Recently, one of my favorite former students, Eric Armstrong,
an African American semi-young man, posted this response to the shooting of
George Floyd, and attendant issues.
Eric is a 49er’s fan; but we can forgive that. I was fortunate
to have not only Eric in my history class, but also his equally talented
sisters, Kia and Ashley. His mother, LaVerne Armstrong, was also a highly-respected
educator in the same district where I taught.
His father, also Eric Armstrong, “worked in HR for nearly 40 years,” Eric wrote, “so
I learned a lot about diversity, inclusion, and empathizing with others from
conversations with him. He now owns a Black Angus Cattle ranch in Oklahoma!”
I
told Eric, then, we would call his father a modern Nate Love, a famous African
American cowboy.
After
graduating from Loveland High School in 1998, the younger Mr. Armstrong obtained
degrees in Chemical Engineering and Spanish from Purdue University. When not
working in technical sales; he enjoys traveling the world in his free time.
That said, here’s what Eric wrote. I moved a couple of commas, spelled
out an abbreviation or two, and stuck a title on his essay.
Otherwise, the eloquent words are his.
Mr. Armstrong, with sister Ashley's children.
*
Tough
Topics, Powerful Words, Time for Deeds
Facebook Friends I
really hope if you read this first sentence, you find the time to read these
next several paragraphs. It’s lengthy but I think it’s important.
Systemic racial
inequality, prejudice, ‘White Privilege,’ are tough topics, powerful words. I
imagine white people; are uncomfortable when they hear them, feel defensive
when directed towards them, and I think most importantly are confused about
what to do about them.
You see racists are
easy to identify and label, they wear hoods, yell slurs, and burn crosses.
Racists don’t hide their disdain, they’re proud of it, and most importantly I
imagine 90% of white people can say unequivocally, “I’m not a racist, that’s
not me!” “My family raised us to...” “I have very close ____ friends.” etc...
The other words however
are harder to define; they are subtle, woven into our nation’s very fabric,
everyday behavior, and actions. Unfortunately, our country was built and
founded on them. In their most basic forms even Black Americans can struggle to
explain them, it’s often an uneasy feeling or a story, the way you were
treated. It’s some simple task that Black Americans worry about that would
never cross the mind of a white person.
Moreover, if you
as a white person can comprehend the definitions and give examples of these
words, then you’d realize 100% of white people have existed/participated/enabled
them. That’s honestly what is at the core of everything happening today. A
profound ignorance exists and the cure is education, open dialogue, and a
paradigm shift in how we respond.
I personally haven't
said much about what’s happened recently, the rash of killings locally here in
Indianapolis or across the country. I’ve admittedly deflected and given short
PC answers. There are two reasons for this commonly shared by many Black
Americans.
1) It reopens painful
feelings and emotional wounds, and if you’re a Black American who has existed
as I have (fairly comfortably) it’s a jarring reminder of what could happen to
you and your friends, family, and colleagues.
2) It’s exhausting. If
you know me, I enjoy talking and pushing the boundaries of comfort on many
topics. I don’t shy away from race if engaged and I try to keep the
conversation light so I’m approachable and those who truly want to understand,
learn and change have a safe place to do so. However, for every one of those
interactions, there are 20 other conversations, comments, posts, when white
people dismiss Black Americans’ experiences as “one-off occurrences” or say “why
do you make everything about race. It isn’t always about race.” Or, “Well if ______Black
American wasn't doing _____, _____ wouldn't have happened.”
So admittedly, lazily,
embarrassingly, I felt like this latest response was going to be the U.S.
status quo. People get fake mad, they post “Black Lives Matter” and are upset
for a while, some Black Americans protest and march, then in a couple months
things/people go back to “normal.”
But I decided to write
this because something different is happening. White people are out marching
too, they’re verbalizing the issues and not just repeating buzz words. Most
importantly they’re engaging us. They’re messaging me, texting me and asking me
to have conversations. They’re asking me what those confusing words mean to me,
asking what my experience has been.
A business colleague
who I consider a friend sent me this:
Weird non work related question. Would you be interested in
coming to our house for dinner in the next two weeks. No need to answer
tonight. The bigger human conversation is that our kids need to meet people who
don’t look like them.
Wow.
Maybe it will be
different this time...
Because if everyone
wants to know how we “fix things” how we “make it better,” that’s it in a
nutshell. White people must willingly have a lot of introspection, ask
questions of themselves and Black Americans, and state the following, “I
acknowledge that though I’m not a racist; I’m ignorant, uninformed, and
contributing to prejudice, systemic racism, and white privilege with my
inactivity. My posts and words are not enough.”
What are the questions?
How do you know you are contributing to this climate?
If as a white person
you’ve ever posted or said, “Skin color doesn’t matter to me.” Or, “I don’t see
race.” Unless you are actually visually impaired, you’re saying (whether you
intend to) I’m not recognizing that because your skin is brown, your experience
in this world has been markedly different than mine. It must be acknowledged
that race is a factor, a variable in a human’s life experience and reactions,
questions, interactions, must be adjusted.
Change your language to
take that into account, instead say, “I actively try not to let my inherent
biases and ignorances negatively impact how I interact with Black Americans.”
See color, value
differences.
If as a white person
you’ve called something “ghetto” or used the word as an adjective to associate
things with Black Americans. I compare it with how people use with the word “gay”
to describe something they dislike.
Or you’ve said “_____
doesn’t act black” or “_____ isn’t really even black.” Your words mean you believe
they exhibit positive characteristics ascribed to white people.
How about these? You
have many black friends and co-workers... right? Have you been to their homes
or invited them to yours? Do you vacation with them? Have these conversations
with them?
It may not be how you
treat those Black American friends and colleagues. How do you interact with the
Black Americans who are strangers? Do you strike up conversations? Do you avoid
sitting by them, cross the street, wait for the next elevator...?
I have seen a lot of
this world and our country and I’ve been invited into the homes of strangers
internationally and never to the homes of some of my “friends” here in the U.S.
My Christian friends, do
you attend diverse church services? What does your congregation look like? God
valued/preaches inclusion and diversity but why is the church segregated?
How about the
neighborhood where you live? Any black neighbors? Do your kids have Black
American classmates? Do Black American kids play with your kids at your home
and vice versa? If you say, “No, there just aren’t Black Americans where I
live. I live there because it’s safe and has good schools.” Well if there are
no Black Americans there; are they in the underperforming schools and unsafe
neighborhoods? The separate but equal ones?
If you asked your kids
who are three Black Americans they know, are they all celebrities and athletes?
Do you go to businesses, concerts, read books and see movies by Black
Americans? You have to ask why is that? Who/what experiences are you exposing
yourself and family to or limiting them from becoming educated about?
Again, the racist
people are not the problem. We know where they stand and what they believe. It’s
the tolerant white people, the ones that have casually existed with Black Americans.
I call it arms-length prejudice. You have been fine with black people having
equal rights as long as it doesn’t change your world, come into your
neighborhood, school, or church. As long as it doesn’t date your sons and
daughters. Have you been social distancing from Black Americans? You have to
ask yourself, have you been perpetuating that arms-length distance, whether
subconsciously or consciously? Do you want things to change? Do you really care
about the black friend(s) or those black strangers that you post black squares
and black lives matter hashtags about? It’s going to take more than posts and
rhetoric. If you care about Black Americans but stand by while prejudice or
prejudice-adjacent comments are being spoken then it won’t change. If it’s tolerated
by our leaders and business owners as them just “speaking their mind” or “telling
it how it is” then you are supporting the issue.
Many of you are
currently raising the young humans who will determine how Black Americans are
treated in the next 20 to 40 years and beyond. If you change their experiences
and relationships with Black Americans you will change the behaviors and
outcomes. Posts, black squares, and words are fantastic; education, action, and
follow up are better.
Marching and demonstrating
serves only to keep the issue in the front of people’s minds. The actual work
is done right here with us having the conversations and listening. Calling
people out, calling yourself out. A lot of people want to be healthy, but don’t
want to exercise. I see the same behavior with race. A lot of white people want
the conversations about race to stop, for the problems to go away, but they don’t
want to do the hard work to get us there.
It’s time for these
conversations. For white people to ask your friends of color about the first
time they were called the n-word or were pulled over/followed for no reason?
These conversations
that must be had between blacks and whites are going to be uncomfortable, they’re
going to bring upon whites feelings of guilt and shame and often times blacks
may be embarrassed or angry, not at you, about their struggle; but it’s an
important step in healing and understanding.
Lastly, both blacks and
whites must understand that changing a behavior takes a long time. Some people
estimate it takes 10,000 hours of doing a task to master it. How many hours
have you and your children spent discussing, interacting, and educating
yourself about Black Americans? Black Americans, how many conversations have
you opened yourself up to with white people? This is not going to happen
overnight...but the conversations can start today
By the way, I found it was easy to get veterans to come into my classroom and talk (check this link); and I tried to make sure they gave students the real picture.
(This reading is a little more ragged than I like; but I retired in 2008; so I may get around sometime and fix it up.)
Not all soldiers are heroes, either. This picture by Winslow Homer captures a soldier "playing sick."
The Glory of War?
Too often we have a fool’s understanding of war. We think of waving flags, flashing swords, medals, and acts of bravery. For this reason, young men (and now young women) are sometimes anxious to get involved when fighting erupts. This was the case at the start of the Civil War, when Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941, on up to modern times. Phillip Caputo, a Vietnam veteran, once noted sadly, “War is always attractive to young men who know nothing about it.”
This mindset is a result of limited knowledge. Those who have experienced combat are normally reluctant to discuss it. Books cannot capture the taste and smell of war. Nor can TV or movies—even the “bloodiest” films made today. They cannot measure fear. They cannot quantify adrenaline. Too often, we get a romanticized version of what combat is truly like. Movie battles combine a certain excitement and glory. War seems an adventure. The star rarely dies. The “good guys” shoot with incredible accuracy. The “bad guys” can’t hit an elephant at trunk’s length.
If a hero does die, his or her death is usually quick and tidy. Good guys get to say a few last words to a friend or loved one in the movies. Most end “happily ever after” and the returning soldier wins the heart of the girl he left behind.
Or guy.
As a veteran of the Civil War, however, General William T. Sherman came much closer to the truth. When asked to describe what it is like when humans kill humans, he replied simply: “War is hell.”
There has never been much glamour in the business. We should never forget that. Most of the time military life can be dull. There are long periods without any fighting at all. In fact, many soldiers never see combat at all. Some serve their entire time in the military as clerks or cooks.[1] For those who do march into battle, and serve in the field, discomforts are the rule. In 1861, for instance, what would be the glamour in lugging a heavy rifle and pack around, under a blazing sun, and being shot at for a bonus? The Civil War was full of marching men by the thousands, on dirt roads, kicking up “suffocating clouds of dust.” Soldiers rushing to reach the scene of battle at Gettysburg were pushed to march thirty miles or more in one day—an exhausting challenge. That battle, like many others, was fought in blistering heat. The troops suffered tremendously from thirst. During the fight (July 1-3, 1863), one man solved the problem by spooning water out of a muddy hoofprint to make coffee. At other times, the rains poured down on both armies. Then “General Mud” took command, as the troops like to joke. Boots grew heavy with sticky mud and wagons sank to their axels and had to be dragged out by tired animals and men. Soggy clothing, damp blankets, dripping tents and cold food were the rule in camp.
It could be a miserable life. Men in both Northern and Southern armies went days without a decent meal or change of clothing.[2] One cavalryman complained that he had not had more than one meal a day for three weeks. I “have slept on the ground every night, generally without blankets, and [have] been in the saddle constantly,” he noted. Southern soldiers, part of an army that often lacked supplies, might march barefoot after shoes fell apart. Even one Yankee general complained of the poor conditions. Jokingly, he wrote his wife, he could only dream of being “within a few miles” of his toothbrush someday.
Waving the flag may look glorious; but this regiment, the First Tennessee, was cut to ribbons during the war. Sam Watkins, a veteran of four years of blooding combat, tells the story in another reading you might like.
Worse than muddy coffee or unbrushed teeth, death was a constant visitor of both armies—of all armies, in all times. And where is the glory in that? What would be “exciting” about a bullet that smashed a man’s kneecap to splinters? Did General Gabriel Paul, who was struck by a bullet in the side of his face, a shot which destroyed both eyes, experience the “glamour?” What about Bayard Wilkeson, a young officer, who had his leg nearly ripped off by a cannonball? He looked down to see it dangling by a few shreds of flesh and had to cut it off with his pocketknife.
How about the soldier described below who was hit three times in quick succession during the Battle of the Wilderness?
During the day’s fighting [said one witness] I saw a youth of about 20 years skip and yell, stung by a bullet through the thigh. He turned to limp to the rear. After a few steps he stopped, then kicked out his leg once or twice to see the wound. He looked at it attentively for an instant, then turned and took his place in the ranks and resumed firing.
In a minute or two the wounded soldier dropped his rifle, and clasping his left arm, exclaimed: “I am hit again.” He sat down behind the battle ranks and tore off the sleeve of his shirt. The wound was very slight—not much more than skin deep. He tied his handkerchief around it, picked up his rifle, and took position alongside of me.
I said: “You are fighting in bad luck today. You had better get away from here.” He turned his head to answer me. His head jerked, he staggered, then fell, then regained his feet. A tiny fountain of blood and teeth and bone and bits of tongue burst out of his mouth. He had been shot through the jaws; the lower one was broken and hung down. I looked directly into his open mouth, which was ragged and bloody and tongue-less. He cast his rifle furiously on the ground and staggered off.
Never forget. War is the organization of large bodies of human beings for one purpose. That is: to kill and maim the greatest number of enemies possible. It is the business of reducing other men and women to something that might pass as roadkill.
Killed in action on April 2, 1865. Asks students what they think it would be like to die on the last day of a war.
*
The Civil War has been called the first “modern war.” What this means is that new and better weapons made killing more efficient [easier; faster]. The concentration of rifle fire at the Battle of Spotsylvania was so great that trees two feet in diameter were shot in half. “In the tornado of fire and iron,” one survivor recalled, “no living man nor thing could stand.” The slaughter at Gettysburg was typical. A total of 160,000 men took part. In only three days more than 38,000 were captured, wounded or killed.[3]
Often men died bravely, but achieved absolutely nothing. At the Battle of Fredericksburg, Union troops charged Rebel forces protected behind stone walls and in a sunken roadway. Those who survived remembered rushing ahead, only to meet an “avalanche of artillery” fire. “We were almost blown off our feet,” recalled one survivor. The storm of fire pressed them back like “a mighty wind.” A second charge was ordered and made, with no better result. Only 20 or 30 minutes had passed. Yet, over half of the thousands of soldiers involved were mowed down. Afterward the battlefield was covered with a thick carpet of blue bodies.
Those men had made two brave attacks. Yet courage brought no reward. No soldiers, no matter how courageous, could have broken that Rebel line by head-on attack. Instead, the assault resulted only in senseless slaughter and ended in heaped corpses. The charge was stupid. The bravery wasted. “This is war—‘glorious war,’” one survivor remarked bitterly. “If we could see it in its true colors it is the most horrible curse that God could inflict upon mankind.”
Perhaps the Rebel general, D. H. Hill, said it best, after another equally hopeless charge. At Malvern Hill it had been his soldiers who had to attack, in the face of dozens of Yankee cannon. By the hundreds, his men had died. Hill could only choke out the words, “It was not war, it was murder.”
The Civil War, like all wars, brought death in all its forms. Thirty thousand prisoners died from disease and starvation in squalid Confederate prison camps. Another 25,000 met a similar fate in equally bad Northern jails. Men died when wagons they were driving tipped over and crushed them. They died from accidental gunshot wounds, while cleaning weapons they thought were not loaded. They were killed when warships sank in storms, when railroad bridges they were crossing in trains collapsed. They were killed when horses they were caring for kicked them in their heads.Death came for them in many different ways. General Stonewall Jackson and his men won fame as the “Foot Cavalry,” for the speed with which they reached the battlefield. But on the way to the fight at Cedar Mountain, eight of his soldiers died from sunstroke and heat exhaustion. Wounded troops at Fort Donelson froze to death after being shot down on the wintery battleground. At Chancellorsville, gunfire set thick forest ablaze. Men too badly injured to move were burned alive. On another occasion, a 16-year-old Rebel was hit by a shot that broke his thigh. By chance he fell in a nest of wasps. The bullet and stinging wasps cost him his life. Tens of thousands of men in both armies and both navies died from pneumonia, flu, or that hero’s disease: severe diarrhea.
No glory there.
The true story of this war, or any other, is a tale of shattered human beings, suffering and immense sorrow. Jeb Stewart was one of the most famous horsemen of the Civil War. He was handsome, dashing and brave—a general at age 28—the type of man women might faint for. He was a corpse by age 31, killed by enemy fire at the Battle of Yellow Tavern in 1864. General John Hood lost a leg from one wound. Then he had an arm torn apart from wrist to biceps in another battle. Henry Kyd Douglas was hit six times by enemy fire in the course of three years.
For the wounded, war could be a horror story, in what one historian has called an “Age of Amputation.” Following each battle, hospitals looked the same. General George Armstrong Custer walked into one where doctors had a waist-high pile of arms and legs. Another visitor at a different site described “a heap of human fingers, feet, legs and arms” near the door. “I shall not soon forget the bare-armed surgeons, with bloody instruments,” he added. The rasping sound of saws on bone quickly drove him from the area.[4]
Blurry picture; but that's a bone saw at top.
There was, of course, great courage and bravery displayed during the Civil War. There was even a certain amount of glory and excitement. For the most part, however, this war was like all other wars. It was an exercise in the creation of death. It meant suffering multiplied beyond imagination. We should not ignore that fact. The war meant suffering and loss for thousands of soldiers, sailors and families.
And someone had to explain every death to loved ones left behind. What could the mother of a sailor on the U.S.S. Cumberland say on hearing the news, that the vessel had been sunk in battle and her precious son lost? Who could comfort Hetty Carey? She had been engaged to an officer for three years. Finally, she married him—only to end up back in the same church, three weeks later, for his funeral. Eliza Hoffman received the news that her boyfriend had been killed. She spent the next year in her room, speaking to no one, with meals left at the door.
What did it mean—what could it feel like—for the Northern wife who received this letter?
Dear Mary,
We’re going into action soon, and I send my love. Kiss the baby, and if I am not killed I will write to you after the fight.
Love
Daniel
Loving Daniel never wrote again—for he was killed a few hours later. By war’s end, 600,000 Americans on both sides had met the same fate.
Your Work:
Pick some soldier in this reading and write a paragraph about how they felt about their experiences in war. You can be a ghost if you like, or a loved one, back home, who receives bad news.
One Young Man Goes to War
When Fort Sumter was fired upon S. H. M. Byers was a 22-year-old Iowa farm boy. News of the war made him anxious to serve his country. Like most young men he little realized what horrors awaited. “And so I enlisted,” he noted, “in a regiment that was to be wiped out of existence before the war was over.”
Byers join the army with the “hope of tremendous adventure.”Before his first fight, he remembered being “anxious to participate in a red-hot battle.” He and his fellow soldiers marched into combat, “as light-footed and as light-hearted that September morning as if we were going to a wedding.” “The fact is,” he added, “no one thought himself in severe danger. Some of us would be killed, we knew, but each thought it would be the ‘other fellow.’”
In the beautiful fall weather of 1862, Byers and the rest sang as they approached the battlefield. “We saw the poetry of war,” then, Byers remarked with grim humor years later. Yet sundown of the same day would see five of Byers’s friends “and forty-two of my regiment dead in a ditch.” Two hundred and seventeen men (of 482 in his unit) were killed or wounded “within an hour” fighting that day.
Even after he had fought in several battles, Byers almost wished he would be wounded (“I hoped for this little honor”). But he never felt he might die. Bill Bodley, one of Byers’sfriends, saw his own brother killed, and it made him sick. Another time, Byers watched cannon fire “poured into their faces” when a brave Rebel unit charged. “It seemed,” he remembered, “to be the destruction of humanity, not a battle.” And that same night Byers stood guard beneath an oak tree, with the unburied dead around him, including two more old friends from school.
This was his experience in the “adventure” of warfare.
Another charge that went for naught: the 54th Massachusetts at Fort Fisher, 1864.
[1] I enlisted in the Marines in 1968, and volunteered twice to go to Vietnam. But I ended up, by luck, not going. Instead, I spent my time in the Corps doing paperwork as a supply clerk. As I used to tell my students, “I defended the country with a staple gun.”
[2] The author once had a Vietnam veteran talk to his classes. He told students he went 63 days, while out in the jungle, without a change of clothing. The class groaned. He added, “You really didn’t notice after the first week.”
[3] We know at least one female took part in Pickett’s Charge; and several women, disguised as men, served in combat during these years.
[4] Students should not be left to imagine that warfare is glamorous—but a discussion of duty and patriotism might also be important.
As for the reality: I used to have veterans come to my class and talk. One Vietnam veteran broke down in tears trying to talk about seeing his friend killed. Several vets told students they suffered from PTSD, even World War II vets, who had never heard the term when they were young. Joe Whitt, who survived the attack on Pearl Harbor and several other naval battles, told student he had the same dream every night for years. His ship exploded and he went flying into the air. As he was coming down, he put his feet together and braced his arms at his sides. And every night, when he hit the water, he woke up.
Joe had seen a U.S. warship hit by enemy fire and break in half at the Battle of Savo Island. Almost the entire crew, several hundred men, was lost.
This barn roof was painted this way for nearly fifty years.
Equal
Rights in America?
This story appeared
in Time magazine,
October 7, 1957. It was an era when African Americans were just beginning to
demand equal rights. (During the same week President Dwight D. Eisenhower
ordered 3,000 U.S. Army paratroopers into action. Their job: protect nine black
students who wished to attend the all-white high school in Little Rock,
Arkansas.)
Three concepts
will be introduced below. The Confederacy was
the nation formed by eleven states which broke away from the U.S. in 1861. They
fought the Civil War to protect and keep slavery. The “stars
and bars” was a flag they carried during the fight. The KKK is the Ku
Klux Klan, whose basic beliefs hold that whites should rule America and the
races should remain separated.
War of Nerves
In the ranch-house suburb of Levittown, Pennsylvania
(population 60,000), the empty house at 30 Darkleaf Lane came alive last week.
From one roof peak flew an American flag, and from another—lighted by a
spotlight at night—flew the stars and bars of the Confederacy. Each evening the
house was now crowded with members of a new club, who worked hard at a strict
bad-neighbor policy. With windows wide open they talked loudly over coffee,
turned up their record players, sang songs, and directed all this racket at the
house next door. The reason: William E. Myers, Jr. and his three small children
had moved in. The Myerses are Negroes,
the first to buy a home in the five- year-old Levittown community.
Myers, a 34-year-old, $4800-a-year** refrigeration-equipment
tester, moved into his pink, three-bedroom ranch house in August because his
family had outgrown a two-bedroom cottage in a mostly-Negro area a mile away.
But his coming to Levittown caused fears, anger, and rumors that he was the
leader of a Negro invasion. For days ugly crowds grumbled outside his house,
and finally threw stones through his picture window. Local police were
reinforced by tough state troopers at the direction of Pennsylvania’s Governor
George M. Leader. (“I am ashamed,” said Leader, “that this has happened in
Pennsylvania.”)
After a cop was hit by a rock, state police drove off the
crowd with swinging nightsticks. Further meetings by more than three people in
the area around Myers’ house were banned. But since the crackdown,
trouble-makers have come up with new methods of tormenting [harassing,
bothering] Myers. They have taken turns each evening slamming a heavy mailbox
door near his house, or stop their cars to yell and blow bugles.
Not everyone in Levittown is against Myers. More than 1,000
people in the town signed a “Declaration of Conscience” to show how shocked
they were by the violence and misbehavior of those who were trying to scare off
Myers. Some people came by to mow Myers’ lawn, leave gifts or say hello. But
even a few of these have paid the price for their friendliness. Next-door
neighbor Lewis Wechsler has been openly friendly since Myers moved in; since
then a cross has been burned during the night on Wechsler’s lawn and a painted
“KKK” was splattered across one wall of his home. One woman who lives half a
block away stopped one evening to chat with Myers. When she got home she found
a sign on her lawn: NIGGER LOVER it said.
Last week the police cracked down on the noisy neighbors.
The owner of the home, William A. Hughes, who lives about 1 1/2 miles away, was
taken to court. The judge ordered Hughes to bounce the loud “club” members from
his house or face a fine. So Hughes agreed. The members finished their coffee,
turned off the records and disappeared. At week’s end householder Myers waited
nervously to see what would happen next. Said he: “I want to be the same as any
other American; I want to be treated like anyone else. This is a war of nerves.
But I’m not going to move.”
**$4,800 per year in 1957, would have been considered very good pay.
Your work:
(Answer on your own paper. Write short paragraphs for
#1 and #4.)
1. Why do you think
some of William Myers’ neighbors were so afraid of ONE black family living in
Levittown?
2. In what ways did
people who hated Myers attempt to scare him?
3. In what ways, if
any, do you feel the following people showed courage? Answer for each of the
choices below:
A) William Myers, Jr.
B) The white “club” members.
C) Neighbors who showed friendship toward
Myers.
4. What do you think
would happen in your neighborhood if a person of a different race moved in?
Would it make any difference?
Burned cross, farm field north of Cincinnati. The author of this blog has NO idea who would have stuck that campaign sign there.
“If I could do anything I wanted for
twenty-four hours the thing I would want most to do would be to complete the
melting pot.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt
__________
I RETIRED FROM TEACHING in
2008; but I’ve been gathering materials on immigration and thought they might
be of use to educators today.
The topic is certainly timely.
***
__________
“We’re not just a nation. We’re not an ethnicity. We are a dream of justice that people have had for thousands of years.”
Craig Ferguson came from Scotland to the United States.
__________
Below,
you will read about the Somalia-born marathoner representing the U.S. in the
2020 Olympics, about Jacob Riis, who left Denmark and came to the U.S. because
a girl broke his heart, and Pfc. Diego Rincon, a native of Colombia, who gave
up his life fighting under an adopted flag in 2013. You will read about the
immigrant who became rich and went on to own a thousand slaves and the
immigrant who thought Oreos were a luxury item. Immigrants have added
rich color to the American pallet. You have Rocky Aoki, the Japanese immigrant,
starting as a driver of an ice cream truck and rising in the restaurant
business to found Benihana. You have the novelist Saul Bellow, describing the
money he inherited from his father and used to buy his first house as “Papa’s savings,
representing forty years of misery” in his adopted country.
If
you want nativism and racism, you have it here, and if you’ve never read The
Old World in the New by Edward A. Ross, lambasting immigrants and their “pigsty
way of life,” you are in for a vomit-inducing experience.
It’s
all here, the pageantry of immigration, as best I see it. You have Calvin
Coolidge and Woodrow Wilson making it clear: They see the “wrong kind” of
immigrants as a threat to the nation. You have the social worker who complains
that an Italian family isn’t “Americanized” because they’re still eating
spaghetti and the British writer who refers to the Irish as “human
chimpanzees.” You have the Iraqi refugee who remembers the kind I.N.S.
officer who let her mother pass through inspection on Christmas Eve in 1979,
even when he shouldn’t. There’s the immigrant who comes to America – rather,
flees Switzerland – after being caught in bed with a farmer’s daughter. You
have the immigrant coming ashore on D-Day with his camera, recording forever
those terrible scenes. You have the young man from India who has never eaten
celery, the Syrian mother who cooks her first Thanksgiving turkey, and Gimel
Aguina, 16, dying of cancer, who tells the Make-a-Wish Foundation his dream
is to become a U.S. citizen.
As
Sen. Lindsey Graham once put it, “America is an idea.” That idea is that we
welcome all kinds of people and offer them a chance at the American Dream.
*
I’ll keep adding to this entry as new material comes to hand. And I’m still looking for a list I used to start a discussion of immigration with students. It included famous individuals from many nations.
I’d ask students, as part of a game, to see how many they could identify in a set time. I’ll update here when I find it.
Another immigrant.
Examples
that I used on that list, or would now include:
Madeline Albright (Germany)
Gino Auriemma (Italy)
Alexander Graham Bell (Scotland)
Irving Berlin (Russia)
Victor D. Brenner (Lithuania)
Sergey Brin (Russia)
Gisele Bündchen (Brazil)
Andrew Carnegie (Scotland)
Raúl H. Castro (Mexico)
Chang and Eng (Siam; now Thailand)
Louis Chevrolet (Switzerland)
Oscar de la Renta (Dominican Republic)
Guillermo Del Toro (Mexico)
Albert Einstein (Germany)
Emanuel Goldenberg (Romania)
Mazie Hinoro (Japan)
Harry Houdini (Hungary)
Henry Kissinger
(Germany)
Hedy Lamarr (Austria)
Bob Marley (Jamaica)**
Rupert Murdoch (Australia)
James Naismith (Canada)
Martina Navratilova (Czechoslovakia)
Akeem Olajuwon (Nigeria)
John Oliver (United Kingdom)
Joseph Pulitzer (Hungary)
Michael Pupin (Serbia)
Ayn Rand (Russia)
Knute Rockne (Norway)
Helena Rubinstein (Poland)
Eero Saarinen (Finland)
Levi Strauss (Bavaria)
Arnold Schwarzenegger (Austria)
Nikola Tesla (Croatia)
Charlize Theron (South Africa)
…and I always included the Gogolak brothers, Pete and Charlie (Hungary), who changed pro football forever.
I’ll find that list if it kills me. I had a bunch of beer makers lumped together, all German immigrants: Schlitz, Pabst, Anheuser-Busch, Christian Moerlein, and others.
**I can’t find any mention of Bob Marley becoming a U.S. citizen; but he’s on several lists of famous immigrants.
Another immigrant.
NOTE TO TEACHERS: Next, are parts of two readings that
I used in my classes (mentioned above). Our curriculum changed in the early
90s, however, and I didn’t teach immigration again. So these don’t include the more recent immigrant waves. Here, however, are portions that still
work.
I always found students were
interested in the topic of immigration, interested, really, in where they and
their families were from.
Select passages that still
apply:
The
central force of U.S. history has been what Carl Wittke called “mankind in
motion [emphasis added throughout, to help you find interesting details].”
In all the history of the world, no greater flood of population has ever moved
in one direction. Wave after wave of immigrants has broken over our shores,
changing, shaping and creating the United States.
The next paragraph
is dated; but some totals, Norway for one, are impressive. I read in 2013 that
34.5 million Americans claimed Irish
ancestry, seven times the current population of Ireland.
Since
the Declaration of Independence (1776), over fifty million human beings have
packed up and headed for these shores. By 1900, as many as 15,000 were arriving
daily. The totals from some countries are staggering. Between 1820 and 1920
over 4,500,000 Irish landed here….In 1900 Sweden had a population of five
million, having lost 1,250,000 to America. Norway’s population stood at
2,000,000, with 850,000 more Norwegians living in the U.S. Seven million
Germans came, 5.3 million Italians, 4.1 million Canadians and 3.5 million
Russians. Even today, as many as a million Mexicans enter this country, many
illegally, every year.
So
great was the “magnetic pull” of America that it seemed everyone in Europe
wanted to come. By 1900 the mayor of one Italian village could not resist
joking with a visitor. “I welcome you,” in the name of the people of the
village, he said, “three thousand of whom are in America, and the other five
thousand preparing to follow them.”
I always liked this example. The
definition of “pogrom” was included for the benefit of my students:
In the
1880s millions of Russian Jews followed the same path. In their homeland they
faced vicious pogroms [large-scale attacks aimed at Jews], and many were killed
before they could escape. Young Israel Baline remembered seeing a mob burn
down his father’s home. And when he came to America he rejoiced to be safe
and free at last. He changed his name to Irving Berlin and became famous writing
songs like “White Christmas” and “God Bless America.”
It is
tradition: this coming to America to be free. Irving Berlin did. So, too, Max
Thorek, a Jew from Hungary, who saw a mob beat his brother to death. Add
Reverend Henry Scholte, who left the Netherlands (bringing 800 members of his
church) after he had been arrested for his religious ideas. Add Voldemar Vee
Dam, who fled Estonia in 1945, crammed with fifteen others on a boat built for
four! A man willing to risk four months at sea, to travel 8,000 miles. to reach
our shores.
Count
up the Polish rebels who left their land in 1830 after failing to rid
themselves of a king. Add in the Germans who came during the 1840s, after a
failed revolution. Put down Carl Schurz: a man who had to crawl through a sewer
to escape hanging after efforts to topple the German government failed. Then
consider one last man, a German who came about that time. “Why are you going?”
to America, he was asked. “Kein König da,” was his reply. “No King
there!”
America
was the “second chance.” It was a place where you could begin over, a land of
hopes, dreams and opportunity. Emanuel Goldenberg may have said it best. For
when he arrived in 1900, he said simply, “I was born again at Ellis Island.”
Even
now, hoping to be “born again,” the wash of peoples over our shores continues.
Thousands of Vietnamese came here when Communists took over their country in
1975. Many Iranians came to the United States after 1979, to get away from a
strict religious government that ruled their native land. Over a million Cubans
(out of that island’s population of ten million) have settled in Florida and
other states in the last fifty years. In 1982 two Chinese dancers touring the
U.S. refused to return home. A year later a Chinese tennis star chose to stay.
In 1989 two representatives of China’s government made the same decision. For
all, America meant freedom.
…During the American Revolution
Hessian (German) soldiers fought for England for pay—and 1,100 were captured.
When released from jail at the end of the war only 300 chose to go home! Even
from inside a prison most recognized that America offered a bright future.
In recent years, a flood of Cuban
athletes has defected. The story of the Iranian family arriving on Christmas
Eve, and crossing paths with a kind Immigration and Naturalization Service
agent, which follows later in this post, I’d include in any new reading for
students.
In the
1840s, the flood of Irish began. Most Irish farmers owned less than three
acres, and the main crop was potatoes. In 1845 a deadly potato blight
[disease] destroyed most of the harvest. When the blight struck again in 1846
over a million Irish starved. Hundreds of thousands desperately sought escape
from gnawing hunger. And they looked and they saw hope across the Atlantic.
Elise Isely never forgot the day her father received a letter from her uncle,
with money to pay their way over. Mr. Isely had been sweeping the small, rented
hut which was all they could afford. “Let the next tenant [renter] sweep…we are
going to America!” he shouted with joy. America! It was, for the Irish, a place
of survival, for Mr. Isely and others, “the second chance.”
To most
of the world ours seemed to be a nation with land for the taking, jobs, and a
chance to grow wealthy. These were the “magnets,” the “colors” that caught the
eye of the immigrant. Sweden, for one, suffered from overcrowding and poor
soil. From 1850 on, Swedes poured out of that nation to settle in Minnesota and
the Dakotas. Soon Swedish settlers owned more farmland here than was under the
plow in all their native land. Janos Kovac, a Hungarian worker, was also clear
when asked why he came. At home he could “earn only enough for bread and
water.” Then, echoing the thoughts of others, he added, “There was but one
hope, America.”
So they
came: the 500,000 Puerto Ricans who made homes in New York City in the
1950s, leaving their poor island behind. There were the thousands of Italians,
leaving a land more crowded (by size) than China. Greeks came, and people from
Egypt, Algeria, Armenia and Lebanon, from all the corners of the earth. And one
man, who arrived in 1964, probably summed it up best. He came, he said, because
he “saw the good life in the United States as heaven.”
*
In my reading for students, I included
a footnote which read: “For many years, immigrants coming from Europe and from
the east were required to land at Ellis Island, in the harbor of New York City.
There they were examined before they were admitted. Individuals who were
diseased, those mentally disabled and others were turned back.”
If I were still
teaching, I’d ask students what kind of anguish they thought those moments of
not knowing would have caused.
I did ask students to
answer the following questions from the reading:
1.Name the
six nations which sent us over 1,000,000 immigrants and give the total number
each sent.
2.How
many million immigrants, total, have come to the United States since the
Declaration of Independence?
3.Why was
Israel Baline (Irving Berlin) glad to be in America?
4.What
did one German say was his reason for coming here in 1848?
5.In the
1840s why did so many Irish come to America? After 1850 why did the Swedes
come?
6.What
did the poor Hungarian, Janos Kovacs, say about America?
7.Look at
the picture on page one. Pick one person on the boat and write a paragraph
about them. Describe how they feel as they approach America for the first time.
8.Look at
the cartoons on page four. What has happened to the Irishman after he came to
the United States? What will he say about America when he returns to Ireland
for a visit?
9.Look at
the picture to the below. What do you think this mother wants in America?
Question #7.
Question #8.
Question #8.
Question #9.
I had a second reading, also
in need of updating; but many parts should still be of use to teachers
today.
The first line, now, would have to
read more like 100,000,000. This assignment for students began:
Think of this number – and think of it
clearly: over 50,000,000. F-I-F-T-Y M-I-L-L-I-O-N. That’s how many immigrants
have come to America; and no sign it’s letting up. They came – and they come
now – with hopes of a better life, and the dreams of all the world packed away
with their luggage. But what really happened? What did they face in their new
home? How did America change them, even as it was changed by them? Did they
find what they longed for? Or were they doomed to disappointment?
There was a tale popular among
immigrants around 1900, which provides our first hint. Told in many versions,
it goes like this. After landing in the U.S. a newcomer is walking down the
street. He sees a $10 bill on the ground, and bends to pick it up. Then
he stops, straightens up, and keeps walking. “My first day in America,” he
reminds himself confidently. “Why should I work?”
Hardships or not, hundreds of
thousands of immigrants headed for these shores each year. Many were convinced
by advertisements or read newspaper stories about this great “America.” In the
1820s Gottfried Duden (a German immigrant) wrote a book praising the United
States. Others read in letters that America was too good to be true! “The
poorest families adorn [cover] the table three times a day like a wedding
dinner,” one Englishman reported, “[with] tea, coffee, beef, fowls, pies,
eggs, pickles, [and] bread.” Then he posed a question similar to one being
asked around the world. “Say, is it so in England?”
For millions the answer was “no.” O. E.
Rolvaag found life in Norway so poor that in winter he ate salt herring and
potatoes three times a day, every day. Sadie Frowne and her mother lived
simply, after her father died. They expected little in Poland. She later wrote
that even “soup, black bread and onions” were sometimes unaffordable.
Stoyan Christowe lived in a poor
village in the mountains of Bulgaria. One day a letter came from Michael
Gurkin, who had gone to the United States. This “Christopher Columbus” of
the village claimed that he had seen “rooms” that moved up and down inside
taller buildings. He bragged that he made more money in one day than he had in
Bulgaria in a month. And most importantly, he sent cash home to his family to
prove it! Stoyan remembered that Gurkin’s letter “struck the village like a
comet!” Soon, people all over the valley prepared to follow.
In Sweden they sang this song about the
United States:
Ducks and chickens rain right down,
A roast goose flies in,
And on the table lands one more
With knife and fork stuck in!
The dreamers and adventurers could not resist going. Sometimes the desperate had no choice. Many were disappointed with what they found here. Germans who had read Duden’s book were surprised by the problems they encountered. Angrily, they labeled the author “Der Lugenhund:” the lying dog. One immigrant found many earlier arrivals had exaggerated their success. “We often find,” he said, “that he who relates [tells] he owns a sawmill only owns a saw and saw-buck [sawhorse]…He who describes the beautiful carriage he owns is the owner of a wheelbarrow.”
The immigrants began their journey with
high hope. Most faced hardship along the way. Many travelers found ships
crowded and unhealthy. In early years the situation was so bad Pennsylvania had
to pass protective laws. One required that each passenger over age 14 have a
certain amount of space. That “space,” however, was only 6' x 1' x 3' 9".
Yet, this was an improvement over the packing in some ships! In 1711, 859 of
3,086 people who headed for Philadelphia died at sea. As late as 1847, Lark sailed from Ireland with 440 people
aboard. Disease took the lives of 158. “Swimming coffins” one newspaper
called such ships. For many they were the only affordable way to reach our
shores.
Once they arrived the immigrants had
much to learn and fresh problems to face. “Hundreds of pickpockets were on the
lookout,” George Moore noticed when he landed. They and others like them were
ready to rob and cheat the newcomers. There were crooks who sold fake “railroad
tickets” or offered special “land sales” and a hundred “cheats and
money-suckers.” Another angry immigrant said dishonest Americans swarmed
everywhere. They would “cheat a fellow out of his eye-teeth” if he
opened his mouth to get a chew of tobacco.
Naturally, the immigrants were unsure
about American customs. Hikozo Hamada, from Japan, had never seen a telegraph
before. “How could a message run a wire faster than a bird could fly,” he
wondered. Then he decided the man telling him about it was making a joke!
Stoyan Christowe, the Bulgarian, saw the Statue of Liberty as he approached New
York. He thought it must be a statue of some saint, some religious figure.
Another immigrant corrected him. Sounding as if he considered Stoyan a very
great idiot, he explained that, of course, the statue was a monument to
honor Christopher Columbus.
The foods, the clothes, even the
weather could be a shock. Michael Pupin, who landed in 1874, found one
unexpected difference. At home he had seen pictures of half-dressed American
Indians, and assumed the U.S. had a warm climate. Only when he arrived
in New York in March did he realize his mistake. He had sold his coat in order
to get money to buy a ticket over. Another man spoke of a sense of confusion.
“I felt,” he said, “like a man deposited by a rocket on the moon.”
The greatest problem was language. Some
spoke no English, or so little they could barely ask a simple question. One
Italian showed an American official a piece of paper with the word
“Pringvillamas” on it, and asked how to get there. Only after much thought did
the official realize he meant Springfield, Massachusetts. A Hungarian hoped to
find a relative at “Szekenvno, Pillsburs” (Second Avenue in Pittsburgh). A
third spent his last pennies on a train ticket, thinking meals were included.
On the three-day trip he was forced to go hungry because he knew not a word of
English. An immigrant woman wrote that Americans wanted to help but the
language barrier was often impossible to overcome. “It’s like standing outside,
with the door locked on both the inside and the outside,” she explained. “You
cannot go in and they cannot let you in.”
Nor did most newcomers find the living
conditions pleasant. Most poured into the cities and the slums and ghettos
grew. In 1890 Jacob Riis, the famous reporter, found twenty people living in
one 12 x 12 room, with two beds. Another American described one crowded
city block. “The architecture seems to sweat humanity at every door and
window,” he said. Beyond the cities, living conditions could be just as
primitive. Augustine Haidusek farmed and lived in a lean-to for the first six
months. Stoyan Christowe spent five winters in a railroad car rigged with
bunks. Mareah Scholte left a good home in Europe to follow her husband to Iowa.
When she saw the poor log cabin which was to be her home, she sobbed, “I can’t!
I can’t live here!”
In a note, I explain that Riis, himself, was from Denmark. Later
he wrote a book, How the Other Half Lives, about life in the
slums of New York City. I turned his book into a reading for students,
too.
The old reading included:
Most immigrants lacked skills or training and took whatever jobs they could find. As a boy, Andrew Carnegie made $1.20 per week, in a cotton mill. Michael Pupin arrived with five cents in his pocket, and began work in a cracker factory. Irving Berlin took a job as a singing waiter. In 1910, young immigrant girls worked sixty hours per week, sewing shirts for as little as $2.00.
Even now it is much the same. Some
immigrants are professionals: doctors, scientists and math computer geniuses.
Far more common are immigrants who start in jobs Americans don’t want. Rocky
Aoki came from Japan. At first, he drove an ice cream truck in one of the worst
neighborhoods in New York City. Other arrivals, like Narciso Cardoza, work as
dishwashers or busboys for $3.50 an hour. Out West it is immigrant labor that
harvests most crops, because the work is back-breaking and the pay poor.
Even these jobs are usually an
improvement over what the immigrant left behind. Cardoza, for one, left a poor
existence in El Salvador in 1981. Now he marvels at American tennis courts
where everybody can play—about apples, strawberries and peaches—all so good and
cheap! One Mexican girl remembered picking apricots for eleven hours a day. It
was hard, until her family got their first check. Then it seemed a miracle. For
in that single check was enough money for clothes, a used car, and a couch that
made a bed. “Oh, I tell you all was happy that night!” she reported with
excitement.
I’d include more examples of the struggles for immigrants, now,
if I rewrote this story.
Finally, the immigrant often had to overcome the prejudice of the natives. When the Irish arrived, Americans were horrified by their “un-American” Catholic religion. In 1834, a Catholic convent and school were burned by a Massachusetts mob. Ten years later natives in Philadelphia destroyed two churches. When soldiers arrived to protect the buildings, rioters turned a cannon on them. Several hours of fighting left dozens killed and injured.
Many Americans, at different times in
history….predicted the newcomers would ruin the country. “Can one throw mud in
clear water and not disturb its clearness?” asked one worried native. Letting
in such people was “like the oozing leak of a sewer pipe into crystal water of
a well,” said another. Some claimed the problem was the Irish and their
religion. Later, some Americans felt it was Italian “criminals.” E. A. Ross
wrote in 1924 that it was people from Southeast Europe, whom we should fear.
They brought a “pigsty mode of life” and “their brawls and their animal
pleasures” to our shores. Today some say the problem is Mexico, whose poor
stream across the border searching for work.
In the 1840s papers ran job
advertisements warning: “NO IRISH NEED APPLY.” Prejudice against the Chinese
was particularly ugly in the West. They were buried in separate graveyards, and
in some states could not testify in court against a white person. In 1885, a
mob in Rock Springs, Wyoming smashed up a Chinese neighborhood and left 28
dead. Japanese children in San Francisco also ran into problems after 1906, and
had to attend separate schools.
In spite of such problems, men, women
and children from around the globe continued to pour in. Some were broken in
spirit by the hard conditions they faced, to be sure. For the most part they
were happy with their new home and they adjusted and learned to fit in.
Irish, Italians and Poles helped make
the Catholic religion the largest in the United States. Russian and German Jews
spread their ideas. Hard-working Germans helped settle Pennsylvania and flooded
the streets of Cincinnati and Milwaukee. Swedish immigrants left 400 place
names on the map and a lasting mark on life in Minnesota. Irish workers sweated
to build America’s canals. Chinese labor made up 90% of the work on the first
railroad to cross the United States in 1869. Czechs, Hungarians and Welsh workers
poured into American factories and coal mines. And immigrants helped turn the
U.S. into an industrial giant.
Here, you could do so much more: Honduran immigrants, working
construction and digging tunnels in Washington D.C. in 2018. One out of every
seven workers in Texas is an immigrant today. I’d throw in immigrants working
at Donald J. Trump’s private golf resorts in 2020, too.
(Examples will be
provided below.)
My old reading for students continued:
Others
showed their love for their adopted land by serving in times of trouble. One
Revolutionary War officer remarked that countless Irish were enlisted in
Pennsylvania’s ranks [or line]. They “might as well be called the ‘line of
Ireland.’” Thousands of Irish also fought in the Civil War. Some carried an
American flag in battle, and a green flag with shamrock, symbol of their old
country. Another 175,000 Germans signed up to fight with the Northern armies.
Japanese Americans (who suffered much unfair treatment during World War II)
also did their part. Suspected of being loyal to Japan, these “new” Americans
joined the U.S. armed forces in large numbers. They fought bravely for the
American flag and won hundreds of medals for bravery.
Immigrants
changed this nation in every way you might imagine. Dutch settlers taught us
the tradition of Santa Claus, while the Irish gave us St. Patrick’s Day. German
settlers introduced kindergarten classes and physical education in school.
Foods like bagels (Jewish), lasagna (Italian), sauerkraut (German), tacos and
“Chinese food” became popular. Even “Cracker Jack” was invented by a pair of
Germans.
These
people contributed in a thousand ways. Jewish immigrants gave us words like
“klutz” and “chutzpah.” A “paddy wagon” is a police vehicle. It was named after
the Irish, or “Paddies,” at a time when many police officers had been born in
that land. The Swedes gave us the idea of the smorgasbord. Two Frenchmen
brought dentistry to the U.S. in 1784. Others helped make soccer popular. They
have been leaders in business, science, sports, education and in all areas of
American life.
All those paragraphs need to be updated to represent the
contributions of immigrants in the last 25 years. When I sit down to rewrite my
readings for students, I’ll throw in the Gogolak brothers for fun, since they
introduced soccer-style place kicking in pro football. That’s an old example,
too. But you could include Cuban baseball stars, Kenya-born marathoners and
Coach Gino Auriemma, who has led the University of Connecticut’s women’s basketball
team (last time I checked) to a record of 1,088 wins and only 142 losses.
My old reading for students ended with this:
It is difficult to say what an “American” really is. For we are an odd mix. Long ago one writer said Americans were a new, different breed of people. Here, “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.”
Today some disagree. They say America
isn’t a “melting pot” at all—that different, distinct groups still
exist. They compare our nation to “an orchestra of mankind,” or a “rainbow,” or
even a “salad.” Each element plays a part in creating the overall sound, look
or taste of “America.”
Over the centuries, immigrants have
made and remade new Americas. Our nation’s history is one of “new beginnings”
for people from around the globe.
A Few Who Made Good.
If immigrants found life hard at first, there were numerous stories of success to fuel their hopes. Andrew Carnegie arrived from Scotland in 1848. As you read, he started work in a cotton mill, for low pay. Later he became a messenger for a telegraph company and “went hoping up the golden ladder [of success] rung by rung.” First, he made himself the best messenger by memorizing street names in his area. He moved on to start a business building bridges. Then he bought a steel company. By 1890 he was the king of the industry, and later sold his holdings for nearly $400,000,000.
Nor is Carnegie a great exception.
Michael Pupin arrived here with five cents to his name, and took a poor job,
too. One day he began to read articles about Thomas Edison, the great inventor.
Pupin’s life-long interest in science was born—and he was to become the
inventor of the X-ray machine. Max Thorek left Hungary and came to Chicago,
“unknown, alone, friendless [and] penniless.” He wished to be a doctor, but it
seemed at first he “might just as well hope for the moon.” He had to sweat and
suffer before he won a scholarship—yet, he reached his goals.
If I get around to
reworking this reading, I’ll probably cut Mr. Aoki, below. In 1999 he got sent
to prison for insider trading.
His story up until then
was pretty cool:
Rocky Aoki might serve as our last
example. He earned his way through college selling ice cream. After graduation,
using borrowed money, he started a restaurant by the name of Benihana. In the
first year he feared he would go broke. He worked hard, and by age 30 had made
his restaurant go. He turned it into an entire chain and became a
multi-millionaire. Today Mr. Aoki owns a dozen homes around the world, 2,000
automobiles—and considers himself one lucky American!
“When I see my face
in the mirror, I know I’m Japanese,” he says. “But I feel very American. More
American than Americans.”
I could replace him with Hamdi Ulukaya.
He was born in Turkey, but of Kurdish
descent. He came to this country in the 90s as a student. In 2002 he started
selling feta cheese, from a family recipe. His product was popular, and he
expanded into yogurt. By 2016, his company, Chobani, had 2,000 employees
and $1.5 billion in annual sales.
I had students do the following questions after completing the
reading above:
1.What
types of information did the immigrants have which made them want to come to
America?
2.When
Michael Gurkin wrote back that he had seen a “room” that moved up and down,
what do you think he was talking about? What did Gurkin send home that
convinced people in the mountains of Bulgaria to come here?
3.What
did Christowe Stoyan think the Statue of Liberty might be?
4.What
are five problems immigrants would run into either on the trip over to America,
or after they arrived? What was the biggest problem they had to overcome?
5.What
mistake did Michael Pupin make?
6.Why did
native Americans dislike the Irish when they came?
(I’d
throw in the same kind of question to cover Muslim immigrants today.)
7.Name
three groups of immigrants who met prejudice in this country (besides the
Irish). Tell how each suffered.
8.Imagine
that no immigrants had ever come, except the original English settlers. What
are ten “American” foods, words, inventions, ideas or custom that we would not
have today?
9.In what
ways did Andrew Carnegie and Rocky Aoki both go on to success in the United
States?
10.Ask any
two adults (other than your own relatives) what nations their ancestors came
from. Give the adult’s names and the countries.
If
possible, find out where your own family came from.
***
__________
“America is different. It is the only peaceful multi-racial
civilization in the world. Its people come of such diverse heritages of
religion, tongue, habit, fatherhood, color and folk song that if America did
not exist it would be impossible to imagine that such a gathering of alien
strains could ever behave like a nation. Such a stewpot of civilization might
be possible for city-states…[but not for a great nation] unless its people were
bound together by a common faith.”
Theodore White, Breach of
Faith, p. 323:
__________
The
wrong kind of people?
(Colonial
America)
Starting in 1607,
indentured servants were often considered a problem. Some were incorrigible
children combed from London streets. Others were “cut-purses,” petty thieves
and women of ill repute. Many were poor and a risky trip to America was better
than starving in Edinburgh or Southampton. “Many of the Poor who had been
useless in England were inclined to be useless likewise in Georgia,” colonial
authorities complained.
As for the criminal element, Ben Franklin said the
English might just as well have dumped loads of rattlesnakes on colonial
shores.
Quakers were feared for
their pacifism and for protesting against slavery. They thought the Native
Americans should be paid for their land; and they would not follow the Bible in
the way the Puritans demanded. The Puritans also feared Baptists and Catholics.
Quakers were whipped at the cart tail, branded and in the famous case of Mary
Dyer, executed.
The Germans arrived in
ships riven with disease, often referred to as “swimming coffins.” In the eyes
of the English colonists, they brought strange customs, strange foods and
talked funny.
*
The promise of America.
(1783)
George Washington once promised, “The bosom of
America is open to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger, but the
oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions.”
NOTE TO TEACHERS: I might
use that quote today, if I was teaching, and ask students, “Do Washington’s
words still hold true?”
*
Alien
and Sedition Acts.
(1798)
In
the heat of the fighting vs. France, the Federalists passed what the historian
Benjamin Andrews calls “tyrannical legislation.”
“A
new naturalization act was passed, requiring of an immigrant as prerequisite to
citizenship, fourteen years of residence instead of the five heretofore
sufficient.” Three alien acts gave the president the power “without trial or
even a statement of his reasons, to banish foreigners from the land”
*
“To admit the Grecian Horse.”
(1802)
In a series of nine essays, published in the New York
Evening Post, Alexander Hamilton, responds to President Thomas Jefferson’s
message to Congress, in nine parts, including
VIII,
regarding immigration.
Jefferson had proposed admitting new arrivals to the country
to immediate citizenship. Hamilton disagreed. The “consequences that must
result from a too unqualified admission of foreigners, to an equal
participation in our civil, and political rights,” he said, should give pause.
New arrivals would remain tied, in sentiment to old ways, and
principles learned in the places of their births. “The influx of foreigners must, therefore, tend to produce a
heterogeneous compound; to change and corrupt the national spirit; to
complicate and confound public opinion; to introduce foreign propensities,”
Hamilton warned.
As has always been the case,
the question of immigration boiled down to how much is good, and how much is
too much. As Hamilton put it, “there is a wide difference between closing the
door altogether and throwing it entirely open[.]”
Under the Alien and Sedition
Acts, the period of waiting to become eligible for citizenship had been
extended to fourteen years. Hamilton believed a five-year waiting period would
suffice.
Jefferson’s plan, if adopted,
he warned, would pose a fresh new danger to the young republic. “To admit
foreigners indiscriminately to the rights of citizens, the moment they put foot
in our country, as recommended in the Message, would be nothing less, than to
admit the Grecian Horse into the Citadel of our Liberty and Sovereignty.”
Gauden's bust of Lincoln.
*
The
Irishman with a thousand slaves.
(1822)
One
immigrant who prospered was John Burnside, who made enough as a
merchant in New Orleans to be able to buy up 6,000 acres of good Louisiana
land, which he worked with the help of 1,000 slaves, becoming the richest sugar
planter in the state. On the eve of the Civil War, his slaves, alone, were said
to be worth $2 million. (A History of the Old South by Clement
Eaton, pp. 392-393)
The website for
his fabulous home, Houmas, which still stands, offers a sanitized take on
slavery, but explains:
John
Burnside was born in Tyrone County, Ireland around 1810 of a poor family. At
the age of twelve or thirteen, he somehow managed to obtain passage to America,
with only a few pennies in his pocket. He began his young career in the grocery
house of Talbot Jones in Baltimore. After a year or so, he traveled south and
found employment as a storekeeper in Fincastle, Virginia, and eventually joined
the staff of Andrew Beirne, a fellow Irishman who had come to America thirty
years earlier to make his fortune.
Burnside rose to junior partner in the firm, became friends with
Beirne’s son, Oliver, and with him opened a dry goods store in New Orleans in
1837. On the death of his father, Oliver returned to Virginia to run the
business there. The name of the New Orleans business was changed to J. Burnside
and Company, which he sold in 1858 for $2,000,000. That same year he decided to
“enter the sugar business” and bought the Houmas Plantation for $1,000,000.
Then 48 years old, Burnside,
immediately began enlarging his holdings
and purchasing other sugar plantations along the Mississippi River. In a very
short time, he was dubbed “The Sugar Prince,” by attaining the largest sugar
empire in the South. Along with his properties on the Mississippi, Burnside
also purchased the largest estate in the City of New Orleans, then known as the
Robb Mansion. He collected great furnishings and great works of art to appoint
both his city estate, later named “Burnside Place”, and his country estate,
“The Houmas.” He shared his time between the two grand properties and
entertained lavishly.
No
mention of what his slaves thought about all the great
furnishings and great works of art and the lavish entertainment.
Burnside
died at age 71, in 1881, and “left one of the largest estates in America to his
boyhood friend, Oliver Beirne.”
We
assume his former slaves received next to nothing for their toils.
*
Twins
on display.
(1829)
In 1829 two twin brothers, Chang and
Eng, were brought to the United States from Siam, what is now Thailand.
Born in 1811, they were congenitally
joined at the waist. “A short cartilaginous tubular structure allowed for
shared liver and hepatic circulation.” According to Britannica (I think; this
is from a loose copy), “They supported themselves in various ways after their
father’s death and were engaged in a duck and egg business when they were
discovered” and brought to the U.S. “and displayed to the public, ostensibly as
an educational exhibit.”
They were exhibited widely, billed as
the “Siamese twins,” from which we get the term. They eventually settled in
North Carolina, became citizens, and adopted the last name “Bunker.” They
married sisters in 1843, and between them had 19 children. “In later years they
quarreled often and Chang took to drink. The loss of their slaves and much of
their property after the Civil War forced them out of retirement for a time.”
They died, age 62, on January 16-17, 1874, Chang first, Eng three or four hours
later.
*
(1836)
In 1836, a New Yorker warned, “All
Europe is coming across the ocean, all that part at least who cannot make a
living at home; and what shall we do with them? They eat our taxes, eat our
bread, and encumber our streets, and not one in twenty is competent to
keep himself.”
*
(1840)
The census finds that there are only four Chinese living in the United States, in a population of 17 million. (NYT 5/29/18)
*
“That
abomination the Catholic religion.”
(1840s)
In the 1840s, the first great waves of
Irish came, arriving on “damned plague ships and swimming coffins.” It was said
they would never be loyal to America, but only to the Pope. Catholic
schools, it was said, would ruin democracy. The Irish were usually low-skilled
workers, poor, supposedly all drunks, and would end up on “alms.” One nativist
said of the Irish, “He never knew an hour of civilized society…Breaking heads
for opinion’s sake is his practice…pushed straight to hell by that abomination
the Catholic religion…The Irish fill our prisons, our poor houses…Scratch a
convict or a pauper, and the chances are that you tickle the skin of an Irish
Catholic.”
In 1844, Samuel Elliot Morse warned
that the new immigrants are “the ignorant and vicious…the outcast
tenants of the poorhouses and prisons of Europe.” They were exported by their
governments, “to our loss and their gain.”
*
“Over-the-Rhine”
in Cincinnati
(1844)
Naturally, immigrants new to this
country tend to cluster together, with the most recent arrivals from Germany
(for instance), living in the same place as German immigrants who came earlier
and can offer advice and support. A diarist in Cincinnati notes:
February
12: [The]
German population is increasing among us, to an unprecedented degree. They are
very industrious plodding people, they have stability of character – much
goodness of heart, and many social virtues. I feel kindly toward them,
and will not allow myself to auger evil from their presence here. (102/54)
The neighborhoods
north of the Miami and Erie Canal, which ran through Cincinnati became known as
“Over-the-Rhine,” due to the heavy concentration of German immigrants settling
there.
*
Three
acres to raise potatoes.
(1845)
The average Irish family lives on a
plot of land only three acres in size, and the only crop they can grow on such
a limited area and still produce enough food to live is potatoes. In 1845, problems
begin to appear, as a strange fungus or “blight” spreads through the island,
wiping out most of the crop for the year. The worst year of all, “Black ’47,”
sees mass starvation stalk the land.
Before the “Potato Famine” ends, a
million Irish are dead, and another million have fled the country, most heading
for America.
The Potato Famine left many Irish with no other choice than to emigrate.
*
A Nativist
political party is founded
(1845)
The Know-Nothing Party slogan was, “Americans
must rule America.” And the Church of Rome was described as “dripping with
the cruelties of millions of murders, and haggard with the debaucheries of a
thousand years, always ambitious, always sanguinary, and always false.”
Banner of the Know Nothing Party.
*
(1848)
The Irishman Thomas Reilly, writing
home in 1848, said, “I am very sad, very lonely, very poor now indeed…Perhaps I
will return to Ireland with the green flag flying over me. I care not if it
becomes my shroud. I have no regard for life while I am in exile.” Another
Irishman remembered the loneliness. “Had I fallen from the clouds amongst this
people,” he said, “I could not feel more isolated, more bewildered.”
*
A
customer admired his drawings.
(1848)
In the fall of 1848, another young
immigrant, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, arrived in America, age six months. His
father was an “itinerant cobbler” from France, his mother, Mary McGuiness, from
Bally Mahon, County Longford, in Ireland.
Augustus would later describe himself
as “red-headed, whopper-jawed, and hopeful,” growing up in New York City. As a
young man, he saw his father’s business thrive, and helped sell shoes to
prominent New York families. But he was “unusually morose,” he said, later.
In an article by Ruth Mehrtens Galvin
(I can’t remember the publication), she writes that the young man “had constant
fights with rival neighborhood gangs and got frequent lickings for such
rowdiness as biting a classmate’s finger or smearing blackboard chalk all over
his face.” He had to work from age 13, but after “a customer admired his
drawings of the workmen in his father’s shop, he was allowed to follow his
artistic bent and was apprenticed to a cameo-maker.” From his first boss he learned how to carve
cameos and sing while he worked. “The boy also went to the free evening art
classes at Cooper Union, returning home to draw far into the night,” Galvin
writes.
Saint-Gaudens was soon fired for
leaving crumbs on the floor and found another cameo-maker who taught him to
work in clay.
He eventually traveled to Paris to
study, but left at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. By then he had set
his mind on producing a statue of Hiawatha. But according to Galvin, he fell
into a pattern which would trouble him much of his life. He overestimated his
receipts—and often lost money on his work. But he also found others to bail him
out. While abroad he met “a handsome, partially deaf young woman named Augusta
Homer, a sometime artist (and first cousin of Winslow Homer.) He was working in
Rome on several projects; but workmen ruined one while he was out walking; and
he fell off a scaffold and hurt his back. He was still broke—and on return to
the United States, his works were attached for debt, and it took the
intervention of a friend to allow Saint-Gaudens to get his projects back. He
entered a contest to create a statue of Charles Sumner, lost, and vowed never
to enter such a contest again.
He didn’t.
Through the kindness of an older rival,
the young sculptor won a commission for a statue of Admiral Farragut,
Saint-Gaudens later saying he got the job “by the skin of the teeth.” With that
commission lined up, he finally married, and returned to Paris to continue his
work. He and his wife returned to the U.S. in July 1880, and Augusta gave birth
to a son in September.
On May 26, 1881, before tens of
thousands of New Yorkers, Saint-Gaudens’s Farragut was unveiled in Madison
Square Park. One hand holding a field glass, the admiral stood at the center of
the Stanford White pedestal as on the bridge of a ship, the skirt of his
uniform coat lifting in the wind. Below the bronze statue, in relief,
Saint-Gaudens had modeled, in the stone base, figures of “Courage” and
“Loyalty,” resting in a fluent sweep of waves. The crowd cheered, and the
reporter from the New York Herald wrote that the monument at once “took
its place in the very front rank of the few fine ones in the country.”
In 1884 he won the job to create a
statue honoring Col. Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts
Infantry. He expected to complete the work in two years; but he would not
finish until 1897.
Another famous work was to produce a
sculpture of Marian Hooper Adams, known as “Clover,” the wife of Henry Adams,
who had committed suicide. Adams gave only general instructions. “The whole
meaning and feeling of the figure is in its universality and anonymity,” Adams
suggested. “With the understanding that there shall be no such attempt at
making it intelligible to the average mind, and no hint at ownership or
personal relation.” The sculptor asked Adams to look at the face he was molding
in clay. Adams refused. His work is a haunting classic.
Saint-Gaudens also cast a number of
small models of Diana with her bow, and then a 13-foot version, which became
the weathervane atop Stanford White’s Madison Square Garden.
Meanwhile, his interest in the statue
of Col. Shaw grew and, as Galvin says, “the black soldiers took on more and
more importance.”
The statue was finally unveiled on
Memorial Day in 1897, and surviving veterans of the 54th marched
past, to the tune of “John Brown’s Body.” “The impression of those old soldiers
passing the very spot where they left for war so many years before, thrills me
even as I write these words,” Saint-Gaudens wrote years later.
He then returned to Paris and remained
until 1901. His statue of General William Tecumseh Sherman, accompanied by the
figure of “Victory,” won acclaim; and for once even the sculptor was almost
satisfied with his work. “I have got a swelled head for the first time in my
life,” he wrote to a son. “I have become a harmless, drooling, gibbering idiot,
sitting all day long looking at the statue. Occasionally I fall on my knees and
adore it.”
He designed a new penny and new ten-
and twenty-dollar gold pieces, at the request of President Teddy Roosevelt.
Sickness, including an intestinal tumor, marred his final years.
His son
remembered him turning every kind of problem into a “jest.” Saint-Gaudens
entitled his memoirs Reminiscences of an Idiot, but never finished them,
dying at age 59, in 1907.
The artist once explained his approach to life
this way:
It seems as if we are all in
one open boat on the ocean, abandoned and drifting, no one knows to where, and
while doing all we can to get somewhere, it is better to be cheerful than to be
melancholy; the latter does not help the situation, and the former cheers up
one’s comrades…Love and courage are the greatest things….The thing to do is to
try and do good, and any serious and earnest effort seems to me to be, to our
limited vision, a drop in the ocean of evolution to something better.
Not a bad career for an immigrant boy.
(Like most human beings, Saint-Gaudens
had his flaws. He had a son by one of his models. When his wife learned of this
years later, Augustus wrote her an adoring letter, which “apparently, after
some estrangement, placated her.”)
*
“All
the tribes and peoples.”
(1849)
In 1849, Herman Melville sounded a more
hopeful note, predicting,
We are the heirs of all time,
and with all nations we divide our inheritance. On this Western Hemisphere all
tribes and peoples are forming into one federated whole; and there is a future
which shall see the estranged children of Adam restore as to the old
hearthstone in [an American Eden]…The seed is sown, and the harvest must come.
*
(1850)
One in ten Americans is of foreign
birth, population 23 million. In the following decade 2.8 million more
immigrants arrive.
*
“A land
of sweat.”
(1850s)
I failed to note the sources for these
examples, but the Irish immigrants were often unwelcome.
“There were riots all over the
country, especially on election days but often begun by some street quarrel.
Stones were thrown through the windows of a Catholic church in Boston, a
Turnverein hall in Cincinnati was attacked, a Catholic church was blown up in
Massachusetts. Catholic church services were rotten-egged in Maine, and a
priest was tarred and feathered.” (Freedom’s Ferment, I suspect, check.)
Many of the Irish considered their
decision to leave more as exile, not emigration. “Dob eigean dom imeacth to
Meirice,” said one.
“I had to go to America.”
*
“Pants
for miners.”
(1853)
One immigrant who “struck it rich,” was
Levi Strauss, who left Bavaria in 1847 and arrived in San Francisco in 1853.
Strauss later began selling heavy duty work pants to gold miners, using rivets
at points of strain to make them more durable. In 1873 he patented these pants,
today known as jeans.
When he died in 1902, his estate was
worth $30 million, equal to $855 million in today’s money. He had never married,
so control of his company went to the daughter of his nephew and her husband.
*
“272
million gallons of blood.”
(1856)
During the Know Nothing era, vilification
of Irish immigrants was standard practice for demagogues.
Anti-Catholic speakers were
guarded in the streets by young toughs, called “Wide Awakes,” who hoped to goad
the Irish into attacking them. Parson Brownlow, fueled the fury with his
anti-Catholic writings. In 1856, for example, he claimed Catholics had murdered
68 million people for the crime of being Protestant, in the process shedding
272 million gallons of blood, “enough to overflow the banks of the Mississippi
and destroy all the cotton and sugar plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana.”
(Freedom’s Ferment, p. 387)
*
A new
name for a new American.
(1857)
In the book Sod and Stubble author John Ise described his parents’ experience as immigrants
to the United States (p. 10-11):
Henry Eisenmenger…had come from
Wurttemberg, Germany, in eighteen fifty-seven, had worked on a farm in Illinois
for several years, joined the Union Army at the outbreak of the Civil War,
helped guard the Mississippi, fought around Chattanooga, marched with Sherman
to the sea, and at the close of the war returned to Illinois with a new
name, ‘Ise,’—because his captain could not remember his full name.
He moved out to Kansas, farmed, met Rosie, 17, “and promptly
fell in love with her.”
Rosie Haag’s parents came from Germany and she was born in
Wisconsin, then the family moved to Kansas.
There, for a few years, they endured
the most desperate poverty. Rosie’s father fell ill with typhoid fever a week
after they came, never to recover his health fully. The first summer a terrible
drought blasted all the crops completely. They borrowed money for food, and a
team of oxen, but the oxen died. The next year they borrowed money again to buy
milk cows, but the cows died of blackleg. Several years later, the mother and
all her nine children, except Rosie, were stricken with typhoid fever; but Rosie,
only thirteen years of age, finally nursed them all back to health. Deeper in
debt every year, their situation seemed almost hopeless; but with true German
tenacity they persevered, and within a few years had paid their debts, bought
hours and cows and implements, and were now in comfortable circumstances. Rosie
had prospered moderately herself, and had bought three cows with her savings…
*
“Human
chimpanzees.”
(1860)
Charles
Kingsley, British historian, speaking of the Irish, is quoted in How the Irish Saved Civilization, p. 6:
I am daunted by the human chimpanzees I
saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. I don’t believe they are our
fault. I believe that they are happier, better and more comfortably fed and
lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is
dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins,
except where tanned by exposure are as white as ours.”
*
He
“tried to find a fortune and instead he found a grave.”
(1861)
What prompted them to leave Ireland? “Starving
peasants died along the roads, with mouths stained green by grass they’d
eaten.”
“A man might brag he was a banker, who
only swept out the offices of the bank.”
“It is a well-established fact
that the average length of life of the emigrant after landing here is six
years, and many insist it is much less,” remarked one new American. But 150,000
fought bravely for the Union in 1861, many others for the Rebel cause. Indeed,
William Murphy’s first job in America was to serve in the U.S. Navy during the
war. Of a brother, James, he wrote home to relatives, “He like thousands more
tried to find a fortune and instead he found a grave.”
As one modern writer observed,
they “discovered to their sorrow that the streets of America were not paved
with gold, but rather that the Irish immigrants were expected to pave
the streets themselves.”
America was “a land of sweat,”
they wrote. Patrick Walsh, called a life working on the canals and railroads,
“despicable, humiliating, and slavish.”
*
“White
miners fueled by alcohol.”
(1861)
From a brochure provided by the
Marshall Gold Discovery State Historical Park – “Welcome to the Wa Hop Store” –
we learn this: In 1848, there were only two Chinese persons in California. By
1861, however,
Coloma had a large Chinatown [located
where the park now stands], with a Chinese barber, mail services to China,
practitioners of herbal medicine, banking and food services. The Wa Hop Herb
and Dry Goods Store still stands.
Trouble,
however, was brewing. With “placer mines petering out,”
Coloma declined from its heyday,
but Chinatown continued to prosper as diggings abandoned by less patient miners
were taken over by the Chinese. The success of Chinese miners provoked violent
reactions. In 1861, a riot occurred over the right to mine under an old hotel.
A mob of white miners fueled by alcohol rampaged throughout Chinatown looting
and destroying property. Buildings were burned and the Chinese chased away. Several
Chinese were beaten, and one or two were killed as a large crowd of spectators looked
on.
A visitor to the Wa Hop store today
will notice:
A dining area is provided for
customers. To the right of this is a shrine. The altar provides a special place
for descendants to pay respects to their ancestors. On both sides of the altar
hang couplets. Five pieces of red paper on the top symbolize prosperity, high
official position, longevity, peace, and health. On the altar incense sticks,
candles, flowers, fruits, and food are usually offered during festivals.
Farther to the right you can
see drawers for herbs, clay and glass jars for wine and spirits, barrels and
cans for storing food, a small gristmill to produce rice flour, chopping
blocks, an herb cutter, and meat and fish for sale. …
A list of foods kept and sold
in the Wa Hop store in the 1860s includes: dried fish and squid, sweet rice
crackers, dried bamboo sprouts, salted cabbage, brown sugar, four kinds of
dried fruit, five kinds of dried vegetables, vermicelli, dried seaweed, Chinese
bacon, peanut oil, dried mushrooms, tea, and rice.
The Chinese storekeeper also
held the miners’ gold for safekeeping, financed their needs, and kept accounts
of their debts. The store was also a message and postal center for the highly
transient Chinese.
*
Contract
soldiers.
(1861)
April 15:
President Lincoln calls for 75,000 volunteers. Eventually, enthusiasm for war
fizzles. As Van Loon describes it,
Thereupon bounties of one or
two hundred dollars had been offered to all those who were willing to enlist
and enterprising business men had gone to Europe and had filled whole ships
with Belgian and English and Polish immigrants who entered the army as soon as
they set foot on our free soil and had divided their bounties with promoters!
And this profitable business had continued until the British government
complained of it in such forcible terms that the Washington authorities were
forced to take notice and forbade further enlistments on the part of these
“contract soldiers.” (124/384-385)
*
“Their
new patriotism.”
(1862)
An Englishman traveling in the United States, notes, regarding German
immigrants, that “they form a great portion of the population of New York,
making the German quarter of that city the third largest German town in the
world.”
He adds, “on all hands I heard praises of their morals, of their
thrift, and of their new patriotism.” (106/83-84)
*
“An alien
and poor.”
(1860s)
William Alfred, born in 1922, and raised in Brooklyn, later became
a Professor of English at Harvard. In the book, The Immigrant Experience: The
Anguish of Becoming American, he described the experiences of his great-grandmother,
Anna Maria Gavin Egan, b. 1845-1850 (she didn’t know the real date). “Of
Ireland she rarely spoke, save to recall that she was often hungry there and
that for her main meal she often ate cress out of the brooks on oaten bread
with a bit of lard.”
Of her first years here, she never tired of speaking. She and
her mother landed at Castle Garden and walked up Broadway to City Hall, with bundles
of clothes and pots and feather beds in their arms. The singing of the then
exposed telegraph wires frightened them, as did the bustle of the people in the
streets. They lost their fear when they met an Irish policeman who directed
them to a rooming house on Baxter Street.
She was “wakened often in the night by the sound of drunken
voices singing:
We'll hang Jefferson Davis
On a sour apple tree.”
One of her brothers eventually headed for California, but
returned years later, with a sad tale.
Years after she was married, she was
finally reunited with her brother, who had gone West in a vain quest for a
fortune and returned without even the wife he had married in California. “What
happened to her?” Anna Maria asked. “She ran off with another fellow,” he
answered. “Why?” said she. “Because,” said he, “I’ve but a little bit of a
thing.”
Anna Maria’s house:
Little Siberia, my mother called the house. Its center was the
volcano of a stove in the basement kitchen. No comfort was to be won on a
winter's night more than eighteen inches from it; and the butter had to be set
on the mantle over it to prevent having to split it with a cleaver. “Little
Siberia” – the full sense of being an alien and poor was also in the phrase.
130/20-23
*
(1866)
Immigrants came to America for all
kinds of reasons. Shortly after the Civil War, Frank Buchser left Switzerland after
being caught in bed with a girl by her father. (Robert
E. Lee by Emory M. Thomas; p. 403).
*
“Not
allowed a seat on the best cars.”
(1869)
In Westward by Rail, William
Fraser Rae makes racism directed at the Chinese clear. Rae, who traveled west
in 1869, writes on pages 201-202, “The aversion to the Chinamen is very general
on the Pacific slope of the continent.”
In Nevada, he notes, “Turning from the
advertising to the leader columns of the Elko Independent, I find that
the Democratic Party is honored with its support, and that the Chinese are the
objects of its aversion.”
He adds,
One or two Chinamen entered the
train here. Among them was a merchant who had amassed a fortune, who spoke
English fluently, and who conversed intelligently on most subjects. He was not
allowed a seat in the best cars, but was condemned to occupy a place in the
emigrants’ cars. All his money could not conquer the prejudice against his
tribe.
When he visits San Francisco soon
after, he notes the “gaming hells” in the Chinese quarter of the city.
Lotteries are popular among the immigrants. “The highest prize is a thousand
dollars.”
He continues,
Near the Chinese quarter, and
in the streets leading from it, are streets wherein more danger is to be feared
than among the Chinese themselves. Nearly every house is tenanted by women who,
scantily dressed in gaudy apparel, stand on the doorsteps or at the open
windows, proclaiming their profession by look and gesture. (302)
The importance of immigrant labor to
other Californians is clear:
At present, Chinese labor is as
much necessary of their existence as the clothes they wear. In private houses,
John—all Chinamen being called John—is a far better servant than Biddy [or an
Irish domestic]. He takes lower wages; he is temperate, honest, and
respectful; he does his work with extreme care, whether it consists in washing
dishes or nursing babies, scrubbing floors or waiting at table. Manufactories
would have to be closed, vineyards suffered to run wild, and many railways
would continue to be projects, were there no Chinamen to watch the spindles,
tend the vines, cut the sleepers, build bridges, and lay the rails. Chinamen,
however, are chargeable with the unpardonable fault of being Chinamen.
But the
legal disabilities remain:
…Nay even their virtues …are
all regarded as disabilities unfitting them for being treated as rational human
beings. It is considered dangerous to stand on the platform of a street-car,
and passengers are prohibited from standing there. Yet Chinamen and Chinawomen
are compelled by a regulation of the company to stand on this platform, and are
forbidden to sit inside. (303-04)
“In the courts of law,” he notes on page 305,
“the evidence of Chinamen has been proclaimed inadmissible. They might be
wholly in the right, and yet be adjudged as wrongdoers.”
Ah Hund, a Chinese immigrant, was
defendant in a case in San Francisco. The author was happy to learn that,
…if not permitted to testify,
[he] would have been robbed of his property, [and] was placed in the witness
box, in accordance with the judge’s ruling that the Fourteenth Constitutional
Amendment, while extending equality to the negro, likewise entitled the
Chinaman to sue for justice and ensure that he would not sue in vain. That the
Supreme Court of the United States will confirm this decision if appealed
against is regarded as certain. In any case, however, the Fifteenth
Constitutional Amendment will be an effectual bar to the repetition of
iniquitous proceedings like those in question. How far the efforts made by the
Democrats, who are now the majority here, to persecute and expel the Chinese
will prove successful remains to be seen. The Alta California …has made
a bold and firm stand in favor of justice to the Chinaman. (305-06)
*
“Tales of a big open country far across the seas.”
(1860s-1870s)
Eugene Boe’s ancestors left Norway and settled on the prairies
of Minnesota. Of the homeland they left behind, he writes:
Nature had yielded her blessings in
scant measure, but nothing was done to help or encourage the tens of thousands
struggling to survive on little scraps of barren soil. Neighbor had quarreled
with neighbor for every square foot of these steep, stony, stumpy upland
meadows and the plots staked out were too small to support a family.
Indebtedness was inevitable, the grip of creditor on debtor struck
strangulating. Stills on the farm were legal and too many of the luckless could
find their only consolation in drink. 130/51
The allure of America was clear:
After January 1, 1863, any person who
was twenty-one years old and was either a citizen or had applied for
citizenship could file a claim for a quarter section (160 acres of land) and
come into ownership of that land after five years’ occupation of it. A claimant
need have only fourteen dollars for the filing fee. 130/52
Government and religious leaders, as well as newspapers ridiculed
those thinking of leaving, in a song:
Salmon hopping from brook to kettle,
Cakes that rained out of the heavens,
And the little roasted piggies
That politely asked one to have some ham.
“Emigration Fever was called ‘the most dangerous disease of our
time, a bleeding of the Fatherland, a Black Death.’” 130/52
At home,
The Boes, like their neighbors, subsisted on a little patch of
ground that also had to nourish a cow and a few chickens. Finding enough food
for mere survival consumed most of the family’s energies. The limited rations
of milk, eggs, and potatoes were supplemented only by fish taken from a lake
nearby.
In the spring of 1865 Osten and Henrik were twenty-five and twenty-one
years old, respectively. Since childhood they had heard the tales of a big open
country far across the seas. It is doubtful that word of the Homestead Act had
reached their hamlet. It was enough for them to be told of the land where bread
and meat were plentiful, where neighbor helped neighbor and there was the
chance to breathe and stretch. They had also heard the shocking accounts of the
way the red man had slain many of their countrymen in the southern counties of
Minnesota. But that uprising had occurred two years earlier and the Indians
were peaceful again.
For years the brothers had been saving the trifling sums they
were paid for helping local fishermen. Now they had enough put by for the
modest fare to take them on their long voyage. …
The brothers were leaving with the blessing of their parents. (Later
the daughters were also to go.) The moment of parting must have been painful
all around. These farewells were as final as a funeral. Parents and children
alike knew they would not lay eyes upon one another again in this world. 130/53
On the ships:
Mold formed on all the rations. The
flat bread, or skriva brod (a thin-sliced, yellowish-brown bread), dried
mutton and ham, primost (a brown cheese in cake form made of whey,
sugar, and cream), and gjatost (goat’s cheese) had to be scraped and
dried regularly. Sea sickness, pneumonia, dysentery, and typhoid fever were
common ailments. It was an unusual voyage that didn’t have death itself for a
fellow traveler. When someone died, the body was wrapped in sails (or a big
stone was tied to the feet) and consigned to the ocean. 130/55
The two brothers headed West as soon as they landed, first to Decorah,
in northwest Iowa, an area which had been settled by earlier Norwegian
immigrants. “New arrivals “always found a welcome there. They joined the
households of the earlier immigrants, whose hospitality had no limits.”
“Eager to break fresh ground, the brothers quit Decorah one day
in the late spring of 1865 and began the northwesterly trek of 150 miles to
Northfield [in Minnesota]. They traveled the entire distance on foot.”
Henrik never went further; Osten kept going. One day in April
1868, “when the snow was off the ground,” he set out. First, he hiked 125 miles
to St. Cloud to file a claim at the government land office. He chose the
township of Aastad, Minnesota 36 miles square, 36 sections. Only two other settlers
had filed claims. “The township is a gently rolling prairie punctuated with
marshes, creeks, thickets, and thirty clear lakes. Its western edge flattens
out and sweeps into the rich valley of the Red River of the North.”
As Eugene Boe describes it, “The landscape was a trackless
wilderness, immense, beautiful, uncluttered.”
In the years following the American Civil War, a million
Norwegians sailed to America, most settling in regions west of the Mississippi,
and far north.
A partial catalog of the trials that
beset them would show such entries as grasshopper plagues, blizzards, long
Arctic winters, stupefyingly hot shadeless summers, prairie fires, earthquakes,
cyclones, tornadoes, electrical storms, the devastation of blackbirds and gophers
and the chinch bug, hail storms, torrential rains that turned the grain to rot,
poor seed and ignorance of good farming practices, oxen running wild, horses
and cattle driven insane by mosquitoes, nerve-shattering winds, droughts, crop
failures, money panic (“Need brings dogs into bondage,” said the bankers), lost
or stolen livestock, stem rust in the spring wheat, the constant threat of
attack by Indians, killing strikes by pneumonia, influenza and tuberculosis and
black diphtheria and typhoid fever, death by freezing, backbreaking labor
without end, and aching loneliness. 130/58-59
Osten was willing to suffer, willing to work, not matter what,
for “this land was his and it would always have a value beyond any
riches it might yield. Possession of land made him one with the Norse
chieftains. Land had dignity and stability.”
He began by building a sod house.
Osten lived in this earth house for ten years. Then he built a
one-room log house and three years later a large frame house. To the sod hut he
brought his bride, the spirited seventeen-year-old girl he had met at Sunday
services in a neighbor’s granary, during his fourth summer on the prairie. Here
four of his nine children were born – and died: two in infancy, and two young
daughters who, as victims of the dreaded black diphtheria, choked to death in
his arms.
In winter blizzards the snow often packed against the door and
drifted over the roof, imprisoning the family for days. …
When he looked back on that experience, Osten’s fondest memories
of that first home in the new country were of the winter nights when he lay
warm under [his wife] Caroline’s patchwork quilts. A candle burned in the
hollowed-out turnip and the hearth ablaze with cow dung gave off the most
beautiful colors. Lying there awake he’d gaze out through the wooded slats at
the moonlight putting its dazzling shine on the boundless white sea of crusted
snow.
Young Boe rose to prosperity slowly:
In the custom of penniless
immigrants, Osten helped his neighbors for two years before touching his own
quarter section. The few dollars earned bought a team of oxen. By giving a
neighbor another helping hand, he was able to borrow a one-bottom walking plow.
The sod was extremely tough of fiber and fought hard against uprooting.
Yielding finally, it gleamed and glistened under the summer sun, a rich black
substance that promised great fertility.
130/60-61
Sometimes, Nature itself seemed to be his biggest enemy, in the
form of blizzards of both snow and grasshoppers.
One winter day, a brutal storm swept the prairie. “Inside the
dugout Osten heard the raging wind. The howl and whine terrified his young wife
and set their infant daughter screaming. In its fury he could see it driving
waves of snow across the fields.” Still, he knew he had to venture out, make
his way to the barn, and milk the cows.
The barn was no more than fifty yards from the dugout. But so
great were the clouds of driving snow that he could not dimly locate it. In
fact, he could scarcely see his hand in front of him. He took a coil of rope
from inside, fastened one end of it to the door, and began walking in the
direction of the barn. If he could just hold onto the rope, he would be able to
retrace his steps to the hut.
The foaming, fuming storm blasted him off his feet again and
again. The snow stabbed his face like icy needles and slashed his clothing with
the force of nails. He wandered for hours, losing all sense of time, before
finding the barn. Then it took all the strength of his mighty arms to open the
door against that maniacal wind.
Osten was trapped in the barn for three days and three nights.
The wind howled across the open plain at seventy-five miles per hour and the
temperature dropped to forty degrees below zero. He drank the milk from the cows
and jumped up and down and beat himself to keep from freezing to death. There
were times, he confessed later, when he thought how nice it would be if he
could bring himself to kill the animals and wrap himself up in their skins.
Such were his memories of the Great Blizzard of 1876.
“When Osten and Caroline’s daughters died of black diphtheria,
they were buried in the snow and not brought to their permanent graves until
spring softened the earth again.” 130/64-65
Two years later, “hoppers” swept across the region:
They came like dive bombers out of the West. They came by the
millions with the rustle of their wings roaring overhead. They came in waves,
like the waves of the sea, descending with the terrifying speed, breaking now
and again like a mighty surf. They came with a force of a williwaw and they
formed a huge, ominous, dark brown cloud that eclipsed the sun. They dipped and
touched earth, hitting objects and people like hailstones. But they were not hail.
They were live demons. They popped, snapped, crackled, and roared. They
were dark brown, an inch or longer in length, plump in the middle tapered at
the ends. They had transparent wings, slender legs, and two black eyes that
flashed with a fierce intelligence.
So came the grasshoppers, like one of the seven plagues of
Egypt, and the devastation they wrought was homeric.
Blanketing the ground like snow, they devoured everything in sight
but the implements in the fields. They ate every blade of grass, every stalk of
grain, the roots of vegetables, the bark on the trees, the clothes on the line,
the hickory handles on forks, even leather saddles and boots. Boys who went
barefoot and barelegged had their feet and legs eaten raw.
… Osten remembered that they were so
thick in the wagon ruts that the juice from their crushed bodies would run in
streams down the wagon tires. Only chickens and ducks could eat them, but a
diet of hoppers turned the yolks of eggs red and gave the eggs such a strong
taste they were nearly inedible.
So critical was the situation that Governor Pillsbury proclaimed
a day of prayer in April of 1878. The next day, as history still records, a
polar wave struck and froze every grasshopper in the state stiff. And no
replacements ever flew in.
The devout, among them my grandparents, always cited this as
irrefutable proof of the power of prayer,” Eugene Boe later wrote. 130/62-64
The Norwegians and others from Northern Europe helped settle a
region once roamed by Indians alone. Eugene Boe, writing in 1971, seemed not to
notice the loses the natives must have suffered. He explains:
The settlements were all homogeneous
and self-contained. The immigrant invasion of that part of the country was
overwhelmingly Scandinavian, but the separate components of Scandinavia did not
become a melting pot in the New World. A township like Aastad remained
exclusively Norwegian. The Swedes and Danes and Finns kept to themselves in communities
that had names like Swedish Grove and Dane Prairie and Finlandia. 130/68
Like all immigrants, the settlers held fast to old ways but
worked hard to learn the new. “May 17 was Norwegian Independence Day, a holiday
always commemorated with folk songs and dances and feasting.”
But the seventeen days of Christmas was the time of year that
brought everyone together in sustained revelry. All work came to a halt except
for such inescapable chores as milking the cows and feeding the animals and
chickens. Neighbors visited back and forth in a kind of festival of open
houses. 130/73
In the beginning, Boe wrote of his ancestors, “Their quest was
mainly for meat and bread.” Yet they thrived.
In their wildest fantasies they could
not possibly have dreamed that the seed from their family tree – flowering now
unto its fifth generation – would be so fruitful in the New World … that it
would bear surgeons, lawyers, writers, musicians, professors, farmers with
large landholdings, politicians, successful businessmen, a college president,
and a state governor. 130/81
*
(1870)
A Catholic priest warned c. 1870, “that
the present system of public schools, ignoring all supernatural authority and
making knowledge the first and God the last thing to be learned, is a curse to
our country, and a floodgate of atheism, of sensuality, and of civil, social,
and national corruption.” (A Distant Magnet, p. 223).
*
Reformer
with a pen.
(1871)
Thomas
Nast, a German immigrant, takes up his pen and uses political cartoons to trash
the crooked “Tweed Ring” that runs the government in New York City.
Stuffing
the ballot boxes is a key to the “Ring’s” success.
*
The
Page Act.
(1875)
Dislike of Chinese immigrants took hold
after 1849. They were reputed to frequent “opium dens.” Their customs were
“strange.” It was believed they would defile the white race if they
intermarried. They were seen as good only as servants, doing laundry. Like many
immigrant groups, they did undercut pay for native-born workers, as when
employed building the railroads. The Page Act of 1875 banned females from China
– on the grounds that they were all prostitutes – and this soon became a ban on
Chinese women in all but name.
David Denby, writing about Harry Houdini, gives his
background:
He was born Erik Weisz (later Americanized, sort
of, to Ehrich Weiss) in Budapest on March 24, 1874. When he was four, he
immigrated to this country with his mother and his brothers. His father had
left Hungary two years earlier and settled in Appleton, Wisconsin, a mill town
near Lake Winnebago, where he found a job as a rabbi. He was no longer young,
though, and he didn’t speak much English. The fifteen German Jewish families of
Appleton fired him after a few years, and the family moved to Milwaukee, where
they were often hungry, and then to Manhattan – to a cold-water flat on East
Seventy-fifth Street (at the time a slum) and to jobs in the garment industry,
cutting the lining of neckties. In New York, Ehrich, watching his father slide
into despair and ill health, vowed, like many immigrant children, never to be
poor – and, even more important to him, never to allow his mother, Cecilia,
whom he adored, to want for anything. Like Al Jolson and Irving Berlin, who
were also children of Jewish clergymen, he launched into show business as the
way out of ghetto jobs like stitching garments and rolling cigars. It was the
first of his escapes.
There is a photo of him as a skinny,
angry-looking teenager. Like Theodore Roosevelt, the contemporary avatar of
self-transformation, he built himself up; he ran, boxed, swam (in the East
River), lifted weights, and became both strong and astoundingly flexible.
There’s no record that he was aware of the Zionist agitation in Europe at the
time, but he came to represent Max Nordau’s ideal of Muskeljudentum,
or muscular Judaism, with its rejection of male bodies enfeebled by endless
study. He spent little time in school and worked at odd jobs; he may have
learned the secrets of locks while employed at a locksmith shop. As a child, he
had played at conjuring and had dreamed of becoming a trapeze artist. When he
was in his late teens, he acquired a used copy of the memoirs of Jean-Eugène
Robert-Houdin, the French watchmaker who became the great magician of the
nineteenth century. Ehrich was so excited about Houdin that he changed his name
to Houdini. He thought, Begley says, that the final “i” signified that he was
“Houdin-like.”
…By 1906, he was throwing himself, chained, into
inhospitable bodies of water, dropping twenty-five feet off the Belle Isle
Bridge, for instance, into the freezing Detroit River. In 1915 and after,
thousands of onlookers saw him straitjacketed and hanging upside down from a
scaffold above the streets of Kansas City, Minneapolis, and many other cities.
He’d pull himself up, wriggle free, drop the straitjacket, and spread his arms.
The reference to Jesus did not go unnoticed.
*
“There is
only one hope.”
(1880)
Janos
Kovacs, a Hungarian who immigrated c. 1880, had a family to support, and only a
six-acre farm, under mortgage, to his name. He said, evocatively: “There is
only one hope, America.
*
The
Chinese Exclusion Act.
(1882)
May 6:
Congress passes the Chinese Exclusion Act, repudiating a more balanced treaty
agreement. Andrews explains:
That compact, recognizing as inalienable
the right of every man to change his abode, had permitted the free immigration
of Chinamen into the United States. The new treaty of 1881 so modified this
feature that immigration might be regulated, limited or suspended by us for no
specific period should it threaten to affect the interests of the United States
or to endanger their good order. A bill soon followed prohibiting Chinese
immigration for a period of twenty years, on the ground that the presence of the
Mongolians caused disorder in certain localities. This was the bill which
President Arthur vetoed as contravening the treaty, he objecting, among much
else, to the systems of passports and registration which the bill would impose
upon resident Chinese. But the advocates of the exclusion policy were in
earnest, wrought up by the growing hordes of Celestials pressing hither.
Only sixty-three thousand Chinese had
been in the country in 1870; in 1880 there were one hundred and five thousand.
Another bill was at once introduced, substituting ten for twenty years as the
time of suspension, and it became a law in 1882.
(The new law did allow merchants,
teachers, students, travelers and diplomats to enter the country.)
*
A
review of the film, The Chinese Exclusion Act, includes this:
The film isn’t only concerned with
politics and legislation. There is plenty of social history, of life in
Chinatowns and the profound dislocations forced on Chinese-American families,
as well as an account of the horrific wave of violence (including mass
lynchings) and ethnic purges that struck around 300 cities and towns in the
western United States in the years after 1882.
A section on the Page Act of 1875, a
forerunner to the Exclusion Act, reveals how a ban on immigration by Asian
prostitutes — which led to grueling, humiliating interviews — effectively
barred Chinese women from America while greatly contributing to the sexual
stereotyping of all Asian women.
There are also heroes in the story,
like the American-born Wong Kim Ark, whose victory in the Supreme Court in
1898 established the birthright to citizenship that we’ve taken for granted
until recently.
The volume and tenaciousness of legal challenges to the Exclusion Act, and the
eloquence of Chinese immigrants who spoke out and editorialized against it, feed a recurring
if not very convincing theme in the film that the Chinese were particularly
attracted to the democratic values of the founding fathers.
The
act was originally scheduled to remain in place for ten years, but it was not
repealed until 1943.
*
“God
Bless America.”
(1880s)
A
wave of Russian Jews came in the 1880s, often penniless, speaking Russian or
Yiddish, and congregated in city slums. Many found work in sweatshops,
including children. But following generations went into banking, business and
law. Harvard set a quota for Jewish students; in New York City, 90% of white-collar
jobs were off limits to Jewish applicants. One who came out of this milieu was
Irving Berlin. He would later go on to write classic “American” songs
like God Bless America, White Christmas, Cheek to Cheek, Easter
Parade, Always and Heat Wave.
According
to an article in Esquire (January 1990), Berlin “had always lacked an
innate sense of worth, and that gnawing sense of inadequacy had been the thorn
in his side driving him to feats of greatness.”
His
marriage was difficult. “His wife, Ellin, meanwhile, lived a separate existence
on the lower floors of their cavernous house, spending her time on charity work
and writing a memoir of her grandmother. Berlin’s three daughters and many
grandchildren rarely paid a visit.” (p. 60; loose item in my files)
NOTE TO TEACHERS: When I was
teaching, I had students memorize the poem below, starting with the fourth
line, “A mighty woman…” I felt the poem said a great deal about America and the
“American Dream.”
*
The New
Colossus
by Emma Lazarus
(1883)
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
*
Friedrich
Trump arrives.
(1885)
Friedrich
Trump, grandfather of President Donald J. Trump, leaves Bavaria, in part to
avoid mandatory military service, and travels to America. According to his grandson on arrival he knew almost no English.
All his life
he spoke German primarily.
*
Rock
Springs massacre.
(1885)
September 1:
Notices have been posted in mining towns throughout southern Wyoming, calling
for Chinese workers to be expelled.
One white labor leader has warned that “a storm is brewing.” White miners, many digging
coal for the Union Pacific Railroad, are earning a dollar a day more than
Chinese miners, but complain, if there are mine shutdowns, that Chinese laborers
are rehired faster than whites.
On this fateful evening, in Rock Springs, Wyoming,
Andrew Bugas, a
nineteen-year-old white miner, was at home with his cousin. A fellow-miner
named Sandy Cooper showed up unannounced and asked Bugas’s cousin if he had a
rifle or a shotgun. “I will furnish you with one which you must use tomorrow,
for we are all going hunting and shooting all the Chinamen we see,” Cooper
said. Bugas and his cousin thought Cooper was joking, but the man returned half
an hour later with a heavy rifle and two boxes of cartridges. Cooper then urged
Bugas’s cousin not to go to work in the morning, because it was important for
white miners to be “present.” It would become clear the following day what he
meant.
*
September 2: By the
time the first workers are scheduled to report to the mines, a mob of white
miners, mostly foreign-born themselves, has formed in Rock Springs. A fight between
white and Chinese workers ignites a spark of hate, and the mob eventually attacks
the area known as “Chinatown.” Before the fury burns itself out, at least 28
Chinese are dead, and Chinese homes and businesses are burned to the ground.
In the summer of 2024, George Matthes, a student working as
part of an archaeological dig, uncovers,
A coin, a piece of glazed
stoneware, a fragment of bone. Close to a metre down, Matthes began digging
through charcoal, as if he were crouched in the middle of a fireplace. He
uncovered a melted glass jar, then an intact pig’s jaw. He’d found it: the burn
layer. “I realized, I’m standing on top of one of the most horrible events in
Wyoming’s history.”
The town of Rock Springs itself had mushroomed suddenly,
after a rich bituminous coal deposit was found in 1868, two miles south of a
stream known as Bitter Creek. The railroads were just beginning to cut iron paths
across the West, and fuel was critical, and coal made Rock Springs. By 1885, the
town was home to roughly 3,000 people, with
about 550 Chinese miners working in tunnels below.
Another 300 white miners were also employed.
Leo Qarqwang was already working the early shift in No. 6
mine, when a gang of about a dozen white miners attacked him and another
Chinese, battering them with spades, picks, and shovels. Qarqwang was hit in
the head with a shovel, leaving him with a gash a quarter inch deep. Fighting
spread, as other Chinese rushed to defend their comrades, and when the first
battle ended, four Chinese were badly wounded, one of whom would later die.
Several of the white miners were also injured.
The troubles now spread. Around 10:00 a.m., Burgas would
later testify, he saw a group of white men and boys
hurling stones at Chinese dinner carriers – men who
carried meals on poles slung over their shoulders, to deliver to miners – causing
them to scatter. Soon afterward, he watched as a brigade of sixty or seventy
white men assembled nearby, most with rifles or revolvers. They headed to the
Knights of Labor hall, chanting, “White men, fall in.” When they spilled out,
later that afternoon, a cry went up: “Vengeance on the Chinese!” The mob took a
vote and decided that the Chinese residents should be expelled. A group of
seventy-five men began making their way toward Chinatown. When they encountered
a group of Chinese workers along the railroad tracks, they fired wildly at
them. The mob halted just outside the Chinese quarter, and a committee of three
men delivered a message: residents had an hour to pack up their belongings and
go. But barely half an hour later the rioters invaded Chinatown.
They came from two different directions, Chinese
witnesses later said. One group crossed a plank bridge over Bitter Creek, and
another advanced from the railroad tracks. A man named Lor Sun Kit was the
first resident shot. A bullet pierced his back; he crumpled to the ground,
wounded but still alive. The rioters shot a fifty-six-year-old miner named Leo
Dye Bah in the chest, killing him. A thirty-eight-year-old man named Yip Ah
Marn was also shot dead.
At this point,
the Chinese began scattering to the surrounding hills. Soon, one witness recalled,
the hills were “literally blue with the hunted Chinamen.”
Qarqwang was
still being treated for his wounds when he saw armed members of the mob
approaching. He, too, fled to the hills, and spent the next several days
wandering in the sagebrush, with nothing to eat.
Other Chinese fled
down the Union Pacific railroad tracks that crossed through town, hoping to catch
a ride to safety. Some tumbled down the steep banks of Bitter Creek, in a
desperate attempt to escape. At least one was shot and killed as he tried to
climb the far bank. A second Chinaman, Leo Mauwik, was shot in the arm, but
despite the loss of blood, didn’t stop running until he reached the town of
Green Springs, fifteen miles away. A white woman (some say a “Mrs. Osborn,” who
owned a local laundry) fired as Chinese ran past, felling two. Rioters set fire
to Chinese homes and business, and clouds of smoke billowed over the town. The
worst members of the mob picked up bodies and tossed them into the burning
buildings. Ah Lee barricaded himself inside his own business; but whites broke
through the roof and shot him in the head.
Ah Kuhn, a
Chinese interpreter was one of the lucky ones. He managed to flee. But he dropped
about sixteen hundred dollars in gold he was carrying – equal to more than
$50,000 today. East of town, he found a white resident who gave him bread and
water and let him rest. Another lucky miner, known as China Joe, found safety
inside a large oven, where he remained for three days.
Rioters also
approached the home of the white foreman in charge of the No. 6 mine and made
it clear he must leave town.
Next, the group visited the home of Soo Qui, one of
the Chinese head men, but he was in Evanston. His terrified wife met them
instead. “Soo, he go,” she said. “I go to him.” Two days later, she arrived in
Evanston by train, disembarking in a colorful gown. A newspaper reporter
characterized her as the “last of her race” to abandon Rock Springs and
“probably the last to set foot in the place for many a long year.”
Around 7 p.m.,
members of the mob spotted a badly wounded Chinese man lying in the street. They
debated whether to shoot him or not but decided to let him die in due time.
Gunfire crackled throughout the night, and fires lit “the town in a red glow.”
With the dawn
of September 3, the full extent of disaster was revealed:
Bodies were found in the burned-out cellars, often
clustered together. Some people had draped wet cloths over their heads and
burrowed into the earthen walls, trying to escape the smoke and flames. Hogs
feasted on a corpse that they had dragged from the ruins. “Today for the first
time in a good many years, there is not a Chinaman in Rock Springs,” the town’s
newspaper proclaimed. “Nothing but heaps of smoking ruins mark the spot where
Chinatown stood.”
The Union
Pacific, for whom the Chinese had worked, sent a trainload of food and water
down the tracks, hoping to save as many of the workers and their family members
as it could. And again, there were heroes who stood up for humanity, and did
not bow to blind fury.
A man who managed to reach Green River was chased by
a band of forty men until the white manager of a local hotel ushered him
inside. “She cowed the mob as effectually as could a whole battery of artillery
have done,” a newspaper account later said. Several hundred people eventually
took refuge in Evanston. Some went to a gun store in town and bought all the
revolvers in stock, in preparation for another attack.
Francis E.
Warren, the governor of Wyoming, sent an urgent request for U.S. soldiers to be
sent to Rock Springs, but the President of the United States was off hunting in
the Adirondack Mountains, and could not be reached.
When Warren
finally reached Rock Springs himself, he found it hard to believe what the mob
had done. As he would later recall, “The smell of burning human flesh was
sickening and almost unendurable, and was plainly discernible for more than a
mile along the railroad both east and west.”
A report
written up later by the Chinese counsel in New York, added additional detail.
The body of Leo Know Boot, age 24, was found, with a bullet having passed
through his neck, “cutting the windpipe in two.” Yii See Yen, had been shot in
the left temple, the “skull broken.” He was 36, and “had a mother living at
home” in China. Leo Dye Bah had been shot in the chest and killed. “I also
ascertained that the deceased was 56 years old, and had a wife, son and
daughter at home.”
“Every
one of the surviving Chinese has been rendered penniless by the cruel attack,” the
counsel added.
(We should add that a grand jury was impaneled to
bring charges, but two dozen white witnesses refused to implicate any rioters. Backed
by federal troops, the Union Pacific managed to restart mining operations – and
even brought back 250 Chinese to do the digging. When most white miners refused
to return if the Chinese had jobs, “a contingent of Mormons,” members of
another group that had face mob violence and blind hate, helped get the mines
running again.)
*
Races
of “less social efficiency and less moral force.”
March 4, 1887: Congress meets in session, with
Henry Cabot Lodge taking his seat in the House as a representative from
Massachusetts. He will later make clear his opposition
to certain immigrants, warning colleagues that the “mixture” of Anglo-Saxons
with races of “less social efficiency and less moral force” would result in the
decline of “a great country and a great people.”
*
(1890)
More than half of the nation’s coal
miners are foreign-born. Italians are arriving in increasing numbers. Many
natives consider them non-white, “swarthy,” prone to crime, likely to
join gangs and the Mafia.
*
A mass lynching in New Orleans.
(1891)
March 14: Thousands of Italian immigrants
have settled in New Orleans in recent years, including some whom are members of
the Mafia. After Captain David C. Hennessey, chief of police, is “assassinated
by some secret murderer,” suspicion falls on members of the crime syndicate.
Ridpath explains what happened:
A trial followed, and the circumstances tended to establish –
but did not establish – the guilt of the prisoners. The proof was not
positive – did not preclude a reasonable doubt of the guilt of those on trial,
and the first three of the Italian prisoners were acquitted. The sequel was
unfortunate in the last degree. A great excitement followed the decision of the
Court and jury, and charges were made and published that the jury had been
bribed or terrorized with threats into making a false verdict. These charges
were never substantiated but on the day following the acquittal of the Italians
a public meeting, having its origin in mobocracy, was called, and a great
crowd, irresponsible and angry, gathered around the statue of Henry Clay, in
one of the public squares of New Orleans.
Speeches were made. The authorities of the city, instead of
attempting to check the movement, stood off and let it take its own course. A
mob was at once organized and directed against the jail, where the Italian
prisoners were confined. The jail was entered by force. The prisoners were
driven from their cells and nine of them were shot to death in the jail yard.
Two others were dragged forth and hanged. Nor can it be doubted that the
innocent as well as the guilty (if indeed any were guilty – as certainly none
were guilty according to law) suffered in the slaughter. (1219/514)
Many of the immigrants were from Sicily, and in a Jim Crow era, they were
not always welcome.
“Sicilians were
viewed by many Americans as culturally backward and racially suspect,” writes historian Manfred Berg. Because of
their dark skin, they were often treated with the same contempt as black
people. They were also suspected of Mafia connections, and their family
networks were closely watched by the New Orleans police.
In the wake of the murder, there were trials, but those trials
did not go as many believed they should.
When news spread that the trial had
resulted in six not-guilty convictions and three mistrials, the city went wild.
They assumed that the Mafia had somehow influenced jurors or fixed the trial
and that justice had not been served. “Rise, people of New Orleans!” wrote the Daily States newspaper. “Alien hands of oath-bound
assassins have set the blot of a martyr’s blood upon your vaunted
civilization.” The message was clear: If the New Orleans justice system
couldn’t punish Italians, the people of New Orleans would have to do so
instead.
In response, thousands of angry
residents gathered near the jail. Impassioned speakers whipped the mob
into a frenzy, painting Italian immigrants as criminals who needed to be driven
out of the city. Finally, the mob broke into the city’s arsenal, grabbing guns
and ammunition. As they ran toward the prison, they shouted, “We want the
Dagoes!”
A smaller group of armed men stormed
the prison, grabbing not just the men who had been acquitted or given a
mistrial, but several who had not been tried or accused in the crimes. Shots
rang out – hundreds of them. Eleven men’s bodies were riddled with bullets and
torn apart by the crowd.
Outside the jail, the larger mob
cheered as the mutilated bodies were displayed. Some corpses were hung; what
remained of others were torn apart and plundered for souvenirs.
The Italian government complained and
there was talk of war between the two countries.
But many Americans, swept up on a tide
of anti-immigrant sentiment, applauded the killings. An editorial in The New York Times called the
victims “desperate ruffians and murderers. These sneaking and cowardly
Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins…are to us a pest without
mitigations.”
The difficulty between Italy and the United States would subside
over the coming months; but the anti-immigrant feeling in this country would
boil up repeatedly in this country, in years ahead.
*
Keeping
children alive.
(1892)
Nathan
Straus, an immigrant from Bavaria, first settled in the South, where his father
established a profitable general store. By the 1880s, Straus and his brother
Isidor had become part owners of Macy’s department store in Manhattan.
Straus
had long been concerned about the childhood mortality rates in the city — he
had lost two children to disease. From another German immigrant he heard about
“pasteurization,” which was finally being applied to milk.
Straus saw that pasteurization offered
a comparatively simple intervention that could make a meaningful difference in
keeping children alive.
One major impediment to pasteurization
came from milk consumers themselves. Pasteurized milk was widely considered to
be less flavorful than regular milk; the process was also believed to remove
the nutritious elements of milk — a belief that has re-emerged in the 21st
century among “natural milk” adherents. Dairy producers resisted pasteurization
not just because it added an additional cost to the production process but also
because they were convinced, with good reason, that it would hurt their sales.
And so Straus recognized that changing popular attitudes toward pasteurized
milk was an essential step. In 1892, he created a milk laboratory where
sterilized milk could be produced at scale. The next year, he began opening
what he called milk depots in low-income neighborhoods around the city, which
sold the milk below cost. Straus also funded a pasteurization plant on
Randall’s Island that supplied sterilized milk to an orphanage there where
almost half the children had perished in only three years. Nothing else in
their diet or living conditions was altered other than drinking pasteurized
milk. Almost immediately, the mortality rate dropped by 14 percent.
*
Immigration Restriction League
(1894)
Worried about the quality of the nation’s “race
stock,” three Harvard graduates found the Immigration Restriction League. Their
announced purpose is to exclude “elements undesirable or injurious to our national
character.”
Or, as Erika Lee puts it more bluntly in American
for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States, they were “convinced that
Anglo-Saxon traditions, peoples, and culture were being drowned in a flood of
racially inferior foreigners from Southern and Eastern Europe.”
*
“The
more sordid and hapless elements of their population.”
(1902)
Immigrants filled the cities and rural
America viewed the cities as decadent. Nativism took deep root. In 1902, a
college president, Woodrow Wilson, wrote in History of the American People,
But now
there came multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and
men of the meaner sort from Hungary and Poland, men out of the ranks where
there was neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence;
and they came in numbers which increased from year to year, as if the countries
of the south of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and
hapless elements of their population….The people of the Pacific coast had
clamored for many years against the admission of immigrants out of China…and
yet the Chinese are more to be desired, as workmen if not citizens, than most
of the coarse crew that came crowding in every year at the eastern ports.
*
Sam
Glosser couldn’t get in today.
(1903)
Stephen Miller’s great grandfather, a Jew fleeing
pogroms and abuse in Russia, and speaking Yiddish arrives in America.
He would have been barred from entry under immigration policies crafted by his
great grandson, under the Trump administration. Sam Glosser was the immigrant’s
name. He passed beneath Lady Liberty’s torch around 1903. Most East European
Jews went straight to work in the sweatshops of the New York City garment
industry—low-skilled workers, earning low pay.
Virulent anti-Semitism was still common in America at
the time. A New York newspaper referred to people like Glosser as “slime” being
“siphoned upon us from the
Continental mud tanks.”
(Miller is a leading architect of Trump
administration immigration policy.)
*
Smuggled
across the border.
(1904)
The
story of Jeu Gong Lum was another one I had never heard till
I ran across it in an article in The New Yorker last year:
Jeu
Gong Lum came to the United States from China in 1904. After being smuggled
across the Canadian border by human traffickers, he made his way to the
Mississippi Delta, where a relative ran a grocery store. In 1913 he married
another Chinese immigrant, and they opened their own store.
They
had three children and gave them American names.
In 1923, the family moved to Rosedale,
Mississippi, and Martha, then eight years old, entered the local public school.
According to Adrienne Berard, who tells the Lums’ story in Water Tossing Boulders, nothing seemed amiss for the first year,
but when Martha returned to school after the summer the principal relayed the
news that the school board had ordered her to be expelled [emphasis
added]. Public schools in Mississippi had been racially segregated by law since
1890, and her school educated only whites. The board had decided that Martha
was not white and, consequently, she could not study there.
The Lums engaged a lawyer, who managed
to get a writ of mandamus—an order that a legal duty be carried out—served on
the school board. The board, which must have been very surprised, contested the
writ, and the case went to the Supreme Court of Mississippi, which ruled that
the board had the right to expel Martha Lum on racial grounds. That part was
not so surprising.
The court acknowledged that there was
no statutory definition of the “colored race” in Mississippi. But it argued
that the term should be construed
in the broadest sense[emphasis
added], and cited a case it had decided eight years earlier, upholding the
right of a school board to expel from an all-white school two children whose
great-aunts were rumored to have married nonwhites.
That decision, the court said, showed
that the term “colored” was not restricted to “persons having negro blood in
their veins”—apparently since the children involved were in fact white. Martha
Lum did not have “negro blood,” either, but she was not white. She could attend
a “colored” school. Mississippi’s separate-schools law, the court explained,
was enacted “to prevent race amalgamation.” Then why place an Asian-American
child in a school with African-American children? Because, according to the
court, the law was intended to serve “the
broad dominant purpose of preserving the purity and integrity of the white race.”
The Lums appealed to the U.S. Supreme
Court. At issue was the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been ratified in 1868.
The first clause of that amendment is the most radically democratic clause in
the entire Constitution, much of which was designed to limit what the Founders
considered the dangers of too much democracy….
The U.S. Supreme Court decision in the
case, Lum v. Rice, was handed down in
1927, three years after Congress passed the Johnson-Reed immigration act, which
barred all Asians from entering the United States. Was Martha Lum a citizen?
The Supreme Court said she was. Was she being denied the equal protection of
the laws? The Court said that she was not, and cited a series of
precedents in which courts had upheld the constitutionality of school
segregation.
It was true, the Court conceded, that
most of those cases had involved African-American children. But it couldn’t see
that “pupils of the yellow races” were any different, and the decision to expel
such pupils was, it held, “within the discretion of the state in regulating its
public schools, and does not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment.” Even
though the Mississippi court had stated that the purpose of the
school-segregation law was to preserve “the purity and integrity of the white
race,” it was not a denial of equal protection to nonwhites. The Lums, of
course, knew from firsthand observation what it meant to be classified as
“colored” in Mississippi, and they did what a lot of African-American
Mississippians were also doing—they left the state.
The
decision was unanimous. The opinion of the Court was delivered by the Chief
Justice, William Howard Taft. Among the Justices who heard the case were Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Louis Brandeis.
One
of the precedents the Court quoted prominently in support of its decision was a
case it had decided thirty-one years earlier – Plessy v. Ferguson.
*
Flexible greasepaint.
(1904)
Makysmilian Faktorwicz, a Polish immigrant, heads for Hollywood.
He sells made-to-order wigs and theatrical makeup to actors, as the film
industry begins to boom. Now known as Max Factor, he applies the makeup to
different actors personally and customizes to meet their needs.
Ten years later, he will develop his first real cosmetic
product, a kind of “flexible greasepaint,” which was soon in high demand.
*
“The Yellow Peril.”
(1905)
Fear
of Japanese immigrants as their numbers increased in California and along the
West Coast.. Like the Chinese, they were viewed as part of “The Yellow Peril.”
These Asian people were considered “inscrutable,” or “sneaky.” In 1905, the San
Francisco Chronicle ran a series of stories headlined, JAPANESE A MENACE TO
AMERICAN WOMEN, CRIME AND POVERTY GO HAND IN HAND WITH ASIATIC LABOR and BROWN
ASIATICS STEAL BRAINS OF WHITES.
*
(1906)
In
the fall of 1906, the San Francisco Board of Education ordered all Japanese
students to attend segregated schools.
*
The
first of thirteen children.
(1907)
The
first member of this Northern Italian family of thirteen children comes to the
United States in 1907, and the rest follow, as money allows, until 1920. The
father, Giovani, is a carpenter. Teresa, the mother, spends her time in the
home, as you might expect. The brothers, who come to America first, often send
money home, allowing sisters and other relatives to follow. The children (born
in order) are Rachele, Valeriano, Francesco,
Giuseppe, Gelindo, Giocondo, Felicità , Angelina, Ancilla, Candido, Cirilla,
Stella and Gilia.
That is: six boys first, then
three girls, then Candido, who will be the most famous, and finally, three more
girls.
The family is religious, but
not rich. They wore wooden shoes, saving handmade slippers for Mass on Sunday.
When war threatens Europe in 1914,
Giovani Jaccuzi increases his efforts to move his boys to America. At least one
of the boys found work in rural Idaho. Eventually, the family gathered in
California.
“They dug ditches, built
railroads, did everything they could to make a buck and send it back to Italy,
and try to get the rest of the family over,” one grandson remembered.
The
brothers, speaking only basic English, worked first in the California orange
groves, before banding together and using their background as mechanical
engineers to establish a machine shop in Berkeley in 1915, working under the
name Jacuzzi Brothers Incorporated.
They
entered the aviation industry, and it was Rachele, the oldest and most
talented, who was credited for the invention of the Jacuzzi Toothpick
Propellor. It’s super-light design proved instrumental in American military
planes during World War I (it’s currently on display at the Smithsonian).
In 1921, however, Giocondo was
killed, along with three passengers, when a Jacuzzi J-7 he was flying crashed. The
J-7 was America’s first monoplane with an enclosed cabin; but now the matriarch
of the Jacuzzi clan forbade her other children from flying.
The brothers turned their
attention to the land. They focused on improved systems for irrigating fields
and developed a line of deep-well injector pumps. They sold their patents to
big companies, in return for royalties, and began manufacturing swimming pool
supplies. The family might have prospered, but in relative anonymity, save for
the bad luck of Kenneth Jacuzzi, who in 1943, developed a bad case of strep
throat at the age of 15 months. This led to his development of juvenile
rheumatoid arthritis. Doctors told his father, Candido, and his mother, Inez,
that the boy would probably not live beyond age eight. “The boy was once active
and healthy, but doctors told the family that he would slowly lose mobility and
be unable to live independently.
Candido and Inez were relieved
to find a hospital that would provide a kind of hydrotherapy, to help their
son. Kenneth would be immersed in a tank filled with hot water, seated upright
on a bench, and water “would swirl and pummel” his body, “to relieve stiffness
and improve flexibility.” But it was an hour drive, one way, to get treatment,
and only two sessions a week. Inez, who was doing all the driving, finally asked
her husband one day, “Why can’t you make something like this at home?”
The family had plenty of
experience making water pumps. So Candido came up with a pump that could create
the same kind of relaxing swirls, but be attached to an ordinary bathtub, which
allowed his son to stretch out full length. In 1949, the Jacuzzi brothers began
selling their new pump.
An
ad campaign promoted it as a “lightweight, portable, hydromassage unit,”
perfect for “the tired businessman or harried housewife, for the golfer with
sore muscles, for the aches and pains of senior citizens, for frolicking
youngsters and for those who just want to relax and pamper themselves with a
hydromassage bath.”
Consumers feared attaching an
electric motor to a tub full of water. The Jacuzzis designed their own units,
with the technology built in, and began to market the “Roman Bath” model, the
first whirlpool – the kind of machine now found in every professional sports
locker room. There were multiple water jets, and the water was heated, and
recirculated, and there were skidproof steps.
The business boomed for many
years. Luxury hotels were expected to have jacuzzies, homeowners might have add
one to a large bathroom. The jacuzzi became a “status symbol.” But family
disagreements built. Candido was eventually indicted for tax fraud and fled the
country. In 1979, the Jacuzzi clan sold their company for $73 million and
agreed never again to use the family name to sell spa products. Remo Jaccuzi,
son of Valeriano, started his own company, Jason Internation (“Ja” for the
family name, “son” to mark his connection to the first inventors of the famous
machine.)
Remo managed to come up with a
clever way to use the family name in advertisements, despite the deal signed in
1979:
“Behind
Every Jason Bath Stands a Jacuzzi,” one tagline read. “A product so good I wish
I could put my name on it,” was another, joined by Remo’s elaborate signature.
“We
had a few cease-and-desist orders,” Paulo [Remo’s son] said, chuckling. His
father, who has settled into a retirement home with his wife of 60 years, sent
him to the library to read up on copyright law. “But there was nothing they
could do. A “Jacuzzi” was a buzzword for hot tubs, and they couldn’t claim exclusive
copyright.”
In such fashion, one immigrant family
prospered greatly, although Candido did have to flee his adopted country.
As for Kenneth Jacuzzi,
whose juvenile rheumatoid arthritis served as impetus for Candido’s invention, he
did become wheelchair bound. Still, he married, earned an M.B.A., and worked as
a Jacuzzi manager in Italy. He went on to become the director of Arizona’s Office
of the Americans with Disabilities. He was an avid reader, an author, and loved
to paint portraits.
He lived to be 75, dying in
2017.
*
“Original
race stocks.”
(1909)
Sen.
Henry Cabot Lodge had tried to extend the list of “excluded immigrants” to
include not only “paupers, convicts and diseased persons” but all “Italians,
Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks and Asiatics” who arrived on our shores and
failed a literacy test. What he wanted was to limit immigration to “original
race stocks of the 13 colonies.” These others, he said, were “slum dwellers,
criminals and juvenile delinquents.”
*
“Still
eating spaghetti.”
(1910)
Prescott
F. Hall, head of the Immigration Restriction League, would sound fresh warning
in 1910. Do we want America, he asked, “To be peopled by British, German and
Scandinavian stock, historically free, energetic, progressive, or by Slav,
Latin and Asiatic races, historically downtrodden, atavistic and stagnant?”
One
seventh of the population of the United States that year was foreign-born, including
31% of the people in Massachusetts and 30% in New York. Two-thirds of
workers in iron mining were foreign-born.
A
social worker, visiting an Italian immigrant family, noted sourly, “Not
Americanized; still eating spaghetti.”
Something
like 40% of Italians came but returned home, 50% of Poles, and 60% of
Hungarians. Such immigrants were known as “birds of passage.”
*
A child
of Norwegian background changes football.
(1913)
Knute
Rockne dies in a plane crash in 1931. At the time, his Notre Dame football team
is on a 19-game winning streak. He has already had three undefeated teams,
including the 1924 squad, famous for the Four Horsemen. His record on the day
he dies is 105-12-5.
Not
bad for an immigrant from Norway.
Born Knut Larsen Rokne in 1888, his family
immigrated in 1893, when he was five and made a new
home in Chicago. After high school he worked for four years, saved enough money
to go to Notre Dame, and excelled in football, winning All-American honors in
1913. In a game on November 1, 1913, against the team from Army, Notre Dame
used long forward passes, with Rockne catching most of the throws, the first
time a college team had ever used the pass to any great extent. The final score
was 35-13, with the Fighting Irish catching the Cadets by surprise.
*
A
famous painter.
(1913)
Winhold
Reiss left Germany in 1913, in part because he wanted to come to America and
paint portraits of Native Americans. In 1925, he also painted a series of
portraits of famous and ordinary people in Harlem.
*
Criminal
success.
(1913)
Pearl
Adler, a Jew from Russia, also arrived in this country in 1913. With pogroms
sweeping her homeland, her father decided to send her to America for her
safety, along with an older cousin. But the cousin backed out, and Adler landed
in the U.S., without much guidance. By the time she turned twenty, she had
landed in the underworld, and when Prohibition took effect, she opened her
first brothel.
In
a review of a book about Adler’s life, we learn:
Within
a few months, Pearl, now renamed Polly by her new friends, had opened her first
brothel, conveniently located across from Columbia University. Speakeasies
sprouted “like mushrooms”: “Manic, uninhibited revelry echoed everywhere, from
the Bronx to Greenwich Village.” Predictably, everyone was trying to get a
piece of the action, including the vice squad, which ran a shakedown business
that had Polly’s bank account rising and falling like out-of-control blood
pressure. (Although one might say her family, who would soon be arriving in
America, did much the same; they were all too happy to take her money even as
they barred her from their Seder.)
In
the Depression, it is said that Polly could turn away 40 young women, seeking
work, for every one she hired. She had to shift locations repeatedly, to stay
ahead of the law, but her place took on the feel of a literary salon,
with drink from the best bootleggers, food from her private cooks and
good company from Polly. It became the after-hours place not only for
gangsters, lowlifes and politicians, but also for the Algonquin Round Table and
for writers at The New Yorker. (Dorothy Parker and Polly would chat while the
men availed themselves of the services.)
The gossip columnist Walter Winchell
was said to be a regular customer. Yet, when a famous bandleader fell in love
with Polly, Winchell described her as a “broken down whore,” in one of his
columns, “and an ugly one at that.”
*
A new
puzzle
(1913)
In Victorian times a popular game was “Magic Square,” where
given words could be arranged two ways:
F O U R
O G R E
U R G E
R E E D
Arthur Wynne, an immigrant from Liverpool, working for the New
York World, is given the task of devising a new puzzle. He blacks out
certain squares and crisscrosses the squares.
On December 21, 1913, the first “crossword puzzle” is published.
*
“Low-browed,
big-faced persons of obviously low mentality.”
(1914)
In 1914, Edward A. Ross blasted the new
immigrants in his book, The Old World in the New. He spoke of immigrants
from Southeast Europe and their “pigsty way of life,” “their brawls and
their animal pleasures.” He described them as “hirsute, low-browed, big-faced
persons of obviously low mentality. Not that they suggest evil. They simply
look out of place in black clothes and stiff collar, since clearly they belong
in skins, in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age.”
Or, as one lawmaker had put it in the
1880s, “I believe in a pedigree, not only in the animal, but in the human
race.”
*
Company
towns.
(1915)
Over half of all workers in mines and
factories were foreign-born in 1915. Conditions were far from ideal. Almost
2,300 coal miners would die on the job during the year, roughly the average
between 1903-1930.
A Polish immigrant reported making
$41 in two weeks at his factory job. He then had to pay the company $9 rent for
living in a company-owned house, owed $24 for purchases at the company-owned
store, and had to pay a fee of 50¢ for a visit to the company-owned hospital
and 30¢ for the privilege of having his tools sharpened at the company-owned
shop.
“Company towns” were common in those
days – with workers sometimes paid in “scrip,” or bills and coins only
good at the company store. Only one in ten American workers belonged
to a union.
From 1900 to 1915, three million
Italian immigrants landed on our shores. The flow had been changing. More and
more Jews, fleeing persecution in Poland and Russia, joined them. Many others
came from Greece, Romania, Hungary, and Armenia. On the eve of World War I, 1
of every 4 Greek males at work was working in this country.
*
“Sweeping
the nation toward a racial abyss.”
(1916)
Madison Grant, a conservative lawyer,
in The Passing of the Great Race
(1916), sees grave danger in the arrival of Italians, Greeks, Serbs and other
“lesser types.” These arrivals did not impress him.
They were:
a large
and increasing number of the weak, the broken and the mentally crippled of all
races drawn from the lowest stratum of the Mediterranean basin and the Balkans,
together with hordes of the wretched, submerged populations of the Polish
ghettoes. Our jails, insane asylums and almshouses are filled with this human
flotsam and the whole tone of American life, social, moral and political has
been lowered and vulgarized by them.
You can get a whole raft of disgusting
quotes from the book:
In the
Europe of today the amount of Nordic blood in each nation is a very fair
measure of its strength in war and standing in civilization. The proportion of
men of pure type of each constituent race to the mixed type is also a powerful
factor.
We Americans must realize that the altruistic
ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century and
the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America “an asylum for the oppressed,”
are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss. If the Melting Pot is
allowed to boil without control and we continue to follow our national motto
and deliberately blind ourselves to all “distinction of race, creed or color,”
the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the
Athenian of the age of Pericles, and the Vikings of the days of Rollo.
Races
must be kept apart by artificial devices of this sort or they ultimately
amalgamate and in the offspring the more generalized or lower type prevails.
Situated
on the eastern marches of Europe, the Slavs were submerged during long periods
in the Middle Ages by Mongolian hordes and were checked in development and
warped in culture. Definite traces remain of the blood of the Mongols both in
isolated and compact groups in south Russia and also scattered throughout the
whole country as far west as the German boundary.
Denmark,
Norway and Sweden are purely Nordic and yearly contribute swarms of a splendid
type of immigrants to America and are now, as they have been for thousands of
years, the chief nursery and brood land of the master race.
Where
two distinct species are located side by side, history and biology teach that
but one of the two things can happen; either one race drives the other out, as
the Americans exterminated the Indians and as the Negroes are now replacing the
whites in various parts of the South; or else they amalgamate and form a
population of race bastards in which the lower type ultimately
preponderates.
It is
scarcely necessary to cite the universal distrust, often contempt, that the
half-breed between two sharply contrasted races inspires the world over.
Belonging physically and spiritually to the lower race, but aspiring to
recognition as one of the higher race, the unfortunate mongrel, in addition to
a disharmonic physique, often inherits from one parent an unstable brain which
is stimulated and at times over excited by flashes of brilliancy from the
other. The result is a total lack of continuity of purpose, an intermittent
intellect goaded into spasmodic outbursts of energy.
Writing
in 1925, even the historian Benjamin Andrews, puts it in these kinds of terms,,
explaining, “So enormous was the influx of foreigners that we were threatened
with a fatal emasculation of our national character. (4-372)
*
“Liberty
cabbage.”
(1917)
When the United States joined the war
in 1917, fear of German immigrants took hold. They were suspected of
disloyalty, considered likely to commit sabotage. There were rumors that German
American Red Cross volunteers were putting glass in bandages. There were
hundreds of German weekly newspapers and 53 dailies in 1914. All were now
deemed “suspicious.”
There were numerous arrests for exercising
free speech. Beatings of suspected “disloyal citizens” were common.
Hamburger was renamed “Salisbury
steak,” sauerkraut became “Liberty cabbage.” But it still tasted like
sauerkraut.
The Cincinnati City Council shut down
pool rooms operated by aliens, on grounds customers were not learning the
American way of life.
The governor of Iowa ruled that only
English might be spoken in schools, churches and in telephone conversations.
Two decades earlier, Sen. Henry Cabot
Lodge had tried to extend the list of “excluded immigrants” to include not only
“paupers, convicts and diseased persons” but all “Italians, Russians, Poles,
Hungarians, Greeks and Asiatics” who arrived on our shores and failed a
literacy test. What he wanted was to limit immigration to “original race stocks
of the 13 colonies.” These others, he said, were “slum dwellers, criminals
and juvenile delinquents.”
The disloyal German immigrant.
Terms like “yid, mick, dago, greaser,
bohunk, polack, and uke were tossed around as casually as baseballs well into
the late twentieth century.” (Geoffrey Wawro says). Teddy Roosevelt
popularized suspicion of “hyphenated Americans.” Woodrow Wilson picked it up,
saying, “any man who carries a hyphen about him carries a dagger that he is
ready to plunge into the vitals of the Republic.”
Wilson feared sending “All-American”
boys to die in Europe, while “foreign slackers on American soil” would take
jobs and remain safe. “Birds of passage” would be safe. “Real Americans” would
die.
Roosevelt said: “The military tent will
rank next to the public school among the great agents of democratization.”
German officers who interrogated
American prisoners despaired: “These half-Americans express without hesitation
purely native sentiments. Their quality is remarkable. They brim with naïve
confidence.”
Lodge warned about the “unguarded gates
of American citizenship,” but men like Ottavio Fiscalini, Aleksandr Shazkows
and Olaf Knutson died for this country. Wawro notes that the army of doughboys
spoke 49 different languages. NYT (9/12/18)
*
Exterminate
the pests.
(1918)
Like many Americans, Guy Empey,
who had signed up to fight with the British in 1916, did not trust German
immigrants living in the United States. His anti-German bias is not much
different from a similar bias against Japanese Americans in 1942, or
anti-Muslim bias after the attacks of 9/11.
In his book, First Call,
published in 1918, he warned:
The German in the trenches can be handled by our boys at the
front, but what about the German at home here in the United States? The one who
stabs us in the back! Are we going to let these snakes hinder and undermine
our armies [emphasis added throughout] at the front or are we going to
safeguard our boys and exterminate the pests?
Although we are fighting Germany, German language newspapers are
being published all about us.
The Germans in the United States, whether naturalized or not, who
are unwilling to renounce their Fatherland and who are unwilling to fight this
Fatherland with rifle and bayonet, are our enemies and should be interned
immediately.
We have many men who hold high offices of trust who are nothing
more or less than pro-Germans or spies in the pay of Germany. They have tried
and are now trying to hinder the successful promotion of this war. These men
should be hanged as traitors; shooting them is too good for them.
Before the United States entered the war, the genuine pacifist was
to be respected as one who had the strength of his convictions, but now that
the United States is at war, it is up to every pacifist to help, not hinder.
The pacifist of to-day is either a pro-German or a traitor to his country and
should be treated as such. Give a few of them jail sentences and see how
quickly the rest become patriotic.
*
Fifty percent return in only 90 days!
(1919)
Charles Ponzi launches his
famous swindle. In an old article from the Cincinnati Enquirer, written
by John Eckberg, we have this:
Ponzi took in millions of dollars by promising enormous returns to
the small investor – up to 50% within 90 days.
Ponzi claimed that he made the extraordinary profits by taking
advantage of foreign exchange rates. Investors flocked to him with overflowing
pockets.
And his idea worked for some – as long as there was a ready supply
of new investors willing to buy a Ponzi note for $100 down.
Ponzi, a thin immigrant from Parma, Italy, had a flair, as well.
He had been a laborer, clerk, fruit peddler and waiter until he devised the
investment scam.
And for a while it turned his life around. He drove a $12,000
automobile in a day when cars cost $1,000. He bought a huge estate and
hobnobbed with Brahman Boston.
He bought a bank to maintain a flow of cash. He did not advertise
because word-of-mouth was good enough. The money poured in from widows, youths
and others looking for a quick buck.
Eventually, however, the walls to Ponzi’s house of cards came
tumbling down. Later investors found out their money had gone to pay off
earlier ones and that there was little left in the way of interest or
principle.
When his scheme finally failed and investigations followed, Ponzi
was sentenced to seven years in prison. Investors received 30 cents on every
dollar. Estimates at the time said Ponzi had taken in $15 million. He died in
1949, in Brazil, where he was teaching English. “Those were confused, money-mad
days,” he told a reporter before he died. “Everybody wanted to get rich quick,
I hit the American people where it hurt – in the pocketbook. I was Number One
in those days.
*
“A
hybrid race.”
(1922)
In the 1920s, laws are passed demanding
that English be the sole language taught in public schools. Henry Ford
and his Dearborn Independent paper
rail against Jews. The Imperial Wizard of the KKK warns against Catholics and
immigrants. “We have taken unto ourselves a Trojan horse crowded with
ignorance, illiteracy and envy, he warns.”
Kenneth L. Roberts, author of Why
Europe leaves Home, writes:
The
American nation was founded and developed by the Nordic race, but if a few more
millions of members of the Alpine, Mediterranean and Semitic races are poured
among us, the result must inevitably be a hybrid race of people as worthless
and futile as the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and
Southwestern Europe.
The “National Origins Act” was passed
by Congress and signed into law in 1924. Under the new system, total legal
immigration from Europe was capped at 150,000 persons per year. Provisions of
the act had the effect of reserving 80% of all slots from Europe to
British, German and other early arrivals to American shores. All non-white
immigrants from Asia and Africa were barred. These restrictive quotas cut
Italian immigration from 222,000 in 1921 to 18,000 in 1928, Polish immigration
from 98,000 to 9,000, and reduce the influx from other central and southern
European areas from 151,000 to 11,000. Asian immigration slows to a trickle,
dropping from 25,000 to 3,000.
In the next twenty-five years, fewer
immigrants arrive than had arrived in 1907 alone.
One critic of immigration suggested
that a bond of $1000 or $5000 be posted by each immigrant coming to the United
States.
*
“Forty years of misery in America.”
(1924)
When Saul Bellow was nine, in 1924, his family (his parents were
Jews from what is now Lithuania, who emigrated to Canada in 1913), moved to the
United States and settled in Chicago. He grew up there and turned to writing.
He would later be awarded both a Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature.
In his novel, Herzog, we capture a sense of what life for
many immigrants was really like. In one scene, the main character, Herzog,
explains that, “Papa’s savings, representing forty years of misery in
America” went so he, the son, could buy a house (p. 120)
Herzog’s father’s story is very powerful:
As
for my late unlucky father, J. Herzog, he was not a big man, one of the
small-boned Herzog’s, finely made, round-headed, keen, nervous, handsome. In
his frequent bursts of temper he slapped his son swiftly with both hands. He
did everything quickly, neatly, with skillful Eastern European flourishes:
combing his hair, buttoning his shirt, stropping his bone-handled razors,
sharpening pencils on the ball of his thumb, holding a loaf of bread to his
breast and slicing toward himself, tying parcels with tight little knots,
jotting like an artist in his account book. Their each cancelled page was
covered with a carefully drawn X. The 1s and 7s carried bars and streamers .
They were like pennants in the wind of failure. First Father Herzog failed in
Petersburg, where he went through two dowries in one year. He had been
importing onions from Egypt.
The police caught him and charged his for illegal residence.
“He was convicted and sentenced,” the author explains. “The
account of the trial was published in a Russian Journal printed on thick green
paper. Father Herzog sometimes unfolded it and read aloud to the entire family,
translating” as he went. “He never served his sentence. He got away. Because he
was nervy, hasty, obstinate, rebellious. He came to Canada, where his sister
Zipporah Yaffe was living.”
He tried bootlegging next, but failed once more. As his son
tells the tale, “He lacked the cheating imagination of a successful
businessman.”
Grandfather Herzog was still alive,
then....Later he predicted that the Revolution would fail and tried to acquire
Czarist currency, to become a millionaire under the restored Romanoffs. The
Herzog’s received packets of worthless rubles, and Willie and Moses played with
great sums. You held the glorious bills to the light and you saw Peter the
Great and Catherine in the watermarked rainbow paper. Grandfather Herzog [back
in Russia] was in his eighties but still strong. His mind was powerful and his
Hebrew calligraphy elegant. The letters were read aloud in Montreal by Father
Herzog—accounts of cold, lice, famine, epidemics, the dead. The old man wrote,
“Shall I ever see the faces of my children? And who will bury me?” Father
Herzog approached the next phrase two or three times, but could not find his
full voice. Only a whisper came out. The tears were in his eyes and he suddenly
put his hand over his mustached mouth and hurried from the room. Mother Herzog,
large-eyed, sat with the children in the primitive kitchen which the sun never
entered . It was like a cave with the ancient black stove, the iron sink, the
green cupboards, the gas ring.
Mother Herzog had a way of meeting
the present with a partly averted face. She encountered it on the left but
sometimes seemed to avoid it on the right. On this withdrawn side she often had
a dreaming look, melancholy, and seemed to be seeing the Old World—her father
the famous misnagid, her tragic mother, her bothers living and dead, her
sister, and her linens and servants in Petersburg, the dacha in Finland (all
founded on Egyptian onions). Now she was cook, washerwoman, seamstress on
Napoleon Street in the slum. Her hair turned gray, and she lost her teeth,
her very fingernails wrinkled. Her hands smelled of the sink.
Herzog was thinking however, how she
found the strength to spoil her children. She certainly spoiled me. Once, at
nightfall, she was pulling me on the sled, over crusty ice, the tiny glitter of
snow, perhaps four o’clock of a short day in January. Near the grocery we met
an old baba in a shawl who said, “Why are you pulling him, daughter!” Mama,
dark under the eyes. Her slender cold face. She was breathing hard. She wore
the torn seal coat and a red pointed wool cap and thin button boots. Clusters
of dry fish hung in the shop, a rancid sugar smell, cheese, soap—a terrible
dust of nutrition came from the open door. The bell on a coil of wire was
bobbing, ringing. “Daughter, don’t sacrifice your strength to children,” said
the shawled crone in the freezing dusk of the street. I wouldn’t get off the
sled. I pretended not to understand…
Mama’s brother Mikhail died of typhus
in Moscow. I took the letter from the postman and brought it upstairs—the long
latchstring ran through loops under the banister. It was wash day. The copper
boiler steamed the window. She was rinsing and ringing in a tub. When she read
the news she gave a cry and fainted. Her lips turned white. Her arm lay in the
water, sleeve and all. We two were alone in the house. I was terrified when she
lay like that, legs spread, her long hair undone, lids brown, mouth bloodless,
deathlike. But then she got up and went to lie down. She wept all day. But in
the morning she cooked the oatmeal nevertheless. We were up early.
My ancient times. Remoter than Egypt.
No dawn, the foggy winters. In darkness, the bulb was lit. The stove was cold.
Papa shook the grates, and raised an ashen dust. The grates grumbled and
squealed. The puny shovel clinked underneath. The Caporals [a cigarette brand]
gave Papa a bad cough. The chimneys in their helmets sucked in the wind. The
milkman came in his sleigh. The snow was spoiled and rotten with manure and
litter, dead rats, dogs. The milkman in his sheepskin gave the bell a
twist. It was brass, like the winding-key of a clock. Helen pulled the latch
and went down with the pitcher for the milk. And then Ravitch, hungover, came
from his room, in his heavy sweater, suspenders over the wool to keep it
tighter into the body, the bowler on his head, red in the face, his look
guilty. He wanted to be asked to sit.
The morning light could not free
itself from the gloom and frost. Up and down the street, the brick recessed
windows were dark, filled with darkness, and school girls by twos in their
black skirts marched toward the convent. And wagons, sledges, drays, the horses
shuddering, the air drowned in leaden green, the dung stained ice, trails
ashes. Moses and his brothers put on their caps and prayed together.
“Ma tovu ohaleha Yaakov…”
“How goodly are thy tents, O Israel.”
Napoleon Street, rotten, toylike,
crazy and filthy, riddled, flogged with harsh weather—the bootlegger’s boys
reciting ancient prayers. To this Moses’ heart was attached with great power .
Here was a wider range of human feelings than he had ever again been able to
find. The children of the race, by a never failing miracle, open their eyes on
one strange world after another, age after age, and uttered the same prayer in
each, eagerly loving what they found. What was wrong with Napoleon Street?
thought Herzog. All he ever wanted was there. His mother did the wash, and
mourned. His father was desperate and frightened, but obstinately fighting. His
brother Shura with startling, disingenuous eyes, was plotting to master the
world, to become a millionaire. His brother Willie struggled with asthmatic
fits. Trying to breathe he gripped the table and rose on his toes like a cock
about to crow. His sister Helen had long white gloves which she washed in thick
suds. She wore them to her lessons at the conservatory, carrying a leather
music role. Her diploma hung in a frame….His soft prim sister who played the
piano
…Oh, the music! thought Herzog. He
fought the insidious blight of nostalgia… Helen played. She wore a middy and a
pleated skirt, and her pointed shoes cramped down on the pedals, a proper, vain
girl. She frowned while she played—her father’s crease appeared between her
eyes. Frowning as though she performed a dangerous action. The music rang into
the street.
Aunt Zipporah was critical of this
music business. Helen was not a genuine musician. She played to move the
family. Perhaps to attract a husband. What Aunt
Zipporah opposed was Mama’s ambition for her children, because she
wanted them to be lawyers, gentlemen, rabbis, or performers. All branches
of the family had the cast madness of yichus. No life so barren and
subordinate that it didn’t have imaginary dignities, honors to come, freedom to
advance.
Yichus means, basically, to descend from good stock.
Moses Herzog faults himself, “To haunt the past like this – to love
the dead!” Still, his mind travels back to 1923, with Aunt Zipporah in the
kitchen, asking her father, what happened to Mikhail?
“We don’t know,” said Papa. “Who can imagine what a black year
they’re making back home. (It was always in
der heim, Herzog remind himself.) “A mob broke into his house.
Cut open everything, looking for valuta. Afterwards, he caught typhus,
or God knows what.”
Aunt Zipporah tells Father Herzog, he’s not cut out to be a
bootlegger. These other men, they are. “They don’t have skins, teeth, fingers
like you but hides come fangs, claws.” Moses remembers that his mother seemed
to agree. “Can you even shoot a man?” his aunt wonders. “Could you even hit a
man on the head? Come. Think it over.”
He remembers his mother as a woman of the Old World. Her “mind
was archaic, filled with old legends, with angels and demons.”
His father,
…wanted to run bootleg whiskey to the
border, and get into the big time. He and Voplonsky borrowed from moneylenders,
and loaded a truck with cases. But they never reach Rouses Point. They were
hijacked, beaten up, and left in a ditch. Father Herzog took the worst beating
because he resisted. The hijackers tore his clothes, knocked out one of his
teeth, and trampled him.
He and Voplonsky the blacksmith
returned to Montreal on foot. He stopped at Voplonsky’s shop to clean up, but
there was not much he could do about his swollen bloody eye. He had a gap in
his teeth. His coat was torn and his shirt and undergarment were blood-stained.
That was how we entered the dark
kitchen on Napoleon Street. We were all there.
It was gloomy March, and anyway the lights seldom reached that room. It
was like a cavern. We were like cave dwellers. “Sarah!” he said. “Children!” He
showed his cut face. He spread his arms so we could see his taters, and the
white of his body under them. Then he turned his pockets inside out – empty. As
he did this, he began to cry, and the children standing about him all cried. It
was more than I could bear that anyone should lay violent hands on him – a father,
a sacred being, a king. Yes, he was a king to us. My heart was suffocated by
this horror. I thought I would die of it. Whom did I ever love as I loved them?
Moses remembers his mother remonstrating with his father. He
must give up his plan of being a bootlegger.
He began to tell the story of his
life, from childhood to this day. He wept as he told it. Put out at four years
old to study, away from the home. Eaten by lice. Half-starved in the Yeshiva as
a boy. He shaved, became a modern European. He worked in Kremenchug for his
aunt as a young man. He had a fool’s paradise in Petersburg for ten years, on
forged papers. Then he sat in prison with common criminals. Escaped to America.
Starved. Cleaned stables. Begged. Lived in fear. A baal-chov—always a
debtor. Shadowed by the police. Taking in drunken borders. His wife a servant.
And this was what he brought home to his children. This was what he could show
them – his rags, his bruises.
“So,” the character Moses Herzog explains, “we had a great
schooling in grief.”
*
Immigration
Act sets quotas.
(1924)
Alarmed by a continued wave of immigrants reaching
our shores, Congress acts to pass, and President Calvin Coolidge to sign, a new
Immigration Act. This act sets “quotas” for all countries, and limits immigration,
generally.
Under
the new system, some countries are allowed only a few slots for immigrants to
this country. Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and Spain, for example, may send 100
each. Germany will have nearly 26,000, Italy, only 3,854.
Turkey
will be allowed a mere 226 slots, Spain 252, but the United Kingdom will have
the largest share: almost 66,000.
Ireland
will score nearly 29,000 chances.
The
entire continent of Africa will have 1,200 slots, and the entire continent of
Asia will be limited to 1,300. These quotas will remain almost unchanged for
the next forty years.
Quota laws dramatically reduced immigration in the 1920s.
“The
need of restriction is manifest,” The New York Timesdeclared
in an editorial, for “American institutions are menaced” by “swarms of
aliens.”
Edward
A. Ross warned against allowing Slavic immigrants to flood the country,
insisting, they “are immune to certain kinds of dirt. They can stand
what would kill a white man.”
The president of MIT said newcomers from eastern and southern
Europe were “vast masses of filth” who were “living like swine.”
The Washington Post editorialized that 90 percent of Italians
coming to the United States were “the degenerate spawn” of “Asiatic hordes.”
A Boston philanthropist, Joseph Lee, warned that restrictions
were needed, lest Europe be “drained of Jews – to its benefit no doubt but not
to ours.”
The rich widow, Mary Harriman, put her wealth behind efforts
to stop “the decay of the American race.” Another second advocate of stricter
limits, added, “There can be no doubt that recent history has shown a movement
of inferior peoples or inferior representatives of peoples to this country.”
Still a third said, “The inrush of lower races is threatening the very blood of
our country.” During debate in Congress, one lawmaker put it bluntly, claiming
that action was demanded in the face of “the necessity for purifying and
keeping pure the blood of America.” The Saturday Evening Post
summed it up for readers. “Race character is as fixed a fact as race color,”
the Post declared. “Thirty years ago,” the
magazine insisted in another article, “science had not perhaps
sufficiently advanced to make us fully aware” of the danger of open
immigration. Now it had.
Then you had the work of Madison Grant, summarized by The
New York Times, like so:
“Whether we like to admit it or
not,” Grant wrote, “the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run,
gives us a race reverting” to the “lower type.” Lower than Nordics were the
questionable “Alpines.” Lower than the “Alpines” were the woeful “Mediterraneans.”
And, he concluded: “the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew
is a Jew.”
*
“Distinctly undesirable members of our
population.”
(1924)
Robert DeC. Ward, writing
in Scientific Monthly, describes the danger posed by undesirable
immigrants.
Close students of the eugenical aspects of immigration have for
many years felt that too large a proportion of incoming aliens have been of low
vitality and poor physique – distinctly undesirable members of our population
yet not specifically excludable under existing statutes. The matter has more
than once been brought to the attention of Congress, but without result.
There have been admitted not hundreds but thousands of aliens who
were diseased; who were mentally and physically far below par; who had criminal
records and tendencies; who could not earn their own living; who were in every
way hopelessly undesirable and impossible material for American citizenship.
The committee in Congress,
focused on eugenics, noted:
Experts have estimated that had mental tests been in operation and
had the “inferior” and “very inferior” immigrants been refused admission to the
United States, over 6,000,000 aliens now living in this country, most of them
potential fathers and mothers of future Americans, would never have been
admitted. It surely is high time for the American people to put a stop to such
a degradation of American citizenship and such a wrecking of the future
American race.
Dr. William J. Mayo also
spoke in favor of limits on immigration:
Eugenics as applied to man is still in its infancy. During the
World War, tests showed that 18 per cent. of the young men drafted were not
developed beyond the mental age of eleven years. Since our form of government
must always be controlled by men of average intelligence, the general average
of intelligence must be raised if the standards of government are to be raised.
He says also:
The alien is a public health problem, just as he is a social
problem, and the public hospital sees the dark side of this picture. In the
American of several generations, the doctrine of moral obligation has become
thoroughly ingrained. In southern Europe the Oriental point of view more or
less prevails that no obligation which is not enforceable exists. The laxity of
the conduct of the law in the United States, the slowness of justice, and the
extraordinary latitude allowed the offender against the community, give the
criminal more than a sporting chance to escape punishment and have exposed the
administrators of law to the contempt of the class of offenders brought to us in
recent years by immigration. And these are the people with whom our public
hospitals are overcrowded. Our courts have been filled with alien lawbreakers
until the people have arisen in righteous indignation and reduced the number of
immigrants to 3 per cent. of the number already here from each country. If the
percentage system of immigration in effect in 1890 could be reverted to, as has
been advised, a much more desirable class of citizens would be brought from the
countries that gave birth to the United States and its concept of government.
(155/95-97; also found online)
So,
quotas became the rule. Jews in Poland and Russian – victims of unrelenting
abuse – were now trapped. In 1923, 220,000 Italians had come to the United
States. The quota limit was less than 2% of that figure.
Waves
of Greek and Armenia, and Hungarian immigrants were now cut off, and those
countries now sent trickles.
NOTE TO TEACHERS: I don’t
know what kind of furor you might stir up by focusing on this issue – and I
understand that sensible limits on immigration are valid. But the idea that
blood can be poisoned by immigrants, that we can’t trust all Mexicans, that
kind of thinking, appalls this blogger.
I think people of Irish
background (like me), of Italian, Greek, Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Armenia,
German, and many others might be shocked to learn that there was a time when
they, too were seen as threats to the fabric of America.
*
Eight
pictures for 25¢.
(1925)
This item appeared in Time
magazine, in the Science section, under the title “Photomaton.”
“The
average inventor has a hard life and it is a rare instance for him to reap the
rewards of his invention as I have done.” So said one Anatol Josepho of New
York last week, a few moments after pocketing a slip of paper upon which were
written the idyllic figures $1,000,000. His invention was a quarter in
the slot machine. Out of it comes, not gum or hairpins, but a strip of eight
sepia photographs, each 2 in. by 1 ½ in., showing the quarter-dropper in
whatever eight poses it has pleased him to strike. The pictures are photographs
direct upon sensitized paper. To make a strip of eight pictures requires only
eight minutes.
Josepho was a Jewish immigrant from
Russia, and patented his invention in 1925, selling it to a syndicate of
investors smart enough to “know a real gold brick” when they saw one.
Josepho, in photos at right; unknown mother and child, left.
Like an artist’s “self-portrait” in
earlier times, and the “selfies” of today, human beings seem to have a need to
see what they look like.
*
“A
fatal emasculation.”
(1925)
Writing in 1925, the historian Benjamin
Andrews, warned that hordes of newcomers were a threat to what it meant to be
“American.”
“So enormous was the influx of
foreigners that we were threatened with a fatal emasculation of our national
character,” he wrote. (4/372)
*
Speaking German till age five.
(1925)
A newsreel film exists.
It captures the moment Babe Ruth returns from the illness dubbed the “bellyache
heard ‘round the world.’” Lou Gehrig also pinch hits, the start of a streak of
2,130 games.
At that point Gehrig is an
unproven major leaguer. He is batting .174, with 0 homeruns in 11 games; and he
has played sparingly his first two seasons. He flies out in the eighth; but the
next day he replaces Wally Pipp at first base and doesn’t miss a game until May
1, 1939. (NYT; “Capturing a Piece of
Yankee History,” 3/26/2014)
Lou’s parents were German
immigrants, and he had not learned to speak English until he was five.
*
“Only
one export and that is its people.”.
(1926)
“Most countries send out oil or iron, steel or
gold, or some other crop,” John F. Kennedy once remarked, “but Ireland has had
only one export and that is its people.”
A census in 1841 gives the population of that
island as 8.2 million; but in the next century almost that many will emigrate
from a land not much larger than Maine. Unlike many groups, Irish immigrants
were often young women, traveling alone. (Annie Moore, a teen traveling from
County Cork, was the first immigrant ever processed at Ellis Island.)
By 1910, as the economist Emily Balch
then explained, new Irish immigrants were met, in cities like New York and
Boston, by all kinds of “Irish policemen,
Irish politicians, Irish bureaucrats, Irish saloonkeepers, Irish contractors
and Irish teachers.” So they “could be excused for thinking that ‘Irish’
equaled ‘American.’”
In 1926, Mrs. Thomas McKessy, from Limerick,
arrived with her ten children.
(1927)
__________
“The days of the Anglo-Saxon as the ruling class of the Republic
are numbered.”
Hendrik
Van Loon
__________
Louis Bromfield wins the Pulitzer Prize for his
novel, Early Autumn. The treatment of immigrants in the book is telling.
The story is set in “The Town,” somewhere in Ohio.
The Town is the site of a booming steel
industry, located in the Flats. There immigrants labor long and hard. The
native-born Ohio people refer to them as “Dagoes,” and “Hunkies,” and there’s
one big Ukrainian, Stepan Krylenko, who looms large. Judge Weissman is a power
in politics in the town, “a fat perspiring Oriental and the son of an immigrant
Viennese Jew.”
At one point, as Weissman leaves The Hill, where the rich people dwell, he
passes a boy in his carriage who shouts in Russian,
“‘Jew! Dirty Jew!’
Judge Weissman regarded the boy with his pop eyes, wiped his mahogany face and
muttered to his companion, Lawyer Briggs, ‘These foreigners are getting too
free in their manners. … The Harrisons will have trouble at the Mills one of
these days. … There ought to be a law against letting them into the country.’”
*
“We
knew we were Mexican.”
(1927)
Fidel Ybarra’ parents brought him from
Mexico to Texas in 1927, when he was a year old. His Mexican family moved to
Kansas a few years later, where he grew up. His father worked for the railroad,
as Fidel did later.
Fidel married; he and his wife had
seven children, who grew up knowing “only the rudiments of the Spanish
language.”
He tells his story to Least Heat-Moon,
in PrairyErth (pp. 230-236):
Those
houses at Gladstone were made of one-by-twelves, and the gaps between the boards
were covered with thin wood strips. Tarpaper over the roof. No insulation
except my mother’s wallpaper. We had two rooms, about fourteen by twenty. That
was the whole house. After the kids come along there was twelve of us in there.
No electricity, no running water. There was six other shanties, some just one
room, and all we had was one outhouse with two doors, a men’s and a women’s,
and just one seat in them: thirty people and two seats. We had a pump for
water. But Santa Fe [the railroad] didn’t charge us nothing to live there, and
in the winter the company sent in a car of old track ties and pieces of depots
and boxcars, and we’d unloaded and chop the wood up for our stove, but the
place was still cold.
His wife calls in from the next room,
“Oh yeahhh. If we went to Emporia to visit overnight, when we came home
everything was frozen.”
Fidel remembers refrigerator cars
coming through on the railroad. In the summer the trains would stop and throw
off “the old ice on the siding, we broke it up and put it in our icebox. And
one day thirty-six reefers of potatoes derailed in Gladstone.”
Did he like living in those houses, the
author asked?
“I didn’t mind. A lot of farmers around
us didn’t have no plumbing neither,” Fidel says.
Heat-Moon points out that those white
farmers had more than two rooms.
Fidel responds,
When my
kids complain, I tell them, “You should have lived when I lived back then.”
After the war we still just had kerosene lanterns, so I went to a company boss
and told him if the houses were fit to live in they were fit to have
electricity, and after a while we got it. And in 1950 I went and asked for
propane stoves, and later we got them too. If I’d thought about it, I should
have got Santa Fe to put an electric pump in the well.
He adds
later, “We knew we were Mexican but we didn’t call ourselves poor
because we had jobs.
What
did he mean, “You knew you were Mexicans?” the author asked.
In the
Cottonwood or Emporia, Topeka too, we couldn’t get served in restaurants, but
in some places you could take food out around to the back to the kitchen. We
couldn’t get no haircuts neither. Then one day when I was in high school in
Cottonwood, I guess in 1941, I was walking down the street past the old bank
and the barber come out of the basement where his shop was, Jim Venard was his
name, and he starts talking to me, he says, “Who gives you your haircuts young
man?” And I said, “My dad—nobody here will cut it,” and he says, “You come to
me. I’ll cut it. Bring anybody else.” That was a breakthrough. During the war
things changed, especially afterwards: guys figured if they were good enough to
fight for the country, they were good enough to eat in a cafe instead of in the
alley. But we never had it as bad as the colored people. Whites let us in
earlier.
I
couldn’t enlist because of my blind eye, so I worked on the track then: seven
days a week, ten hours a day, sixty cents an hour.
*
Unwelcome
at work.
(1928)
Stanford
University admitted that it was almost impossible to place Chinese or Japanese
graduates in professional jobs. “Many firms have general regulations against
hiring them; others object to them on the grounds that the other men
employed by the firms do not care to work with them.”
(Ironically,
Japanese immigrants looked down on Korean immigrants.)
*
Work
as a domestic servant.
(1930)
Mary Anne MacLeod, 18, emigrates
to this country from
Scotland, planning to find work as a domestic servant. Her older sister,
Catherine, had already left the Isle of Lewis, first for Canada, and then New
York City. On a visit home she convinces Mary Anne to come with her to America.
Mary Anne returned to Scotland briefly, in
1934, but by then she had met her future husband, and so she determined to make
a life in the U.S.
Two years later, she married Fred Trump, the father
of the future 45th and 47th president of the United States.
Mother of a future president.
*
“Rigid
policy of sterilization.”
(1932)
Margaret Sanger is born on September 14, 1879.
Her parents are Irish immigrants, and she will be one of eleven children. Her
mother will have seven more pregnancies that end in miscarriages.
Margaret Sanger offers up her
own theories on immigration, based on eugenics:
In 1932, Sanger gave a speech titled, disturbingly, “My Way to Peace,”
in which she called for a “stern, rigid policy of sterilization”; the
restriction of immigration to keep out the “feeble-minded, idiots, morons,
insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes”; and the
lifelong sequestration of “illiterates, paupers,
unemployables . . . [and] dope fiends” to farmlands and
homesteads where they’d be taught to work.
*
“Their only fault to lay in there
being foreigners.”
(1930s)
Mario Puzo was born in 1920, to Italian immigrant parents, and
grew up in New York City’s “Hell’s Kitchen” neighborhood. Like many
second-generation members of immigrant families, he often failed to appreciate
the obstacles his parents and other new arrivals had faced.
“My father and mother were illiterate, as were their parents
before them. But practicing my art I tried to view the adults with a more
charitable eye and so came to the conclusion that their only fault to lay in
there being foreigners; I was an American.” 130/35
As a child I had the usual dreams. I wanted to be handsome,
specifically as cowboy stars in movies were handsome. I wanted to be a killer
hero in a world-wide war. Or if no wars came along (our teachers told us another
was impossible), I wanted at the very least to be a footloose adventure. 130/36
My father supported his wife and seven children by working as a
track man laborer for the New York Central Railroad. My oldest brother worked
for the railroad as a brake man, another brother was a railroad shipping clerk
in the freight office. Eventually I spent some of the worst months of my life
as the railroad’s worst messenger boy.
My oldest sister was just as unhappy as a dressmaker in the
garment industry. She wanted to be a school teacher. 130/38
I never came home to an empty house; there was always the smell
of supper cooking. My mother was always there to greet me, sometimes with a
policeman’s club in her hand (nobody ever knew how she acquired it). But she
was always there, or her authorized deputy, my older sister, who preferred
throwing empty milk bottles at the heads of her little brothers when they got
bad marks on their report cards. During the Great Depression of the 1930s,
though we were the poorest of the poor, I never remember not dining well.
130/39
At sixteen, his oldest brother had managed to save up enough
money to buy an old tin lizzie Ford:
One day my mother asked him to drive
her to the market on Ninth Avenune and Fortieth Street, no more than a five-minute
trip. My brother had other plans and claimed he was going to work on a new
shift on the railroad. Work was an acceptable excuse even for funerals. But an
hour later when my mother came out of the door of the tenement she saw the tin lizzie
loaded with three pretty neighborhood girls, my Don Juan brother about to drive
them off. Unfortunately there was a cobblestone lying loose in the gutter. My
mother dropped her black leather shopping bag and picked up the stone with both
hands. As we all watched in horror, she brought the boulder down on the nearest
fender of the tin lizzie, demolishing it. Then she picked up her bag and
marched off to Ninth Avenue to do her shopping. To this day, forty years later,
my brother’s voice still has a surprised horror and shock when he tells the
story. He still doesn’t understand how she could have done it. 130/39
Mario was sent off summers, by the Fresh Air Fund, to live in
New Hampshire, and taste a country life:
As a child I knew only the stone city. I had no conception of
what the countryside could be. When I got to New Hampshire, when I smelled
grass and flowers and trees, when I ran barefoot along the dirt country roads,
when I drove the cows home from pasture, when I darted through fields of corn
and waded through clear brooks, when I gathered warm brown speckled eggs in the
henhouse, when I drove a hay wagon drawn by two great horses – when I did all these things – I nearly went crazy
with the joy of it. It was quite simply a fairy tail come true.
The family that took me in, a middle-aged man and woman,
childless, were Baptists and observed Sunday so religiously that even checker
playing was not allowed on the Lord’s day of rest. We went to church on Sunday
for a good three hours, counting Bible class, then again at night. On Thursday
evenings he went to prayer meetings. My guardians, out of religious scruple,
had never seen a movie. They disapproved of dancing, they were no political
reactionaries; they were everything that I came later to fight against. 130/42
I believed then, as a child, that the State of New Hampshire had
some sort of gates at which all thieves and bad guys were screened out. I
believed this, I think, because the house was left unlocked when we went to
church on Sundays and Thursday nights. I believed it because I never heard
anyone curse or quarrel with raised voices. I believed it because it was
beautiful to believe. 130/43
His mother saw no profit in reading, but allowed it of her
children:
My direct ancestors for a thousand years have most probably been
illiterate. Italy, the golden land, so loving to vacationing Englishmen, so
majestic in language and cultural treasures (they call it, I think, the cradle
of civilization), has never cared for its poor people. My father and mother
were both illiterates. Both grew up on rocky, hilly farms in the countryside
adjoining Naples. My mother remembers never being able to taste the ham from
the pig they slaughtered every year. It brought too high a price in the marketplace
and cash was needed. My mother was also told the family could not afford the
traditional family gifts of linens when she married and it was this that
decided her to emigrate to America to marry her first husband, a man she barely
knew. When he died in a tragic work accident on the docks, she married my
father, who assumed responsibility for a widow and her four children perhaps
out of ignorance, perhaps out of compassion, perhaps out of love. Nobody ever
knew. He was a mystery, a Southern Italian with blue eyes who departed from the
family scene three children later when I was twelve. But he cursed Italy even
more than my mother did. Then again, he wasn’t too pleased with America either.
Here in America, the children of the immigrants, “achieved some
economic dignity and freedom. You didn’t get it for nothing, you had to pay a
price in tears, and suffering, but why not?” 130/45-46
The older folks all thought back fondly to their days in Italy.
Puzo writes, “No, really, we are all happier now. It is a better life. And
after all, as my mother always said, ‘Never mind about being happy. Be glad you’re
alive.’”
Later, he came to see their strength – these first off the boat:
“How did they ever have the balls to get married, have kids, go out to earn a
living in a strange land, with no skills, not even knowing the language?”
He realized, later, these adventurers in a new land were, “Heroes.
Heroes all around me. I never saw them.”
But how could I? They wore lumpy work clothes and handlebar
mustaches, they blew their noses on their fingers and they were so short that
their high school children towered over them. They spoke a laughable broken
English and the furthest limit to the horizon was their daily bread. Brave men,
brave women, they fought to live their lives without dreams. Bent on survival
they narrowed their lives to the thinnest line of existence.
It is no wonder that in my youth I found them contemptible. And
yet they had left Italy and sailed the ocean to come to a new land and leave
their sweated bones in America. Illiterate Colombos, they dared to seek the
promised land. And so they, too, dreamed a dream. 130/47-48
*
“That arctic mask of the human being.”
(1933-1945)
Between 1933 and 1945 European Jews
fleeing Hitler and the Nazi regime turned to the United States. Not all gained
admittance; but we did take in 12 Nobel Prize winners, including Albert
Einstein, and other refugees who helped us win the race to develop an atomic
bomb.
The New Yorker has a
good story (March 9, 2020) about Jews and others who fled to America, and congregated in Hollywood.
On February 11, 1933, two weeks after Hitler
became Chancellor, Thomas Mann travelled to Amsterdam to deliver a talk titled
“The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner.” A onetime conservative who had
embraced liberal-democratic values in the early nineteen-twenties, Mann was
attempting to wrest his favorite composer from Nazi appropriation. He did not
set foot in Germany again until 1949…
High-placed friends conspired to keep these
celebrity refugees safe. Eleanor Roosevelt, an avid reader of Feuchtwanger’s
books, became alarmed when she saw a photograph of the author in a French camp.
A New York-based organization called the Emergency Rescue Committee dispatched
the journalist Varian Fry to France to facilitate the extraction of writers and
other artists, often by extralegal means. Such measures were required because
American immigration laws limited European nationals to strict quotas. If the
quotas had been relaxed, many more thousands of Jews could have escaped. Fry,
the first American to be honored at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in
Jerusalem, ignored his narrow remit and worked heroically to help as many
people as possible, including those without name recognition.
Anna Seghers, A German-Jewish refugee
spent the war in Mexico City. In her novel Transit, published in 1944,
features a main character who escapes after being mistaken for a noted writer
who has committed suicide.
Another’s path to freedom depends on transporting
two dogs that belong to a couple from Boston. All around Marseille are “the
remnants of crushed armies, escaped slaves, human hordes who had been chased
from all the countries of the earth, and having at last reached the sea,
boarded ships in order to discover new lands from which they would again be
driven; forever running from one death to another.”
The New
Yorker explains:
All five novelists had been alert to political
danger in their work of the nineteen-twenties and early thirties.
Feuchtwanger’s breakthrough novel, “Jew Süss,” contains harrowing evocations of
anti-Jewish violence in eighteenth-century Germany; his “Success,” set in
Munich in the early twenties, caricatures Hitler as a pompous thug. In Döblin’s
“Berlin Alexanderplatz,” the ex-convict Franz Biberkopf supports himself, in
part, by selling the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter. Thomas
Mann’s novella “Mario and the Magician” is a parable of Fascist manipulation.
Heinrich Mann had been more farsighted than any of them, as Thomas acknowledged
in his birthday speech at Viertel’s. Heinrich’s “Der Untertan,” or “The
Underling,” written before the First World War but not published until 1918, is
the definitive portrait of German nationalism curdling into chauvinism and
anti-Semitism.
According
to The New Yorker, the “most haunting” of these novels is Werfel’s The
Forty Days of Musa Dagh, published in 1933. The topic is the heroic
struggle against Armenia genocide.
At one point, the German protestant missionary
Johannes Lepsius, based on a real-life figure, encounters Enver Pasha, one of
the chief agents of the genocide: “What Herr Lepsius perceived was that arctic
mask of the human being who ‘has overcome all sentimentality’—the mask of a
human mind which has got beyond guilt and all its qualms.”
The warnings may sound fresh even in
2020.
In 1938, Mann stated, “Even America feels today that
democracy is not an assured possession, that it has enemies, that it is
threatened from within and from without, that it has once more become a
problem.” At such moments, he said, the division between the political and the
nonpolitical disappears. Politics is “no longer a game, played according to
certain, generally acknowledged rules. . . . It’s a matter of
ultimate values.” Mann also challenged the xenophobia of America’s strict
immigration laws: “It is not human, not democratic, and it means to show a
moral Achilles’ heel to the fascist enemies of mankind if one clings with
bureaucratic coldness to these laws.”
Mann would later spread the blame for
the Holocaust widely. “In a 1945
speech titled ‘The Camps,’ he said, ‘Every German – everyone who speaks German,
writes German, has lived as a German – is affected by this shameful exposure.
It is not a small clique of criminals who are involved.’”
“A duck and a chicken regarding each other without
understanding.”
(1938)
Jade Snow Wong, “A Chinese Evolution,” b. 1922; grew up in San
Francisco, and published Fifth Chinese Daughter, her autobiography.
Her father had come to America in 1903, but without permission
from his mother. “Go! Go! You will have the life to go, but not the life to
return!” she told him angrily. 130/107
My father’s motherland was in the grip of military and political
upheaval. My father wrote to his family, “In America, I have learned how
shamefully women in China have been treated. I will bleach the disgrace of my
ancestors by bringing my wife and two daughters to San Francisco, where my wife
can work without disgrace, and my daughters shall have the opportunity of
education.” He was beginning his own domestic revolution. For fifty-five years,
my father was to remain in San Francisco. He retained a copy of every letter he
wrote to China.
Her father liked to be called “Daddy,” in English:
To support the family in America, Daddy tried various
occupations – candy making, the ministry to which he was later ordained – but finally
settled upon manufacturing men’s and children’s denim garments. He leased
sewing equipment, installed machines in a basement where rent was cheapest, and
there he and his family lived and worked. There was no thought that dim and
airless quarters were terrible conditions for living and working, or that child
labor was unhealthful. The only goal was for all in the family to work, to
save, and to become educated. It was possible, so it would be done. 130/109
I observed from birth that living and working were inseparable.
My mother was short, sturdy, young looking, and took pride in her appearance.
She was at her machine the minute housework was done, and she was the hardest
working seamstress, seldom pausing, working after I went to bed. The hum of
sewing machines continued day and night, seven days a week. She knew that to
have more than the four necessities, she must work and save. We knew that to
overcome poverty, there were only two methods: working and education. It was
our personal responsibility. 130/110
Her oldest brother was born in America and named Lincoln Wong.
“By day, I attended American public school near our home. From 5:00
PM to 8:00 PM on five weekdays and from 9:00 AM to 12 noon on Saturdays, I attended
the Chinese school.” 130/111
Yet there was little reason for
unhappiness. I was never hungry. Though we had no milk, there was all the rice
we wanted. We had hot and cold running water – a rarity in Chinatown, as well
as our own bathtub. Others in the community used the YWCA or YMCA facilities,
where for twenty-five cents, a family could draw six baths. Our sheets were
pieced from dish towels, but we had sheets. 130/113
One day after junior high school
classes (I was one of only two Chinese faces there), a tormentor chased me,
taunting me with “Chinky, chinky, Chinaman…” and tacked on some insults.
Suddenly, I wondered if by my difference, I was inferior. This question had to
be resolved again and again later: when I looked for my first job, when I
looked for an apartment, when I met with unexplained rejection. It was a
problem I felt that I could not discuss with my parents. 130/120
From infancy to my sixteenth year, I was reared according to nineteenth
century ideals of Chinese womanhood. I was never left alone, though it was not
unusual for me to feel lonely, while surrounded by a family of seven others,
and often by ten (including bachelor cousins) at meals 130/107
As long as I could remember, I had
been told that a female followed three men during her lifetime: as a girl, her
father; as a wife, her husband; as an old woman, her son.
My indignation mounted against that tradition and I decided that
my past could not determine my future. 130/122
At the age of seventy plus, after
years of attending night classes in citizenship, he became naturalized. He
embraced this status wholeheartedly. One day when we were discussing plans for
his birthday celebration, which was usually observed the tenth day of the fifth
lunar month by the Chinese calendar, he announced, “Now that I have become a
United States citizen, I’m going to change my birthday. Henceforth, it will be
on the Fourth of July.” 130/130
Her own children would later chafe at the
old ways:
When they ask why they must attend
Chinese school, I say firmly, “This is our standard. If you lived in another
home, you could do as they do.” Our children chatter among themselves in
English, but they can understand and speak Chinese when desired. It is a
necessity when with their grandmothers. Even this simple ability contrasts with
some children of Chinese ancestry. As my mother exclaimed in dismay when such a
grandchild visited her, “we were as a duck and a chicken regarding each other
without understanding.” 130/117
*
Teaching
Washoe to communicate.
(1939)
In
1939, when she was a little girl, Trixie Tugendhat’s father, an industrialist,
rushed them out of Austria, shortly before the Germans invaded Poland. The
family went first to Brazil, then on to the United States. She later married
Allen Gardner, and they formed the team that taught Washoe, the chimp, to
use sign language.
Roger
Fouts tells this amusing story. Washoe was like a spoiled child, well aware of
her special status:
Once I told Trixie that Washoe
had tried to bite me, and Trixie gave Washoe a rare scolding. That very night
at dinner, Trixie was cooking at the stove. Washoe was in her high chair, at
the head of the table, acting like a little angel. I didn’t believe this act
for a minute, so I was sitting as far from her as I could get.
COME ROGER, Washoe signed. PLEASE COME.
I shook my head no. There was no way I was getting near her.
PLEASE PLASE COME ROGER, she tried
again. I signed an emphatic NO. At that moment Trixie turned around and saw
Washoe making these very sweet and perfect signs.
ROGER, Trixie implored me, WASHOE WANTS
YOU! I was trapped.
I began edging around the table, ever
so slowly. Trixie went back to her cooking. I kept sliding over one inch at a
time. Finally, Washoe couldn’t contain herself any longer. She lunged out of
her high chair and grabbed me around the neck with both hands. I yanked
backward with all my might and broke loose.
“Quite
often,” Fouts wrote, “I had to remind myself this little chimpanzee girl was
not a human being. But after a while I realized this distinction had become
meaningless to me.”
*
That
most American of monuments.
(1941)
Work
on Mt. Rushmore is completed in October 1941, at a final cost of $990,000. The
sculptor in charge is Gutzon Borglum, son of Danish immigrants. About
360 men worked on the carving, starting in 1927.
“Those were the Depression years,” says Berg, 73, a retired
metalsmith, who lives in Yuba City, California, about 45 miles North of
Sacramento. Berg worked on Rushmore from August 1936 through 1940. He was 17
and still in high school when he was hired for 55 cents an hour as a “call
boy.” He sat on the heads of the faces and relayed messages from the drillers
hanging in bosun chairs on the mountain below to the winch operator above who
moved the drillers up and down.
…Lack of funds and weather
problems spread 6 ½ years of work over 14 years. Problems with rock
conditions—some rock could not be carved—forced Borglum to change his model of
the presidents nine times. Each time an alteration was made, the 5-foot tall
models used in the studio to block out the figures on the mountain (1 inch on
the studio models represented 1 foot in the mountain) had to be recomposed.
“One my first jobs was to go down on the Washington head and
turn it a little,” says Bill Tallman, 85, who worked on Mount Rushmore from
1929 until 1935 and who, some say, was the project supervisor longer than
anyone except Lincoln Borglum, the sculptor’s son.
Orville
Worman remembers being hired because he was a good baseball player, and could
play shortstop. “I was drilling on road construction,” he says now, “and Mr.
Borglum and his son, Lincoln, wanted a ball team. We had 12 men on the ball
club, and won second place in the state in 1939.” (Cincinnati Enquirer,
4/28/1991.)
*
“To
make our own place in this country.”
(1942)
With
prejudice inflamed against all Japanese and Japanese Americans living in this
country, after Pearl Harbor was bombed, Fred Tayama had written in October 1942,
in Harper’s Magazine:
My parents came over
here many years ago. They desired quite earnestly to adapt themselves to the
ways and customs and life in this country. They were poor and had to work very
hard. They were anxious that we attend American schools, that we children who
were born here and were citizens should have every opportunity to make our own
place in this country. Nevertheless, we suffered somewhat in that our parents
could not fully bridge the gap, largely because of language, and were not able
to take effective part in the American activities like the Parent-Teacher
Association and so on. We Nisei feel that we have bridged that gap. My little
girl is ten years old. She plays the violin in the school orchestra and works
in the school library. We are members of the Parent-Teacher Association and
freely and frequently consult with our daughter’s teacher. As far as we are
able to tell, she mingles with her Caucasian schoolmates on terms of absolute
equality. She can understand a very little bit of Japanese which she has picked
up from her grandmother, but cannot and will not speak the language at all. We
value her association with her teacher and playmates above everything else, and
those are the things which we are being asked to give up by this evacuation
program. 500/159-160
*
“The
Japs live like rats.”
(1942)
After
Pearl Harbor was bombed suspicion turned to all Japanese and Japanese Americans
living in the United States. Sabotage was feared. Even the absence of
sabotage proved how “sneaky” these people were. “It is a sign,” Walter
Lippmann wrote, “that the blow is well organized and that it is held back until
it can be struck with maximum effect.”
Gov.
Chase Clark of Idaho made his feelings clear when he said, “The Japs live like
rats, breed like rats and act like rats. We don’t want them buying or leasing
land or becoming permanently located in our state.”
*
(1943)
The
Zoot Suit Riots convulse Los Angeles, as U.S. servicemen launch attacks on
young Hispanic men. (I need to check this out more.)
*
“A Puerto Rican Pilgrimage.”
(1940s)
Jack Agueros was born in Harlem in 1934, and his earliest
memories of the city were all good. His father Joaquin had first left Puerto
Rico, stowing away on a steamer in 1920. But what his son would call his “toe
to toe aloneness” proved, at first, too much. “On the fourth day, Joaquin
Agueros went back to San Juan.” 130/86
His father soon tried life on the mainland a second time, and
this time he remained, always proud of what he could do to make life better.
His son remembers, growing up:
We never used wallpaper or rugs. Our floors were covered with
linoleum in every room. My father painted the apartment every year before
Christmas, and in addition, he did all the maintenance, doing his own
plastering and plumbing. No sooner would we move into an apartment than my
father would repair holes or cracks, and if there were bulges in the plaster, he
would break them open and redo the area – sometimes the whole wall. He would
immediately modify the bathrooms to add a shower with separate valves, and
usually as a routine matter, he cleaned out all the elbow traps, and changed
all the washers on faucets. This was true of the other families in the
buildings where I lived. Not a December came without a painting of the
apartment. 130/89
Like all good parents, Jack’s mother and father wanted him to be
successful – and to have a better life than they had had. The boy was clearly
bright and they hoped he would study law someday.
Lawyers, my mother would explain, had
to defend people whether they were guilty or not, while politicians, my father
would say, were all crooks. A doctor helped everybody, rich and poor, white and
black. If I became a doctor, I could study hay fever and find a cure for it, my
godmother would say. Also, I could take care of my parents when they were old.
I liked the idea of helping, and for nineteen years my sole ambition was to
study medicine. 130/91
For the first seven years of his life, what he most remembered
was this:
My mother kept an immaculate household. Bedspreads (chenille seemed
to be very in) and lace curtains, washed at home like everything else, were
hung up on huge racks with rows of tight nails. The racks were assembled in the
living room, and the moisture from the wet bedspreads would fill the apartment.
In a sense, that seems to be the lasting image of that period of my life. The
house was clean. The neighbors were clean. The streets, with few cars, were
clean. The buildings were clean and uncluttered with people on the stoops. The
park was clean. The visitors to my house were clean, and the relationships that
my family had with other Puerto Rican families, and the Italian families that
my father had met through baseball and my mother through the garment center,
were clean. Second Avenue was clean and most of the apartment windows had
awnings. There was always music, there seemed to be no rain, and snow did not
become slush. School was fun, we wrote essays about how grand America was, we
put up hunchback cats at Halloween, we believed Santa Claus visited everyone. I
believed everyone was Catholic. I grew up with dogs, nightingales, my god-mother’s
guitar, rocking chair, cat, guppies, my father’s occasional roosters, kept in a
cage on the fire escape. Laundry delivered and collected by horse and wagon,
fruits and vegetables sold the same way, windowsill refrigeration in winter,
iceman and box in summer. The police my friends, likewise the teachers.
In short, the first seven or so years of my life were not too
great a variation of Dick and Jane, the school book figures [of the 1950s] who,
if my memory serves me correctly, were blonde Anglo-Saxons, not immigrants, not
migrants like the Puerto Ricans, and not the children of either immigrants or
migrants. 130/92
When World War II ended, the situation changed. “What caused the
clean and open world to end? Many things. Into an ancient neighborhood came
pouring four to five times more people than it had been designed to hold. Many
who came running at the promise of jobs were jobless as the war ended.” 130/93
As he grew older, he also experienced the sting of prejudice for
the first time. He and his friends were happy in their own neighborhood.
But when we went over Cooney’s Hill
[into a wealthy, white neighborhood], we risked dirty looks, disapproving
looks, and questions from the police like, “What are you doing in this
neighborhood?” and “Why don’t you kids go back where you belong?”
Where we belonged! Man, I had written compositions about
America. Didn’t I belong on a Central Park tennis court, even if I didn’t know
how to play? Couldn’t I watch Dick play? Weren’t these policemen working for me
too? 130/94
One day, his mother began to paint a different picture about the
family’s earliest years in America.
My mother was telling it “like it was,” and I sat stupefied, for
I could not believe that what she said applied to the time I thought of as open
and clean. I had been existing in my life like a small plant in a bell jar, my
parents defining my awareness. There were things all around me I could not see.
“When you were born we had been living as boarders. It was hard
to find an apartment, even in Harlem. You saw signs that said ‘No Renting to Colored
or Spanish.’ That meant Puerto Ricans. We used to say, “This was supposed to be
such a great country?” But with the new baby we were determined not to be boarders
and we took an apartment on 111th Street. Soon after we moved, I lost my job
because my factory closed down. Your father was making seven or eight dollars a
week in a terrible job at a carpet factory. They used to clean rugs, and your
father’s hands were always in strong chemicals. You know how funny some of his fingernails
are? It was from that factory. He came home one night and he was looking at his
fingers, and he started saying that he didn’t come to this country to lose his
hands. He wanted to hold a bat and play baseball and he wanted to work – but he
didn’t want to lose his hands. So he quit the job and went to a restaurant for
less pay.” 130/98
Jack’s eyes were opened wider, the longer he lived in New York.
One day he listened to a family friend, Don Pedro, complain about the local politicians:
“Meanwhile they take a truck up to
the Bowery and pick up fifteen or twenty guys, tell them how to vote, and then
give ’em a pint of whiskey for their troubles. I’ve seen them buy a whole
family with a bag of groceries, and I’ve seen dead men vote, if you know what I
mean.” 130/101
And then there was the casual prejudice of some of educators he
met in school – who expected little from Puerto Ricans.
In school, Mr. Miller, goddam him to
hell forever, took a Puerto Rican boy named Luis and kept him under the teacher’s
desk during class periods. When Luis would moan, Miller would kick him. Between
periods, Miller walked Luis around the school, keeping him in a painful armlock.
Mr. Flax, the principal, laughed. And Diamond, the algebra teacher, either sent
us to play basketball or asked us to lay our heads on our desks while he
checked the stock market reports in the New York Times. To whom did you
complain about a teacher – a laughing principal? 130/102
In the end, he describes his parents, as they were at first, as
“gladiators without skills or language” when they came. They had gradually
risen “into America’s dream-cherished lower middle class, and then put it down
for [a return to] Puerto Rico after thirty plus years.”
What, Jack wondered, was his place in the world? “What is a
migration, when it is not just a long visit?”
After going on forty years, growing up here, he admitted, “And I
am very much a migrant because I am still not quite at home in America.” 130/104-105
*
The great
war photographer
(1946)
The great war photographer, Robert
Capa, was Hungarian, and became a U.S. citizen in 1946.
D-Day: June 6, 1944. Capa was there.
Young German prisoner...as German manpower began to fail.
American killed by enemy sniper.
There appears to be a good cache of pictures from D-Day at a French internet site; I didn’t have time to check them out.
*
Building
a real estate empire and charging patients $5.
(1947)
A
penniless Jewish refugee from Hungary named Laszlo N. Tauber arrived in
the United States in 1947. A doctor, he was happy just to be alive, but soon
found work as a surgeon. At age 76 (when I clipped an article about him), he
was still practicing medicine and still charging his original patients $5 an
office visit.
Dr.
Tauber didn’t need to worry about money. He remained devoted to helping the
sick; but he had invested wisely in real estate, building an empire worth an
estimated $500 million. It was when he first went looking for a place to set up
an office that he became interested in how real estate was handled in this
country.
“Sometimes
I remember too much,” he says of his past in a war-torn Europe. “There are a
lot of bad memories.”
(This
article is probably from 1991; it was in a file of mine, of loose clippings.)
*
A song
written after a visit to Mexico.
(1947)
The
unintended racism of the song “Mañana (Is
Soon Enough for Me),” sung by Peggy Lee, and released in 1947, seems clear
today:
The faucet she is dripping and the
fence she’s fallin’ down
My pocket needs some money, so I can’t go into town
My brother isn’t working and my sister doesn’t care
The car she needs a motor so I can’t go anywhere
My mother’s always working, she’s
working very hard
But every time she looks for me I’m sleeping in the yard
My mother thinks I’m lazy and maybe she is right
I’ll go to work maãana but I gotta
sleep tonight
(maãana, maãana, maãana is soon enough for me)
Oh, once I had some money but I gave
it to my friend
He said he’d pay me double, it was only for a lend
But he said a little later that the
horse she was so slow
Why he give the horse my money is something I don’t know
(maãana, maãana, maãana is soon enough for me)
Maãana, maãana, maãana is soon enough for me)
My brother took a suitcase and he
went away to school
My father said he only learned to be a silly fool
My father said that I should learn to make a chile pot
But then I burned the house down, the chile was too hot
The window she is broken and the rain
is comin’ in
If someone doesn’t fix it I’ll be soaking to my skin
But if we wait a day or two the rain may go away
And we don’t need a window on such a sunny day
Oba! Oba!
(Maãana, maãana, maãana is soon enough for me) Oba! Oba!
(Maãana, maãana, maãana is soon enough for me) Oba! Oba!
(Lee
later said she regretted that listeners took this song as insulting to another
culture.)
*
“Even
though I wasn’t a citizen yet, America was my country.”
(1948)
The
story of Tibor Rubin, born in Hungary in 1929, surely makes a point. Based on
his experiences, you could argue that a person becomes truly an American when
their heart and soul tell them that they are. Rubin was Jewish, and in the
winter of 1944 he and his family were rounded up by the Nazis and sent to
several concentration camps. His father died in one, his mother and a sister in
another. Tibor was sent to Mauthausen, where he hung on for fourteen months. He
was finally saved when U.S. soldiers liberated the camp on May 5, 1945. “I promised the good Lord that if
I get out of here alive, I’d become a G.I. Joe, to give back something,” he
told an interviewer years later. He came to this country in 1948, but
had to wait until his English improved before he could enlist, flunking the test to join twice. He worked as a butcher until
he could pass (with a little help from two other test takers), successfully
enlisted in 1950, but was told, because he wasn’t a citizen he’d not be
required to fight.
“My
commander told me that I didn’t have to go to war,” he said. “So I told him:
‘Well, what about the others? I cannot leave my fellow brothers.’”
And
fight, he did.
Rubin’s
unit was sent to Korea, and he battled North Korean troops, and later Chinese
forces, when they joined the war. In fact, Rubin was recommended for the Medal
of Honor, but his award was delayed for more than fifty years, and finally
bestowed by President George W. Bush.
“When
Corporal Rubin’s battalion found itself ambushed by thousands of Chinese
troops,” the president said at a White House ceremony, “the Americans’
firepower soon dwindled to a single machine gun. The weapon was in an exposed
position and three soldiers had already died manning it. That was when Corporal
Rubin stepped forward. He fought until his ammunition was gone. He was badly
wounded, captured and sent to a P.O.W. camp.”
Rubin
would spend the next 30 months in a North Korean prison; but it would turn out
he also had enemies in his own unit.
Chillingly, Corporal Rubin had an enemy
on his own side. Numerous reports detail affidavits submitted by his fellow
soldiers who described their sergeant as a virulent anti-Semite who repeatedly
assigned him the most dangerous missions, including one in which he
single-handedly held off a wave of North Korean soldiers for 24 hours, securing
for his own troops a safe route of retreat.
The affidavits also suggested that
though Corporal Rubin was recommended more than once for the Medal of Honor,
the same sergeant, Artice V. Watson, deliberately ignored the orders from his
own superiors to prepare the appropriate paperwork.
In 2002, after Congress passed the
Leonard Kravitz Jewish War Veterans Act — named for a Jewish soldier killed in
an act of heroism in 1951 and subsequently denied the Medal of Honor —
President Bush ordered a review of the records of 137 Jewish veterans. Corporal
Rubin’s case was deemed among the most egregious. At the time, The Jewish
Journal, a Southern California newspaper, published a statement from a
notarized affidavit about Corporal Rubin and Sergeant Watson.
“I really believe, in my heart, that
First Sgt. Watson would have jeopardized his own safety rather than assist in
any way whatsoever in the awarding of the medal to a person of Jewish descent,”
Cpl. Harold Speakman wrote.
When Corporal Rubin was awarded the
medal, an Army spokeswoman told The Los Angeles Times that notarized documents showed
that “Rubin’s first sergeant did the circular trash can on these” — that is,
the recommendations — “and did not process them.”
Corporal
Rubin’s courage wasn’t just shown on the battlefield, but also in the enemy
prison camp, where he remained until the spring of 1953.
Again,
the Times explains:
Corporal Rubin spent 30 months as a prisoner of war in North Korea, where
testimony from his fellow prisoners detailed his willingness to sacrifice for
the good of others. He had been steeled for captivity and privation, he said,
by his experience in Mauthausen. And he declined the offer of his Communist
captors to return him to Hungary, then under the influence of the Soviet Union.
Instead, he made a habit of sneaking out of the camp at night and foraging for
food, stealing from enemy supplies, and bringing back what he could to help
nourish his comrades.
“He shared the food evenly among the
G.I.’s,” Sgt. Leo A. Cormier Jr., a fellow prisoner, wrote in a statement,
according to The Jewish Journal. “He also took care of us, nursed us,
carried us to the latrine.” He added, “Helping his fellow men was the most
important thing to him.”
…
“I
have a mom who was very religious,” Corporal Rubin said later by way of
explaining his actions. “And she always teach us: ‘There is one God, and we are
all brothers and sisters. You have to take care of your brothers, and save
them.’ To her, to save somebody’s life is the greatest honor. And I did that.”
Corporal Tibor Rubin
distinguished himself by extraordinary heroism during the period from July 23,
1950, to April 20, 1953, while serving as a rifleman with Company I, 8th
Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division in the Republic of Korea. While his unit
was retreating to the Pusan Perimeter, Corporal Rubin was assigned to stay
behind to keep open the vital Taegu-Pusan Road link used by his withdrawing
unit. During the ensuing battle, overwhelming numbers of North Korean troops
assaulted a hill defended solely by Corporal Rubin. He inflicted a staggering
number of casualties on the attacking force during his personal 24-hour battle,
single-handedly slowing the enemy advance and allowing the 8th Cavalry Regiment
to complete its withdrawal successfully. Following the breakout from the Pusan
Perimeter, the 8th Cavalry Regiment proceeded northward and advanced into North
Korea. During the advance, he helped capture several hundred North Korean
soldiers. On October 30, 1950, Chinese forces attacked his unit at Unsan, North
Korea, during a massive nighttime assault. That night and throughout the next
day, he manned a .30 caliber machine gun at the south end of the unit’s line
after three previous gunners became casualties. He continued to man his machine
gun until his ammunition was exhausted. His determined stand slowed the pace of
the enemy advance in his sector, permitting the remnants of his unit to retreat
southward. As the battle raged, Corporal Rubin was severely wounded and
captured by the Chinese. Choosing to remain in the prison camp despite offers
from the Chinese to return him to his native Hungary, Corporal Rubin
disregarded his own personal safety and immediately began sneaking out of the
camp at night in search of food for his comrades. Breaking into enemy food
storehouses and gardens, he risked certain torture or death if caught. Corporal
Rubin provided not only food to the starving Soldiers [capitalized in U.S. Army
documents], but also desperately needed medical care and moral support for the
sick and wounded of the POW camp. His brave, selfless efforts were directly
attributed to saving the lives of as many as forty of his fellow
prisoners. Corporal Rubin’s gallant
actions in close contact with the enemy and unyielding courage and bravery
while a prisoner of war are in the highest traditions of military service and
reflect great credit upon himself and the United States Army.
The U.S. Army provided additional detail about Rubin’s heroism, noting that he
had displayed courage over a period of nearly three years.
Earlier in the war, as the 8th Cav.
moved toward the Pusan Perimeter, Rubin kept to the rear to ward off North
Koreans nipping at his battalion’s heels. At 4 a.m., while defending a hill on
his own, Rubin heard gunfire from what sounded like hundreds of enemy troops.
“I figured I was a goner. But I ran from one foxhole to the next, throwing hand
grenades so the North Koreans would think they were fighting more than one
person,” he said. “I couldn’t think straight – in a situation like that, you
become hysterical trying to save your life.”
“He tied up the enemy forces, allowing
the safe withdrawal of Allied troops and equipment on the Taegu-Pusan road. The
enemy suffered, not only tremendous casualties ... but it slowed the North
Korean invading momentum along that route, saving countless American lives and
giving the 8th Cav. precious time to regroup to the south,” wrote Cpl. Leonard
Hamm in his nomination of Rubin for the Medal of Honor.
And when Hamm himself later lay fallen,
it was Rubin who fought to go back for him when the first sergeant issued
orders to leave him behind. “But we didn’t know if he was dead,” Rubin said.
“All I could think about was that somebody back home was waiting for him to
return.” Rubin was pinned down by snipers and forced to low-crawl for several
hundred yards when rescuing Hamm, whose body was so loaded with shrapnel that
he could hardly lift a limb.
“Rubin not only saved my life by
carrying me to safety; he kept the North Korean snipers off our butts,” said
Hamm.
Rubin’s
courage that day might have been enough for him to be awarded the Medal of
Honor; but he was far from done. When U.S. and U.N. troops stormed back north
later in the war they ran into unexpected trouble.
The
Chinese had decided, unexpectedly, to join the war.
At the end of October 1950, thousands
of Chinese troops were laying in wait. Masters of camouflage, they blended into
the brush and burned fires to produce smoke to mask their movements. When
Soldiers of the 8th Cavalry Regiment were stretched before them like sitting
ducks, the Chinese swarmed in.
“The whole mountain let loose,” said
Rubin, who was then a corporal serving in the 8th Cav.’s 3rd Battalion. On Oct.
30 the 3rd Bn.’s firepower dwindled to a single machine gun, which three
Soldiers had already died manning. By the time Rubin stepped up to fire, most
of his fellow Soldiers felt doomed in the confusion of battle.
“Nobody wanted to take over, but
somebody had to. We didn’t have anything else left to fight with,” he said.
Rubin’s buddies say he was a hero, selflessly defending his unit against
thousands of Chinese troops.
Battle raged for three days around
Unsan, then the Chinese pushed the Soldiers south. Those who survived retreated
with little or no ammunition and hundreds of wounded. More than 1,000 men of
the 8th Cav. were listed as missing in action after the battle, but some
returned to friendly lines or were rescued by tank patrols in the following
weeks.
When battle ended in Unsan, hundreds of
Soldiers were taken prisoner by the Chinese. They were forced to march to a
camp known today as “Death Valley,” ill-dressed for winter’s freezing
temperatures, exhausted and hungry. Many of them grew sick with dysentery,
pneumonia or hepatitis. Others died. “It was so cold that nobody wanted to
move, and the food we got was barely enough to keep us alive,” said former Sgt.
Richard A. Whalen. “But Rubin was a tremendous asset to us, keeping our spirits
up when no one felt good.”
Years in a Nazi concentration camp had
taught Rubin ways of survival that most humans never need know. He knew how to
make soup out of grass, what weeds had medicinal qualities and that the human
body can sometimes prevail if a person’s mind is in the right place.
What his comrades needed, Rubin knew,
was hope – hope to keep them moving and hope to make them fight for their
lives.
“Some of them gave up, and some of them
prayed to be taken,” Rubin remembers. He held pep talks, reminding the Soldiers
of the families awaiting their safe return home. He stole food for them to eat,
nagged them to “debug” themselves of the relentless lice and even nursed them
through sickness.
“He’d go out of his way to do favors to
help us survive,” said Cormier. “I once saw him spend the whole night picking
lice off a guy who didn’t have the strength to lift his head. What man would do
that? I’d have told him to go down and soak in the cold water so the lice would
all fall off. But Ted did things for his fellow men that made him a hero in my
book.”
Rubin thought the best way to overpower
his captors was by hitting them where it hurt most – their bellies.
“They didn’t have much more food to eat
than we did,” Rubin said. “One potato would have been worth a million dollars
if any of us had had it to give.” So when night fell he stole corn, millet and
barley. And when the Chinese planted a “victory” garden, he snuck past armed
guards to reap the harvest, stuffing his pants full of radishes, green onions
and cucumbers. “The Chinese would’ve cut Ted’s throat if they’d caught him
stealing. It still amazes me that they never did catch him,” said Cormier.
“What he did to help us could have meant the sacrifice of his own life.”
Rubin and Cormier became fast friends
as POWs. They were assigned as “bunkmates,” although mud floors served as beds
for the hundreds of men confined together in small rooms. When dysentery seized
Cormier’s body, Rubin stayed at his side and nursed him. Fellow prisoners
credit Rubin with saving the lives of more than 40 Soldiers during his
imprisonment at “Death Valley” and later at Camp 5 in Pyoktong. About 1,600
U.S. Soldiers died in Camp 5 in early 1951.
Rubin was repatriated under “Operation
Little Switch,” the initial exchange of sick and wounded prisoners from April
20 to May 3, 1953.
Cormier
wanted to make it clear. He and many of other prisoners were nearly broken by
the terrible conditions in the prison camps. Rubin was not. He gave the others
“the courage to go on living when a lot of guys didn’t make it,” Cormier said.
“He saved my life when I could have laid in a ditch and died – I was nothing
but flesh and bones.”
Few
men can say they survived both a German concentration camp and a terrible North
Korean-Chinese prison.
Rubin
was philosophical after the war. As the U.S. Army explained,
Life as a prisoner under the Nazis and
the Chinese are incomparable for Rubin. Of his Chinese captors, Rubin says only
that they were “human” and somewhat lenient.
Of the Nazis, Rubin remains baffled by
their capacity to kill. He was just a boy when he lost his parents and two
little sisters to the Nazi’s brutality. “In Mauthausen, they told us right
away, ‘You Jews, none of you will ever make it out of here alive’,” Rubin
remembers. “Every day so many people were killed. Bodies piled up God knows how
high. We had nothing to look forward to but dying. It was a most terrible
thing, like a horror movie.” American Soldiers swept into the camp on May 5,
1945, to liberate the prisoners. It is still a miraculous day for Rubin,
indelibly imprinted in his heart. “The American Soldiers had great compassion
for us. Even though we were filthy, we stunk and had diseases, they picked us
up and brought us back to life.” Rubin made a vow that day that he’s fulfilled
ten times over.
When
asked about his decision to stick with his unit and go fight, even though his
commander said he couldn’t, Rubin later explained, “Even though I wasn’t a
citizen yet, America was my country.”
Cormier
was by no means the only man in his unit to praise the courage of Tibor Rubin,
who had made a vow. Whalen called serving with Rubin “the luckiest break of my
life,” adding, “I wouldn’t be here today without him.”
The same could be said of former Cpl.
James E. Bourgeois, for whom Rubin cleaned wounds and bandages with boiled
snow. “At one time my wounds got so infected he put maggots in them to prevent
gangrene from setting in. This, I am sure, not only saved my left arm – which I
have full use of today – but also my life,” Bourgeois said.
When being admired for his courage,
Rubin is quick to wave off praise. His acts had more to do with his vow to
serve than with heroism, he said. “The real heroes are those who never came
home. I was just lucky,” Rubin said. “This Medal of Honor belongs to all
prisoners of war, to all the heroes who died fighting in those wars.”
The Los Angeles Times added details in describing Mr.
Rubin’s life. His nephew described him, in the years after the war, as a man
with a comic demeanor, disabled in part by years of starvation and battle
wounds.
After he was freed and
returned home, Rubin worked for years at his brother’s Long Beach, California
liquor store. He rarely talked about his experiences. Years later, he did
explain his actions in July 1950, when he kept the Taegu-Pusan Road link open, giving
his unit time to withdraw.
With North Korean troops
swarming around his position, he told an interviewer, “I didn’t have too much
time to get scared, so I went crazy.”
As for his efforts to help
his comrades during the 30 months in prison, Rubin called life in a POW camp “a
cakewalk” compared to Mauthausen.
*
“Even I
could be a hero.”
(1949)
The
family of John Zorn, age 2, emigrates from Poland to the United States. Jewish
refugees, their son John later becomes interested in baseball. “As an
immigrant, you want to be an American, but more broadly, you want to be part of
the team, you want to be part of the group, you want to have some shared
endeavor, and baseball seemed to supply that model more than almost anything,”
he later explains.
So,
John plays baseball. At age 12, he remembers playing centerfield one day. An
opposing batter drilled a shot, that arced over his head. “I turned fully,
racing with my back to the infield, stuck out my glove, and the ball landed in
it. In baseball, I thought, anything could happen. Even I could be a hero.”
He
also remembers flipping baseball cards against a wall – with the boy flipping
his card closest to the wall winning other flippers’ cards. Thorn became a
writer, and an editor, and was asked to update a baseball history, Big-Time
Baseball, soon republished at A Century of Baseball Lore. His
interest in the sport, in that era known as “America’s Pastime,” grew, and his
knowledge of baseball history grew with it. He authored several dozen books
about the sport, and when Major League Baseball’s first historian died, Zorn
was asked to take up the post as the second. (Smithsonian, pp. 18-23,
April-May 2024)
*
History
of Skyline Chili.
By
Lambert, James, Christie, William and John Lambrinides
Here
in Cincinnati, the following story is often found on tables at the many Skyline
restaurants:
As a boy in Greece, our father Nicholas
Lambrinides dreamed of coming to America and someday opening his own successful
restaurant. He had cultivated his love for food preparation in the kitchens of
his mother and grandmother in the village of Kastoria.
In 1949, the time appeared right for
the family to pool resources into father’s long-held dream. His recipe had been
honed to perfection.
The first Skyline Chili was at 3822
Glenway Avenue in suburban Price Hill. The name Skyline was originated because
of the view of downtown Cincinnati from the restaurant’s kitchen window.
There, we serve father’s own recipe of
chili. We bought only top-grade beef, and carefully trimmed all bone and fat,
ground up the beef, combined it with father’s own blend of spices—a unique
assortment that gave his dish a distinctive and inimitable flavor.
The restaurant prospered and the family
decided to open a second location in the downtown area. Over the years, others
became franchisees, opening their own stores in over 30 locations by 1983.
Father
died in 1962, mother in 1979.
(When
I checked in February 2020, the chain had grown to include close to 200
locations, including several in Florida.)
*
Ban on
immigrants from Asia is lifted.
(1952)
June 27:
Congress overrides President Truman’s veto to pass the McCarren-Walter Act,
which initiates various immigration reforms.
The key
provisions:
The ban on all immigrants from Asia was finally
lifted.
The quota system, adopted in 1924, was
extended. Under that system, the number of immigrants allowed from each
country, was determined by how many immigrants from each had come in previous
years. This favored countries which had already sent many individuals to U.S.
shores, Germany and Ireland, for example. Asian nations were limited to 100
immigrants per year. The United Kingdom could send 65,361 immigrants to the
United States, annually.
African nations, in total, could send 4,274.
Truman’s veto focused on events related to the
Cold War. He explained:
The
countries of Eastern Europe have fallen under the communist yoke – they are
silenced, fenced off by barbed wire and minefields – no one passes their
borders but at risk of his life. We do not need to be protected against
immigration from these countries – on the contrary we want to stretch out a
helping hand … to succor those who are brave enough to escape from barbarism.
*
(1955)
Mazie
Hirono was born in Japan, just two years after the end of World War II. Her
father was Japanese, her mother, Japanese American. When her parents’ marriage
failed – dad was a compulsive gambler and an alcoholic - Mazie and her mother
and siblings moved to Honolulu, where her mother was born.
Mazie
is now a U.S. Senator for Hawaii.
*
“That’s
not just my story.”
(1956)
In
1959 Fidel Castro took control of Cuba and instituted a communist government.
Roughly one tenth of the population of the island fled to the United States in
years to come.
Marco
Rubio tells his story (quoted, Rolling Stone, 4-7-16):
“This
is not just a country I was born in. America is the country that changed,
literally, the history of my family.” His parents: “a bartender and a maid from
Cuba,” who came here in 1956 and built a new life. “That’s not just my story. That’s
our story as a people. And I know that because we are all just a generation
or two removed from someone who made our future the purpose of their lives.”
Their
son later became U.S. senator from Florida and currently serves as U.S. Secretary
of State.
*
West
Side Story.
(1957)
Scenes
from West Side Story would also work to stir a little discussion about the
prejudice directed toward Puerto Ricans, although they are not immigrants. The
Jets, in the movie, also have clear ethnic roots.
That
story, which debuted in 1957 on Broadway, has one of the Puerto Ricans
responding to their foes, the Jets:
ANITA: Your father’s a Pole, Your mother’s a Swede, But you were born here, So that’s all you need!
The song, “America,” from the movie, should work to
stir discussion.
*
Slurs
aimed at Hispanics
(1960s)
In
the 1960s Mexicans began to arrive in increasing numbers, filling jobs on farms
and working as maids, etc. Sometimes referred to as “Greasers,” they were said
to be “lazy” and “ignorant.” Another insulting term was “Spics.” These people
were often denied service in restaurants, like African Americans.
*
Hamid
and the celery.
(1963)
In 1963, Hamid Abdulla came to the U.S.
to study engineering at Akron University. He probably weighed no more than 120
pounds when he arrived. In the end, he never returned to India, part of what
was then called the “brain drain.” His brother eventually came. He married an
Indian woman and they had too beautiful daughters, who went on to professional
careers.
At dinner one night, Hamid bit down on
a piece of celery, letting out the usual crunch. My father told him, “You’re
supposed to eat that without making any noise.” Hamid did his best.
It
was a rare joke by my dad and one without intent to embarrass. Hamid became a
true family friend.
In
the end, Hamid never returned to India, becoming part of what was then called
the “brain drain.” His brother eventually came to this country, as well. Hamid married
an Indian woman, and they had two beautiful daughters, who went on to
professional careers.
*
The
Gateway Arch
(1965)
The
Gateway Arch in St. Louis, designed to recognize the importance of Western
settlement in American history, was designed by an immigrant from Finland, Eero
Saarinen, and work began in 1963.
It
was finished in October 1965, and stands 630 feet tall, higher than the
Washington Monument (555 feet) or the Statue of Liberty (302 feet).
His
family came to this country in 1923, and he died before construction even began
on the arch.
The Arch stands 630 feet tall. An elevator system can take you to an inside observation deck at the top.
Looking down at the Mississippi River from the observation deck.
My
father left Taiwan for the United States in 1965, when he was twenty-one, and
he was nearly twice as old before he set foot there again. In those days, you
left if you were able to, especially if you were a promising student. A dozen
other physics majors graduated with him from Tunghai University, and ten of
them ended up pursuing careers abroad. My father flew from Taipei to Tokyo to Seattle
to Boston. He scanned the crowd at the airport and saw a friend who’d come from
Providence to pick him up and drop him off in Amherst.
But the
friend didn’t know how to drive, so he had promised to buy lunch for another
guy in exchange for a ride to the Boston airport, then to Amherst, and finally
back
to Providence. The two young men greeted my father at the gate, traded
backslaps, and rushed him to the car, where they stowed his worldly
possessions—textbooks and sweaters, mostly—in the trunk. Then they set off for
Boston’s Chinatown, a portal to a world they had left behind.
In the
years that followed, willingly marooned far from home, my father acquired
various characteristics that might mark him as American. He lived in New York,
witnessed and participated in student protests, and, according to old photos,
sported long hair and vaguely fashionable pants. He arrived as a devotee of
classical music, but within a few years his favorite song was the Animals’
“House of the Rising Sun.” He subscribed, very briefly, to The New
Yorker, before realizing it wasn’t meant for newcomers like him, and
requesting a refund. He discovered the charms of pizza and rum-raisin ice
cream. Whenever new grad students arrived from Taiwan, he and his friends piled
into a car to pick them up. It was a ritual, and it was a type of freedom—being
on the road and possibly eating well—that was not to be passed up.
When my
mother was a child in Taiwan, her father set up a chalkboard in the family’s
kitchen and wrote a new word in English on it every day. The Second World War
had interrupted my grandfather’s medical studies, so he became a civil servant.
He wanted slightly more for his children. My grandparents had their children
choose American names, like Henry or Carol. The children picked up the basics
of English, this bizarre new language, which they might use to speak a new
future into being. They learned about the rest of the English-speaking world
through a subscription to Life, where my mom first discovered the
existence of something in America called Chinatown.
She
arrived in the U.S. in 1971, to study public health at Michigan State
University.
It turned out that she had also been
accepted at the University of Illinois, but the letter had not arrived in time.
Her plans changed and she headed for Champaign-Urbana, where she later met his
father. Hsu was born there in 1977. The family later moved to Texas, where his
father found work as an engineer. The boy began to speak with a drawl, wanted
to wear cowboy boots, and begged for an American name. When a local steak house
“made clear” to his parents that it wasn’t the place “for their kind,” they
decided to move to Cupertino, California, when he was nine.
Meanwhile, Hsu’s father had begun
building a record collection, as soon as he arrived in America. He listened to
classical music at first, but became interested in Bob Dylan, and “that voice,
thin and deranged. His father’s “records stayed protected in their shrink-wrap,
if possible, to avoid wear to the cardboard sleeves. He would peel back part of
the plastic to stamp his name.” He added the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Neil
Young, Aretha Franklin, and Ray Charles to his collection. He had a few by the
Who, Jimi Hendrix, and a lot more classical music. He listened to Guns N’
Roses, and bought Rolling Stone and Spin magazines and paid
attention to their “best” lists.
Hsu grew up listening to baseball on
the radio, instead, and came to music later. His grandparents moved to
California, and then his parents moved back to Taiwan when he was in high school,
and they communicated with Hsu by fax machine. His father helped with his advanced
math classes, sending long explanations of problems and equations. Often, Hsu
ignored the explanations, and copied his father’s answers; but his father’s
taste in music had influenced him, and helped him fit in with kids his age.
Often, he had tagged along when his father headed for the record store.
The son wondered later, how his parents
did it:
The first generation thinks about survival; the
ones that follow tell the stories. I often try to weave the details of my
parents’ lives into a narrative. How did they imagine themselves? How did they
acquire a sense of taste or decide which movies to see? Would they have
recognized themselves in “Future Shock”? And was there an influential Eric in
my father’s life? The things around them were like the raw materials for
American identities, and they foraged as far as their car or the subway line
could take them.
He also remembered his irritation when
he realized his parents still spoke with an accent; but he enjoyed trips to the
mall with his mother, looking for the kind of clothes that teens wanted to wear,
to fit in, in the early 90s.
Later, I realized that we were both assimilating
at the same time, sifting, store to store, for some possible future – that we
were both mystified by the same fashions, trends, and bits of language. Later
still, I came to recognize that assimilation was a race toward a horizon that
wasn’t fixed. The ideal was ever shifting, and your accent would never quite be
perfect.
NOTE TO TEACHERS: It always
seemed like a good question to ask my students: “How does an immigrant ‘become’
American?”
In fact, what does it take to
be a “good American,” even if born here?
When Hsu was 14, he listened to
Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” It was, he felt, “one of the greatest
songs I had ever heard, mostly because it was the first great song I had chosen
for myself.”
“I believed,” he said, “that I’d
happened upon a secret before anyone else, and I was addicted to this belief.”
He went on to create a “zine,” and wrote earnestly about the music and movies
he loved. He questioned the mindless homework that had been assigned by his
teachers, and defined both “cool” “and who I was by what I rejected.” He went
to work on the school newspaper – kept a scrapbook of articles after Kurt
Cobain, the lead for Nirvana, died by suicide in 1994. When he failed his
driver’s test, and spent more time studying baseball statistics and record
reviews than his math formulas, his father, by then back in Taiwan, begged him
to devote more time to classwork.
Whenever my father wrote something that came
across sterner than intended, he quickly followed up, unprompted, to clarify:
Last Friday, I
overemphasized the toughness. Don’t be scared. The life is full of excitement
and surprises. Handle it and enjoy it. . . .
I feel sorry that I cannot
be around all the time to support you whenever you need. But I feel comfortable
since mom can do good job and you are quite mature. But if there is any thoughts
or problem, call me or fax to me.
Love, Dad
The question of college came up
eventually, and Hsu and his parents decided Berkeley would be his best choice.
They wanted him to develop skills, so he could get a good job, and become well
rounded.
He remembered:
But I was desperate to go there because of the enormous slices of
pizza and cheap records, the left-wing bookstore tucked inside the parking
garage, the weirdos yelling about free speech or abortion on the quad.
I was an American child, and I was bored, and I was searching for
my people.
*
A
Pulitzer Prize.
(1970)
Nilo
Cruz was still a boy in 1970, when his family arrived in the United States on a
“freedom flight,” or vuelo de la libertad. The flights, begun in 1965,
and leaving Cuba for Miami daily, continued until 1973. With a budget of $12
million, this effort marks the largest-ever airborne refugee program.
Cruz
went on to become a playwright, with his seventh full-length play, “Anna in the
Tropics,” winning a Pulitzer in 2003.
*
“Bend
the bamboo.”
(1975)
The
parents of Hoang Nhu Tran fled the communist takeover of South Vietnam in 1975
and brought him to the U.S. when he was nine. Resources were slim and they
lived in a trailer park. As soon as they saved enough for a small house, they
moved to be closer to the best junior high in Fort Collins, Colorado. When
Hoang reached ninth grade they moved again, closer to the best high school.
Hoang ended up as valedictorian, attended the United States Air Force Academy
and was later awarded a Rhodes scholarship.
Asked
to explain how this was possible, his father replied: “You have to bend the
bamboo when it is young.”
*
In
1975 the fall of Vietnam sparked a flood of Vietnamese immigrants. Many settled
in Louisiana and started fishing for shrimp. Native shrimp boat captains
reacted with anger and violence resulted.
Cambodians
also followed.
(Scenes
from Gran Torino, which features Cambodian gangs, might work.
In another story in The New York Times
(11/14/17)
Nguyen worries about how his son will fit in at nursery school. Already,
at age 3, classmates are pulling their eyes into slants. His son’s
school was teaching him the myth of the Pilgrims and Indians. “Do you know what
Thanksgiving means?” dad asks.
“Yes,”
the boy responds. “Genocide.”
Nguyen
came to this country in 1975; he was a small boy and spent time in a refugee
camp. He went on to teach English, American studies and ethnicity, and
comparative literature at USC. He remembers, “my parents worked 12 to 14
hours almost every day of the year, running a Vietnamese grocery store in
San Jose, California.” Often his parents’ efforts to fit in struck him as odd,
particularly because “my father never ceased reminding me, in my youth, that I
was ‘one hundred percent Vietnamese.’” Twice in the mid-90s, his parents
returned to Vietnam. After returning from the second trip, his father remarked,
“We are Americans now.”
They
never returned to Vietnam again.
Today,
Nguyen says he likes cranberries at Thanksgiving more than most of his white
in-laws. The adults at family holiday gatherings like the Vietnamese food more,
“but we do our best with the t ey. My nephews and niece, middle-school to
college age, seem to prefer the American food but will nibble on the Vietnamese
food.” His son, for whom he is grateful, likes to play with his “Batman” and
“Star Wars” Legos. “Our Americanization is nearly complete,” Nguyen explains.
In
an opinion
piece
for The New York Times, “Our Vietnam War Never Ended,” written
in 2015, Nguyen mentions 4,000,000 Vietnamese in the diaspora. He mentions
coming to the States at age four and growing up in a Vietnamese
enclave in San Jose, where he ate Vietnamese food, attended a Vietnamese
church, studied the Vietnamese language and “heard Vietnamese stories, which
were always about loss and pain.”
His older, adopted sister, “a beautiful girl,” in the picture he
studied as a boy, was left behind. His own parents fled south in 1954, as
teens. His father never saw his mother again, didn’t see his father for forty
years. His parents owned a grocery store, here in the States, for a time. Both
were shot and wounded in a Christmas Eve robbery. The author was ten at the
time; and when his older brother took the call and told him, he couldn’t cry.
His brother yelled at him for not caring.
Like all immigrants, he adapted. He speaks of “the English
language that I had decided was mine at some unspoken, unconscious level.”
“I knew that in the American imagination I was the Other, the
Gook, the foreigner, no matter how perfect my English, how American my
behavior.” In high school he and a handful of other Asian students sat at one
lunch table, calling themselves the Yellow Peril, as a joke.
He says today, people ignore the war story of the Vietnamese and
focus on the immigration story. He adds that it would be “hard to find a
more patriotic bunch than us.” Still, he wishes Vietnamese names were on
the Memorial in Washington D.C. The Vietnamese have built their own memorial in
Orange County, California, including statues of an American and Vietnamese
soldier standing side-by-side.
His brother became a doctor; he became a professor and novelist;
another Vietnamese immigrant helped draft the Patriot Act, a fourth helped
develop bunker busting bombs for use in Iraq.
*
A
balance beam in the backyard.
(c.
1979)
We
also saw, during the 2021 Summer Olympics (delayed by COVID) that a young lady
whose parents were Hmong immigrants, Sunisa Lee, could win the gold medalin the
all-around competition for women’s gymnastics. (These kinds of stories make me
proud of what America can represent.)
Her
mother, Yeev Thoj, came to
this country at age 12, from Laos, during the Vietnam War. She remembers what it
was like. “We went to a grocery store,
and I thought it was magic,” she told ESPN. “Vanilla ice cream in a box.
Starburst. And girls wore jeans instead of skirts.”
(I haven’t seen a year given for her arrival;
1979 is approximate.)
She eventually had a daughter,
Sunisa, split with Sunisa’s father, and met her husband, John Lee, another
refugee. He, too, was of Hmong blood, a people who lived in simple villages in
the mountains and had helped U.S. forces during the Vietnam War. “We had
never ridden in a car,” John says, of what it was like to come to America. “We’d
never seen lights. We didn’t have electricity in Laos.”
Sunisa
was raised by John and her mother and took his last name in his honor. Her life
changed one day, at age seven, while doing somersaults in the park. Another
parent saw her and suggested to her parents that they enroll her in gymnastics
classes. John went home and built her a simple balance beam in the backyard.
And
a career was launched.
Ms.
Lee went on to win gold at the 2024 Olympics. She has six Olympic medals in
all.
*
Fleeing
religious persecution in Iran.
(1979)
In
1979 the fall of the Shah and other dislocations in Iran lead to an influx of
Iranians fleeing persecution.
Tali Farhadian Weinstein remembers her arrival on Christmas
Eve in 1979, after her family had decided to leave Iran. As Jews, they had felt
unsafe and fled first to Israel and then came on to the United States. She was
only three years old when she arrived but went on to become a lawyer and
later serve as the general counsel of the Brooklyn district
attorney’s office and teach criminal justice reform at New York University
School of Law.
She writes:
My parents and grandparents had watched, from the windows of the
house we shared, as Tehran University was overrun by protesters. Rumors swirled
that anyone who had a connection to Israel – where both my parents had gone to
college – could be charged with Zionism, apparently a crime. As Jews, my
parents and grandparents became afraid to go to work and even to leave the
house. One day our next-door neighbors disappeared.
In February 1979, when the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran
from exile, intent on establishing an Islamic theocracy, my parents
decided it was too dangerous to stay any longer.
Her
father soon put his wife, Tali, and a younger brother on a plane and promised
he’d join them once he arranged his parents’ affairs. Instead, her father
decided to try his luck in America.
He
entered the United States with a tourist visa and got a job in Maryland as a
dishwasher. He made his way to New York City and secured work as a
hydraulic engineer, his field in Iran, and eventually, an apartment for us in
Rego Park, Queens. A few months later, my mother followed—a 26-year-old woman
with two children and a suitcase stuffed with pots and pans, a few items of
clothing for each season, photo albums and a couple of toys.
The three of us arrived at J.F.K. Airport on Dec. 24, 1979. The
tourist visas that we had in our Iranian passports were almost certainly fake;
my mother had bought them at an exorbitant price from a travel agency that sold
them to us in combination with our one-way tickets. And even if they had been
real, we didn’t look like tourists. How many tourists take their rice cooker on
vacation?
When it was their turn for inspection, the immigration officer
“very reasonably—challenged my mother’s claim that we had come for a short
visit.” Her mother didn’t know enough to say she wanted asylum, “that we had a
well-founded fear of persecution in our country of origin.” She didn’t know
“that those words had the power to keep us in America, that anyone on American
soil had a right to be heard on that claim.” She had grown up in Iran, where
such protections did not exist.
The I.N.S. officer made a fateful decision that night.
Before him stood a young mother traveling alone with her babies,
visibly in need of refuge. She told him that the children wanted to see their
father, that they had spent months apart. And he granted us “deferred
inspection”—meaning that we had permission but not authorization to enter the
country—and told us to come back to the airport right after the holiday for
deportation.
I have thought a lot about that night in the years since. As a
child, I attributed my freedom in this country to a small miracle—the accident
of having arrived on Dec. 24, a holy day for a vast majority of my new
countrymen and women. Maybe that was why the officer exercised the law with
mercy and compassion.
Weinstein, who has made a career in law, then argues that the
I.N.S. officer made the right choice by not enforcing the law.
In a democracy, anyone who has the power to enforce the law also
has the power – and the duty – to enforce it with discretion. Not every crime
should lead to punishment. Not every punishment should be meted out at the
maximum. Law enforcement requires us to exercise our humanity and sense of
justice, always mindful of the demands of safety, in individual cases.
Discretion in law enforcement can be abused, of course, but the alternative – the
letter of the law without the spirit of the law– is worse.
She says her family was lucky. They had a few days of freedom –
and quickly reunited with her father. Her mother managed to call an American
she knew, a rabbi, who told her about the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. The day
after Christmas, her family walked into the society’s office and applied for
asylum.
The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society continued to represent us, pro
bono, for nearly a decade while my parents made their asylum case. Life during
that time was not always easy. I remember coming home from school one afternoon
to find my mother, who had found work as a schoolteacher, crying in the kitchen
after a colleague had threatened to have her deported. I remember long days
spent at the I.N.S. building in Newark, periodic reminders that even as our
life in America took root, our situation was precarious.
Our uncertainty ended in 1986, when President Ronald Reagan
signed a law making any immigrant who entered the country before 1982 eligible
for amnesty. There has not been another large-scale amnesty program since.
“As a child, I was shown that the law could be enforced with
goodness and humanity,” she writes, forty years later. “For my family’s first
Christmas, America gave us safety, kept us together and offered us a chance at
a new life. I wish the parents and children at our borders could expect the
same gifts today.”
NOTE TO TEACERS: If I were still teaching, I would use this story
with a couple of questions: Did the I.N.S. officer make the right decision in
1979, or not? And what if every officer made the same decision every time?
In some of the selections below – in the next, for example – my bias
shows – but I believe the facts are clear enough. You can always do your own
research. But it should be made clear to your students that the topic of
immigration is incredibly complicated.
*
“Those Polish guys are good, hard workers.”
(1980)
In old but still interesting news, The
New York Times offers up the tale of yet another rich businessman who
went about screwing his workers in an
unwavering effort to fatten his bank account.
First, he hired undocumented workers for
a job that had to be done. He wanted to knock down an old building so he could
put up a mixed-use 58-story skyscraper in downtown New York City.
Second, he conspired to pay those workers less
than half what union workers would have demanded.
Third, the businessman required the undocumented
to put in 12-hour shifts – but didn’t pay overtime.
Fourth, if those workers – in this case from
Poland – complained about working conditions or because their wages were late
or sometimes not paid at all they would be threatened with deportation.
How did this scam work? Recently, a judge
unsealed records from a settlement, twenty years ago. According to that
settlement the businessman was forced, after battling for years, to pay the
undocumented workers the money they said he owed. Including legal costs and
interest the tab came to $1.375 million.
The businessman testified that he never visited
the work site, where the Poles were demolishing the 12-story Bonwit Teller
building. A foreman on the job, Zbignew Goryn, disagreed. The businessman, he
said, did visit the site, marveling about the Polish demolition crew. “He said,
‘Those Polish guys are good, hard workers,’” Goryn told the judge.
A smaller group of union workers, paid union
rates, made fun of the Poles. Adam Mrowiec testified in court: “They told me
and my friends that we are stupid Poles and we are working for such low money.”
“We worked in horrid, terrible conditions,”
Wojciech Kozak remembered. “We were frightened illegal immigrants and did not
know enough about our rights.” “We were working 12, 16 hours a day and were
paid $4 an hour. Because I worked with an acetylene torch, I got $5 an hour. We
worked without masks. Nobody knew what asbestos was. I was an immigrant. I
worked very hard.”
Eventually, pay stopped coming. The Poles found
a lawyer, John Szabo, to represent their cause. Szabo went to the businessman’s
office to complain. If something wasn’t done, he’d place a mechanic’s lien on
the property. If that happened the building could not be sold until the lien
was settled.
A representative of the businessman began
showing up to pay the Poles in cash. This insured there was no
income-tax-social-security-tax-union-dues paper trail. Joseph Dabrowski
testified that the businessman appeared on site and told workers, “If you finish
this fast” then “I will pay for it.”
Szabo filed a lien. Daniel Sullivan, a labor
consultant, said that the businessman came to him for help. He said he had
“difficulties…that he had some illegal Polish employees.” The businessman had
his lawyer call Szabo. They were going to call the Immigration and
Naturalization Service and have his clients deported. Szabo refused to back
down in court. Eventually, the businessman wilted and settled the case. The
workers were paid 100% of what they had been demanding for fifteen years.
The new 58-story tower went up at the corner of
Fifth Avenue and 56th Street in downtown New York City.
Proud of his accomplishments, the businessman
slapped big gold letters on the side of his skyscraper: T-R-U-M-P.
*
Three
million refugees have been saved.
(1980-2017)
A new program is implemented
in 1980, to rigorously screen candidates for refugee status. By 2017, three
million people from around the globe will have been admitted to this country,
as they flee religious, political, or racial persecution. Often that means
their lives have been saved.
As Time notes, at the dawn of Donald
Trump’s first term in office,
“Not one
has killed anyone in a terrorist attack. Even if you include the three Cuban
refugees who murdered three people in the 1970’s, before those standards were
in place, the odds of a U.S. citizen dying from a terrorist attack by a refugee
on American soil are infinitesimal, - roughly 1 in 3.6 billion, according to
the Cato Institute, or 48 times less than the chance of being killed by an
asteroid.
(I’m not sure I see how that math works; but this
blogger is a big fan of saving human lives, regardless.)
*
“The
brain drain.”
(c.
1985)
If
I were still teaching, I’d throw in the N---- family, whose daughters I had in
class, both brilliant young ladies and diligent students. Both parents were
doctors; but they fled Afghanistan when the Taliban took over. I’d introduce
the concept of the “brain drain,” to students. That is: the idea that
many talented professionals leave poorer countries and come to the United
States.
Certainly,
in Cincinnati, any check of listings for doctors will turn up plenty of
“foreign” names.
*
Interpreter
for her parents at age four.
(c.
1985)
The
struggles
and promise of immigration are neatly combined in the story of Michelle Wu, described
as a “Harvard policy nerd” who gained a seat on the Boston City Council, and in
2021 set her sights on becoming mayor.
She proposes to make Boston a
laboratory for progressive policy; to reapportion city contracts to firms owned
by Black Bostonians; to pare away at the power of the police union; to waive
fees for some public transportation; and to restore a form of rent control, a
prospect that alarms real estate interests.
“In nearly a decade in city government,
I have learned that the easiest thing to do in government is nothing,” she
said. “And in trying to deliver change, there will be those who are invested in
the status quo who will be disrupted, or uncomfortable, or even lose out.”
Michelle
was born shortly after her parents came to the U.S. from Taiwan, hoping to help
their children along a path to the American Dream. Her father, a chemical
engineer, had been offered a spot as a graduate student at Illinois Institute
of Technology. But neither parent spoke much English, and by the time Michelle,
known in Mandarin as Wu Mi, was four or five, she was already serving as their
“interpreter.”
She
excelled in school, as her parents expected and demanded. In high school, the Times
explains, “She stacked up A.P. classes, joined the math team and color guard,
and earned perfect scores on the SAT and ACT exams. As co-valedictorian, she
wowed the audience at graduation with a piano solo from Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in
Blue.’”
Even
during her high school years, there were problems at home. Her father lived
apart from the family; and divorce soon followed. It was hard on Michelle, and
her younger brother and sister.
Politics, however, was off the table;
their parents, raised by parents who fled famine and civil war in China, viewed
it as a corrupt, high-risk vocation. They wanted Michelle to go into medicine,
along a “pipeline of tests and degrees to a stable, happy life,” she said. When
she left for Harvard — something her parents had hoped for her whole life — Ms.
Wu was not sure whether she was a Republican or a Democrat.
It was while she was at Harvard that
her family came unraveled. … Her mother, isolated in their suburban
neighborhood, began acting erratically, shouting at the television and dialing
911 to report strange threats.
Ms. Wu, newly graduated, had started a
fast-track job at the Boston Consulting Group when Sherelle Wu [her younger
sister] called and said, “We need you home, now.”
Ms. Wu rushed home and was shocked by
her mother’s condition. She has described finding Yu-Min standing in the
rain with a suitcase, convinced a driver was coming to ferry her to a secret
meeting. She examined her daughter’s face closely, seeking evidence that she
was not an android.
“You’re not my daughter anymore, and
I’m not your mother,” Ms. Wu’s mother told her.
“Life feels very short when that kind
of switch happens,” she said.
Thrust into position as the head of the
family, Ms. Wu, then 22, dived in. She became a primary parent to her youngest
sister, who was 11, eventually filing for legal guardianship. She managed
psychiatric treatment for her mother, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and
opened a small tea shop, thinking her mother might take it over.
Then, frustrated by the bureaucratic
obstacles she had encountered, she enrolled at Harvard Law School, bringing her
mother and sister back to Boston with her. This time, she intended to stay.
Ms.
Wu took a course at Harvard Law taught by Elizabeth Warren. Her foray into
politics began soon after.
*
Immigration
“has literally shaped us.”
(1986)
The
Simpson-Mazolli Act passed in 1986. For the first time fines would be imposed
on companies that hired undocumented workers. Amnesty was granted to all people
living illegally in the U.S., so long as they had arrived before January 1,
1982. At the time, we were losing the battle at the border. One border patrol
agent compared it to “sword-fighting Zorro with a short knife.”
“The
border is a revolving door,” said another.
In
the early 1980s it was said that the Gross National Product of Los Angeles
County was greater than that of Mexico.
Immigration
“has more than enriched us – it has literally shaped us,” President Reagan said
at the time. An article in USA Today (June 30, 1986) notes that as of
1985, seven million Germans, 5.3 million Italians, 4.8 million Irish, 4.1
million Canadians, 3.5 million Russians, 2.5 million Mexicans, 2.5 million
Scandinavians, .7 million Chinese and .4 million Japanese had come to the
United States. Great Britain sent five million. In 1982 more than 40,000
Laotians arrived, along with 18,000 Cambodians. From 1976 to 1985, almost
40,000 South Koreans came annually.
*
(1987)
In
the 1980s, American students of Asian ancestry would score much higher on
the SAT than white, black and red peers. They would become known as the “model
minority.”
*
Second generation.
(1989)
If you start looking at second-generation children of immigrants, the impact
becomes even more enormous. Sabrina Ionescu’s father, Dan, for example, fled
Romania in 1989. Her mother, Liliana Blaj, and an older brother, Andrei, were
unable to rejoin him until 1995. She was born two years later, eighteen minutes
before her twin brother Edward, in California, grew to 5'
11'' and became a high school basketball star.
To get some idea of her prowess, consider that her high school
teams went 119-9 during her four years on the team.
Recruited by Oregon, Ionescu (pronounced “you-ness-coo”) became
the prototype for a rapidly developing women’s game. In February 2020, Ionescu
became the first college player, male or female, ever to have scored 2,000
points, grabbed 1,000 rebounds and handed out 1,000 assists in a career.
In
an interview in 2019, Ionescu explained to the Washington Post
how her game developed in stages.
When I was younger, I was always
playing with the guys, and I had to find ways to get the ball, because they
never wanted to pass to me. So I figured that if I could rebound, I would be
able to get the ball myself.
Then passing-wise, when I was in sixth
grade playing with the eighth-grade team [a boy’s club team, I believe], I was
obviously a lot shorter, skinnier, smaller than they were. I would just have to
find ways to impact the game other than shooting or scoring, and that was
passing. … I think it just all kind of added together on its own.
In
middle school there weren’t enough interested girls to form a squad. Ionescu
remembers the experience. “My middle school said I should be playing with
dolls. Seriously, word-for-word. So I went out and recruited a bunch of girls
to sign up for the team, and then I would just play. It’s funny now. I wish I
could go back and just tell those people they had made a mistake.”
Before
she arrived, the Oregon Ducks women’s games were games drawing announced crowds
of 1,501.
Four
years later, Ionescu and her teammates were lacing it up and playing before
average crowds of more than 10,000 excited fans. Even pro players like Steph
Curry and Koby Bryant had become fans. Before he and his daughter, Giana, died
in a helicopter crash, the Lakers great had brought his girl to watch Ionescu
play—a role model for her—as he had been a role model for Ionescu.
Ionescu
spoke at his memorial service on 2/24/20 and talked about how she had hoped to
change the women’s game, with Giana to help. She said she and Giana’s dad often
texted each other. Now, she said, she sometimes texted him, even though he was
gone, always hoping, somehow to get a response. The date was significant, “2,”
Giana’s number, “24,” Koby’s, “20,” the number of seasons Bryant played in the
purple and gold. Ionescu, know for playing with great intensity, herself, flew
back to Corvallis that night, led her team to victory, and grabbed the
necessary rebound to “join” the 2,000-1,000-1,000 club. It’s a small club, of
course.
*
A new Immigration
Act.
(1990)
Another
loose article, from the Associated Press, by way of the Enquirer (November
11, 1990, I believe), notes that the new Immigration Act of 1990, should read,
“Give us your kin, your skills and your moneyed masses…”
The
new law would increase the number of immigrants accepted by 400,000, over three
years. “This year,” reporters noted, “131,000 refugees are being accepted,
primarily from Indochina and the Soviet Union.” Refugees counted separately.
“The new three-year total is 2.1 million visas for permanent residence, up from
1.7 million for the previous three-year period.” The law set aside 465,000
visas, favoring applicants with relatives already in this country. The
number of visas set aside for skilled workers increased to 140,000 per year, up
from 54,000.
*
“Yacht
people.”
(1990)
A
loose article from the Los Angeles Times notes:
Through a little-heralded provision in
the Immigration Act of 1990, the United States is offering well-heeled
immigrants the chance to become permanent residents for an investment of $1
million in a business creating at least 10 jobs for Americans.
Up to 10,000 investor visas will be
issued annually starting Oct. 1st, marking the first time in the country’s
history that wealth has become a criterion for legal immigration.
…The new law has been widely
cheered by developers, attorneys and government officials who have inundated
perspective immigrants with investment options, from million-dollar hamburger
stands to experimental bicycle patents.
Even the former commissioner of the
U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Western Region, Harold W. Ezell,
has begun selling car washes and Wiener-schnitzel hot dog franchises to
the soon to be arriving “yacht people” of the world.
One
critic noted that this law marked a change to a new ethos of immigration “that
calls not for the tired, the poor or the huddled masses, but rather, the rich,
the skilled and the elite.
*
“My
kids are American. I’m here to stay.”
(1990)
In
an article in Esquire, titled, “Any Happy Returns?” Pete Hamill
wrote about immigrants in Miami, Florida. “As always in Miami,” he says, “I
feel as if I’m in a Latin American country.”
Driving
down the highway, he explains,
I’m listening to Radio Mambi. This is a
fifty-thousand-watt Spanish-language station named for the black guerrillas who
fought the Spanish in the nineteenth century. When I’m here I listen to nothing
else, because I’m a connoisseur of the fanatic heart. Radio Mambi, with all
those watts capable of reaching Havana, is totally dedicated to the destruction
of Fidel Castro. The news shows lead with stories about Fidel. The comedy
shows are about Fidel. The talk shows are about Fidel. Fidel is the devil.
Fidel is evil. Fidel should die. It’s beautiful.
At
that point, many Cubans were looking forward hopefully to the collapse of
Fidel’s regime. “The Florida governor has even created a committee to make the
transition in Havana smoother,” Hamill writes. “We’re going back! Christmas
in Havana! Vamaños, Cubanos!”
“But
wait!” he exclaims. “What about the Nicaraguans? They can go right now. About 150,000
Nicaraguans are living in the Miami area. The suburb of Sweetwater is
almost completely Nicaraguan now, and is called Little Managua.”
(Managua
is the capital city of Nicaragua.)
The
leftist regime of Daniel Ortega had just been voted out of office. A man he
talks to later says, “We’re happy about the elections. But going back...I don’t
know. We’ll see.”
A
second immigrant from Nicaragua makes it clear:
“Nobody wants to go back,” he says.
“And the reason is simple. They didn’t come here because of the Sandinistas.
That’s all politics and bullshit. They came here because of poverty.
Here they have jobs, they have places to live, they have cars, they have their
kids in good schools, they think it’s paradise. Why would they want to go back?
And how can the Americans force them to go back? That’s why everybody else came
here, too.”
Driving around in Sweetwater, I can see
what he means: green lawns and cars in driveways and children on bicycles.
Managua, ruined by earthquake in 1972,
was never rebuilt by Anastasio Somoza; the old dictator stole the relief money
and guaranteed the triumph of the Sandinistas. In comparison with Managua, the
ugliest major city in Latin America, Sweetwater looks like a movie set. It
reminds me that we all see this world from different perspectives. For a
decade, we were taught to see Nicaragua as a theater for Cold War ideological
struggle; the exiles were fleeing the Red Peril, thus proving the failure and
cruelty of Marxism, and therefore had to be granted refuge. Many Nicaraguans
looked at their country in a simpler way: as a place where they could not
feed their children.
“Look around,” Carballo has warned me.
“Then ask yourself: Would you leave this for Managua?”
Sweetwater
used to be a rundown suburb, Hamill wrote. But the Nicaraguans came and began
to transform it. Like most immigrants, they “worked at mean jobs” when
they arrived. Eventually, they elected their own people to city council, where
meetings were sometimes held in Spanish. “They witnessed their own scandals
(most of the city council was recently indicted for extortion). They worked
hard. They moved up,” Hamill explained.
Now?
Would they ever want to go home? Hamill writes: “‘I would like to go for a
visit,’ a man named Edgar Cruz says to me, washing a Mazda in the driveway of
his home. ‘That would be nice. But I’m an American now. My kids are American.
I’m here to stay.’”
Hamill
goes to hear a speech by Francisco Mayorga, the economic adviser to the new
president of Nicaragua. The Sandinistas are gone, the leftists who controlled
the government, he says. “The economy is in ruins,” he continues. “We have to
clean up their mess now. And we will need the help of el exilio.”
Or:
the exiles.
When
Hamill asks one well-dressed young man if he plans to go back, he replies,
“Hey, I love my country. But I love myself more.”
And
in this way, are new Americans created.
*
Belated
recognition.
(1991)
Congress
also enacts a new provision, belatedly creating a two-year period, beginning on
May 1, 1991, which would allow Filipino veterans from World War II,
including guerrilla fighters, to apply for U.S. citizenship.
More
than half of 200,000 Filipinos who fought the Japanese were killed. About
50,000 were eligible under the new program. (A law in 1942 gave all those who
served in the U.S. military, who were not born here, a chance to become
citizens; but it expired in 1946, without including Filipinos.)
*
(1991)
From
a loose article in my files:
After
a coup in Haiti, including “necklacing” of political rivals (hanging
tires around victims’ necks and setting them on fire), 6,600 refugees were
picked up in U.S. waters between September and mid-December 1991 (CincinnatiEnquirer editorial, December 16, 1991).
*
American
police are much nicer.
(1993)
According
to a story in USA Today (6/7/1993) a freighter carrying 300 illegal
Chinese immigrants ran aground on a New York City beach. Seven people died
fleeing the vessel. “The Immigration and Naturalization Service said the ship
is the 24th refugee vessel stopped in U.S. waters since August ’91.”
The
article goes on,
Coast Guard, police and fire rescuers
said “chaos” erupted when the 300-foot freighter Golden Venture slammed into a
sandbar 200 feet off Rockaway Beach, Queens around 2 a.m.
Passengers, some in suits and some in
underwear, jumped into the cold Atlantic surf.
“It looked almost like the movies about
the invasion of Normandy,” said Detective Ming Li
Besides
the dead, two dozen were hospitalized, some escaped, and 200 were taken into
custody. Passengers said they had been at sea for a hundred days and had paid
as much as $30,000 to be smuggled into the United States. “They say American
police are much nicer than police in China,” one New York officer laughed.
*
“Looking for a little bit of liberty.”
(1993)
Sports Illustrated ran an interesting article on December 6, 1993. Written by Steve Wulf, it begins:
The
small plane flying over Ponce, Puerto Rico, on Nov. 19 carried a rather
significant message: CUBANO EXILIATE. The sign, which also bore a phone number,
meant “Cuban, defect,” a suggestion for the 881 members of the Cuban
delegation that was in Puerto Rico for the 17th Central American and Caribbean
Games.
And defect is exactly what many of them did. As of Monday, the
day before the 10-day-long Games were to end, Cuba had won more than 300 medals
and lost 39 members of its delegation…[The number] was so large as to
stun observers of Cuba’s sports machine.
Long held up as proof that Fidel Castro’s socialist system
worked, Cuba’s athletes are now providing persuasive testimony that it isn’t
working. Said Odalys Hernà ndez, who
defected shortly after pitching her softball team to a 10-1 victory over
Colombia on Nov. 26, “I was looking for a little bit of liberty, which does not
exist in Cuba.”
One of
the defectors in Puerto Rico was the second-in-command of the Cuban security
detail.
Wulf
notes that “defections” by Cubans were at an all-time high, with most of those
leaving braving passage by sea. Rene Arocha, “a second-line pitcher on the
Cuban national team, was a pioneer when he defected” in 1991, Wulf says. At the
World University games in Buffalo in 1992, two other Cuban ballplayers
“bolted.”
Gymnast
Jose Tejada, who won a gold medal during the games in Puerto Rico, told Wulf he
had been planning to jump ship for more than a year.
“This wasn’t something I decided
overnight. I’m not a child. My prime motivations were the limitations placed on
me and the economic factor and the question of ethics. At the root of these
problems is a political problem. I talked it over with my mom and dad, my
brothers and cousins, and now that I’m here, I will fight hard to help them.”
Tejada, who has no family in the U.S.,
was asked if he might not feel alone. No, he said, “I have all of you.”
The
press chief for the Cuban team called the situation “regrettable.” “Our feeling
is simply that if they don’t love their country, we don’t care to dedicate any
words to them.” A large part of the problem is that Cuban athletes, if they
defect, can make more money, in baseball, for example.
Even
two decades later, the defections continued. In 2013 the Chicago White Sox signed Jose Abreu to a six-year deal worth $68 million. Two
other Cubans who left the island behind, Yasiel Puig and Yoenis Cespedes signed
huge contracts. Puig inked a 7-year, $42 million contract with the Dodgers.
Cespedes signed a 4-year deal with the A’s worth $38 million.
*
“From
now on I will say what I want to say.
(1994)
The
Cincinnati Enquirer reported on January 1, 1994, that the
granddaughter of Fidel Castro, Alina-Maria Salgado-Fernandez, 16, had been
allowed to enter the United States to be with her mother, who had defected a
week earlier. “I’m going to meet a lot of new people,” she told reporters. “I
have to learn the language. And I want to study a lot, something I could not do
in Cuba.”
The
story notes, “The girl and her mother, Alina Fernandez Revuelta, then toasted
the new year with champagne.”
Fernandez
Revuelta, an outspoken critic of her father’s regime, said, “From now on I will
say what I want to say.” In Cuba, Salgado-Fernandez had been under virtual
house arrest and was constantly watched. Alina-Maria said through an
interpreter, “My mother and I feel for everyone who doesn’t have their mother.
I can’t explain why they let me go and don’t let others go.”
*
The
perfection of the Oreo.
(c.
1996)
Tejal
Rao, born in London, but of Middle Eastern descent, writing in the NYT (7/4/17)
remembers growing up in Europe and the Middle East, “the Oreo was my
introduction to American food culture.” She still considers “the classic Oreo
to be a sandwich cookie of perfect proportion and sweetness.”
The
experience itself of eating
such a cookie was important. “It was about consuming something American,
something cool and rare and glamorous that I might be cut off from at any
moment. … It wasn’t until I moved to the United States [as a teenager] that I
understood Oreos were not, in fact, a luxury product.”
*
Make a
wish.
(1998)
Cincinnati Enquirer for August 5, 1998: Gimel Aguinaga, 16, terminally ill with
cancer asked the Make-a-Wish Foundation for help in becoming a citizen
before he died; this meant his mother would have to be naturalized, too, since
he was not a legal adult. From Nicaragua, his mother, Blanca Aurora Sunsin, had
been living in U.S. for thirteen years legally, but her English was poor. She
had to take tutoring lessons to be able to answer the 20 or so questions asked
on citizenship test. She passed, and the boy and a sister, 14, were sworn in,
the boy wearing a black beret to cover baldness from chemo.
“We
are touched that a person of such tender age realizes the importance and the
value of United States citizenship,” said one official.
*
No
immigrant to this country has ever climbed higher.
(2002)
If
you spotted Lhakpa Sherpa carrying a box of pineapples at a Whole Foods store
in West Hartford, Connecticut, you never know she was famous.
She
grew up in Nepal, in the shadow of the Himalayas. As a girl – she was one of
eleven children born to a shepherd and a homemaker, she grew up too poor to
have shoes. Her brothers were sent to school, she and her sisters were not. “We had no television and no phone,” she once
explained. “I used to spend my day watching sheep and birds. I could see Mount
Everest from my village.”
Early on, she took an interest
in climbing higher. Her mother worried that she might be eaten by snow leopards.
And if she persisted, no man would want to marry her. One day, her father sent
her after a few stray sheep, and she ran into a party of Sherpa men with ropes
and climbing gear. She vowed to climb Everest someday. At age 17, she finally
found work as a porter, carrying heavy loads up the steepest mountains. She was
promoted to “kitchen boy,” and then promoted again, to guiding clients.
In 2000, she suggested to the
Nepalese government that a Nepali women-only team should be funded, to climb
Everest. A seven-woman party made the attempt that May. Six members succumbed
to altitude sickness, but Lhakpa made it. She was “only” the second Nepali
woman to do it.
The first, in 1993, died on
the way down.
Lhakpa made it again in 2001,
and in 2002, after marrying a Romanian mountaineer, she moved to Connecticut.
She had two daughters, but her husband proved abusive. Like many immigrants to
this country, she started off with low-paying jobs, but kept returning to Nepal,
and climbing whenever she could. In 2022, she summitted Mount Everest for the
tenth time – the only woman to have ever done so. In the “death zone,” above 26,247, she had to
breathe from bottled oxygen. Her daughter, Shiny, who was at a base camp down
the mountain, was able to follow her progress on a walkie-talkie, and said
prayers for her mother’s safety. At 6:30 a.m. on May 12, Lhakpa stood on top of
the world once more.
Still, there was great danger.
The New York Timesexplains,
She was out of food and water,
utterly exhausted, and her anxious mind kept trying to convince her to sit down
and rest as she suffered on the hike down the mountain. She fought that deadly
impulse time and again by focusing on her children.
Shiny, who had always opted out
of hiking trips back home, made the strenuous climb up to the first camp to
celebrate with her mother. When Lhakpa arrived, Shiny saw her immigrant mother
— who had worked so hard and overcome so much — in full bloom for the first
time. Tears streamed down Lhakpa’s cheeks, which had been baked to crackling
from the sun and wind.
Now she plans to climb K2 in
2023, and make an eleventh climb up Everest. She hopes to bring both daughters
to base camp this time, along with a team of girls from around the world. “I
hope I will bring 20 daughters,” she tells a reporter. “I want to teach them
climbing skills and show them that all girls can climb mountains.”
*
The
helpful police.
(2010)
Jowel
Iranzi, told his story to the NYT in On the Way Home by Elissa Alford;
(1-31-16): He came here in May 2010, and Jewish Family Services helped him
settle in; getting him a room in the home of a retired nurse, and providing a
bicycle and backpack. They also lined up a job at a bakery, where Iranzi worked
the second shift.
He
figured out a seven-mile bike route to work where he cleaned baking trays,
fished donuts out of hot oil and packaged products. “I had been in construction
in Africa, so it was very different, and it was hot and greasy. But I was
meeting people from all over the world – Nepal, Iraq, Myanmar – and was young
and happy.”
Iranzi
was a Tutsi, born in the Congo, and his family had to flee – to Burundi,
where his father was killed. He spent two years in a refugee camp.
The
day I received my letter from the United States, I took pictures holding the
American flag with my friend in the camp. My wife, Antoinette, and our
6-month-old boy had already gone to the States with her family, and they moved
in with me after I started working. I was grateful just to be where I was and
to have a job.
At
3 a.m. every night he would finish his shift, lift his backpack to his
shoulders, hop on his purple bike, and start pedaling for home, using the
sidewalk, not riding in the middle of the street. One night: “I suddenly saw bright lights behind me and
wondered, What’s going on? Is that an ambulance? Are they going to help someone
who is sick? Then the car pulled over and a voice said, ‘Stop right there.
Police.’ They were stopping me?”
One
officer told him to keep his hands on his bicycle and approach; the other came
up behind. Iranzi was shaking and when they asked to see an ID he was nervous.
It would be a year before he had a real green card. So he gave them his
immigration and Social Security numbers. “As
a refugee, you arrive with no trust or self-esteem,” he added. Then they
asked to search his backpack—finding only his lunchbox. One officer asked, “Where are you heading?” Iranzi
didn’t know enough English to respond. Fortunately, the other officer knew
French, and knew many in the Congo spoke French, too. Iranzi now told them he
was heading home from work and supplied the name of his employer and the
company address.
He
was stopped two more times in weeks to come. The second time, all they asked
for were his name and ID. The third time, one officer remarked: “Oh, this is the guy. Let him
go?”
Iranzi
continued:
That fall I
started taking college classes in the mornings, so I’d get back from class in
the afternoon and then do a full shift. I was sleeping less than four hours
a night, but I had a positive perspective: You make it work. The Jewish
Family Services offered me a job helping to settle other refugees. Now my
bachelor’s degree is almost complete, and I’m training for the National
Guard.
I eventually
saved enough money to buy a car, but in the days when I was still riding my
bike, the police never bothered me again. Instead, when a police car passed by,
they sometimes slowed down, turned on the light for a second and made that
little whoop sound.
I started to
like it when they did that. I was new to the United States, and this was kind
of hello.
*
“We
serve 2,000.”
(2011)
I
have a few notes here, that I made more recently. When I bicycled across the
U.S.A. in 2011, I met an impressive young man in Clinton, Iowa. He got his
start in the restaurant business, washing dishes at a place owned by (if
I remember correctly), a cousin. He worked hard, moved up, learned to make a
restaurant work.
In
my blog for the trip I wrote:
in Clinton,
Iowa I had the best meal of my trip at a Mexican restaurant called La Feria (I
think that’s spelled right). The owner is named Caesar Lopez, and he came
to the United States with his family when he was a young boy. The meal his
place put down in front of me was so huge, and so good, I felt almost guilty
paying such a minimal price – and even thought of ordering a beer just to
improve the tab. I asked the waiter if the owner was around, and Caesar
came out to see me. He’s probably only 35, but already has three places,
and says, “I love what I’m doing, I don’t see myself ever doing anything
else.” He just loves to make the customers “feel good,” “to put the best
food possible” on the table.
I asked him what a
“bad” day was in his place. He said when they served 500. “What’s a
good day?” I asked in astonishment.
“We serve 2,000.”
The proud owner of La Feria.
NOTE TO TEACHERS:
Any discussion of immigration today might be fraught with issues that could
divide a classroom – and bring down parental anger upon one’s head. Many of the
examples below come from the Trump years (2017-2021), which I have plugged in from
a different blog I started when he was first elected. By 2016, I had been
retired for eight years. My bias is clear, and I would not use a similar tone
in a classroom.
I’d clean this up,
if I were still in a classroom – but you may find some of these examples
useful, if you handle them wisely.
I do check my facts
rigorously.
*
Florida
voter purge.
(2012)
Back
in 2012, Florida announced that it was purging 186,000 non-citizens from its
voting rolls.
Feverish
authorities went to work. First, they checked their original scary list and
discovered that the actual number of non-citizens registered to vote was…2,600.
Still too many!!!! Then they checked again, and the list shrank to 198! Then
they found out that among the tens of thousands of voters they had purged was a
Brooklyn-born, decorated World War II vet.
That
was embarrassing for everyone involved.
By
the time Florida authorities cleaned up their records the 186,000 had been reduced to 85 cases,
a not scary number at all.
*
The ultimate
sacrifice.
(2013)
We knew years ago how much immigrants helped to keep America safe. In February
2008, the U.S. military reported that 65,033 foreign-born men and women were
serving under the Stars and Stripes. That included 20,328 non-citizens
but did not include the 111 who had already been killed in Iraq and
Afghanistan, fighting for a flag that some native-born Americans don’t believe
they’re fit to have drape their coffins. Those heroes had been granted
citizenship posthumously in return for their lives.
By 2013, 284
foreign-born service members had been killedin the global fight
against terror.
Let’s consider a few who
gave their lives under the Stars and Stripes:
One officer who decided to use his
talent and skill in service to our national security was Army Chief Warrant
Officer Suresh Krause. In Sri Lanka, where Krause was born, the two official
languages are Tamil and Sinhalese, both of which are considered “critical”
languages for recruitment purposes by the U.S. Army.
Krause joined the U.S. military to
contribute another skill that was a passion from an early age — flying —
telling family members the Christmas before his death that he planned on
serving as a pilot in the Army for 20 years.
Krause’s story is similar to that of
many talented and ambitious immigrants. He came to America at age 14 after
being adopted by his aunt and uncle. As a young man, Krause tried to take
advantage of the opportunity his parents gave him. Krause, who teachers
describe as a “math genius,” displayed incredible talent in aeronautics, going
on to graduate from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. After graduation, he
became an officer in the U.S. Army, where he distinguished himself once again.
During his military career, Krause earned several prestigious awards, including
the Army Commendation Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Global War on
Terrorism Service Medal, and NATO Medal, for his valor and leadership on the
front lines.
Krause was ultimately killed while
piloting a Black Hawk helicopter in Kandahar, Afghanistan. His uncle, Brody
Schmidt, described his decision to enlist as an act of gratitude for the nation
that took him in. “This is not his native soil,” Schmidt said at the time, “But
in his heart of hearts he bled U.S.A. blood.” Following his death, former
Representative Mary Bono Mack helped Krause obtain his U.S. citizenship.
“Simply becoming an American citizen
wasn’t enough for Suresh,” Mack stated, “He wanted to defend his adopted home,
as well… In the end, Suresh Abayasekara Krause was as American as you can get.”
Next:
Sgt. Pamela Osborne, who was born in
Jamaica, is one foreign-born member who made her mark on the U.S. Army. Osborne
moved to Miami at age 14 with two goals: to become a U.S. citizen and to serve
her adopted country as a solider in the military. She enlisted in 2001, shortly
before September 11. “She loved what she did,” her husband has said. Even after
being diagnosed with a medical condition that could have resulted in her
leaving the military, she kept going. As she explained to her husband at the time,
“I’m going to serve my country, to protect my country.” Osborne passed
away in the service of her fellow soldiers. On October 11, 2004, after spending
the morning in church, Osborne headed out to deliver supplies to another
enlisted service member and vehicle mechanic, Pvt. Anthony Monroe of Bismarck,
North Dakota.
Both were killed when rocket fire hit
their camp in Baghdad. “Sgt. Osborne was always ready to help soldiers,” one of
her colleagues wrote on a tribute page after her death, “She was a credit to
the United States, and I’m lucky to have known and served with her.”
Finally:
Army Sgt. 1st Class Tung Nguyen
is one immigrant who died in service in recent years after a long and
celebrated career in the U.S. Army. Nguyen joined the military shortly after
graduating from high school. During his 20 years of service, Nguyen rose
steadily through the ranks. In 1992, he qualified as a Green Beret, becoming a
part of U.S. Army Special Forces, a prestigious unit designed for special and
unconventional operations. He was given several other accolades as well,
including two Meritorious Service Medals, two Army Commendation Medals, and
four Army Achievement Medals.
Nguyen’s decision to serve led
naturally from his experiences early in life. As a young boy living in South
Vietnam, he was surrounded by a tradition of military service. He grew up
hearing stories from the front lines of the Vietnam War, a battle in which many
of Nguyen’s family members fought against communist forces. At the age of 11,
Nguyen fled his native Vietnam, finding refuge and a stable home with a foster
family in Tracy, California. Once there, his interest in serving his new
country continued. Nguyen died during a small arms fire in Iraq in 2006.
Following his death Nguyen was awarded the Bronze Star, Purple Heart, Iraq
Campaign Medal, and Combat Infantryman Badge posthumously.
In his last conversation with his
mother, while reflecting on his life, service, and accomplishments, Sergeant
Nguyen continued to show a great level of dedication and gratitude to the
United States. He ended the conversation thanking her for “letting him go to
America.”
Sgt. First Class Nguyen.
*
Muslim ban.
(2017)
When he first takes office, Mr. Trump is on an
anti-Muslim crusade. His base is terrified. They believed Obama was a Muslim.
And all the Muslims in the world were out to get us. So, it was up to the new president
to block immigration from the Muslim world entirely.
The federal courts promptly blocked the total
ban.
On February 12, the president tweeted simplistic
warning: “72% of refugees admitted into U.S. (2/3 -2/11) during COURT
BREAK-DOWN are from 7 countries: SYRIA, IRAQ, SOMALIA, IRAN, SUDAN, LIBYA
& YEMEN[.]”
Our newly-elected president should have known
that many refugees from
these countries were Christians.
Many were Muslims but had worked for the
U.S. military. That made them unpopular in their own countries. They sought
safety in America, a nation they helped during the war.
Eventually, he realized that not all Muslims
were bad. He decided he liked Iranians, if they protested against their
government. On December 31, he tweeted: “Big protests in Iran. The
people are finally getting wise as to how their money and wealth is being
stolen and squandered on terrorism. Looks like they will not take it any
longer. The USA is watching very closely for human rights violations!”
Of course, under Trump administration policies,
if any leaders of those protests might need to flee to avoid arrest or
execution, they would not be welcomeas refugees in
this country.
Muslim-Americans have died for this country.
*
One in
twelve jobs.
(2017)
Immigration
talk is all the rage in Washington. Trump’s base fears immigrants, in part
because immigrants want to kill Americans with hammers, shovels and garden
tools.
Let’s
take a trip to Texas – where they really, really, really need a wall!
__________
“Texas lives on immigrant labor. Our economy is the
way it is partly because cost of living is cheap and the reason for that is
labor is cheap.”
Jeff Nielsen,
Houston Contractors Association
__________
Look
closely and you notice something odd. Texas government is dominated by the GOP.
Texas has a GOP governor. The GOP controls the Texas House of Representatives
and the Texas Senate. The state has two Republican U.S. senators and
Republican-gerrymandered congressional districts ensure Republicans send 25 GOP
representatives to the U.S. House of Representatives vs. 11 Democrats. And yet
undocumented workers are employed all over the state.
Despite
what Trump & Co. would have you believe they aren’t killing people. They’re
laying brick, finishing drywall and shingling homes. According to the Houston Chronicle, 400,000 construction
jobs in Texas are filled by undocumented workers.
Why?
They
work for half what American workers might demand. Jeff Nielsen, executive vice
president of the Houston Contractors Association, is blunt. “Texas lives on immigrant labor. Our economy is the way it is
partly because cost of living is cheap and the reason for that is labor is
cheap.”
(I
found that 400,000 number so surprising, I decided to check my sources. The sources
agree.)
A Pew
study completed in 2014 estimated that 1 in every 12 Texas jobs was
filled by an undocumented worker. They were hired mostly by GOP-leaning
business owners, almost all of whom would argue what we what we need most if we
want to help real American workers would be massive tax cuts for businesses!
Tax cuts would allow them to hire more workers!
*
(2017)
A Sikh
gentleman, born in India and living near Seattle, is approached in his driveway
and shot by a white assailant.
December 3: Speaking of courts –
that pesky third branch of government – Trump is on the rampage again.
A jury in San Francisco has listened to evidence in the case
of Jose Ines Garcia Zarote and deliberated for six days. Zarote, an illegal
immigrant, shot and killed Kate Steinle, an innocent bystander on a city pier.
That made him poster boy for Candidate/President Trump, who used the case to
prove we needed a giant border wall (and maybe a moat filled with piranhas) to
protect ourselves.
The story is a tragedy. Still, the case for murder is weak. Zarote did fire a gun – and as a
felon should not have had one in his possession. The bullet hit the pavement
and struck Steinle, eighty feet away, on a ricochet. This does not mean Zarote
is not vile. This does not mean the Steinle family did not suffer irredeemable
loss. It does mean Zarote could not be found guilty of murder, since he had no intent.
*
Fleeing
violence from religious extremists.
(2017)
At age seven, Tanitoluwa Adewumi, better known
as Tani, was living in a homeless shelter with his family. His parents brought
him to this country from Nigeria, after fleeing violence from Boko Haram. Tani
got interested in chess and joined a team at his school, after his mother asked
them to waive fees. When he was focused on chess, the boy could forget the
chaos of the shelter. He developed quickly and at age eight, he won the New
York State championship for his age group.
Stories in The New York Times led
to a GoFundMe campaign. Donations of $250,000 poured in and an offer of a
year’s free housing. In May 2021, one month short of his eleventh birthday,
Tani won a Connecticut tournament open to players of all ages. “I want to be
the youngest grandmaster,” he told a reporter. “I want to have it when I’m 11
or 12.”
His parents have found their footing in a new
country. His mother, Oluwatoyin, “has just qualified as a patient care
technician and is looking for work. His father, Kayode, is now a real
estate agent.
The chess wizard.
*
Eddie’s
Steak House loses an employee.
(2017)
At
least one Trump supporter learned a harder lesson, regarding immigration. Helen
Beristain, an Indiana woman who, with her husband, ran a successful restaurant,
Eddie’s Steak Shed, in Granger, Indiana, voted for Trump in 2016.
Sadly,
Mrs. Beristain failed to consider the fact her husband Roberto was an undocumented immigrant, having come
to this country from Mexico in 1998. ICE nabbed him at work and deported him,
leaving Mrs. Beristain to take care of their three children and run Eddie’s
Steak House by herself.
*
“The
reason I’m talking to you now is because I’m free.”
(2017)
Reporters
from The New York Timesasked
immigrantswhat they thought of a cabinet meeting, in June 2017, during which attendees took
turns praising President Trump, often in cloying fashion.
Steve
Le came to America from South Vietnam in 1975, when he was seven, and is now a
doctor. He replied,
In how many other countries can you
call the top elected official in the country a liar and get away with it?
Although our democratic process looks dirty to some people, in the end it all
comes out clean. We continue to be the longest-standing constitutional nation
in the entire history of the Earth, and it is because our forefathers designed
that constitution so uniquely in balancing out the powers.
Yohannes
Tesfagibir came here from Eritrea, which has had only one president since it
won independence in the 90s. It’s known as the North Korea of Africa. “The
reason I’m talking to you now is because I’m free,” he told the reporter.
“The
whole talk from Trump about ‘I’m going to solve their problems, somebody else
is the cause of the problems, and if you’re not with me, then you’re not
patriotic’ – that’s the Middle East,” said Raji Alatassi, who left Syria twenty
years ago.
Leopold
Kazadi, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, said he watched the late-night
comics poke fun at Trump “with a kind of deep patriotism.” “Here I see a lot of
comedians make a joke about the president. People can speak out. In Congo, I
can say it’s like ‘esclave.’ I say ‘esclave’ in French. People are like
slaves.”
“My mom tells me all the time, ‘I’m so glad you’re over there.”
*
“I’m a
real American now.”
(July
4, 2017)
The New York Times reports on immigrants at a
swearing-in ceremony, to become new U.S. citizens:
Mahmoud
Esmaeili “was so excited he couldn’t sleep. He moved to the United States over
five years ago.” He was sworn in July 4 as a U.S. citizen. “I want to cry. I
feel like, wow, my dream has come true and I’m a real American now. He’s 33, a
software engineer. “I like the system here. I like the rule of law. You know
what to expect and what to not expect, so you can plan. That was the major part
of why I wanted to be part of America.”
Referring
to Trump’s anti-immigrant stance, he added, “I believe in this system, and
that’s why I’m here. I believe that one person – even if it’s the president – can’t
do everything he wants. The people are important. People are going to know they
made a mistake and they will re-elect someone more suited to America.”
Muhamad
Tai, a Pakistani Muslim, says the turn of sentiment in recent months has made
his life harder. “I am in between. I still love my country which I was born
for, Pakistan, and I love the country of my future, America.”
A
man dressed in a George Washington costume tells the new citizens, “Our nation,
I believe, has the good wishes of all freedom-loving people in all nations, and
I believe they look upon the United States of America as a kind of model for
mankind. I pray that we may not disappoint their honest expectations.”
Johnna
Scepansky, 50, watching the swearing in, but not related or friends with any of
the participants, says, “I hate the vilification that’s coming out on people
who just want to be here and have the best possible lives for their family.”
NOTE TO TEACHERS: Again, my
dislike for President Trump is admitted. Some of the examples to follow,
however, reshaped to suit your classrooms, might be of value.
I, myself, could make a
plausible argument for the curtailment of immigration. I believe my job was,
and your job is, to make students think.
*
“All these people from shithole countries.”
(2018)
In
an afternoon meeting at the White House, with members of both political parties
present, discussion turns to renewal of DACA and comprehensive
immigration reform. Senators Lindsey Graham and Dick Durbin suggest extending
protection to various immigrant groups, including people from El Salvador,
Haiti and Africa.
The
president gets frustrated, as he so often does, and lets his feelings boil up.
“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” he
asks. “Why do we need more Haitians?” he wonders, hearing they’d be protected
under the bipartisan deal. “Take them out!”
What
would be great? Less Haitians and, according to Trump, more Norwegians!
The
White House does not initially deny the report about what he said.
*
January 12: A new
day dawns. A brand-new cover story is ready. Trump denies on Twitter that he
used the term “shithole” in a meeting with lawmakers. Yes, he admits, his
language was “tough.” He says the “shithole” story is made up. He never
insulted Haitians. “I have a wonderful relationship with Haitians.” All he
wants to do is kick 60,000 of them out of this country.
Other
than that…
The
new cover story takes a major hit when Senator Durbin says, no, Trump did use the term “shithole” and more than once. “I cannot imagine
that in the history of that hallowed room [the Oval Office],” Durbin tells
reporters, “where the president of the United States goes to work every day,
there has ever been a conversation quite like that. It was vile, it was
hateful, it was racist.”
Two Republican lawmakers
in the room issue a non-denial denial. Who, us? We don’t remember what Trump said.
“America is an idea…”
Senator Graham issues a lengthy statement which all but says, “Durbin is telling
the truth. Trump is a liar.”
Here are the key lines:
Following comments by the President, I
said my piece directly to him yesterday. The President and all those attending
the meeting know what I saidand how
I feel. I’ve always believed that America is an idea, not defined by its
people but by its ideals…Diversity has always been our strength, not our
weakness. In reforming immigration we cannot lose these American Ideals.
It
doesn’t help Trump’s case when Tim Scott, South Carolina’s other GOP senator,
tells reporters, Graham confirmedthe shithole comments to him. Scott calls the president’s
response “incredibly disappointing.”
*
January 13: What
can Trump do? He can’t apologize (see:
1/12/18). It’s not in his repertoire. He’ll have to ride this “shithole”
controversy out. Trump tries to tweet his way out of a hole. Not that hole!
Some other hole. Twice he tweet-blames Democrats for destroying the chance to
save DACA.
Reaction
from around the globe is negative. The African Union, representing 55 nations,
says the president’s comments were “clearly racist.” The Union statement
continues: “The African Union
Mission condemns the comments in
the strongest terms and demands a retraction as well as an apology
not only to Africans, but to all people of African descent around the globe.” The
Vatican calls Trump’s words, “particularly harsh and offensive.” Rupert
Colville, United Nations human rights spokesman, tells reporters, “There is no
other word one can use but racist. You cannot dismiss entire countries and
continents as ‘shitholes,’ whose entire populations, who are not white, are
therefore not welcome.” A European
lawmaker suggests Trump “had forgotten to engage his brain before talking.” But
that’s pretty much a given.
Even
Republican leaders feel compelled to say something. House Speaker Paul Ryan looks like he’s sucking
a pickle when asked for reaction. Showing that famous Ryan Spine, he says
Trump’s words are “unfortunate” and “unhelpful.”
Yes,
most Americans agree. Racist comments are “unhelpful.”
Former
RNC Chairman Michael Steele says the president is a racist. “At this point,
the evidence is incontrovertible.”
Republican
Congresswoman Mia Love, herself of Haitian-American descent, says Trump’s remarks were “unkind, divisive, elitist, and fly in
the face of our nation’s values.” She adds, “This behavior is unacceptable from
the leader of our nation.”
Even Norwegians are not impressed. Says one
veteran journalist, Trump’s comments fall “into a pattern of nativist and very
unpleasant language from a poorly qualified president, if not worse…. [He]
seems to relish in derogatory remarks about others and praise for himself.”
Meanwhile, on his radio
show, right-wing nut job Alex Jones explains his latest
conspiracy theory. Someone is covertly drugging Trump.
Really. I’m not joking.
*
“To preserve what we value as the American way of
life.”
(2018)
In the wake of President Trump’s comments about
“shitholes,” others go out of their way to point to “good Americans” who were
born elsewhere, including some of those very countries. Some cite the example
set by Emmanuel Mensah, who came here from Ghana. Mensah, a member of the Army
National Guard, died after rescuing four people from a burning building and going after a fifth.
A photo of Alix Idrache,
from his graduation ceremony at West Point, a Haitian immigrant himself, goes
viral. Idrache captures the essence
of what has always made the United States great.
He posts an explanation
of the scene on the school’s Instagram page.
Three things came to mind and led to
those tears. The first is where I started. I am from Haiti and never did I
imagine that such honor would be one day bestowed on me. The second is where I
am. Men and women who have preserved the very essence of the human condition
stood in that position and took the same oath...
The third is my future. Shortly after
leave, I will report to Ft. Rucker to start flight school. Knowing that one day
I will be a pilot is humbling beyond words. I could not help but be flooded
with emotions knowing that I will be leading these men and women who are willing to give their all to preserve
what we value as the American way of life. To me, that is the greatest
honor. Once again, thank you.
*
Great
immigrants, great Americans
(2018)
The Carnegie Corporation of New York, a
philanthropic organization started in 1911, “salutes great immigrants, great
Americans” in a New York Times spread.
The diverse group includes: Art Acevedo, police chief of
Houston (Cuba), Matee Ajavon, a female professional basketball player
(Liberia), Mohamed Ali, CEO of Carbonite (Guyana), Max Boot, military historian
and columnist (Russia), Salud Crabajal, U.S. Congressman from California
(Mexico), Du Yun, Pulitzer Prize winner in composing and performance (China),
Kerron Clement, Olympic gold medal winner in track and field (Trinidad and
Tobago), Joachim Frank, Nobel Prize in chemistry (Germany), Adriano
Espaillat, U.S. Congressman from New York (Dominican Republic) Pramila
Jayapal, U.S. Congresswoman from Washington (India), Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO
of Uber (Iran), Mariana Walker Guevara, Pulitzer Prize winner for journalism
(Argentina), Martyna Majok, Pulitzer Prize for drama (Poland), Eugene H. Trinh,
astronaut and biochemist (Vietnam), Regina Spektor, singer and songwriter
(Russia), Carmen R. Velasquez, New York State Supreme Court Justice (Ecuador),
Imbolo Mbue, author and PEN/Faulkner Award winner for her fiction (Cameroon),
Shuji Nakamura, Nobel Prize in physics (Japan) and Kumail Nanjiani, comic actor
and writer (Pakistan).
If I were still
teaching, I’d note the three members of Congress who were all born in
other countries.
*
(2018)
The Trump administration decides torevoke Temporary Protective Status for 200,000 Salvadorians living
legally in this country. More than half arrived before 1990. Now they may have
to return to a country they barely remember. Combined, they have 193,000
children born in the United States, and therefore citizens.
*
Bring a gun.
Let’s shoot illegal immigrants.
(2018)
After Carl
Higbie’s words come under scrutiny, he is forced to leave the Trump
administration.
We all know
how much the president wants to clamp down on illegal immigrants pouring into
this country, each and every one, intent on doing us harm. Also: taking jobs in
hotels and making beds.
And picking
strawberries.
Higbie had
some great ideas about how to curb the tide and you can see why his ideas might
have appealed to Trump, who just happens to be a big fan of Norwegian
immigrants, who just happen to be white. In an episode on a radio show,
ironically called Sound of Freedom,
Higbie had this to say:
What’s so wrong with wanting to put up a fence and
saying, “hey, everybody with a gun, if you want to go shoot people coming
across our border illegally, you can do it for free.” And you can do it on your
own, and you’ll be under the command of the, you know, National Guard unit or a
Border Patrol, I think stick a fence six feet high with signs on it in both
English and Spanish and it says “if you cross this border, this is the American
border, you cross it, we’re going to shoot you.”
For added fun
click this link to CNN, which is running sound
clips from various Higbie
hate-filled rants.
*
(2018)
One
American who believes immigration is bad would be Lori McAllen, who works for the Oregon Department
of Motor Vehicles. McAllen causes a firestorm by offering up her thoughts
regarding family separation at the border and posting them on Facebook. “I
think they should shoot them all at the border and call it good,” she writes,
“it’ll save us hard-working AMERICANS billions of dollars on our taxes!!”
Another
man who wants to save tax dollars – and we do know donated to Trump in 2016—is
New York City lawyer Aaron Schlossberg. He’s the gentleman who went bananas after stopping for lunch at a restaurant near his office.
There he overheard several people speaking Spanish. He shouted that they should
be “kicked out of the country.” “Every person I listen to – he spoke [Spanish],
he spoke it, she’s speaking it,” the lawyer wailed, pointing at one employee
and two customers.
“It’s
America!” he wailed.
“If
they have the balls to come here and live off of my money – I pay for their
welfare, I pay for their ability to be here – the least they can do is speak
English,” Schlossberg continued. “If you intend on running a place in Midtown
Manhattan the staff should be speaking English, not Spanish!”
Noticing
that one of the Spanish-speaking customers was filming his tirade, the hungry
racist added, “Honey, I’m calling ICE.”
A
week later, having been identified as a giant asshole on various social media
platforms, he apologized and assured everyone he was not really a racist, even
though he sounded exactly like he was.
*
(2018)
The
#1 chess player in the U.S. today is Leinier DomÃnguez, born in Cuba, a U.S. citizen since
2018.
*
“The
laws are the laws.”
(2018)
White House
Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly decides to weigh in on the matter of
immigration. Asked about illegal immigrants crossing the Mexican border, he tells
reporters:
“Let me step back and tell you that the vast majority of the people that move
illegally into United States are not bad people. They’re not criminals. They’re
not MS13.”
So
far, so good. Kelly sounded like he grasped the nuances of the question.
“But
they’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States
into our modern society,” he adds.
These
immigrants did not speak English well, he warned, as if he imagined his Italian
great-grandparents did. Today’s immigrants, Kelly added, were “overwhelmingly
rural people” from countries where “fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are
kind of the norm…They don’t integrate well; they don’t have skills. They’re not
bad people. They’re coming here for a reason. And I sympathize with the reason.
But the laws are the laws.”
That
immigrants in the first generation have difficulty assimilating has always been
true. The first-generation Irish helped build railroads and canals.
First-generation Italians went to work in coal mines and steel mills, working
long hours for low pay. Today, first-generation Mexicans and Hondurans roof
houses, groom golf courses and nanny kids. The second-generation Irish became
policemen in Boston. The second-generation Italians, like the DiMaggio
brothers, starred on the diamond. The second-generation Mexicans and Hondurans
in the DACA program join the United States military, care for the sick in
hospitals and teach in our schools.
Pfc.
Diego Rincon, whose family fled Columbia as refugees, and who died at 19 in
Iraq, wins posthumous U.S. citizenship. He would probably not approve of the
Trump administration plan to cut the number of refugees allowed to enter the U.S.
While
we’re on the topic, did you know 9,000 Dreamers work as teachers in this
country? That includes New Mexico “Teacher of the Year,” Ivonne Orozco.
President
Trump grumbles that the United States has the “dumbest immigration laws
anywhere on earth,” “the worst
immigration laws in history.” These were “laws that were written by people that
truly could not love our country.”
The
Washington Post runs an interesting article on Gen. Kelly’s family background. It turns out seven of
his eight great-grand parents were immigrants, three from Ireland, four from
Italy.
To produce one Marine general, you need seven immigrant great-grandparents.
(The blogger is actually a fan of Gen. Kelly, for many reasons.
*
“Mrs. Trump hates to see children
separated from their families.”
(2018)
The
Trump administration begins separating children from parents if they try to
enter the country illegally. White House aide Stephen Miller is clear about the
decision to start separating families, even when parents are claiming asylum. “No nation,” he
insists,
…can have the policy that whole
classes of people are immune from immigration law or enforcement. It was a simple decision by the administration
to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period. The message is that
no one is exempt from immigration law.
The
new separation policy proves highly unpopular. The spokeswoman for the First
Lady issues a statement: “Mrs. Trump hates
to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle
can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform. She
believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that
governs with heart.”
None of the four former
First Ladies supports the president. Okay, Hillary, you figure is a given.
Rosalynn Carter remembers Cambodians fleeing a murderous communist regime in
the 70s. Those refugees included many individuals who helped U.S. forces during
the Vietnam War. She’s blunt:
When I was first lady, I worked to call
attention to the plight of refugees fleeing Cambodia for Thailand. I visited
Thailand and witnessed firsthand the trauma of parents and children separated
by circumstance beyond their control. The practice and policy today of removing
children from their parents’ care at our border with Mexico is disgraceful and a shame to our country.
And
you have to credit Mrs. Clinton, a little, for using the Bible to blast
Attorney General Sessions’ claim that the Bible somehow justified his policy.
She calls what’s happening along the border a “humanitarian crisis.”
“Those
who selectively use the Bible to justify this cruelty are ignoring a central
tenet of Christianity. Jesus said ‘Suffer the little children unto me.’ He did
not say ‘let the children suffer.’”
Laura Bush compares the
policy to the treatment of Japanese Americans who were locked up in 1942,
despite having taken no part in the attacks on Pearl Harbor. “I live
in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our
international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart.”
Mrs.
Obama checks Laura Bush’s statement with the comment, “Sometimes truth
transcends party.”
Sen.
Orren Hatch is joinedby a dozen Republican senators in
firing off a letter to Mr. Sessions. “We support the administration’s efforts
to enforce our immigration laws,” they write, “but we cannot support
implementation of a policy that
results inthe categorical forced separation of minor children from
their parents.”
*
ICE
raid in Ohio.
(2018)
In
June 2018, ICE carries out one of its largest immigration raids in years. Agents
descend on the Fresh Mark meat-packing plant in Salem, Ohio, and lead away 146
employees in handcuffs. Fresh Mark is alleged to have hired undocumented
workers for years.
Why
would Fresh Mark do it? The undocumented work cheap and don’t expect
healthcare.
Or overtime pay.
*
Good for the country.
(2018)
In
a Gallup poll in June, 75% of Americans say they believe immigration is good for the country, a record high.
Just
19% feel it is bad for our nation.
*
Dangerous
illegals at a golf course?
(2018)
Federal
and state authorities have evidence that fake green cards and fake Social Security numbers may
have been supplied to illegal immigrants working at a New Jersey golf course.
Here you have these “murders” and “rapists” – probably nine out of every ten
being members of MS-13 – working in the clubhouse, wiping down tables in the
bar and cutting grass on the course. At every turn, these dangerous individuals
have access to deadly implements and might at any moment set upon rich private
club members, stabbing them with kitchen knives, whacking them over the head
with putters or finishing them off with lawn care tools of their choice.
Thankfully,
authorities have broken up the alleged crime ring - in Bedminster, N.J. –
and are gathering evidence even now. Two potential killers, Victorina Morales
and Sandra Diaz, who had been posing as cleaning ladies, turned over fake
document and threw themselves on the mercy of the court.
For
the sake of golfing Americans and their loved ones, let’s pray state police and
F.B.I. agents called in on the case can get to the bottom of this mess at Trump
National Golf Club, owned by the president himself.
Dangerous immigrants along the fairways?
*
Laura
Ingraham “sees” an America she doesn’t like.
(2018)
President Trump makes it
clear he believes “chain migration” must be stopped. Chain migration “begins”
when one immigrant comes to this country legally. After several years, that
immigrant becomes a citizen. The new citizen then sponsors relatives, particularly
parents, and siblings, to come. Those relatives qualify for green cards and
may, in five years or so, become citizens themselves.
According to Laura
Ingraham, on Fox News, we can’t allow this to continue. Ingraham highlights the danger:
In some parts of the country, it does
seem like the America that we know and
love doesn’t exist anymore.
Massive demographic changes have been
foisted upon the American people and they’re changes that none of us ever voted
for and most of us don’t like.
From Virginia to California, we see
stark examples of how radically in some ways the country has changed. Now, much
of this is related to both illegal and in some cases, legal immigration that,
of course, progressives love.
Let’s tease out her
meaning. Once upon a time there was an America we could “love.” Now there are
changes “most of us don’t like.” These are changes “we see.”
What prompts Ingraham to
turn fear into words? She’s upset about a Democratic candidate for Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who
expounds socialist views. People like Ocasio-Cortez, that “we see,” will ruin
America.
Even legal immigration
may mean America won’t be the America “we love” for much longer.
This particular blogger
and retired teacher sniffs racism in Ingraham’s words; but perhaps others will
interpret them more generously. One who does, unfortunately, is David Duke. Her
argument seems so on point, he tweets, that he has
to offer his support. “One of the most important (truthful) monologues in the
history of MSM [mainstream media],” he says.
And who is Duke? He ran
as a Republican for governor of Louisiana in 1991. He didn’t win. He ran as a
Republican for the U.S. Senate in 2016. He still didn’t win. Duke is also a
former grand wizard of the K.K.K. and, to the day he dies, likely to remain a
K.K.K. man at heart.
What then can “we see,”
assuming we look through the eyes of people like Ingraham, Duke and (I would
argue) the current President of the United States?
We don’t want immigrants who
look like this:
Sikh officer: U.S. Army - special permission needed to wear head covering.
Father of a Muslim American officer killed in battle.
Afghan children - refugees.
Nigerian immigrant takes the oath of citizenship.
*
A
proposal to block most refugees.
(2018)
Top White House aide
Stephen Miller comes under attack in August, from an unexpected direction. Miller
is a leading architect of Trump administration immigration policy. In that role
he has pushed for an array of limits, including curtailing legal immigration.
Chain migration, Miller
says, must end (see above, and below).
The “zero tolerance”
policy, separating parents and children seeking asylum at the border, leading
to children barely old enough to talk being locked up in cages, was a Miller
initiative. Last year the number of refugees allowed to enter the country legally was
cut to the lowest level in four decades. The total was capped at 45,000, even
though a coalition of religious groups hoped to see at least 75,000 admitted.
Miller’s fingerprints were all over that policy too.
Now Team Trump is
advancing plans to reduce the flow to 25,000 per year. One
former administration official told reporters that with Miller in his ear,
Trump has considered going as low as 5,000 refugees.
Why has Miller been so
keen on the idea of cutting immigration? And why is Trump so happy to listen? Politico recently explained. Miller was
not “deterred” by the child separation disaster, one GOP source said.
“He is an adamant believer in stopping
any immigration, and the president thinks it plays well with his base.”
Miller was distraught in the aftermath
of the zero-tolerance fiasco, said two Republicans close to the White House. He
considered zero tolerance an essential component to his efforts to deter
immigration. For his troubles, he got heckled at D.C. restaurants, prompting him in one instance
angrily to pitch $80 worth of takeout sushi into a trash bin.
Protesters showed up at his apartment
complex chanting, “Stephen Miller/ You’re a villain/ Locking up/ innocent
children.”
Now
Miller is taking heatfrom his family. In an editorial, his
uncle David S. Glosser lays down the story of Miller’s roots. Glosser begins:
“Let me tell you…about Stephen Miller and chain migration.”
In
the face of “violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in
the Czar’s army” a Russian Jew named “Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where
his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America.”
He set foot on Ellis Island on January
7, 1903, with $8 to his name. Though fluent in Polish, Russian, and Yiddish he
understood no English. An elder son, Nathan, soon followed. By street corner
peddling and sweat-shop toil Wolf-Leib and Nathan sent enough money home to pay
off debts and buy the immediate family’s passage to America in 1906. That group
included young Sam Glosser, who with his family settled in the western
Pennsylvania city of Johnstown, a booming coal and steel town that was a magnet
for other hard-working immigrants.
The
family set out in dogged pursuit of the American Dream. First, they sold goods
out of a horse-drawn wagon. Next came the purchase of a haberdashery. Over the
years the Glossers built up a chain of supermarkets and discount department
stores. The family business “was big enough to be listed on the AMEX stock
exchange and employed thousands of people over time.”
What
does this have to do with Miller? His mother was a Glosser and the sister of the editorialist.
David
Glosser is harsh in assessing his nephew’s anti-immigrant stance:
I shudder at the thought of what would
have become of the Glossers had the same policies Stephen so coolly
espouses—the travel ban, the radical decrease in refugees, the separation of
children from their parents, and even talk of limiting citizenship for legal immigrants—been in effect when
Wolf-Leib made his desperate bid for freedom.
The Glossers came to the U.S. just a
few years before the fear and prejudice of the “America First” nativists of the
day closed U.S. borders to Jewish refugees. Had Wolf-Leib waited, his family
would likely have been murdered by the Nazis along with all but seven of the
2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol [the Glosser’s ancestral village].
I would encourage Stephen to ask
himself if the chanting,
torch-bearing Nazis of Charlottesville, whose support his boss seems
to court so cavalierly, do not envision a similar fate for him.
Glosser
goes on to outline the president’s own immigration story. Friedrich Trump, his
grandfather, left Germany to avoid military service and came to the U.S. in
1885. Avoiding service to country is a Trump family tradition.
Trump’s
mother “fled the poverty of rural Scotland for the economic possibilities of
New York City.”
And
today, two like-minded men, Miller and Trump, are working in tandem to slam the
door to America on people who would come here for the same reasons their own
ancestors did.
Neo-Nazis at Charlottesville.
*
The
First Lady and chain migration.
(2018)
For a list of all the
times President Trump has railed against “chain migration,” go to his Twitter
Archive, type “chain migration”
under “search” and see what pops up:
Nov 1, 2017: CHAIN
MIGRATION must end now! Some people come in, and they bring their whole
family with them, who can be truly evil. NOT ACCEPTABLE!
Nov 2, 2017: Congress must
end chain migration so that we can have a system that is SECURITY
BASED! We need to make AMERICA SAFE!
Feb 6, 2018: We need a
21st century MERIT-BASED immigration system. Chain migration and the
visa lottery are outdated programs that hurt our economic and national
security.
Now, just for fun, try
to guess who was sworn in as American citizens in August 2018.
It was the First Lady’s
parents,Viktor and
Amalija Knavs. And how did they get
to the head of the line to immigrate to the United States? Were they admitted
because of special merit? Do they have special skills in demand in the United
States? Were they ready to serve under the U.S. flag?
Viktor
was listed as early as 2007 as having
residence at Mar-a-Lago. In Slovenia, Viktor Knavs (now 73) worked as a
chauffeur and car salesman. Amalija Knavs (now 71) was a pattern maker at a
textile factory.
How
about Melania?
She
was admitted to the U.S. under a program that allows people with extraordinary abilities to cut the line.
According to the Washington Post,
“She has not provided details about how she proved to the U.S. government that
she qualified to receive a green card for her ‘extraordinary ability,’ a
category generally reserved for highly accomplished people such as Nobel Prize
winners.”
Melania’s
older, “under-the-radar” sister, Ines, also immigrated to the U.S. One Florida philanthropist, who met her at
Mar-a-Lago in 2005, described her “as a lovely person, and extremely creative.”
Apparently, Ines is an artist; but the First Lady doesn’t care to talk about
her. Ines lives quietly “in a Trump-owned apartment in the same Upper East Side
building that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump called home” before they headed
off to D.C. to help drain the swamp.
And
if Laura Ingraham was worried about a “socialist” Democrat like Ocasio-Cortez,
she might want to consider Melania’s father. Growing up in what was Yugoslavia,
he joined the Communist Party.
White
House spokeswoman Hope Hicks once assured reporters that Melania’s dad was never a “card-carrying”
member.
Still,
shouldn’t Fox News be warning about him?
The
First Lady’s parents made their first trip to America in February 2004. Now,
fourteen years later, they are as American as you and I.
Yet,
in his State of the Union address last February the president warned:
Under the current broken system, a
single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives.
Under our plan, we focus on the immediate family by limiting sponsorships to spouses and minor children. This
vital reform is necessary, not just for our economy, but for our security and
our future.
The
First Lady has declined to comment about her parents’ new status; and we don’t
know if she, her son Barron, who is close to his grandparents, or even the
president celebrated in any way.
We
do know this. The president howled again during a recent news conference that
the danger of “chain migration” was manifest. “You bring one person in, you end
up with 32 people,” he said. “You come in and now you can bring your family and
then you can bring your mother and your father, you can bring your
grandmother,” he grumbled on another occasion.
This
was a terrible situation – and now that Melania’s family was safely arrived –
it had to be stopped.
In
any case, congratulations to the First Lady’s parents, two newly minted
Americans; and no harm done.
The First Lady's parents: New Americans.
*
“The strongest message we give the rest of
the world.”
(2018)
Former
Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Madeline Albright blast the new Trump
administration immigration policies. Powell, a decorated war hero and a
Republican, points out, “My parents came from Jamaica on banana boats and
raised two children here.” He goes on to say, “that one became a teacher and
the other had success as a soldier. We are giving that image up, and we
shouldn’t. It’s the strongest message
we give the rest of the world.”
Albright,
who served in the Clinton administration, adds, “I’m deeply troubled by the
direction we’re going. I’m a naturalized American citizen. I came when I was 11
years old. I’m very upset about the image we’re projecting abroad.”
She
talks about escaping the Nazis and learning that 26 Jewish relatives died
during the Holocaust.
“I’ll never forget what it was like to
come to America, on the SS America, past
the Statue of Liberty. I remember [years later] giving a certificate to a man,
a refugee, who said, ‘Can you believe I’m a refugee and the secretary of state
is handing me my naturalization certificate?’ I said, ‘Can you believe the secretary of state is a refugee [emphasis in original]?’”
*
The
Fourteenth Amendment is pretty clear.
(2018)
President
Trump suggests in November 2018 that he might sign an executive order to end
“birthright” citizenship in this country.
Speaker
of the House Paul Ryan, and others, point out that this would be to ignore the Fourteenth Amendment and previous
Supreme Court decisions.
Ryan
points out:
You cannot end birthright citizenship
with an executive order. As a conservative, I’m a believer in following the
plain text of the Constitution, and I think in this case the 14th Amendment is
pretty clear, and that would involve a very, very lengthy constitutional
process.
This
irks Trump, even though Ryan agrees with him that “unchecked illegal immigration”
is the “root issue.” First, Trump tweet-attacks Ryan. Then he warns that if the
infamous migrant caravan approaching does arrive and members throw rocks or
stones at troops guarding the border, those rocks and stones will be considered “firearms.” That
means U.S. troops will be authorized to fire on civilians, including women and
children. Make America great again, c. 1890.
See:
Wounded Knee.
Former
Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, a decorated Vietnam War hero and former Secretary
of Defense responds to Trump’s comments: “My reaction ... is one of disgust.
That is a wanton incitement of
unnecessary violence. It is a distraction, it is a distortion, it is a
rank political purpose to use our military like this.”
*
“White
genocide.”
(2018)
One
definite foe of immigration is Rep. Steve King of Iowa. His past statements on
the topic include:
A)Retweeting
posts from a British man, Mark Collett, who likes to warn about the dangers
of dark-skinned people
flooding into Europe. Collett is an avowed “Nazi sympathizer.”
B)Endorsing
a candidate for mayor of Toronto, Faith Goldy, who likes to warn that Canada is
facing “white genocide.”
King has described Goldy as “pro Rule of
Law, pro Make Canada Safe Again, pro balanced budget, &...BEST of all, Pro
Western Civilization and a fighter for our values.”
C)Making pork chops an issue, complaining when he
learned Somali immigrants working in Iowa meat packing plants needed “a special
dispensation” from their imams to handle pork. “The rationale,” King claimed
without really knowing what he was talking about, “is that if infidels are
eating this pork, [the Muslims] are not eating it. So as long as they’re
preparing this pork for infidels, it
helps send them to hell and it must make Allah happy.” At that point,
King almost choked on his breakfast sausage. “I don’t want people doing my pork
that won’t eat it, let alone hope I go to hell for eating pork chops.”
D)Saying
during his meeting with leaders of the Freedom Party, that immigration offers nothing of value
to our country. “What does this diversity bring that we don’t already have?
Mexican food, Chinese food, those things—well, that’s fine. But what does it
bring that we don’t have that is worth the price? We have a lot of diversity
within the U.S. already.”
E)Defending
the predominantly white face of the current GOP during one interview, by offering this nugget: “I’d ask you to go back through
history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been
made by these other categories of
peoplethat you’re talking
about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?”
F)Justifying
his anti-Dream Act position during one interview by insisting, sure, a few good people
(like 689,000) might come into this country as children—grow up
here—serve in the U.S. military—go to college—consider themselves as American
as King himself. But, hey, they aren’t worth the trouble. “Some of them are
valedictorians, and their parents brought them in,” King insists. “For
everyone who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there that weigh 130
pounds and they’ve got calves the
size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana
across the desert.”
G)Tweeting
that America is endangered by current immigration because “culture and demographics
are our destiny. We can’t restore our
civilization with somebody else’s babies.”
*
The alt-right is obsessed with a fear of “white genocide.”
The Times explains:
“White genocide is a white nationalist
belief that white people, as a
race, are endangered and face extinction [emphasis added, unless
otherwise noted] as a result of nonwhite immigration and marriage between the
races, a process being manipulated by the Jews,” according to Ryan Lenz, editor
of Hatewatch, for the Southern
Poverty Law Center.
Many neo-Nazi types in Charlottesville carried shields
painted with a “14.” The number stands for fourteen words: “We must secure the
existence of our people and a future for white children.”
The slogan was created by David Lane, currently serving a
190-year prison sentence for murdering Jewish radio host Alan Berg.
*
(2018)
In
a final warning before the 2018 midterm elections, the
president tweet-warns illegal immigrants not
to show up at the pollsand
vote. “Law
Enforcement,” he says, “has been strongly notified to watch closely for any
ILLEGAL VOTING which may take place in Tuesday’s Election (or Early Voting).
Anyone caught will be subject to the Maximum Criminal Penalties allowed by law.
Thank you!”
*
Learning
about Thanksgiving.
(2018)
An
article in The New York Times (11/13/18): describes immigrants adjusting to the Thanksgiving
rituals they find in this country:
Two years ago this month, Mayada
Anjari was only dimly aware that a holiday was approaching. After the
family’s three-year journey as refugees from Syria, her sons—Hayan,
Mohammed and Abdulrazaq—had just started school here; her husband, Ahmad
Abdulhamid, was looking for work; and she had a baby girl, Jana, to chase
after.
By last fall, the boys (now 14, 12
and 10) had learned about the Pilgrims (and to dislike broccoli),
their father was working full time, and Ms. Anjari had memorized the two-mile
walk to the nearest store that stocked staples like grape leaves and flatbread
and olives. She had cooked for the church group that sponsored the family’s
resettlement, and some people in Manhattan had even paid to eat her kabsa
(spice-rubbed chicken with scented rice), her expertly stuffed vegetables, and
her fatayer, folds of flaky pastry stuffed with ground meat or spiraled around
soft cheese.
A new friend who was also Muslim gave
her a turkey from a local halal butcher for Thanksgiving. Ms. Anjari cut it
into pieces, covered it with water, and simmered it into soup with potatoes,
carrots, ginger and cumin. Her family liked it, she said, but it didn’t seem
very special to her.
This fall, Jana began prekindergarten,
and fans of Ms. Anjari’s food helped her publish a cookbook of Syrian
recipes. So she decided to take a test run at making her first Thanksgiving
feast.
Like many people who have recently
arrived in America from other countries, Ms. Anjari, 33, found the
holiday a bit perplexing. At home, she said, family celebrations and feast days
are reserved for religious events. “People do things in so many different
ways here,” she said: how they dress, how they raise children, how they
worship. “I was surprised that there’s a holiday that everyone celebrates.”
The
family fled the violence in 2013, crossing into Jordan, and ending up in a
refugee camp. Eventually, based on family status, including small children, the
United Nations Refugee Agency selected them for resettlement in the U.S.
The
Times notes:
In 2016, the year the family arrived in
New Jersey, the United States accepted about 85,000 refugees for resettlement,
including more than 15,000 Syrians; in 2017, the total dropped to about 52,000.
So far in 2018, about 22,000 people have been allowed in, and just 50 of them
were Syrian.
The
article also features Dima King, who came to the U.S. in 2017, “seeking asylum
because of anti-gay persecution and legislation that had taken hold in
his native Russia since 2013.
King,
who has had help training to become a restaurant cook, is now tackling his
first Thanksgiving dinner.
Jana, shown above.
*
“So we
build our home in a strange land.”
(An American holiday)
Masha
Gessen reveals a piece of writing by her mother:
I write this on the eve of the most
American of holidays…
Her
daughter expected her to describe the Fourth of July; instead, she focused on
Thanksgiving.
This will be my eleventh Thanksgiving
in America. And though I have a persistent aversion to the very concept of
patriotism, thanks to the forced lessons of “Soviet patriotism,” I find myself
saying “thank you” to a world we have chosen and mastered, a world that has
been kind to us.
*
“You
can tell by the food.”
(2018)
Census
data (NYT 9/13/18) show that the share of foreign born population in the U.S.
is now the highest since 1910.
Since
2010 more than 4 in 10 new arrivals are from Asia and 45 percent of all new
arrivals are college-educated.
Since
2010, 2.6 million people from Asia have arrived; only 1.2 million from Latin
America (is this just legal number?).
The
foreign-born population stood at 13.7 percent or 44.5 million people.
In
1910 the percentage was around 15; by 1970 it had declined to 5 percent.
Emmanuel D’Souza, a nurse practitioner
in Dayton, Ohio, who emigrated from India in 2004, said he has noticed a
growing and thriving Indian population in his area.
“Now when you go to the grocery store
at 5 or 6 in the evening, you see a lot of Indian people, buying vegetables
after work,” said Mr. D’Souza.
He said he saw fewer Indian people when
he bought his house in 2009 than he does today. Now he counted at least four
temples and two mosques, and said there are two Indian specialty grocery
stores. Mr. D’Souza, 41, who is Catholic, also sees Indians in church on
Sundays.
In
Ohio 43% of foreign-born individuals are college-educated vs. 27% of
native-born Ohioans.
Half
of all foreign-born individuals in this country, still, are from Latin America.
North Dakota had the single largest
percentage increase in foreign-born residents since 2010, Mr. Frey said, with
the number going up by 87 percent. Dr. Fadel E. Nammour, a
gastroenterologist in Fargo, N.D., who moved to the United States from
Lebanon in 1996, said he has noticed more immigrant-owned restaurants since
he moved to North Dakota in 2002. In recent years, the state has settled refugees from countries including Iraq,
Somalia and Congo. In all, foreign-born people in North Dakota rose to
31,000 in 2017 from just 16,600 in 2010, Mr. Frey found.
“There is more diversity now,” Dr.
Nammour said. “You can tell by food. There are Indian places that opened up. We
have an African place now. Little things that are a little bit different.”
*
The
fight against illegal immigration takes strange turns.
(2019)
In
January 2019, a dozen illegals are fired from jobs in New York. No way of knowing how many were
psychopaths, waiting for the right moment to murder and maim. We do know
they could have been plotting harm for years – to vacuum carpets, cut the grass
and slit a few throats at Trump
National Golf Club Westchester in Briarcliff Manor, New York.
Once
again, we discover that Donald J. Trump has been hiring the undocumented for
years. The case of Margarita Cruz, who worked at the New York club for eight years, highlights the
hypocrisy of the president’s anti-immigrant screeds. Cruz admits she bought
false documents, including a green card and Social Security card years ago. It
cost her $120.
So,
you might excuse Trump management, and say, “Well, how could they know?” The
flaw in that argument is obvious. Cruz was never provided health insurance or
pension benefits, like co-workers. Anibal Romero, the lawyer who represents
Cruz and other recently fired employees, including a head chef, is blunt. “I’m
not buying they didn’t know,” he says. “This was a two-tiered system. The people who were
legal and the people who are undocumented.”
And why would any
employer complain? Look the other way and you don’t have to provide healthcare
or pension benefits. One of the falsely documented or undocumented workers had
worked for Trump for eighteen years.
No
healthcare or pension
required.
Eric Trump, for one,
pretended shock. He promised the Trump Organization would redouble efforts to
ferret out all the illegals clogging the payroll.
*
The GOP
is completely inept.
(2019)
Trump
lovers are no doubt thrilled to hear that on Thursday ICE launched one of its largest
raids in years, netting 280 undocumented workers at CVE Technology Group
and four related businesses in Allen, Texas. No telling how many of those 280
were waiting to rape or kill upstanding Americans.
You
can assume they were all working cheap.
It’s
odd how often businesspersons, who lean heavily Republican in voting
preferences, are caught hiring the undocumented and then insist they believe we
need a giant border wall. A check of public records fails to yield much info on
Edward Cho, owner of CVE, but chances are he donates more to Republican causes
and candidates than otherwise. Nearly three out of every four dollars donated to political parties in Texas end up in GOP coffers.
The
state is controlled by Republicans: governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of
state, both houses of the legislature. Both U.S. senators and 23 of 36
representatives in the U.S. House are members of the Republican Party. Yet the
GOP is completely inept when it comes to curtailing the hiring of undocumented
workers in the state.
The
Texas Tribune pointed this out in an
article in 2016:
In Texas, 1.1 million
unauthorized immigrant workers made up 8.5 percent of the state’s total labor
force, concentrated in industries like agriculture, hospitality and especially
construction, where an estimated 25 percent of workers were unauthorized.
Researchers at the
Workers Defense Project and the University of Texas at Austin put that number
even higher, finding that half of surveyed construction workers in Texas said they were undocumented.
Typically,
Tribune reporters talked to two
undocumented brothers working in construction. They said they often put in
14-hour days, for which they earned $90, meaning they worked for $6.43 per
hour, with no overtime pay.
So
why don’t Texas Republicans do more to curtail illegal hiring? It pays
handsomely to look the other way.
*
“Our
employees are like family.”
(2019)
As
for the president, he’s on to the next topic. He’s listing his greatest hits. At
a rally for the MAGA faithful, he’s talking immigration:
We need workers to come in. But they
need to come in legally, and they’ve got to come in through merit, merit,
merit. They’ve got to come in through merit, they have to be people
who can help us, they have to be people who can love our country, not hate our
country. We have people in Congress right now, we have people in Congress that
hate our country. And you know that. And we can name every one of them if they
want. They hate our country. Sad. It’s very sad. When I see some of the things
being made, the statements being made, it’s very, very sad. And find out: How
did they do in their country? Just ask ’em. How did they do? Did they do well?
Were they succeeding? Just ask that question. Someone would say, “Oh, that’s
terrible that he brings that up,” but that’s okay, I don’t mind, I’ll bring it
up. How did they do in their country? Not so good. Not so good.
“These
people are sick,” Trump adds, describing Democrats, liberals and critics in a
way meant to stir visceral hate.
Again,
the crowd goes wild. No one stops to wonder: How did the parents of
the First Lady manage to enter this country? What merits did they bring?
And
what about all those undocumented workers who are surfacing,
working at Trump golf clubs?
It
turns out, the president isn’t the only Trump who knows the Gibberish tongue.
Last January, Eric, who now runs the Trump Organization, along with Don Jr.,
claimed the fact that all Trump properties seemed to have hired undocumented
workers and employed them for years – well, that was a sign that the U.S.
immigration system – not the Trump Organization – was messed up.
Eric
did want to make it clear. He had a heart. True, it was a Trump heart, but a
heart with real valves and chambers. “I must say, for me personally, this
whole thing is truly heartbreaking. Our employees are like family, but when
presented with fake documents, an employer has little choice.”
WTF!
Did he just admit there are good people who sneak into this country and don’t
want to rape and kill?
*
Census
question.
(2019)
Today, Trump insults the U.S. Supreme Court,
calling a decision to block a question on the 2020 Census, asking whether
people living at a given address are citizens or not, “totally ridiculous.”
In a 5-4 vote, the majority said the rational
cited by the administration for asking the question was “contrived.”
So, let’s go to the U.S. Constitution.
Article I, Section 2, requires that a census be
taken every ten years, counting all “free Persons,” excluding “Indians not
taxed,” and tossing in “three fifths of all other Persons” to establish state
populations.
Those “three fifths” were slaves. That meant
every five slaves counted as three white persons in determining population.
These populations become the basis for purposes
of representation in the U.S. House of Representatives and for apportionment of
any direct taxes.
Okay. I’m checking Article I, Section 2
again. Nope. The words “citizen” and “citizenship” do not pertain. In
fact, every census, starting in 1790, counted non-citizens for purposes
of determining population. A German immigrant in Pennsylvania at that time, an
Irish immigrant in Massachusetts in 1850 and a Chinese immigrant in California
in 1890 counted. They might someday become citizens – save any of the Chinese,
who were permanently excluded – but they were counted.
The slaves were counted till 1860, even though
they weren’t legally persons, but, rather, property.
*
Floaters.
(2029)
Border
control agents in a chat group find humor in describing immigrants who died
trying to cross the Rio Grande as “floaters.”
A father drowned with his daughter, trying to cross the Rio Grande.
*
Who
needs a border wall if there’s no border?
(2019)
Daniel
McCarthy, running as a Republican for a U.S. Senate seat in Arizona, has
proposed a novel solution for the immigration crisis on our southern border.
McCarthy would like to shift the border slightly, by annexing Mexico and
turning Mexico into a bunch of new states.
*
Construction
workers!
(2019)
In
news you may have missed, the Trump administration is working hard to keep us
safe from killer immigrants who want to slit our throats while we sleep, but in
the meantime also work construction. You know…people who tunnel
underground to … run storm water systems and subways.
New
rules mean that 400,000 people from six nations, who were granted
temporary protected status when their countries were hit by war, natural
disasters and waves of crime, may be asked to leave the U.S.
Many
have been living in the United States for twenty years. Most have deep roots in
this country. Combined, they have nearly 200,000 children born here, all
American citizens.
Those
200,000 might have to abandon the only country they have ever known if they
want to remain with their parents.
Ever
Guardado, 38, is typical. He works in construction, pays taxes, owns a home in
Sterling, Virginia, and has three children, all citizens by birth. “I thought I
would be secure forever,” he told reporters.
“Now
I’m scared every day.”
We
can assume his children are equally scared.
Mr. Guardado.
*
The Camp
of the Saints.
(2019)
Stephen
Miller the trusted White House aide and architect of the Trump administration
immigration policies, is once again in the news.
Miller
dodged public comment Tuesday, but White House Press Enabler Stephanie Grisham
said the SPLC was nothing but “an
utterly-discredited, long-debunked far-left smear organization.”
So, reporters wondered, was she saying Miller’s emails were fine?
Grisham admitted, lamely, that she hadn’t seen them.
The SPLC had, and said the source for more-than 900 emails was
Katie McHugh, a former writer and editor at Breitbart, who had
communicated regularly with Mr. Miller in 2015 and 2016. McHugh was 23 when she
started at Breitbart in 2014 and she was fired three years later, after
she posted a series of anti-Muslim tweets. She has since renounced her ties
with the far-right.
(Miller has not.)
In September 2015 Miller sent McHugh a book recommendation. She
should read The Camp of the Saints, which might inform her writing. As
summarized by Hatewatch, an arm of the SPLC,
Notably, “The Camp of the Saints” is popular among white
nationalists and neo-Nazis because of the degree to which it fictionalizes the
“white genocide” or “great replacement” myth into a violent and sexualized
story about refugees.
The novel’s apocalyptic plot centers on
a flotilla of Indian people who invade France, led by a nonwhite Indian-born
antagonist referred to as the “turd eater” – a
character who literally eats human feces. In one section, a white woman is
raped to death by brown-skinned refugees. In another, a nationalist character
shoots and kills a pro-refugee leftist over his support of race mixing. The
white nationalist Social Contract Press plucked the 1973 book from
relative obscurity and distributed it in the United States.
Miller wasn’t done offering McHugh his help. In October 2015 he
sent her a story he found on a white nationalist website, VDARE. That site “traffics in the ‘white
genocide’ or ‘great replacement’ myth, which
suggests that nonwhite people are systematically and deliberately wiping white
people off the planet.”
Miller
had all kinds of racist bugaboos to share. It upset him when Amazon pulled
Confederate symbols for sale—just because Dylan Roof posed with the Rebel flag
before shooting nine African Americans to death at a Charleston, South Carolina
church. Miller suggested McHugh aggregate stories of crimes committed by
non-white immigrants. He was enthusiastic when McHugh agreed to do a story
on Chris Harper-Mercer, a college
student who killed nine at his school in Roseburg, Oregon. Could McHugh
emphasize the fact the killer was “mixed race?”
Miller lost interest when it turned out
Harper-Mercer espoused white supremacist beliefs.
It’s impossible to miss the drift of Miller’s
pro-white, anti-everyone else thinking. (Trump loves him, of course.) Miller
has long been a fan of writers who hate Muslims. He liked to send McHugh
links to InfoWars, a website which claims the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre
was faked. He cited the Immigration Act of 1924, holding it up as a model of
good legislation.
It was a model Hitler praised too.
In
fact, according to SPLC, a review of all those hundreds of emails found no “examples of Miller writing
sympathetically or even in neutral tones about any person who is nonwhite or
foreign-born.”
*
Kill
DACA?
(2019)
The
U.S. Supreme Court is hearing a challenge to President Trump’s effort to end
the DACA program once and for all.
Court
watchers believe the five conservatives justices are inclined to allow the
Trump plan to go forward. And that means 797,297 “Dreamers,” as they are
called, may soon be eligible for deportation.
The
rules for acceptance in the DACA program are strict. Applicants must have come to the U.S. before age 16, must
have been living here since June 15, 2012, must be in school, have graduated
from high school or earned a GED, must have been honorably discharged from the
Coast Guard or U.S. armed forces, and must have a job.
A
person covered under DACA loses protection if they have felonies or serious
misdemeanors on their record.
“Some
are very tough, hardened criminals.”
All
individuals covered under this Obama-era program were brought to this country
illegally, but at an age where they had little say in the matter—or no say at
all, since many were too young to talk at the time. They settled here and grew
up thinking of themselves as Americans.
That
means it’s time for a hateful Trump tweet:
Many of
the people in DACA, no longer very young, are far from “angels.” Some are very
tough, hardened criminals. President Obama said he had no legal right
to sign order, but would anyway. If Supreme Court remedies with overturn, a
deal will be made with Dems for them to stay!
Later,
Trump cites Lou Dobbs, who claims that 53,792 DACA recipients have
criminal records. I think, in Lou’s mind, that proves we should deport all
797,297 “Dreamers.” And toss their bags over the border fence, as they leave.
A report from the National Center for Health Statistics notes
that the fertility rate for the United States fell to its lowest level ever in 2018. For every 1,000 women of child-bearing age, there were
59.1 births. Buried in the numbers, there is one positive trend, with
births to teen mothers down 70% since 1991. The decline among women in their
20’s and early 30’s is less positive.
At current rates (1.73
children per woman), and barring robust immigration, the U.S. will soon begin
to experience negative population growth.
U.S.
population growth in 2019 slowed to the lowest rate since 1918, when World War I and a flu pandemic caused a
slight decline. Total population rose by 1,552,022, an increase of one half a percent. Forty-two states and the
District of Columbia recorded fewer births than in 2018. An aging population
also meant four states, West Virginia, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont
recorded more deaths than births.
The slowing of immigration also contributed to
the slowing of population growth. In 2019, only 595,348 immigrants came to
America to live. That compares to 1,046,709, who came in 2016.
NOTE TO
TEACHERS: It might be a good question to ask students: “How might slowing
population growth be a positive or a negative?”
*
Grape-picking,
sixty hours per week.
(2019)
Holy crap! The Trump Winery in Virginia fires at least seven employees who lack legal
immigration status.
Omar Miranda, who gave
his name, and a second worker who refused, both said they worked at Trump
Winery for more than a decade. Miranda noted that workers had finished the
harvest season, which meant 60-hour work weeks, sometimes picking grapes under
floodlights.
(Something tells this
blogger that the Trump Winery wasn’t paying overtime for these workers.)
According to the Washington
Post—“Fake News”—to all Trump fans, but a paper that contacted the Trump
Organization for comment, the Trump Winery “has long relied on a couple dozen
immigrants—primarily from Mexico—who legally arrive year after year on seasonal
work visas, living in a dormitory on the winery property during the harvest.”
But it was another group of year-round staff that got the axe just before the
end of the holiday season.
So, let’s recap:
1.Trump can’t find
American workers to do the grape-picking.
2.He’s not willing to pay
a wage that would attract them.
3.He takes a chance and
hires Mexicans.
And we all know, most
Mexicans who come here are “murderers” and “rapists.” Trump told us so.
(Over the past year, the
Post notes, it has spoken with at least 49 former Trump employees who
lacked proper immigration documentation.)
*
“An
automotive Shantytown.”
(2019)
Of
course, not all immigrants fare well. The first arrivals often live grinding
lives, as Jacob Riis might have warned. In December 2019, The New York Times
ran a story titled, “How the Immigrant Dream Died in an Automotive
Shantytown.” (Even the pictures echo Riis’s work.)
Reporters
for the Times focused on Willets Point, an area known for “the largest
collection of auto and salvage shops in New York City.” They describe it as “a
warren of squalid streets lined with flimsy auto repair shops.” The Irish, who
crammed filthy hovels in the back streets and alleys of Boston in 1854, might
also relate. “The streets, many unpaved, lack sidewalks, sewers and storm
drains. They are potholed and littered with trash, discarded cars and auto
parts.”
Most
people who work in Willets Point are Hispanic immigrants. “Mechanics delve deep
under car hoods,” the reporters explain,
and hawkers barrage drivers with quick,
cheap repair offers. Pneumatic tools squeal over the banter of
Spanish-speaking mechanics. The pungent aroma of epoxy wafts out of auto body
shops and mingles with the savory smells from Latin food carts that ply the
muddy, puddled roadways.
Here and there, women sell food from carts or out of the backs of minivans. The odors of “homemade Latin dishes of oxtail stew, yucca, sweet plantains, and
rice and beans” perfume the streets.
The
lure to outsiders, besides the food: cheap car repairs, often only a third what
a more established, name brand auto repair operations would charge. “This kind
of place doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Rahat Khan, a Pakistani immigrant, tells
reporters. “It’s the heart of New York car repair.”
Now,
these men and women—and their families—wonder if the American Dream will be
harder to achieve than ever. The City of New York is moving aggressively to
clear the neighborhood for a housing development. Already, 200 small businesses
and 1,700 workers have been displaced. Only about 75 shops and businesses
remain. “Practically, we are in limbo. They have us cornered,” Ever Rivera, 39,
a Salvadoran immigrant with five children, says in reference to city
government. He works as a technician at Carlos Auto Electric.
Kahn
pays $2,500 a month to rent a small shop in Willets Point, and says he would
have to pay triple elsewhere. “When they close this place,” he tells reporters,
“I’ll probably just buy and sell cars to make money.” Roberto Bolañoz, an
Ecuadorean immigrant with 27 years repairing cars, hopes to move his shop to
New Jersey. Arturo Olaya, who came here from Colombia, “runs an auto upholstery
shop inside of a repurposed shuttle bus parked on the street.”
He
says he may have to try his luck in Florida.
The
Times explains what Willets Point and the jobs to be found there have
meant for immigrants hoping to build better lives:
The area has been a vital source of
blue-collar work, especially for newcomers who lack English skills, proper
documentation and certification as an auto mechanic.
Instead of streets paved with gold, new
immigrants find them lined with tire joints, junkyards, hubcap sellers, muffler
shops, and brake and transmission specialists.
“It may not be pretty, but this place
has always offered hard-working immigrants a shot at the American dream,”
said Sam Sambucci, who owns an auto salvage company and the property under it.
Asked
to sum up his feelings, Arturo Olaya says, “Willets Point for me is 24 years of
hard work trying to build up a business, trying to move forward.”
Hundreds
of men and women have worked in Willets Point with the same goal, “to move
forward.” Rodrigo Ramos met his wife, Lina Tapia, when she was selling food
from a minivan. Both are immigrants from Mexico. They worked nine years to get
ahead, he as a mechanic, bought a house in a modest New York neighborhood, had
two children. Now they have their own small repair shop.
“It’s
a small village here,” Mr. Ramos said, describing the Point. “Everyone knows
each other.”
This,
too, is typical of immigrant groups—sticking together, helping boost each other
up.
Now
the City of New York is moving closer to clearing Willets Point for urban
development. Important streets have been closed for construction and upgrades.
Many small business owners may be ruined. Reporters explain:
The street closings have alarmed
Carolina Velásquez, 42, a Salvadoran immigrant and an owner of a deli that has
become difficult to reach. The detours started shortly after she put down a
$30,000 security deposit to extend her lease. Business has died off so much
that she often has trays of food she gives away to workers in the area.
“Our job is being thrown to the trash,”
she said.
Mr.
Sambucci sums up the struggle for immigrants like himself and so many others,
who have come for centuries to these shores. “You have first-generation
immigrants here sharing the American dream,” he says. “They’re here every day
at 7 a.m., whether it’s 0 degrees or 100 degrees. And no one wants to stand up
for these people.”
Immigrant workers will fix your car.
NOTE TO TEACHERS: Again,
excuse my bias if you liked President Trump. I wouldn’t approach the topic of
immigration this way in a classroom; but, as already mentioned, I’m too lazy to
rewrite this material. It’s from a different blog.
*
“I think they were both pretty proud.”
(2019)
Hanley
Ramirez and Carlos Santana, two members of the Cleveland Indians are sworn in as citizens in April 2019, after both men, born in the
Dominican Republic, passed their citizenship tests. “Two of our guys became citizens this week – Hanley and
Carlos – which is pretty cool,” Indians manager Terry Francona told
reporters at the time.
*
No one
individual makes a case.
(2020)
Did
someone mention immigrants? (I mean, not counting the undocumented workers the
Trump Organization keeps having to fire?) Yes. Chad Wolf, acting secretary of
the Department of Homeland Security, warned on Wednesday that, “There has been a
complete breakdown of law & order in New York City.” He went on to add
in a tweet, “NYC proudly passed sanctuary city laws & bragged about it for
months. But now they, & more importantly, the citizens of NYC are facing
the deadly consequences of the sanctuary policies.”
At
issue is a heinous crime. On that all agree. Reeaz Khan, a 21-year-old man from
Guyana, has been arrested and charged in the brutal sexual assault and murder
of 92-year-old Maria Fuertes earlier this month.
Got
it?
Undocumented
immigrants want to kill us all, and if one undocumented worker or illegal
immigrant commits a crime anywhere in America, then we have a “complete
breakdown of law & order.”
*
U.S.
marathon runners.
(2020)
Congratulations
to marathoner Ms. Molly Seidel, who is joined on the U.S. Olympic team by first-place finisher Aliphine Tuliamuk and Seidel’s idol growing up, Sally Kipyego. Both
women are natives of Kenya, proof again that not all immigrants who enter the
country legally, or illegally, come here to kill Trump fans.
The
men representing the U.S. in the marathon will be Galen Rupp, Jacob Riley
and Abdi Abdirahman.
Abdirahman was born in Somalia.
*
Chinese
welcome?
(2020)
Chinese
immigration increased dramatically after 1980. By 2020, there were five million
Americans of Chinese ancestry living in the United States.
Bowen
Yang knew he had made a success of his life when he became the first Asian
American to join the cast of Saturday Night Live. Yang is a member of
two minorities, including being gay.
*
“I lost
my life, but I won’t lose my hope.”
(2021)
With
the collapse of the government in Afghanistan in 2021, and the return of the
Taliban, an exodus of women and girls – particularly those with the most
education – commenced. The Taliban has all but banned high school education for
girls. Most women have been ordered to stay at home from work. If they do go
out, they must be accompanied by a male relative, and must cover themselves,
save for the eyes, in burqas, sack-like clothing. Shelters for women, who needed protection
from abuse, have been closed. Child marriages are on the rise. Minority women
face renewed harassment. Those lucky enough to get out have scattered into
neighboring countries, across Europe, and been admitted as refugees to the
United States. University professors, Olympic athletes, judges, doctors, police
officers and an all-female robotics team which had won an international
competition have all fled in a search of greater freedom.
Time magazine interviewed eight about
their experiences, but for purposes of American history, we include only three:
Hasina
Najibi and Raihana Rahimi, friends from their days in flight-training school,
both 25, have settled in Florida, where they share an apartment and dream of
being able to fly once more. They were in Dubai when the Taliban overran Kabul
and never returned home. They asked their families to burn their uniforms,
pilot IDs and diplomas, for fear their parents might be punished. Najiba
remembered watching her mother burn her uniform during a video call. “All my
dreams were on fire,” she says.
Now, living together in the heat
of southern Florida, the women wait tables in a strip mall. In the evenings,
they put a rug under the tree near their apartment. They drink green tea and
talk about their lives back in Afghanistan – and their biggest dream: to return
to the skies.
Asked about the future of
Afghanistan, Rahimi sounded a hopeful note:
I think about Afghan women, and
how they should not be forgotten. They lost everything they had. Their lives,
their rights, and their dreams are now being held hostage. Sometimes I feel
this situation is not going to last. I think one day Afghanistan will be
liberated and we will return to our country. How can a regime that ignores half
of society survive?
Where did the two young women
see themselves in a year?
Najibi: All I
dream of is returning to my studies. I hope by this time next year, I’ll be
closer to my goal.
Rahimi: I lost
my life, but I won’t lose my hope. I am determined to find a way back into my
profession. This is the dream that keeps me alive. Even though I sometimes feel
exhausted, I tell myself I’ll find a way. Back in Afghanistan my family and
even my teachers at times would tell me piloting is not for me. I always felt
the discrimination. But I succeeded there. I am sure I can succeed again.
Masouma
Tajik also found safety, in her case in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In August
2021, she was a new graduate of American University of Afghanistan and working
as a data analyst in Kabul. She had her own apartment and liked to light
candles and rent movies. Django Unchained, she said, was her favorite.
When Kabul fell to Taliban forces, she headed for the airport, hoping to board
a flight to safety. Before she finally could, she was whipped by Taliban
officials. She first found refuge in Ukraine, sending money home to her family
every month. With a Russian invasion imminent, she went to Poland, then the
Netherlands, and finally came to the U.S. She has a two-year scholarship in the
data science master’s program at Rutgers University.
What does she miss most? “I miss going to the office every
day. I miss the ice cream shop in Kabul. That glimpse of normalcy that I had in
Kabul, I miss that,” she said.
Asked to describe herself in
one word, she did not hesitate.
“Unstoppable,” she offered.
*
“Everything
in Cuba is getting worse.”
(2022)
In a story from December 2022, Roger GarcÃa Ordaz tells a reporter for The New York Times that he has tried to leave Cuba eleven times, in hopes of reaching U.S. shores. “Of course I am going to keep on throwing myself into the sea until I get there,” he said. “Or, if the sea wants to take my life, so be it.”
In the last year, an estimated 250,000 Cubans have left the island for the States, with most arriving by land, at the southern border. (Cuba already has one of the oldest populations in the Western Hemisphere.)
The Cuban government has long blamed Washington’s sanctions and a decades-old trade embargo for crippling the country’s economy and pushing people off the island, and says a law in place since 1966 that gives most Cubans who meet certain criteria a fast track to residency is a key reason for migration surges.
The law essentially assumes that all Cubans are political refugees who need protection, but has been widely criticized for giving them privileges that are not provided to any other nationality.
But Cuba also has a long history of using migration to rid the nation of those it considers malcontents. When political unrest grew, Fidel Castro would publicly bid the agitators — he called them “degenerates” and “worms” — good riddance.
Some 3,000 people left from the port of Camarioca in 1965, and 125,000 departed from Mariel in 1980. In 1994, street protests led to an exodus of about 35,000 people, who washed up on Florida shores on inner tubes and rickety vessels.
Many Cubans now sell their homes, if they have them, and fly to Nicaragua – where they hire smugglers to help them make the 1,700-mile journey north to the U.S. border.
Katrin Hansing, an anthropologist at the City University of New York who is on sabbatical on the island, noted that the soaring migration figures do not account for the thousands who have left for other countries, including Serbia and Russia.
“This is the biggest quantitative and qualitative brain drain this country has ever had since the revolution,” she said. “It’s the best and the brightest and the ones with the most energy.”
The departure of many younger, working-age Cubans augurs a bleak demographic future for a country where the average life expectancy of 78 is higher than for the rest of the region, experts said. The government already can barely afford the meager pensions the country’s older population relies on.
A typical story might be that of Joan Cruz Mendez, 41, a taxi driver, who has tried to flee the island by sea, three times. On one occasion, he and others on a boat left Baracoa and got 30 miles; but they had to turn back when too many people got sea-sick and vomited. “The last thing you can lose is hope,” he tells the American reporter, “and I think a large part of the population has lost hope.”
In March, he bought a plane ticket to Panama for his wife, using his savings to pay a smuggler $6,000 to get her to the United States. She was now working at an auto-parts store in Houston, he said.
A 19-year-old explained the problem succinctly, telling the reporter that he, too, had tried to flee. In Cuba, “everything keeps getting worse.”
*
Enes Freedom
(2022)
New name for a new American.
One of these days, I’ll organize all these examples. But for now, I’ll just add them as I come across them in the news.
I like one detail in the story of Enes Kanter, a 6' 10'' NBA player. Kanter was born in Switzerland, but his parents were of Turkish extraction. When the Turkish government became increasingly authoritarian, Kanter protested, and was warned if he ever visited Turkey that he’d find himself under arrest. In November of 2021, Kanter became a U.S. citizen and added “Freedom” as a new last name.
In February 2022, he tweeteda picture of himself standing with Republican senators, carrying the caption: “I am proud to be AMERICAN.”
*
Laken Riley murder.
(2024)
One can, of
course, find horrific stories of illegal immigrants killing Americans. See, for
example, the murder of nursing student Laken Riley in 2024.
Indeed, a
story that same year claimed that there were 13,099 illegal
immigrants roaming free in the United States,
who had committed homicide.
NOTE TO
TEACHERS: That number, I believe, is false; but in any discussion of this
topic, my method would have been to keep my own opinions to myself, and to
disagree with almost anything students said – to force them to sharpen their
own thinking. For instance, though I might have a different view, I might ask,
“If even one illegal immigrant has entered our country and committed murder,
doesn’t that support President Trump’s calls for strict limits on immigration
to this country? What would Laken Riley’s parents say?”
*
They’re
eating the dogs…”
(2024)
In one of the most famous
anti-immigrant attacks of recent years, candidate Donald Trump warns that
Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio, are a threatnot
only to people but pets. “In Springfield, they are eating the dogs,” he assures
his loyal supporters. “The people that came in, they are eating the cats.
They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there.”
The governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine admits
that Springfield suffered through hard times and job losses in the 1980s and
1990s.
Now,
however, Springfield is having a resurgence in manufacturing and job creation.
Some of that is thanks to the dramatic influx of Haitian migrants who have
arrived in the city over the past three years to fill jobs.
They
are there legally. They are there to work.
It
is disappointing to me that Springfield has become the epicenter of vitriol
over America’s immigration policy, because it has long been a community of
great diversity.
DeWine
adds,
As a supporter of former President
Donald Trump and Senator JD Vance, I am saddened by how they and others
continue to repeat claims that lack evidence and disparage the legal migrants
living in Springfield. This rhetoric hurts the city and its people, and it
hurts those who have spent their lives there.
The
governor explains that he and his wife have traveled to Haiti more than twenty
times, to help with Catholic charity relief:
We have always been amazed when, even
in the poorest areas of Haiti, we see children coming out of homes made of
rusting corrugated metal and cardboard with shoes shined and clothes neat and
pressed. We know that the Haitian people want the same things we all want — a
good job, the chance to get a quality education and the ability to raise a
family in a safe and secure environment. Haitian migrants have gone to
Springfield because of the jobs and chance for a better life there.
In
fact, when he visited the city in the wake of all this turmoil, he said one
business owner told me he “would not have been able to stay open after the
pandemic but for the Haitians who filled the jobs.”
Finally,
Gov. DeWine says,
Springfield today has a very bright
future. The people who live there love their families, value education, work
hard, care about one another and tackle the challenges they face head-on, just
as they have done for over 200 years.
I am proud of this community, and
America should be, too.
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