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Fievel’s fate isn’t as grim as the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, but his escape comes with the price of loneliness. As he wanders the city alone, he longingly stares into a school window where engaged students fawningly recite the Pledge of Allegiance. The scene conveniently cuts away before the phrase “under God” is said, which is likely a nod to the fact that this line wasn’t added until the Cold War.[10] As the film progresses, we see Fievel greeted by other relics of the Gilded Age: A rat wearing a top-hat scowls at him; the anachronistic “Stars and Stripes Forever” (which was not written until 1897) plays on a recently invented Edison phonograph (1877); an elevated train nearly crushes Fievel, then immediately afterward a horse drawn carriage nearly does the same.
With Fievel now adrift in the city, An American Tail makes its first real historical sin of omission, albeit one entirely appropriate for a children’s film. Even casual students of history know that before internal combustion engines (e.g., cars) were invented, society relied on horses for transportation. This is important when contextualizing the film because the fairly clean streets upon which Fievel wanders sidestep a problem of historical accuracy—namely, the massive amount of manure that horses left behind on city streets. Additionally, the rented tenement apartments where immigrants typically lived usually did not have flush toilets—landlords were not required to install flush plumbing until 1901[11]—which meant that, in addition to textiles, New York City also manufactured the steamy conditions needed for cholera outbreaks to occur. Unfortunately, cholera flare-ups regularly killed thousands, and the city’s poorest neighborhoods were the most vulnerable to the disease.[12]
Fievel, not burdened with these concerns, turns to his recently made friends for help finding his family. Tony Toponi, a fellow sweatshop escapee and apparent first generation Italian-American, and Bridget, an Irish mouse with political aspirations, suggest that they go see Honest John since he purportedly knows every mouse in the city. Bridget makes this suggestion on the cusp of an unfortunate event which shatters the myth of what it means to live in America. To Fievel’s surprise, cats begin rampaging through the immigrant community and, for a second time in his life, destroy everything around him. Although free of the pogroms of the East, it turns out the U.S. has its own Push Factors too.
The Gilded Age’s “New Immigrants”—i.e., people from Southern and Eastern Europe—often brushed up against resentful U.S. citizens who we collectively refer to as “Nativists.” Sometimes Nativists organized themselves into gangs, but they also became formal organizations by creating political parties. The best known of these was the anti-Catholic “Know Nothings,” who started as a secret society before going mainstream. Together with other xenophobic groups, they complained newcomers diminished America’s greatness by depressing wages, introducing disease, serving the Pope, or, in Fievel’s case as a Jew, rejecting Jesus. Without a shred of irony, politicians deferred to the primacy of Nativist-Americans by enacting strong legislation to assuage their fears.
The 1891 Immigration Act transformed immigration in America. While the Constitution grants Congress control over the process of naturalization (i.e., the requirements for citizenship), it does not clearly say who controls entry into the country, and prior to 1891 states often passed their own regulatory laws to do so.[13] The Immigration Act gave the Federal government comprehensive authority to control immigration and required immigration officials to keep out “idiots, insane persons,” those who reflected “moral turpitude,” and “persons suffering from a loathsome or a dangerous contagious disease”.[14]
Out of this legislation came new facilities including New York City’s Ellis Island. Over the course of its sixty-year lifespan, the facility admitted entry of 12 million immigrants. Immigration officials dutifully followed the law and returned around 2% of immigrants back to Europe.[15] What became of those people is anybody’s guess and begs for historical attention.
Later on, in the 1920s, Nativists scored a major victory with the creation of the National Origins Act, which established a quota system that limited the total number of newly admissible persons, and restricted immigration to 3% (later 2%) of the total number of people already in the U.S. from any given country. In practice, the law worked as Nativist hoped: 70% of immigrants could only come from either Germany or the British Isles, Italian immigration fell by over 90%, and Russian families like the Mousekewitzes fell to just 1.3% of the total immigrants admitted to the U.S. per year.[16] [17]
