is only 650 meters above sea level. Roseto Valfortore is near the border of neighboring Benevento Province, approximately thirty miles inland from the Adriatic seaport Bari. During the Roman era its rose-covered countryside prompted the name Rosetum. The way of life of the paesani, or villagers, has hardly changed over the past hundred years. They farm small patches of rough ground on the terraced hillside and each year raise one or two pigs. The village, like half a dozen others scattered over the sides of the small mountain, is under the prefecture of Naples.

Most of southern Italy was in the grip of poverty toward the end of the last century, and the villagers were especially receptive to the tales of riches and the "good life" in America. By 1882 the first wave of emigrants from Roseto had sailed to New York, encouraged by enthusiastic letters written by a Jesuit priest from Baltimore, Luigi Sabetti. Father Sabetti, a native of Roseto, was the posthumous son and fifteenth child of the town's doctor. In 1849, when he was ten years old, his mother died. Unwilling to be a financial burden to his older siblings, the young boy determined to become a Jesuit priest. After schooling in Naples and in France, he was ordained to the priesthood in 1868. Three years later he sailed for the United States, where he joined Woodstock College in Maryland as professor of moral theology.

United States immigration laws at that time were nonrestrictive, and the passage to America was relatively inexpensive. The Italian authorities, however, considered emigration unpatriotic and at first declined permission to the Rosetans and a few other would-be emigrants from the nearby villages Biccari, Castelluccio Valmaggiore, and Alberona. After the local authorities finally relented, thanks to the persuasive efforts of several influential people, the first group of eleven Rosetans, ten men and one boy (joined by three men and one boy from Castelfranco) left Italy in January 1882 for New York. One of the steamer's passengers died from an infectious disease during the voyage, causing everyone to be quarantined for one month. When the passengers were finally allowed to disembark, the Rosetan travelers went directly to the Italian settlement on Mulberry Street, where they spent the night on a tavern floor. An Italian railroad contractor, exacting a commission of one dollar from each of them, promised them work at Perth Amboy, New Jersey. The offer turned out to be a swindle, but eventually they obtained employment through a New York City employment agency: three as carpenters in Polatka, Florida, and eight as slate-quarry laborers in Howell Town, Pennsylvania, now part of Bangor. The work in the quarry pits was not only strenuous and dangerous but also foreign to their experience as farmers and artisans. Consequently three of the Rosetans went off to other communities in the United States, and the fourth, Guiseppe Albanese, homesick, returned to Italy, where he received a triumphant welcome. Despite his return home, he later became an active promoter of emigration.

Among those whom Albanese influenced was Guiseppe Cardo, a wealthy physician in his seventies. Declaring jokingly that the trip would rejuvenate him, Dr. Cardo sailed for America in 1883 with a group of fifteen needy peasants to whom he loaned travel money. He secured employment for them as laborers in Amsterdam, New York. After two months there, and an additional six months working on the railroad at Indian Springs, near Peterborough, Ontario, winter came, their jobs ended, and the group disbanded. They failed to repay Dr. Cardo who returned to Italy feeling deserted and embittered.

Several members of the disbanded group managed to reach Howell Town on the invitation of fellow Rosetans who had settled there the previous year. Employed as slate quarriers, they worked ten-hour shifts for about eight cents an hour and lived in one-room shacks that looked out on heaps of slate rubble. Unable to speak English, and tenaciously holding to Old World customs and habits, the Italians were shunned and treated as inferiors by the English and Welsh. Nevertheless, their competition as laborers was feared. Furthermore, after several knifing incidents involving a few young Sicilians living in the area, the Rosetans were required to observe a curfew. Despite these hardships, they worked conscientiously, scrupulously saving their money so that they might send to Italy for their relatives.

By 1894 the number of passports issued to Rosetans bound for America had reached 1,200, not including women and children and others who had left clandestinely. Local Italian authorities were helpless to stop such a mass emigration. They hesitated to impose restrictions for fear the villagers might rebel. Many who remained in Italy were able, with money sent by their relatives in America, to buy their homes and fields from their landlords, who were willing to sell because they feared that there would not be enough Rosetans left to work the land. Other Rosetans shuttled between Italy and America, trying to increase their earnings and property. For them expatriation was only a temporary expedient. Later, however, the requirements of the Immigration Act of 1917 and the quota system established by the acts of 1921 and 1924 encouraged many Italian Rosetans to make Pennsylvania their permanent home.

As the Italian population grew and prospered economically, the social restrictions imposed by the English and Welsh prompted them to build their own community, and in social isolation they achieved a remarkable degree of self-sufficiency. They selected a hillside tract that was linked to adjacent Bangor only by a rough wagon road and the tracks of the Central Railroad of New Jersey, which crossed it from north to south. The land could be bought cheaply and with little formality because it had been stripped of its trees, which had been sold for lumber. The sawmill had left it covered with rubbish, stumps, and stones. In this unpromising spot the Italians in 1887 founded their new town, calling it New Italy. The first house, which faced the railroad tracks, was built in 1888 by Nicola Rosato. Shortly thereafter Lorenzo Falcone constructed a shed finished in clapboards that would house fourteen people. He divided his land into lots and sold it to relatives and friends, thereby establishing the community New Italy.

Further building development continued during the years 1889 to 1892 as new immigrants arrived. Paths were widened to lanes, lots were fenced in, and additional houses were built as land purchases continued. As described by Valletta, immigrants ingeniously used available materials: native stone for building, slate for roofs, walls, and walks. They helped each other dig out and build stone foundations for houses that were at first four-room one-story stone structures. There were no privately owned stores at first, for the quarry workers were required to trade at company stores. There were no factories, no churches, and no druggists or doctors nearer than Bangor. In 1892 the New Italy Hotel was opened by the first naturalized citizen, Lorenzo Pacifico. He sold wine, beer, and liquor in addition to tickets for transoceanic trips. The travel money was handled through an Italian bank in New York City. Grocery stores and other shops soon opened in Roseto.

The Italians provided their own social life through the Mutual Aid Society of Saint Philip Neri, organized in 1895. Its main functions were to teach Americanism, parliamentary procedure, and religion. The Cornet Band, also organized in 1895, played on festive occasions such as the religious festival of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, held annually during the last week of July from 1884. Masses at the first Mount Carmel celebrations were said by priests from Philadelphia and New York City. During the years 1891 to 1894 the celebration took on a secular character, because there was no Italian priest available who could serve full time at the church. The festival attracted crowds of people, both Italian and American, from surrounding towns. Two brass bands, the Roma Band of Philadelphia and the Bersaglieri Band of New York City, played classical Italian music. In 1895 the festival featured the blessing of the American and Italian flags by an Italian priest from New York City. Many visitors—enchanted by the town's peace and quiet, fresh spring water from the Blue Mountains, and wholesome food—chose to spend their summer vacations in New Italy. Some, including Italian shoemakers, blacksmiths, barbers, and tailors, deserted New York and Philadelphia to open their shops in Roseto or nearby communities.

The new citizens found it an increasing deprivation to be without a church of their own. The nearest Roman Catholic church was in Easton, Pennsylvania, where most Rosetans went for Sunday services, baptisms, weddings, and funerals. The town leaders petitioned Archbishop Ryan, the Roman Catholic bishop of Philadelphia, to establish a mission church in New Italy. His refusal encouraged some Rosetans to embrace the Protestant faith. In 1887, Michelangelo D'Uva, one of the group who had come to America with Dr. Cardo, had moved to New York City and been converted to Protestantism. Visiting New Italy with another Italian convert, Giovanni Gozzolino, a traveling book salesman, D'Uva went from house to house distributing free copies of the Bible and religious pamphlets in the Italian language. He further took advantage of the religious vacuum to persuade many of his compatriots to attend a nearby Presbyterian church at Five Points where there happened to be an Italian pastor, the Reverend A. Arrhigi.

Mr. Arrhigi took a great interest in the immigrants and helped them in many ways, finally managing to persuade the presbytery to open an Evangelical mission in New Italy. The Italians were able to recruit as their first pastor a Lombard Waldensian priest, Emmanuel Tealdo. The first services were held in a shanty with boards laid across for pews and an empty beer keg as a pulpit. There were special services in English on Tuesday afternoons to help the congregation with the language. In addition evening services featured talks by missionaries working in other Italian settlements in the United States. In 1893, with D'Uva's financial assistance, the members constructed a one-room building on a plot of land donated by one of the converts. Thus the Presbyterian mission was chartered with sixty-four members. The same year, and a few days before the Protestant church was completed, a small Catholic church, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, was built. Its establishment stemmed the tide of conversions to Protestantism, but since no priest was available to provide full-time service, the church remained closed for the most part for three years.

Very close to Roseto, in West Bangor, was a second, separately established, predominantly Italian settlement that also lacked a facility for Roman Catholic worship services, although it had a chapel dedicated to Saint Rocco in the home of a lay reader. There was, however, an Italian Episcopal priest, who presided over two mission churches. Many of the West Bangor Italians, viewing the Episcopal liturgy as only slightly different from the Roman Catholic, joined the church and continued as Protestants even after a Catholic church was finally provided.

By 1896, Archbishop Ryan had reversed his decision to deny the residents of New Italy their missionary church. He managed to recruit an Italian priest, Father Pasquale de Nisco, from a parish in London, England, to establish a full-time mission in New Italy. Father de Nisco, a cultured and sophisticated man, was able to help the paesani with legal, civic, political, and family matters. He exhorted the Italian Presbyterians to return to their mother church or face excommunication, thereby setting off a controversy between the priests and ministers of the area churches that lasted until 1912.

Nine Presbyterian ministers served over the twenty-year period from 1892 to 1912. Then, in the absence of an ordained minister, the pulpit was filled for the next seven years by divinity students. By this time the original converts had grown old, some had returned to the Catholic church. During the period of controversy several discontented Presbyterians withdrew to organize the Association of the Bible Students, later known as the Russellites, or Jehovah's Witnesses. There were other trials and tribulations. A libel suit was initiated by one of the priests against the Presbyterian minister in New Italy. Another court case concerned the ownership of a strip of land adjacent to the Presbyterian cemetery.

Father de Nisco inaugurated a comprehensive plan for public improvement that was to serve as a pattern for subsequent progress. He encouraged his parishioners to secure American citizenship, urged parents to send their children to school, established clubs to promote interest in sports, initiated a circulating library, and formed organizations to meet the spiritual needs of specific age groups. The Mutual Aid Society Addolorata looked after the spiritual welfare of adults; the San Luigi Society worked among boys; the Sacred Heart Sodality was directed to mothers and wives; and the Figlie di Maria promoted Christian life among girls.

Father de Nisco began a campaign in the pulpit, in homes, and in the county court against "Sicilianism." His efforts were effective in reducing petty lawlessness. Most lawbreakers either reformed or left the area. Father de Nisco bought twenty-eight lots around the Catholic church with the idea of constructing a plaza, a parochial school, a hospital, and a cemetery. He encouraged Rosetans to beautify their town after the fashion of the village in Italy. He gave them seeds and bulbs and offered cash prizes for the best flowers. Women cleared the lots with axes and picks, spaded the rocky soil, and planted onions, beans, potatoes, and melons—enough to supply food for the summer and winter months. Fruit trees and grape arbors followed, and within a few years the ample backyards of Roseto's otherwise plain and almost austere homes bloomed with flowering shrubs, fruit trees, and berry bushes and vegetable gardens among patches of lawn.

The priest emphasized the need for cleanliness, often supervising the removal of trash and urging residents to improve their housing. Land values doubled nearly every two years, and the average capital required to begin construction on a house soon rose to four hundred dollars. On Father de Nisco's recommendation the Bangor banks agreed to lend money for building, allowing ten years for repayment. Father de Nisco attempted to improve the lot of the men in the quarries, who were earning only about eight cents an hour, were paid only every three months, and were compelled to trade at company stores. After failing in negotiations with the quarry owners, he organized a labor union, appointing himself as president. When shortly thereafter he called a strike, quarry owners imported one hundred southern blacks as strikebreakers. When the blacks saw the dangerous quarry pits, however, they refused to work and soon returned home. The priest was ultimately successful in increasing workers' wages to $1.50 for a nine-hour day. On another occasion, when a smallpox epidemic erupted in the town, he closed the quarries again by imposing a quarantine on the citizens. In addition, he urged them to become immunized.

Father de Nisco also recommended that the town obtain a wholesale liquor license, for he thought it better that his people should have the light wines and beer to which they were accustomed with their families, "under their own vine and fig trees," rather than frequent the bars in Bangor.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Roseto Story by John G. Bruhn, Stewart Wolf, Remsen Wolff. Copyright © 1979 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface,
1. Roseto in Historical Perspective,
2. Health and Disease in Roseto,
3. The Rosetan Way of Life,
4. Roseto's Neighbors: Bangor and Nazareth,
5. Roseto in Social Transition,
6. Myocardial Infarction in Sociological Perspective,
7. Summary and Projections for the Future,
Bibliography,
Index,