That which has and will continue to make America great

I spent this Labor Day weekend sifting through a treasure trove of documents and records on Ancestry.com. I have been thinking about 2018 in the context of bygone eras and the continuous, inevitable march of human migration throughout history, and I wanted to understand more about what caused my ancestors to migrate to America when they did. I knew where some of them came from, but not exactly when they came, and certainly not why they came. But this weekend, through the miracles of the internet, I was able to fill in a surprisingly huge chunk of my ancestral past. What I found is, in my opinion, too compelling of a story not to share
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The biggest surprise was that, before they came to America, my ancestors were not just “German” and “Swedish” and “Irish”. Before they came to America, the majority of my ancestors were starving or persecuted and came from impoverished or war-torn places. Here’s a list of circumstances that I now know different branches of my family tree were fleeing when they left Europe:
- Poverty in Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late 19th century (my mother’s mother’s father’s family)
- The Swedish Famine of 1866–1868 (my mother’s father’s mother’s family)
- Famine among the Volga Germans and persecution by the Russian Empire in the early 20th century (my mother’s father’s father’s family)
- Persecution of the Poles in the late 19th century by the German Empire (my father’s mother’s mother’s family)
- The Franco-Prussian War of 1871 (my father’s father’s father’s mother’s family)
- The Great Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s (waaaaay back on my father’s side)
I am sitting here today because, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, lowly peasants from the “shithole countries” of Europe heard about a wonderful land where they and their families could live happy and prosperous and free lives.
America was great then because it was a place that treated people like my ancestors with dignity, opportunity, and equality before the law. America and its institutions worked for them. They were allowed to pass through Ellis Island, given “welfare” in the form of free land in the Midwest via the Homestead Act, and were defended by the Constitution and the rule of law, allowing them to secure the blessings of liberty for themselves and their posterity.
Now, this was all well and good for my ancestors because they were white. If my ancestors had been trying to come to America from somewhere other than Europe at the turn of the 20th century, they would have had an even rougher time of it. In short, by the beginning of the 1900s, America had become a shining beacon of liberty and opportunity if you were a white man.
Since then, in my opinion, America’s greatness has come from its strides to extend the reach of its institutions and opportunity to cover more than just white men. From the 19th Amendment to the Civil Rights Act to Obergefell v. Hodges, the American citizenry has worked tirelessly to keep what works in our institutions and throw out what doesn’t. All the while, we strive to strengthen these institutions, using them to extend the reach of liberty, opportunity, and equality to everyone who resides here.
A mark of America’s greatness moving forward will be how far it continues to push the light of liberty to stamp out the darkness of hatred and persecution.
A mark of America’s greatness moving forward will be how many more generations of its people, whether born here or abroad, it raises out of poverty.
A mark of America’s greatness moving forward will be how many distraught people of all walks of life are able to find peace and love in our lands.
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One of the genetic traits I inherited from my ancestors is the tendency to cry when I read something especially hopeful and patriotic. Today my eyes got especially wet as I read again the words inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty, picturing my great-grandfather catching sight of her in New York Harbor onboard the steamer President Lincoln in the spring of 1912:
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!”
