A Great Book About American Immigration Law
I have often complained that one of the failures of American history class as I experienced it in high school* was that everything after the civil war was taught as a series of legislation punctuated by two world wars. The world wars were taught as story, and subsequently stuck with me . But the history of legislation was essentially a list: a name, a date, a paragraph about what the law in question accomplished. Here’s what stuck: anti-trust legislation, labor rights legislation, and, inexplicably, the Taft-Harley Act (the name, not the content).**
It turns out that the history of legislation can be pretty thrilling in the right hands.
One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 began as an attempt by journalist and second-generation American Jia Lynn Yang to understand the law that allowed her parents to come to the United States, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The result is a gripping account of forty years of Congressional wrangling over immigration law in the United States.
Yang successfully argues that the idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants is a relatively new one—and demonstrates that laws controlling immigration are even more recent. The book centers on the passage of three major immigration laws—in 1924, 1952 and 1965—and the competing ideas about ethnicity, race and the nature of the United States as an entity that shaped those laws.
Yang never loses sight of the fact that laws are passed by people. She introduces us to the often colorful and sometimes awful politicians and activists who lobbied for and against changes in immigration policy, clearly evoking each man’s character as well as describing his political career. She outlines ugly relationships between immigration laws and the eugenics movement, isolationism, anti-Communist rhetoric, McCarthyism, anti-Semitism, and calls to keep the United States true to its “Northern European roots.”
Yang ends where she began, with the impact of the 1965 bill, which opened the door to non-white immigration, closed the border with Mexico for the first time and changed the United States in ways that its promoters had never anticipated.
One Mighty and Irresistible Tide is an important and sometimes surprising history of American immigration policy and the people who made it.
*I realize that this is not a universal experience. It wasn’t even my universal experience. My world history teacher did an excellent job of capturing my imagination despite the challenges inherent in the concept. Fabulous high school history teachers exist. My hats off to you all.
**I’ll save you the trouble of looking it up: formally known as the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, it restricted the power and actions of labor unions. The 80th Congress passed it over President Truman’s veto.
The guts of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Wrapping My Head Around the Weimar Republic, Pt 3: May Day, 1929
If I had more self-discipline, I would wait and tell this story in chronological order, after several other stories from the Weimar Republic that already have a place in my blog post editorial calendar.* But I found this story absolutely amazing when I read it over the course of several days’ articles in the Chicago Tribune of 1929. Sometimes I’ve just got to share the story NOW. Pull up a seat.
* * *
One of the recurring themes in Weimar Germany, as it appears in Sigrid Schultz’s Tribune articles, is street fighting between different political factions and police intervention in the battles. The combinations involved vary from day to day, but the pattern is clear: one group has something to celebrate, a second or sometimes third group objects, fisticuffs (or gun shots) ensue, the police come in. The article always includes the numbers dead, wounded, and arrested.
What was later described as the battle of May Day in 1929 didn’t follow that pattern.
Anticipating trouble, the Berlin police revoked the right to march on May Day that labor unions and the socialist and communist parties had won under the former kaiser’s regime.** (This is known as a self-fulfilling prophecy.)
Violent demonstrations broke out in several neighborhoods on the days leading up to May 1, which confirmed the wisdom of the order as far as the police were concerned. The socialist party accepted the police mandate and rented large halls in which to hold their May Day meetings—though I assume they grumbled about it. The communists were going to march, dang it.
On April 30, communist party members went from house to house, asking people to turn out for the parade and telling them not to carry weapons because this was going to be a peaceful demonstration. Meanwhile, the police mobilized all their reserves and armed them with machine guns, tear gas bombs, and armored cars. (You can see where this is going, right?)
On May 1, an estimated 80,000 communists and their allies turned out for a parade and open air meetings. After some fights with the police, the communists built a barricade using sewer piping that was stacked by the side of the road. The police stormed the barricades with machine guns and armored cars. The communists retaliated by throwing stones.
Despite the inequality of weapaons, the battle continued for four days, with a rising number of dead and wounded on both sides. On the last day, some of the policemen had had enough. To quote Miss Schultz: “The riot-swept district of Wedding was the scene of the first open outbreak of the policemen’s dissatisfaction at the way they have been driven by Junker officers in the last few days. Defying their superior officers’ orders, the men took off their steel helmets, laid aside their hand grenades and entire equipment, and proceeded to fraternize with the crowd by singing popular songs.” (Sound familiar?)
It’s a nice image, but the impact of the May Day battle didn’t end when the fighting stopped. Blutmai (Bloody May) is considered one of the events that contributed to the political instability of the Weimar Republic.
*A rather grand description of something that is basically a list of documents in a Scrivener file.
**I don’t know about you, but I grew up learning about May Day as a time when you made a basket,*** filled it with flowers, and gave it someone in the morning. (Usually your mother.) It was a nice craft project for an elementary school classroom or a Bluebird troop. No one mentioned a word about May Day as an international celebration of the labor movement.
***Often woven out of strips of construction paper. Though the crafty websites these days seem to be going with the much simpler paper cone.
The Hunt for History
I am not a collector of anything in any meaningful sense of the word.* I am certainly not a collector of historical ephemera. Which means that I had my doubts when my stack of books to consider for review for Shelf Awareness for Readers included The Hunt for History: On the Trail of the World’s Lost Treasures—from the Letters of Lincoln, Churchill, and Einstein to the Secret Recordings Onboard JFK’s Air Force One by rare documents dealer Nathan Raab. At best, I hoped for a glimpse into a subculture of which I know little.
While I, in fact, got at a look at (and greater understanding of) the world of collecting historical documents (broadly defined), The Hunt for History was more than I had expected.
Raab tells spellbinding stories of tracking down and identifying rare historical documents and artifacts—the announcement of Napoleon’s death from a British admiral stationed on St. Helena, an outraged letter from Susan B. Anthony to a clueless autograph dealer,** and, yes, previously unknown recordings made on Air Force One on November 22, 1963. (He also shares heartbreaking stories of telling someone their family treasure is neither valuable nor authentic.)
But despite its title, The Hunt for History is more than a series of treasure hunts. Writing in a light, conversational style, Raab uses the stories of individual documents to illustrate both his education as a documents dealer, and his growing fascination with history. Working alongside his father, he learns to authenticate documents, to identify forgeries, and to recognize whether an authentic document has the historical significance of a major find. At the same time, he comes to understand how a piece of the past can provide an attachment to history. That understanding becomes deeply personal in the penultimate chapter of the book, in which Raab describes a historical discovery that changed him —the letters and library of a Jewish scientist smuggled out of Germany prior to WWII.
In the end, The Hunt for History is a delightful account of one man’s engagement with the past.
* Even my growing collection of reference books is entirely random, with no organizing principle beyond “this would be useful” and “that looks interesting”.
**From my perspective, this story made the book worth reading all by itself.
The guts of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.