Wednesday, June 17, 2020

A Former Student Discusses "White Privilege" and What We Can All Do


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

I love you all & God Bless.

Eric Armstrong, Loveland High School, 1998.

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

The Glory of War? (1861-1865)


I created this reading assignment for students because I didn’t want them to ever imagine warfare was anything but terrible.


If you want a copy, send me an email at vilejjv@yahoo.com.

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]

Considering the size of the armies involved, this was a war of incredible bloodshed. One Southern family sent twelve sons to the fighting. Only three survived. Another woman lost five brothers and her fiancé. In some battles entire units were destroyed. The 1st Minnesota, a northern regiment at Gettysburg, entered the fight with 262 men. Only 47 remained unhurt at the end. Co F , of the 26th North Carolina, began the fight with 90 men. All were killed, wounded, or captured over the course of three days. Another officer reported that eleven different men carried his unit’s flag at the Battle of Antietam. (The flag or “colors” was the focus of heavy fire in those days.) The first ten soldiers were all swept away by enemy bullets.

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’s  friends, 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.

Thursday, April 30, 2020

War of Nerves: Racism in the 1950s



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.

Wednesday, April 1, 2020

How Immigration Made America

 

____________________ 

“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.

 

*

Enes Freedom 

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 tweeted a picture of himself standing with Republican senators, carrying the caption: “I am proud to be AMERICAN.”

 



* 

“Most countries send out oil or iron, steel or gold, or some other crop,” President John F. Kennedy once remarked, “but Ireland has had only one export and that is its people.” 

A census in 1841 gave the population of the island as 8.2 million; but in the next century almost that many would emigrate from a land not much larger than Maine. Unlike many immigrant groups, which were heavily male, many of the Irish were young women, traveling alone. (Annie Moore, a teen arriving from County Cork, was the first immigrant ever processed at Ellis Island.)

By 1910, as the economist Emily Balch explained, the newest Irish immigrants were met, in cities like New York and Boston, by “Irish policemen, Irish politicians, Irish bureaucrats, Irish saloonkeepers, Irish contractors and Irish teachers.” So they might “be excused for thinking that ‘Irish’ equaled ‘American.’” 


* 

No immigrant to this country has ever climbed higher. 

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 Times explains,

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.”


* 

I just learned, for example, that the #1 chess player in the U.S. today is Leinier Domínguez, born in Cuba, a U.S. citizen since 2018. 

Another good example: At age seven, Tanitoluwa Adewumi, better known as Tani, was living in a homeless shelter with his family. His parents had brought him to this country from Nigeria, after fleeing violence from Boko Haram. Tani got interested in chess and joined a chess 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. His skill developed quickly and at age eight, he won the New York State championship for his age group. 

Stories about him 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 also 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.

 

*

“Even though I wasn’t a citizen yet, America was my country.” 

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. 

The New York Times explains: 

“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.” 

His citation for the Medal of Honor reads in full: 

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.

 

* 

Another immigrant, Mazie Hirono, was born in Japan, just two years after the end of World War II. She is now a U.S. Senator for Hawaii.

 

* 

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 medal in the all-around competition for women’s gymnastics. (These kinds of stories make me proud of what America can represent.)

 

* 

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. 

The New York Times describes her: 

Ms. Wu, a protégée of Senator Elizabeth Warren, began her political career in this city as it was turning a corner, its electorate increasingly young, well-educated and left-leaning.

 

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.

 

Ms. Wu marks this period as the crossroads in her life, the point where she let go of the script that her parents had written for 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.

 

* 

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.

 

Najiba Ebrahimi, a member of the Hazara minority, and a champion for women’s rights back home, left after she began receiving calls from unknown men, warning, “You shouldn’t be alive. If you stay here, you’ll die.” She first crossed the mountains into Pakistan with her teenage daughter, brother, and cousin. From there, the former teacher, traveled to Brazil, where her parents already had a restaurant. Now she works there, with her family. 

What did she miss most, a reporter from Time asked. “My students,” she said. “I was the first teacher to get them involved in sports. I bought the school’s first volleyball, and we set up tournaments. I even helped train some of the girls who wanted to go to the Olympics.” 

In Brazil, she was surprised. “Women here have freedom. They can wear what they want, do what they want. They don’t have to be afraid. Here I can walk down the street, around my neighborhood, and it’s safe.” 

Asked to describe the Taliban in one word, she replied, “Fascism.”

 

Basira, who asked that only her first name be used, for fear the Taliban might punish her family back home, fled to Dublin, Ireland. As a 24-year-old activist for the LGBTQI community, her life would have been endangered had she remained. (Even in Dublin, she said, she met abuse from fellow Afghans.) 

What did she miss most about her homeland, she was asked. 

I miss Afghan children, especially my nieces and nephews. After leaving, I dream I am still in Afghanistan. In my dreams I am running, I am protesting; every night I am there. I blame myself sometimes for leaving, for coming here. But then I saw I can work harder and more effectively from outside. I see the girls who are still in Afghanistan, and how they have lost hope. But that hope exists in my heart.

 

She treasures her university diploma, she said, and calls her “skills” that she brought to Ireland her greatest treasure. 

What one word did she associate with the Taliban? a reporter asked. 

“Terror,” she replied.

 

Zahra Khodadadi, a photographer by trade, who found safety in France, said she had worked round the clock to get her parents and four younger siblings out of Afghanistan. They had at least reached Canada. She was not sure when she would next be able to see them. Asked about her homeland, she replied, “I have no hope for Afghanistan. There is no hope. Nothing.”


Basira, who asked that only her first name be used, for fear the Taliban might punish her family back home, fled to Dublin, Ireland. As a 24-year-old activist for the LGBTQI community, her life would have been endangered had she remained. (Even in Dublin, she said, she met abuse from fellow Afghans.) 

What did she miss most about her homeland? 

I miss Afghan children, especially my nieces and nephews. After leaving, I dream I am still in Afghanistan. In my dreams I am running, I am protesting; every night I am there. I blame myself sometimes for leaving, for coming here. But then I saw I can work harder and more effectively from outside. I see the girls who are still in Afghanistan, and how they have lost hope. But that hope exists in my heart.

 

She treasures her university diploma, she said, and calls her “skills” that she brought her greatest treasure. 

What one word did she associate with the Taliban, the reporter asked. 

“Terror.”

 

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 they 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.

 

* 

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 texture 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 have. 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 once 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. 

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)

Guillermo Del Toro (Mexico)

Albert Einstein (Germany)

Emanuel Goldenberg (Romania)

Mazie Hinoro (Japan)

Harry Houdini (Hungary)

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)

Knute Rockne (Norway)

Helena Rubinstein (Poland)

Eero Saarinen (Finland)

Levi Strauss (Bavaria)

Arnold Schwarzenegger (Austria)

Nikola Tesla (Serbia)

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.

 

Here’s another good list you might use. 

And another.

 

**I can’t find any mention of Bob Marley becoming a U.S. citizen; but he’s on several lists of famous immigrants.

 


In the meantime, here’s what I’ve got. I had two great reading assignments for students, but both are out of date. I’ll update those soon. But I’m retired. 

So I might just take a nap. 

Just today, I read an interesting article from The New York Times about Raúl H. Castro. He was born in poverty in rural Mexico in 1916, came here as a child, and rose in Arizona politics to become the first and only Latino governor of that state. And, speaking of racism, in this story you meet “Preacher Jack,” who believed a race war was imminent and planned to lead his followers in a fight to wipe out Jews and immigrants. At age 96, on his birthday, Mr. Castro was being driven across the Sonoran Desert by a friend. They were stopped by Border Patrol officers under a new “show me your papers” law and detained. The same article includes the story of rancher Robert Krentz Jr., who often left water out for those crossing the border illegally, making their way across his land. His murder, never solved, led to a wave of hysteria, which students might also understand.

 

* 

The story of Gong Lum was another one I had never heard till I ran across it in an article in The New Yorker last year: 

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.

 

* 

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 some of 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.” 

Teachers’ Note: 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 75,000,000. 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 for students. 

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. 

(See examples 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 of 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.

 

* 

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.”

 





* 

I’d work this story in, as well, from an article I wrote about education and individual drive: 

The story of Hoang Nhu Tran was entered in evidence. Hoang’s parents 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.”

 

* 

I’d throw in the N---- family, whose daughters I had in class, and two brilliant young ladies they were. Both parents were doctors; but the 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.

 

* 

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.

 

* 

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.” 

I might use that quote today, if I was teaching, and ask students, “Do Washington’s words still hold true?”

 

* 

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 Bierne’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 entertaining. 

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.

 

* 

In 1829 two twin brothers, Chang and Eng, were brought to the United States from Siam, what is now Thailand. 

Born in 1811, the 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.

 

* 

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.”

 

* 

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.” 

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.”

 

* 

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. But 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. 

He 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.”) 

  

  


Gauden's sculpture of "The Puritan." Note the large Bible in his left hand.




Gauden's bust of Lincoln.



* 

The next section includes my notes from Boston’s Immigrants by Oscar Handlin. Handlin describes the background conditions in Ireland that led so many to flee: “Ruinous wars decimated the population from 1,300,000 in 1650 to less than a million in 1660, and confiscations and anti-Catholic penal laws aimed at depriving ‘the majority of the Irish people of all wealth and ambition,’—frankly, ‘to make them poor and keep them poor.’” (21-38.) 

He quotes John O’Donovan, who loved his native land, but wrote in 1848: 

I see no hope for Ireland yet, the potatoes produced too large a population….I see no prospect of relief for two years or more. The number of poor is too great….I am sick…of Ireland and the Irish and care very little what may happen; for whatever may take place things cannot be worse….I would leave Ireland with a clear conscience!! I would leave it exultingly, retire to the Backwoods of America…move into the deserts of the western world there to learn a RUDE but STURDY civilization that knows not slavery or hunger.

 

The ordinary cottier, said another writer of that era (1847), felt the pain even more intensely. He or she “stood…begging…soup which…would be refused by well bred pigs” and daily faced the slavery of the workhouse. (21-47) 

The Cunard Line opened in 1842, marking the start of regular transatlantic steam communication and kept rates so low even the poor could afford to cross. Many of the Irish arrived in Boston or New York penniless, and had no choice but to remain in the cities. (21-48-49) 

Says Handlin, “Most Americans ‘would rather want bread than serve to gain it,’ [Boston Pilot; August 19, 1854] and farm girls in service for a few years while waiting to be married usually lacked the essential attributes of servility and loyalty. Under these circumstances the ‘Irish help’ were triply welcome for their good spirits, their loyalty, and their cheap wages.” (21-61) 

By 1845, he says, the caption: “None need apply but Americans” was common in Boston papers. (21-62)

      

The good old days weren’t really all that good: “Unscrupulous exploitation was the theme of the construction camp; and dirt, disorder, and unremitting toil were its invariable accompaniments.” Daily wages: $1.00-1.25. Skilled stone layers and masons often got $2.00-2.50. 

But most were victimized by rapacious sub-contractors who monopolized supplies in isolated construction camps and took back in exorbitant prices what they paid out in wages. The railroads themselves frequently resorted to equally dishonest practices. The Irish, after traveling several hundred miles, had no recourse when the company decided to pay less than it had advertised. Many roads, by deliberately asking for more men than they needed, built up large labor reserves with which to bludgeon down the wages of those already working for them.

 

As Emerson wrote, “‘Ferried over the Atlantic, and carried over America,’ despised and robbed, downtrodden and poor, they made the railroads grow.” (21-72)      

The conditions of work were as bad as its price was low. The laborers and their employees spoke a different language. Their work week in Ireland had not included Sundays, but in Boston they must toil the full seven days….The leisurely independent peasant live was ended—replaced in a fifteen-hour working day by a feverish struggle for bread under the commands of an alien master.” (21-86)

 

One immigrant remembered it this way: “In the new society ‘one in a hundred may live and prosper, and stand to be looked at as a living monument of…prosperity, but ninety-nine in a hundred are lost, never to be heard of.’” (21-87) 

Living conditions for the Irish in Boston were often abominable. In 1857, Samuel Hooper built two four-story structures, each holding 32 one room apartments. A narrow path separated the two. The path was obstructed by privies and water hydrants. (21-104) 

An attempt to map some of the crowded slums of Boston failed; such areas were “full of sheds and shanties” it was said in 1850. (21-106) 

Handlin says: 

The Irish sections were the most congested in the city and immigrant homes felt a consequent strain upon living resources. They were “not occupied by a single family or even by two or three families; but each room, from garret to cellar [was]…filled with a family…of several persons, and sometimes with two or more…” Every nook was in demand. Attics, often no more than three feet high, were popular. And basements were even more coveted, particularly in the Fort Hill area; by 1850 the 586 inhabited in Boston contained from five to fifteen persons in each, with at least one holding thirty-nine every night.

 

Underground dwellings enjoyed refreshing coolness in the hot summer months and coal-saving warmth in the winter…

 

 A space eighteen feet square and five high held fourteen people. One room, six feet square or less, had no ventilation, except through a second bedroom; and most of the room was taken up by a bed. (21-109-110) 

In many neighborhoods drainage and sewage removal were primitive at best. Many houses and apartments had only one sink and one privy, “usually a mass of pollution, for all the inhabitants, sometimes amounting to a hundred.” (So said an official health report in 1851). Rubbish disposal was difficult; and the spaces between buildings became what Handlin calls “storehouses of accumulated filth.” (21-111) 

Half Moon Place was described by the Cholera Committee in 1849: 

A large part of the area is occupied by…twelve or fourteen privies, constantly overflowing, and by ill constructed and worn out sinks and drains, into which are hourly thrown solid substances, of all sorts, which choke them up and cause the liquid…to run over. Into the area…a steep…staircase affords a passage to Humphrey place, some fifty feet above. Side by side with the staircase, and fully exposed, a large, square, plank drain makes a precipitous descent, conducting, half hidden, half revealed, not only the waste waters of the houses in Humphrey place, but also, the contents of its privies to the area below; which, as may be supposed, is redolent of the fact. (21-112)

 

The situation of the Irish was even worse. A report in 1871 notes: 

This whole district is a perfect hive of human beings, without common necessaries; in many cases, huddled together like brutes, without regard to sex, or age, or sense of decency; grown men and women sleeping together in the same apartment, and sometimes wife and husband, brothers and sisters, in the same bed. Under such circumstances, self-respect, forethought, all high and noble virtues soon die out, and sullen indifference and despair, or disorder, intemperance and utter degradation reign supreme.

 

After 1845, smallpox often flourished in Boston. In 1849 cholera spread from Philadelphia and New York to the city; 611 people died, with mortality particularly high in Irish neighborhoods. (21-113-114) 

Handlin quotes from the Boston Catholic Observer (March 20, 1848): 

Religious liberty means, not religious slavery, not simply the liberty of infidelity, the liberty to deny and blaspheme, but…that religion herself is free…to be herself, and to discharge her functions in her own way, without let or hindrance from the State….Who asserts the freedom of religion asserts the subjection of the State. Religion represents the Divine Sovereignty…in the affairs of men; the State…merely…human sovereignty. Is the Divine Sovereignty higher than the human…? Then is religion…higher than the State….Religion overrides all other sovereigns, and has the supreme authority over all the affairs of the world….This is a terrible doctrine to atheistical politicians, infidels, and anarchists; and hence…they are the enemies…of religious liberty. (21-129)

 

Same paper (March 22, 1848): “Christianity is ‘part and parcel of the law of the land.’…We are professedly a Christian State, and acknowledge ourselves bound by the law of nature as interpreted and re-enacted by Christianity.” 

Same paper (March 29, 1848): 

…the liberty of each man to be of what religion he pleases or of none…a low and an altogether inadequate view…merely a political…not a religious right at all; for no religion that has any self-respect can acknowledge that one has the right to be of any religion he chooses. No man has or can have a religious or moral right to be of any religion but the true religion….Every religion by its very nature is intolerant of every other, and condemns itself, if it is not.

 

John Adams, by comparison, had once written that “every honest, well-disposed, moral man, even if he were an atheist, should be accounted a Christian.” (21-130) 

Judith O’Rourke accepted her lot in a new land and in 1854 told a reporter she scoffed at educating her children. She hoped her sons would “grow up honest good men, like them that’s gone afore them, not ashamed of their station, or honest toil.” Her daughter, she hoped “‘ll be the same lady her mother is…an’ that’s a good enough….She’d look purty I’m thinkin’ wid her music in one corner an’ I wid my wash tub in another.” (21-132) 

Irish leaders were often opposed to reform ideas which “have revived pagan orgies in the pitiful farce of ‘Women’s Rights,’ and Bloomerism.” 

There was a fear of compulsory public education in 1848 (Handlin’s notes aren’t clear where this quote comes from: 

The consequence of this policy is…universal disobedience on the part of children…Our little boys scoff at their parents, call their fathers by the name of Old Man, Boss, or Governor. The mother is the Old Woman. The little boys smoke, drink, blaspheme, talk about fornication, and so far as they are physically able, commit it. Our little girls read novels…quarrel about their beaux, uphold Women’s Rights, and ---…We were a Boston school boy, and we speak of what we know. (21-135)

 

Writing in the Boston Pilot in 1856, Dr. John McElhern vilifies the Saxon race, including in his view, Germans, Scandinavians, Russians, Turks and Anglo-Saxons. Unlike the Celtic race, they are “essentially stupid…false, cruel, treacherous, base and bloody…” with “little or no faculty for poetry, music, or abstract science.” Lowest of all were the Saxons, “the very dregs and offal of the white population in America…These flaxen-haired German men and women…are lower than the race with black wool….Even when they are well to do they send their children out to beg.” (21-145) 

In 1864, Handlin says, more than 1,000 “gamins between the ages of eight and twelve were still prosecuted for vagrancy.” (21-162) 

Group conflict ebbed and flowed in Boston, Handlin explains. In 1839 the city finally repealed laws against intermarriage of the races; in 1855 separate schools for Negro children were abolished. In 1866 some 150 Negroes attended the city’s primary schools, 103 the grammar schools, five the high school. Handlin says: “Public pressure forced the Eastern and New Bedford Railroads to admit colored people to their cars in the forties; and former slaves began to move to the same streets as whites.” The 54th Massachusetts included 300 fugitive slaves. Negro regiments were segregated, but many Boston leaders “taking life and honor in their hands cast their lot with” the segregated troops. 

The latitudinarian belief increased in the early nineteenth century, that “inside of Christianity reason was free.” Governor Hancock had abolished Pope’s Day and in 1780 the Massachusetts constitution eliminated legal restrictions aimed at Catholics. City Council agreed to give Catholics special privileges to insure freedom of worship. Streets near Holy Cross Church were closed to limit the noise of passing trucks. (21-179-180) 

The Irish, the American editorialized on October 21, 1837, 

…instead of assimilating at once with the customs of the country of their adoption, our foreign population are too much in the habit of retaining their own national usages, of associating too exclusively with each other, and living in groups together. These practices serve no good purpose, and tend merely to alienate those among whom they have chosen to reside. It would be the part of wisdom, to ABANDON AT ONCE ALL USAGES AND ASSOCIATIONS WHICH MARK THEM AS FOREIGNERS, and to become in feeling and custom, as well as in privileges and rights, citizens of the United States.

 

Mayor Lyman complained that the Irish were “a race that will never be infused into our own, but on the contrary will always remain distinct and hostile.” (21-185) 

Rebecca Reed’s lurid tales of life in a Catholic convent stirred intense fear. Trouble erupted when a “demented nun,” Elizabeth Harrison, appeared and then disappeared. The Mother Superior of the Charlestown Convent refused to allow entry of authorities who were pursuing rumors of dungeons and torture chambers. A mob gathered and burned the Convent down. 

The press, generally, did object. A mass meeting at Faneuil Hall led to a resolution of sympathy, “to unite with our Catholic brethren in protecting their persons, their property, and their civil and religious rights.” 

A reward of $500 resulted in 13 arrests; eight men were tried, one convicted for the arson. (21-188-189) 

Irish political power increased; one leader said he would work hard to blend their interests with the regular political parties. “A man,” Richard O’Gorman wrote to a friend, “has no right to interfere in American politics unless he thinks as an American.” 

Opposition grew in the 1850s; the Irish were faulted for their anti-liberal ideas. Handlin explains, 

Failure of the enforcement of the prohibition laws was laid at the door of the Irish, and the State Temperance Committee announced it would fight Catholicism as part of its struggle for human freedom. The Burns case [involving apprehension of an escaped slave named Anthony Burns in 1858] clearly linked the immigrants to pro-slavery forces and man-hunters. The Pilot [an Irish paper] supported rendition of the fugitive slave; and the selection of the Columbian Artillery and Sarsfield Guards to protect him against indignant mobs seeking his freedom, incited an inflammatory handbill:

 

AMERICANS TO THE RESCUE!

AMERICANS! SONS OF THE REVOLUTION!!

A body of seventy-five Irishmen, known as the

“Columbian Artillery”

have volunteered their services to shoot down the

citizens of Boston! and are now under arms to defend

Virginia in kidnapping a Citizen of Massachusetts!

Americans! These Irishmen have called us

“Cowards and Sons of Cowards!”

Shall we submit to have our Citizens shot

down by a set of Vagabond Irishmen?

 

In May 1854, John S. Orr, called “The Angel Gabriel,” led a mob that seized the cross of the Catholic Church in Chelsea. In July another church was blown up in Dorchester. The Know Nothing Party increased in power and ruled Massachusetts until defeat in 1857. The Party argued that it did not want to exclude immigrants, rather to make them “be as we are.” When Irish votes helped defeat Fremont in 1856, the Republican Party helped pass an amendment the next year, making the ability to read the state constitution in English and to write, prerequisites for voting; in 1859 a provision was added denying the vote for two additional years to naturalized citizens. (21-198-204) 

The Civil War helped bring the Irish into the mainstream. Governor John A. Andrew wrote the Secretary of War, “Will you authorize the enlistment here…of Irish, German and other tough men…? We have men of such description, eager to be employed, sufficient to make three regiments.” (21-207) 

Patrick Gilmore, an immigrant, wrote When Johnny Comes Marching Home. (21-211)

 

I suppose you could say the Irish had arrived fully in 1876, when John Boyle O’Reilly took over editorship of the Pilot. He railed against attacks on Negroes, Jews, and immigrants, generally Like most of the Irish, however, he considered the Chinese a threat and called for their exclusion. (21-224) 

Expenditures for poor relief grew rapidly: (1847) $43,700, tripling to $139,217 (1852) (Boston’s Immigrants, Table III, 21-240) 

In 1836 16,902 passengers entered Boston by sea, only 443 from Ireland; in 1846 those numbers grew to 112,664, including 65,556 Irish. The following year the totals were roughly the same, another 63,831 Irish arriving. (Boston’s Immigrants, Table V, 21-242) 

In 1850, Boston listed four teachers of Irish nativity. There were 356 Irish carpenters, 203 masons, a single Irish undertaker, and 1,045 tailors; 2,292 Irish served as domestic servants and 7,007 (nearly half, 48.01 percent) were laborers. (Boston’s Immigrants, Table XIII, 21-250-251) 

By 1864 those of Irish nativity made up most of the arrests in the city, 9,791 of less than 12,000. (Boston’s Immigrants, Table XXIV)

  

* 

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.”

 

* 

During the Know Nothing era, 

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.) 



Banner of the Know Nothing Party, 1854.


*

I failed to note the sources for these examples: 

“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.”

 

* 

“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.” 

1850: one in ten of foreign birth, population 23 million; in next decade 2.8 million more immigrants. 



The Potato Famine left many Irish with no other choice than to emigrate.


*

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).

 

* 

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.

 

* 

One immigrant who did well was Levi Strauss, from Bavaria. In 1850 he made his first tough pants, complete with copper rivets, for the miners scrambling over every hill and panning every stream in California.

 

* 

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.”

 

* 

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…

 

* 

Immigrants came to America for all kinds of reasons. Frank Buchser left Switzerland after being caught in bed with a girl by her father.  (Robert E. Lee by Emory M. Thomas; p. 403).

 

* 

The 1840 census found that there were only four Chinese living in the United States, in a population of 17 million. An influx began during the Gold Rush; and later many Chinese helped build the Union Pacific. (NYT 5/29/18)

 

* 

Dislike of Chinese immigrants took hold after 1849. They were reputed to frequent “opium dens.” Their customs were “strange,” and it was believed they would defile the white race if they inter-married. They were seen as good only as servants, doing laundry. Like many immigrant groups, they did have a tendency to undercut pay for American workers, as when employed building the railroads. The Page Act of 1875 banned females from China—on the grounds they were all prostitutes—and this soon became a ban on Chinese women in all but name. The Chinese Exclusion Act, seven years later, banned all Chinese laborers. An attack on Chinese workers in Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885, left 28 dead and a hundred injured.


* 

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. 


Prejudice against the Chinese was pronounced.


*

           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)

 

* 

Next, we have the story of Jacob Riis, who left Denmark in 1870, when he was 21. He headed for America, filled with false ideas of what he would find upon arrival. He would go on to a successful career in journalism, write a famous book, How the Other Half Lives, and call for reforms to better the lives of the poor. 

Looking back on his life, he would write The Making of an American in 1901. Despite many battles along the way, he said, “I would not have missed being in it all for anything.” (preface) 

His story begins on a narrow bridge spanning the Nibs River, in the ancient Danish seacoast town of Ribe. He is heading home for a noonday meal, from the carpenter shop where he works. He spies a beautiful girl. 

When she has passed he stands looking after her, all the music gone out of him. At the other end of the bridge she turns with the feeling that he is looking, and, when she sees that he is, goes on with a little toss of her pretty head. As she stands one brief moment there with a roguish look, she is to stand in his heart forever—a sweet girlish figure, in jacket of grey, black-embroidered, with schoolbooks and pretty bronzed boots…

 

Riis is smitten—noting, further, that the boots had tassels. “Curls she had, too—curls of yellow gold. Why do girls not have curls these days?” (p. 2) 

At age 52, Riis can still see the landscape of his old hometown, “It was grass, all grass, for miles, to the sand dunes and the beach.” 

“Alas!” he adds, “I’m afraid that thirty years in the land of my children’s birth have left me as much of a Dane as ever. (p. 7) 

His family was poor in Denmark; and his thoughts turn to his “dear old mother” and how “She had a house full, and little enough to manage with; but never one went hungry or unhelped from her door.” From her, Riis learned it was important to help others, less fortunate. (11) 

Steel pens had not crowded out the old-fashioned goose-quill, and pen-knives meant just what their name implies. Matches were yet of the future. We carried tinderboxes to strike fire with. People shook their heads at the telegraph. The day of the stage-coach was not yet past. Steamboat and railroad had not come within forty miles of the town, and [there was] only one steam factory—a cotton mill that was owned by Elizabeth’s father….The watchmen still cried the hour at night….The police force, which in my boyhood consisted of a man and a half—that is, one with a wooden leg—was increased and uniformed, and the night watchmen’s chant was stopped. (12-14)

 

In his hometown, Riis remembered, there were three classes of people: “the officials, including church, school and government, the tradesmen, and the working people.” His father was of the last. His father’s salary “had to reach around to a family of fourteen, nay, fifteen, for he took his dead sister’s child when a baby and brought her up with us, who are boys all but one.” (21-22) 

At fifteen, then, he fell in love with the girl with the golden curls. Elizabeth was her name, and she was only 13. But the great barrier to their love was their status. Jacob was of the working class. Elizabeth’s father was of great importance in the town. He pursued the girl with more fervor than skill, so that matrons in the town spoke of the need “to box my ears soundly.” Riis spent four years, working in Copenhagen, never forgetting the girl. 

Once he had learned his trade, been admitted to the carpenters’ union, he dropped his tools “joyfully and in haste, made a bee-line for Ribe, where she was.” Everyone in town knew he had come to propose. Soon, everyone knew his proposal had been rejected, out of hand. 

What did I, a common carpenter, want at the “castle?” That was what they called her father’s house. He had other plans for his pretty daughter.

 

As for Elizabeth, poor child! she was not yet seventeen, and was easily persuaded that it was all wrong; she wept, and in the goodness of her gentle heart was truly sorry; and I kissed her hands and went out, my eyes brimming over with tears, feeling that there was nothing in all the wide world for me anymore, and that the farther I went from her the better. So it was settled that I should go to America. (32-33)

 

He dreamed of returning, a rich man, and taking Elizabeth’s hand in marriage. So, in 1870, he boarded the steamer Iowa, leaving from the port of Glasgow, and headed for America. Entering the harbor of New York City, some days later, he remembered, 

It was a beautiful spring morning, and as I looked over the rail at the miles of straight streets, the green heights of Brooklyn, and the stir of ferryboats and pleasure craft on the river, my hopes rose high that somewhere in this teeming hive there would be a place for me….I had a pair of strong hands, and stubbornness enough to do for two; also a strong belief that in a free country, free from the Dominion of custom, of caste, as well as of men, things would somehow come right in the end, and a man gets shaken into the corner where he belonged if he took a hand in the game. I think I was right in that. If it took a lot of shaking to get me where I belonged, that was just what I needed. Even my mother admits that now. To tell the truth, I was tired of hammer and saw. They were indissolubly bound up with my dreams of Elizabeth that were now gone to smash. Therefore I hated them.

 

Riis had heard of cowboys and Indians back home; he assumed the weather in the New World was always warm. And he wanted to be prepared to ward off any attackers with bows and arrows. 

I made it my first business to buy a navy revolver of the largest size, investing in the purchase exactly one-half of my capital. I strapped the weapon on the outside of my coat and strode up Broadway, conscious that I was following the fashion of the country. I knew it upon the authority of a man who had been there before me and had returned, a gold digger in the early days of California; but America was America to us. We knew no distinction of West and East. By rights there ought to have been buffaloes and red Indians charging up and down Broadway.

 

If Riis ever had cause to use his big revolver, there is no record of it. Finding work to suit him in the city was harder than expected. “I realized,” he laughed many years later, “that there was no special public clamor for my services in New York, and decided to go West.” (38-39)

Riis remembered two other passengers on the Iowa, immigrants like himself, who also had only the most rudimentary idea of what they would find once they arrived in America. One was a big Dane, 

…who carried an immense knapsack that was filled with sausages, cheese, and grub of all kinds when he came aboard. He never let go but for a moment on the voyage. In storm and sunshine he was there, shouldering his knapsack. I think he slept with it. When I last saw him hobbling down a side street in Pittsburgh, he carried it still, but one end of it hung limp and hungry, and the other was as lean as a bad year. The other voyager was a jovial Swede whose sole baggage consisted of an old musket, a blackthorn stick, and a barometer glass, tied up together.

 

Riis was fairly sure the Swedish fellow did not know how to write. 

On the trip over, Riis befriended “a big, explosive German who had been a reserve officer, I think, in the Prussian army.” Riis and Adler, the German, took it upon themselves to complain to the captain about the meat they were being served, “so bad as to offend not only our palates, but our sense of smell.” When the captain seemed willing to listen and bent over the meat for a whiff, Adler jerked the tray on which it sat upward, and the captain’s nose was buried in the dish. (40) 

Finding good work hard to come by in New York City, the two men proceeded to Pittsburgh. “I had a horrible fit of homesickness,” Riis recalled. 

The days I managed to get through by working hard and making observations on the American language. In this I had a volunteer assistant in Julia, the pretty, barefooted daughter of a coal-miner, who hung around and took an interest in what was going on. But she disappeared after I had asked her to explain what setting one’s cap for anyone meant. I was curious because I had heard her mother say to a neighbor that Julia was doing that to me. But the evenings were very lonesome. The girl in our boarding-house washed dishes always to one tune, “The Letter that Never Came.” It was not a cheerful tune and not a cheerful subject, for I had had no news from home since I left. I can hear her yet, shrieking and clattering her dishes, with the frogs yelling accompaniment in the creek that mumbled in the valley. I never could abide American frogs since.

 

He stumbled across a group of Welsh miners, who made it clear they did not like seeing a Danish immigrant in the valley. For some reason, he thought he might make money as a coal miner, but “one day was enough for me.” 

He recalled his brief experience. The mine where he was sent to work opened on the side of a hill. 

You did not go down through a shaft, but straight in through the side of a hill to the bowels of the mountain, following a track in which a little donkey drew the coal to the mouth of the mine and set it down an incline [to be loaded on rail cars]… Through one of these [openings] we marched in, Adler and I, one summer morning with new pick axes on our shoulders and nasty little oil lamps fixed in our hats to light us through the darkness where every second we stumbled over chunks of slate rock, or into pools of water that oozed from above. An old miner whose way lay past the fork in the tunnel where our lead began showed us how to use our picks and the timbers to brace the slate that roofed over the vein, and left us to ourselves in a chamber perhaps ten feet wide and the height of a man.

 

We were to be paid by the ton, I forget how much, but it was very little, and we lost no time getting to work. We had to dig away the coal at the floor with our picks, lying on our knees to do it, and afterward drive wedges under the roof to loosen the mass. It was hard work, and, entirely inexperienced as we were, we made but little headway. As the day wore on the darkness and silence grew very oppressive, and made us start nervously at the least thing. The sudden arrival of our donkey with its cart gave me a dreadful fright. The friendly beast greeted us with a joyous bray and rubbed its shaggy side against us in the most companionable way. In the flickering light of my lamp I caught sight of its long ears waving over me—I don’t believe I had seen three donkeys before in my life; there were none where I came from—and heard that demonic shriek, and I verily believe I thought the evil one had come for me in person.  I know that I nearly fainted.

 

That donkey was a discerning animal. I think it knew when it first laid eyes on us that we were not going to overwork it; and we didn’t. When, toward evening, we quit work, after narrowly escaping being killed by a large stone that fell from the roof in consequence of our neglect to brace it up properly, our united efforts had resulted in barely filling two of the little carts, and we had earned, if I recollect aright, something like sixty cents each. The fall of the roof robbed us of all desire to try mining again. (44-46)

 

Riis and his German friend soon tried their hands at carpentry. Riis now heard the news. Germany and France had declared war. Denmark, he believed, had been robbed of its land by the Germans in 1864. Still patriotic, and still a Dane at heart, he says he “dropped my tools the moment I heard it, and flew rather than ran to the company’s office to demand my time; thence to our boarding-house to pack.” 

He would return home and fight. His German friend tried to discourage him, saying his own countrymen would make short work of the French (which they did). “I heeded nothing,” Riis wrote. 

All the hot blood of youth was surging through me. I remembered the defeat, the humiliation of the flag I loved—aye! and love yet, for there is no flag like the flag of my fathers, save only that of my children and of my manhood—and I remembered, too, Elizabeth, with a sudden hope. I would be near her then, and I would earn fame and glory. The carpenter would come back with shoulder straps [the mark of an officer]. Perhaps then, in the castle …I shouldered my trunk and ran for the station. Such tools, clothes, and things as it would not hold I sold for what they would fetch, and boarded the next train for Buffalo, which was as far as my money would take me. (47)

 

There he stuck for a time, finally pawning most of his possessions in order to raise money for a ticket to New York City. 

He arrived there “with just one cent” in his pocket. But the Danish counsel was not interested in sending him home to fight. He still had his revolver and a good pair of boots. But he now had to pawn those, too, to pay for room and board, until he could figure out how to get home. 

He ran out of money completely and got pitched out of his seedy “hotel” on his ear. He roamed the streets of the city that night with only a gripsack, holding “only a linen duster and a pair of socks.” (51) 

A Catholic charity fed him – and headed out of the city. 

Up the railroad track I went, and at night hired out to a truck farmer, with the freedom of his haymow for my sleeping quarters. But when I had hoed cucumbers three days in a scorching sun, till my back ached as if it were going to break, and the farmer guessed that he would call it square for three shillings, I went farther….I did odd jobs to earn my meals, and slept in the fields at night, still turning over in my mind how to get across the sea.

 

One night, he bedded down in a stable. “In the middle of the night I was awakened by a loud outcry. A fierce light shone in my face. It was the lamp of a carriage that had been driven into the shed. I was lying between the horse’s feet unhurt. A gentleman sprang from the carriage, more frightened than I, and bent over me. When he found that I had suffered no injury, he put his hand in his pocket and held out a silver quarter. 

“Go,” he said, “and drink it up.” 

“Drink it up yourself!” I shouted angrily. “What do you take me for?” 

They were rather high heroics, seeing where I was, but he saw nothing to laugh at. He looked earnestly at me for a moment, then held out his hand and shook mine heartily. “I believe you,” he said; “yet you need it, or you would not sleep here. “Now will you take it from me?” And I took the money.

 

It rained for two days and Riis headed back to the city, with only a quarter to keep him going. For two more days, he was able to eat. Then he read in the New York Sun, that a volunteer regiment was being “fitted out for France.” 

He headed for the office of the paper and asked to see the editor, Charles A. Dana. 

I went up to the office, and was admitted to Mister Dana’s presence. I fancy I must have appealed to his sense of the ludicrous, dressed in top boots and a linen duster much the worse for wear, and demanding to be sent out to fight. He knew nothing about recruiting. Was I French? No, Danish; it had been in his paper about the regiment. He smiled a little at my faith, and said editors sometimes did not know about everything that was in their papers. I turned to go, grievously disappointed, but he called me back.

 

“Have you,” he said, looking searchingly at me, “have you had your breakfast?”

 

No, God knows that I had not; neither that day nor for many days before. (55)

 

Dana knew the answer without waiting, and pulled a dollar out of his pocket and offered it to Riis, telling him, “There, go and get your breakfast.” (56) 

Riis refused the money, left the office, soon sold his good pair of boots, ate a good meal, and found work in “Pfeiffer’s clay-bank.” 

Pfeiffer was a German, but his wife was Irish and so were his hands, all except a giant Norwegian and myself. The third day [Riis worked there] was Sunday, and was devoted to drinking much beer, which Pfeiffer, with an eye to business, furnished on the premises. When they were drunk, the tribe turned upon the Norwegian, and threw him out. It seems that this was a regular weekly occurrence. Me they fired out at the same time, but afterward paid no attention to me. The whole crew of them perched on the Norwegian and belabored him with broomsticks and bale-sticks until they roused the sleeping Berserker in him. As I was coming to his relief, I saw the human heap heave and rock. From under it arose the enraged giant, tossed his tormentors aside as if they were so much chaff, battered down the door of the house in which they took refuge, and threw them all, Mrs. Pfeiffer included, through the window. They were not hurt, and within two hours they were drinking more beer together and swearing at one another endearingly. I concluded that I had better go on, though Mister Pfeiffer regretted that he never paid his hands in the middle of the month. It appeared afterward that he objected likewise to paying them at the end of the month, or at the beginning of the next. He owes me two days’ wages yet. (56-57)

 

After quitting Pfeiffer’s employ, Riis once again returned to the city. On the way back, he found apples littering the ground in an orchard and picked up a few. In the city, he spent a night sleeping on a stone slab in a graveyard and “chewing the last of the windfall apples that had been my diet on my two day trip.” (58) 

His next job was in a brickyard, where he spent six-weeks. He continued to try to find ways to get to France and fight; but the war soon ended in French defeat. The brick-making season ended; and he was out of work again. “I joined the great army of tramps,” he wrote, “wandering about the streets in daytime with the one aim of somehow stilling the hunger that gnawed at my vitals.” At night, he battled with others for space to sleep in sheltering doorways and ash-bins. (66) 

 

__________ 

“I don’t care two pins for all the social theories that were ever made unless they help to make better men and women by bettering their lot.” 

Jacob Riis

__________ 

 

He came to believe, that many comfortably situated reporters were too quick to condemn efforts to raise the less comfortable out of their misery. Someone “had to tell the facts” of what life was like for the downtrodden. And that was one reason he became a reporter. As Riis wrote many years later, after having devoted himself to improving life in his adopted city of New York, “I don’t care two pins for all the social theories that were ever made unless they help to make better men and women by bettering their lot.” That simple principle would become the foundation of his entire career. (68) 

 

I do write materials for students, in grades 7-9 and sell them on TpT at Middle School History and Tips for Teachers. My ratings, so far, are excellent.

 

(I have one reading based on Jacob Riis’s book, How the Other Half Lives, focusing on poverty in the cities in the 1890s.)

 

In his days as a tramp, however, he found one particularly “good” doorway to sleep in, despite the periodic approach of the policeman, who would prod sleepers with a foot or his club and tell them to get up and move on. 

Riis remembered, 

I slept there, or tried to when crowded out of the tenements in the Bend by their utter nastiness. Cold and wet weather had set in, and a linen duster was all that covered my back. There was a woolen blanket in my trunk which I had from home…but the trunk was in the “hotel” as security for money I owed for board, and I asked for it in vain. I was now too shabby to get work, even if there had been any to get….the winter was approaching and every shivering night in the streets reminding me that a time was rapidly coming when such a life as I led could no longer be endured. (69)

 

One night, in desperation, he went to the nearest police station, and asked for a place to sleep. 

He left New York again, bummed his way to Philadelphia, got help from the kindly  Danish counsel and his wife, and was soon headed to Jamestown, New York, where an old schoolmate had settled. “Hope springs eternal at twenty-one,” he wrote three decades later. “I had many a weary stretch ahead before I was to make port. But with youth and courage as equipment, one should win almost any fight.” (77) 

In Jamestown, he chopped wood and cut ice on the lake. He helped repair the steamer that ran from that town to Mayville. “I was out to twist the wheel of fortune my way when I could get my hands upon it.” (79) 

He and a new friend, with whom he worked, now had one good coat between them. They took turns wearing it to weekly parties in a nearby town. “Dancing being tabooed as immoral and contaminating,” Riis laughed, “the young people had recourse to particularly energetic kissing games, which more than made up for their deprivation on the other score.” 

He found work in Buffalo lumberyard next, piling up boards. 

Next, he worked in a factory, making bedsteads. He and a cabinet-maker who hired him “fitted up a bedroom [in the top story of the factory] that was just large enough for one sitting and two standing, so long as the door was not opened; then one of the two had to get out.” (91)

 

To say that there have always been dysfunctional families, is only saying what should be obvious to all. But the family of his new boss was dysfunctional with a capital “D.” Riis recalls, 

I had eventually to give that job up also, because my boss was “bad pay.” He was pretty much all bad, I guess. I do think his house was the most disorderly one I have ever come across. Seven ill-favored children clamored about the table, fighting with their even more ill-favored mother. She used to single out the one she wished to address by slamming a handful of string beans, or whatever greens might be at hand, across the table at him. The youngster would fire it back, and so they were en rapport with each other. The father was seldom sober at meals, and when he “felt funny,” he would stealthily pour a glass of water down the nearest child’s back and then sit and chuckle over the havoc he had wrought. There followed a long and woeful wail and an instant explosion from the mother in this wise. I can hear it now. It was always the same: —

 

“Gott-himmel-donnerwetter-noch-emal-ich-will-demal-hole-du-spitzbub-eselskerl-wart’-nur-ich-schlag-de-noch-todt-potz-sacrement!”

 

       He and Adler linked up again. 

He had come up to get a $1500 place, as he informed me. That would about satisfy him. That such jobs were waiting by the score for an educated German in this barbarous land he never doubted for a moment. In the end he went to work in a rolling mill at a dollar a day. Adler was ever a stickler for etiquette. In Brady’s end we had very little of it. At mealtimes a flock of chickens used to come into the summer kitchen where we ate, and forage around, to Adler’s great disgust. One day they deliberately flew up on the table, and fell a fighting with the boarders for the food. A big Shanghai rooster trod in the butter and tracked it over the table. At the site Adler’s rage knew no bounds. Seizing a half-loaf of bread he aimed it at the rooster and felled him in his tracks. The flock of foul flew squawking out of the door. The women screamed, and the men howled with laughter. Adler flourished another loaf and vowed vengeance upon bird or beast that did not let the butter alone. (92-93) 

Riis had other jobs, some good, some not, but rarely made enough to get ahead. One day he decided to put Buffalo behind him. And off on the road he went again. 

Sunday morning found me spending my last quarter for breakfast in an inn at Lime Lake. When I had eaten, I went out in the field and sat with my back against a tree, and listened to the church-bells that were ringing also, I knew, in my home four thousand miles away. I saw the venerable Domkirke, my father’s grey head in his pew, and Her, young and innocent, in the women’s seats across the aisle. I heard the old pastor’s voice in the solemn calm, and my tears fell upon her picture [which he had in a locket] that had called up the vision. It was as if a voice spoke to me and said to get up and be a man; that if I wanted to win Elizabeth, to work for her was the way, and not idling my days away on the road. And I got right up, and, setting my face toward Buffalo, went by the shortest cut back to my work. (96-97)

 

By Monday evening, he said, “I had walked fifty miles without stopping or eating.” He found work on a lake steamer for good wages. His experiences in America, so far, had taken down his self-esteem “a good many pegs.” But he dreamed of joining a newspaper. “It seemed to me that a reporter’s was the highest, noblest of all callings; no one could sift wrong from right as he, and punish the wrong.…The power of fact is the mightiest lever of this or any day. The reporter has his hand upon it, and it is his grievous fault if he does not use it well.” (98-99) 

He stopped in at one newspaper office and said he wanted work. The man he took to be the editor replied, half in jest, “We don’t work here. This is a newspaper office.” 

Riis left and tried the office of the Express. This time he met the editor for sure and made his request. He wanted to be a reporter. The editor looked him over—his rough workman’s clothing, his tough hands. The editor asked, 

“What are you?”  

“A carpenter,” I said. 

The man turned upon his heel with a loud, rasping laugh and shut the door in my face. For a moment I stood there stunned. His ascending steps on the stairs brought back my senses. I ran to the door, and flung it open. “You laugh!” I shouted, shaking my fist at him, standing halfway up the stairs, “you laugh now, but wait— ” And then I got the grip of my temper and slammed the door in my turn. All the same, in that hour it was settled that I was to be a reporter. I knew it as I went out into the street. (100)

 

He sold furniture for a short time, and while out on the road, working as a salesman, found “my previous training in going hungry for days came in handy at last.” He skipped dinners and tried to save money. Two old friends from Denmark had by now joined him in America, “hearing that I was doing well.” One had forwarded a letter from Elizabeth to him, written long ago, when all of them were young. (Thirty years later, Riis admitted he still had it.) 

The friend who brought the letter had a drinking problem. While Riis was off selling furniture, the man enlisted in the army. He rose to the rank of sergeant, got drunk again, ruined his career, and thirty years later he shot himself to death. 

Like any immigrant, the sergeant sometimes longed for his past life. “In all his ups and downs,” Riis recalled, “he never forgot his home. While his mother lived he helped support her in far-off Denmark; and when she was gone, no month passed that he did not send home the half of his wages for the support of his crippled sister in the old town.”  

Meanwhile, he said, he received news from Ribe. His beloved Elizabeth was to be married. “At the thought,” he said, “I turned my face to the wall, and hoped that I might die.” (115) 

He kept fighting to get ahead. He spent his last $20, a large sum in those days, to go to a business college and learn telegraphing. 

His money ran out. 

He landed a job as a reporter at last on a struggling newspaper on Long Island. The editor put him to work—but couldn’t meet payroll. Riis wrote for nothing in the end, and moved on. He acquired a loyal dog, a big fellow, he named “Bob,” but he was no better off than he had been three years ago. “Three wasted years! Then I had one cent in my pocket, I remembered. Today I had not even so much. I was bankrupt in hope and purpose. Nothing had gone right; and, worse, I did not care.” He looked ahead. “For me there was no supper,” he saw, “as there had been no dinner and no breakfast. Tomorrow there was another day of starvation. How long could this last?” (120-121)

 

Then, at long last, Fate smiled on young Jacob. The superintendent of the school on telegraphing saw him—knew he was down on his luck—told him of a possible opening. “The manager of a news agency downtown asked me today to find him a bright young fellow whom he could break in. It isn’t much—$10 a week to start with.” 

Riis felt as if he was in a “dream.” He followed the superintendent to his home and gave him “Bob” to keep. “For the second time I saw a hand held out to save me from wreck just when it seemed inevitable; and I knew it for His hand, to whose will I was at last beginning to bow in humility that had been a stranger to me before.”  His first real assignment for the newspaper was to write up a fancy lunch gathering at the Astor House. The young reporter had, at the time, been without food for three days. But he was too proud to ask for any. He wrote up his piece, handed it over to the editor, and heard him say, “You will do. Take that desk, and report at ten every morning, sharp.” 

Riis went up the street to a house where a Danish family took in boarders. 

I had work and wages now, and could pay. On the stairs I fell in a swoon and lay there till some one stumbled over me in the dark and carried me in. My strength had at last given out. 

So began my life as a newspaper man.  (123)

 

Riis began to prosper, at last. He was a good reporter; and from his job, and also from a job as a court interpreter, he saved $75. He bought a failing little newspaper, mostly on credit. 

The upshot of it was that I bought the paper for $650, giving notes for the rest, to be paid when I could. If I could not, they were not much out. And then, again, I might succeed. I did; by what effort I hesitate to set down here lest I be not believed. The News was a big four-page sheet. Literally every word in it I wrote myself. I was my own editor, reporter, publisher, and advertising agent. My pen kept two printers busy all week, and left me time to canvass for advertisements, attend meetings, and gather the news. (132)

 

He wrote home, regularly, finally able to tell his mother of success in the New World. Then, one day, a letter arrived. Six years had he been gone from Ribe. Now, at last, he recognized the handwriting on the envelope. 

It was from his Elizabeth. 

I knew by the throbbing of my heart what it was the instant I saw it. I think I sat as much as a quarter of an hour staring dumbly at the unopened envelope. Then I arose slowly, like one grown suddenly old, put it in my pocket, and stumbled homeward, walking as if in a dream. I went up to my room and locked myself in.

 

His joy on finally reading it was clear. “How much sunshine one little letter can contain!” he said later. Elizabeth had in fact married. Her husband fell ill almost at once and died. Meanwhile, Riis had made the News a success—sometimes stirring the anger of local politicians—and now sold it for five times what he paid. He wrote to Elizabeth and said he would be visiting his old home soon; but swore her to tell no one. He sailed across the Atlantic, landed in Denmark and took the train for Ribe, and by chance, at one stop, his father and an old doctor friend boarded. “My heart smote me,” Riis said, at the sight of his father. He cried out. His father seemed stunned, as if he “saw a ghost.” 

While father and son stood, too overcome with emotion to speak, the doctor recovered his surprise. “Bless my soul! Bless my soul if here is not Jacob come back from the wilds as large as life! Welcome home, boy!” They laughed and shook hands all around. Jacob’s father took him home, but insisted he go in first, rather than startle his wife. “What do you think,” he started to say, but he could get no more words out of his mouth. 

“Jacob!” she cried. Somehow she knew, and rising to her feet with great joy, soon had her son in her arms. 

Jacob and Elizabeth soon agreed to marry; and he took her away from her home and carried her across the ocean, to a new life in America. He knew she was leaving family and friends, as he had. She never complained. Often, after dinner, as she cleaned the dishes, he heard her singing “softly to herself the old airs from home.” Often the song would be interrupted by “a sob that was not for my ear.” Riis would put on an apron at such times and help his wife, vowing to insure she had a better life in a new land. “Two can battle with a fit of homesickness much better than one,” he explained a quarter century later, “even if never a word is said about it.” (169-175)

 

In years to come, Riis would become friends with a New York City police commissioner like himself, interested in improving the conditions they saw around them. That man was Theodore Roosevelt. 

Riis would write the classic story of poverty, and the need for new ways of addressing the fate of the poor, in particular the children. That book, How the Other Half Lives is still read today. 

He and his wife had five children of their own, but Elizabeth died early, in 1905, and Riis died two years later, at age 58. 

 Riis never forgot his old home and would travel back to Ribe occasionally. “I felt the tugging of the chain which he must bear through life who exiled himself from the land of his birth, however near to his heart that of his choice and his adoption.” On another occasion, he spoke of the “hoops of steel” that held his heart to Denmark. (399-400) 

Late in life, Riis looked back at what he had tried to do to make the world a better place. “I did my work and tried to put into it what I thought citizenship ought to be, when I made it out.”  He met the King of Denmark on one visit and was knighted. He wore the gold cross “gladly,” he said. 

It meant, 

the defence of womanhood and of little children, and if I cannot wield a lance and sword as the king’s men of old, I can wield the pen. It may be that in the providence of God the shedding of ink in the cause of right shall set the world farther ahead in our day than the blood-letting of all the ages past.” (423; 430)

 

He had, he said, fought “the slum with its helpless heredity of despair.” Riis knew he had done good by humanity while he lived. (431) 

He ended his story so: 

I have told the story of the making of an American. There remains to tell how I found out that he was made and finished at last. It was when I went back to see my mother once more and, wandering about the country of my childhood's memories, had come to the city of Elsinore. There I fell ill of a fever and lay many weeks in the house of a friend upon the shore of the beautiful Oresund. One day when the fever had left me they rolled my bed into a room overlooking the sea. The sunlight danced upon the waves, and the distant mountains of Sweden were blue against the horizon. Ships passed under full sail up and down the great waterways of the nations. But the sunshine and the peaceful day bore no message to me. I lay moodily picking at the coverlet, sick and discouraged and sore—I hardly knew why myself. Until all at once there sailed past close inshore, a ship flying at the top the flag of freedom, blown out on the breeze till every star in it shone bright and clear. That moment I knew. Gone were illness, discouragement, and gloom! Forgotten weakness and suffering, the cautions of doctor and nurse. I sat up in bed and shouted, laughed and cried by turns, waving my handkerchief to the flag out there. They thought I had lost my head, but I told them no, thank God! I had found it, and my heart, too, at last. I knew then that it was my flag; that my children’s home was mine, indeed; that I also had become an American in truth. And I thanked God, and, like unto the man sick of the palsy, arose from my bed and went home, healed.  (442-443)

 

* 

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.

 

* 

A wave of Russian Jews came in the 1880s, often penniless, speaking Russian or Yiddish, and congregated in city slums. May 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)

 

* 

1883

The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus 

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!”


NOTE TO TEACHERS: When I was teaching, I had students memorize this poem, starting with the fourth line, “A mighty woman…” I felt the poem said a great deal about America—and the “American Dream.” 


* 

Friedrich Trump, grandfather of President Donald J. Trump, leaves Bavaria in 1885, 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.

 

* 

By 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.  

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.   

 

Prescott F. Hall, head of the Immigration Restriction League, would sound similar 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.”

 

* 

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.)

 

* 

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.

 

* 

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.”

 

* 

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)

 

* 

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)



Quota laws dramatically reduced immigration in the 1920s.



* 

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.

 

* 

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.” 

In 1913 he bought a piece of land [near Valleyfield, Québec], and failed as a farmer. Then he came into town and failed as a baker; failed in the dry-goods business; failed as a jobber; failed as a sack manufacturer in the War, when no one else failed. He failed as a junk dealer. Then he became a marriage broker and failed—too short tempered and blunt.

 

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.”

 

* 

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.

 

* 

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 Emporea, 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.

 

* 

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.

 

* 

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.’” 

Later: 

Thomas Mann, who had become an American citizen in 1944, felt the dread of déjà vu. The likes of McCarthy, Hoover, and Nixon had crossed his line of sight before. In 1947, after the blacklisting of the Hollywood Ten, he recorded a broadcast in which he warned of incipient Fascist tendencies: “Spiritual intolerance, political inquisition, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency’: that is how it started in Germany.” Two years later, he found his face featured in a Life magazine spread titled “Dupes and Fellow Travelers.” In his diary, he commented that it looked like a Steckbrief: a “Wanted” poster.

 

Fearing the rise of Fascism again, Mann left the United States in 1952 and never returned. “He died in Zurich in 1955, no longer an émigré German but an American in exile.”

 

* 

In 1943, the Zoot Suit Riots convulsed Los Angeles, as U.S. servicemen launched attacks on young Hispanic men. (I need to check this out more.)

 

* 

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.”

 

* 

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.)

 

* 

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.

* 

A penniless Jewish refugee from Hungary named Laszlo N. Tauber arrived in the United States in 1947. A doctor, he was just happy 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, and built an empire worth an estimated $500 million. (This article is probably from 1991). It was when first 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.”

 

* 

Here in Cincinnati, the following story is often found on tables at Skyline restaurants:

 

History of Skyline Chili 

By Lambert, James, Christie, William and John Lambrinides

 

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.)

 

*

In 1952 the McCarren-Walter Act was enacted; the ban against Chinese, Japanese and other Asian immigrants becoming citizens was finally lifted.

 

* 

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.”

 

* 

In the 1960s more Mexicans began to arrive, filling jobs on farms and working as maids, etc. Sometimes called “Greasers,” they were said to be “lazy” and “ignorant.” Another insulting term would be “Spics.” These people were often denied service in restaurants, like African Americans. 

The subtle racism of the song Manana, 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! 





Scenes from West Side Story would also work to stir a little discussion about the prejudice directed toward Puerto Ricans, although they are not technically immigrants. The Jets, in the movie, have noticeable 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.

 

*      

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 any intent to embarrass. Hamid became a great family friend.

 

* 

Hua Hsu’s father left Taiwan in 1965, to come to the U.S. He explains his father’s journey, and his own: 

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. 

Cupertino was in transition when we arrived, in 1986. There was a huge factory downtown, farms on the outskirts, and a few buildings occupied by Apple. Apple seemed like a joke – nobody used Apple computers. As Silicon Valley flourished in the late eighties and early nineties, more Asian immigrants moved there. All my grandparents came from Taiwan to the South Bay, and most of my parents’ brothers and sisters settled there as well. The suburbs were amenable to a kind of haphazard, gradual transformation – flagging businesses were remade by new waves of immigrants, and strip malls began turning, store by store, into archipelagos of hyper-regional Chinese food and the latest in imported hair fads. There were bubble-tea cafés and Chinese bookstores, parking lots mazy with modified Hondas and moms hoping to preserve their pale complexions with full-face visors and elbow-length driving gloves. Chefs from Hong Kong and Taiwan joined the throngs of engineers coming to California. The pressure to appeal to non-Chinese shoppers or diners casually disappeared. Neck bones and chicken feet and various gelatinous things, VHS dubs of the latest Taiwanese dramas, Chinese-language newspapers and books: all could pay the bills, and then some.

 

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 you are 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. 

 

* 

The St. Louis Arch 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).

 

* 

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.

The clip, “It’s a cultural thing,” would work.)

  

From a story in the Times, 4-26-15, “Our Vietnam War Never Ended,” by Viet Thanh Nguyen—he mentions 4,000,000 Vietnamese in the diaspora. 

The author came here at age four and grew 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 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 both 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.

 

* 

In another story in The New York Times (11/14/17) Viet Thanh 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 turkey. 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.

 

* 

Fear of Japanese immigrants grew after 1900. Like the Chinese, they were 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. 

In the fall of 1906, the San Francisco Board of Education ordered all Japanese students to attend segregated schools. 

In 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. 

After 1942, the situation took a turn for the worse. 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.” 

The US government locked up 110,000 people in camps, including 77,000 Japanese American citizens. 

Later, the all-Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team served in Europe, winning more decorations for bravery than any other unit in the U.S. Army. 

In the 1980s, American students of Japanese ancestry would score much higher on the SAT than white, black and red peers. They would become known as the “model minority.”

 

* 

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.

 

* 

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 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.

 

* 

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.

 

ADD THREE SCANS…

 

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 (Cincinnati Enquirer editorial, December 16, 1991). 

In 1990 Congress enacted 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.) 

From a loose article in my files, probably USA Today.

 

* 

In an article in Esquire (July 1, 1990), 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.

 

* 

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 was also increased to 140,000 per year, up from 54,000.

 

* 

A loose article from the Los Angeles Times, in July 1991, 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. 

 

* 

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.

 

* 

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 Hernàndez, 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.

 

* 

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.”

 

* 

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.

 

* 

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.

 

* 

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.



*

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.”

 

* 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: Any discussion of immigration today might be fraught with issues that could divide a classroom – and bring down parental anger on one’s head. These examples come from the Trump years (2017-2021), come from a different blog I started when he was elected. My bias is clear, but I’m too lazy to rewrite all of this now. 

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.


Reporters asked immigrants (NYT 6-25-17) what they thought of the cabinet meeting where members all praised President Trump. 

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,” he told a reporter, “is because I’m free.” 

“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.”

 

* 

The New York Times (7/5/17) 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.”

 

* 

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.” He still considers “the classic Oreo to be a sandwich cookie of perfect proportion and sweetness.” But, “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 that I understood Oreos were not, in fact, a luxury product.”

 

* 

Masha Gessen reveals (NYT (11/15/17) a piece of writing by her mother: 

How does a strange land become your home? I don’t know. It’s a mysterious and incomprehensible process. Yet, bit by bit, the streets of a strange city take on memories of their own and you stop wandering along them like a detached shadow—you become a traveler like all the others. “Absolute homelessness is unbearable,” writes Leszek Kolakowksi, a Polish philosopher living in London. “It would mean a rejection of human existence.” So we build our home in a strange land, and then we can return home from travels to Paris, London, Amsterdam, or Jerusalem. Even when we had the unexpected, incredible chance to travel to Moscow, we left Moscow—to go home. There is a striking duality to émigré consciousness. We mix up our pronouns: we, they, ours, yours, who/where are we after all that? We are people who have built our home on American land and who have gained a home here.

 

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 force 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.

 

* 

The Carnegie Corporation of New York (NYT 7/4/18), 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 was still teaching, I’d note the three members of Congress who were all born in other countries.)

 

* 

After President Trump refers dismissively in January 2018 to immigrants from “shithole” countries, 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.



* 

 

Immigration talk is all the rage in Washington. Trump’s base fears immigrants, in part because immigrants want to kill Americans with saws, 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 recheck 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!

 

* 

The Trump administration decides to revoke 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.

 

* 

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.


* 

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 joined by 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 in the categorical forced separation of minor children from their parents.”

 

* 

In June, ICE carries out one of its largest immigration raids in years. Agents descended 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? Simple. The undocumented work cheap and don’t expect healthcare.

 

* 

Stung by criticism of his administration’s child separation policy, President Trump tweets: 

We must maintain a Strong Southern Border. We cannot allow our Country to be overrun by illegal immigrants as the Democrats tell their phony stories of sadness and grief, hoping it will help them in the elections. Obama and others had the same pictures, and did nothing about it!

 

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. 

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.

 

A second Trump supporter learned an even harder lesson last year. 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 not long after, leaving Mrs. Beristain to take care of their three children and run Eddie’s Steak House all by herself.

 

* 

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. “I think they were both pretty proud.

 

* 

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.”

 

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.

 

* 

March 3, 2017: A Sikh gentleman, born in India and living near Seattle, is approached in his driveway and shot by a white assailant. The gunman shouts, “Go back to your own country.”

 

* 

August 2, 2017: The Trump administration announces plans to cut legal immigration in half.

Only those immigrants who have important skills and can speak English fluently are wanted. 

Had this policy been in place in 1885 it would have been bad for Friedrich Trump, first of the line to come to our shores. According to his grandson, on arrival Friedrich knew almost no English. All his life he spoke German primarily. 

Know who else wouldn’t have made it, had this new policy been in effect a century ago?  Stephen Miller’s great grandfather, a Jew fleeing pogroms and abuse in Russia, and speaking Yiddish. He would have been barred. Sam Glosser was his name and 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, of course, has been the force behind many of the Trump administration’s positions on immigration.

 

* 

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.

 

* 

December 3, 2017: Speaking of courts—that pesky third branch of government—Trump is on the rampage again. (Okay, you can tell I’m biased at times.) 

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. 

Trump insists our court system, as it now stands, is a “laughingstock and a disaster.” What we needed, he fumes, is “punishment that’s far quicker and far greater than the punishment these animals are getting right now.”

 

* 

“All these people from shithole countries.” 

Even assuming Trump doesn’t read any books, the day only gets worse. In an afternoon meeting with members of both political parties, 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.

 

* 

1/12/18: 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 said and 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 confirmed the shithole comments to him. Scott calls the president’s response “incredibly disappointing.”

 

* 

1/13/18: 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.” 

 

Someone is covertly drugging Trump! 

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.

 

* 

Still, you might argue that Donald J. Trump is getting the hang of picking the right people for the right jobs. After all, Rob Porter is better than Carl Higbie, who had to leave his post in January. 

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. 

 

Bring a gun. Let’s shoot illegal immigrants.

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.

 

* 

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: 



Sgt. First Class Tung Nyguen.


Sikh officer in the U.S. Army.


Father of a Muslim American officer killed in battle.


Afghan children.


Nigerian immigrant takes the oath of citizenship.


 

* 

We knew a decade ago how much immigrants helped 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 people like Ingraham and Duke don’t believe they’re fit to have drape their coffins. Those heroes had all been posthumously granted citizenship in return for their lives. 

(By 2013, 284 foreign-born service members had been killed in the global fight against terror.) 

Let’s consider a few of the men and women 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, Ingraham and others like her might open their eyes a little wider and “see” all the colors of true Americans:

 

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.”

 

* 

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.

 

* 

Top White House aide Stephen Miller comes under attack in August 2018, but from an unexpected direction. In case you don’t know, 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). 

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<