The Italian Problem, Part II: No Halfway Measures

Posted on by Robert Francis

Between 1900 to 1915, more than three million Italians entered the United States, and many of them brought from their homeland the tradition of eating songbirds. Concerned conservationists watched these immigrants come ashore and fretted that “these people bring to America all their native predilection for potting the smallest birds that fly, all their poaching proclivities, developed through generations of European land tenure systems, and all their vindictiveness when the authorities attempt to restrain their ‘sport.’”1

The conservationists did not stand idly by when these “low-browed, swarthy, ill kept”2 foreigners threatened America’s native birds (the little ones, at any rate — birds like ducks, doves, and quail were perfectly alright to kill). Game wardens stepped up enforcement of existing laws protecting songbirds, while activists successfully lobbied state legislatures to pass laws specifically targeted to keep Italians from hunting or even owning guns. Violators were arrested and given heavy fines and long prison sentences, setting up a conflict that was heated, and at times fatal.

But there were also some conservationists that felt sympathy for the plight of the Italians, in addition to that of the birds. “Ignorance of the law is held to be no excuse for breaking it,” wrote one, “but this is one of the many cases of legal injustice.”3 These reformers instead worked hard to educate the ignorant foreigner on the economic importance of birds and the consequences of breaking the law. Last week, I wrote about how Americans felt about the Italian practice of hunting songbirds. In this post, I’ll talk about what they did to stop it. 

Enforcement, Conflict, Murder

The famous conservationist William Temple Hornaday expressed, perhaps disingenuously, that he hoped “it will not require blows and kicks and fines to remove from Antonio’s head the idea that America is not Italy, and that the slaughter of song birds ‘don’t go’ in this country.”4 Nevertheless, he and others forcefully advocated for punishing Italian hunters into submission. 

William Temple Hornaday played a significant role in protecting the American Bison from extinction. He was also incredibly racist. In his book Our Vanishing Wildlife, Hornaday dedicated one chapter to “Slaughter of Song-Birds By Italians” and another to “Destruction of Song-Birds by Southern Negroes and Poor Whites.”

Under existing state laws, it was illegal throughout most of the country to kill or harm most species of insect-eating birds, which were considered helpful to farmers. In Illinois alone, these laws were used to make more than a hundred convictions in 1899 “for the wanton killing and trapping of song and insectivorous birds by men and boys, largely Italians and Bohemians.”5 

The National Association of Audubon Societies, whose members were frequently deputized to serve as game wardens, regularly reported their successes in enforcing game laws. In 1906, for example, an Italian was accused of killing twelve robins, two thrushes, and a cuckoo, and “the officers of the Association were the means of causing his arrest and the culprit was sentenced to five months’ imprisonment.”6

Italian immigrants, of course, were not indifferent to the punishments that game wardens and judges were enthusiastically handing down. Many, if not most, had no idea that hunting songbirds — a widespread and perfectly innocuous activity back in Italy — was considered a crime in their new home. The resulting months-long prison sentences or exacting fines felt cruelly disproportionate to the act of killing the wrong kind of wild bird. One writer witnessed “almost a race-riot started by the arrest of an alien for taking shore-birds’ eggs from nests in a sand-barren, when the whole outraged attitude of the man showed that he was unconscious of wrongdoing.”7

And when these “naturally hot-tempered” immigrants were accosted for killing songbirds, “serious trouble for the game warden is often the result.”8 Between 1900 and 1915, more than a dozen game wardens were killed while attempting to arrest gun-carrying poachers, and many more were injured. When Samuel Taylor, for example, discovered two men (“appearing to be Italians”) for killing robins in Rome, New York, he attempted to make the arrest but when he came “within arm’s length was shot and instantly killed.”9 In another case, this time outside New Haven Connecticut, the game warden Walter Cook was shot in the stomach while attempting to arrest a pair of Italians, but survived after staggering back to his motorcycle and driving himself to a hospital.10

An anti-Italian cartoon, published in a 1909 issue of Life Magazine. Some of the Italians accused of murdering game wardens were alleged to have connections to the early Mafia.

Alien Hunting Laws

One of the most dramatic clashes between Italian hunters and game wardens took place near New Florence, Pennsylvania in 1906. Forest and Stream reported that in response to “a gang of Sicilians” that were shooting songbirds, “a deputation of the State constabulary sought to arrest them; the Italians gathered an armed force to resist; and in the fight that followed two of the constables were killed and two more were wounded.”11

Pennsylvania responded to this bloodbath by passing the nation’s first law banning “any unnaturalized foreign-born resident” from hunting or owning guns outright.12 Violation was punished with a $25 fine, or a day in jail for every dollar they couldn’t pay. Other states quickly passed their own laws modeled on Pennsylvania’s. The Massachusetts Audubon Society considered their most important legislative success of 1915 to be “the enactment of the law forbidding unnaturalized aliens to carry or possess a gun,”13 while New York took the approach of raising the price for hunting licenses for non-citizens to $20 — half a month’s wages for a day laborer — compared to the one dollar charged to citizens.14

And the rationale for these laws was explicit: “The most important feature of the license is not revenue, but the fact that it restricts many aliens (largely Italians) from hunting at all,” wrote B. S. Bowdish in Bird-Lore in 1907. The freedom to hunt had long been something that separated America from England, where hunting was reserved for the aristocratic elite. Since the 1600s, hunting had been considered a right, both culturally and legally. But as the historian Adam Rome observed, “The perception that immigrants were the greatest challenge to wildlife management led several states to define hunting as a privilege of citizenship.”15

Spreading the Gospel of Bird Protection

Most voices urged the longest possible sentences for immigrants found guilty of hunting songbirds. “Meet them at the threshold with drastic laws, thoroughly enforced; for no halfway measures will answer,” said William Temple Hornaday. But there were some who argued that education, rather than punishment, was a better approach. “I know that the Italians and Slavs seem lawless and kill birds indiscriminately,” wrote one 1903 contributor to Bird-Lore, “but for this we are responsible, not they. In the first place, they are not thoroughly informed, and, in the second, to get out to the woods for amusement is one of the few cheap pleasures this country offers.”16 Poaching also offered some reprieve from poverty, since robins could sell for sixty cents a dozen on the black market,17 when a full day of backbreaking labor leveling roads, hacking limestone, or unloading barges might only earn $1.50.18

A 1918 sign urging bird protection as a war measure, written in both English and Italian.

The most common measure adopted by activists to correct Italian ignorance was to post signs in English and Italian warning that hunting songbirds was against the law. Organizations like the Long Island Bird Club distributed signs “for posting on trees and fences, stating in English and Italian that to molest birds or nests rendered the offender liable to prosecution by the Bird Club.”19 Fliers could only be so effective, however. “Given a poster printed in Scholastic Italian, how much does it mean to those accustomed to a local patois, and when the unfamiliar names of our birds are added, what can Giacomo of the railway ditch make of the thing?” And besides, “in a few weeks they are either torn down or overshadowed by the latest poster advertising a county fair or a political rally.”20

From a 1918 issue of Bird Lore.

Some organizations went further to work with Italian communities. In 1908 the Anglers’ Association of Onondaga listed notices in Italian-language newspapers, worked with the priest of the local Italian church to warn his parishioners, and convinced the state to appoint an Italian special prosecutor, who “spread the gospel of bird protection among his fellow countrymen.”21

Other activists organized lectures, with varying degrees of effectiveness, to appeal directly to Italian communities. In 1915, Ernest Baynes wrote about his “experiment of giving a lecture before the members of a colony of Italian workmen and their wives and children. The lecture was given in English, of which the audience knew little or nothing, but by a logical series of pictures, accompanied by gestures and changes in the tone of voice, they were made to follow the speaker with intelligent interest.” Baynes wrote that the lecture influenced at least one of his listeners, as “the worst offender in the audience came to his teacher next morning and volunteered the promise that he would never kill another bird.”22

Good Americans

In 1867, Thomas De Voe published The Market Assistant, which carried the descriptive subtitle “A Brief Description of Every Article of Human Food Sold in the Public Markets of the Cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn.” In his book, De Voe listed all of the birds that he had seen displayed for sale in city markets. Fifty years before Italian immigration reached its peak, New Yorkers and Bostonians could and did eat woodpeckers, orioles, blackbirds, bobolinks, juncos, blue jays, robins, cedar waxwings, catbirds, thrushes, finches, and many other kinds of small birds. Despite their availability, De Voe thought that these insectivorous birds “should not only be protected by a stringent law, but every person should be so instructed that no law would be required for their protection.” Fifty years later, De Voe’s wish had largely come to pass. 

Had the surge of Italian immigration come when De Voe was writing The Market Assistant, the Italian practice of eating songbirds would have hardly caused a stir. As it was, their cultural practice ran afoul of newly-consolidated American norms that dictated that ducks, quail, woodcocks, and doves were perfectly fine to kill and eat, often in astounding numbers, while to eat robins, sparrows, finches, and other innocent and helpful birds was ignorant, cruel, and barbaric. 

By the 1930s, Italian-Americans had stopped making the news for killing songbirds. The decline of the practice was likely helped by the educational efforts led by Audubon Societies. More of the change was probably a result of the laws banning immigrants from hunting or even owning guns, and the threat of heavy fines and sentences that came with violating bird protections. 

But assimilation and the passage of time deserve some credit as well. A generation later, Italian-Americans still hunted, but they had shifted their quarry from songbirds to deer and legally-sanctioned game birds. In 1906, a contributor to Forest and Stream had predicted as much: “There is at least this to be said in their favor, that in the course of a few generations these foreigners become good Americans; and it may be that in the transformation they may in time come to share the American attitude toward the useful species which the Audubon law classifies as non-game birds.“23

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  1. Forest and Stream. United States: Forest and Stream Publishing Company, vol. 67, 1906. ↩︎
  2. Hornaday, William Temple. Our Vanishing Wild Life: Its Extermination and Preservation. United States: C. Scribner’s sons, 1913. ↩︎
  3. “Meditations on the Posting of Bird Laws.” Bird-lore. United States: National Audubon Society, 1903. ↩︎
  4. Hornaday, William Temple. Our Vanishing Wild Life: Its Extermination and Preservation. United States: C. Scribner’s sons, 1913. ↩︎
  5. “Reports of Societies: Illinois Society.” Bird-lore. United States: Macmillan Company, 1899. ↩︎
  6. Forest and Stream. United States: Forest and Stream Publishing Company, 1906. ↩︎
  7. “Meditations on the Posting of Bird Laws.” Bird-lore. United States: National Audubon Society, 1903. ↩︎
  8. Baynes, Ernest Harold. Wild Bird Guests, how to Entertain Them: With Chapters on the Destruction of Birds, Their Economic and Aesthetic Values, Suggestions for Dealing with Their Enemies, and on the Organization and Management of Bird Clubs. United States: E. P. Dutton, 1915. ↩︎
  9. “$750 Reward.” Forest and Stream. United States: Forest and Stream Publishing Company, 1914. ↩︎
  10. “A Courageous Game Warden.” Forest and Stream. United States: Forest and Stream Publishing Company, 1914. ↩︎
  11. Forest and Stream. United States: Forest and Stream Publishing Company, vol. 67, 1906. ↩︎
  12. Trafton, Gilbert Haven. Bird Friends: A Complete Bird Book for Americans. United States: Houghton Mifflin, 1916. ↩︎
  13. “Reports of State Societies, and of Bird Clubs: Massachusetts.” Bird Lore. United States: Macmillan Company, 1915. ↩︎
  14. “Fined for Swearing Falsely.” Forest and Stream. United States: Forest and Stream Publishing Company, 1914. ↩︎
  15. Rome, Adam. “Nature wars, culture wars: immigration and environmental reform in the Progressive Era.” Environmental History 13, no. 3 (2008): 432-453. ↩︎
  16. “Meditations on the Posting of Bird Laws.” Bird-lore. United States: National Audubon Society, 1903. ↩︎
  17. Forbush, Edward Howe. “Robins Killed in the North.” Forest and Stream. United States: Forest and Stream Publishing Company, 1908. ↩︎
  18. Warren, Louis S.. The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-century America. United Kingdom: Yale University Press, 1997. ↩︎
  19. “Reports of State Societies and Bird Clubs: Bird Club of Long Island (N. Y.).” Bird Lore. United States: Macmillan Company, 1915. ↩︎
  20. “Meditations on the Posting of Bird Laws.” Bird-lore. United States: National Audubon Society, 1903. ↩︎
  21. “Anglers’ Association of Onondaga.” Forest and Stream. United States: Forest and Stream Publishing Company, 1908. ↩︎
  22. Baynes, Ernest Harold. Wild Bird Guests, how to Entertain Them: With Chapters on the Destruction of Birds, Their Economic and Aesthetic Values, Suggestions for Dealing with Their Enemies, and on the Organization and Management of Bird Clubs. United States: E. P. Dutton, 1915. ↩︎
  23. Forest and Stream. United States: Forest and Stream Publishing Company, vol. 67, 1906. ↩︎