It’s one of those great and wonderful mysteries: Why do people enlist to put their lives on the line for a nation in which they are not citizens?
Regardless the motivations, many people do that, for the U.S. As a partial means of saying “thank you,” the U.S. grants expedited naturalization processes for some of those soldiers.
July 4, at the White House, about two dozen of those non-citizen soldiers completed the process, and took the oath to become citizens of the nation they’ve already served in defense. From the White House blogs:
President Obama Salutes New American Citizens
[Colleen Curtis]
President Barack Obama listens as Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano administers the oath of allegiance during a military naturalization ceremony for active duty service members in the East Room of the White House, July 4, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
President Obama began his Independence Day celebrations by hosting a naturalization ceremony for active duty service members in the East Room of the White House. It was the third time the President has hosted this kind of service, and he told the audience, which included the families of the service members who were taking the oath of citizenship, that it is one of his favorite things to do. “It brings me great joy and inspiration because it reminds us that we are a country that is bound together not simply by ethnicity or bloodlines, but by fidelity to a set of ideas.”
Before the President gave his remarks, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Alejandro Mayorkas presented the countries of the candidates for naturalization and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano delivered the oath of allegiance. President Obama told the new citizens that is was an honor to serve as their Commander in Chief, and to be the first to greet them as “my fellow Americans.”
With this ceremony today — and ceremonies like it across our country — we affirm another truth: Our American journey, our success, would simply not be possible without the generations of immigrants who have come to our shores from every corner of the globe. We say it so often, we sometimes forget what it means — we are a nation of immigrants. Unless you are one of the first Americans, a Native American, we are all descended from folks who came from someplace else — whether they arrived on the Mayflower or on a slave ship, whether they came through Ellis Island or crossed the Rio Grande.
Immigrants signed their names to our Declaration and helped win our independence. Immigrants helped lay the railroads and build our cities, calloused hand by calloused hand. Immigrants took up arms to preserve our union, to defeat fascism, and to win a Cold War. Immigrants and their descendants helped pioneer new industries and fuel our Information Age, from Google to the iPhone. So the story of immigrants in America isn’t a story of “them,” it’s a story of “us.” It’s who we are. And now, all of you get to write the next chapter.
You can read the transcript of the President’s full remarks here.
November 1869, in the first year of the Grant administration — and Nast put aside his own prejudices enough to invite the Irish guy to dinner, along with many others.
(Click for a larger image — it’s well worth it.)
Thomas Nast's "Uncle Sam's Thanksgiving," appearing in Harper's Weekly, November 20, 1869 - Ohio State University's cartoon collection
“Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner” marks the highpoint of Nast’s Reconstruction-era idealism. By November 1869 the Fourteenth Amendment, which secures equal rights and citizenship to all Americans, was ratified. Congress had sent the Fifteenth Amendment, which forbade racial discrimination in voting rights, to the states and its ratification appeared certain. Although the Republican Party had absorbed a strong nativist element in the 1850s, its commitment to equality seemed to overshadow lingering nativism, a policy of protecting the interests of indigenous residents against immigrants. Two national symbols, Uncle Sam and Columbia, host all the peoples of the world who have been attracted to the United States by its promise of self-government and democracy. Germans, African Americans, Chinese, Native Americans, Germans, French, Spaniards: “Come one, come all,” Nast cheers at the lower left corner.
One of my Chinese students identified the Oriental woman as Japanese, saying it was “obvious.” The figure at the farthest right is a slightly cleaned-up version of the near-ape portrayal Nast typically gave Irishmen.
If Nast could put aside his biases to celebrate the potential of unbiased immigration to the U.S. and the society that emerges, maybe we can, too.
Hope your day is good; hope you have good company and good cheer, turkey or not. Happy Thanksgiving.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
About genocide and other political issues that lead to the deaths of tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people: We keep saying “never again!” When is never? There is famine today in Somalia.
This week, the U.N. declared a state of famine in parts of Somalia. Need to Know speaks with Adrian Edwards of the U.N.’s Refugee Agency about the unfolding humanitarian crisis in the region.
In comments made over the weekend, Senator John McCain R-AZ., blamed illegal immigrants for the some wildfires that have raged across his state of Arizona.“There is substantial evidence that some of these fires have been caused by people who have crossed our border illegally,” McCain said Saturday at a press conference. “The answer to that part of the problem is to get a secure border.”’
The Senator from Arizona’s comments set off a wildfire of their own, as the Wallow Fire currently blazes across his state across 500,000 miles.
A forest service spokesman on the Wallow fire in Arizona says there’s no evidence that this specific fire was caused by immigrants.
I still can not believe that there are people who want to argue that there would have been no difference between the current Obama administration and a McCain/Palin reign of terror.
What’s going on there?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Anathema to many partisans of the immigration debates: What if we look at the real value of immigration? The U.S. needs more to encourage immigration than to discourage it. God, and devil, in the details.
From the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank:
In advance of an immigration policy conference, Dallas Fed Senior Economist Pia Orrenius discusses how immigration policy can help the U.S. economy and how the global competition for high-skilled immigrants is increasing. The Dallas Fed and the John Goodwin Tower Center for Political Studies at Southern Methodist University are co-sponsoring “Immigration Policy in an Era of Globalization” at the Dallas Fed on May 19-20, 2011.
This piece had only 329 views when I posted it. Shouldn’t carefully studied views of immigration get more circulation on the inter’tubes?
Do you recall seeing any coverage of the May 19-20 conference in your local news outlets, or anywhere else? The conference included high-faluting experts who discussed immigration policies for the U.S., Canada, the EU, Europe, Britain, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Spain and Germany. One might think to find some value in the information there.
Can we get the immigration we need, legally? Do present proposals in Congress offer to boost our economy, or hurt it?
Think you could pass a U.S. Citizenship exam? From easy questions like, “Who is the president of the United States?” to harder questions that might stump the average American, we take a look at the exam to become an official U.S. citizen.
The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World was a gift of friendship from the people of France to the people of the United States and is a universal symbol of freedom and democracy. The Statue of Liberty was dedicated on October 28, 1886, designated as a National Monument in 1924 and restored for her centennial on July 4, 1986.
The Statue of Liberty has been a fixture in the U.S. and American psyche, too. Excuse me, or join me, in wondering whether we have not lost something of our former dedication to the Statue of Liberty, and the reasons France and Americans joined to build it.
Poem-a-Day sent Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” out this morning (Poem-a-Day is a wonderful service of the American Academy of Poets — you may subscribe and I recommend it). There it was, waiting for me in e-mail. My students generally have not heard nor read the poem, I discover year after year — some sort of Texas-wide failure in enculturation prompted by too-specific requirements of federal law and state law, combining to make a slatwork of culture taught in our classrooms with too many cracks into which culture actually falls, out of sight, out of mind; out of memory. I fear it may be a nationwide failure as well.
Have you read the poem lately? It once encouraged American school children to send pennies to build a home for the statue. Today it wouldn’t get a majority of U.S. Congressmen to sign on to consponsor a reading of it. Glenn Beck would contest its history, Rush Limbaugh would discount the politics of the “giveaways” in the poem, John Boehner would scoriate the victims in the poem for having missed his meeting of lobbyists (‘they just missed the right boat’), and Sarah Palin would complain about “an air-bridge to nowhere,” or complain that masses who huddle are probably up to no good (they might touch, you know).
Have you read it lately?
The New Colossus
by Emma Lazarus
Liberty Enlightening the World; French: La Liberté éclairant le monde - Wikimedia Commons image
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!”
Is the Academy of American Poets playing politics here? It’s September 12. Yesterday many Americans took part in ceremonies and service projects in remembrance of the victims of the attack on the U.S. on September 11, 2001. In much of the rest of America, there is an active movement to nail shut the “golden door,” to turn out a sign that would say “No tired, no poor nor huddled masses yearning to breathe free; especially no wretched refuse, no homeless, and let the tempest-tost stay in Guatemala and Pakistan.”
Does that lamp still shine beside the golden door?
Stereoscopic image of the arm and torch of Liberty, at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia; Robert N. Dennis Collection, New York Public Library. The arm was displayed to encourage contributions to the fund to build a pedestal for the statue, from private donations.
_____________
* I’m calculating Liberty’s gaze at about 40 feet below the tip of the torch, which is just over 305 feet above the base of the statue on the ground. The base is probably 20 feet higher than the water, but this isn’t exact science we’re talking about here.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese immigrants from the United States for 10 years.
1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, page 1 - National Archives
1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, page 2 - National Archives
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* I note the image says it was approved by President Chester Alan Arthur (who had succeeded to office after President James Garfield was assassinated a year earlier). The New York Times calls May 6 the anniversary of Congress’s passing the law; if Arthur signed in on May 6, it was probably passed a few days earlier. May 6 would be the anniversary of its signing into law.
** The Chinese Exclusion Act was preceded by the Page Act of 1875, which prohibited immigration of “undesirable” people. Who was undesirable? “The law classified as undesirable any individual from China who was coming to America to be a contract laborer, any Asian woman who would engage in prostitution, and all people considered to be convicts in their own country.” It was not applicable to many immigrants. The Page Act was named after its sponsor, Rep. Horace F. Page of California.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
More than just as tribute to the victims, more than just a disaster story, the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire, and the following events including the trial of the company owners, lay out issues students can see clearly. I think the event is extremely well documented and adapted for student projects. In general classroom use, however, the event lays a foundation for student understanding.
A couple of good websites crossed my browser recently, and I hope you know of them.
Cartoon about 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, New York Evening Journal, March 31, 1911
Events around the fire illuminate so much of American history, and of government (which Texas students take in their senior year):
Labor issues are obvious to us; the incident provides a dramatic backdrop for the explanation of what unions sought, why workers joined unions, and a sterling example of a company’s clumsy and destructive resistance to resolving the workers’ issues.
How many Progressive Era principles were advanced as a result of the aftermath of the fire, and the trial?
Effective municipal government, responsive to voters and public opinion, can be discerned in the actions of the City of New York in new fire codes, and action of other governments is clear in the changes to labor laws that resulted.
The case provides a dramatic introduction to the workings and, sometimes, misfirings of the justice system.
With the writings from the Cornell site, students can climb into the events and put themselves on the site, in the courtroom, and in the minds of the people involved.
Newspaper clippings from the period demonstrate the lurid nature of stories, used to sell newspapers — a working example of yellow journalism.
Newspapers also provide a glimpse into the workings of the Muckrakers, in the editorial calls for reform.
Overall, the stories, the photos, the cartoons, demonstrate the workings of the mass culture mechanisms of the time.
Use the sites in good education, and good health.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Homeland Defense in the 9th and 10th century European settlements in America - Aardvarchaeology
Re-enactors in Canada bring alive two periods of Swedish immigration to the Americas, the Viking experiments of the 9th and 10th centuries, and later, in the 19th century.
From Aard regular Christina Reid (she started commenting less than a week after the blog opened, bless her heart!), a few pictures from Mid-summer Eve at the Scandinavian Cultural Centre in Burnaby, British Columbia. Tina and her hubby are active in the Reik Félag reenactment group. And her brother is the singer of Viking/Tolkienian metallers Amon Amarth!
How do Canadian public school curricula treat these events? They are all but completely missing from the normal world history and U.S. history texts we use in Texas — of course, the U.S. history texts generally ignore the other two nations of North America in all contexts.
The town I mostly grew up in, Pleasant Grove, Utah, had been settled in large part by Scandanavians who had joined Mormonism and then migrated to Utah. Generally looked down upon by English descendants, they rebelled by voting our high school’s mascot as Vikings. The Christiansens, Fugals, Christesons, Larssons, Andersons, Andersens and others probably would have enjoyed the idea of a Viking re-enactment.
Those wily Canadians figure out so many ways to have fun and hide learning in the activity.
Young Viking couple in Canada, 9th or 10th century, or 21st century reenactors - image at Aardvarchaeology
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Not so fast, Bernstein said. In a wonderful and fun display of historical knowledge and research, suggests several justices from earlier appointments who spoke something other than English first.
Justice Louis Brandeis, German –
“I’m not sure what language was primarily spoken in the Brandeis household, but I would guess German, based on the following information: Brandeis’s parents were German-speaking immigrants; Brandeis attended a German-language elementary school, the ‘German and English Academy;’ the school was co-founded by his father, suggesting that his father had great fondness for the German language and culture; and Brandeis spent two of his teenage years studying in Germany.”
Maybe Justice Arthur Goldberg, Yiddish –
“It’s also possible that Arthur Goldberg’s parents, immigrants from a shtetl in Ukraine, spoke Yiddish at home.”
Justice Felix Frankfurter almost definitely, German –
” . . . a commenter points out that Felix Frankfurter’s family didn’t arrive in the U.S. from Vienna until Frankfurter was twelve years old.”
Justice Clarence Thomas, Gullah –
” . . . I remembered that Justice Thomas’s first language is Gullah, an Afro-English creole dialect”
Thomas spoke Gullah originally? When we shared a wall on Senate staff (he on John Danforth’s staff, I on Orrin Hatch’s), we also shared lunch on a few occasions, and meetings on energy and environment issues. I was struck by his great enunciation, the clear way that he used his nearly baritone voice to make English work. I wonder whether he can still command Gullah — it’s got to be one of the most minority languages on Earth right now. Fascinating.
Are there other Supreme Court justices who may have spoken a language other than English, first? Historians? Got candidates? Justice Warren Burger’s family was of German descent, and in Minnesota, when he was born, it would not have been uncommon for an entire town to have German as its primary language. I haven’t found anything to suggest that’s the case, though. Justice William J. Brennan’s parents were Irish immigrants, so there is an outside chance they spoke some Gaelic dialect.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we could find another justice who served between 1840 and 1960 with German as a first language.
How about Cardozo, and a Sephardic dialect, or Portuguese? Any justices of French descent? Welsh descent? Readers, help out!
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Scouting is one of the most vulnerable victims of wedge politics and attempts to polarize voters. Even among veteran Scouts and Scouters, lines tend to get drawn over what the program should be doing.
It’s Explorers, a group which has been distanced from Boy Scouts by moving it to BSA’s Learning for Life programs. These are not traditional Boy Scouts. I suspect that distinction, small as it is, will get blurred quickly.
Exploring used to be more closely related to Scouting. Exploring was for kids 14 years and older. I belonged to an Explorer Post in Utah that specialized in kayaking (I was more active at the council level at the time), and I had the grand opportunity to work with a large Explorer Post affiliated with AMR Corp. (American Airlines), where some of our Scouts got significant time in aircraft simulators (in the good old days, when such machines had downtime). It was a great program.
That was then. Today, 14-21-year-old Scouts can join Venture Crews, which can be co-ed. The old Exploring program you remember survives today mostly in Venturing.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
I know the city, and I think there are barely enough clues here to figure this one out. Let me say it is not Los Angeles, though the clues may have led one to figure that out. I wonder if you can figure this out, or if maybe there are several places that fill this particular bill.
A friend notes in a recent e-mail:
Nothing quite like going into the nearest Vons (right across from the street from campus), hearing French spoken by two guys exiting the store, standing behind two German speakers, East German accent in line to be checked out by a clerk whose first language is Chinese, and hearing two guys rattling away in Russian in the next checkout line. Oh–and this is after having lunch at the Vietnamese Pho/Banh joint in the same strip mall.
Do you know the city? Or, do you know another city that fits this bill?
Tell us in comments.
________________
Answer is now in comments.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
I once met … at a centenary celebration of some kind … the grandchild of a man who moved as a teenager from the old country to southern Wisconsin, ahead of his family, to learn the local customs, farming techniques, and language. After a few years in a small town in Wisconsin, his family arrived to start farming. The young man had indeed learned the local practices, the local farming techniques, and the local language. German. His family, arab speakers from Palestine, were well served by this young man because German was all they needed to get along in the US.
Here’s the citation on the study Greg Laden wrote about:
M. E. Wilkerson, J. Salmons (2008). “GOOD OLD IMMIGRANTS OF YESTERYEAR,” WHO DIDN’T LEARN ENGLISH: GERMANS IN WISCONSIN American Speech, 83 (3), 259-283 DOI: 10.1215/00031283-2008-020 [you’ll need a paid subscription for the full text]
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
