Pride, perseverance and paesani

Due to Enemy Action excerpted

Keep the e-mails coming

The making of Dark Tide

Food For Thought
By Steve Puleo

Welcome to Food for Thought. This column features a collection of short nuggets that range from news and information about my books to answers to questions I’ve received from readers. If you have any suggestions about further Food for Thought items, please e-mail me and include “Food for Thought” in your subject line.

Pride, Perseverance and Paesani

As the paperback edition of my third book, The Boston Italians, is released this month, I wanted to make a few observations about readers’ reactions to the book since the hardcover’s debut a year ago. I have received hundreds of e-mails and spoken to nearly two thousand people at presentations throughout the Boston area; the response has been overwhelmingly positive and heartwarming — from Italian-Americans and others — and has fallen into two main categories.

First, there is the resounding opinion that the book was long overdue; that it’s simply about time Boston’s second largest ethnic group was the subject of a “non-Mob” book. That the real story — one of Italian immigrants overcoming enormous odds and paving the way for their children and grandchildren to achieve remarkable success — needed to be told.

The second reaction, surprising to me though equally gratifying, has been the need for Italian-Americans to share their family stories. Virtually every e-mail I receive starts out with, “My grandfather arrived at Ellis Island in 1910” or “My parents raised seven children even though their only income was my what my father earned as a pushcart vendor in Haymarket” or “Mr. Puleo, your story reminded me so much of my own…”  It’s as though these readers have wanted to share their stories for a long time but weren’t sure how to do so. The Boston Italians has tapped into that demand and provided the outlet, and I am honored that I had the opportunity to write this story for the first time.

It all goes back to the first generation. More than half the book covers what I colloquially refer to as the Great Immigration and Settlement Years, stretching from the beginning of the Italians’ arrival in Boston up to the onset of the Great Depression. These were the most crucial years of the Italian experience in America, and define to this day how Italian-Americans view their own heritage and how other Americans assess us. The people who defined these first fifty-plus years were the immigrants themselves, who struggled to get to America, overcame hardship once they arrived, contributed their sweat to help build a country, carved a place for themselves and their children in the American mainstream, and forged an ethnic identity that still evokes pride one hundred years later.

As the years go by, and history provides distance and the opportunity for fresh assessment, their sacrifices and accomplishments appear all the more remarkable.

Think about their struggle. Between 1880 and 1921, more than 4.2 million Italians entered the United States, as many as ninety five percent of them through Ellis Island in New York (No other ethnic group during the Great Immigration period sent so many immigrants in such a short time.)  Nearly eighty percent of them were from villages and hill towns of Southern Italy and Sicily where they had tilled the land, fished the sea, or worked with their hands, and fled their homeland due to impoverishment; more than half were illiterate, or barely literate, in their own language.

When they arrived in America, some settled in small mining towns or on farms, but the overwhelming majority flocked to America’s large cities and quickly established tight-knit, insular enclaves, Little Italies, like Boston’s North End, which acted as buffer zones of comfort and familiarity in the midst of a strange and hostile urban landscape that was strewn with pitfalls and prejudice. 

It was within the cocoon of these enclaves that most Italians settled, purchased property, worshiped, shopped, socialized, and in some cases, worked. It was from these enclaves that Italians ventured out, albeit slowly, to expand their job opportunities, learn English, and finally, assimilate into American culture. 

My book looks at Boston Italians within the broader context of the overall Italian experience in America, and that includes why so many left Italy seeking a new life in the first place. More than any other major ethnic group, Italians’ life experiences in the Old Country directly affected their patterns of settlement, manner of living, reliance on family, process of assimilation, and relationship with other Americans.

There’s another reason this book means so much to me, and I think, to readers: the story of the Boston Italians is my story, too. Three of my four grandparents were immigrants (my maternal grandmother was born in America). My two grandfathers and paternal grandmother arrived virtually penniless, with few skills, and unable to speak English. My paternal grandfather was barely literate in his own language. Both my grandfathers eventually became citizens and entrepreneurs; my grandmother never obtained her citizenship and was even classified as an "enemy alien" at the outset of World War II, despite the fact that three of her sons would eventually fight overseas while serving in the United States Army. My paternal grandparents settled in the North End and stayed for years; my maternal grandfather spent a few years there before moving to the nearby city of Everett. Theirs were the quintessential experiences of Italian immigrants.

My parents and aunts and uncles also shared the experiences of thousands of other children of Italian immigrants. Several of my aunts worked in the garment industry, which was flooded with Italian-American women in Boston. As a young girl, my mother worked in my grandfather’s cobbler shop, lighting the small stove to provide heat in the wintertime and waiting on customers after school, contributing to the family business as thousands of other Italian-American schoolchildren did. My father and two of his brothers served in World War II, which was a defining period for Italian-Americans, one in which they were forced to prove their loyalty to America as the United States battled not just Germany and Japan, but Mussolini’s Italy.

I wove the Puleo story through the course of The Boston Italians because it is illustrative of the overall fabric of the Boston Italian experience, a rich and colorful tapestry of enduring strength and value, one held together for one-hundred-and-thirty years by the legacies of struggle, perseverance, hard work, and the bond of family.

In addition to providing pleasure to readers of all nationalities interested in Boston and immigration history, I hope my book helps continue the resurgence of interest and pride among Italian-Americans, in Boston and elsewhere, in our heritage and our history. One Italian-American journalist said that our appetite to know our ancestors is fueled by our desire to build "a spiritual bridge between [our] Italian past and [our] American future.” 

Only with the presence of such a bridge, spanning generations, can we summon their wisdom and example to guide and inspire our own journey.

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Due to Enemy Action excerpted in The Greatest Submarine Stories Ever Told

I’m very pleased that my second book, Due to Enemy Action, has been excerpted in a new anthology entitled The Greatest Submarine Stories Ever Told, edited by Lamar Underwood. The book is subtitled, Dive! Dive! Fourteen Unforgettable Stories from the Deep.

Due to Enemy Action is in good company in this book, which includes excerpts from Shadow Divers (Robert Kurson), The Hunt for Red October (Tom Clancy), Torpedo Junction (Homer Hickham), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne), The Death of the USS Thresher (Norman Polmar), and The Terrible Hours (Peter Maas). It certainly is an honor to be associated with some of these authors and books.

Each excerpt is introduced with a brief summary of the book from which it is taken. “Stephen Puleo’s account is a stunning tribute to men who had to be remembered in a story that had to be told,” Underwood says in the introduction.

The excerpt from Due to Enemy Action is entitled “The Last U-Boat” and focuses on the U-853 as it heads for American waters in the final weeks of World War II.

There is one mistake in the introduction that Due to Enemy Action readers will notice and that I want to point out here. One sentence reads: “At the center of the tale is the torpedoing of the Eagle 56 off the American coast in May 1945, after Germany’s surrender.” [editor’s emphasis]. Of course, the Eagle 56 was sunk by the U-853 on April 23, 1945, two weeks before the war ended. The U-853 then went on to sink the freighter Black Point on May 5, 1945, after the German high command had sent out cease-fire orders to all U-boats. The U-853 was destroyed just hours before the German surrender, the final U-boat sunk in World War II.

The error notwithstanding, I’m honored to see the Eagle 56 – U-853 story be recognized as one of the "greatest" submarine stories ever told, and hope all of you with an interest in submarines and the sea have a chance to pick up this book.

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Keep the e-mails coming

I’ve been blessed to have contact from readers from all over the country via e-mail, one of the truly great benefits of technology that too often seems overly intrusive. Please keep them coming; your comments, ideas, and questions are always interesting and “food for thought” in their own right.

I answer every e-mail I receive, though admittedly some responses may take longer than others, and I appreciate the time and interest you take in writing.  You can contact me at stephen@stephenpuleo.com. My thanks to all of you for your kindness and support.

The making of Dark Tide
At virtually every Dark Tide presentation I give, audience members seem genuinely interested in the source material I used to research the book. If you’re reading this column, I’ll assume you’re interested, too.

Dark Tide draws upon three major primary sources (there are other primary sources and numerous secondary sources as well) to form the heart of its narrative – two of which, I’m proud to say, have never before (to my knowledge) been used in any written account of the Great Boston Molasses Flood.

I’ll start with the source that actually has been used before: Judge Hugh Ogden’s summary report of the entire lawsuit. This 50-plus page report offers rich background on the disaster and tells us as much about Ogden as it does about how he weighed the testimony and evidence. As I said in my bibliographic essay to Dark Tide: “Ogden is a careful writer, setting the scene remarkably well…and tackling each of the major issues with literary verve and methodical analysis.”

Dark Tide is the first published account to draw on the other two sources: the 25,000-page transcript of the huge three-year lawsuit that followed the flood; and the reports that Hugh Ogden wrote to accompany his damage awards to flood victims and their families. Both are riveting and compelling sources, and together, they paint a broad and three-dimensional portrait of the flood, the real-life characters in Dark Tide, and the surrounding historical issues that “touch” the flood story (anarchists, immigration, World War I and munitions, etc.).

The damage award reports contain Ogden’s summary and assessment of every individual’s suffering or financial loss, and his rationale for awarding the amounts he did; the latter, especially, provides a revealing look into the judge’s character and thought process. The reports are also self-contained short stories about every person injured or killed in the flood: they let us know how much the person earned, how many children he (in most cases) had, his occupation, the extent of his injuries, etc. I “broke the seal” on these damage awards — they had lain apparently untouched in the archives for 80 years — my white gloves sooty with fine, black dust.

The 25,000 pages of transcripts, contained in 40 bound volumes, provide stunning firsthand accounts from eyewitnesses, victims, family members of the deceased, and expert witnesses. It would be difficult to imagine a richer trove of primary source material than testimony from people who are under oath, during a period before attorneys “coached” their witnesses. The level of candor and forthrightness in the testimony is remarkable; there are virtually no “I can’t recalls” during the entire trial.

While the courtroom scenes appear only in Part 3 of Dark Tide, I used these sources to form most of the book’s narrative. For example, the Prologue, which describes Isaac Gonzales’s late-night runs through Boston’s North End, was drawn directly from Isaac’s somewhat bizarre testimony.

You can learn more about how I made use of the sources in Dark Tide’s Bibliographic Essay.

If you have any questions, ideas, or thoughts, please e-mail me at

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