HomeHomeJuly 2001
Greetings from warm, sunny Minneapolis! Because our Northern summers are so short, each and every beautiful day is cause for celebration! Speaking of celebrations, on July 4th we also observed the 225th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the event we officially recognize as the defining moment when our European ancestors broke away from Great Britain, and the United States of America was "born".
And, where are we headed in our 225th year as a modern nation-state? We have long been known as a land that embraces those who were seeking a better life, including religious, political and economic freedom. Although the American story is different and often painful for those whose ancestors are of Native American or African American descent, the words written by poet Emma Lazarus, located on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, still resonate for many:
"Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"As we mentioned in last month’s column, this country currently is undergoing some profound changes----economic, and otherwise--and recently released U.S. Census data provide a wealth of information about America today.
The changes we’re seeing in Minnesota seem to reflect changes we’re seeing on a national level--namely that we are becoming much more ethnically diverse, especially as our local economy increasingly is tied to the global marketplace. When the Mall of America first opened in Bloomington nearly ten years ago, it seemed to be one of the few places where one could observe people from other nations strolling about. Today, in nearly every neighborhood of the Twin Cities, one can hear different foreign languages. While we are still predominantly a "white" state, we are seeing growth in our Black, Asian, Pacific Islander, American Indian, and particularly Hispanic populations.
We Minnesotans are also experiencing the "growing pains" that accompany rapid changes. For example, this spring we witnessed a public policy debate on the topic of an estimated 7,000 to 48,000 undocumented workers, many of whom are driving illegally. (Three years ago, the state tightened its documentation requirements for getting drivers licenses.) These workers came to Minnesota to escape the grinding poverty of their native lands. They perform the lower-paying, menial jobs that most of the Minnesota-born workers will no longer do, and they also contribute an estimated $1.6 billion to $3.8 billion to the state’s economy.
The problem is that, without adequate driver’s training or licenses or even car insurance, undocumented workers and refugees are considered to be a hazard on the roadway. If they are involved in car crashes, they allegedly tend to flee the scene because they fear if they are caught without proper INS documentation, they will be deported. While the Chiefs of Police of both Minneapolis and St. Paul are concerned primarily with the safety of Minnesotans and support a change in state law, the Commissioner of Public Safety has been quoted as saying he does not support giving illegal workers a license. Clearly, this issue effects all Minnesotans, and yet, we are only one of several states who are dealing with similar problems.
With such rapid-fire changes going on, where is America headed? Writer Robert D. Kaplan travelled through the American Midwest and West to parts of Mexico and Canada to gain an understanding of America’s past and get a glimpse into the future. He explains some of his ideas in his thought-provoking book, An Empire Wilderness: Travels Into America’s Future (1998, Random House, New York):
"Jacksonian democracy, the Civil War, progressivism, and the New Deal were times in which America restructured itself. But as American society becomes more complex, more implicated in other societies, the odds for future reinventions of the nation-state get longer, especially as an aging population puts additional pressure on traditional institutions. By 2025, America’s population will be as old as Florida’s is now; one in five persons will be over sixty-five. By 2040, the number of Social Security beneficiaries will double. While more than half of all Americans are now over forty, nearly half of Mexico’s population is fifteen years old or younger, just as half the population of many places in Latin America and Asia is under age twenty-five. Large-scale immigration may have to continue if for no other reason than to provide an army of younger workers to support America’s retirees."Kaplan also shares his observations after witnessing the economic, racial and class divisions in the areas around St. Louis, Missouri:
"I thought of the failed places that I had seen in the Third World that the United States---so I had often been told---felt obligated to assist, even to save. I wondered whether the thirty square miles of East St. Louis.....could be saved. According to demographers, the failure of places such as East St. Louis and North St. Louis---of many such inner cities, in fact--will not seriously jeopardize the economic future of the United States. Partly because of the projected influx of Hispanics and Asians over the coming decades, the percentage of blacks in the population will rise only slightly. Moreover, a significant number of blacks will continue to desert places like East St. Louis for better neighborhoods as they pry their way into the middle class. Migration, the desertion of poorer settlements for richer ones, is, after all, what history has always been about.America is supposed to be an exception to such unsentimental historical forces, but the legacy of slavery and the relative intractability of black poverty and social disintegration suggests that American exceptionalism--the advantage of having had a largely empty and mineral-rich swath of the temperate zone at the time of the European Enlightenment--has its limits. America has always been an intensely competitive environment for individuals, groups, and cultures, and as our postindustrial transformation continues to generate an economy in which a worker’s ability to process and analyze information is paramount, competition for places will reach gale force and the myth of group equality will be further exposed.
To wit, in 1997, the on-line service Prodigy announced that unless the United States imports software engineers from overseas, the domestic computer industry will suffer. In Silicon Valley and Orange County, California, computer companies have been founded by immigrants from India, Pakistan, and Hong Kong employing immigrant workforces from Asia and Latin America; one in four people with a science degree in America was born abroad. India, in particular, sends 15,000 of its 50,000 information technology graduates to the United States annually. The nanotech and other high-technology workers that Al Kerth (one of Kaplan’s interview subjects) wants to attract here in the twenty-first century will probably not be specially trained residents of East St. Louis or north St. Louis but more likely young people now in Asia or Latin America who have yet to emigrate here."
Among the many other places Kaplan visited was Omaha, where he discussed the many changes in America over the last 40 years with Ed Jaksha, an American of Slovian descent, and one of his many interviewees:
"But as Jaksha reminisced about the 1950s and expressed a deep fear of the future, I took comfort in history. In the 1880s and 1890s, industralization and urbanization shook the roots of America’s religious and family life. Sects sprouted, racist populists ranted, and single women like Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie worked in filthy factories. Racial tensions hardened as the Jim Crow system spread across the South. Americans confronted a "new and disturbingly altered world" as pastoral life was replaced by the desperate search for values amid the "bleak table-lands of materialism". "Gadgets" such as the lightbulb and the automobile brought an array of new choices and stresses. "The city is so big now, that people disappeared into it unnoticed," lamented Booth Tarkington in The Magnificent Ambersons. A hundred years ago, millionaires’ mansions arose within sight of spreading slums. By 1912, 2 percent of all Americans controlled 60 percent of personal wealth, while close to half the nation lived in poverty or so close to it that illness could push them over edge into destitution. Meanwhile America was being transformed by millions of new immigrants. When America became a global power after its victory in the Spanish-American war of 1898, it soon encountered an unstable world, including a tottering Russia that would be shaken by the disasterous war with Japan in 1904 and a revolutionary upheaval in 1905, to say nothing of what would come a decade later. It is so familiar: America undergoing wrenching change while the outside world draws nearer and becomes ever more volatile."However similar our relationship to our past, this time period is unique, according to Kaplan,
"Thus, the international context of our transformation is different from before. When foreign correspondent John Gunther returned full-time to the United States after World War II to write a comprehensive sociopolitical travel book, Inside U.S.A., he could think of the United States in isolation. Now we are on increasingly intimate terms not only with Mexico and Canada but with much of the rest of the world, too."Needless to say, America is undergoing a fascinating transition---one that will require our patience, tolerance, understanding, strength, energy and compassion as never before. What the future will look like depends on how we handle the many changes and challenges facing us today. Our ancestors molded this nation, for better or worse, into the world power we have become. What we do with the dream that is America is up to us.
As we reflect on our 225th "birthday" we need to remember our past, and the sacrifices of all early Americans. Nicholas Gage, Greek-American author of A Place for Us (1989, Houghton Mifflin, Boston) writes eloquently of hearing his father’s words, recorded on audiotape, describing the sight of his refugee children arriving in New York Harbor in the late 1940’s:
"His tearful words of remembrance, our cries of greeting across the water, the murmurs of wonder at the sight of the statue who lifts her lamp beside the golden door---all these sounds are part of the chorus of the millions who entered this harbor seeking a place where they would be safe and free. First they came from northern Europe to settle a raw new nation, then from southern Europe, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, seeking sanctuary from pogroms, and famines, dictatorships, death camps and genocide. Entering this place, each uttered the same hymn of thanksgiving in his own tongue.Today that chorus has grown faint in our ears, for the old European immigrants have passed away, taking their memories with them. Their children have forgotten what it means not to be American. The new arrivals, fleeing from Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, are still trying to find homes and jobs, to learn the language and send their children to school. They have not yet found a voice to tell their tale."
As we witness a new American transformation amid the interconnected global economy, new stories are being written, new tales will be told. We know it won’t be easy, but it WILL be interesting.
Teresa
tcallies@hotmail.com
Resources:
USA Today’s Gregg Zoroya wrote an interesting piece about finding one’s roots at Ellis Island.Also, Corey Kilgannon wrote an excellent piece for the Sunday New York Times (July 1st, 2001) about genealogical research. Among the online sites listed in the articles are:
The Ellis Island Foundation offers the American Family Immigration History Center, and a searchable database of information on immigrants who passed through New York between 1892 and 1924.
Rootsweb.com - the primary purpose of this site is "to connect people so that they can help each other and share genealogical research." They offer access to other sites as well as research tips and advice.
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