{"value"=>"<p>Series reflects Speranza's life-long personal and professional interest in immigration issues and especially his involvement with the Italian community in the United States. Speranza's work with the Investigation Bureau for Italian Immigrants, the National Italian Labor Exchange, the Labor Information Office for Italians, The Prison Association of New York, the Richmond Hill House and the Committee on Crime and Immigration of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology are all documented to varying degrees in this section. There is some overlap between the General Correspondence and the correspondence in other series.</p> <p>As counsel to the Consul General of Italy, Speranza investigated claims of the families of Italian citizens who died in the United States. Many of these were laborers killed in job-related accidents and Speranza worked to procure some compensation, or at least, back wages for the families of these men. The Legal Files, which are arranged alphabetically, contain additional information on some of these cases. This correspondence documents the often harsh conditions of immigrant laborers in the early years of the century. A May 25, 1906 report by Speranza describing the conditions of workers for the Carolina Company is of particular interest. The Carolina Company brought many Italian immigrants to North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia to clear land for the South & Western Railway Company. Among Speranza's correspondents in his work for the Consul were Raybaudi Massiglia and Adolfo Rossi.</p> <p>In 1915 Speranza went to Italy as a feature correspondent for The New York Evening Post and the Outlook and in July of 1918 he was appointed assistant in the American Embassy in Rome. Most of the letters from this period are copies (the originals may be at Stanford with Speranza's diary from the war years). His correspondents while in Italy included Thomas Nelson Page and Norval Richardson of the American Embassy in Rome and B. Harvey Carroll, of the American Embassy in Venice. Speranza also corresponded with Ernest Hamlin Abbot and Lawrence F. Abbot of the Outlook.</p> <p>The correspondence for the later years of the series includes letters regarding publications of Speranza's work. Speranza continued to publish in the Outlook and also in the Atlantic Monthly and the Yale Review. Speranza corresponded extensively with French Strother regarding a series of articles he published in World's Work. The articles, published in 1923, reflect Speranza's increasingly restrictionist views and his theories on the nature and influences of \"foreign stock\" on American society. Other correspondents on these matters include Talcott Miner Banks, Robert M. Yerkes and John Jay Chapman.</p> <p>A small number of personal /family letters are included in the general correspondences, most notably, letters from Speranza's father, Carlo.</p>"}