Poles

by

The Great Bread and Roses Strike of 1912 — Part 1


What follows is the true story of labor unrest in the city of Lawrence Massachusetts in 1912.  In the history of the United States, before or since, this is the largest strike to effect any single city.  But out of it came many of the long overdue changes needed for working men and women.  The improbability of success for this strike was extremely high and that it would last 62 days was unheard-of.  If on January 1 1912 you had asked anyone could a strike not only go on for 62 days but end in success, you would have been roundly laughed at.  It was considered impossible, even by labor leaders.  But this strike got the attention of the nation, and possibly even more importantly, it got the Republican President of the United States, William Howard Taft, a friend to management, to summon a house committee to investigate the strike while it was in progress!

To tell this story in one sitting is too much.  I am breaking it up into many parts and will endeavor to keep both detail and interest high.  The protagonist in this story, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), won the day but lost in the long run while the antagonist, the American Federation of Labor, lost the day but won in the long run.   And the mill owners, well, they won even in losing as is often the case even today.

 

Lawrence Massachusetts was born from portions of two other towns, Methuen and Andover. It had been proposed that a showcase manufacturing city be built on the banks of the Merrimack River. Each town gave up a little over 3 square miles of land towards that dream. As a consequence, one more new town was created as Andover split in 1853 into two parts, Andover and North Andover, each having its own government.

The financing came from a group of Boston Bankers who had observed the huge success Lawrence’s sister city, Lowell, had been just 20 years prior. Its mills were large and bustling and bringing a tidy profit to owners and shareholders alike.

By 1900 Lawrence was Lowell’s equal in the manufacture of textiles. And to insure a constant power source, the founders of Lawrence had built a dam on the Merrimack river from which two canals were built to bring water to the new mills. The water was needed for the large steam turbines that powered each of the mills.

It was around 1900 when the make-up of the two cities diverged a bit. Lawrence became a magnet city for large numbers of America’s new immigrant groups, Italians and Poles making up the bulk. But there were also Armenians, Russians, and Syrians. The Italian immigrants are a curious anomaly for Lawrence. While both Lawrence and Lowell were attracting large number of these new immigrants, the vast majority of Italians chose Lawrence over Lowell. I have not been able to discover a reason for this except that it is known that William Wood, president and owner of the American Woolen Company, a conglomerate of over a dozen mills, sent men to Italy where posters were put up claiming that any who wished to emigrate to America would share in its riches. Wood vociferously denied this because to have done so would have broken American law. But there was no shortage of immigrants who claimed to have come to Lawrence because of his posters.

This group of immigrants, starting around 1900, are known as the “new immigrants.” The “old immigrants” included the Irish, Germans, Welch, Belgians, and French Canadians. They had held all the positions in Lawrence mills until 1900. Wood at the time was building two new mills, the Ayer Mill and the Wood Mill. The latter is the largest single mill enclosure ever built in America. But the labor pool available to fill these new mills was quite short hence Wood’s decision to entice new immigrants.

Wood really did not need to entice the Italians; they would have come anyway. The European economy of the early 20th Century was very weak. In southeastern Europe, the Balkans, Greece, and Turkey, the old Ottoman Empire was beginning to crumble but it was not going quietly. It was during this period the Turks declared war on Armenia and set about to obliterate it with one of the worst genocides ever.

In Eastern Europe the Russian Empire was also beginning to fall apart. The Czar had set about ridding Russia of its Jews by a series of Pogroms. The ploy was to unceremoniously push the Jews from where they had been living westward with the idea that they would tire of being constantly uprooted and leave the continent entirely. And to a small degree that worked.

Until 1907 Russia ruled over half of Poland. It was there that Russia pushed many of its Jews. But it also imposed its tyranny on the native Poles by requiring military service from its young men. This, of course, did not sit well with the Polish people and rather than fight the mighty czar, many chose to leave for the New World.

By 1912, Lawrence’s population was close to 90,000, an incredible number considering the city was barely 60 years old. The major of its population was either new immigrant or first generation immigrant. Because of this it gained the nickname “immigrant city.” But unlike other cities that attracted large numbers of immigrants, New York and Chicago, Lawrence was not divided into ethnic neighborhoods. For example, the first block moving away from the large Everett Mill had a large number of Italians and Poles with a few Syrians, French and English mixed in. This is not to say Lawrence had no ethnic neighborhoods, it did. The Germans settled an area known as Prospect Hill. The French and Irish had neighborhoods in South Lawrence. But considering Lawrence had claim to at least 15 large ethnic groups, those exceptions are the outliers.

Social unrest in Lawrence started, at the latest, in 1910. It was, however, part of a greater unrest going on in all of Massachusetts. The average mill worker in 1910 was required to work a 58-hour week, 10 hours a day Monday through Friday and 8 on Saturday. It is important to note that this was true for both skilled and unskilled labor. It was the skilled labor that petitioned for, and was granted, a shorter work week when the Massachusetts legislature passed a law reducing the work week to 56 hours which took effect in 1910. In 1911 it changed that law and reduced the work week to 54 hours starting January 1, 1912. It is that point this story begins.

Prior to 1912 unions nationwide were weak even though a number, but mostly the coal miners, conducted large scale strikes. But strikes seldom ended in a win for the working man. Mill and mine owners alike used the tack of hiring new workers to replace the striking workers. Such moves sometimes resulted in riots as in the Pullman Strike and the Johnstown strike. Lesser strikes were frequent in the western coal fields of Wyoming and Colorado but out of them came a man who would greatly influence the Lawrence strike of 1912. He was known as William “Big Bill” Haywood and he represented first the Western Miners Union and later the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The latter was ill-received by Americans because of its socialist doctrine and its affiliation with known anarchists and other “trouble makers,” as they were called.

Extremely poor working conditions in the textile and garment industry was well-documented. Just a year earlier in New York City, March 1911, a disaster known as the Triangle Shirtwaist fire caused the death of 146 garment workers, mostly women, many who jumped to their death or were burned alive. The factory owner did not want the women sneaking out so he had ordered exit doors chained and locked during normal working hours. Their escape routes blocked, the women had to rely on a small and slow elevator. The fire horrified New Yorkers and reforms were called for, some were even enacted, but state legislatures in those days held little empathy for the average mill worker. The reason being a simple one, their election often times relied upon the largess of the mill owners.

In June of 1911, and possibly foretelling a strike, a member of the I.W.W., probably Joseph Ettor, came to Lawrence with the expressed job of recruiting workers into the IWW. Ettor would play a prominent role later on in the strike. The only other union in Lawrence at the time was the Textile Workers Union, a branch of the larger American Federation of Labor (AFL). The TWU membership was entirely made up of skilled labor as was in keeping with AFL doctrine of the day. But the majority of mill workers fell into the category of unskilled labor. Conversely, the IWW had no such restriction and welcomed all comers, skilled and unskilled, into what it called “one big tent.” But to be a union member you had to pay dues and therein lay the problem for the IWW. The group it most ardently wished to represent could not even afford the meager one dollar dues as the worker was already living on starvation wages where pennies were counted. The total membership of the IWW prior to, during, and after the strike never exceeded 900. There were close to 35,000 mill operatives in Lawrence at the time.

January 11, 1912, a Thursday, the residents of Lawrence awoke to a bone chilling 10-degree morning. For many breakfasted consisted of molasses spread over bread. With the exception of the Arlington Mill, all of Lawrence’s mills were clustered along the Merrimack river and an easy walk for the operatives who filled them. Notwithstanding the literal chill in the air, there was also a great deal of tension. On that day the first pay envelopes of the new year were passed out and with them the operatives would find out if their wages had been cut because of the new 56-hour rule. No one knew for certain what would happen if the wages were reduced. Strike committees had been set up but no plan of action had been put forth.

The mill owners felt confident that the operatives would not strike simply because they knew the operatives were already living on the edge and could ill-afford to lose any income and put their welfare in jeopardy. But they also felt that if the mill operatives did strike they, the owners, could simply wait them out. This tack had been quite successful in well over 75% of all previous strikes in Massachusetts going back years. Mill owners refused to meet with strikers and hear their demands and usually within a week the workers returned to their position having won nothing. This is where the owners got their confidence.

What the mill owners of Lawrence failed to recognize on that fateful day in January was just how desperate the condition of their operatives was. It is well documented that a full third of all new immigrants who came to Lawrence to work the mills found the poverty of their native land more inviting than the poverty of Lawrence and therefor they returned home. For those who could not go back there was a feeling of “nothing to lose” by going on strike.

Sometime around 11AM in the giant Everett Mill the paymaster walked through the various departments handing out pay envelopes. When he reached one particular room, a Polish woman whose name is lost to history, shouted out “short pay! Short pay!” She promptly left her position and engaged others to do the same. They did. The moved from the third floor, to the second, to the first, gaining followers as they went. They marched out onto the street, Union Street, turned left and headed down towards the other mills, the first being the Duck Mill on their right and the Kunhardt mill on their left.

As they reached the mills numbers of the new strikers stormed through the entrances to these mills and called to their fellows to follow them into strike. They proclaimed that the worst had happened and their action was necessary.

Next they crossed the Merrimack River to the Ayer Mill on their right and the giant Wood Mill on their left where they repeated their actions and gained supporters. At the same time, a splint group from the original had turned right, just before the Duck Mill and marched down Canal Street to the Pemberton, Washington and Pacific Mills. By day’s end thousands of mill operatives were on strike. This was an unforeseen eventuality by the mill owners.

 

by

The Many Faces of Racism in the 1960s


I grew up in the town of North Andover Massachusetts.  North Andover is a small town some 25 miles north of Boston, and borders the cities of Lawrence and Haverhill.  North Andover in the 1950s and 1960s was a quiet town, a town whose history was steeped in the revolution, and which had its share of Massachusetts blue bloods.  Still, it was a mostly middle class town, a small number of wealthy families and a small number of poor families.  It had in those years only just begun to inherit the 2nd generation immigrants from Lawrence, mostly Italians and Poles.  They were the children of new immigrants who had escaped the textile mills of Lawrence and its tenements to the single family homes of North Andover.  A few still worked the mills, one of which, Stevens Mill, was a textile mill located in North Andover.

In the 1950s North Andover still had a handful of working farms, several of which were cow farms, and one turkey farm.  For that, the residents of neighboring Andover derisively nicknamed North Andover “Turkey Town.”  Andover was home to the elite Phillips Academy which had produced presidents, senators, and many wealthy businessmen.  Andoverites never missed a chance to assure the people of North Andover that they lived in a town that was something less than Andover, a poor relation. It didn’t affect us in the least.

The part of town I grew up in, known as the “old centre,” was mostly made up of upper middle class families.  It was not an area where, for the most part, young families lived unless you were part of the town’s old families which we were.  Our house was one of the homes which lined the town common, a large and old green area situated next to the North Parish Church, the first church of old Andover, and founded in 1646.  All the original families of the town belonged to the North Parish Church, and my family was one such, although that was only my father as my mother was Roman Catholic.  Things were changing.  The picture below is of the North Parish Church as seen from the common.

north parish

We were sheltered from the greater world.  The city of Lawrence, with its many ethnic neighborhoods, had a very stable population whose newest members were from Puerto Rico, a sign of things to come but not anything anyone took any particular note of.  If there were black families in Lawrence, I never saw them and was entirely unaware of them.  The first black man I ever set eyes on came in my sophomore year at North Andover High School, 1963, and he was an exchange student the North Parish Church had brought from Africa.  He was the last black person I knew prior to my going to school in New Jersey in September 1965.  Even my trips to Boston with my father on his business trips did not impress upon me the presence of the black population that lived there.  And that’s how it was.

Although there was some joking about a person’s ethnic background, none of that was ever taken seriously.  No one seemed to truly care what a person’s ethnic background was.  If there was bigotry in the town, it was well hidden.  We did not learn, nor was anyone trying to teach us, any sort of racial or ethnic bias.  Maybe things would have been different if there were some black families living in the town, but there were not.

My family was what was referred to as being “land poor.”  It meant we owned lots of land but did not have much money to go with it.  I never wanted for anything but I never got an allowance.  I did not even know such a thing existed, quite honestly, so asking for an allowance was alien to me.  It was expected that I would mow the lawn, rake the leaves, and take out the trash, and shovel snow in the winter, all without compensation of any sort.  I actually enjoyed and took pride in such chores, and so I always did them willingly. It was what was expected of me, and I thought that was a common thing that members of any family were expected to do.  Then one day, I was not more than 6 or 7 years old, the boy who lived next door said we could earn 25 cents if we shoveled this lady’s driveway.  I had never heard of such a thing!  Earn money for shoveling snow, incredible.  That was my introduction to earning money, and from then on I was always thinking of ways to earn money.  Her driveway was less than a third in length of my own driveway which made the job all the more desirable.

In my late adolescent years I had a paper route.  I delivered the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune to some 60 customers.  The price of the paper was 7 cents a day, and 42 cent the week.   Strangely, getting a tip meant the customer gave me 50 cents a week.  But who gave me such a tip was inversely proportional to their income.  The rich waited at the door for their 8 cents change after giving me 50 cents, while the poorer customers never thought to do such a thing.  I also managed a burgeoning lawn mowing business around the neighborhood.  My main customer was the same lady who wanted her driveway shoveled in the winter.  I could get all of 2 dollars for a simple mowing!  I never wanted for money and always had enough to go to the movies in Lawrence at the Palace and Warner movie houses, theaters of the old single screen variety, now long gone.

When I turned 14 I somehow learned of a summer job at Calzetta’s Farm.  It was regular work with a regular wage.  My lawn mowing business was a bit irregular, some of my customers given to occasionally mowing their own lawns in spite of my services offered.  The farm job required my presence from 8 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon, five days a week for the handsome sum of $15 a week.  I thought I was rich! In the early summer we picked strawberries, weeded the fields, and did whatever the farmers, the brothers Tom and John Calzetta, demanded of us.  Two other young workers, both from the Essex Agricultural Institute, worked with me.  Farm work then, as now, did not suffer a minimum wage requirement, hence the acceptable level of pay we received.  As the name shows, the Calzettas were Italian immigrants, though Tommy and John were second generation.  But everyone regardless of age who lived on the farm, worked on the farm.  The 80 year-old grandmother, dressed in her black mourning garments, worked the 90 degree fields the entire day with the rest of us.  It was hard and dirty work, and when I got home I always had to take a bath.  I worked that farm for two summers, my second I received the wage of $25 a week, I knew I was at the top of my field!  The thought, however, that I was possibly underpaid never once crossed my mind.  I always had money in my pocket and that was what was truly important to me.

The next summer, after I had turned 16, I did not want to go back to work on the farm.  It was too much work!  There was a man, a wealthy man we all knew, who lived in a new house on the common not far from my house.  It was the only modern design house, a ranch, which was ever allowed to be so constructed around the otherwise colonial area around the common.  I knew he owned a mill in Lawrence, and so I literally knocked on his door one evening and asked for a job in his mill.  I do not remember how the conversation went, but he told me to meet him the next morning at 6:30 and he would take me to the mill.

His name was Segal and the mill he owned was known as Service Heel Company, maker of heels for women’s shoes.  That morning was the last time I ever saw Mr. Segal.  He took me to the mill’s office and directed someone to give me a job, after which he disappeared into his own office.  This was the beginning of a most important part of my education, unbeknownst to me of course.  After that morning, I caught the city bus, which stopped right next to Mr. Segal’s house, each morning, lunch bag in hand and ready, more or less, for the day ahead.  My pay was the minimum wage for 1966, $1.25 an hour.  That was $10 a day and $50 a week.  I had doubled my income over the previous summer!  But I was warned, upon taking the job, that I had to be on time which meant being clocked-in by getting my time card stamped by 7AM, otherwise I would be docked 6 minutes if I were even 1 minute late.  I was paid entirely according to my time card.  And if I were late, I could not make up that time at the other end of the day without permission, and such permission was never given.  The picture below is of the mill I worked in.  In the foreground is where the Puerto Ricans worked, and in the background was where I worked.  Although it is not obvious, these two structures were not connected.

kunhardt kunhardt

Service Heel Company was located in the old George F. Kunhardt textile factory.  By 1966 the once booming textile industry had entirely abandoned Lawrence, and a considerably smaller shoe industry had taken its place.  Still, at the time, Lawrence was second only to St. Louis in the production of shoes.  But that did not last.  Most of Lawrence’s vast textile mills stood vacant, relics of a bygone era.  The textile jobs had left but the people had not.  Many of the workers at the heel company had previously worked the textile mill at that very location.  One woman related to me that she had worked in that mill for over 35 years doing piece work the entire time.  At the time, piece work was exempt from the minimum wage.  I could not imagine sitting in such a place for so long a time doing basically the same job for all those years.  But she never complained.  To the contrary, she, and most of her fellow employees, always seemed grateful for the work they had.  There was not any sense of entitlement among these people.  Below is a picture of some of the textile mills of Lawrence.

lawrenceWood Worsted Mills Lawrence

In 1966, the Lawrence mills were segregated, not between black and white, for as I said there was no black population, but between Hispanic and everyone else.  That fact was brought to my attention by the foreman, a very large and smelly man named Tony, who took me to the far side of the mill and pointing to the mill next door said, “that’s where the spics work.  You don’t have anything to do with them.”  He was referring to the Hispanics who worked that mill.  And his statement, rather than being a suggestion, came across as a command.  But I knew in my heart that there was something inherently wrong with his statement, although I doubt I could have explained why I felt that way.  The heel workers were almost entirely of French and Italian ancestry, and as such, were the old immigrants as opposed to the new immigrant from Puerto Rico.  But my experiences in Lawrence at that time never included any feelings of fear or animosity towards the Puerto Ricans aside from what Tony had pronounced.  But I did not challenge his belief either, after all, he was my boss and in charge of my continued employment.

I was a “floor boy” in the mill.  I was indoctrinated into the erstwhile sweatshop.  No air conditioning, no break room, no fans, no drinking fountain, only the steady clanging of machines and the smell of paint and glue as was applied to the heels.  The heels were placed by their type into wooden boxes, about a bushel in size.  It was my job to move the boxes from where they were “made up,” that is, the box had a particular type of heel put in them, to the proper station of the worker who would either cover the heel with leather, paint the heel, or press a nail into the heel.  Each job had a color coded ticket in it to signal when it was due to be finished.  I caught hell any time I moved the boxes in the wrong order or took them to the wrong station.  It was only Tony who gave me hell, as the worker at the station involved was inclined to giving me a friendly nudge to say I had messed up, but that I should not worry.  These were the people who were rightfully referred to as “the salt of the earth.”  They were kind hard-working people who you ate lunch with, got to know, and counted on to help you along.  They were union people who warned me that at the end of working 90 days at the mill I would have to join the union, but the cautioned me against that, not because they disliked the union, but because they knew I was still in school and wanted me to continue my schooling so I would not end up where they were.  But it was this very sort of worker who moved his family to North Andover to help their children get a chance at a better life.

The next summer I worked for the Raytheon Company at its facility in Shawsheen Massachusetts, its “missile systems division.”  I got that job because my best friend’s father worked there and said he could get me some sort of job working there.  I was a “clerk” whose main job was finding and filing schematics for the technicians and engineers who worked in the department.  I found out that summer two thing, first, I received 10 cents an hour more than a woman who held the exact same job and started exactly when I did.  I got that 10 cents because I was a man.  I also first heard the word “scab” as it was used to connote someone who crossed a picket line during a strike.  At the end of the summer Raytheon offered to pay for my college education if I remained there and took up a career in electronics.  But the job had left a bad taste in my mouth and I turned them down.  I had tasted gender discrimination and knew I did not like it.  I also acquired a negative feeling for unions, but that was due to my ignorance, and was something I later replaced with knowledge and a healthy respect for unions and their membership.  Below is a picture of the old Raytheon Mills in Shawsheen.  These mills were a part of a failed textile mill experiment.

raytheon

That fall I entered Boston University, where I did incredibly poorly, and dropped out shortly before the end of the semester in December 1967.  I took a job pumping gas at a local chain gasoline dealer, pumping Texaco in North Andover, Andover, and Lawrence.  But that job I knew to be temporary as I had my sights set on going to the US Army’s aviation school.  And on February 19, 1968 I was sworn into the US Army and on the following day flown to Ft. Polk Louisiana.  Still, the job gave me work experience in yet another area.  In those days there was no such thing as pump your own gas, and almost every service station pumped your gas, cleaned your windshield, and checked your engine’s oil level.  Regular gasoline ranged from 28 to 32 cents a gallon in those days, oil was 40 to 50 cents a quart.

I had never been out of the northeast prior to going to Ft. Polk, and I was in for an education unlike any I had thus far known.  My last two years of high school were spent in Bordentown New Jersey where a number of my classmates were black or Hispanic.  But because of my father, my upbringing in his Unitarian culture, it never occurred to me that their heritage mattered.  We were just guys who were all intent on doing the same thing.  My trip to Ft. Polk was about to present to me a type of prejudice I had not known.

The trip to Louisiana involved flying to New Orleans followed by a second short flight to Lake Charles Louisiana.  From Lake Charles I had to take a bus to complete the journey to Leesville Louisiana where Fort Polk was located.  I remember staring out the bus window at the southern streets as they passed by, and at one particularly memorable stop, I saw the peculiar sight, to me at least, of two water fountains right next to each other on the outside of a building.  Above one was the sign “white” and above the other “colored.”  I was educated as to the ways of the “old south” which had yet to give way to a new way of thinking.

drinking

The US Army in 1968 was heavily engaged in the war in Vietnam, and it quite literally did not have time for anyone’s prejudices.  I would say roughly a third of the men in the company I was assigned to were black.  But to me, and to the army, they were just one of many, who had one job and one focus.  Anything that was not related to our being properly trained as a soldier was not approved of.  The assimilation of all races in the military was nearly complete and the vast majority of men in the army were forced to leave behind them whatever prejudices they had brought with them.  The picture below is what my company area looked like in 1968.

polk

The most telling time in those early months of my military career came on April 4, 1968 when Martin Luther King was assassinated.  In the bunk next to mine was a black man who upon hearing the news of Dr. King’s assassination broke down and cried.  I did not then understand the importance of the man.  All I knew was what the northern media, and the government, wanted me to know about Dr. King, and that was all negative.  It was a hard lesson I had to learn, but learn it I did.  That day, and several days afterwards, it was reported that there were riots in Leesville and many other locales.  The post was closed and we were denied day passes to leave the fort.

That was my experience up to 1968.  It was not particularly unique except that it was mine.  Others experienced many of the same things, just in different ways.  The 1960s changed me in more ways than I was aware of at the time, but am the better for now.

by

Whatever Happened to the American Dream?


The simple answer is ‘it is alive and well.”  But the form it takes varies greatly.  That form is, of course, defined by whoever has that dream.  But like so much of what I write, this subject needs a little history behind it.

The first people to have a dream that America could possibly answer were English merchants, followed by the group of separatists we now call the Pilgrims.  They were followed by the Puritans.  Each of these first three groups had their own separate and specialized version of the new American dream.  The English merchants saw huge economic possibilities in the New World.  The Pilgrim came purely for religious freedom, and the Puritans for a combination of both, religion and  business.  All three groups realized the American dream, some quickly, some a little more slowly.

Through 1945 at least, the idea of freedom of some sort, religious, business, personal, was the single most attractive part of the American dream.  Even when immigrants were sold a bill of goods, as the Italians and Poles who were recruited at the beginning to the 20th century to work American factories with the promise of riches, many had come to escape the persecution of the Tsar, military impressment, and starvation that the Italian immigrant had known.  They were huddled into ethnic masses, ghettos, in America’s cities, and while the original immigrants found it difficult to escape the squalor they found themselves in, most quickly came to realize that the potential for their children far outweighed whatever shortcomings they had endured.

But the end of World War 2 saw the return of over 2 million soldiers to the American economy.  The federal government, remembering the economic travails of World War One vets, decided to give veterans a way to buy their own homes through the Veterans Administration which gave rise to the VA Home Loan.  World War One vets had felt abandoned and when the depression hit, they formed what was called “Hooverville” right next to the capitol building.  They were a constant reminder the president and congress of the unfilled promises made them following WWI.

Enter a man named William Jaird Levitt.  In the late 1920s he developed an idea of selling a large tract of affordable housing to upper middle class Americans on Long Island.  The idea, while successful, was derailed by the depression.  During WWII he won a large contract to build housing for the navy.  But when the federal government came up with the idea of government guaranteed loans, Levitt cashed in by creating an entire town on Long Island, Levitttown.  Small tract houses were advertised to the veteran as a way to realize the American dream, at least as defined by Levitt.  Levitt invited ex-servicemen to visit his model house and see how they could cash in on the new American dream, a house, a car, a wife, and two kids.  That advertising ploy was hugely successful, so much so, that some years later Levitt repeated his idea in Pennsylvania.  But now, burned into the American psyche, was this new version of the American dream and it has survived to this day.

In 1922 Congress passed an immigration law, the first of its sort, the limited the number of immigrants who could enter the U.S.  The law, hugely racist, was passed using 1900 immigration figures as the basis of who could enter the U.S. and in what numbers.  In 1900 the largest portion of immigrants came from northern Europe.

On April 30, 1975, the American embassy in Saigon Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese communists.  Americans saw on their television hundreds of Vietnamese, friends of America they were called, being airlifted off the top of the American embassy.  Shortly after that hundreds of Vietnamese who feared for their lives took to boats to escape their native land.  They became known as the “boat people.”  Most of those refugees were welcomed to America in no small part because of American guilt over what had occurred in their homeland.  The point here is, first, America made an exception to the immigration law, and second, but more importantly, these Vietnamese had an American dream in their minds that did not include a house, a car, and two kids.  Their dream was a throwback to the original settlers of English North America and the immigrants who came through the early part of the 20th Century.

Today’s politicians are selling the American public the idea that the American dream includes a right to a job, a right to very low taxes, and a right to feel entitled.  Those three things are a gross exaggeration of reality.  At the beginning of the 20th century poor immigrants desired one thing and one thing only, a chance.  They did not feel entitled to anything.  I think Americans today believe the American dream should be given to them and not worked for.

The American dream is alive and well, it is just not the one being sold by the politicians.  It is not up to the government to find you a job.  It is up to you.  It is not up to the government to lower the unemployment rate, it is up to business.  You are not entitled to a car, a house, or anything else save a chance equal to that of anyone else.  The American dream is the chance to lead a happy and successful life according to your own definition of what that looks like, and nothing more.