THIS IS A RECOUNTING OF THE IMPORTANCE OF IMMIGRANTS TO THIS LAND, WITH the spotlight on those who escaped war, hunger, and deprivation to come to Brooklyn.
It is also the story of those whose bigotry and narrow-mindedness caused them to fight to keep out those who were different from them. I came to discover that those in power get to define who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy, so American history marks as heroes politicians who were antidemocratic and anti-American while those who fought for freedom, for racial equality, and for social justice were labeled as enemies of the state, arrested, and imprisoned. I am hoping that In the Country of Brooklyn will allow the reader to take a second look at some of these “heroes” and “villains.”
The Puritans, who came to America to escape religious persecution, set the standard. Conservatively Christian, the leaders like the Reverend Cotton Mather made the rules and set the punishments. Brooklyn, it turns out, was founded by a woman who left Salem to escape the Puritan madness.
Though the Puritan sect no longer exists in America, its conservative brethren still do, and if you study the history of bigotry, Christian ministers and their followers were at the forefront of the segregationist and isolationist movements. The Christian South justified segregation using quotes from the Bible. The Ku Klux Klan was a faith-based organization. The White Citizens Council was made up of devout churchgoing Christians.
As for the hatred of the Jews, most presidents in office in the first half of the twentieth century were anti-Semites or exhibited anti-Semitic tendencies in their private lives. Woodrow Wilson was an anti-Semite, Franklin Roosevelt knew about the Holocaust and did nothing to help the victims, and Harry Truman’s wife, Bess, vowed never to allow a Jew to set foot in her house. Congress wasn’t any more tolerant. In 1921 Congress passed a bill effectively stopping the flood of Jews into this country, which resulted in the deaths of millions of Jews who had no place to run to when Hitler started wiping them out in Europe less than a generation later.
The Irish and Italians also faced bigotry. Once in America, the Irish had to face bigotry from the WASPs. NO IRISH NEED APPLY signs were routine, but once the Irish organized politically, they became a powerful force unto themselves. The Italians kept to themselves at first, but with each generation became more assimilated.
The history of blacks in America is a whole different story. Blacks weren’t barred from coming to America but rather were brought to America against their will. Once here, they were enslaved. After the Civil War, they were marginalized, prevented from getting an education and from earning a decent living. After the war, the whites in America used all their political and financial power to keep the blacks subservient. Even as late as 1947, blacks were down so far that the very idea that a black man would be allowed to play major league baseball was revolutionary.
As more and more Latinos came to America, they faced similar racist attitudes and made great strides with each generation. The last group fighting for their equal rights are the members of the gay community.
As you will see, as people become used to living with those of other cultures, tolerance grows and bigotry dies. As a result, every generation becomes less and less bigoted.
It has been estimated that by the year 2030 whites will no longer be the majority population of America. The ability and willingness of Americans to integrate the newcomers to this land will determine how we as a nation fare in the twenty-first century. Perhaps the experiences of the transformation of Brooklyn can be used as an example for the rest of America. While it’s often said that “New York City is not America,” one in seven Americans can trace their family back to Brooklyn. If your family came to America from another country, chances are pretty good your great-great-grandfather lived in Williamsburg, or Flatbush, or Bay Ridge, or Brighton Beach before moving on to other places.
The 70.61 square miles of Brooklyn include densely populated urban areas, suburban areas with beautiful private homes, public housing projects, and luxury high-rises, co-ops, and condos, and the type of building that will forever be associated with Brooklyn—the brownstone. There are beaches, swamps, city parks, state parks, and national parks, an army base, a former navy yard, a Revolutionary War battlefield, railroads, subways, highways, tunnels, bridges, churches, synagogues, mosques, a minor league baseball stadium, and nearly four hundred years of history.
In the 2000 census, Brooklynites numbered 2,465,326, living 34,916.64 to the square mile, compared to 79.56 to the square mile for the rest of the country. Demographically, Brooklynites were 41.2% white, 36.4% black or African-American, 19.8% Hispanic or Latino, and 7.5% Asian. And 4.3% were racially mixed. There are even Native Americans and Hawaiians living in Brooklyn!
In the twentieth century, Brooklyn went from farmland to suburb to thriving metropolis to the poster child for suburban flight, crime, urban decay, and drugs—and to the poster child for urban revival and gentrification. Brooklyn is booming again, real estate prices are out of sight, crime is down, and it’s even become a tourist destination.
So, while the Brooklyn of today and tomorrow may almost be unrecognizable to the generations of Brooklyn’s past, some things have remained as constants throughout Brooklyn’s history. The biggest one, as I’ve indicated, is change. Brooklyn always seems to be reinventing itself. Like many urban areas, it struggled through the upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s. But unlike some other areas that had fallen on hard times—Detroit, Buffalo, and Camden come to mind—Brooklyn has risen from the ashes. And while that’s not a unique phenomenon (the Bronx is on its way back, as is Newark, and Cleveland is already back), it’s being done in a truly Brooklyn style. Just as in the old days, new money has come in, new immigrant groups have come in, and both pushed out the less fortunate. The Europeans came and pushed out the Native Americans. Then the descendants of the English and Dutch settlers were pushed out by the European immigrants of the 1800s—mainly the Germans and the Irish. The German immigrants in Williamsburg, in their turn, fled to Ridgewood and Glendale in Queens after the opening of the Williamsburg Bridge led to the influx of Jews from the overcrowded ghettos of the Lower East Side. Those same Jews and their children left for the suburbs in the 1950s, when the Puerto Ricans moved in. Then the Hasidic Jews came and lived in uneasy harmony with the Hispanics. And then came the artists, the Williamsburg hipsters who took over the old empty factories and the run-down apartment buildings and the dilapidated stores and made the ’Burg a cool destination—like Manhattan’s SoHo back in the 1970s. And when the artists and hipsters fixed up the buildings, it was time for the developers and the yuppies to come, and with them came the big glass luxury condos—pushing the artists out to Bushwick, and pushing out the remaining Hispanics and Hasidim who could not afford the rising rents. It’s a story as old as Brooklyn itself.