Five Hundred Years After the First Immigrants
Sermon by Steve Edington
October 10, 2010
This sermon was preceded by the singing of Woody Guthrie's Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).
Woody Guthrie wrote those words in the early weeks of 1948 after listening to the news on his radio. It would be another 10 years before someone else would set the words to music so we could hear it as Kathy, Dan, and Harry just sang it. By the time it got set to music Woody was in the throes of Huntington's Chorea, a disease that would take his life as it had his mother's. The incident he describes was indeed about a plane crash on January 28, 1948 that killed 32 people including four Americans--who comprised the flight crew and a security guard. What struck Woody was how the news reports of the tragedy named the flight crew and security guard, but only referred collectively to the 28 passengers being deported as simply "deportees".
There's an interesting back-story to this incident. The 28 Mexicans killed were indeed being deported, but they were not in the country illegally. They were allowed to work in the United States as farm laborers by means of an arrangement between the United States and Mexican governments called the Braceros Program. The American farm contractors who did the hiring under this Braceros Program were responsible for transporting those they'd hired back to the Mexican border if they (the contractors, that is) no longer wanted or needed their services before the agreed upon length of time for hiring the workers was up. This Braceros Program, which ran from the early 1940s until 1964, has its similarities to what has much more recently been proposed, and consistently shot down, as a "Guest Worker" arrangement for Mexican (primarily Mexican) farm laborers.
How much or how well Woody Guthrie knew of all this is not clear. By 1948 he was living in New York with his second wife, Marjorie, as they raised their three children Nora, Arlo, and Joady. But the news reports of the plane crash over Los Gatos Canyon took him back nearly 20 years to when he was working the fields in southern California in an effort to support his first wife and kids whom he'd left back in Texas after the dust storms had ruined the land there. He'd worked next to, and sweated next to, the Juans and the Rosalitas, the Jesuses and the Marias and he knew of their humanity and their struggles. He remembered all this in 1948 from what was now his home in Brooklyn, New York.
What he was really trying to say with his poem, which became one of his last well known songs before his health failed him was, hey, these people are human beings too. They have names, they have families, and they are working so that others of us can eat the food they pick. To collectively refer to them as simply "deportees" is to rob them of their humanity, even in death. As politically sophisticated as he was (and however much he managed to hide that sophistication) I don't think Woody was out to primarily make a political statement here as much as he just trying to speak up for the basic human integrity of those who had lost their lives, and who were still going unrecognized and unnamed. "The radio says they are just 'deportees'." In some ways it's a long, long way from 1948 to 2010, but in other ways there's very little distance in the intervening sixty plus years at all. I'll pick up this point a little later.
For the next few minutes, though, I'd like to explore how our nation, from its earliest days, has had what amounts to a severe cultural split personality disorder when it comes to our feelings and attitudes towards immigrants and immigration. We became a land of immigrants when the first of Columbus' voyages hit our shores--the ones in the Caribbean--nearly 520 years ago. The fallout from that event, as it affected the native population in subsequent years is a terribly sobering story, but it's not the one I'm telling today.
The split personality disorder to which I just referred set in sometime thereafter. What I mean by the term points to what has to be one of the greatest, and one of the most maddening paradoxes in our nation's story. On the one hand we like to pride ourselves, rightly so in many respects, of being the open door to the world. The song we heard earlier--Emma Lazarus' famous poem on the Statue of Liberty--lifts a lamp beside our golden shore to the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning for freedom.
There certainly is truth to that. A week ago last Friday night--at one of the events of the Kerouac Festival in Lowell--I was moved to near tears as I listened to a Cambodian poet read his work about. His poems were about his escaping the reign of terror of the Khymer Rouge's killing fields and making it to America, knowing that other family members, friends, and fellow citizens were being slaughtered even as he got out. How could you not love your country after hearing that?
But there's a tragic, and I would say un-American, underside to the image of the lamp beside the golden shore. It's about what has too often happened to those huddled masses, and their descendents, once they got here. Consider these words, spoken by a very prominent American, as the 18th century drew to a close, and as large numbers of German immigrants began to arrive in what was a predominantly Anglo/English culture:
"Those who come hither are generally of the most ignorant Stupid sort of their own nation... unless the stream of their importation (can) be turned they will soon outnumber us (and we will not) be able to preserve our language and even our Government will become precarious." The gentleman goes on to ask, "Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and who will never adopt our language or customs anymore than they can acquire our complexion." These words were spoken and published by Benjamin Franklin, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and one of the authors of our Constitution.
Cut to some 70 or so years later: Following the devastating and deadly potato famine in Ireland in the late 1850s, Irish immigrants came to our golden shore in large numbers, quite literally fleeing for their lives. Yes, they found refuge here. But in many of our major eastern cites, most notably Boston, they also encountered messages in the windows of certain business establishments, and in the help wanted sections of newspapers that stated, "No Irish Need Apply."
In an 1871 issue of Harpers Weekly magazine, a forerunner of our Harpers monthly periodical of today, a cartoon ran showing a drunken Irishman sitting on top of a power keg barrel he was preparing to light while swinging a bottle of whiskey with his other hand. The title of the cartoon was "The Usual Irish Way of Doing Things." The author of the cartoon was Thomas Nast, the same editorial cartoonist who gave us our image of Uncle Sam, as a symbol of America; and the images of the elephant and the donkey as the symbols of our two major political parties.
Thomas Nast was a German-born American. Some of his ancestors may well have been among the targets of Ben Franklin's fierce anti-German sentiments. But that did not prevent Mr. Nast from holding up to ridicule, and playing to the stereotypes and prejudices, of yet another group of immigrants who came to these shores a couple of generations after his ancestors first arrived, and who were subjected to the same kind of fear and suspicion themselves.
This influx of, particularly, Irish and Italian immigrants in the mid to late 19th and early 20th centuries also set off a wave of anti-Catholicism in what was then a predominantly Protestant Christian culture. The suspicions went something like this: They conduct these rituals in Latin and ring bells and use incense; and they won't even send their children to "real American" schools. Another of Mr. Nast's cartoons from this era showed American Bishops portrayed as crocodiles, swimming up on a shore where American kids were standing, threatening to swallow them up. This, according to Nast, was what would happen if Catholic parochial schools were permitted to exist.
In some cases the prejudices, with a certain amount of silliness, went both ways. In his novel Visions of Gerard Jack Kerouac writes of how in the Catholic grade school he attended in Lowell in the 1920s, he was told that the Protestant kids at the public school up the street had tails growing under their trousers; with Kerouac adding, "which I, for one, actually believed."
Much less silly, however, was the questioning of Catholic's loyalty to America. If their primary fidelity was to their religion and that religion was based in Rome with its orders coming from the Pope, then could they really be counted on to be true Americans.
I can still remember, as a fifteen year old high school sophomore at St. Albans High School in St. Albans, West Virginia when then Senator John Kennedy was running for President in the West Virginia Primary. In the Baptist Church I attended there were serious conversations about how, if he were elected President, his first loyalty would be to be The Vatican, and he would be taking direction from the Pope.
These were not mean or spiteful or hateful people saying such things. They were good, decent, hard-working folks--persons like my father--who were not even aware of the cultural blinders they were wearing. The fact that Senator Kennedy went on to win that Primary and then get elected President represented, among many other things, a reversal of nearly 100 years of that type of anti-Catholic fear and suspicion.
Throughout our history, then, we have contended with the paradox of the open door to the golden shore on the one hand; and a kind of tribalistic fear and suspicion of the outsider, of the stranger, of the one we don't know and do not understand, on the other. And our celebration of the golden shore, and our exploitation--usually a political exploitation--of the fear of the stranger, or unknown one have occurred, and continue to occur to this day practically simultaneously.
I've thought of the strong anti-Catholic sentiment that was a part of our cultural landscape for so long (and that's not to suggest it's been completely eradicated), while witnessing the ongoing controversy over the proposed Islamic Cultural Center, to be named the Cordoba Center, in lower Manhattan, a few blocks north of where the World Trade Center once stood. I spoke to this a few weeks ago, and will briefly retouch here. I think New York Mayor Bloomberg, a practitioner of the Jewish faith, made the right call in supporting the building of the Center as a symbol of religious freedom and toleration in our country. I was also struck by the fact, that as the opposition has come from wide-ranging points on the political spectrum, that another of the Center's supporters was Senator Orin Hatch of Utah--one of the Senate's most strongly conservative members and a devout Mormon. Perhaps Senator Hatch was recalling the fears and mistreatment of his Mormon ancestors as he offered his support for this project.
Personally, first of all, there's little in the way of belief, doctrine, or practice in either the Catholic or Islamic faiths with which I can connect. But that's hardly the point. I offer just a few observations: I notice that there is a place within the Pentagon--Washington D.C.'s own ground zero--for Moslem prayers to be offered; and I've heard no outcry about that. While this proposed facility is not definitively a mosque--there are now standing two mosques within five and ten blocks of New York's Ground Zero. I hear no outcry about that. Back in December conservative pundit Laura Ingrahm, on the Fox News Channel, interviewed the wife of the Center's Project Director, a woman named Daisy Kahn, and said to Ms. Kahn, with respect to the Center, "I like what you're doing." That remark of Ms. Ingrahm's seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle.
My further observations and predictions are these: This proposed Islamic Center has provided the same kind of fuel for political exploitation as did the fear and suspicion of Catholics from an earlier time in our nation's history. I know the wounds of 9/11 still run deep for all the clearly understandable reasons; but to stir up a frenzy of opposition to this proposed Center is, as I see it, little more than an exploitation of those wounds. My prediction is that once this current election season is over, and once the issue has been milked for all the political advantage that can be gained from it; the Center will be built and we'll hear very little more about it. If proven wrong on that I'll stand corrected, but that's the eventual outcome I'm seeing.
Moving on, at the outset of this sermon I said that the distance between 1948 and 2010 was a pretty short one when it came to what Woody Guthrie was writing about Deportee. This is the last thread I'll pick up for today. You could take the word "German" out of that statement of Ben Franklin's and insert the word "Mexican" and you'd be listening to a right wing talk radio program right now.
This we should acknowledge: We live in a world of nation states with their boundaries, and with their stipulations as to who is a citizen, or legal inhabitant, of that nation and who isn't. In a perfect world, perhaps, no such boundaries would exist; but that is not world we live in, however much we way aspire towards it. I'll further acknowledge that, like any other nation, we here in this one have the right and responsibility to determine who can rightfully be a citizen, and who can rightfully live in this country, citizen or not.
The issue now, as it always has been, is how do we best go about making that determination. I hold up Woody Guthrie's words here: "Is this the best way?" Woody was writing specifically about farm labor, but taking just those first five words of his moves the question to another level: "Is this the best way?" Is enacting legislation like that in effect now is the State of Arizona that gives state and local law enforcement officers the authority to arrest and detain anyone whom they think might be--on the basis of appearance alone--in this country without proper legal sanction? That particular piece of the Arizona law has for now been overturned by a higher court, but is still being appealed, and still retains its chilling effect. Is the best way, as has been proposed in some quarters, the revocation of the 14th Amendment that grants citizenship to those born within our borders? That effort seems to have run out of steam, but the fact that it was proposed by persons in positions of power that would actually allow them to initiate such action is sobering all by itself.
The recent Arizona legislation raised an issue within our own Unitarian Universalist family as to whether or not we should hold our 2012 Annual General Assembly in Phoenix as scheduled. What was decided at last summer's GA in Minneapolis--which I did not attend as I had a rather important wedding to officiate--was that our GA in Phoenix would go forward, and that the program would be largely built around seeking out and advocating for those best ways when it comes to this whole matter of immigration; about how we find the most just and moral means of dealing with those who come into this country under a wide range of circumstances and conditions.
A Study/Action Resolution to that effect, titled "Immigration as a Moral Issue" was passed at the Minneapolis General Assembly, calling upon our congregations to engage on this issue over the next four years. It contains more that I'll read here, but it's a strong and thoughtful document. Copies are available at our Social Justice Committee table, and I hope many of you will pick up a copy, carefully read it over, and offer your suggestions to me or to Marty Storer who Chairs that Committee as to have we in this UU congregation might most meaningfully and creatively respond to what our Association has put before us.
Just a couple more thoughts before I wrap up on what I know is still a very unfinished topic. For all the disagreements I had with our former President, Mr. George W. Bush, I felt he was on the right track with the national immigration reform legislation he proposed in 2004. I had my reservations with some of it, but felt that its passage, which didn't happen, would have been a step in the right direction. It did call for increased southern border security; and it also contained a guest worker provision similar to the Braceros program mentioned earlier. And--in a bow to reality--it contained as well a rather demanding and strenuous path to citizenship for those who had been in this country for a certain length of time without the requisite documentation.
When the former President first proposed all this it had the support of such conservative leaning Senators as Mr. John McCain and the aforementioned Senator Hatch. That support has since gone by the board, and you'd be hard pressed to find anyone now standing for high office--again in this current election season--who would get behind such legislation. So what's happened in the last six years? It's not that there's been some great increase in undocumented persons coming here; that number has actually gone down. As with the Islamic Center, the matter of persons in this country without legal recourse--a concern that has been with us from our earliest days--has once again become a tool for political manipulation.
All I can do, all we can do, is hope for and work towards, a greater resolve to find that best way, or, more accurately, best ways, when it comes to how we deal with the ever changing, the ever evolving, the ever struggling, and sometimes the even painful story of America. The best way is not the most politically exploitable or most politically manipulative way.
I cannot help but notice, for example, that for all their differences, the positions of former President Bush and our current President, Barack Obama on immigration reform are actually pretty close. Whether it would stand a chance legislatively or not, it would be a positive symbol, I feel, if these two gentlemen--from quite different places on the political spectrum--could publicly stand behind a nationwide immigration reform proposal. Theirs might not be the altogether best way, but it could point us in the way of a more productive and positive conversation than the one taking place now.
The American story, then, is one of celebrating the lamp beside the golden shore on the one hand, while still being trapped by the fear of the stranger, and of the one we do not know or understand, on the other. Whether we will ever transcend this maddening paradox I cannot say. It's been more than 200 years, after all, since Ben Franklin went after the Germans. I only ask which side of this paradox we can try to be on, and go from there.
We opened up with Woody Guthrie, and we'll finish with him. He traveled the length and breadth of this country during some of its most trying times--times of a horrible Depression and of a war that took so many of our young lives. He met people living on the edge of survival, but who still believed they could have a piece of the country that was theirs, or that they wished to make theirs. Whatever their station in life, whatever their race or ethnicity, and wherever they were coming from, he called them "my people."
Woody Guthrie declared, in a very simple but straightforward way, that they and we and all of us live in land made for you and me. Let's sing together This Land is Your Land.
Stephen D. Edington
October 10, 2010
