Antonio Mangano

Born in Acri, Cosenza, Calabria on 7 December 1869,* to Onofrio Mangano (b. 1822 or 1826), cook, and his wife Marianna (1849-1880), he embarked with his parents to the USA from Liverpool, on 15 September 1879,** moving to Hempstead, Long Island, New York.

It is possible that his father was imprisoned for murder in Cosenza between 1848 and 1854 'during the revolution'. He was then arrested for murder in 1880, only a year after their arrival, for killing his younger wife Marianna on 7 June in a fit of jealous rage. Antonio was drawn into the domestic trauma in a very direct way. "The boy had undoubtedly been coached by his father, who had been permit­ted to remain with him during the night. The child fenced cleverly with the interpreter, but was com­pelled to admit that long before the Po­lice were notified his father took him from the Five Points Mission House school and told him to go home and wake his mother, who lay asleep on the floor." [NY Times, 9 June 1880] Taken into custody, he spent the first night in the police lockup, and was then sent in the House of Detention.

This event provides some insight into the silence which surrounds Antonio's early life. The family were sharing their tiny apartment at 22 Mulberry Street with two boarders, one of whom became a suspect in the case. 'The room in which the woman was found dead is in the centre of a densely-populated block of houses, and a dozen windows command a view of the interior of it'. It also suggests where Antonio first heard the gospel: when he was not working on the street as a bootblack, he was attending school at the Five Points Mission, and so perhaps first encountered the Protestant faith there or in an orphanage run by the Mission.

While in Sing Sing prison, Onofrio Mangano was also convicted of murdering a fellow prisoner, Charles Williams, in a clash which seemed to have overtones of conflict between Italians and Irish migrants. When he was sentenced to death, he 'shrugged his shoulders and said in Italian: “Well, I can’t help it; I could not speak for myself, and if that is to be my destiny it must be so."' (NY Times, 22 January 1882, p. 5) Could it have been that Antonio's passion for Americanizing and Protestantizing Italians was in part driven by a sense that his father had been wrongly charged because of his language and his nationality? Mangano never reveals this in his writings, but he does make it clear that the morass in which Italian migrants found themselves - morally, socially, politically, culturally - presented an integrated challenge that he would spend his life attempting to unpick.

We are not told how he attracted enough support to attend school at Colgate Academy (graduated 1894), a preparation that enabled him to matriculate to Colgate and Brown Universities. Unlike his father (who Sing Sing records indicate could read, but not write), Antonio would take degrees from Brown University (BA, 1899); Columbia University (MA 1903); Union Theological Seminary (B.D. 1903); and Colgate Theological Seminary (DD 1918).

In 1903, when he was living as a student at 700 Park Ave, New York, he returned to Italy for several months, possibly to visit family or the emerging Baptist work there.

The church was also known as the Dietz Memorial Baptist Church after Frederick Dietz donated $20,000 for the construction and furnishing of the church building, in memory of his wife, Marie Louise Dietz. (With changing demographics, the congregation later became a largely African-American congregation known as the Devoe Street Baptist Church.) Antonio would name one of his children after Dietz.

In 1907, he married Mabel Austin Farnham (b. 1878, Connecticut–1959), the oldest of three daughters of Rev. Seth Taylor Farnham (1847–1884) and Julia Maria nee Austin (1848–1923). As Barone notes, it was a marked step up in social standing and access to American elites. (Barone 2021)

Mangano's mission in Brooklyn became a model for immigrant churches elsewhere. From his experience Mangano recommended migrant church autonomy: “If the converted foreigners speak little English and are of the laboring class, the attempt is always a failure. The vast majority of church-members will not mix with them and the Italians feel keenly their isolation, the social gulf between the races, and their own shabby clothes.” Mangano also reported that established Baptist clerics were often at a loss dealing with immigrant members of their congregation. [Sons of Italy, 166].

In 1907 he became head of the Italian Department at The Colgate Theological Seminary, which at the time was located in Brooklyn, NY. The course was two years long with a preliminary year for those starting without the required previous education. The school took Italian immigrants who had been converted in the USA from Catholicism to Protestantism. Practically all the students were men over twenty years of age with little education, so in the school the Italian and English languages were studied; an elementary American history, an elementary church history and theology; now and then some prominent man gave us a lecture on various subjects. As Luigi Turco noted to his son, "I had gone to grammar school in Italy, and I was considered one of the best . . . students, so one may see that at the end of the course the men were not well prepared for the work of the ministry." In 1912 one of the first classes graduated four students: Pascal Arpaio (who founded the First Italian Baptist Church in Oklahoma); Giutino Basile (missionary to Oneonta, NY); Vito Cordo (first to Trenton, NJ, then to Cleveland), and Antonio Perrotta (New York).

In 1914 he attended "a conference called by the several ministerial bodies of New York City, to consider the question of the week-day religious instruction of public-school children" in Bible House. In 1916, Mangano inspected the Barre mission during his summer vacation. He was discouraged by what he found, in spite of the hours and dollars invested. The town was dominated by migrants who were influenced by the atheist socialism of the industrializing north: “anti-religious sentiment was so strong that only a very few of the people could be reached. The work was at a very low stage up to the last summer. A little Sunday school and a sewing class was all that remained of Italian work. My experience was most interesting, though at times disheartening. Everywhere I went people said to me, ‘You must not talk of religion here, for the Italians will hoot you out of town’ and then they told me how several years ago they had driven an Italian Priest from the city.” (Mangano 1916)

The Colgate Theological Seminary was located in Brooklyn, NY until 1921 when it was moved to Orange, NJ, then to Hamilton, NY, and then, in 1927, to Rochester, NY where it merged with the Rochester Theological Seminary to become the Colgate Rochester Divinity School. By the date of the merger, Mangano had grown the Italian Department (also called La Scuola Teologica Battista Italiana) from four to fifteen faculty and had graduated forty-one candidates. In 1923 he wrote about the Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Czechoslovak, Mexican and Romanian Departments, which in 1921 were merged into one. In 1924, he took his final year class of 8 students (from autumn of 1924 to May 1925) to Rome to study at the Waldensian Faculty of Theology. He was a major catalytic figure in the lives of many of his students, acting not only to teach them, but to place them, and then later to promote their causes when vacancies occurred.

By 1930 he was living at 21 Thayer St., Rochester, New York with his wife Mabel (b. 1879, Connecticut), and three sons. Suitably for a clergyman who saw 'the pastors wife' as a key figure in his own emphasis on education, Mabel was well connected and well educated. In his discussion of church organization, Mangano had said that ideally “a well-trained Italian pastor” should “work with adults, an earnest Christian American” should “handle boys’ and young men’s work” and “an Italian-speaking woman” should “spend her time visiting and teaching in the homes” and perhaps also organize the children’s Sunday school (Quoted in Barone 2021). Mabel had been born into a Baptist clerical family on 7 September 1878 at Suffield, Conn, and was educated at Vassar College (1902) and Harvard University (B.A., 1904). She was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the National Society of New England Women (Rochester, N.Y. Colony). With Mangano, she had three sons: Richard Farnham (born May 17, 1908 at Jamaica, Long Island, New York); Philip Austin (born March 23, 1910 at Richmond Hill, Long Island, New York) and Arthur Dietz (born July 31 1 1911 at Hampton Falls, New York). Mabel was a lifelong partner in Mangano's educational activities. Those activities were not just in favour of literacy, but extended to the political and cultural mainstreaming of his community. Speaking on the same platform as Katherine Mayo in 1932, he noted the 'need for improving political among foreign-born vot­ers, of whom there are many without contact with true American ideals... It is one of the greatest curses of our social system that the foreigner is engaging in the political corruption which has affected judges at the present time. If we are ever going to change these conditions we should lead these peo­ple to a knowledge of Christ.” [New York Times, 12 January 1932] He also saw that corruption as spreading through the influence of Fascism through the 1920s and 1930s. As a key Protestant intellectual leader he participated with Charles Fama [q.v.] and the Defenders of the Constitution in attempting to stem the flow of Fascist propaganda, meanwhile representing the cases of naturalized Italian-Americans when they found themselves negatively affected by Fascist regime administration. At a commemoration of the birth of Garibaldi in 1931, he reflected on the collapse of democracy and intellectual freedom in Italy under Mussolini. (New York Times 5 July 1931)

Mangano died, aged 81, on 9 May 1951, at his home at 64 Beverly Road, Kew Gardens in Queens. Mabel died in 1959, leaving funds for a scholarship fund at Vassar College. Mangano had been instrumental in the creation of the Italian Baptist Home Mission; founded and was president of l'Associazione Battista Italiana negli Stati Uniti d'America, acting as its unquestioned leader for several decades, and had a profound impact on Protestant missions and church planting among Italian migrants to the USA. His book, Sons of Italy (1917), remains in print, and is regularly used as a key source for historians working on Italian Protestantism.

Notes:

* on another document, Mangano noted his birth date as 18 December 1868;

** On another document he noted it was 1 September 1877, on the Red Line. Ellis Island Records, however, indicate that the family arrived on the SS Switzerland, in 1879.

Sources:

Ancestry.com

Barone, D., 'On the Profit of Protestant Wives', Journal of Religion and Society vol. 23 (2021)

Farnham, E.P., 'The First Italian Baptist Church of Brooklyn,' Missions: A Baptist Monthly Magazine II (1911).

Wiley, Ruth Marion Gibbs, 'Gibbs Genealogy. 1629-1966' (TSS, California for the author, 1970).

Heller, Paul, 'Preaching the Gospel to Anarchists and Socialists: Baptist Missionaries in Barre, 1899–1916', Vermont History 78.2 (Summer/Fall 2010): 196–207.

La Sorte, Michael, 'Rev. Antonio Perrotta and the Rochester, NY Italian Baptist Mission', Italian Americana 9.2 (Spring/ Summer 1991): 230-244

Mangano, Antonio, “Italian Work in Barre,” Missions: A Baptist Monthly Magazine 7 (June 1916): 476.

Mangano, Antonio, Sons of Italy (New York: Missionary Education Movement, 1917).

Mangano, Antonio, Antonio Mangano papers, A1037, Colgate University. https://archives.colgate.edu/repositories/2/resources/36

Mangano, Antonio, 'Italian Tent work in Brooklyn,' Baptist Home Mission Monthly (October 1906): 370-71.

New York Times Archives, 1879-1882, 1931, 1951, 1959, online.

Williams, Howard, A History of Colgate, 1819-1969 (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1969).