Michael Novak is the grandson of Slovak immigrants. Educated in theology at Harvard and the Gregorian University in Rome, he has published books in philosophy and theology ranging from The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to The Joy of Sports and taught at Harvard, Syracuse, Notre Dame, and Stanford. He is currently the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. He wrote The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics in 1971 as a kind of manifesto for the white ethnic revival.
Source: Michael Novak, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (New York: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 61–78.
THE PRICE OF BEING AMERICANIZED
My grandparents, I am sure, never guessed what it would cost them and their children to become “Americanized.”
In their eyes, no doubt, almost everything was gain. From the oppression experienced by Slovaks at the hands of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the gain was liberty; from relative poverty, opportunity; from an old world, new hope. (There is a town in Pennsylvania, two hundred miles from where they now lie buried, called “New Hope.”)
They were injured, to be sure, by nativist American prejudices against foreigners, by a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, and even by an Irish church. (Any Catholic church not otherwise specified by nationality they experienced and described as “the Irish church.”)
What price is exacted by America when into its maw it sucks other cultures of the world and processes them? What do people have to lose before they can qualify as true Americans?
For one thing, a lot of blue stars—and silver and gold ones—must hang in the window. You proved you loved America by dying for it in its wars. The Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slavs whose acronym Msgr. Geno Baroni has made to stand for all the non-English-speaking ethnic groups—pride themselves on “fighting for America.” When my father saw my youngest brother in officer’s uniform, it was one of the proudest days of his life … even though it (sickeningly) meant Vietnam.
I don’t have other figures at hand. But when the Poles were only four percent of the population (in 1917–19) they accounted for twelve percent of the nation’s casualties in World War I. “The Fighting Irish” won their epithet by dying in droves in the Civil War.
There is, then, a blood test. “Die for us and we’ll give you a chance.”
One is also expected to give up one’s native language. My parents decided never to teach us Slovak. They hoped that thereby we would gain a generation in the process of becoming full Americans.
They kept up a few traditions: Christmas Eve holy bread, candlelight, mushroom soup, fish, and poppyseed. My mother baked kolacky. Pirohi, however, more or less died with my grandmother, who used to work all day making huge, steaming pots of potato dumplings and prune dumplings for her grandchildren. No other foods shall ever taste so sweet.
My parents, so far as I know, were the first Slovaks in our town to move outside the neighborhoods traditional for our kind of people and move into the “American” suburbs. There were not, I recall, very many other Catholics in the rather large, and good, public school I attended from grades two until six. I remember Mrs. S., the fifth-grade teacher, spelling “Pope Pius” with an “o” in the middle, and myself with gently firm righteousness (even then) correcting her.
What has happened to my people since they came to this land nearly a century ago? Where are they now, that long-awaited fully Americanized third generation? Are we living the dream our grandparents dreamed when on creaking decks they stood silent, afraid, hopeful at the sight of the Statue of Liberty? Will we ever find that secret relief, that door, that hidden entrance? Did our grandparents choose for us, and our posterity, what they should have chosen?
Now the dice lie cold in our own uncertain hands.
CONFESSIONS OF A WHITE ETHNIC
Three is no other way but autobiography by which to cure oneself of too much objectivity. It is a cure many in America might profitably indulge.
A discussion of ethnicity incites emotion. The stereotypes are not so old that they no longer injure.
While working on this book during the past year, I discovered many things about myself: my relation to my parents; my discomfort (intellectual and emotional) with a dominant conception of intellectual and professional life; my suspicion of both liberal and radical politics; my appreciation for certain kinds of writing; my unhappiness with the sterility of political debate, no less between President Nixon and his opposition than between the various epigones of the Left.
Friends of mine and critics sometimes complain that they do not know where I am, or where I am coming from. My standpoint is not fairly described (whose is?) as radical, or liberal, or conservative. So I have been trying to trace its roots.
No available public standpoint works for me. I have had to go in search of my own. A search through memory and instinct by way of history has helped. Awareness of ethnicity is not some golden thread that, taken in one’s fingers and given a sudden pull, establishes the pattern of the tapestry. It is, however, an additional light for the understanding.
To understand a person’s attitudes or perceptions, it is helpful to know his history. Not in order to “explain” him—for history and ethnicity “explain” nothing—but in order to estimate, against a concrete context, the weight one should assign some of his emphases. We depend on others for most of the picture of the arena in which we act. The task is to learn to see it as they see it, in order to know how to interpret what they say.
Nothing, of course, is so painful as to have one’s views discounted according to some ethnic or religious stereotype. “Jews are always complaining.” “A WASP would think so!” “You’re from Mississippi, aren’t you?” “New York intellectuals …” “That’s a surprising view from a Catholic!” The knowing putdown is intolerable.
Perhaps that is why even so courageous a writer as Norman Mailer has rather steadfastly avoided Jewish materials. He tried to embrace the melting pot. When he dramatizes an encounter, central to his work, between a stud and a Jewish maid, the stud is named Sergius O’Shaugnessy but given a sensibility of felt Jewishness thinly pasted over Irish. The Jewish force in Mailer is almost always hiding behind projection into Irishmen, Poles, Anglo-Saxon Texans. Mailer may want his mother’s Irishness to win, but it doesn’t—hardly ever. The celebrated writer’s block may here have one of its sources. Meanwhile, his journalism benefits by Jewish self-dramatization. One who stands outside the usual political conflicts between WASPS, ethnics, and blacks has a fascinating alternative to the WASP style of objectivity. He gives us dramas of self and dramas of history. Sheer talent, sheer craftsmanship, divert us from the guarded core.
So the risks of letting one’s own secrets out of the bag are rather real. Yet there is no other way.
1. Neither WASP nor Jew nor Black
Growing up in America has been an assault upon my sense of worthiness. It has also been a kind of liberation and delight.
There must be countless women in America who have known for years that something is peculiarly unfair, yet who only recently have found it possible, because of Women’s Liberation, to give tongue to their pain. In recent months I have experienced a similar inner thaw, a gradual relaxation, a willingness to think about feelings heretofore shepherded out of sight.
I am born of PIGS—those Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slavs, those non-English-speaking immigrants numbered so heavily among the workingmen of this nation. Not particularly liberal or radical; born into a history not white Anglo-Saxon and not Jewish; born outside what, in America, is considered the intellectual mainstream—and thus privy to neither power nor status nor intellectual voice.
Those Poles of Buffalo and Milwaukee—so notoriously taciturn, sullen, nearly speechless. Who has ever understood them? It is not that Poles do not feel emotion—what is their history if not dark passion, romanticism, betrayal, courage, blood? But where in America is there anywhere a language for voicing what a Christian Pole in this nation feels? He has no Polish culture left him, no Polish tongue. Yet Polish feelings do not go easily into the idiom of happy America, the America of the Anglo-Saxons and yes, in the arts, the Jews. (The Jews have long been a culture of the word, accustomed to exile, skilled in scholarship and in reflection. The Christian Poles are largely of peasant origin, free men for hardly more than a hundred years.) Of what shall the young man of Lackawanna think on his way to work in the mills, departing his relatively dreary home and street? What roots does he have? What language of the heart is available to him?
The PIGS are not silent willingly. The silence burns like hidden coals in the chest.
All four of my grandparents, unknown to one another, arrived in America from the same county in Slovakia. My grandfather had a small farm in Pennsylvania; his wife died in a wagon accident. Meanwhile, Johanna, fifteen, arrived on Ellis Island, dizzy from witnessing births and deaths and illnesses aboard the crowded ship. She had a sign around her neck lettered PASSAIC. There an aunt told her of a man who had lost his wife in Pennsylvania. She went. They were married. She inherited his three children.
Each year for five years Grandma had a child of her own. She was among the lucky; only one died. When she was twenty-two and the mother of seven (my father was the last), her husband died. “Grandma Novak,” as I came to know her many years later, resumed the work she had begun in Slovakia at the town home of a man known to my father only as “the Professor”; she housecleaned and she laundered.
I heard this story only weeks ago. Strange that I had not asked insistently before. Odd that I should have such shallow knowledge of my roots. Amazing to me that I do not know what my family suffered, endured, learned, and hoped these last six or seven generations. It is as if there were no project in which we all have been involved, as if history in-some way began with my father and with me.
The estrangement I have come to feel derives not only from lack of family history. Early in life, I was made to feel a slight uneasiness when I said my name.
Later “Kim” helped. So did Robert. And “Mister Novak” on TV. The name must be one of the most Anglo-Saxon of the Slavic names. Nevertheless, when I was very young, the “American” kids still made something out of names unlike their own, and their earnest, ambitious mothers thought long thoughts when I introduced myself.
Under challenge in grammar school concerning my nationality, I had been instructed by my father to announce proudly: “American.” When my family moved from the Slovak ghetto of Johnstown to the WASP suburb on the hill, my mother impressed upon us how well we must be dressed, and show good manners, and behave—people think of us as “different” and we mustn’t give them any cause. “Whatever you do, marry a Slovak girl,” was other advice to a similar end: “They cook. They clean. They take good care of you. For your own good.” I was taught to be proud of being Slovak, but to recognize that others wouldn’t know what it meant, or care.
When I had at last pierced the deception—that most movie stars and many other professionals had abandoned their European names in order to feed American fantasies—I felt only a little sadness. One of my uncles, for business reasons and rather late in life, changed his name, too, to a simple German variant—not long, either, after World War II.
Nowhere in my schooling do I recall any attempt to put me in touch with my own history. The strategy was clearly to make an American of me. English literature, American literature, and even the history books, as I recall them, were peopled mainly by Anglo-Saxons from Boston (where most historians seemed to live). Not even my native Pennsylvania, let alone my Slovak forebears, counted for very many paragraphs. (We did have something called “Pennsylvania History” somewhere; I seem to remember its puffs for industry. It could have been written by a Mellon.) I don’t remember feeling envy or regret: a feeling, perhaps, of unimportance, of remoteness, of not having heft enough to count.
The fact that I was born a Catholic also complicated life. What is a Catholic but what everybody else is in reaction against? Protestants reformed “the whore of Babylon.” Others were “enlightened” from it, and Jews had reason to help Catholicism and the social structure it was rooted in fall apart. The history books and the whole of education hummed in upon that point (for during crucial years I attended a public school): to be modern is decidedly not to be medieval; to be reasonable is not to be dogmatic; to be free is clearly not to live under ecclesiastical authority; to be scientific is not to attend ancient rituals, cherish irrational symbols, indulge in mythic practices. It is hard to grow up Catholic in America without becoming defensive, perhaps a little paranoid, feeling forced to divide the world between “us” and “them.”
English Catholics have little of the sense of inferiority in which many other Catholic groups tend to share—Irish Catholics, Polish Catholics, Lithuanians, Germans, Italians, Lebanese, and others. Daniel Callahan (The Mind of the Catholic Layman, Generation of the Third Eye) and Garry Wills (“Memories of a Catholic Boyhood,” in Esquire) both identify, in part, with the more secure Catholicism of an Anglo-Catholic parent. The French around New Orleans have a social ease different from the French Catholics of Massachusetts. Still, as Catholics, especially vis-à-vis the national liberal culture, nearly all have felt a certain involuntary defensiveness. Granted our diverse ethnic circumstances, we share a certain communion of memories.
We had a special language all our own, our own pronunciation for words we shared in common with others (Augústine, contémplative), sights and sounds and smells in which few others participated (incense at Benediction of the Most Blessed Sacrament, Forty Hours, wakes, and altar bells at the silent consecration of the Host); and we had our own politics and slant on world affairs. Since earliest childhood, I have known about a “power elite” that runs America: the boys from the Ivy League in the State Department as opposed to the Catholic boys in Hoover’s FBI who (as Daniel Moynihan once put it), keep watch on them. And on a whole host of issues, my people have been, though largely Democratic, conservative: on censorship, on communism, on abortion, on religious schools, etc. “Harvard” and “Yale” long meant “them” to us.
The language of Spiro Agnew, the language of George Wallace, excepting its idiom, awakens childhood memories in me: of men arguing in the barbershop, of my uncle drinking so much beer he threatened to lay his dick upon the porch rail and wash the whole damn street with steaming piss—while cursing the niggers in the mill below, and the Yankees in the mill above—millstones he felt pressing him. Other relatives were duly shocked, but everybody loved Uncle George; he said what he thought.
We did not feel this country belonged to us. We felt fierce pride in it, more loyalty than anyone could know. But we felt blocked at every turn. There were not many intellectuals among us, not even very many professional men. Laborers mostly. Small businessmen, agents for corporations perhaps. Content with a little, yes, modest in expectation, and content. But somehow feeling cheated. For a thousand years the Slovaks survived Hungarian hegemony and our strategy here remained the same: endurance and steady work. Slowly, one day, we would overcome.
A special word is required about a complicated symbol: sex. To this day my mother finds it hard to spell the word intact, preferring to write “s—.” Not that much was made of sex in our environment. And that’s the point: silence. Demonstrative affection, emotive dances, an exuberance Anglo-Saxons seldom seem to share; but on the realities of sex, discretion. Reverence, perhaps; seriousness, surely. On intimacies, it was as though our tongues had been stolen, as though in peasant life for a thousand years—as in the novels of Tolstoi, Sholokhov, and even Kosinski—the context had been otherwise. Passion, certainly; romance, yes; family and children, certainly; but sex rather a minor if explosive part of life.
Imagine, then, the conflict in the generation of my brothers, sister, and myself. (The reviewer for the New York Times reviews on the same day two new novels of fantasy—one a pornographic fantasy to end all such fantasies [he writes], the other in some comic way representing the redemption wrought by Jesus Christ. In language and verve, the books are rated evenly. In theme, the reviewer notes his embarrassment in even reporting a religious fantasy, but no embarrassment at all about preposterous pornography.) Suddenly, what for a thousand years was minor becomes an all-absorbing investigation. Some view it as a drama of “liberation” when the ruling classes (subscribers to the New Yorker, I suppose) move progressively, generation by generation since Sigmund Freud, toward concentration upon genital stimulation, and latterly toward consciousness-raising sessions in Clit. Lib. But it is rather a different drama when we stumble suddenly upon mores staggering any expectation our grandparents ever cherished. Fear of becoming “sexual objects” is an ancient fear that appears in many shapes. The emotional reaction of Maria Wyeth in Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays is exactly what the ancient morality would have predicted.
Yet more significant in the ethnic experience in America is the intellectual world one meets: the definition of values, ideas, and purposes emanating from universities, books, magazines, radio, and television. One hears one’s own voice echoed back neither by spokesmen of “middle America” (so complacent, smug, nativist, and Protestant), nor by the “intellectuals.” Almost unavoidably, perhaps, education in America leads the student who entrusts his soul to it in a direction which, lacking a better word, we might call liberal: respect for individual conscience, a sense of social responsibility, trust in the free exchange of ideas and procedures of dissent, a certain confidence in the ability of men to “reason together” and adjudicate their differences, a frank recognition of the vitality of the unconscious, a willingness to protect workers and the poor against the vast economic power of industrial corporations, and the like.
On the other hand, the liberal imagination has appeared to be astonishingly universalist and relentlessly missionary. Perhaps the metaphor “enlightenment” offers a key. One is initiated into light. Liberal education tends to separate children from their parents, from their roots, from their history, in the cause of a universal and superior religion. One is taught regarding the unenlightened (even if they be one’s uncles George and Peter, one’s parents, one’s brothers, perhaps) what can only be called a modern equivalent of odium theologicum. Richard Hofstadter described anti-intellectualism in America (more accurately, in nativist America rather than in ethnic America), but I have yet to encounter a comparable treatment of anti-unenlightenment among our educated classes.
In particular, I have regretted and keenly felt the absence of that sympathy for PIGS which simple human feeling might have prodded intelligence to muster, that same sympathy which the educated find so easy to conjure up for black culture, Chicano culture, Indian culture, and other cultures of the poor. In such cases one finds the universalist pretensions of liberal culture suspended; some groups, at least, are entitled to be both different and respected. Why do the educated classes find it so difficult to want to understand the man who drives a beer truck, or the fellow with a helmet working on a site across the street with plumbers and electricians, while their sensitivities race easily to Mississippi or even Bedford-Stuyvesant?
There are deep secrets here, no doubt, unvoiced fantasies and scarcely admitted historical resentments. Few persons in describing “middle Americans” “the silent majority,” or Scammon and Wattenberg’s “typical American voter” distinguish clearly enough between the nativist American and the ethnic American. The first is likely to be Protestant, the second Catholic. Both may be, in various ways, conservative, loyalist, and unenlightened. Each has his own agonies, fears, betrayed expectations. Neither is ready, quite, to become an ally of the other. Neither has the same history behind him here. Neither has the same hopes. Neither lives out the same psychic voyage, shares the same symbols, has the same sense of reality. The rhetoric and metaphors proper to each differ from those of the other.
There is overlap, of course. But country music is not a polka; a successful politician in a Chicago ward needs a very different “common touch” from the one needed by the county clerk in Normal. The urban experience of immigration lacks that mellifluous, optimistic, biblical vision of the good America which springs naturally to the lips of politicians from the Bible Belt. The nativist tends to believe with Richard Nixon that he “knows America, and the American heart is good.” The ethnic tends to believe that every American who preceded him has an angle, and that he, by God, will some day find one, too. (Often, ethnics complain that by working hard, obeying the law, trusting their political leaders, and relying upon the American dream, they now have only their own naiveté to blame for rising no higher than they have.)
It goes without saying that the intellectuals do not love “middle America,” and that for all the good, warm discovery of America that preoccupied them during the 1950s no strong tide of respect accumulated in their hearts for the Yahoos, Babbitts, Agnews, and Nixons of the land. Willie Morris in North Toward Home writes poignantly of the chill, parochial outreach of the liberal sensibility, its failure to engage the humanity of the modest, ordinary little man west of the Hudson. The Intellectual’s Map of the United States is succinct: “Two coasts connected by United Airlines.”
Unfortunately, it seems, the ethnics erred in attempting to Americanize themselves before clearing the project with the educated classes. They learned to wave the flag and to send their sons to war. They learned to support their President—an easy task, after all, for those accustomed to obeying authority. And where would they have been if Franklin Roosevelt had not sided with them against established interests? They knew a little about communism—the radicals among them in one way, and by far the larger number of conservatives in another. To this day not a few exchange letters with cousins and uncles who did not leave for America when they might have, whose lot is demonstrably harder than their own and less than free.
Finally, the ethnics do not like, or trust, or even understand the intellectuals. It is not easy to feel uncomplicated affection for those who call you “pig,” “fascist,” “racist.” One had not yet grown accustomed to not hearing “hunkie,” “Polack,” “spic,” “mick,” “dago,” and the rest. A worker in Chicago told reporter Lois Wille in a vividly home-centered outburst:
The liberals always have despised us. We’ve got these mostly little jobs, and we drink beer and, my God, we bowl and watch television and we don’t read. It’s goddamn vicious snobbery. We’re sick of all these phoney integrated TV commercials with these upper-class Negroes. We know they’re phoney.
The only time a Pole is mentioned it’s to make fun of him. He’s Ignatz Dumbrowski, 274 pounds and 5-foot-4, and he got his education by writing into a firm on a matchbook cover. But what will we do about it? Nothing, because we’re the new invisible man, the new whipping boy, and we still think the measure of a man’s what he does and how he takes care of his children and what he’s doing in his own home, not what he thinks about Vietnam.
At no little sacrifice, one had apologized for foods that smelled too strong for Anglo-Saxon noses; moderated the wide swings of Slavic and Italian emotion; learned decorum; given oneself to education, American style; tried to learn tolerance and assimilation. Each generation criticized the earlier for its authoritarian and European and old-fashioned ways. “Up-to-date” was a moral lever. And now when the process nears completion, when a generation appears that speaks without accent and goes to college, still you are considered “pigs,” “fascists,” and “racists.”
Racists? Our ancestors owned no slaves. Most of us ceased being serfs only in the last two hundred years—the Russians in 1861. Italians, Lithuanians, Slovaks, Poles are not, in principle, against “community control,” or even against ghettoes of our own.
Whereas the Anglo-Saxon model appears to be a system of atomic individuals and high mobility, our model has tended to stress communities of our own, attachment to family and relatives, stability, and roots. Ethnics tend to have a fierce sense of attachment to their homes, having been homeowners for less than three generations: a home is almost fulfillment enough for one man’s life. Some groups save arduously in a passion to own; others rent. We have most ambivalent feelings about suburban assimilation and mobility. The melting pot is a kind of homogenized soup, and its mores only partly appeal to ethnics: to some, yes, and to others, no.
It must be said that ethnics think they are better people than the blacks. Smarter, tougher, harder working, stronger in their families. But maybe many are not sure. Maybe many are uneasy. Emotions here are delicate; one can understand the immensely more difficult circumstances under which the blacks have suffered; and one is not unaware of peculiar forms of fear, envy, and suspicion across color lines. How much of this we learned in America by being made conscious of our olive skin, brawny backs, accents, names, and cultural quirks is not plain to us. Racism is not our invention; we did not bring it with us; we had prejudices enough and would gladly have been spared new ones. Especially regarding people who suffer more than we.
When television commentators and professors say “humanism” or “progress,” it seems to ethnics like moral pressure to abandon their own traditions, their faith, their associations, in order to reap higher rewards in the culture of the national corporations. Ethnic neighborhoods usually do not like interviewers, consultants, government agents, organizers, sociologists. Usually they resent the media. Almost all spokesmen they meet from the world of intellect have disdain for them. It shows. Do museums, along the “Black art” and “Indian art,” have “Italo-American” exhibitions or “Lithuanian-American” days? Dvorak wrote the New World Symphony in a tiny community of Bohemian craftsmen in Iowa. All over the nation in print studios and metal foundries when the craftsmen immigrants from Europe die, their crafts will die with them. Who here supports such skills?
2. A Cumulative Political Awakening
Such a tide of resentment begins to overwhelm the descendant of “the new immigration” when he begins to voice repressed feelings about America that at first his throat clogs with despair. Dare he let resentment out? Shouldn’t he keep calm? Can he somehow, out of anything available, put together categories and words, and shoot them aloft, slim silver missiles of despair? The incoming planes are endless. The illusions of Americans are vast.
Allies are foes; foes are friends. A language for ethnic divergence does not exist. Prejudices are deep in social structures and institutions; deep, too, in moralities and philosophies; not shallow in families and close relationships. American politics is going crazy because of a fundamental ignorance. Intellectuals, too, are blind.
The battle is partly in one’s own soul. On the one hand American, enlightened, educated; on the other, stubbornly resistant, in love with values too dear to jettison, at home neither in the ethnic community nor in any intellectual group, neither with theorists nor with practical politicians, convinced of a certain rightness in one’s soul and yet not confident that others will see, can see, the subtle links in a different way of life. It is the insecurity of certainty: the sense that something of value is not likely to he understood. The planes keep droning on and on.
A Slovak proverb: When trees are blown across the road in front of you, you know a tornado’s coming.
It is impossible to define people out of existence, or to define their existence for them. Sooner or later, being free, they will explode in rage.
If you are a descendant of southern and eastern Europeans, everyone else has defined your existence. A pattern of “Americanization” is laid out. You are catechized, cajoled, and condescended to by guardians of good Anglo-Protestant attitudes. You are chided by Jewish libertarians. Has ever a culture been so moralistic?
The entire experience of becoming American is summarized in the experience of being made to feel guilty.
For southern and eastern Europeans, there is one constant in their experience of America—abated and relieved for perhaps the decade of the fifties only. They are constantly told to gear up for some new morality. Even in being invited to give a speech on ethnic problems (as the token ethnic), one is told chummily by the national organizer: “As far as I’m concerned, the white ethnics are simply a barrier to social progress.” Catching himself, he is generous: “Though I suppose they have their problems, too.”
The old rule by which ethnics were to measure themselves was the WASP ethic. The new rule is getting “with it.” The latter is based on new technologies and future shock. The latter could not have existed without the family life and social organization of the former. Parent and child are now at war. In the middle—once again—are southern and eastern Europeans. We are becoming almost Jewish in our anticipation of disaster. When anything goes wrong, or dirty work needs doing, we’re it.
I never intended to think this way. I never intended to begin writing—ye gods!—as an ethnic. I never intended to dig up old memories.
What began to prod me were political events. The anomaly in American publishing and television of William F. Buckley, Jr., had long troubled me: a Catholic who was making a much-needed criticism of American “enlightenment,” but from a curiously Anglo-Saxon and conservative point of view. I hoped he was not a dotted line which a larger Catholic movement would fill in.
By the time of the Goldwater campaign of 1964 and the Wallace campaign of 1966, I was alarmed by the cleavage between the old WASP and the new technological consciousness. Catholics might be driven to choose, and might choose the older ways. Worse still, I began to be irritated by the controlled, but felt, anti-Catholic bias among journalists and intellectuals. Despite myself, I disliked the general American desire to believe that ethnic groups do not exist, or if they do, should not. I had nothing to do with ethnic groups myself, and no intention of linking myself to them. I was neither ashamed of them nor hostile to them; it simply seemed to me important, even from their point of view, for me to live the fullest life and to do the best work I could.
But then interpretations of the Wallace vote among Catholics in Wisconsin and Maryland seemed to me grossly false and unfair. I wasn’t about to identify with the pro-Wallace voters. But I felt increasingly uncomfortable with the condescension and disdain heaped upon them. So I found myself beginning to say “we,” rather than “they,” when I spoke of ethnics. It is not an entirely comfortable “we,” for many ethnics have not been to college, or travelled, or shared the experiences I’ve had. I wasn’t sure I wanted to defend them, or whether I was entitled to do so after too many years of separation from them. I couldn’t be sure whether in the next decade the ethnics or the intellectuals would first abandon the path of community, diversity, integrity, and justice. Despite their internal diversity, intellectuals are by and large as capable of minority rule and a relatively narrow ideology as any other group. Meanwhile, the despair and frustration of ethnic groups might become so great that they will think only of their own survival and welfare, and close their hearts to everybody else. American life sometimes hardens. It has not yet hardened, but the present decade is (as usual) crucial.
Which group offers a better chance for social progress—the intellectuals or the ethnics? The sixties have convinced me. The intellectuals cannot do it alone. Arrogance is their principal defect, an arrogance whose lash everybody else in America has felt. A Boston policeman gave Robert Coles the picture:
I think the college crowd, the left-wing college crowd, is trying to destroy this country, step by step. They’re always looking for trouble. They’re never happy, except when everyone pays attention to them—and let me tell you, the ordinary people of this country, the average workingman, he’s sick and tired of those students, so full of themselves, and their teachers who all think they’re the most important people in the human race.
Then a gas station attendant gave Coles some advice to pass along to Daniel Berrigan in jail:
And tell him he’s wasting his time, because this country is run by the big industrialists, and the politicians who do what they’re told to do, and the big-mouthed professors (they’re all so swellheaded) who are always whispering advice to people—as if they know how the world works! That’s what I say: tell the poor father to mind his own business and get out of prison and speak honestly to his flock, but stay away from politics and things like that—or else he’ll start sounding like a crook himself. All politicians learn to sugarcoat the truth; they just don’t talk straight from the shoulder. I guess they look down on the ordinary American workingman. I guess they don’t trust us. I guess they figure they can con us, all the time con us.
3. The Flag, That Flag
From 1870 until 1941 ethnics were told they were not worthy of America. They are cynical about authority, but they believed the dream.
The flag to ethnic Americans is not a symbol of bureaucracy or system (of which the middle classes know far more than they). It is a symbol of spiritual and moral value. It was held beyond their grasp for generations. The flag invoked asceticism, struggle, a long climb up a bitterly contested mountain. Blood flowed until it was implanted on the peak. Iwo Jima was another Calvary.
To ethnics, America is almost a religion. The flag alone proves that they are not stupid, cloddish, dull, but capable of the greatest act men can make: to die for others. The flag is not a patriotic symbol only. It is the symbol of poor and wretched people who now have jobs and homes and liberties. It is a symbol of transcendence. Many millions proved that they were men, not PIGS, by expressing a willingness to die beneath those colors. When that flag flaps, their dignity is celebrated.
Those who attack the flag attack the chief symbol of transcendence, human dignity, and acceptance available to millions of human beings.
“I AM AN AMERICAN!” How many humiliations were endured until one could say those words and not be laughed at by nativists.
Where has the dream led, in reality? ‘While a young Italian lawyer was working with a civil rights team in Mississippi, his home city was running an expressway through the traditional homes of his family. While a young Pole was in Vietnam, his brother was laid off from work. His parents became so furious at being stereotyped as racists they are wondering why they ever came to America.
The new experiences awaken memories that are too painful. A white nativist woman in a coal town in Pennsylvania establishes the historical perspective:
Why, I would just as soon live alongside a nigger family as some of these foreigners. I think that the niggers are whiter than the foreigners are because at least they speak your own language … [Foreigners] might be plotting to kill you and you wouldn’t even know it.…They remind me of these old-time people back in the Bible. The women would have a shawl of some kind on their head. … They had a different look from us … couldn’t talk our language.
Our parents “began to go out of their way in order to act American. You see, they could not stand shame, and shame was one of the means used to get them to come over and change their habits.” In those dark days the flag, at least, meant pride. It was not their flag. It was ours.
Monsignor Geno Baroni was one of the most important leaders of the white ethnic revival of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1971 he received a grant from the Ford Foundation to establish the Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs. Throughout his career he was a staunch advocate of poor and working-class Italian, Polish, Irish, and other white ethnic Americans. Here he testifies before the Bicentennial Committee of the United States Catholic Conference in Newark, New Jersey, in December of 1975. He provides an overview of his career and a good summary of his understanding of the white ethnic revival, an understanding of it as both a reassertion of ancestral cultures and a defense of concrete interests such as jobs and neighborhoods.
Mr. Muench, a Ukrainian American, also testified before the Bicentennial Committee of the United States Catholic Conference in December of 1975. His short speech candidly reveals many of the class and racial resentments felt by working-class whites in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Source: National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Bicentennial Committee, “Ethnicity and Race,” 1975 (3211 4th Street, N.E., Washington, D.C. 20017).
MSGR. BARONI: Thank you very much Cardinal Dearden. I want to thank all of you for the opportunity of being here to share my experiences and views in this important discussion and dialogue.
Some of the people of St. Lucy’s know I’ve been here many times for their great feast. More often, I have been to Newark on a regular basis since 1971, and have been involved in the development of the North Ward Educational and Cultural Center headed by Mr. Steve Adubato.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention here some of those who got me involved in all of this. I have to mention my father, an immigrant coal miner, and my mother, still living in western Pennsylvania. My father is suffering from black lung. He was a union organizer. It was he who taught me his favorite songs, “Sixteen Tons.” “You load 16 tons, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.”
It was he who taught me first and best about social justice, and it was my mother who taught me the theology: “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”
I’d also like to mention people like Cardinal O’Boyle of Washington, who helped me get involved in the urban arena of race and ethnicity at both the national and the local level. I’d like to discuss some part of this very important and complex question in this context:
What is the role of an urban church in urban society that’s rapidly changing? How do we face the difficult challenge of the persistence of ethnicity and race in spite of the old fashioned and longstanding melting pot mentality in which we’ve all been raised? How do we develop a new concept or a new framework to deal with cultural pluralism and parish neighborhood development? What is the future of urban ethnicity in our independent cultural society? How can we—if we can—an institution of faith, a believing institution, help to create a new urban social policy that could provide liberty and justice for all?
One challenge facing the church and society in the bicentennial era is to develop an urban policy that legitimizes ethnic, racial and cultural pluralism and includes the revitalization of the parish neighborhood as an essential building block for renewing cities.
If we are to provide increased liberty and justice for all, we must turn to the cities. It is no coincidence that we are here in Newark to begin this sixth Bicentennial hearing sponsored by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops on the theme of liberty and justice for all. Mayor Gibson, whom I know very well, is famous for saying in 1971: “Wherever cities are going, Newark is going to get there first.” Someone else also said, and this explains Mayor Gibson’s statement, that cities like Newark are fast becoming “black, brown and broke.” These ideas conjure up fantasies of a new American type of apartheid—of abandoned cities surrounded by hostile suburbs.
Newark is a symbol because Newark exemplifies the dynamics of deterioration of northern urban cities, especially when one looks at the uncertain relationship between the growing black and Hispanic populations and the whites remaining in the cities. New York City is another symbol of American cities because of its financial bankruptcy and the threatened breakdown of its human services to meet human needs.
If we are to use these Bicentennial hearings to listen, to share experiences and to dialogue, then we might begin to ask: What is the role of the church, if any, in the development of some new, more humane urban social policy?
A theologian (Harvey Cox) once suggested that the decline of the relevance of the major faiths was creating a secular city, indicating that the churches have no role in the urban malaise. Is this so? Allow me to begin to answer this question from a personal perspective.
I was an inner-city priest and social activist in the ’60s. Like so many others, I felt overwhelmed by the loneliness and overcrowding, the bad housing, the fear, the violence of life, and all the forces that were at work stifling development of human life and spawning misery in that marvelous achievement of man that is called the city. (Lewis Mumford)
Lorraine Hainesbury was more than prophetic in the early 1960s when she said: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun or does it explode?” They exploded in cities like Detroit, Newark, Watts and 57 other centers of urban life. A year later the Kerner Commission revealed that we had indeed become a “divided society,” that there was an “inevitable group conflict between the rising expectations of minority groups and the fears of the white middle class in America.” Years before Gunnar Myrdal, in a classic work, had described race as the “American dilemma.”
But there is another dimension to this dilemma which hasn’t yet been written, although Oscar Handlin suggested it when he wrote about the experience of the immigrants in The Uprooted.
We all know the inscription that welcomes the immigrants at the base of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.” We were “aliens” and we became naturalized, “Americanized,” only to discover by the 1970s that like Pogo, who said, “I have met the enemy and he is us.”
I had high hopes in the early 1960s when I was working in a parish in the inner-city of Washington, D.C. I had high hopes because I was Catholic coordinator of the civil rights march of 1963.
The church matched, project for project, federal poverty program efforts. But by 1967–68, when some of my own diocesan programs began to fall apart and when our urban centers exploded, I began to seriously re-evaluate the challenge of American’s urban crisis.
I began to try to react to many of my friends who called my family hard-hats, racists, dumb-dumbs, pigs. I began to react to some of my liberal friends both in and out of the church by saying, “All right, if we whites are part of the problem, then we had best be part of the solution.”
Year after year the United States Catholic Conference had issued statements about race relations that culminated in the urban crisis document of 1968, “The Racial Crisis,” which established the Urban Task Force. By chance circumstance and coincidence I had become, in the middle ’60s, director of urban affairs for the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. In 1969, I became program director of the Urban Task Force of the United States Catholic Conference.
One major accomplishment of the Urban Task Force was the development of the Campaign for Human Development, another great example of the Church’s involvement. This was part of the Church’s response. This indeed was a new step. It provided seed money to local grassroot organizations to begin programs of self-help and self-determination.
More importantly, the Campaign for Human Development was to be an education program, an instrument to raise the consciousness of American Catholics and to help form a public moral will that would generate a greater public response to the hellish cycle of poverty, because we knew even in the ’60s that Galbraith had said, “Oh, yes, we’re an affluent society.” But many of us knew that if we were an affluent society, that was wrong because in our midst were many people living without hope, some because of poverty, some because of race, and some because of both.
By 1970, as part of my interest in the growing polarization between white, black and brown urban groups, I began to follow my own hunches that the traditional black-white human relations projects were insufficient to deal with the polarization, to deal with alienation. I began to look at 75–80 American cities to determine who the whites were who lived next to the growing black and Hispanic urban communities.
I found those people who lived between the ghetto and the suburb, those people who were very heavily first, second and third generation Catholics, particularly of eastern and southern European background. They had refused, and our research since then has indicated that many of them did not want to and still do not want to leave the city, their communities, their neighborhoods. North Ward Newark, for instance, has over 300 social clubs, in its own area, something that could not be duplicated in terms of our suburban sprawl.
But neither my training nor my education prepared me to understand and appreciate the ethnic factor in urban society. Once I did, I planned a small workshop, the first Catholic-sponsored conference on the ethnic factor in urban society. My friends from the Washington Post thought I should have talked to the food editor. But most of my social activist and liberal friends, both in and out of the Church, were skeptical, sometimes hostile and more than cynical in their attitudes and comments at that workshop.
But I became convinced in going from city to city, neighborhood to neighborhood, that we could not understand the urban crisis unless we understood the ethnic and class factor in urban American life.
During 1970, Msgr. Higgins of the United States Catholic Conference, who was very supportive and encouraging, and I jointly prepared a Labor Day Statement which was one of the first Catholic documents to raise the question of the ethnic and class factor in terms of the urban crisis. This statement declared that we should not ignore the legitimate concerns of the white working class people who had remained in our cities.
Just prior to that, Dr. James Coleman, author of the famous Coleman Report, claimed that integration in our cities has failed because we have ignored some of the real concerns of the white working class. Statements such as these had been supportive of my initial hunch.
In 1971, with the assistance of the Ford Foundation, I established an independent, non-profit corporation with the blessing and approval of Cardinal O’Boyle. With some presumption on my part, I called that organization the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs. This center has since developed projects and research and development programs in 42 cities at a cost of more than $5 million.
These programs were designed to sensitize the public and private institutions to the ethnic factor in our urban society, and to seek out what little research and knowledge was available on first, second and third generation heavily ethnic, heavily Catholic people, who for some reason had remained in the middle of our cities, of a troubled urban America.
Since then we have done an extensive study with the Department of Commerce of 18 metropolitan areas to analyze who is left in the neighborhood. This study shows that white ethnic groups who share the cities with black and brown communities seem to be caught in the middle on every social, educational and economic scale.
We have also done studies of the major Fortune 500 corporations to determine the Polish, Italian, black and Latin representation on the boards of directors and the staffs of these corporations. While these groups make up 40 percent of the total population in the study area, they make up less than three percent of the top personnel of these corporations.
We have also become involved with the disinvestment practices that are destroying changing neighborhoods in most of our major urban areas. Banks and financial institutions take local savings out of a community—that is called disinvestment—and then “redline” this same community by failing to reinvest loans for repairs and home mortgages to low income and working class people in “changing neighborhoods.”
I believe that no single issue has been more destructive of neighborhoods than the disinvestment and redlining practices of these financial institutions. They not only exacerbate tensions between racial and ethnic groups, but they destroy the viability and stability of older communities, making them unable to deal adequately with rapid social change.
This issue has now become a focus for national legislation. It has been outlined in the recent U.S. bishops’ statement on housing. We need to develop a programmatic effort for and in almost every major city and parish neighborhood to fight disinvestment and to develop reinvestment strategies for urban neighborhoods.
Other programs within our own experience at the Center include: Firstly, work with the U.S. Civil Service Commission in training city officials to understand the role of racial and ethnic neighborhoods in the strengthening of cities. It is our contention that neighborhoods are the building blocks of the city, not the downtown renaissance, not the downtown malls, but the neighborhoods. If the neighborhoods are allowed to die, then cities also die with these neighborhoods. Then we are no longer able to meet and serve the changing needs of the community.
Secondly, with other government agencies, we have begun to develop a national project in terms of neighborhood revitalization for commercial and economic development at the neighborhood level. We believe there is an important role for the parish in the revitalization of our cities and neighborhoods.
Thirdly, at the same time we have worked with public officials in and out of government to develop the intercultural dimension of ethnic studies to a point that truly respects and reflects the diversity of our children and our nation. I believe very strongly that fear and polarization are byproducts of the monocultural melting pot mentality of both the public and private school system. Because we have ignored cultural, racial, ethnic and class diversity, we have trained and educated a whole nation of people who are unable to deal with ethnic and racial diversity and second culture experience in their own neighborhoods and local parishes. We have grown up in a sense to become interculturally incompetent from both a personal and an professional perspective.
During the 1960s, many dioceses and parishes followed and supported the secular policies and programs developed by the government—urban renewal, model cities, housing, poverty programs, and civil rights. While the Church played an important role in developing urban programs, most of our Catholic urban activists seemed to step out of their own Catholic labor tradition, a tradition of our own working class. We seemed in the ’60s to step out of that tradition and background of the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s, and ignore the labor union movement and what it had done for poor people, blacks, whites and browns. Many seemed to ignore the legitimate needs of the lower middle class, heavily Catholic population that makes up such a large part of our urban society.
Following the secular model once more, we found ourselves, even in the Church, guilty of either catering to our people’s fears from the right or scapegoating our people’s concerns from the left. In a sense we ignored or neglected, for the most part, the essential ministry to our own people’s alienation. We did this even though we knew that, for the most part, working class people were indeed more supportive of minimum wage legislation, more supportive of health care, more supportive of housing and educational programs than our more affluent bankers, lawyers, doctors and businessmen and their national lobbying organizations.
I was reminded of this recently when I was in Detroit and called my mother on a Sunday. She was 82 years old the other day, and she asked what was this Third World. I said, “What do you mean, Mom?”
She said, “Am I allowed to eat grapes? Am I allowed to eat lettuce?”
I said, “What do you mean?”
She said, “One of your friends was here, the one that was here last year and said don’t eat grapes.”
I said, “Yes.”
“Remember the last year or year before he said we’re not allowed to eat lettuce?”
I said, “Yes.”
“He was here this Sunday saying I’m responsible for the Third World.”
I said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “What do you mean?”
She said, “I know you have trouble with limbo and purgatory and all those things, but,” she says, “I don’t know anything about the Third World.” She said, “I just believe in heaven and hell.”
In a sense, I believe that somehow, in some way, we should not cater to our people’s fears.
In a sense the politics of innovation of the ’60s was defined very much in terms of class and race. Coming out of a Vietnam war and into an economic recession in a time of rapid social change, America was exacerbated by economic, social, cultural and increasing political alienation. We found ourselves in a constant battle of values and in conflict with the first-changing American culture.
As Bruno Bettleheim put it in a sensitive paper on the problem of the generation, “Whenever the older generation has lost its bearings the younger generation is lost with it.” This reminds us of Simone Weil’s warnings that uprooted people tend to uproot others.
And perhaps it reminds me, too, of the seminary where I go once in a while, that the major subject with kids these days seems to be death and dying. That kind of bothers me because I think that we should be talking about celebrating life as well as being concerned in such a major way with death and dying. Does that mean our young people are on the battlelines with a conflict of culture?
Where do we go from here? The Department of Housing and Urban Development admits that there is no national urban policy. Many in Washington are now calling for national economic planning because we have none. We are in a tough situation.
Take employment. You have five people looking for three jobs. If those five people were white, you’d have trouble. If those five people looking for three jobs are black, brown or white, men or women, you’d have trouble.
Housing is the same way. In the next ten years we expect to build perhaps only 18 million units of housing, but we’ll have 28 million families looking for and competing for those 18 million units. Twenty-eight families looking at 18 units. That’s going to exacerbate whatever we mean by black, white, or brown, ethnic and cultural differences.
Basically, our urban policies have destroyed neighborhoods where the real social action takes place between people of different ethnic, racial and cultural classes.
As we enter this bicentennial era, America—and this includes American Indians, Hispanics, blacks, and the children of affluence who have formed the counter-culture—is beginning to ask: “Who am I and who are we as Americans?” And I believe that we as American Catholics will also he asking: “Who am I and who are we as American Catholics?” We desperately need a new ideal for ourselves and a new idea of ourselves. We do not have a national sense of purpose. We do not have a national sense of identity. We do not have a national sense of commitment. And we hardly have a national sense of patriotism.
The Church has an important role and can provide an important model to help America legitimize her own cultural, racial and ethnic diversity as she looks for a new idea and a new vision by which to define herself. The Church can do this by courageously following the lead of the 1919 statement by the American bishops, “Program of Social Reconstruction,” and developing a new pastoral urban social policy which responds to America’s intercultural pluralism.
Intercultural pluralism must be a dimension of this new urban social policy. A new social policy must be intercultural to the extent that it includes the genius of American ethnic, racial and cultural experience. It must encourage ideas, programs, and projects that enhance cultural differentiation, and ideas, programs and projects that cultivate the interplay of possibilities that would be valuable to all Americans from each ethnic, racial or cultural group.
In going away from the melting pot, this redefinition means America must see itself as the most ethnical, racially, culturally, regional lifestyle, pluralistic country.
In the words of Rene Dubos, a very famous anthropologist: “Although the persistence of human diversity has many drawbacks, it also has beneficial consequences. It creates social tensions which lead to a strenuous quest for attitudes and laws designed to give equal rights to all citizens—irrespective of religion and race, of ethnicity, of culture, of age and sex. Human diversity makes tolerance more than a virtue; it makes tolerance a requirement for survival.”
I would like to make the following five suggestions for the development of a new intercultural, pastoral urban social policy that might come out of the bicentennial hearings. At least it ought to be part of the discussion.
One, we must begin to develop our own American theology of pluralism based upon our own Catholic experience as individuals and collectively as an American Church, including rights and cultures and ethnicity and race. We can no longer import German or Dutch or even Third World liberation theology. Later on, perhaps, when we understand and analyze our own American experience, we can dialogue with the diversity and pluralism of the universal Church.
Secondly, we need to review and understand what has happened to us as we moved from being aliens to being naturalized, to being “Americanized.” American Catholic young people will be facing new challenges and new cultural conflicts as they strive to find out what it means to be third and fourth and fifth generation. What does it mean to be Catholic? What does it mean to be Catholic in America?
We need to understand, as Cardinal Dearden said earlier, the importance of our heritage, our identity, our values, and our faith. We know very little about the persistence of the ethnic factor in our own multi-ethnic families and society. We must take this opportunity to go beyond ethnic chauvinism, get to know “our own story,” and share our experience with one another. We must respect our cultural diversity and then, together, not separately, find our unity.
As a young student who got involved in a counter-culture said to me, “I want to be somebody.” He said, “I’d rather be German bread, Greek bread, or brown bread, or whatever, but not this tasteless, odorless, Americanized Wonder Bread which is a symbol of American life.” He said, “This blandness reminds us of the emptiness of American society.”
Our young people, the so-called flower children, were looking not for more cars, not for bigger houses, not for swimming pools. Symbolically, be it Patty Hearst, or be it anyone else, these children of the counter-culture, the children of the best and brightest, these children rebelled against materialism. They rebelled and began to look for values. They began to look for flour for the soul. So, our own American Catholic children will be next in the ’80s in terms of struggling to decide what it means to be Catholic and what it means to be American.
Thirdly, in a sense the future of Catholicism and its healthiness in this country means the development of an intercultural ministry that goes beyond the melting pot to a legitimate cultural diversity. We must find out how to minister to the most ethnically, racially, culturally, and regionally diverse country in the world. We must not just add a bilingual of bicultural program of this group or that group. We must develop an intercultural ministry that includes the personal and professional competency that helps us to deal with second culture and multi-cultural experiences.
I believe this is perhaps what Archbishop Jadot was alluding to when he suggested, at the first of these bicentennial hearings, that “we must respect cultural traditions, cultural values, local values, practical ways of life. But this entails more than a passive respect. What we must provide is support, upbuilding and help.” This, the apostolic delegate indicated, is a requirement of “cultural justice.” This idea brings me to my next point.
Four, we need a new sense of cultural justice that not only affects and demands respect for the background of the American Indians, blacks, Chicanos, but also of European ethnics, and would foster equality in the transmission of their children and cultural values as a matter of giving them what is due them.
What I am talking about is not just a passing benefit, but a right of each individual, as Vatican Council II clearly states: “Energetic effort must also be expended to make everyone conscious of his right to culture and of the duty he has to develop himself culturally and to assist others.” (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World)
The Council also warns against cultural discrimination. I believe instead of fighting the first amendment Church and State battle for Catholic schools, we ought to take a new tactic. We ought to say our schools are valuable and important in a cultural democracy, that it is our right to transmit our values and culture and story to our children, that it is a cultural right in a cultural democracy, not in a mono-cultural, homogeneous kind of nation that has given us negative sensitivities on the question of abortions or schools. The United States Supreme Court would have to deal with us. We’re one fourth of the people. It would have to deal with us in an intercultural way.
We must in our schools create models of intercultural education. What is a good school? A good school should be a place that our people know it so well, and not the tragedy of the situation that happened in Boston and other places. A good school might be creating a new kind of image that perhaps children, rich and poor, black and white, might share their cultural heritage, and we might not be wiped out in developing a homogenous melting pot kind of Miss America, Miss Virginia Slims, Marlboro Man, empty type of person.
We need to develop an intercultural program that would lead the public sector as well into a new area of understanding and appreciation between ethnically, racially and culturally diverse people because we already live in a world that is an intercultural village.
Fifthly, what is most important is that we reexamine the role of the parish in neighborhood revitalization. We need to reaffirm that the parish has a key role in the future of the neighborhood. To rebuild the parish neighborhoods is to rebuild and revitalize the city.
Pope Paul VI said, “There is an urgent need to remake, at the level of the street, of the neighborhood or of the great agglomerative dwellings of the social fabric whereby man may be able to develop the needs of his or her personality. Centers of special interest and of culture must be created or developed at the community and parish levels with different forms of associations, recreation centers, and spiritual and community gatherings where the individual can escape from isolation and form a new fraternal relationship.”
“To build up the city, the place where men and their expanded communities exist, to create new modes of neighborliness and responsibility for this collective future, which is foreseen as difficult, is the task in which Christians must share.” (“A Call to Action,” May 1971)
I claim that this task can best and most effectively be done through the parish, as a catalyst. The parish has an important liturgical and sacramental focus, but as a pastoral institution, it must also have a clearly visible social focus. If the neighborhood dies, the parish dies. Again and again, I repeat this: The parish will die. And if more and more parishes and more and more neighborhoods die, our cities will continue to die. You will find it even more difficult as we enter a new era of American apartheid.
The parish must revitalize the neighborhood not only around the altar where we are one in the unity of the eucharist, but the parish must develop a new sense of community development. The parish must become a catalyst for revitalizing neighborhoods in order to help them with rapid social change, racial and cultural change.
The parish and the neighborhood are partners to the family, and are the size and scope necessary for creating a sense of community that can be the real building block of the cities. Cities are so large and so complicated by themselves, but by developing a new sense of parish-neighborhood revitalization we may begin to provide healthy neighborhoods which can be the nucleus for rebuilding our cities. Otherwise, no one will be able to escape to the distant suburbs or rural areas and not be affected by the creeping cancer of urban decay.
In developing whatever might come of this bicentennial hearing by way of some future pastoral and social policy program, I think we have to have all the courage and daring of our own Catholic past. We need, of course, to take strength from the great social statements of Popes Leo XIII, John XXIII, and Paul VI, but also people like Cardinal Gibbons and Bishop Haas, P. Murray, John Ryan, Cesar Chavez, and many, many others.
Particularly, I look at that landmark of the U.S. Catholic bishops that I hope the bicentennial hearings will equal—that you will put together somehow in the Detroit Conference next year a document—that statement of 1919, John Ryan’s great document, “Program for Social Reconstruction.”
Now is the time for a similar vision. Now is the time for the American Catholic Church to rediscover its own identity and offer itself as a model for American cultural diversity. Then we can believe that justice is a constituent part of our gospel message. Then we can celebrate together what it really means to be American and Catholic. Then we can celebrate together the variants of our common humanity as we struggle for the twin goals of economic justice and for a cultural democracy in our efforts to provide liberty and justice for all. Thank you very much.
BISHOP MCNICHOLAS: Monsignor, I have two brief questions: Number one, the vast majority of Catholics who live in the suburbs are removed from the ethnicity and the ethnic background by several generations, and even more by their custom of living. They really are Americanized. What are the values in the Church preaching ethnicity and the statements you made to this group that make up a large part of our dioceses?
The second one, and I ask this from my own ignorance, have you personally, or the National Center for Urban Affairs, taken a position on the question of busing for racial integration?
MSGR. BARONI: Both are very difficult questions but important ones, I’m sure.
The question of assimilation, of course, is a very real one, it’s true. Look what happened to the counter-culture children of the 1960s who came to Washington in what I call their Brooks Brothers jeans, sensitive about war and peace. They were very upset at having two cars and two swimming pools. In a sense, they had everything materially, but they were looking for values; they were looking for a way of life, and that’s a religious question.
I just happen to believe that a sense of story in our own tradition and the tradition of others related to a faith which sometimes asks, “Why are we eating this meal tonight?”
There has to be a sense of identity. My father’s most important concern was that we would certainly be Americans; but he always wanted to make sure we knew who we were. He’d always ask, “What is your name? What’s your identity?” I think that it’s not a sense of romantics, a sense of going back to something in the past, but it’s knowing who our parents and grandparents were.
I have a hunch, Bishop, that if you give up your identity with your group, you’ll also give up the values and faith of that group.
I was at Harvard last year in the Kennedy School of Government, in the graduate school, in the Institute of Politics, and I was often asked why I was still a Catholic, suggesting that I should probably be past that. I just cannot see giving up my identity.
Abramson, at the University of Connecticut, says there are a lot of standards about who are the best Catholics, but when it comes down to it, he talks particularly about the Spanish-Americans. To the degree that they are sensitive to being Spanish, that’s the degree they’ll always be strongly Catholic. That’s Abramson’s thesis.
I’m saying somehow we have to put that together in terms of our own story.
Now the question of busing is much more complicated and much more difficult. But somehow, in some way, I believe this is going to be a big Catholic issue, not only in Boston but in northern cities. Somehow, some say, I think there is a great hypocrisy in that question. My thesis would be to put the PhDs on the first bus, the MAs on the second bus, and then I think working class people would follow.
That may sound facetious, but there is a lot of economic segregation.
I remember Gonzaga never had a white child living within 16 miles of it, but people walked three miles to get to Gonzaga. Sometimes people took their father’s car to Gonzaga, and the father took the bus to work.
We valued education, but it is whose kids you go to school with that counts.
I think the burden is unfairly upon poor blacks and working class whites. And unless we deal with the hypocrisy of the better educated intellectual community, who must share the burden of busing, then I don’t think we can ask our people to do any more than the people with the best education.
We have two real issues here: rapid social change, and who’s going to shape and who’s going to share the burden of that change.
I think our people will be fair and I think our people will follow because they’ve been taught very well about what’s a good school. It’s a good school where the doctors go, the lawyers go. I don’t think we can ask our people to share lousy schools, be they black, or be they white, by themselves.
MR. FINN: Msgr. Baroni, since my question may seem hostile, I should suggest that my intent is sympathetic. As a parent of immigrants and a native of Gary, Indiana, which is one of the cities that has been torn by the strife, I’ve learned a lot from what you’ve said.
I would like you to answer why, if we have a culture which is so homogeneous, that we would describe as America, it would necessarily be as bland as Wonder Bread? Why could we not have a culture in which one could say I am Catholic and American, rather than I am Catholic and Italian-American, Catholic and Irish-American, Catholic and Spanish-American?
I’m asking you what that intercultural dimension, to use your term, is, that would be different from a homogenized culture which might be rich and profound and distinct as others, say European cultures, are.
MSGR. BARONI: One of the best pastors I had, Msgr. O’Leary, was the chancellor in the Sacred Heart parish, my first parish. I believed in being all-American. As he described the parish, he would say, “The German people are great; they give money to the Church. The Irish are great; they give money to the priest. The Italians are great, but they sing in the choir.”
We have done studies ourselves to show that there is a difference between different groups, even in the fourth and fifth generation, in alcohol, in drugs.
My father wants to go to the hospital to die. Other groups want to go to the hospital because they have all the equipment there.
So, we don’t need health care even in the fourth and fifth generations. There are nuances that are always in the heads of how people describe themselves. But our studies about children from third, fourth generations from Polish, Italian and Irish backgrounds in terms of drugs are very different from others.
My point, though, is, of course, that even in one family there are mixed ethnics; you know, Irish-Italian, and that’s a new type of ethnicity. You know, ethnicity will never go away. Take the Welsh in England, the Scotch in Ireland, the Belgians in the Basques.
We’re not the European kind of ethnic. We share an American culture, a fantastic American culture. But, you know, there is a difference. The Irish, I think, send their kids mostly to Catholic schools. I went two weeks to Catholic school to make my First Communion, and I came home with a note my name should be changed to Kevin. My father said, “There is no way. He doesn’t look like Kevin.”
Then we had a bishop named Gilfoyle who wanted us to take the pledge at twelve. Again, my father had a problem. We drink wine with our first glass of water. My father also kept asking, what was the sermon today, and how many times the sermon was about sex and drinking and Communism. He said, “Sex and drinking? That’s not my problem. That’s the American Catholic Church.”
Consider the bankruptcy of our culture. Take novels. Now, who writes the novels? Which groups came in when the Kennedy Center was being done up for the performing arts, theater, dance, opera? Jewish and black groups. Because they had an identity. What I’m saying is we have to do our own Portnoy’s Complaint.
BISHOP HEAD: You made reference to disinvestment and redlining, and we are all very interested that the redlining bill goes through and is signed. You made reference to redlining and disinvestment as the cause, one of the major causes, of deterioration.
Would you not rather say that they are the causes for the perpetuation of deterioration of neighborhoods rather than the causes of it?
MSGR. BARONI: Well, perhaps both. There are some studies now. The center was involved in developing legislation with Senator Proxmire on that bill.
Disclosure is not going to be the only answer. In the North Ward, some people asked should we decide to stay to try to work together, live together. We decided to stay.
There are counter incentives both in the public and private sectors. As the neighborhood goes from the decaying Central Ward, from a deteriorated neighborhood to a declining neighborhood, this cancer keeps spreading.
I’m saying there can be cancer on the toe and there can be cancer on the arm. We have to deal with it wherever our parishes are, in these changing or older neighborhoods, or else we will die. Let me put it this way: Somebody decides I need new shingles and a new roof. They go down to the savings and loan and they say: “We live on Collingwood in Murray Hill.” And they are told, “That’s a changing neighborhood. We don’t make loans anymore, even of your own money.” So, you decide, “I’m going to move out.” But the person next to you says: “If you stay, I’m going to stay.” You create a psychology. You have to reinvest in the community.
When Jones’ Drug Store closes up and Smith’s Market closes up, even though your house may be perfectly beautiful six blocks away, you say, “Oh, the neighborhood is going. I’ve got to leave.”
We’re seeing this with HUD. HUD is now the tenth largest city in the country in terms of the houses they own in cities like Detroit and other places.
So that there are a lot of factors here, but let’s look at the counter incentives that make a neighborhood psychologically say something is wrong. How do you turn that around and reinvest and deal with those senses of security, self-sufficiency, that are desperately needed in creating the community?
There is so much community in these neighborhoods. We need to revitalize them as part of a healthy nucleus. We have got to see what we can do in the suburbs and see what we can do in other central wards.
I do believe the question of disinvestment is not only money, it’s a psychological kind of thing. We have buildings that could help meet the needs of new people, but if you don’t have a healthy neighborhood, it can’t deal with the needs either of the older people or the new people and we end up like the South Bronx, large sections of inner cities without governments. And that’s dangerous and that’s disasterous.
CARDINAL DEARDEN: Thank you, Msgr. Baroni.
CARDINAL DEARDEN: We’ll return now with the series of briefer presentations such as we had in this afternoon’s session. The first presentation is that of Gerard Muench.
MR. MUENCH: I’m a member of St. John the Baptist Church of the Ukrainian rite here in Newark. I’ve been working with young people all my adult life, both as a teacher in the Archdiocese of Newark and as a counselor. For the last 15 years I’ve been counseling the children of the Ukrainian community here in Newark.
I would like to address the committee this evening on the problems of the white ethnic youth in the city. These are the youth who are made to feel like second-class citizens because they speak a foreign language in their homes. These are the youth who are made fun of when they must pronounce their last names. These are the youth who are thought of as being different.
Look at the youth today. The upper middle-class youth are having an identity problem. They don’t know their background. They have no real cultural ties. So they don’t know where to look. They turn to the superficial culture of long hair and rock music, or even more tragically, to the drug culture. The black and Puerto Rican youth often feel they are not a part of society, and so they drop out.
The one group of youth not having these problems is the ethnic youths. They know who they are and what their culture is. They also know their value system.
Who are these white ethnic youths? They’re the children of the non-English speaking immigrants. A large part make up the blue-collar class in this country, but the greater part are Catholic and they live in their own ghettos.
But let us look at some of the problems these young people do have. They look around to see the student radicals, and many of the radical clergy for what they really are. They see these phonies in their poor boy outfits as rich kids playing in the gutter, making fun of the values of ethnic groups. These values of education, ownership and cleanliness are sacred to the ethnics, and they feel hurt and angry.
Another of their values is respect. They see ridicule on all sides. Imagine how they feel when they see adults going to communion with their hands in their pockets! As for family life, it’s made fun of on all sides.
Remember also that the ethnics are usually found at the edge of the black ghetto. They’re used by the suburbanites as a buffer against the blacks. They’re accused of being racists. But, remember, racism is not their invention. They found it here. Why should they pay the price for America’s guilt? Their ancestors owned no slaves. Many ceased being serfs themselves only in the last 100 years.
These young people also resent the moral pressure to abandon their own traditions and language in order to reap the higher rewards of the culture of quantity, replacement and mobility.
The church in this country has put much of this pressure on our youth. It’s been closing their national churches. It has even made fun of many national religious customs. The church in America has never tried to solve the problem of preserving diversity. What has the church done for the ethnic youth? It has taken away their national customs and replaced them with guitar music and prayer meetings.
Why doesn’t the church let them keep their native customs? Why can’t you bishops encourage the different national devotions?
Especially hurt by this attitude of the Latin church are those youths who happen to be members of the Eastern churches. I have worked with youth in our parish for 15 years, and never once were we invited by a Latin-rite church to share our ideas with them. We have been invited by Protestants and Othodox youths. The CYO can take on numerous causes, but never once did I hear them ask for liberty and justice for the Ukrainian Church.
What have you bishops for these ethnic youths? Are you not their fathers, also?
To sum up my thoughts, I think basically I have been saying this: Perhaps you have not been fair to the youth of our ethnic groups. You have pampered the children of the rich; you have consoled the children of the poor; but you have made fun of the ethnic youth.
How has this group paid back the church? They’re the youth who are entering the religious orders. They are the youth who are refilling the seminaries. They are the youth who work days so they can attend college at night. These are the youth who can’t afford a Catholic college. The scholarships go to the “needy.” These are the youth who look forward to having a family and owning a house.
What I ask is that you help these youth keep their culture, their heritage. I ask you to help them to get scholarships to Catholic schools and colleges. I ask you to accept them for what they are, your children. I ask you to stop playing politics—to stop pushing these youths aside for the rich liberals. I ask you to give liberty and justice to the ethnic youth.
CARDINAL DEARDEN: Do any of the panelists have questions?
BISHOP DOUGHERTY: You seem to fault bishops exclusively.
MR. MUENCH : No.
BISHOP DOUGHERTY: So, the question is do you fault the bishops exclusively?
MR. MUENCH: No. I’m sorry if that was the impression. I think I fault the whole Christian community.
CARDINAL DEARDEN: Since there are no further questions from the panel, we have one from the floor.
FATHER MARTIN: I am Father Martin, O. S. E. of Holy Faith Monastery, Clifton, N.J.
I wish to throw in this correction. I immigrated to this country as a seven-year-old boy from Italy. From Assisi, Italy we immigrated to Trenton. I attended St. Joseph’s School. We moved to Philadelphia, attended St. Rita’s School. We came to Newark. I was taught in Philadelphia by St. Francis, in Trenton by the Sopina Sisters. When we came to Newark, I attended Mt. Carmel School by the same sisters, the Sopina Sisters. Then the school was demolished.
In every school I attended, we had both languages. Italian one hour in the afternoon. When the school was demolished those who lived on this side of the Pennsylvania Railroad had to go to St. John’s on Mulbern Street, and those who were living on the other side of the railroad went to St. James.
CARDINAL DEARDEN: Father, do you have a question?
FATHER MARTIN: What I’m trying to correct is that I got a scholarship. You say there were no scholarships. I got a scholarship for half tuition at St. Benedict’s. I’m a graduate of St. Benedict’s.
When I was a freshman at St. Benedict’s, Bishop Mugavero, who is here present, was a senior. I went to Seton Hall. I didn’t pay a penny. I got the scholarship. There were many, many scholarships given.
CARDINAL DEARDEN: Do you want to comment on that?
MR. MUENCH: I think the point has been made clearly enough. I realize there have been some scholarships.
CARDINAL DEARDEN: Thank you.
Lee Iacocca, the child of Italian immigrants, was something of a business wunderkind in the 1960s and 1970s, serving first as president of Ford Motor Company and then as president and chair of the board at Chrysler. In the early 1980s President Reagan appointed him chairman of the Statue of Liberty—Ellis Island Commission. The commission was charged with the renovation of the statue and restoration of the Ellis Island immigrant reception facility, which had fallen into ruin. In this speech to the Ethnic Heritage Council of the Pacific Northwest in Seattle in 1984, Iacocca invokes the heroic epic of nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigration to America, implies that it is a foundational myth akin to the pilgrims or the founding fathers, and hails Ellis Island and the statue as the principal shrine of this myth.
Source: Matthew Seeger, ed., “I Gotta Tell You” (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 1994), pp. 316–323.
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, OCTOBER 20, 1984
Thank you. Good evening ladies and gentleman.
It’s always a real pleasure to come to the great Pacific Northwest. Thank you for inviting me. Originally, I was going to say “Washington.” But I’m so tired of going to the other Washington, I couldn’t muster the strength to say it.
I first want to thank all of you for your support of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island project.
I also want to congratulate you on forming this Ethnic Heritage Council four years ago. I think it’s important for all of us to hold on to our own heritage … whatever it is. But we ought to share it, too. And learn more about other people’s heritage. You’re helping each other do that.
We started doing that in Detroit a few years ago. During the summer we have a series of ethnic festivals on the riverfront. One week the Germans take over, the next the Polish, and then the Italians, and the Greeks, and so on. And everybody’s welcome. You get a sense of diversity and unity at the same time, and I guess that’s what America is all about.
I know that’s true of this group. You’re coming together tonight to pay tribute to a most important symbol of our unity as a nation—the Statue of Liberty. And yet the diversity is just as evident. When I was invited, they sent me some background material on your organization. It had the names of board members and committee heads. There’s a Filipino named Koslosky … a Norwegian named Morrison … and a Japanese named Sanchez. And then there’s Carin Jacroux. That sounds awfully French to me, but she says she’s German, she works at the Austrian Consulate, and she’s here representing an Italian club!
Now, come on. That’s carrying things a little too far! Maybe she just likes going to lots of parties. If she lived in Detroit, she’d have to spend the whole summer camped out at the ethnic festivals on the riverfront!
Well, it’s fun to dress up in the old costumes … to dance to the old music … to eat the food and listen to stories about the old country. That’s important, and I hope we never lose it.
But when a bunch of us got together a couple of years ago to do something about the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, the mood was pretty serious. The Statue looks the same from a distance, but inside her bones are breaking apart. Pieces have actually fallen off and washed up in New Jersey.
Ellis Island is only a half a mile away, and it’s a mess. It’s been shut down for thirty years now. I don’t know how many of you have been there, but to me the place is haunted with 17 million ghosts. That’s how many people came through there between 1892 and 1954. Every time I walk into the Great Hall, I feel like I’m in church.
When President Reagan asked me to be chairman of a committee to restore both the Statue and Ellis Island, I was honored. Believe me, I had my hands full at Chrysler, and I wasn’t looking for any hobbies. But this is something I had to do. It’s a labor of love for me.
Both my parents came through Ellis Island … my dad twice. The first time was in 1902. He was twelve years old and scared to death. The second time was in 1921, after he’d returned to Italy to bring back a bride … my mother.
So, my roots run deep—and my attachment is great—as I’m sure it is with so many of you in this room.
Well, the restoration is a big job. The statue—for those of you who haven’t been in it—is basically a copper skin about as thick as a half-dollar, connected to a structural framework by iron straps. When you put iron next to copper and add a little moisture, you have a battery. That causes galvanic corrosion. The copper skin is in pretty good shape, but the iron straps have just about been eaten away. We’re replacing two thousand of them, this time with an alloy that won’t react with the copper.
We also have to strengthen the right arm … the one that holds the torch. It was damaged during World War I when a munitions plant blew up a few miles away in New Jersey. If the plant was sabotaged—as many people believe—then she was one of the casualties of that war.
The torch itself has been removed, and it will have to be replaced. The new one will be identical, of course, and the old one will be displayed somewhere—I don’t know where yet—maybe it will move around the country. By the way, you Huskie fans will be able to see it on New Year’s Day in the Rose Bowl Parade.
Ellis Island is an empty shell now. But in two years the Great Hall will be rehabilitated and some of the first exhibits will be in place. By 1992, when the project is completed, Ellis Island will be not just a museum but a living monument to the whole immigration experience in America. You’ll enjoy visiting it. It will freeze a moment in time. You’ll see it as they saw it. You’ll experience their music and literature, and their food and arts and crafts. It will be sort of an ethnic Williamsburg—but not commercial.
Coincidentally, 1992 will be the five hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the New World. That will be a big day for all Americans, but especially for Italians, because he was Italian. And I guess for the Spanish, too, because they put up all the dough. See, cooperation started early in this country.
The whole project—the statue and Ellis Island—will cost about $230 million. That sounds like a lot, but it’s only a buck for each American … the price of a pack of cigarettes. None of that will come from public funds. All of it will be from private individuals, groups like yours, and companies, big and small. We’re already over a $120 million in cash and pledges.
Your participation out here has been tremendous. You just saw me get a check for a quarter of a million from the employees at Boeing.
I want to thank all the employees at Boeing for that.
And you may not know this, but the biggest single corporate sponsor in the country is the Chateau St. Michelle winery here in Washington … and get this—they’ve already pledged five million bucks! So my thanks to all the people at St. Michelle.
We’re looking for a million and a half from people in Washington, not counting corporate contributions. And a million from Oregon.
So far, we’ve got about 50 million committed from companies around the country, and a little more than that from individuals and groups—the grass roots effort!
We’ve got almost 2 million bucks from school kids sending us their nickels and dimes. I opened my mail last Monday and there was a letter from a kid. He said: “Dear Mr. Iacocca, here’s my allowance for this week.” And there were two $1 bills attached. He said, “Spend it wisely!”
The kids are fantastic. You know, kids are always raising money for something … a new school bus, football uniforms, a class trip. But this project has really caught on. They’re washing cars, and having bake sales. You name it.
But that’s the magic—and the fun of it. Everybody is getting into the act. Right here in Seattle, the Bellevue Terrace Nursing Center is sponsoring Wheel-a-thons, and they’ve raised thousands of dollars.
One guy rode a motorized surfboard over three thousand miles to raise money.
How about this—we even got $2,000 from the Hell’s Angels! Leather jackets, motorcycles, and all—would you believe underneath those guys are patriots?
And when people send in money, they always seem to write a letter. I wish you could read them. People who are immigrants say, “America has been good to me, and I just want to pay a little of it back.” The second-generation people say, “Here’s something for my mom and dad … for all they went through for me.” And you can almost see the tear-stains on the letters.
One day a guy came into my office and gave me a million dollars. Right out of the blue. He told me about how his family had come here poor, like everybody else. And obviously they did well … they got rich. And the man felt a big debt to this country. All he asked was that I never reveal his name. So, if anybody here has a million—I promise to keep you anonymous, too.
Maybe the most touching letter of all came from a man in Poland. He sent some silver certificates worth about $2 for the Statue, and asked for a picture of what he called “This beautiful symbol.”
And what a beautiful symbol she is! To us, and to the rest of the world.
I think it’s important to remember that we didn’t build her. It wasn’t our idea. A hundred years ago, French schoolkids collected pennies to build Miss Liberty, just like our kids are doing today. The idea began right after the Civil War. Some people in France were as thankful as we were that this country … this experiment in liberty … had held together through its darkest hours. They were thankful because in this American experiment they saw an example for the rest of the world. It was an example of hope, and they built the statue as a symbol of that hope.
The greatest gift, as Robert Burns said, is to see ourselves as others see us. It took the French to provide us with this “beautiful symbol.” But I wonder if any of us here tonight can see what the Statue of Liberty stands for quite as clearly as that man in Poland. It seems freedom means more if you don’t have it. If you do, you just take it for granted.
Americans a hundred years ago didn’t really appreciate the importance of that symbol. After the French sent the statue over, our government refused to put up the money for a base to put it on. Some people started a fund drive, but it didn’t work … until Joseph Pulitzer got involved. He was an immigrant from Hungary, and he owned a newspaper in New York. He made the Statue a major cause. He especially went after the silk stocking crowd in New York, and embarrassed them into contributing.
So even from the beginning, Americans didn’t really appreciate what they had … what the Lady in the Harbor stood for.
To really understand, you may have to look through somebody else’s eyes. Think back with me for a minute what it must have meant to my parents, or yours, or your grandparents … to all those 17 million people who came during the big immigration wave.
First, they left their families and their homes. Most knew they’d never get back to see them again. What makes people do that? Courage … desperation … determination to be free … wanting to give their kids a decent life? All of those, I guess. But what a wrenching thing it must have been!
And then seventeen or eighteen days on the ocean … down below in steerage … where almost everybody was seasick. My mother got typhoid fever. They had two to three crowded, smelly weeks to think about what they’d left, and wonder if just half the stories about America were really true.
None of them remembered that boat ride very fondly. But they remembered the day they got to New York. They all came up on deck, dressed up in their best clothes because this was the biggest day of their lives. They stood on the deck with just those clothes on their back, and maybe a suitcase with a rope around it. And the first thing they saw was the Statue of Liberty.
It was shiny then, because the copper hadn’t turned green yet. And they could see it gleaming in the harbor from miles out.
I don’t care how sick they were, or how scared, or how lonely, the sight of the Lady saying “welcome” made the whole thing worth it. They never forgot that … or what happened next.
If the statue was a symbol of hope, Ellis Island was the reality. They called it “The Island of Tears,” and for good reason.
They were herded off the boat into this gigantic building … thousands in a single day. It looked like a cathedral, but inside it was a cattle barn. Everybody was jammed in long lines, hanging onto each other, and to the kids, and to the suitcase with the rope around it.
The sheer numbers meant nothing was personal. There were quick medical exams, and some of them were humiliating. They had tags hung around their necks, and they didn’t know what they meant. An immigration agent asked them thirty questions in two minutes … in a language they didn’t understand.
Twenty percent of them were detained on the island for medical or legal reasons, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks. One in fifty was put back on the boat for Europe. For them the dream was over!
Ellis Island, was reality, all right … an almost brutal counterpoint to that hope they were feeling just a few hours before. Earlier this year, a man wrote a letter to the New York Times. He called Ellis Island a “charnal house” and said we shouldn’t try to restore it we should tear it down. He said it was a symbol “best forgotten.”
Well, he’s wrong. We need that symbol as much as we do the statue. Because that’s where the story really began. That’s where they were really introduced to America. They took a ferry across to the Battery and—guess what—they found the streets were not paved with gold. They were on their own. The adventure was over. Now they had to go to work. Now they had to build something—with brains, and strong backs, and sheer guts.
They went to work in factories, and in the mines, and on the railroad … generally at the lowest jobs those always went to the new arrivals. But in just a couple of decades they built an Industrial America that was the wonder of the world!
They also built homes and neighborhoods and churches. Their kids went to college, fought in our wars, and became leaders in their communities.
So both the statue and Ellis Island are important symbols, One of the shining hope for freedom and a better life. And one of the sacrifice, and the suffering, and the plain hard work that turned that hope into reality.
We need them both.
Almost half of the people in America today are direct descendants of those 17 million whose first glimpses of America were those two symbols.
But they are equally important to every American, whether his forebears came three hundred years ago to find religious freedom;
Whether they came from Ireland during the potato famine;
Or from Germany and Eastern Europe to escape their endless wars;
Or from Scandinavia to farm the prairies, or to cut the timber here in the Northwest;
Or from China and Japan to this coast … or north from Mexico … or south from Canada.
The Statue of Liberty stands for the same thing for all of us … even those whose ancestors were brought here in chains … as slaves. Maybe she is especially important for them.
And the process goes on and on, doesn’t it? Let me say again how much I appreciate this beautiful painting that was given to me tonight. Ms. Houng and thousands of other Vietnamese who’ve risked so much to get here are telling us that everything Miss Liberty has stood for is still alive today. And I think we need them to remind us.
We’ve let some of our symbols decay, but now we’re repairing them. But in the last twenty years or so, we’ve seen America jerked in a dozen confusing directions, so that some believe that even the basic values behind those symbols are decaying as well.
We’ve seen our leaders shot down … our cities burn in racial violence … a president thrown out in disgrace … and a war that forced us—painfully—to confront our own limitations.
We’ve also seen the economic order in the world change. And for the first time in our memory, we are no longer clearly in command of it.
Our own economic base is changing, too. Our heavy industry is shrinking. The jobs that for so long were filled by the newest Americans are moving out of America to the Far East and the Third World.
Some people are even beginning to say that America can’t compete anymore—that we can’t cut the mustard.
Well, I’ve spent a lot of time on the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. And other people are working full-time on it. Millions of people have sent in money. This thing has caught on because these symbols still stand for something beautiful.
We aren’t spending $230 million just so the Statue won’t fall into the harbor and become a hazard to navigation. We aren’t fixing up Ellis Island so people will have a nice place to go on Sunday afternoon. We’re doing it because we want to remember, and to honor, and to save the basic values that made America great.
Values like hard work, dignified by decent pay. Like the courage to risk everything and start over. Like the wisdom to adapt to change. And maybe most of all—self-confidence. To believe in ourselves. Nothing is more important than that.
The symbols mean nothing if the values aren’t there.
I’ve heard it said—and so have you—that our kids will be the first generation of Americans that will have to settle for less than their parents had.
I pray to God our kids don’t believe that. But I can see how they might. Look at the size of the public debt we’re saddling them with. We’re paying our way today by mortgaging their futures. Our parents didn’t do that to us. And they’d be ashamed of us for doing it to our kids.
And look at all the whining they’re starting to hear about how America can’t compete anymore. That’s what everybody told us at Chrysler five years ago, remember? How many of you remember the Wall Street Journal telling Chrysler to quit fighting—and to “die with dignity”?
Well, we didn’t see a hell of a lot of dignity in six hundred thousand people losing their jobs. So we did what we had to do—including a lot of painful things. We practically had to start over. But we survived. We got out of debt. We got rid of the government as our business partner. This year we made a billion and a half dollars just in the first six months. And I just approved a five-year business plan that’ll mean investing over $10 billion in technology and jobs right here in America.
Hell, if we could do it, anybody can. Because we had less going for us than just about anybody, believe me.
The country is going through some big changes today. I don’t know what to call it … “the information age” … “the hightech era” … “the postindustrial society.” And people are scared. They wonder if there’ll be a place for them.
Well, hell, what are they scared about? There was a revolution going on eighty years ago, too, when those millions of people were being pushed through the chutes at Ellis Island. It was called the industrial revolution. They came out of the sulphur pits in Sicily and the coal mines in Silesia, and then jumped right into the middle of it. And they didn’t even speak the language!
So what’s so tough about today? And why can’t our kids look forward to—even more than we have, not less?
We make a mistake if we think the Statue of Liberty is just a historical monument. We’re missing the boat if we think she stands for the past. She has never stood for the past. Every immigrant, every returning GI and doughboy who sailed by her, was escaping the past and entering the future.
She may be almost one hundred years old, but the values she stands for—better not be as weathered as she is. And I don’t think they are. Maybe when we get her polished up, more people will see that.
We’re not just preserving a statue here, we’re preserving all that she stands for.
And if that’s not worth remembering, and honoring, and saving … if that’s not worth passing on to our kids … then let me ask you, ladies and gentlemen—what the hell is?
Thank you.
Mario Cuomo is the American-born son of Italian immigrants. He served three terms as governor of New York from 1983 to 1995 and after his famous keynote address at the Democratic Convention in 1984 was frequently touted as a possible presidential candidate. In the 1980s he was perhaps the best known and most articulate white ethnic liberal Democrat in the country. In this selection from a speech on Lincoln, he weaves his own family’s immigrant story together with Lincoln’s vision in order to argue for liberal values.
Source: Mario Cuomo, More Than Words (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), pp. 86–89.
What a great gift Lincoln is! In this speech I use him to inspire us and to remind us that we are still in the process of perfecting the Union, still a “Tale of Two Cities,” still struggling to complete America “the unfinished work.” Lincoln serves, too, as a strong witness against the Reagan assault on government as a pernicious force. Lincoln’s own view was a balanced one using government to do things which he believed the private sector was not doing adequately, such as making “land improvements.” Today that would mean investing in our infrastructure.
Something else was at work in the 1980s that was troublesome and could benefit from Lincoln’s soaring intellect and penetrating rhetoric. There was a harshness growing, a loss of civility. Lincoln, who stretched his sinewy arms around his young nation and kept it from division and fragmentation with his strength and compassion, is still a powerful voice against the destructive force of racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination. I had in mind especially some new unpleasantness involving Italian-Americans that had been in the news just before the time of this address, and I talked about it specifically in the speech.
It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work … that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Gettysburg Address (Everett Copy)
November 19, 1863
It is an intimidating thing to stand here tonight to talk about the greatest intellect, the greatest leader perhaps the greatest soul, America has ever produced.
To follow such legendary orators as William Jennings Bryan and Adlai Stevenson.
Only a struggling student myself, to face as imposing an audience as the Lincoln scholars: Tough-minded. Demanding. Harsh critics. Highly intelligent.
And to face so many Republicans: Tough-minded. Demanding, harsh critics.
And I certainly wasn’t encouraged after I learned that when another New York governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, announced his intention to come here to speak on Lincoln, a local political stalwart threatened him with an injunction.
To be honest with you, I feel a little like the Illinois man from one Lincoln story. When he was confronted by a local citizens’ committee with the prospect of being tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail, he announced, “If it weren’t for the honor of the thing, I’d just as soon it happened to someone else.”
I should tell you one more thing before I go on with my remarks. It would be foolish to deny that there has been some speculation surrounding this event about ambitions for the presidency. Let me be candid. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t regard it as the highest possible political privilege to be president. And governors are, perhaps, better prepared than most to be president.
Governors like Teddy Roosevelt and FDR and even governors from places like Georgia and California. Particularly governors of great industrial states with good records. That’s because governors do more than make speeches. They have to make budgets and run things—and that’s what presidents do.
So, the truth is, despite what might be said about planning to run again for governor, the speculation about the presidency is plausible.
I wouldn’t be a bit surprised—if the election goes well this year for him—if early next year you heard a declaration of interest from a reelected governor of a large state—Jim Thompson of Illinois.
Good Luck, Jim!
But seriously, this is an event beyond the scope of partisan politics.
When Lincoln gave his one and only speech in my capital, Albany, New York, he told the Democratic governor, “You have invited and received me without distinction of party.”
Let me second that sentiment, and thank you for inviting and receiving me in the same spirit.
To be here in Springfield, instead of at the memorial in Washington, to celebrate this “high holy day” of Lincoln remembrance gives us a special advantage.
In Washington, Lincoln towers far above us, presiding magisterially, in a marble temple.
His stony composure, the hugeness of him there, gives him and his whole life a grandeur that places him so far above and beyond us that it’s difficult to remember the reality of him.
We have lifted Lincoln to the very pinnacle of our national memory. Enlarged him to gargantuan proportions in white stone recreations.
We have chiseled his face on the side of a mountain, making him appear as a voice in the heavens.
There is a danger when we enshrine our heroes, when we lift them onto pedestals and lay wreaths at their feet. We can, by the very process of elevating them, strain the sense of connection between them and the palpable, fleshy, sometimes mean concerns of our own lives.
I have come to remember Lincoln as he was. The flesh-and-blood man. Haunted by mortality in his waking and his dreaming life. The boy who had been uprooted from one frontier to another across Kentucky and Indiana and Illinois, by a father restless with his own dreams.
To remember some of Lincoln’s own words—which taken altogether, are the best words America has ever produced
To remember the words that he spoke ten days after his lyrical, wrenching farewell to Springfield on his way to his inauguration as our sixteenth president.
“Back in my childhood,” he said then, “the earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of a small book … Weems’s Life of Washington.
“I remember all the accounts there given of the battlefields and struggles for the liberties of the country and the great hardships of that time fixed themselves on … my memory.
“I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for.
“I am exceedingly anxious that the thing which they struggled for, that something even more than national independence; that something that held out a promise to all the people of the world for all time to come, … shall be perpetuated in accordance with the original idea for which the struggle was made …”
Here was Lincoln, just before his inauguration, reminding us of the source of his strength and eventual greatness. His compelling need to understand the meaning of things and to commit to a course that was directed by reason, supported by principle, designed to achieve the greatest good. He was a man of ideas, grand and soaring ones. And he was cursed by the realization that they were achievable ideas as well, so that he could not escape the obligation of pursuing them, despite the peril and the pain that pursuit would inevitably bring.
Even as a boy he grasped the great idea that would sustain him—and provoke him—for the rest of his days. The idea that took hold of his heart and his mind. The idea that he tells us about again and again throughout his life. It became the thread of purpose that tied the boy to the man to the legend—the great idea, the dream, the achievable dream, of equality, of opportunity … for all.
“The original idea for which the struggle was made …” The proposition that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Even by Lincoln’s time, for many the words had been heard often enough so that they became commonplace, part of the intellectual and historical landscape, losing their dimension, their significance, their profoundness.
But not for Lincoln.
He pondered them. Troubled over their significance. Wrestled with their possibilities.
“We did not learn quickly or easily that all men are created equal,” one Lincoln scholar has observed.
No. We did not learn those words quickly or easily. We are still struggling with them in fact.
As Lincoln did. For a whole lifetime. From the time he read Weems’s little book, until the day he was martyred, he thought and planned and prayed to make the words of the Declaration a way of life.
Equality and opportunity, for all. But truly, for all.
Lincoln came to believe that the great promise of the founding fathers was one that had only begun to be realized with the founding fathers themselves. He understood that from the beginning it was a promise that would have to be fulfilled in degrees. Its embrace would have to be widened over the years, step by step, sometimes painfully, until finally it included everyone.
That was his dream. That was his vision. That was his mission.
With it, he defined, for himself and for us, the soul of our unique experiment in government: the belief that the promise of the Declaration of Independence—the promise of equality and opportunity—cannot be considered kept until it includes everyone.
For him, that was the unifying principle of our democracy. Without it, we had no nation worth fighting for. With it, we had no limit to the good we might achieve.
He spent the rest of his life trying to give the principle meaning. He consumed himself doing it.
He reaffirmed Jefferson’s preference for the human interest and the human right. “The principles of Jefferson,” he said, “are the definitions and axioms of free society.”
But Lincoln extended those instincts to new expressions of equality.
Always, he searched for ways to bring within the embrace of the new freedom, the new opportunity, all who had become Americans.
Deeply, reverently, grateful for the opportunity afforded him, he was pained by the idea that it should be denied others. Or limited.
He believed that the human right was more than the right to exist, to live free from oppression.
He believed it included the right to achieve, to thrive. So he reached out for the “penniless beginner.”
He thought it the American promise that every “poor man” should be given his chance.
He saw what others would or could not see: the immensity of the fundamental ideas of freedom and self-determination that made his young nation such a radically new adventure in government.
But he was not intimidated by that immensity. He was willing to use the ideas as well as to admire them. To mold them so as to apply them to new circumstances. To wield them as instruments of justice and not just echoes of it.
Some said government should do no more than protect its people from insurrection and foreign invasion and spend the rest of its time dispassionately observing the way its people played out the cards that fate had dealt them.
He scorned that view. He called it a “do nothing” abdication of responsibility.
“The legitimate object of government,” he said, “is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they cannot, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves. There are many such things …” he said.
So he offered the “poor” more than feedom and the encouragement of his own good example: He offered them government. Government that would work aggressively to help them find the chance they might not have found alone. He did it by fighting for bridges, railroad construction, and other such projects that others decried as excessive government.
He gave help for education, help for agriculture, land for the rural family struggling for a start.
And always at the heart of his struggle and his yearning was the passion to make room for the outsider; the insistence upon a commitment to respect the idea of equality by fighting for inclusion.
Early in his career, he spoke out for women’s suffrage.
His contempt for the “do-nothings” was equaled by his disdain for the “Know-Nothings.”
America beckoned foreigners, but many Americans—organized around the crude selfishness of the nativist movement—rejected them. The nativists sought to create two classes of people, the old-stock Americans and the intruders from other places, keeping the intruders forever strangers in a strange land.
Lincoln shamed them with his understanding and his strength. “I am not a Know-Nothing,” he said. “How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of Negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people? … As a nation we began by declaring ‘all men are created equal.’
“We now practically read it: ‘All men are created equal except Negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘All men are created equal except Negroes, and Catholics and Foreigners.’”
Then he added: “When it comes to this I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
Had Lincoln not existed, or had he been less than he was and the battle to keep the nation together had been lost, it would have meant the end of the American experiment. Secession would have bred secession, reducing us into smaller and smaller fragments until finally we were just the broken pieces of the dream.
Lincoln saved us from that.
But winning the great war for unity did not preserve us from the need to fight further battles in the struggle to balance our diversity with our harmony, to keep the pieces of the mosaic intact, even while making room for new pieces.
That work is today, as it was in 1863, still an unfinished work … still a cause that requires “a full measure of devotion.”
For more than 100 years, the fight to include has continued:
• In the struggle to free working people from the oppression of a ruthless economic system that saw women and children worked to death and men born to poverty live in poverty and die in poverty, in spite of working all the time.
• In the continuing fight for civil rights, making Lincoln’s promise real.
• In the effort to keep the farmer alive.
• In the ongoing resistance to preserve religious freedom from the arrogance of the Know-Nothing and the zealotry of those who would make their religion the state’s religion.
• In the crusade to make women equal, legally and practically.
Many battles have been won. The embrace of our unity has been gradually but inexorably expanded.
But Lincoln’s work is not yet done.
A century after Lincoln preached his answer of equality and mutual respect, some discrimination—of class or race or sex or ethnicity—as a bar to full participation in America still remains.
Unpleasant reminders of less enlightened times linger. Sometimes they are heard in whispers. At other times they are loud enough to capture the attention of the American people.
I have had my own encounter with this question, and I have spoken of it.
Like millions of others, I am privileged to be a first-generation American. My mother and father came to this country more than sixty years ago with nothing but their hopes. Without education, skills, or wealth.
Through the opportunity given them here to lift themselves through hard work, they were able to raise a family. My mother has lived to see her youngest child become chief executive of one of the greatest states in the greatest nation in the only world we know.
Like millions of other children of immigrants, I know the strength that immigrants can bring. I know the richness of a society that allows us a whole new culture without requiring us to surrender the one our parents were born to. I know the miraculous power of this place that helps people rise up from poverty to security, and even affluence, in the course of a single lifetime. With generations of other children of the immigrants, I know about equality and opportunity and unity in a special way.
And I know how, from time to time, all this beauty can be challenged by the misguided children of the Know-Nothings, by the shortsighted and the unkind, by contempt that masks itself as humor, by all the casual or conscious bigotry that must keep the American people vigilant.
We heard such voices again recently saying things like: “Italians are not politically popular.”
“Catholics will have a problem.”
“He has an ethnic problem.”
An ethnic problem.
We hear the word again. “Wop.”
“We oftentimes refer to people of Italian descent as Wops,’” said one public figure, unabashedly.
Now, given the unbroken string of opportunity and good fortune provided me by this great country, I might simply have ignored these references. I could easily have let the words pass as inconsequential, especially remembering Lincoln, himself the object of scorn and ridicule But the words took on significance because they were heard beyond my home or my block or even my state. Because they were heard by others who remembered times of their own when words stung and menaced them and their people.
And because they raised a question about our system of fundamental American values that Lincoln helped construct and died for. Is it true? Are there really so many who have never heard Lincoln’s voice, or the sweet sound of reason and fairness? So many who do not understand the beauty and power of this place, that they could take of the tint of your skin or the sex you were born to or the vowels of your name an impediment to progress in this, the land of opportunity?
I believed the answer would be clear. So I asked for it by disputing the voices of division. By saying, “It is not so. It is the voice of ignorance, and I challenge you to show me otherwise.”
In no time at all the answer has come back from the American people. Everyone saying the same things:
“Of course it’s wrong to judge a person by the place where his forebears came from. Of course that would violate all that we stand for, fairness and common sense. It shouldn’t even have been brought up. It shouldn’t even have been a cause for discussion.”
I agree. It should not have been. But it was. And the discussion is now concluded, with the answer I was sure of and the answer I am proud of as an American. The answer Lincoln would have given: “You will rise or fall on your merits as a person and the quality of your work. All else is distraction.”
Lincoln believed, with every fiber of his being, that this place, America, could offer a dream to all mankind, different than any other in the annals of history.
More generous, more compassionate, more inclusive.
No one knew better than Lincoln our sturdiness, the ability of most of us to make it on our own given the chance. But at the same time, no one knew better the idea of family, the idea that unless we helped one another, there were some who would never make it.
One person climbs the ladder of personal ambition, reaches his dream, and then turns … and pulls the ladder up.
Another reaches the place he has sought, turns, and reaches down for the person behind him.
With Lincoln, it was that process of turning and reaching down, that commitment to keep lifting people up the ladder, which defined the American character, stamping us forever with a mission that reached even beyond our borders to embrace the world.
Lincoln’s belief in America, in the American people, was broader, deeper, more daring than any other person’s of his age—and, perhaps, ours, too.
And this is the near-unbelievable greatness of the man—that with that belief, he not only led us, he created us.
His personal mythology became our national mythology.
It is as if Homer not only chronicled the siege of Troy, but conducted the siege as well.
As if Shakespeare set his play writing aside to lead the English against the Armada.
Because Lincoln embodied his age in his actions and in his words.
Words, even and measured, hurrying across three decades, calling us to our destiny.
Words he prayed, and troubled over—more than a million words in his speeches and writings.
Words that chronicled the search for his own identity as he searched for a nation’s identity.
Words that were, by turns, as chilling as the night sky and as assuring as home.
Words his reason sharpened into steel, and his heart softened into an embrace.
Words filled with all the longings of his soul and of his century.
Words wrung from his private struggle, spun to capture the struggle of a nation.
Words out of his own pain to heal that struggle.
Words of retribution, but never of revenge.
Words that judged, but never condemned.
Words that pleaded, cajoled for the one belief—that the promise must be kept, that the dream must endure and grow, until it embraces everyone.
Words ringing down into the present.
All the hope and the pain of that epic caught, somehow, by his cadences: The tearing away, the binding together, the leaving behind, the reaching beyond.
As individuals, as a people, we are still reaching up, for a better job, a better education, a better society, even for the stars, just as Lincoln did.
But because of Lincoln, we do it in a way that is unique to this world.
What other people on earth have ever claimed a quality of character that resided not in a way of speaking, dressing, dancing, praying, but in an idea?
What other people on earth have ever refused to set the definitions of their identity by anything other than that idea?
No, we have not learned quickly or easily that the dream of America endures only so long as we keep faith with the struggle to include. But Lincoln, through his words and his works, has etched that message forever into our consciousness.
Lincoln showed us, for all time, what unites us.
He taught us that we cannot rest until the promise of equality and opportunity embraces every region, every race, every religion, every nationality … and every class. Until it includes, “the penniless beginner” and the “poor man seeking his chance.”
In his time, Lincoln saw that as long as one in every seven Americans was enslaved, our identity as a people was hostage to that enslavement.
He faced that injustice. He fought it. He gave his life to see it righted.
Time and again since then, we have had to face challenges that threatened to divide us.
And time and again, we have conquered them.
We reached out—hesitantly at times, sometimes only after great struggle—but always we reached out, to include impoverished immigrants, the farmer and the factory worker, women, the disabled.
To all those whose only assets were their great expectations, America found ways to meet those expectations, and to create new ones.
Generations of hardworking people moved into the middle class and beyond.
We created a society as open and free as any on earth. And we did it Lincoln’s way—by founding that society on a belief in the boundless enterprise of the American people.
Always, we have extended the promise. Moving toward the light, toward our declared purpose as a people: “to form a more perfect Union,” to overcome all that divides us, because we believe the ancient wisdom that Lincoln believed—“a house divided against itself cannot stand.”
Step by step, our embrace grows wider.
The old bigotries seem to be dying. The old stereotypes and hatreds that denied so many their full share of an America they helped build have gradually given way to acceptance, fairness, and civility.
But still, great challenges remain.
Suddenly, ominously, a new one has emerged.
In Lincoln’s time, one of every seven Americans was a slave.
Today, for all our affluence and might, despite what every day is described as our continuing economic recovery, nearly one in every seven Americans lives in poverty, not in chains—because Lincoln saved us from that—but trapped in a cycle of despair that is its own enslavement.
Today, while so many of us do so well, one of every two minority children is born poor, many of them to be oppressed for a lifetime by inadequate education and the suffocating influence of broken families and social disorientation.
Our identity as a people is hostage to the grim facts of more than 33 million Americans for whom equality and opportunity is not yet an attainable reality, but only an illusion.
Some people look at these statistics and the suffering people behind them, and deny them, pretending instead we are all one great “shining city on a hill.”
Lincoln told us for a lifetime—and for all time to come—that there can be no shining city when one in seven of us is denied the promise of the Declaration.
He tells us today that we are justly proud of all that we have accomplished, but that for all our progress, for all our achievement, or all that so properly makes us proud, we have no right to rest, content.
Nor justification for turning from the effort, out of fear or lack of confidence.
We have met greater challenges with fewer resources. We have faced greater perils with fewer friends. It would be a desecration of our belief and an act of ingratitude for the good fortune we have had to end the struggle for inclusion because it is over for some of us.
So, this evening, we come to pay you our respects, Mr. Lincoln. Not just by recalling your words and revering your memory, which we do humbly and with great pleasure.
This evening, we offer you more, Mr. President. We offer you what you have asked for, a continuing commitment to live your truth, to go forward painful step by painful step, enlarging the greatness of this nation with patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people.
Because—as you have we told us, Mr. President—there is no better or equal hope in the world.
Thank you.
Nowhere was the opposition to busing for racial integration fiercer and more persistent than in Boston, where white ethnics, particularly Irish Americans in the South Boston neighborhood, violently resisted African American integration of the local schools. This is an excerpt from Michael McDonald’s recent memoir about growing up in South Boston, All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, which vividly recounts the neighborhood’s resistance to busing.
Source: Michael McDonald, All Souls: A Family Story from Southie (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999).
Ma’s tunes on the accordion started to be all about the busing. She played them at rallies, sit-ins, and fundraisers for the struggle, all over Southie. The songs sounded like a lot of the Irish rebel songs we grew up with. They had the same tunes, but the words had changed: “So come on Southie, head on high / They’ll never take our pride. …” The Black and Tans, the murderous regiments who’d wreaked havoc on Ireland on behalf of the English Crown, became the TPF (Tactical Police Force), the special force that was turning our town into a police state. The Queen of England was gone from Ma’s songs too, her place taken by Judge Garrity, the federal judge who’d mandated busing, “the law of the land”: “Judge Garrity and traitors too / We’ve just begun to fight.” Garrity had an Irish name, which made it all the worse, as the Irish hated nothing more than a traitor. That’s why we hated Ted Kennedy; he’d sided with the busing too, and was seen as the biggest traitor of all, being from the most important Irish family in America.
The English themselves weren’t completely absent from our struggle, though. They ran the Boston Globe and were behind the whole thing. My friends and I started stealing stacks of the Globe left outside supermarkets in the early mornings. We could sell them for a dime to people on their way to work, who’d have been paying a quarter if it weren’t for us. That’s when I found out the Globe was the enemy. We tried to sell it in Southie, but too many people said they wouldn’t read that liberal piece of trash if it was free, that it was to blame for the busing, with all its attacks on South Boston. I heard a few people say it was a communist paper. “Not only are they communists, they’re the rich English, keeping up their hate for the Irish and Southie,” Coley told me. He showed me the names of the Globe’s owners and editors: “Winship, Taylor. All WASPs,” he said, “White Anglo Saxon Protestants, forever gettin’ back at the Irish for chasing them out of Boston.”
Boy, was I confused now that the English were involved. We’d always hated the English for what they did to the Irish. But whatever that was, listening to Ma’s Irish songs, I’d thought it was in the past and across a great big ocean. Now it was right here in Southie. I was glad to be doing my part anyway, stealing the Boston Globe and making a couple bucks on their loss. The rich English liberal communist bastards!
That September, Ma let us skip the first week of school. The whole neighborhood was boycotting school. City Councilor Louise Day Hicks and her bodyguard with the bullhorn, Jimmy Kelly, were telling people to keep their kids home. It was supposed to be just the high school kids boycotting, but we all wanted to show our loyalty to the neighborhood. I was meant to be starting the third grade at St. Augustine’s School. Ma had enrolled Kevin and Kathy in the sixth and seventh grades there as well. Frankie was going to Southie High, and Mary and Joe were being sent to mostly black Roxbury, so they really had something to boycott. But on the first day, Kevin and Kathy begged Ma not to send them. “C’mon Ma, please?” I piped in. It was still warm outside and we wanted to join the crowds that were just then lining the streets to watch the busloads of black kids come into Southie. The excitement built as police helicopters hovered just above our third-floor windows, police in riot gear stood guard on the rooftops of Old Colony, and the national news camped out on every corner. Ma said okay, and we ran up to Darius Court, along the busing route, where in simpler times we’d watched the neighborhood St. Paddy’s Day parade.
The whole neighborhood was out. Even the mothers from the stoop made it to Darius Court, nightgowns and all. Mrs. Coyne, up on the rooftop in her housedress, got arrested before the buses even started rolling through the neighborhood. Everyone knew she was a little soft, and I thought the excitement that day must have been a bit much for her. She ran up to the roof and called the police “nigger lovers” and “traders,” and started dancing and singing James Brown songs. “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud!” She nearly fell off the roof before one cop grabbed her from behind and restrained her. Everyone was laughing at that one: big fat Mrs. Coyne rolling around on the rooftop kicking and screaming, with a cop in full riot gear on top of her. Little disturbances like that broke out here and there, but most people were too intent on seeing the buses roll to do anything that might get them carted away.
I looked up the road and saw a squadron of police motorcycles speeding down Dorchester Street, right along the curb, as if they would run over anyone who wasn’t on the sidewalk. The buses were coming. Police sirens wailed as hundreds of cops on motorcycles aimed at the crowds of mothers and kids, to clear the way for the law of the land. “Bacon … I smell bacon!” a few people yelled, sniffing at the cops. I knew that meant the cops were pigs. As the motorcycles came closer I fought to get back onto the sidewalk, but it was too crowded. I ran further into the road to avoid one motorcycle, when two more came at me from the middle of the street. I had to run across to the other side of the road, where the crowd quickly cleared a space for me on the sidewalk. All the adults welcomed me, patting me on the shoulder. “Are you all right?” “Those pricks would even kill a kid.” “Pigs!” someone else shouted. I thought I’d lost Kevin and Kathy, but just then I saw them sitting on top of a mailbox up the street for a good view of the buses. They waved to me, laughing because they’d seen me almost get run over.
The road was cleared, and the buses rolled slowly. We saw a line of yellow buses like there was no end to them. I couldn’t see any black faces though, and I was looking for them. Some people around me started to cry when they finally got a glimpse of the buses through the crowd. One woman made the sign of the cross and a few others copied her. “I never thought I’d see the day come,” said an old woman next to me. She lived downstairs from us, but I had never seen her leave her apartment before. I’d always thought she was crippled or something, sitting there in her window every day, waiting for Bobby, the delivery man who came daily with a package from J. J.’s Liquors. She was trembling now, and so was everyone else. I could feel it myself. It was a feeling of loss, of being beaten down, of humiliation. In minutes, though, it had turned to anger, rage, and hate, just like in those Irish rebel songs I’d heard all my life. Like “The Ballad of James Connolly”: “God’s curse on you England / You cruel hearted monster / Your deeds they would shame all the devils in Hell.” Except we’d changed it to “God’s curse on you Garrity.”
Smash! A burst of flying glass and all that rage exploded. We’d all been waiting for it, and so had the police in riot gear. It felt like a gunshot, but it was a brick. It went right through a bus window. Then all hell broke loose. I saw a milk crate fly from the other side of the street right for my face. More bricks, sticks, and bottles smashed against the buses, as police pulled out their billy clubs and charged with their riot shields in a line formation through the crowds. Teenagers were chased into the project and beaten to the cement wherever they were caught.
I raced away about a block from the fray, to a spot where everyone was chanting “Here We Go Southie, Here We Go,” like a battle cry. That’s when I realized we were at war. I started chanting too, at first just moving my lips because I didn’t know if a kid’s voice would ruin the strong chant. But then I belted it out, just as a few other kids I didn’t know joined the chorus. The kids in the crowd all looked at each other as if we were family. This is great, I thought. I’d never had such an easy time as this, making friends in Southie. The buses kept passing by, speeding now, and all I could see in the windows were black hands with their middle fingers up at us, still no faces though.
The buses got through the crowd surrounded by the police motorcycles. I saw Frankie running up toward Southie High along with everyone else. “What are you doing out here!” he yelled. “Get your ass home!” He said there was another riot with the cops up at the high school, and off he ran with the others. Not far behind were Kevin and his friends. He shouted the same thing at me: “Get your ass home!” I just wanted to find Ma now and make sure she wasn’t beaten or arrested or anything, so I ran home. The project was empty—everyone had followed the buses up the St. Paddy’s parade route. Ma wasn’t home, but the TV was on, with live coverage of the riots at Southie High. Every channel I turned to showed the same thing. I kept flipping the dial, looking for my family, and catching glimpses of what seemed to be all the people I knew hurling stones or being beaten by the police, or both. This is big, I thought. It was scary and thrilling at the same rime, and I remembered the day we’d moved into this neighborhood, when Ma said it looked just like Belfast, and that we were in the best place in the world. I kept changing the channels, looking for my family, and I didn’t know anymore whether I was scared or thrilled, or if there was any difference between the two anyhow.
The buses kept rolling, and the hate kept building. It was a losing battle, but we returned to Darius Court every day after school to see if the rage would explode again. Sometimes it did and sometimes it didn’t. But the bus route became a meeting place for the neighborhood. Some of my neighbors carried big signs with Resist or Never or my favorite, Hell No We Won’t Go. There was always someone in the crowd keeping everyone laughing with wisecracks aimed at the stiff-looking state troopers who lined the bus route, facing the crowds to form a barrier. They never moved or showed any expression. We all wanted to get them to react to something. But we wanted a reaction somewhere between the stiff inhuman stance and the beatings. When my friends and I tried to get through to them by asking questions about their horses and could we pet them, they told us to screw. And it wasn’t long before some kids started trying to break the horses’ legs with hockey sticks when riots broke out. One day the staties got distracted by a burning effigy of Judge Garrity that came flying off a rooftop in the project. That’s when I saw Kevin make his way out of Darius Court to throw a rock at the buses. A trooper chased him, but Kevin was too fast. His photo did end up in the Boston Globe the next day, though, his scrawny shirtless body whipping a rock with all his might. It looked like the pictures we’d always seen of kids in wartorn countries throwing petrol bombs at some powerful enemy. But Kevin’s rock hit a yellow bus with black kids in it.
I threw a rock once. I had to. You were a pussy if you didn’t. I didn’t have a good aim, though, and it landed on the street before it even made it to the bus. I stared at my rock and was partly relieved. I didn’t really want it to smash a bus window. I only wanted the others to see me throwing it. On that day there were so many rocks flying that you didn’t know whose rock landed where, but everyone claimed the ones that did the most damage. Even though I missed, a cop came out of nowhere and treated me just like they treated the kids with good aim. He took me by the neck and threw me to the dirt. I sat there for a few minutes to make sure that everyone had seen that one. I was only eight, but I was part of it all, part of something bigger than I’d ever imagined, part of something that was on the national news every night.
Every day I felt the pride of rebellion. The helicopters above my bedroom window woke me each morning for school, and my friends and I would plan to pass by the TPF on the corners so we could walk around them and give them hateful looks. Ma and the nuns at St. Augustine’s told me it was wrong to hate the blacks for any of this. But I had to hate someone, and the police were always fracturing some poor neighbor’s skull or taking teenagers over to the beach at night to beat them senseless, so I hated them with all my might. SWAT teams had been called into the neighborhood. I’d always liked the television show “S.W.A.T.,” but they were the enemy now. We gave the SWAT sharpshooters standing guard over us on the rooftops the finger; then we’d run. Evenings we had to be off the streets early or else the cops would try to run us down with their motorbikes. No more hanging our on corners in Old Colony. A line of motorbikes straight across the street and sidewalks would appear out of nowhere and force everyone to disappear into hallways and tunnels. One time I had to jump into a bush because they were coming from both ends of the street. I was all cut up, and I really hated them then.
It felt good, the hate I had for the authorities. My whole family hated them, especially Frankie, Kathy, and Kevin, who got the most involved in the riots. I would’ve loved to throw Molotov cocktails myself, along with some of the adults, but I was only a kid and the cops would probably catch me and beat me at the beach. So I just fantasized about killing them all. They were the enemy, the giant oppressor, like Goliath. And the people of South Boston were like David. Except that David won in the end, and we knew we were going to lose this one. But that made us even more like the Irish, who were always fighting in the songs even if they had to lose and die a glorious death.
One Friday in early October we took part in what Louise Day Hicks called National Boycott Day. Everyone boycotted school again. We’d all heard about the kids who’d gone to school during boycotts and who were threatened over the phone with getting their things cut off. Kevin told Ma we’d better not risk castration, and we got to stay home and watch the rally and march down Broadway. The rally was a good one. When the thousands of people sang the national anthem, with their right hands over their chests, I cried. It was as if we were singing about an America that we wanted but didn’t have, especially the part about the land of the free. Louise Day Hicks really squealed that part out from the bandstand microphone, and we all knew what she was getting at.
When the rally was over, the crowds marched to Judge Garrity’s home in the Boston suburb of Wellesley. We weren’t allowed to go because Ma thought people would surely be arrested. I wanted to go because I’d heard that where the Judge lived everyone was rich and white and I wanted to see what they looked like. But I couldn’t, so I just watched the march on its way down Broadway.
The signs at the marches were starting to change. Instead of Restore Our Alienated Rights and Welcome To Moscow America, more and more now I saw Bus The Niggers Back To Africa, and one even said KKK. I was confused about that one. The people in my neighborhood were always going on about being Irish, with shamrocks painted on the brick walls and tattooed to their arms. And I had always heard stories from Grandpa about a time when the Ku Klux Klan burned Irish Catholics out of their homes in America. I thought someone should beat up the guy with the KKK sign, but no one seemed to mind that much. I told my friend Danny about the Ku Klux Klan burning out the Irish families, and that the guy with the KKK sign was in the wrong town. He laughed. He said he’d never heard that one before. “Shut up,” he said. “They just hate the niggers. What, d’ya wanna be a nigger?” Jesus no, I thought to myself.
With National Boycott Day, everything got more scary. In the afternoon, after all the speeches, chants, and the tearful national anthem, crowds gathered at Darius Court once again to taunt the police and to throw rocks at the buses. The TPF chased one man into the Rabbit Inn tavern across the street, and a crowd of people at the bar protected him from the cops. Everyone knew the Rabbit Inn was no place to mess with. That’s where the Mullen gang hung out—the toughest bar in Southie. The next night, after dark, we were all called out of our apartments in Old Colony. The mothers on the stoop were yelling up to windows that the TPF was beating people at the Rabbit Inn to get back at them for the night before. Ma wasn’t home, so I ran to Darius Court with all of the neighbors, some of them carrying baseball bats, hockey sticks, and big rocks. When I got there, the dark streets were packed with mobs rushing the police. I saw Kevin running through a maze of people carrying a boulder with both hands. He was excited and told me that the TPF had beat the shit out of everyone at the Rabbit Inn, with their police badges covered. Just then I saw people covered in blood being taken from the bar into the converging ambulances.
The mothers in Old Colony showed their Southie loyalty that night. They went up against the entire police force that was filling the streets. I kept getting knocked around by bigger people running in all directions. Someone said the TPF had split open an eleven-year-old’s head. I pushed through the crowd to get a look at the kid, and was relieved to see through all the blood that he wasn’t Kevin. I wondered if I’d better get home, in case people started getting killed. As the sirens screeched, I saw the blue lights flashing onto the face of Kristin O’Malley, a four-year-old from my building sitting on her big brother’s shoulders and smiling at all the excitement. I figured if she could stay our then so could I.
Someone propped up his stereo speakers in a project window, blasting a favorite at the time: “Fight the Power” by the Isley Brothers. We always did that in Old Colony, blare our speakers out of our windows for the whole neighborhood to hear. It was obvious this guy was doing it for good background music to the crashes and thumps of battle.
Everyone sang along to “Fight the Power.” The teenagers in Southie still listened only to black music. The sad Irish songs were for the older people, and I never heard anyone listening to rock and roll in Old Colony. One time an outsider walked through Old Colony wearing a dungaree vest with a big red tongue and the rolling stones printed on the back. He was from the suburbs and was visiting his cousins in Old Colony. He got a bottle thrown at his head and was called a pussy. Rock and roll was for rich suburban people with long hair and dirty clothes. Mary had a similar tongue painted on her bedroom wall, but that was for Rufus and Chaka Khan; it was okay to like them. Of course no one called it black music—we couldn’t see what color anyone was from the radio—but I knew the Isley Brothers were black because I’d seen them on “Soul Train.” But that didn’t bother anyone in the crowd; what mattered was that the Isley Brothers were singing about everything we were watching in our streets right now, the battle between us and the law: “And when I rolled with the punches I got knocked on the ground / By all this bullshit goin’ down.”
The mob started pushing and swaying toward the cop cars, blocking them from going down the street. Mrs. Coyne was out there again, and was the first to put a bat through a police windshield. Then everyone surrounded the cops and smashed all of their windows. I started to see things fly through the air: pipes, bricks, bats, and even a hubcap.
Just then I saw my mother pushing through the crowd, yelling at me to run home. “They’re beating kids!” she screamed. She kept getting knocked from side to side. She grabbed me by the collar and said she couldn’t find Kevin and Kathy; she had a crying voice on her. I didn’t want to go home without her, but she made me, while she went looking through the crowds, dodging everything flying through the air. Later on Ma dragged Kevin and Kathy home and gave into us for running up to Darius Court to join the riot. Frankie was still up there, Ma couldn’t find him, and we were mad that the three of us couldn’t do everything that the older kids could. Ma couldn’t yell at us for long; Kevin drowned her out by blasting the television news reports. And soon we were all glued to the set once again, watching for those we knew in the crowd getting dragged into paddy wagons at Darius Court.
Efforts to pass national legislation addressing employment of illegal immigrants occurred regularly through the late 1970s and early 1980s. Bills even passed either the House or Senate those years only to fail in the other chamber. Finally, Congress worked out a compromise in the Simpsom-Mazzolli Bill in 1986, which, in an attempt to stem or roll back the tide of illegals, mandated fines for employers who knowingly hired illegal immigrants. In return, the law provided amnesty for immigrants who had been in the country since 1982 and, in an attempt to satisfy the large farmers of the southwest, created a program to supply them with temporary migrant labor.
Source: “Reagan’s Statement on Signing Immigration Bill, November 6, 1986,” Historic Documents of 1986 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 1987), pp. 966–969.
Congress had been trying for five years to enact legislation overhauling the nation’s immigration laws. During this time bills were approved three times in the Senate and twice in the House, and conference committees were set up to try to iron out differences. Yet Congress was unable to agree upon a new immigration law until October 17, 1986, when the Senate, by a 63–24 vote, approved a compromise measure that had been passed by the House two days earlier. President Ronald Reagan signed the bill, known as the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, on November 6.
The new law was designed primarily to staunch the flow of illegal aliens into the United States. The statute, which went into effect on the day Reagan signed the bill, for the first time made it a federal violation for employers knowingly to hire foreigners who were in the country illegally. Such employers faced fines of $250 to $10,000 per illegal alien—and in flagrant cases, six-month jail terms—although the penalties would not become effective until May 1988. These sanctions marked what the New York Times characterized as a “major change in American immigration policy,” because under previous laws, while it was illegal to enter the country without proper papers and illegal to work here, it was not a violation of the law for an employer to hire so-called “undocumented workers.” The law also beefed up criminal penalties for smuggling aliens into the United States. Under the law a violator could be imprisoned for up to five years per smuggled alien and fined in accordance with fines specified in the federal criminal code.
AMNESTY PROVISIONS
The immigration law also set up a mechanism for giving legal status, or amnesty, to perhaps millions of illegal aliens who could prove they had resided continuously in the United States since January 2, 1982. There was also a provision barring newly legalized aliens from most forms of federal public assistance, such as food stamps and welfare payments, for five years. Exceptions were made for emergency medical care, aid to aged, blind, or disabled, for serious injury, or assistance that would be in the interest of the public health.
While the amnesty program was created upon enactment, the law mandated that the attorney general must establish regulations for it. Aliens who believed they were eligible would be able to apply during a twelve-month period scheduled to start May 5, 1987, six months after the law took effect. From November 6 to May 5 illegal aliens apprehended by government authorities would not be deported if they appeared to have a reasonable chance of gaining legal status.
OTHER PROVISIONS
Another major provision was the creation of a new program designed to assure that western farm owners, who historically relied on an illegal work force, would have an adequate supply of labor to harvest crops. The program provides temporary resident status for up to 350,000 foreigners who could prove that they had worked at least ninety days in American agriculture between May 1985 and May 1986. The bill also appropriated $1 billion per year for four years after enactment to reimburse states for the public assistance, health, and education costs resulting from legalized aliens.
The law also contained antidiscrimination language designed to ease fears by Hispanics that employers, worried about possible penalties, would refuse to hire anyone who either looked or sounded foreign. The new law’s antidiscrimination measures, among other things, included a provision—sponsored by Representative Barney Frank, D-Mass., but opposed by the bill’s chief sponsor in the Senate, Alan K. Simpson, R-Wyo., and the Reagan administration—that set up an Office of Special Counsel in the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute any charges of discrimination stemming from unlawful immigration-related employment practices. Another provision barred employers from discriminating against legal resident aliens simply because they were not full-fledged citizens of the United States.
THE SIGNING STATEMENT
The immigration law, which generated impassioned debate during its long legislative history, continued to be a source of controversy after its passage by Congress. When Reagan signed the bill into law, he also issued a detailed, four-page statement, giving his reservations about some sections of the bill and containing his interpretation of the controversial antidiscrimination provisions. The president’s statement called into question the wording of the provision that prohibited employers from discriminating against legal aliens. The president said that to bring a successful suit under this section an alien would have to prove that an employer acted with “discriminatory intent.”
Members of Congress, Hispanic groups, and civil rights advocates took strong exception to the president’s statement, maintaining that he interpreted the provision too narrowly. Frank, for example, called the president’s interpretation “intellectually dishonest, mean-spirited,” and incorrect. “A pattern or practice of discriminatory activity,” Frank said, “would violate the law even if you cannot prove an intent to discriminate.”
EFFECTS OF THE NEW LAW
Ramifications of the law were felt within weeks after it was enacted. Immigration officials reported that arrests of illegal aliens along the U.S.-Mexican border dropped sharply. “The word our agents have now is that the alien smugglers are confused. They’re not really sure what this new law includes,” said Jerry Hicks, deputy chief patrol agent for the border patrol in McAllen, Texas. “They’re afraid there’s a lack of a market now for aliens.”
Hispanic groups and immigration lawyers reported that employers in Texas and other western states had begun laying off many workers within days after the immigration bill was passed, even though the law would not prosecute employers for hiring illegal aliens prior to November 6. There also were reports of extreme uneasiness among Hispanic employers, who traditionally have hired many illegal aliens. “Employers are petrified,” said Macario Ramirez, the head of a sixty-four-store Hispanic shopping center in Houston. “They say, ‘who am I going to hire?’ They are caught in a dilemma. It is complex to have to screen people, but they need people to work.”
Immigration experts said that big questions remained unanswered. It was not clear, for example, exactly how many illegal aliens would respond to the amnesty offer. Nor was it certain whether the Immigration and Naturalization Service would have enough personnel to monitor the amnesty program or to force employers to comply with the law. If the INS could enforce it adequately, the immigration law might be effective in stopping illegal immigrants. The experts believed that success in stemming illegal immigration ultimately would depend on employers voluntarily helping immigration officials enforce the new law’s provisions. “If people believe in this … it may work,” said immigration expert Michael S. Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “But if they view it like the sale of drugs on the streets in New York City, with the profits high, the police on the take, and a revolving door in the courts, they will just breed cynicism, and they will fail.”
Following is President Ronald Reagan’s statement on signing the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, November 6, 1986:
The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 is the most comprehensive reform of our immigration laws since 1952. In the past 35 years our nation has been increasingly affected by illegal immigration. This legislation takes a major step toward meeting this challenge to our sovereignty. At the same time, it preserves and enhances the Nation’s heritage of legal immigration. I am pleased to sign the bill into law.
In 1981 this administration asked the Congress to pass a comprehensive legislative package, including employer sanctions, other measures to increase enforcement of the immigration laws, and legalization. The act provides these three essential components. The employer sanctions program is the keystone and major element. It will remove the incentive for illegal immigration by eliminating the job opportunities which draw illegal aliens here.
We have consistently supported a legalization program which is both generous to the alien and fair to the countless thousands of people throughout the world who seek legally to come to America. The legalization provisions in this act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society. Very soon many of these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight and, ultimately, if they choose, they may become Americans.
Section 102(a) of the bill adds section 274B to the Immigration and Nationality Act. This new section relates to certain kinds of discrimination in connection with employment in the United States. Section 274B(a) provides that it is an “unfair immigration-related employment practice” to “discriminate against” any individual in hiring, recruitment or referral for a fee, or discharging from employment “because of” such individual’s national origin or—if such individual is a United States citizen or an alien who is a lawful permanent resident, refugee admitted under INA section 296, or asylee granted asylum under section 208, and who has taken certain steps evidencing an intent to become a United States citizen—because of such individual’s citizenship status. Employers of fewer than four employees are expressly exempted from coverage. Discrimination against an “unauthorized alien,” as defined in section 274A(h)(3), is also not covered. Other exceptions include cases of discrimination because of national origin that are covered by title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, discrimination based on citizenship status when lawfully required under government authority, and discrimination in favor of a United States citizen over an alien if the citizen is at least “equally qualified.”
The major purpose of section 274B is to reduce the possibility that employer sanctions will result in increased national origin and alienage discrimination and to provide a remedy if employer sanctions enforcement does have this result. Accordingly, subsection (k) provides that the section will not apply to any discrimination that takes place after a repeal of employer sanctions if this should occur. In the light of this major purpose, the Special Counsel should exercise the discretion provided under subsection (d)(1) so as to limit the investigations conducted on his own initiative to cases involving discrimination apparently caused by an employer’s fear of liability under the employer sanctions program.
I understand section 274B to require a “discriminatory intent” standard of proof: The party bringing the action must show that in the decisionmaking process the defendant’s action was motivated by one of the prohibited criteria. Thus, it would be improper to use the “disparate impact” theory of recovery, which was developed under paragraph (2) of section 793(a) of title VII, in a line of Supreme Court cases over the last 15 years. This paragraph of title VII does not have a counterpart in section 274B. Section 274B tracks only the language of paragraph (1) of section 703(a), the basis of the “disparate treatment” (discriminatory intent) theory of recovery under title VII. Moreover, paragraph (d)(2) refers to “knowing and intentional discrimination” and “a pattern or practice of discriminatory activity.” The meaning of the former phrase is self-evident, while the latter is taken from the Supreme Court’s disparate treatment jurisprudence and thus includes the requirement of a discriminatory intent.
Thus, a facially neutral employee selection practice that is employed without discriminatory intent will be permissible under the provisions of section 274B. For example, the section does not preclude a requirement of English language skill or a minimum score on an aptitude test even if the employer cannot show a “manifest relationship” to the job in question or that the requirement is a “bone fide occupational qualification reasonably necessary to the normal operation of that particular business or enterprise,” so long as the practice is not a guise used to discriminate on account of national origin or citizenship status. Indeed, unless the plaintiff presents evidence that the employer has intentionally discriminated on proscribed grounds, the employer need not offer any explanation for his employee selection procedures.
Section 274B(c) provides that the President shall appoint, with the advice and consent of the Senate, a Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices within the Justice Department, to serve for a term of 4 years. I understand this subsection to provide that the Special Counsel shall serve at the pleasure and with the policy guidance of the President, but for no longer than for a 4-year term (subject to reappointment by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate).
In accordance with the provisions of section 174B(h) and (j)(4), a requirement to pay attorneys fees may be imposed against non-prevailing parties—including alleged victims or persons who file on their behalf as well as employers—if claims or defenses are made that do not have a reasonable foundation in both law and fact. The same standard for the imposing of attorneys fees applies to all nonprevailing parties. It is therefore expected that prevailing defendants would recover attorneys fees in all cases for which this standard is satisfied, not merely in cases where the claim of the victim or person filing on their behalf is found to be vexatious or frivolous.
The provisions of new INA section 245A(a)(4)(B) and (b)(1)(C)(ii), added by section 201(a) of the bill, state that no alien would qualify for the lawful temporary or the permanent residence status provided in that section if he or she has been convicted of any felony or three or more misdemeanors committed in the United States.
New INA section 245A(d)(2) states that no alien would qualify for the lawful temporary or permanent residence status provided in that section if “likely to become [a] public charge [ ].” This disqualification could be waived by the Attorney General under certain circumstances. A likelihood that an applicant would become a public change would exist, for example, if the applicant had failed to demonstrate either a history of employment in the United States of a kind that would provide sufficient means without public cash assistance for the support of the alien and his likely dependents who are not United States citizens or the possession of independent means sufficient by itself for such support for an indefinite period.
New INA section 245A(a)(3) requires that an applicant for legalization establish that he has been “continuously physically present in the United States since the date of the enactment” but states that “brief, casual, and innocent absences from the United States” will not be considered a break in the continuous physical presence. To the extent that the INS has made available a procedure by which aliens can obtain permission to depart and reenter the United States after a brief, casual, and innocent absence by establishing a prima facie case of eligibility for adjustment of status under this section, I understand section 245A(a)(3) to require that an authorized departure and illegal reentry will constitute a break in “continuous physical presence.”
New INA section 210(d), added by section 302(a) of the bill, provides that an alien who is “apprehended” before or during the application period for adjustment of status for certain “special agricultural workers,” may not under certain circumstances related to the establishment of a nonfrivolous case of eligibility for such adjustment of status be excluded or deported. I understand this subsection not to authorize any alien to apply for admission to or to be admitted to the United States in order to apply for adjustment of status under this section. Aliens outside the United States may apply for adjustment of status under this section at an appropriate consular office outside the United States pursuant to the procedures established by the Attorney General, in cooperation with the Secretary of State, as provided in section 210(b)(1)(B).
Section 304 of the bill establishes the Commission on Agricultural Workers, half of whose 12 members are appointed by the executive branch and half by the legislative branch. This hybrid Commission is not consistent with constitutional separation of powers. However, the Commission’s role will be entirely advisory.
Section 304(g) provides that upon request of the Commission’s Chairman, the head of “any department or agency of the United States” must supply “information necessary to enable it to carry out [the] section.” Although I expect that the executive branch will cooperate closely with the Commission, its access to executive branch information will be limited in accordance with established principles of law, including the constitutional separation of powers.
Section 601 establishes a Commission for the Study of International Migration and Cooperative Economic Development, all of whose members are appointed by the legislative branch. Section 601(d)(1) states that the access to executive branch information required under section 304(g) must be provided to this Commission also. Accordingly, the comments of the preceding paragraph are appropriate here as well.
New INA section 274A(a)(5) provides that a person or entity shall be deemed in compliance with the employment verification system in the case of an individual who is referred for employment by a State employment agency if that person or entity retains documentation of such referral certifying that the agency complied with the verification system with respect to the individual referred. I understand this provision not to mandate State employment agencies to issue referral documents certifying compliance with the verification system or to impose any additional affirmative duty or obligation on the offices or personnel of such agencies.
Distance has not discouraged illegal immigration to the United States from all around the globe. The problem of illegal immigration should not, therefore, be seen as a problem between the United States and its neighbors. Our objective is only to establish a reasonable, fair, orderly, and secure system of immigration into this country and not to discriminate in any way against particular nations or people.
The act I am signing today is the product of one of the longest and most difficult legislative undertakings of recent memory. It has truly been a bipartisan effort, with this administration and the allies of immigration reform in the Congress, of both parties, working together to accomplish these critically important reforms.
Future generations of Americans will be thankful for our efforts to humanely regain control of our borders and thereby preserve the value of one of the most sacred possessions of our people: American citizenship.
Patrick Buchanan was an advisor to Presidents Nixon and Reagan, a newspaper reporter and columnist, and a television commentator. He also ran for president in the Republican primaries in 1992 and 1996 and as the Reform Party candidate in 2000. An Irish Catholic, he set himself as a conservative populist spokesman for working-class white ethnics. He was a strong opponent of abortion, gay rights, and free trade. He also strongly backed immigration restriction and crackdowns on illegal immigrants. In this speech in June of 1993, he outlines his position on immigration.
The great American Melting Pot is not melting, as once it did.…
If our prime minister believes that 50 years hence “spinsters will still be cycling to Communion on Sunday morning,” he had best think again. Rather, “the muezzin will be calling Allah’s faithful to the High Street mosque” for Friday prayers.
Thus did the grandson of Winston Churchill, a week ago, call for a halt to the “relentless flow of immigrants” into Great Britain.
A volley of protest followed. “The Times of London … chastised him for … a ‘tasteless outburst,’” reports the New York Times, “[A] leading Labor Party politician described his remarks as ‘putrid and racist.’ Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, archly denounced what he described as ‘any intervention which could have the effect of damaging race relations …’ Downing Street said Prime Minister John Major agreed with Mr. Howard.”
But, on this issue, Mr. Churchill speaks for Europe and its growing concern over the swelling tide of immigration from the East and the Third World, and the impact on the fate and future of the West.
For Mr. Churchill’s remark came just days before France’s interior minister called for “zero immigration,” and only days after Germany voted to amend its asylum law. Mr. Churchill spoke the same weekend a neo-Nazi teenager was charged with arson-murder in that fire-bombing in Solingen that took the lives of five Turkish girls and women. The riots triggered by that atrocity left Solingen’s town center gutted. All over Europe the doors to the East and South are being shut.
Before condemning Germany for restricting asylum-seekers, we ought to remember: Germany is smaller than Oregon and Washington combined, yet is home to almost 80 million people, among them 1.8 million Turks Still, 167,000 new immigrants arrived in the first four months of this year. (How would Oregon and Washington react to 500,000 immigrants this year?) Moreover, Germany has accepted more Bosnian refugees than all other nations combined.
To their credit, the Germans have coddled neither the neo-Nazi skin-heads, nor the Turkish and leftist vandals—as some Americans did after our L.A. riots that made Solingen look like a panty raid.
But Germany today could be America tomorrow, if we do not address the twin issues of immigration and assimilation.
Consider the change in our own country in four decades. In 1950, America was a land of 150 million, 90 percent of European stock. Today the US population is 250 million—about 75 percent white, 12 percent black, 9 percent Hispanic, and the balance largely Asian-American.
By 2050, according to the Census Bureau, whites may be near a minority in an America of 81 million Hispanics, 62 million blacks and 41 million Asians. By the middle of the next century, the United States will have become a veritable Brazil of North America.
If the future character of America is not to be decided by our own paralysis, Americans must stop being intimidated by charges of “racist” “nativist,” and “zenophobe”—and we must begin to address the hard issues of race, culture and national unity.
Already, California faces yearly fiscal crises due to the soaring cost of services for illegal aliens, perhaps a million of whom walk into the United States every year from Mexico.
And the great American Melting Pot is not melting, as once it did. After decades of heroic effort to integrate blacks more fully into American society, our failures remain as conspicuous as our successes. Racial tension is rising. In the L.A. riots, not only were whites the victims of attempted lynchings, Koreatown was pillaged by blacks and Hispanics. Many of the latter were illegal, as four in 10 felonies in San Diego County are the work of illegals.
While white-on-black crime has become relatively rare (white criminals choose black victims only 2 percent of the time), black criminals now choose white victims, in rapes and muggings, 50 percent of the time.
And demands are growing that our heritage of individual rights be superseded by a new system of racial entitlements. Quotas are routine in government and private business. On college campuses, there are new demands for all-black dorms and all-black cultural centers; blacks, whites, Hispanics and Asians tend to congregate, more and more, only with each other.
Supporters of open immigration contend that Hispanic, Asian and Arab immigrants often bring with them the same strong family ties, respect for authority, and work ethic Americans have always cherished and celebrated.
Undeniably true. But it is equally true that many Third World immigrants are living off public services, and many are going into crime. It is also true that America’s generous asylum laws are being abused. The man who allegedly murdered the CIA workers in McLean, the men arrested for the World Trade Center bombing, were supposedly fleeing persecution abroad.
America needs to take what some have called a “time out” on immigration: a closing of our southern frontier to invading illegals, by troops if necessary, a toughening of our asylum laws, a cutback on legal immigration to spouses and minor children of those already here.
Looking back down the 20th century, we see that all the great multinational empires have fallen apart. Now, the multinational states—Canada, Czechoslovakia, India, Russia, Yugoslavia, South Africa, Ethiopia—are breaking apart. Are we immune to all this?
After a quarter-century of wide open immigration, we need at least a decade to assimilate the tens of millions who have come in. Else, Russia’s fate in the ‘90s may be America’s in the new century.
Affirmative action had become a very controversial issue by the late 1970s and early 1980s. Orrin Hatch, a Republican senator from Utah, offered the constitutional amendment below outlawing affirmative action. Martin Kilson, an African American professor from Harvard, testified at hearings on the amendment chaired by Hatch.
Source: Thomas Frazier, ed., The Many Sides of America: 1945 to the Present (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996); original in Hearings Before the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Committee of the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, 1983.
JOINT RESOLUTION
Proposing an Amendment to the Constitution of the United States Relating to Affirmative Action
Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution if ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States: