Immigrants, Then

My emigrant ancestors were all safe and sound in the new land's Dutch hamlets by the turn of the twentieth century, but my wife's great-grandparents were just then arriving, as were many thousands of others in a wave of European immigration that started after the Civil War and ended when European soldiers dug the trenches of the Great War. 

Many came then, most all of them were "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." Someone or two may have been well-heeled, but the vast majority were beautiful only in an immigrant sense. 

Germans, like this family, were most numerous. Some six million came here between 1820 and 1938. But many of those Lewis Hine photographed were a bit more exotic, like these Slavic folks coming in what our President calls "chain migration."

It's helpful to remember that many thousands who came were not thought of as being "American," nor did they look like it. 

Nor were they. In almost every case, including those who came from the Netherlands, an entire emigrant generation would pass on before their descendants would begin to think of themselves as Americans or act or speak like those almost those these ethnics even called "Americans." 

Maybe it's helpful to have a look at the faces of people we admitted to this country more than a century ago, even though, back then, we didn't necessarily welcome them. 

These people are who we are today. These are us.

A man named Lewis Hine played photographer and social commentator with these photographs back in the earliest years of the 20th century. He spent time at Ellis Island, where, like others (there was a gallery for those Americans who wanted to watch) Hine observed the patchwork ethnics like these were creating. 

Lewis Hine got famous when he went on to do a memorable portfolio of portraits of children employed in New York City sweatshops. Meanwhile these photographs sat unseen until they were found a couple of decades ago. The Washington Post ran some just yesterday.

They have real currency right now or so it seems to me. These are men and women and children America adopted outright 110 years ago. 

Marvelous, priceless photographs. Unless your people were carried over the water in shackles or lived here for centuries before any of these, it's good to remember that today, a century later, these folks are us.