*
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)
