Gesualdi shifts the responsibility of poverty "in the land of freedom and equality" from the striving immigrant to the exploitive "hosts", in contradicting Banfield's theories.
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Thanks to H-ITAM, Dominic Candeloro, Editor

THE ITALIAN IMMIGRANTS OF CONNECTICUT, 1880 to 1940 ---
Louis J. Gesualdi
[New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts & Sciences, 1997]
[v.54 of their "Transactions" series]

Review by: William T. Amatruda, Law Librarian, Catholic Univ. of America

This short study is both sociological and historical.

Aside from the published social science literature, it also draws heavily on materials
gathered by members of the Federal Writers Project of the WPA during the late 30s and early 40s.

These include many interviews, transcribed in the authentic words of those who gave them, as well as interpretive essays by the researchers, some of whom were Italian American.

The principal finding is that:

...low participation in political, religious, and cultural organizations, low rates of higher education, and widespread mistrust of both non-Italians and of countrymen outside the family...

...had more to do with poverty, economic competition, and the hostility and cultural insensitivity of outsiders....

...than with the sort of deep-seated cultural mores proposed by writers like Edward Banfield in his controversial 1958 book "The Moral Basis of a Backward Society".

A fascinating, warts-and-all view of a bygone world, and of people on whose shoulders we stand.   Highly recommended.
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RAA NOTE: Banfield wrote "The Moral Basis of a Backward Society"  an inflammatory book on Italians after spending just ONE year living with just his wife's family in southern Italy.

He had only the shallowest of understanding of the Northern/Southern Italy problem, and the 350 years of occupation by a variety of foreigners, prior to the Unification.

He wrote an even more disparaging book about African-Americans in The Unheavenly City (1968). He strongly defended Mayor Richard J. Daley's corrupt "machine politics" in Political Influence.

Edward C. Banfield, Professor of Government at Harvard was a controversial and conservative, and some say xenophobic, so called expert on urban affairs and urban poverty, who took what I would characterize as a "inhumane" view of the "unprivileged".

Banfield modified Darwin's theory of the "Survival of the Fittest" to "Survival of the Fattest". Banfield was a protégé of Edward Shils.