It's the pasta, stupid

[Tigermike 3,047]

It's the pasta, stupid

By Ralph R. Reiland

Monday, March 28, 2005

"The idea is to build an 'AfricaTown,' similar to Little Italy and Chinatown," explained Charles Oliver in a recent issue of Reason magazine, referring to the vote by Detroit City Council to spend $30 million a year in public money to develop a blacks-only, race-based district of entrepreneurship in downtown Detroit.

"By a 7-2 vote," reported Oliver, "the council has decreed that only black businessmen and investors can qualify for the money." The concept of this black version of Little Italy originated in a $112,000 report commissioned by the council: "A Powernomics Economic Development Plan for Detroit's Under-Served Majority Population."

Detroit's population is poor, shrinking and overwhelmingly black. By official count, 26 percent of the populace is living below the poverty line and 83 percent of the city's population is black. It's this "under-served majority population," according to the "Powernomics" report, that is being passed up economically by a mixed bag of nonblack newcomers.

More specifically, the report complains that entrepreneurial immigrants from Latin America and the Middle East are opening up too many stores and selling too much of everything to blacks. In doing so, it's alleged that these money-grubbing greenhorns are stealing jobs and business opportunities from blacks.

The plan is to create a black Little Italy, dubbed AfricaTown, funded in large part by taxpayers' dollars and made up of black-owned businesses catering to a black clientele. The analogy to Little Italy, of course, doesn't work. There's nothing about the proposed development of AfricaTown that bears the least resemblance to how Little Italy happened.

The Italian immigrants first settled in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1850s, eight decades before the U.S. even had a minimum-wage law (i.e., 25 cents an hour in 1938) and long before the federal government got in the business of safety nets. The Italians, in short, came to Mulberry Street for an opportunity, not a handout.

A 1901 study by Dr. Kate Holladay Claghorn, "The Foreign Immigrant in New York," describes the beginning days of Little Italy: "The little handful of Italians that made up the immigration from Italy in the early decades were mainly a vagabond but harmless class of organ grinders, ragpickers, bear laders and the like."

Reported Claghorn: "There was little pauperism among these people, if we may judge from the relative infrequency of Italian cases appearing in the reports of private charitable societies. They were a class of people who worked and paid their rent. They were strict in keeping their agreements. They are considered very desirable tenants."

The "handful," in short order, grew to "a great army of barbers, bootblacks, fruiterers and shoemakers," along with "about 400 persons employed in macaroni factories" and "many Italian watchmakers, bakers, confectioners, keepers of cafes and ice cream saloons, wine dealers, grocers, dry-goods dealers, and many in other businesses."

What worked was hard work. Again, as Claghorn recounted: "The Italian fruit peddler bestows a considerable amount of his inherited racial art sense in 'composing' his wares to form an attractive picture; the Italian barber pays considerable attention to the attractiveness of his place; the Italian bootblack is not the little ragged urchin of yesterday with battered box and a shrill velocity of motion, but a well-kept looking individual anywhere from 15 to 30 years of age, with a regularly established place of business ranging from the throne-like arm chair and umbrella to the regular shop as well-kept as the barber's."

Across the board, reported Claghorn, rich or poor in Little Italy, "all classes are highly industrious, thrifty, and saving" -- the exact formula for upward mobility and business expansion. "The tradespeople prosper rapidly," she reported. "The Italian barber enlarges his shop, perhaps finally sells out and becomes a banker; the fruit peddler buys a little shop, then a bigger one and may finally become a wealthy importer; and in like manner with other shopkeepers. The more ambitious and successful move to the suburbs and become property owners in Long Island City, Flushing, Corona, Astoria, etc."

That's how Italians got rich. It's how America got rich. Or as historian John Steele Gordon explained it: "If America is famous for its get-up-and-go, it's because we have ancestors who got up and came."

Little Italy, in short, was successful because the spaghetti was good, not because someone got a handout from city council.

Ralph R. Reiland, the B. Kenneth Simon professor of free enterprise at Robert Morris University, is a local restaurateur. E-mail him at rrreiland@aol.com.

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