Working for the Common Good

During Al Capone’s reign in Chicago, he was known for being generous to the poor by setting up soup kitchens.

In Chapter One of Al Capone’s Beer Wars: A Complete History of Organized Crime in Chicago During Prohibition, author John J. Binder, offers the opinion that some immigrants to Chicago:

Brought with them a belief . . . that the system was there to be exploited by individuals for their personal gain as opposed to the idea that individuals worked for the common good. [Italics mine.]

Binder was trying to put the Chicago “Beer Wars” into context.
He was explaining why immigrants from the semi-feudal worlds of Italy, Ireland, Germany, and Russia, worked to exploit American society: some by building legal businesses, and others by building illegal businesses.
(Based on my own family history, I’m quite sure that many Italian-Americans were a lot more idealistic citizens than Binder imagined.)

In the conclusion of his book, Binder gives Capone an A minus, for his work as a professional gangster.
These were his reasons for this “less than perfect” grade:

He had strong business sense and excellent martial skills . . . However, his public behavior . . .put him [too much] in the spotlight” and he should have filed his income tax returns.

A portrait of Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) by George Catlin, after a painting by Thomas Sully.

Founding Father Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), as a thinker, was more concerned about “the Common Good” than many of the other Founding Fathers.
Jefferson was the son of a landowner, and he owned slaves throughout his life.
However, he did believe in Universal Suffrage, and in the ideals of Democracy (at least in theory).
He certainly didn’t believe in a “divine right” for English men, then only one-third of the population!
Jefferson also didn’t believe that the American system of slavery would continue many generations after his death.
(He left that disquieting problem for future generations to contend with.)

In 1813, idealist Jefferson wrote to John Adams (1735-1826) that Europe’s class system of “rank, birth, and tinsel-aristocracy will finally shrink into insignificance.”*

A few days before he died (in 1826), Jefferson wrote: 

The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately. . .*

Despite Jefferson’s materialism, he truly believed that only the American people could preserve our Democratic system.
He stipulated that our nation must become better educated, and more guided by the sciences.
(If this were not so, I think he feared that eventually we would lose our Democracy.)

A portrait of Abigail Adams by Jane Stuart (after Gilbert Stuart, circa 1800).

I just finished the biography Dearest Friend A Life of Abigail Adams (published in 1981) by Lynne Withey.
It’s about the wife of the nation’s first Vice President and second President, John Adams.
In Dearest Friend, I learned that Mr. and Mrs. John Adams (a couple who disliked the whole idea of political parties) switched from being Federalists to being Republicans, during their lifetimes.
Here’s a section:

Behind her growing conservatism was a profound distrust of the ordinary man or woman. Such people, she believed, were incapable of thinking rationally about important issues but would follow a charismatic leader blindly and could easily be duped by propaganda.

A deep materialism, and the goal of the “Common Good,” have been at war in the U.S. since its’ inception.
After the Revolutionary War, many of the elite colonialists fled to Canada.
When framing the Federal Government, the Founding Fathers bowed to the financial interests of the big plantation owners, and counted blacks as 5/8ths of a human being (for mainly financial reasons).
After the Civil War, many plantation owners received $300 payments, but only a few blacks received forty acres and a mule.
Since the beginning of this country, some Americans have considered true Democracy to be just a pipe dream, not really worth working on.

A scene from The Migrants, a 1974 TV movie about migratory farm workers, that starred Cloris Leachman (right) and Lisa Lucas (left).

When studying U.S. history, it’s evident that the English elite exploited both the non-English, and the English plebs, as North America was settled.
During the 1600s and 1700s, wild forests were farmed (and Native Americans murdered) through the use of slaves, English and Irish convicts, and the indentured servant system.
During the 1800s and 1900s, immigrants from Europe, and Asia, were used to build our cities and railroads, as well as staff our mines and factories.
A few immigrants (like Andrew Carnegie) became titans of industry, but most first-generation Americans worked long hours doing manual labor, in hopes that some of their children would eventually survive existence in the underclass.

The book Round Trip to American describes how many immigrants came to the U.S. for a while, found it not to their liking, and returned to their home countries (Europe or Asia).
Some migrants returned to Europe and Asia, and transformed their home countries into modern societies.

The massacre of the Chinese at Rock Springs, Wyoming, drawn by Lieutenant C.A. Booth. 7th U.S. Infantry. White miners slaughtered Chinese miners.

Trump talks about saving America by deporting immigrants, but his idea is not based on logic, or facts.
By deporting so many hard-working immigrants, he’s just disrupting profitable American companies.
Undocumented immigrants typically pay into the Social Security system, but then get nothing back, helping to keep the system solvent.
Throughout the history of this country, immigrants have always started more new businesses than the U.S. born.
Immigrants spend money on food and housing, increasing consumer spending.
Financially speaking, deporting immigrants by the thousands, is not a good move for the U.S. economy.

I guess that our relationship to the Constitution, and Democracy, is a bit like our relationship to marriage.
Some men (or women) vow never to commit the sin of adultery during the wedding ceremony.
A few years later, however, “the heart wants what it wants” and they are unfaithful to their wives (or husbands).

Charles H Bennett’s illustration of a coalman confronting a chimney sweep: “the pot calling the kettle black.”

I know that the folks who back Trump are hypersensitive about this idea of the Common Good.
Kevin Roberts (President of the Heritage Foundation) mischaracterizes Lefties (in Project 2025), saying that “The Left does not believe that all men are created equal. They believe they are superior.”
He mistakes idealism for self-righteousness.

Trump, and his supporters, swear that they believe in the Democratic system of government, and that the Left must “hate America.”
That’s the pot calling the kettle black.
Without a concern for the Common Good, Democracy will fail.

*Both of the Jefferson quotes are taken from Thomas Jefferson on Democracy, selected and arranged by Saul K Padover, Penguin, 1939. 

The War on Immigrants

In the Martin Scorsese film Gangs of New York, Bill Cutting “The Butcher” (Daniel Day Lewis, center front) particularly hates Irish immigrants.

America has had a love-hate relationship with immigration ever since the French arrived in Canada, and the Virginia Company was founded (in 1606) to settle sections of the North American coast.
French Canada wanted the Ontario region to be more French, and the Virginia Company wanted the colonies to be predominately English.

I’ve discussed Americans resenting immigrants (while at the same time Big Business needing immigration).
However, I’ve not written an entire memorandum.
Like many third-generation Americans, I’ve enjoyed the “polite fiction” that we live in a “happy melting pot,” and that most Americans believe in “liberty and justice for all.”
Over the last few years, I’ve come to the realization that this may be a delusion.

Redman Toys issued action figures for 2002’s Gangs of New York.

Bill Cutting (Bill the Butcher) wore the red, white, and blue sash of the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party.

By necessity, the Americas were originally settled by men.
(Of the first 18 Puritan wives who sailed on the Mayflower, 13 died during the first winter.)
During the early years of settlement, many men developed romantic partnerships with indigenous women.
However, the TPTB back in Europe frowned upon these relationships.
(My 2/8/24 memorandum: “Tobacco Wives and King’s Daughter” deals with how the French, and British, governments dealt with the issue of not enough “white” women.)

Later, the Founding Fathers made disparaging remarks about non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants.
Men of British heritage (like Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson), worried as Anglo-Saxon families journeyed back to the safety of Britain, while rude Germans and unintelligible Swedes kept arriving.
Then, as now, the Founders were displeased with the quality of the immigrants.
It wasn’t enough that newcomers be from the British Isles; the Irish were despised, about as much as the Germans. 

The Redman Toys “The Butcher” action figure (Gangs of New York) came complete with extra weapons, and a stand with the Know-Nothing Party banner that read “Native Americans, Beware of Foreign Influence,” (with the “Ns” reversed).

As a woman of Southern Italian descent, this hatred is difficult to understand.
How are Brits able to dislike a people that looks, and acts, so similarly?
However, there’s a long history of Anglo-Saxons holding the Irish in contempt.
Just as ambitious Southern Italians traveled up to Lombardy, to find work after WWII, ambitious Irish men and women traveled to Britain, and the U.S., to “better themselves.”
However, while they did find jobs, Irish people didn’t find acceptance, especially at first.

The book Jane Austen’s England, by Roy and Lesley Adkins, makes clear that the Irish poor were considered the lowest of the low in England.
(The Adkins book covers the period from 1775-1817.)
In describing his fellow countrymen, teacher Thomas Finnegan said:

The [Irish] children were most depraved; they are exposed to every species of vice. . . and as for the parents, they are very dissolute, generally; on Sundays particularly they take their children with them to public houses.

1881 British cartoon showing a “Irish-American Dynamite Skunk” caged, in a London zoo.

When Irish Immigrants arrived in America, they were greeted with “No Irish Need Apply” signs in shop windows, and in newspaper advertisements.

Like other immigrants, the Irish were given the lowest-paying, dangerous, and most menial jobs.
After a few generations, however, the Irish were forgiven for not being Anglo-Saxon.

It’s no accident that—with the exceptions of Van Buren (Netherlands), Eisenhower (Germany), and Trump (Germany and Scotland)—all U.S. Presidents have had strong Anglo-Saxon, and/or Irish roots, on at least one side of their family trees.
(Scotland is only partially Anglo-Saxon.)
In nearly 250 years, there have been no primarily Italian, French, Greek, Slavic, Jewish, Hispanic, or Asian U.S. Presidents.
President Obama’s father was born in Kenya; ancestors on his maternal side were mostly Northern European and lived in this country since the early 1600s (earlier than the Mayflower).

American financier Stephen Girard was born in Bordeaux, France.

He bequeathed his entire fortune to social welfare institutions.

This portrait hangs in the U.S. Treasury Department, and is by James Reid Lambdin.

While not having Anglo ancestors is detrimental to being elected President, this “hardship” has not been as big a barrier to making money.
From the beginnings, recent immigrants have built fortunes faster than other Americans.
The first American millionaire was a Frenchman named Stephen Girard (1750-1831).
Today, one of the richest persons is Elon Musk, born in South Africa.
Studies attempt to analyze why entrepreneurship is so much stronger among first-generation Americans, than it is among Americans with long histories on American soil.

Seventeen Chinese men were lynched during the Los Angeles Massacre of 1871.
The Columbus Day holiday (1891) was a direct result of eleven dark-skinned Sicilian immigrants being lynched in New Orleans.
While these stories are horrific, we should remember that at least 6,400 African-American kidnapped immigrants—a group that didn’t arrive willingly—were lynched in the U.S., since the Civil War.
(”There Have Been More than 6,400 Lynchings Since the End of the Civil War, New Study Reveals” by Anagha Srikanth, 6/16/2020, The Hill.)
Lynching creates fear, and fear is a method of keeping the underclasses down.

Jane Lynch, and Jim Gaffigan, appeared on Finding Your Roots.

There’s little about the war against immigrants in grade school and high school textbooks.
Instead, we learn bits and pieces in college-level history courses, on Finding Your Roots (PBS), or the podcast “Untextbooked.”

I recently discovered a series of Chicago Tribune columns—one entitled ”Many Sicilians Are Here; Difficult to Assimilate”—in which anthropologist George A. Dorsey (1868-1931) expressed theories about Sicilian-Americans that are similar to what Trump is saying about current immigrants.
In one 6/4/1910 column, Dorsey said that Sicilians make zero contributions to American society, because Sicily is a land of “mediocre genius.”
He goes on to say that many Sicilian immigrants are criminals and Sicilian women are uneducable.
(One passage describes a Palermo woman drawing a knife on a physician.)

Statistics prove that immigrants are 30% less likely to commit crimes than home-grown criminals.
However, no one cares about statistics.
Trump signed a Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) bill on 1/20/2021, giving an estimated 200,000 Venezuelan exiles protection from deportation, but no one cares about that either.
(Link to Politico article “Trump grants Venezuelans Temporary Legal Status on His Way Out,” 1/19/21, by Sabrina Rodriquez.)

The fact remains that it isn’t just American society that’s built on immigration.
It’s human society.
Only a small number of us have sent our DNA to Ancestry, or 23 and Me.
Yet, so far, 10% of Southern “white” Americans are shown to have some Black ancestry.
Before Great Britain welcomed immigrants from Africa and Asia, England itself was a blend of Anglo-Saxons, Normans, Celts, and Scandinavians.
(As Dorothy L. Sayers put it, “the English are mongrels, and . . . they pride themselves upon being mongrels.”)
Each of us is a blend, even if we’re 100% Northern European, 100% Southern European, Asian, Jewish, Black, or any other type of person.

In Quatermass and the Pit, many Londoners descend from humans “altered” by insect-like Martians (Dr. Quatermass and Barbara Judd, center and right), while a few haven't been altered (Dr. Roney, left).*

An alien space ship is dug up, activates the altered humans, and chaos results!

Borders around countries aren’t solid.
Every region of the world has ethnic divisions.
Some Mexican-Americans lived on the same land since the 1700’s.
However, now that land isn’t part of Mexico; it’s part of the USA.
Ukrainians know themselves as a separate ethnic grouping, but Putin insists that Ukrainians are Russians.
Italy didn’t become a separate Italianate country until 1861.
(Giuseppe Garibaldi, who unified Italy, had hoped to make Nice—his birthplace—part of Italy, but he failed.)
It’s all a crap shoot whether you call yourself—Italian or French, Mexican or American, German or Slavic, Ukrainian or Russian, white or Black. Wars, social constructs, or forgetting your history, may place you on the “wrong side” of a divide.

*In 1967’s Quatermass and the Pit, Andrew Keir was Dr. Quatermass; James Donald was Dr. Roney; and Barbara Shelley was Barbara Judd (shown above, wearing the remnants of an EEG-like device that read her brain waves).

You Can’t Tell the Players Without a Scorecard

2009’s District 9 in which members of an extraterrestrial race line up for food in a militarized refugee camp.

The book Round Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880-1930, by Mark Wyman, explains how millions of immigrants weren’t “immigrants” at all.
They were migrants.
Although there were 20 million migrations between 1890-1924, the return rate for that period averaged 35%, and many “immigrants” crossed the ocean back and forth several times.
Regions with the highest return rates were Southern Italy (60%), Romania (66%), and Slovakia (57%).
Between 1908-1923, 60% of Southern Italians returned to Italy (969,754 Italians out of 1,624,353).
Migrants labored in U.S. mines and stockyards, sweated in factories, and built U.S. transportation systems, but then traveled back home.
Many never considered living in the U.S. long-term, or becoming citizens. 

One reason for returning home was that although American wages were higher, the working conditions were worse.
In 1895, Chicago stockyard workers—mostly migrants—labored alongside children in rooms “flooded with water, foul smells, smoke, and steam” for 10 hours a day and 16 cents an hour (the equivalent of $5.86 per hour today).
Children made half that amount.
25% of the immigrant workers at the Carnegie Steel South Works (in Pittsburg) died or were injured between 1907-1910.
According to Round Trip to America, “travelers on returning ships were repeatedly struck by the large numbers of injured, broken, or ill immigrants on board and the multiplicity of widows.” 

Another reason for people returning home was nativist resentment.
One line from the poem by Emma Lazarus describes immigrants as “the wretched refuse of your teaming shore,” and that’s how migrants—especially those from southern Europe—were perceived.
An immigration inspector claimed in 1887 that the U.S. was “now receiving installments of the ignorant and degraded, a class that is little superior to the Digger Indians of the West.”
(“Digger Indians” is a derogatory term that was created to facilitate Manifest Destiny.)
More than 125 years later, former president Trump proclaimed (in 2023) that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

As soon as many immigrants recognized what they were getting into, a good share (especially those who wanted to stay) stopped working for others, and became entrepreneurs.
The first millionaire American (from 1810 until his death in 1831) was Stephen Girard—a banker and shipowner who was born in France.
In the 1920’s and 30’s, many immigrants started their own grocery stores, bakeries and butcher shops.
Other immigrants founded small toy and food-stuff factories—idea-based businesses.
In 2023, immigrants are still the principal force behind new American businesses.

“Forgotten man” and former socialite Godfrey Park (William Powell) wasn’t an immigrant, but he was “down on his luck” in 1936’s My Man Godfrey.

As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the 1830’s: “in no country in the world are private fortunes more precarious than in the U.S.
It is not uncommon for the same man in the course of his life to rise and sink again through all the grades that lead from opulence to poverty.”
Fortunes are still precarious, in this modern country.

Christopher Columbus (Gerard Depardieu) in 1492: Conquest of Paradise—a film that concealed (rather than revealed) many disturbing facts about his treatment of Native Americans.

The Columbus Day holiday had an interesting origin.
It began in 1891, when eleven dark-skinned Sicilian immigrants were lynched in New Orleans.
(There were false rumors that the Sicilians had been “let off,” after killing a white man.)
Italian consulates throughout the U.S. were incensed.
A year later, President Harrison helped create a holiday that would kill two birds with one stone.
It would honor the 400th anniversary of the “discovery of America,” and help Italians enter the mainstream of American society. 

A lobby card for 1944’s Fighting Sullivans, a film about five Irish-American brothers who died fighting for their country in WWII. It’s a myth that after the Sullivan brothers died, siblings were prevented from serving together.

During the Civil War, 25% of the men in the Union Army were immigrants, and another 25% were first-generation Americans.
During WWI, 18% of the U.S. soldiers were immigrants.
Detailed counts (on origins) weren’t kept for WWII.
However, Italian-American soldiers comprised at least 10% of the volunteers, and Polish-American soldiers at least 8% (far above their percentages in the U.S. population).
Scores of first generation Irish and German Americans volunteered to fight on the Allied side in WWII, seeking to prove their patriotism.

The current immigration policy is supposed to be based on three main factors—family reunification, labor market needs, and diversity.
The system is being overwhelmed, however, by asylum seekers (many bringing children).

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. has a labor shortage.
More workers—skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled—are needed in many fields: medicine, agriculture, hospitality, teaching, construction and manufacturing.
On the other hand, American business seems determined to widen the salary gap between upper management and blue-collar jobs, so many of the available jobs don’t pay very well.

Immigration is a very difficult issue.
An article by the Cato Institute in 2021 called the present system “archaic and barely coherent.”
An article on the Brookings Institute website, in 2023,* tells us that 80% of new technical jobs will go unfilled.
Are we allowing for asylum-seekers who may just want to work here, and find safety for their families?
Is it possible to recreate the immigration system so it isn’t tainted by nativism and prejudice?

* “Industrial Policy Will Require Immigration Reform,” Greg Wright and Emma Berman, September 29, 2023.