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.

A Shrine to Nativism or to Democracy?

In high school, in the Midwest, I learned about the concept of Manifest Destiny.
This was the idea that White Americans were ordained, by God, to settle the entire continent “from sea to shining sea.”
The concept of Manifest Destiny was tied in with the idea of “American Exceptionalism,” the genocide of indigenous people, and the rejection of Native American rights.
Since Mount Rushmore was imagined by its’ sculptor (Gutzon Borghum) as about the expansion of America, one way to think about it is as a shrine to Manifest Destiny.

Originally, Red Cloud was going to be immortalized on another North Dakota mountain.

Instead, Mount Rushmore was built by sculptor Gutzon Borghum.

Borghum was a proponent of nativism who believed in strict controls on immigration.

Honoring U.S. presidents was NOT the original concept for building a giant monument in North Dakota.
Moreover, the four presidents weren’t selected based on their thoughts on Democracy.
According to an article “75 Surprising Facts About Mount Rushmore” (by Dylan Mancy), the original idea was to sculpt images of “Oglala Lakota leader Red Cloud, explorers Lewis and Clark, and Buffalo Bill Cody.”
This concept would have made it a monument to both Native Americans, and to U.S. expansion—an exceedingly contrary proposal indeed!
However, it would have been more in harmony with what the Lakota (also known as the Teton Sioux) called Mount Rushmore.
The Lakota called Rushmore the “Six Grandfathers.”

As far as I can tell, the main person who selected the four presidents for Mount Rushmore was the sculptor, Gutzon Borghum.
His idea was to pay homage to presidents who had contributed greatly to the “founding, expansion, preservation, and unification of the country.”
George Washington represented the founding.
Thomas Jefferson represented expansion—through the Louisiana Purchase.
Teddy Roosevelt represented preservation and economic growth.
Finally, Abraham Lincoln represented unification.

In Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism, Paula Marantz Cohen, discusses how the chase in 1959’s North by Northwest (starring Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint) “dramatizes the puny but heroic efforts of individuals to stand up against institutional pressures.”

It’s interesting that President James K. Polk is not immortalized on Mount Rushmore, especially since Polk was the president most closely allied with U.S. expansion.
However, Teddy Roosevelt was associated with the West as a naturalist, hunter, and conservationist; helped build the Panama Canal; as well as a close personal friend of the sculptor.

Another interesting fact (that I learned in “75 Surprising Facts About Mount Rushmore”) was that Mount Rushmore was named after Mr. Charles E. Rushmore—an obscure New York lawyer who surveyed gold claims in North Dakota, in 1885.
(His guides incorrectly assumed that the mountain had no name.)
How odd to name such a large mountain after such a minor official!

Sculptor Gutzon Borgham,* the creator of Mount Rushmore, was born in 1867, in the Idaho Territory.
His father immigrated from Denmark and his mother was the child of Danish immigrants.
According to Wikipedia, Borgham was a child of Morman polygamy.
At one time, his father (Jen) was married to both Borgham’s mother (Christina), and to her sister Ida.
(However, Jen Borgham eventually divorced Gutzon’s mother, stayed with Ida, and left the Morman Church.)

In 2004’s Team America: World Police, the counter-terrorism force (Team America) used Mount Rushmore as a home base.

After attending preparatory schools in Kansas and Nebraska, Borgham moved to New York City where he sculpted religious figures for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
By age 40, one of his sculptures was accepted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he was on his way to success and fame.
Over the years, Borgham became more and more fascinated with themes of American patriotism and heroic nationalism.

Now we come to the subjects of nationalism and nativism.
Nativism is a belief system in which “non-natives” are threatening, and only the “true natives” in a country are considered acceptable citizens.
This idea might seem an odd concept in a “melting pot” land in which everyone is an immigrant or descended from immigrants—except, of course, Native Americans.
However, somehow many White Northern European Protestants have come to assume that only they are “true Americans,” and everyone else is an unfit interloper.

Imagining only people of Northern European heritage, as “real” Americans doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Between 3.8 to 7 million Native Americans lived in North America before the arrival of Columbus.
The ancestors of Black Americans were kidnapped, and forcibly kept here as slaves, beginning in 1640.
Their labor made millions for their captors.
Immigrants have toiled on U.S. soil from all over the world.

Chinese men built the railroads.
The ancestors of people of Hispanic descent (like Eva Longoria) raised cattle, and grew crops, on the Northern side of the Rio Grande long before the U.S. was a country.
Yet, somehow indigenous peoples, Black people, Southern European people, Jews, and Catholics are considered “non-natives?”
How does that work?

Front page of the Treasure Chest comic book story “The Shrine of Democracy.”

Instead of portraying Mount Rushmore as a shrine to nativism, this story portrayed the monument as a shrine to Democracy.

Today, Mount Rushmore is known as a monument to a system of government and to great presidents.
On June 14, 2023, a Naturalization ceremony was held in which more than 200 citizens from over 60 countries were welcomed.
The Mount Rushmore site has links for 21 associated Native American tribal nations, and proclaims that the Federal Government consults and coordinates with those tribal nations.
One wonders how Gutzon Borghum would have reacted to this turn around.

* Twelve years before Borgum worked on Mount Rushmore, he created mock-ups for Stone Mountain in Georgia. A 38-minute documentary Monument: the Untold Story of Stone Mountain (by the Atlantic History Museum), covers Borghum being fired from that project, as well as Stone Mountain’s history with the KKK. (You can watch the complete video HERE.)