Transcript
Two Harbors
1882 · 1886
On May 6, 1882, President Chester Arthur signed a law that shut Chinese laborers out of the United States. It also barred every Chinese immigrant from ever becoming a citizen.
That year, while Congress argued, nearly forty thousand Chinese immigrants arrived, more than in any year before.
October 28, 1886 New York harbor
Four years later, in New York harbor, the sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi held a cord tied to a French flag. The flag hid his statue's face. When Senator William Evarts finished his speech, Bartholdi would pull.
Some tellings say Bartholdi pulled too soon: the senator had only paused for breath. The official record says the speech was over. Even this moment has two versions.
Two harbors, four years apart. One law shut a door. One statue lifted a lamp.
Between 1865 and 1898, more than twelve million people came anyway. Who got to become American? And who got to decide?
Emma Lazarus A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles.
The Lamp
1871–1886
Her full name was Liberty Enlightening the World.
The idea is credited to Édouard de Laboulaye, who led France's anti-slavery society. At her feet, Bartholdi put a broken chain. From the ground, it's barely visible.
Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian immigrant, printed every donor's name in his newspaper, the World. By August 1885, the fund passed $100,000. Most gave under a dollar.
Back in 1883, the poet Emma Lazarus wrote a sonnet to help. Her family had been New Yorkers since colonial times. She helped Jewish refugees from Russia.
President Cleveland accepted her in the rain.
Grover Cleveland We will not forget that Liberty has here made her home; nor shall her chosen altar be neglected.
At the dedication, nobody read her poem. Nobody mentioned immigrants.
Only two women were allowed on the island. So suffragists chartered a boat and spoke among the warships. Liberty was a woman. Most American women couldn't vote.
Downtown, office workers threw ticker tape out the windows: New York's first ticker-tape parade.
In 1886 the statue meant France, America and liberty. The people sailing past her would give her a new meaning.
Last Residence
1865–1898
Before anyone became American, they had to leave somewhere.
From 1865 to 1898, more than twelve million immigrants arrived. They followed the jobs. Arrivals sank after the panics of 1873 and 1893.
Through the 1880s, most came from Germany, Ireland, Britain and Scandinavia. By 1896, most came from southern and eastern Europe: Italy, Austria-Hungary, the Russian Empire.
In southern Italy, farmers had too little land and too many taxes. Young men sailed for work, and as many as half went home.
In the Russian Empire, pogroms in 1881 and the May Laws of 1882 pushed Jews from villages and trades. In 1891, Moscow expelled thousands of Jewish families.
The pull came by mail: letters about jobs, and tickets paid for by relatives already here. Steamships cut the crossing to a week or two.
Steerage, the cheapest class, cost about twenty-five dollars from Naples.
Americans moved too. Farm children left for city jobs. Black Southerners, pushed by debt and terror, moved to Atlanta and Birmingham. Some went north.
Chicago grew from three hundred thousand people in 1870 to over a million in 1890. Four in ten had been born abroad.
Industry got the workers it wanted: Slovaks and Hungarians in Pennsylvania steel, Poles in Chicago’s packinghouses. French Canadians in New England mills. Italians on railroad crews. The industrial workforce grew bigger, and far more mixed.
Whether a Polygamist
1882–1893
In August 1882, Congress passed its first general immigration law. Fifty cents a head. And no entry for anyone likely to become a 'public charge.'
In 1890, Washington took over New York's immigration station. On January 1, 1892, a new one opened on Ellis Island.
The first immigrant registered was Annie Moore, seventeen, from Cork. The commissioner gave her a ten-dollar gold piece.
From 1893, every ship had to ask every immigrant the same questions. Name. Age. Calling. Able to read or write. Who paid the passage. Whether in possession of money.
Whether a polygamist.
Doctors from the Marine Hospital Service looked each arrival over. Most were through in a few hours. About one in a hundred, or fewer, went back.
The legend says Ellis Island clerks changed people's names. They didn't. Ship's clerks wrote the names at the port of departure. Inspectors only checked them.
Rose Cohen …we stood scanning the faces of a group of Americans divided from us by iron gates.
Rose Cohen was twelve. She remembered landing at Castle Garden, which had closed two years before. Memory is evidence, and it can slip.
Workers wanted rules too. In 1885, backed by the Knights of Labor, Congress banned imported contract labor.
In 1891, Congress added contagious diseases and polygamists to the list. For Europeans, the gate stayed open.
Final Destination
1879–1894
Most newcomers stayed in the cities, where the ships docked and the jobs were. In 1890, four in ten New Yorkers had been born in another country.
Landlords cut old houses into rooms and built new tenements behind the old ones. An 1879 law said every room needed a window. Builders answered with the dumbbell: a window onto an air shaft only a few feet wide.
Every group built a neighborhood of its own: Chinatown, Polish Downtown, Little Italy, the Jewish Lower East Side. In Tampa’s cigar factories, the rollers paid a reader to read them newspapers and novels as they worked.
They started newspapers, churches, synagogues and theaters. Hometown societies paid for a doctor, a loan or a funeral.
In the winter of 1893, ten people shared three small rooms on Cherry Street. The oldest daughter, Rahel, was thirteen. Years later, as Rose Cohen, she wrote it all down.
It’s Friday, near sundown. Four things in this room tell how the family got here, and what it cost.
Leaving, working, crowding in, arguing over a beard and a kerchief. Almost every immigrant family had that argument. Most settled somewhere in between.
Her first summer here, before her mother came, Rose climbed to a tenement roof and looked up.
Rose Cohen The sky is the same everywhere. There is only one.
Nationality
1869–1892
Washington wrote the law. The demand came from the West.
By 1880, about 105,000 Chinese lived in the United States. They mined, farmed, cooked, ran laundries and rolled cigars. Few were women.
In the hard times of 1877, San Francisco's jobless cheered Denis Kearney's Workingmen's Party. Its slogan was 'The Chinese must go!'
Employers had used Chinese workers to cut wages and break strikes. Kearney was an immigrant too, from County Cork.
Frederick Douglass saw it differently. In Boston, he said:
Frederick Douglass I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races;
Frederick Douglass but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours.
In 1882, Congress passed exclusion. President Arthur vetoed a twenty-year ban as 'a breach of our national faith.' Then he signed a ten-year one.
In fiscal 1882, nearly forty thousand Chinese arrived. In fiscal 1885, twenty-two.
On September 2, 1885, at Rock Springs, Wyoming Territory, white miners attacked the Chinese miners beside them. Most of the attackers were immigrants too.
Reader, memorial of 559 Chinese miners, Rock Springs It was a sad and painful sight to see the son crying for the father, the brother for the brother,
Reader, memorial of 559 Chinese miners, Rock Springs the uncle for the nephew, and friend for friend.
Twenty-eight Chinese miners were killed. Seventy-nine homes burned. No one was ever indicted.
Joseph and Mary Tape sued to get their daughter Mamie, eight and born in San Francisco, into the neighborhood school. In 1885, they won.
The legislature answered with separate Chinese schools. Mary Tape wrote the school board:
Mary Tape Is it a disgrace to be Born a Chinese? Didn't God make us all!!!
Mary Tape Mamie Tape will never attend any of the Chinese schools of your making! Never!!!
That April, the Chinese Primary School opened in Chinatown. Mamie was among its first students.
In 1892, Congress renewed exclusion and made Chinese laborers carry a certificate of residence or face deportation. New York's Chinese Equal Rights League answered in print.
Wong Chin Foo Treat us as men, and we will do our duty as men
Wong Chin Foo America is our home through long residence.
They asked for rights for those already here, not an open door.
Able to Read or Write
1882–1897
November 1882, Delmonico's, New York. A banquet honored Herbert Spencer, who coined “survival of the fittest.” Evarts presided. In 1886, by one famous story, the statue's dedication cut him off mid-speech.
Yale professor William Graham Sumner, 1883:
William Graham Sumner The class distinctions simply result from the different degrees of success with which men have availed themselves of the chances which were presented to them.
Success proved fitness, he argued. Help for the poor, he said, came out of the Forgotten Man's pocket.
The minister Josiah Strong wrote a best seller in 1885:
Josiah Strong And can any one doubt that the result of this competition of races will be the “survival of the fittest”?
An argument about rich and poor had become a way to rank races.
The American Protective Association organized Protestants against Catholics. In 1893 the Congressional Record printed an oath: I will not employ a Roman Catholic in any capacity if I can procure the services of a Protestant.
In New Orleans in 1891, a jury failed to convict Italian immigrants accused of killing the police chief. A mob led by prominent citizens broke into the parish prison and killed eleven men. No one was indicted.
Emma Lazarus 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!
Thomas Bailey Aldrich Wide open and unguarded stand our gates, and through them presses a wild motley throng… O Liberty, white Goddess! Is it well to leave the gates unguarded?
Two poems, one statue. Lazarus: open the door. Aldrich: guard the gate. Both poems see a crowd. Neither names a person.
Aldrich called her “white Goddess.” She was copper, the brown of a new penny. By 1906 she was green.
In 1894, three young Harvard graduates founded the Immigration Restriction League. Their tool was a literacy test. Congress passed one in early 1897. President Cleveland vetoed it.
Grover Cleveland The time is quite within recent memory when the same thing was said of immigrants who, with their descendants, are now numbered among our best citizens.
Every group of newcomers had heard it said about them.
Calling or Occupation
1888–1895
In April 1888, twenty-seven-year-old Jane Addams went to a bullfight in Madrid.
Jane Addams I found that I had seen, with comparative indifference, five bulls and many more horses killed.
What horrified her was that she hadn’t been horrified.
Jane Addams I had fallen into the meanest type of self-deception in making myself believe that all this was in preparation for great things to come.
In September 1889, she and Ellen Gates Starr moved into a Halsted Street mansion, between an undertaker and a saloon.
They called it a settlement. You didn’t visit the neighborhood. You settled in it, as a neighbor.
Winter dusk on Halsted Street. Every window of Hull-House is lit.
Hull-House took on City Hall, too. The mayor made Addams the ward’s garbage inspector.
Jane Addams Perhaps our greatest achievement was the discovery of a pavement eighteen inches under the surface in a narrow street
Addams on entertaining her immigrant neighbors:
Jane Addams to preserve and keep whatever of value their past life contained and to bring them in contact with a better type of Americans.
Years later, Addams noticed a girl leave her kerchiefed mother at the front door and go in by the side. Some neighbors heard only the second half.
Hull-House also opened careers to college women. Resident Florence Kelley studied the sweatshops. In 1893, Illinois barred factory work under fourteen and made her its first factory inspector.
Whether Ever Before in the United States
1895 → 1903
In August 1895, Wong Kim Ark sailed home to San Francisco from China. He'd been born on Sacramento Street. The customs collector wouldn't let him land.
On March 28, 1898, the Supreme Court ruled six to two.
Justice Horace Gray The fourteenth amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory…
Born here meant American. Wong Kim Ark was a citizen, and so was Mamie Tape. The ruling didn't end exclusion. Congress repealed that law in 1943.
In 1903, a friend of Emma Lazarus put her poem on a bronze plaque inside the pedestal. By then, the people sailing past had already decided what the statue meant.
Everybody tried to decide who got to become American. The people on the boats decided too, by coming, and by staying.
Emma Lazarus I lift my lamp beside the golden door!