The Macaroni Riots of Federal Hill

In the late summer of nineteen fourteen, the streets of Federal Hill in Providence, Rhode Island, exploded over pasta. That is the short version. The longer version is a story about immigration, exploitation, radical politics, and the way poor communities fight back when they have nothing left to lose.

Federal Hill was the heart of Providence's Italian immigrant community, a dense neighborhood of families who had come over in the wave of Southern and Eastern European migration that remade American cities between eighteen eighty and nineteen fifteen. Life was hard, wages were thin, and the pantry staple that kept thousands of families fed was macaroni, cheap and filling and familiar from the old country.

Then in the summer of nineteen fourteen, something changed. World War One had just broken out in Europe, disrupting Italian imports, and local wholesalers seized the moment. The price of pasta climbed by about two thirds in a month. The man the neighborhood blamed most was Frank P. Ventrone, an Italian pasta wholesaler on Atwells Avenue who, his accusers charged, was selling American-made pasta under Italian labels while charging the prices of imported goods.

On August twenty-second, socialist organizers held a peaceful rally on the hill. A week later, on August twenty-ninth, the peace ended. A crowd of roughly one thousand people marched down Atwells Avenue and ransacked Ventrone's store. The riot spread over the next several nights. Radicals who had been organizing in the neighborhood for years, members of the Industrial Workers of the World and local socialists, helped channel the fury. Luigi Nimini, who had founded the Karl Marx Club at the corner of Atwells and Dean Street, published a radical Italian-language newspaper called La Ragione Nuova, the New Reason, that gave voice to the anger.

By the time the riots ended on September seventh, fourteen people had been shot, fifty arrested, and twenty thousand dollars in property destroyed. But the protest worked. Socialist negotiators hammered out an agreement with local food wholesalers to bring prices back down.

The whole episode lasted nine days. It was the kind of flash-point story that gets forgotten in official histories but that never quite leaves the neighborhoods where it happened. Ventrone's block still stands on Atwells Avenue. Federal Hill is a restaurant destination today, famous for its red sauce. But the red in the sauce has a longer history than most diners know.