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).

Trump’s Fence Was a Dumb Idea

Scene from The Great Wall (with Matt Damon).
In the 2016 film, the Great Wall was built not to keep out Huns, but to keep out monsters.

Rulers have built a few great walls in world history.
The oldest one on record was the Chinese “Great Wall” built around 220 B.C.
For some reason, some voters say they’ll vote for Trump in November of 2024—not because they like him as a man—but because they like “his policies.”
One of his “policies” was to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

The 1,500-mile Chinese Great Wall* was constructed between Inner Mongolia and China.
It was built with conscripted labor, over generations, and according to Chinese folklore each stone equates with the loss of one human life.
The gigantic monetary cost was a factor in the fall of the Ch’in Dynasty.
The height of the Great Wall ranged from 15-50 feet.
Its’ effectiveness depended on the ability of nearby troops to defend it against roaming tribes, like the Huns.

Morgan Freeman (Azeem) and Kevin Costner (Robin Hood) on location in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. The 1991 movie was filmed near the 10% of Hadrian’s Wall that still remains.

Around 117-122 A.D., the 73-mile Hadrian’s Wall* was built to secure the Roman north-western border, as well as control commerce and immigration.
(The wall didn’t separate Britain from Scotland.)
This wall was about 20 feet high, had a walkway on top (patrolled by sentries), and also had a 30-foot ditch/fosse at its’ base.
Just the construction of the ditch/enforcement zone alone involved moving nearly 2 million yards of rock and earth, and the structure took around five years to build.
According to historical accounts, Hadrian actually helped design Hadrian’s Wall; Hadrian (unlike Trump) had design and construction knowledge.

President Ronald Reagan speaking in front of the Berlin Wall.

As to the U.S.-Mexico border barriers, before WWII, fences were built to keep cattle on their side of the border.
Beginning with the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, fences began to be built, specifically to keep Mexican people out.
As late as 1986, however, Ronald Reagan disparaged putting up more barriers and fences at the border, saying—during a debate with George H.W. Bush—that instead there should be more legal work permits for Mexicans.
Reagan did end up building more fences.
After Reagan’s administration, both Democratic and Republican administrations gradually added to barriers.
In addition, Presidents maintained the fences that were already there, just as President Biden is doing now.

During Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, he promised to build a concrete barrier between the U.S. and Mexico...which Mexico would pay for.
Potential voters seemed to like the “idea” of less immigration from Mexico, and ignored the wall’s impracticality.
What Trump, and his MAGA supporters, didn’t realize was that there were many good reasons why building a heavier barrier was not a good idea.
Chief among the reasons, was cost.
There’s also the difficulty that the Federal Government doesn’t own most of the land along the border.
Finally, there are all the problems that more and heavier barriers cause in terms of the ecosystem, animal habitats, and flooding.

Trump’s hostility toward Mexicans, and immigration, helped win him the White House.
Congress approved $1.375 billion for the wall in 2021, and a total of $15 billion was appropriated in total, some derived from Pentagon funds.
(President Biden was able to send $2.2 billion back to the Pentagon. He’d like to claw back more of the billions that have not yet been spent, but for that he’d need Congressional approval.)

According to a BBC News article—“Trump Wall: How Much Has He Actually Built” (Lucy Rodgers and Dominic Bailey, updated 10/31/2020)—there were 654 miles of barrier fence, between the U.S and Mexico, when Trump took office in 2016.
(354 miles were barricades and 300 miles were fencing.)
By 2020, there was 669 miles of primary barrier, a gain of only 15 miles, where there had been no barrier before.

Actually, the Trump “Wall” isn’t really a wall at all; it’s steel fencing (bollard) that you can see through.
(Better for the environment, and cheaper, too!)
However, Trump’s new fence can be cut through with power tools available at any hardware store.
(Read the Washington Post article: “Smugglers Are Sawing Through New Sections of Trump’s Border Wall.”)

In the end, the U.S. government paid for Trump’s fence.
The original estimated cost was $20 million per mile ($11 billion total).
However—between paying for steel and concrete, and paying for land—that number grew to as much as $46 million per mile, in some sections.
Is a steel fence really worth that much money, especially when it’s clearly ineffective?

According to U.S. News & World Report, (Claire Hansen, 2/7/2022) the 18- to 30-foot steel fencing is anchored in concrete, and some of the barriers feature sensors, lights, and even cameras.
Whether all cameras are being monitored, is unclear. 

What Trump’s fence has in common—with the Great Wall of China and Hadrian’s Wall—is that all three were very expensive, and require maintenance.
What they don’t have in common is that the Chinese wall, and the Roman wall, were adequately staffed with soldiers.
Without soldiers, or a monitoring system, no barrier fence (or wall) can keep people out.

While the Chinese and Roman governments had control of the land—where they built the Great Wall and Hadrian’s Wall—the Federal Government doesn’t own all the land where it would like to put up a fence.
The people who do own the land (private citizens, various nature preserves, and Native American tribes) have fought against building more barriers on their property.
(That’s one of the reasons why there was only a net gain of 15 miles.)

Besides attempting to build the “Trump Wall,” Trump’s minions did try to stem the immigration flow between the U.S. and Mexico by taking 472 administrative actions.
These actions mainly diminished humanitarian protections, however, and made the immigration system even more chaotic.

Recently, a new immigration bill was worked out by the Senate, and (likely) won’t even be considered by the House.
This bill contains a 70/30 blend of right-wing and progressive ideas designed to help solve the immigration crisis:

• Emergency powers would be invoked, if more than 5,000 people enter on a given day.
• People wouldn’t need to wait 180 days for a work permit; they’d receive a permit as soon as they passed a much higher initial screening.
• Unauthorized immigrants, once living in the U.S., would face a 13-year waiting period to become citizens.
• The administration would be allowed to immediately deport migrants (except unaccompanied minors) who don’t enter at official ports of entry.
• Up to 4,300 new asylum officers would be hired to work on asylum cases.

However, Trump, anti-immigration forces, and immigration advocates are all against this bill, so I guess it’s not worth talking about.

In 1984’s Moscow on the Hudson (filmed the Reagan administrations) Vladmir Ivanoff (Robin Williams) was a Russian defector, welcomed to live free in the Land of Opportunity.

The skyline of New York is on the left, and that of Moscow is on the right.

President Obama actually deported more immigrants during his administration than President Trump.
President Obama deported 3.2 million immigrants between 2009-2012, and another 2.2 million immigrants between 2012-2016.
Trump deported around 2 million immigrants.

Candidate Trump has promised that, if elected in 2024, he’d change his 2016-2020 pattern, and start a mass deportation plan.
If Trump uses political advisor Stephen Miller’s proposals, he’d do this—not through the courts—but by federalizing the National Guard.
I’m not sure where Trump is planning to obtain the lists of who is to be deported, or how people would be removed.
Would the deportees be loaded on airplanes, in buses, or in train/cattle cars?
But then, Trump has never been a “detail man.” He’s a “big picture” person.
That’s why his wall (or fence) plans failed.

*The historical data on the Chinese Great Wall, and Hadrian’s Wall, is taken from articles in the last printed 24-volume set (1997) of Collier’s Encyclopedia.

It’s a Puzzlement

I’ve been trying to figure out since 2016 why Americans would vote for Donald Trump.

In 1966’s The King and I, King Mongkut of Siam (Yul Brynner) is puzzled by teacher Anna Leonowens’ (Deborah Kerr) lessons about Western culture.

As King Mongkut says in the Hammerstein musical: “Is a puzzlement.”
I have a shelf of books on the Trump administration.
I still don’t fully understand why people would vote for Trump, a man who is far from admirable.

There are various reasons why Trump was elected via the electoral college in 2016, and why he actually received more popular votes in 2020, than he did in 2016.
This memorandum is an attempt to explain why people still support him.

One reason why Trump won the electoral college (but lost the popular vote) in 2016, is the old story of rural Republicans having more power in the electoral college than big-city Democrats.
American novelist Barbara Kingsolver discussed—in a 6/12/2023 Guardian article, by Lisa Allardice—how rural people have become so tired of being mocked by city people that they want to blow up the system! 

In 1975’s Crazy Mama, Melba (Cloris Leachman, in red), pretends to hold her mother, Sheba (Ann Southern, in blue) hostage, so they can rob a grocery store.

Melba, Sheba, and Cheryl Stokes (Linda Purl) try to regain the Stokes farm, and fight back against a cruel America in the 1950s.

Wanting to blow up the system, isn’t just a goal of the rural South.
Many Americans are frustrated with news organizations, higher education, and the U.S. government.
These Americans believe that these groups look down on them, and are setting unrealistic standards for how they should behave.
(MAGA people oddly equate those organizations with Leftists and the Democratic party.
That’s a stretch.)
Meanwhile, mediocre CEOs, top tier performers, and sports stars rake in millions, while workers make less in real terms, than we did in the 1970s.
To these angry voters, a vote for Trump isn’t merely a vote for him.
It’s an act of rebellion against an elitist system. 

In posters for the 1960’s comedy Kisses for My President, the husband, and “First Fellow” (Fred MacMurray)—of President Leslie McCloud (Polly Bergen)—wore a demeaning flowery hat.

Another reason for Trump “winning” in 2016, was the fact that Hillary Clinton is female.
Although Clinton did win the popular vote, she won despite some voters not seeing her as “presidential material.”
Some voters may not support President Joe Biden in 2024 because they don’t want Kamala Harris to become President (in case of Biden’s death).
If Nikki Haley were somehow able to become the Republican nominee, would these voters really vote for a Sikh-raised, now Christian, daughter of immigrant parents?
I don’t think so.
The prejudice against women having presidential power is still too deep. 

Some Americans fear more than Feminism.
They’re afraid that their way of life is being threatened.
I suppose that, from their perspectives, the current world doesn’t make sense.
They want to go back to the 1950s, when men were men and women were women, and white Anglo-Saxon Christians were unquestionably at the top of the food chain. 

Donald Trump (himself) gives directions to Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin, left) in 1992’s Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.

Director Chris Columbus says Trump “bullied” his way into the movie; Trump claims he was “begged to appear.”

In 2024, star Macaulay Culkin is one, of many, trying to remove this bit from the film.

A reason why people support Trump—even those who don’t like him personally—is because he’s promised “strong leadership” and maintaining “traditional” values (just as other Republicans have).
Trump doesn’t seem to have any values at all, except keeping himself solvent.
However, that vapidity allows people to maintain the illusion that his fuzzy values, somehow match theirs. 

There’s a culture war going on, and it’s heating up.
Each side considers the other side “mad” and unreasonable.
A few years back, big companies set up Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) departments.
Now, there’s a serious backlash against such departments, and Kentucky governmental officials are trying to outlaw them.
Many thousands of picture books were published on Black heroes, and containing LGBTQ stories.
Now, those books are being banned, along with dictionaries and encyclopedias (hated symbols of knowledge).
“Bad actors” are creating pornographic books, and convincing parents that these fake books are being used as textbooks in grade schools.
(The culture war is getting really ugly!)

I realize that people are tired of “the lesser of two evils” presidential elections, and pretending that previous U.S. Presidents weren’t flawed.
Presidents have made serious nationalistic errors during their administrations*—and distrust of government has been building.
This has resulted in isolationism, and those fears are being used by Trump. 

One factor is that—with so much confusing information available on the web—finding “the facts” has become difficult.
(See my 5/6/2023 memorandum “The Argument Over “Truth.”)
Believe it or not, people are going back to ideas like “the earth is flat,” and a literal belief in the Bible.
People are judging information by the source of the data—its’ side on the cultural divide—and only believing what they want to believe.
(After all, with computer-generated imagery and sound, anything can be faked.)

In 1971’s Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye (Topol) sings about not having to work hard, if he were rich.

Trump—the laziest President in U.S. history—spent 307 days golfing, the highest number for any US President, ever.

Another reason for Trump keeping his “fan base,” is the illusion that he’s a great businessman, and that he’ll run the country well.
Few realize that The Apprentice office was a stage set, and that Trump was a lazy CEO, interested mainly in selling his “brand.”
He was never as skilled at running the Trump Organization as his grandmother (who started Elizabeth Trump and Son), or even his father.
Besides that, the revolving door of Republicans who were fired, or forced out—during his administration—makes it clear that Trump was never a sound President.

Trump is a very “amusing” candidate, and that in itself may be enough to win support.
He mugs for the camera.
He hugs the U.S. flag.
Most of all, he’s conquered his phobia of shaking hands with strangers.
Trump’s rich man belief that he “owns the room” is very attractive to MAGA voters.
While most politicians are boring, part of being a con man is to be an entertainer.

George C. Scott played Mordecai Jones, in 1967’s Flim-Flam Man, known to British audiences as One Born Every Minute.

(N.Y. banker David Hannum said “There’s a sucker born every minute,” about a P.T. Barnum exhibit, but Barnum himself never said it.) 

One chapter in Aja Raden’s nonfiction book, The Truth About Lies, deals with the story of Gregor MacGregor (1786-1845).
MacGregor was a Scottish confidence man, who stole money from rubes—from Britain to Venezuela—for over 40 years.
Raden explains how the more deeply MacGregor’s victims were invested in his lies, the more stubbornly they insisted on believing in him.

I once planned a memorandum on why Trump would be a bad president again.
However, I’ve decided that it’s not worth my time.
Nearly every reason why Trump must not win election in 2024, is out there for all to see and hear.
Many follow him blindly, or (worse still) imagine that he’s somehow better than Joe Biden.
Instead, I’m planning memorandums on why the Republican 2017 tax changes wreaked havoc, why the Trump wall cost as much as $46 million per mile, and why we should all vote in 2024.

*For further information on “bad judgment calls” made by U.S. Presidents, read The Spy Masters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future, by Chris Whipple (Scribner, 2020) and Profusely Illustrated, by Edward Sorel (Alfred A. Knopt, 2021) a memoir that has 172 great illustrations!

Tobacco Wives and King’s Daughters

Buck Wyatt (Robert Taylor, right) and Roy Whitman (John McIntire, left) greet a room of  potential “mail order” brides in a Westward the Women lobby card. (The photos on the board show “picture grooms.”)

The story of how female immigrants made their way to America—and how single immigrant women learned about American ways, and found mates—has always interested me.
I know from my Italian family that sometimes women from the “old country” would travel to the Americas, to marry men they had never met (after very short courtships).
It may seem odd, but this is my Valentine’s Day memorandum.

For a woman to locate a man to marry on her own wasn’t the norm in human societies.
Worldwide, many marriages were arranged by parents, or by religious elders.
In the royal and aristocratic families of Europe, marriages were arranged to keep a select group of bloodlines in control.
However, generally couples saw each other—at least a few times—before they wed.

The DVD for America’s Last Little Italy: The Hill, a 2020 documentary on the St. Louis “Little Italy.”

The subject of the 2020 documentary America’s Last Little Italy: The Hill is the “Little Italy” in St. Louis, MO.
One story is that of “picture brides,” Italian maidens who immigrated to St. Louis to marry specific Italian men.
These arrangements were mainly made from the late 1800s through the early 1900s.
Usually, the women came from the same provinces (or villages) in Lombardy or Sicily, as their prospective bridegrooms.
(Other immigrant cultures, that used the “picture bride” idea, included Japan and Korea.)

When the Americas were settled by various European groups, there were many more men than women.
When you consider that so many women died in childbirth, this was a really big issue.
At first, there was intermarriage with Native Americans, but ruling groups found that to be problematic.
(It was felt that such marriages made the settlements less English, French, and Spanish.)
Governments, and private companies, didn’t want blended societies (European/indigenous) in the “New World.”
They desired societies that were mirror images of their own, back in Europe.
Thus, TPTB sought helpmates for the lonely men who farmed the land (and stole it from indigenous peoples) among the “less prosperous classes” of European women.

The Virginia Company (founded in 1606) was in charge of sections of the North American coast until 1624.
It recruited indentured servants, and “Tobacco Wives” (1620, Jamestown) as marriage partners for the settlers.
Later, the British government transported female convicts to the thirteen colonies (as indentured servants), many of whom also married farmers or started their own farms.
(Women were called “Tobacco Wives,” because sometimes the tobacco farmer husbands paid for their wives’ expenses in tobacco leaves.)

The French handled the issue in a more respectful manner than the British.
From 1663 to 1673, women were shipped to New France to marry French Canadian farmers. These women were called Filles du Roi (King’s Daughters), and many were orphans.
(Some women were as young as 16, but the average age was 24.)
Unlike the English bride program, which was done on the cheap, these women were given a trousseau that included a hope chest, a wardrobe of clothing, and sewing supplies.
Over 40% brought along a modest dowry for their new husbands, given by the French government.

In the early days of colonial America (if they weren’t indentured servants, or tobacco wives), nearly all women arrived with husbands.
Between 1900-1910 (according to Mark Wyman’s Round Trip to America), only 30% of all immigrants were women, a big share to work as house servants, factory women, housewives, and shop girls.
The female to male ratio was higher than 30% for some countries (like Austria and Hungary), and as low as 95.7% male to 4.3% female for Serbs and Bulgarians.
(Workers from Serbia and Bulgaria usually didn’t bring wives, or marry here; they tended to go back to their home countries, after they’d earned a nest egg.)

Potential Chinese female immigrants were treated much worse than European women.
As Reese Jones describes in his book White Borders,* government officials assumed they were prostitutes.
The Page Act of 1875 (the first U.S. restrictive immigration law) focused on Chinese women as “as vectors of disease, as agents of moral decline, and of literally diluting the white race through pregnancy and mixed-race children.”
As a result, Chinese women were asked to prove that they weren’t prostitutes with “intrusive interviews and embarrassing medical examinations.”

One of my favorite films on mail-order brides, is 1951’s Westward the Women.
In it, an Italian widow with a young son, and a “fancy woman” who works in saloons—Mrs. Moroni (Renata Vanni) and Fifi Danon (Paris-born Denice Darcel)—represent immigrant women who traveled to the American West.
Mrs. Moroni speaks little English and Mr. Moroni likely died soon after the family arrived in America.
Miss Fifi Danon worked, so she’s fluent in English.

In Westward the Women, Italian widow Mrs. Moroni (Renata Vanni), and her son, are interviewed by Roy Whitman (John McIntire), the man in charge of a “mail-order” bride wagon train to California.

In Westward the Women, Mrs. Moroni and Miss Danon are two of 138 women journeying (from Chicago) to become brides in a remote area of California.
Farmer Roy Whitman (John McIntire) and cowboy Buck Wyatt (Robert Taylor) organize a wagon train to bring the brides to Whitman’s town—a town filled with lonely cowboys, farmers, and storekeepers.
The movie seems loosely based on the successful Benton brother trip from Maryland to Oregon, and the not-as-successful Asa Mercer expeditions (1864-1866) from Boston to Seattle.

Poster for Zandy’s Bride, with Hannah Lund (Liv Ullmann) and Zandy Allen (Gene Hackman).

The fractured glass in the picture frame is symbolic of their relationship.

Another favorite movie on women marrying “strange men” is 1974’s Zandy’s Bride.
In this frontier drama—set in 1890s Big Sur Country—Hannah Lund (Liv Ullmann) is a mail-order bride (originally from Sweden), and Gene Hackman is Zandy Allan, her socially-inept, misogynist bridegroom.
This Western was based on the novel The Stranger, by Lillian Bos Ross.
It’s interesting that Zandy sends for a Swedish bride, when there’s a Latina (Maria Cordova, played by non-Latina Susan Tyrrell) who’s eager to marry him.

Photo from Westward the Women, with Patience Hawley (Hope Emerson, the tallest woman)—and the rest of the women—looking at their “picture groom” photos, before the combination square dance/ wedding reception.

Westward the Women ends just after the surviving women meet (and marry) the men.
Even rough cowboy Buck Wyatt (Robert Taylor) ends up “getting hitched,” although he never intended to find a wife in Fifi Danon (Denice Darcel).
There’s no bride, however, for Ito Kentaro (Korean War veteran, Henry Nakamura).
The role of an Asian cowboy was played mainly for comic relief.
On the other hand, Zandy’s Bride, begins a little before the wedding between Liv and Zandy, and its’ subject is how the bride and groom get on after they’re wed.

In Westward the Women, the men are grateful to find brave women willing to join them in matrimony, but we never learn how all their stories work out.
In Zandy’s Bride, however, it takes at least a year—and a little distance—for Zandy to recognize the true worth of his mail-order bride. 

According to “Coming to America: The War Brides Act of 1945”—on the National WWII Museum website—over 60,000 foreign women wed American servicemen during WWII.
These women had little time to really get to know their new husbands, but they were determined to join them in the U.S. anyway.
U.S. immigration laws stood in their way.
Congress passed the War Brides Act of 1945, and under this law eventually 300,000 women, plus dependents, were admitted by 1948.

Panel from the “Korean War Bride” tale from All True Romance #11 (1953).

To read the entire story, click HERE.

After the Korean War, more than 6,000 Korean women married American soldiers and immigrated to the U.S.
Besides the difficulties of adjusting to a new and strange culture, these women also faced discrimination, and the ridiculous stereotype that Asian women are docile, weak, and sexually available.

Obtaining an immigrant bride is still a thriving business.
Women greatly outnumber men in countries like Russia, El Salvador, and Guadeloupe, and so women in those lands have been open to becoming mail-order brides.
Some women, from poorer countries, travel to the U.S. to find rich husbands.
(It’s the fodder of reality TV shows like 90-Day Fiancé.)
American men have married foreign women, hoping they’ll make more “traditional” wives than “spoiled” American women.
Did Trump—and his father and grandfather—marry Europeans because they were frightened of American women, or did they believe American women inferior?
(All three generations married European women who needed to become citizens; Donald Trump married two.)

*White Borders, by Reese Jones, Beacon Press, 2021.

Wealth and Cultural Identity

A representation of Metacomet, Metacom or King Philip (as he was variously known), as drawn by Paul Revere.

In her book, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, Jill Lepore explains the roots and aftermath of King Philip’s War (1675-1676) in which thousands of Native Americans, and Puritans, died—men, women, and children.
In the aftermath part, she explains how famous American actor, Edwin Forrest, won great success (in 1829) with a play he had commissioned: Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags.

The play, Metamora, is the story of a noble Native American chief driven to war by English treachery.
Rapturous audiences applauded the defiant words of a long-dead First American.
Oddly enough, this play was performed during the same era when President Andrew Jackson put through the Indian Removal Act of 1830!
(This notorious Act forced more than 60,000 people to be moved to the other side of the Mississippi River, in a “Trail of Tears.”
(Thousands of Native Americans died along the way, or soon after arriving in Kansas and Oklahoma.)

Nathaniel Currier (of Currier and Ives) representation of Edwin Forrest as Metamora in the play Metamora, the Last of the Wampanoags.

In Act Two of the play, Metamora proclaims:

White man, beware! The mighty spirit of the Wampanoag race are hovering o’er our heads; they stretch out their shadowy arms to me and ask for vengeance; they shall have it. . . From the east to the west, in the north and in the south shall cry of vengeance burst, till the lands you have stolen groan under your feet no more!

What is it that made English-Americans applaud as a white actor bellowed out these words?
What is it, that made Americans alternately praise the beauty and power of Native American cultures, and then commit genocide against them?
That’s the issue that Jill Lepore deals with.

A representation of Massasoit (also known as Ousamequin) with his warriors. Massasoit was the father of Metacomet (King Philip).

Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags was loosely based on the life of King Philip (1638-1676, also known as Metacomet/Metacom), chief of the Wampanoags.
(The Wampanoags, or People of the First Light, lived in Cape Cod, and the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.)
Philip was the second son of Ousamequin/Massasoit—the same chief/sachem who saved the Pilgrims in the first Thanksgiving (1621)—and he succeeded his father in 1662, after his elder brother died.

By the end of the war (as discussed in The Name of War), half of New England towns were reduced to ashes.
Many Christian indigenous people (who had assimilated and were living on their farms) were transported to island prison camps, left to starve and to die.
After King Philip was killed—and his head hung in the center of Plymouth, Massachusetts—the brief war ended.
Hundreds of indigenous noncombatants were sent into slavery—to the West Indies, and possibly North Africa—alongside the wives and children of known combatants.
(The slave money—from selling Native Americans—helped rebuild after the war.)

King Philip was blamed for uniting with the Narragansett tribes, and for starting the war.
Purportedly, the war began after three Wampanoag men were tried, and hanged, for killing John Sassamon—a Christian, Harvard-educated indigenous man—who was both a schoolmaster and a minister.
(Supposedly, King Philip was angry because Sassamon had informed the English that Philip was planning a war.)
Native American leaders, however, were becoming very tired of Englishmen both taking their lands, and trying to convert them to the British way of life.
The Wampanoags and the Narragansetts attacked various New England towns, and (after more than a half century of peace) the Puritans had a full-scale war on their hands.

A representation of King Philip negotiating with the Pilgrims.

A major point in The Name of War is that the war came at a time when Puritan religious leaders were concerned that living close to indigenous peoples was making white Americans “less civilized” and “less English.”
Lepore notes:

Building a “city on a hill” in the American wilderness provides a powerful religious rationale, but on certain days. . .it must have fallen short of making perfect sense. When the corn wouldn’t grow, when the weather turned wild, these are the times when the colonists might have wondered, What are we doing here? . . . as many as one in six sailed home to England in the 1630s and 1640s, eager to return to a world they knew and understood.

While some religious leaders—like Baptist Roger Williams and Puritan John Eliot (creator of the “Indian Bible”)—were intent on Native Americans converting and assimilating, other leaders wanted the First Americans to live in separate villages, if they lived at all.
At the same time, many leaders like King Philip never became Christians, and decided that the only path to keeping their freedom, was to fight back.

Mingo (Ed Ames, left) with Jeremiah (Jimmy Dean, right) in “The Imposter” (season 4, episode 16) of Daniel Boone.

Mingo and Jeremiah were pretending to be British officers, so as to steal experimental rifles for the Revolutionary War. (Mingo attributed his darker skin to sea adventures.)

The TV series Daniel Boone starred Fess Parker in the title role, and aired from 1964-1970.
(Daniel Boone lived from 1734 until 1820, and so he lived about 100 years after King Phillip.)
Non-indigenous Ed Ames played Boone’s Oxford-educated, half-Cherokee friend, Mingo, for 72 out of the 165 one-hour episodes.
Ed Ames’ parents were immigrants from what is now Ukraine.

Mingo was not a real historical figure.
However, he reminds me somewhat of John Sassamon (mentioned above)—a Harvard-educated Algonquian, raised to be Christian by his Native American parents.
John Sassamon, like Mingo, lived on both sides of the cultural divide.

“Mingo” was short for “Caramingo,” and his English father was the fourth Earl of Dunmore.
From the Native American perspective, “mingo” is a word for “chief” in the Choctaw language.
Besides John Sassamon, Mingo’s character also resembles Joseph Brant—a Mohawk, who was a captain in the British Army—and was educated at Moore’s Indian Charity School (the precursor to Dartmouth College). 

Other members of the large Daniel Boone cast were “Rosey” Roosevelt Grier and Jimmy Dean.
Former football star “Rosey” Grier played escaped slave, Gabe Cooper, for 16 episodes.
Singer and actor, Jimmy Dean, (whose voice we hear in sausage commercials) played three different frontiersmen (including Jeremiah) in 15 episodes.
Reviewers have criticized the series for not being historically accurate, pointing out that Boone never wore a coonskin hat.
(The real Boone preferred more-elegant felt hats to hunting hats.)

Last panels from “The Murderers’ Cave,” a Gold Key Fess Parker: Daniel Boone comic book (#2, 1965).

(You can read the entire story HERE!)

Mingo is accused of crimes in Daniel Boone TV episodes like “My Brother’s Keeper” (season 1, episode 3), and “A Rope for Mingo,” (season 2, episode 11).
However, the story drawn in the comic book “The Murderers’ Cave” never aired.
In this story, Mingo is accused of murder by two disreputable white men, but their word is believed over Mingo’s, because he’s only a savage.
By the end of the trial, Daniel Boone says; “You are free now, Mingo! But you understand, they have to enforce the law . . .” and Mingo responds: “I understand, Daniel . . . but my people can never be free under such laws!”
(Was the dialogue “too liberal” for the times?
Is that why this particular script never aired?) 

Nearly 350 years later, we (in the U.S.) are in a similar position to the New England indigenous tribes versus the New England Puritans during King Philip’s War.
On one side, about half of us want to live in a melting pot—with all of us having our different religions, and our different identities—but trying not to step on one another’s toes.
On the other hand, about half of us want to be “Englishmen,” with an out of proportion attachment to material possessions.*

*Jill Lepore notes, in The Name of War, that Native Americans rejected “the English conflation of property and identity, saying: We have nothing but our lives to loose [lose] but thou hast many fair houses cattell [cattle] & much good things.” (Italics and bold face mine.)