"We think of New York as the capital of banking, publishing, business, fashion, entertainment, the high life, but for most of the people who live here, it is, or was, the capital city of the exile." "(HAGGLING IN DIFFERENT LANGUAGES)" "An old, wry New Englander once said," ""We call England the mother country" ""because most of us come from Poland or Italy."" "It's not quite as drastic as that, but today the chances of an American being of wholly English stock are no more than 1 in 5." "Those other four brought with them their religions, their prejudices, their folk ways, not least their food and drink." "Everything on these racks is what some American regards as the staff of life." "They are the staples the immigrant couldn't do without." "Suffle catari, pasta Romana, rigatini." "So that today, few American children, in the cities especially, need to be told that goulash comes from Hungary, knockwurst from Germany, borscht from Russia, lasagne from Italy." "And to Jews of all nations, these are the Siamese twins of cookery." "Salmon, known as lox." "And bagels." "As inseparable as an Englishman's bacon and eggs." "I remember once there was a strike of the fishing fleet out of New York." "The salmon wasn't coming in, so there was a glut of bagels." "And in a whimsical moment," "I sent a cable to my editor and said," ""I'd like to write a piece entitled 'Lox Lag Brings Bagel Boom'."" "And this man, a splendid Englishman, cabled right back." ""Your message hopelessly scrambled." "Garbled." ""It read, 'Lox Lag Brings Bagel Boom'!"" "There are still many Englishmen who think of an American as an Englishman gone wrong." "If so, it's been a long time ago, because the American population, like the American diet, began to lose its Anglo-Saxon staples so long ago as the 1840s, with a wave of immigration that swelled to a flood" "and then to a tidal wave in the quarter-century between 1890 and the First World War." "(VARIOUS LANGUAGES)" "Why did they come?" "Why do they still come?" "For several powerful reasons, the chief of which was to seek sanctuary from hard times in the homeland." "(IRISH FLUTE)" "In Ireland, the mainstay, the people's staple, was potatoes." "Today this scene could be a commercial for picturesque Ireland." "Yet the failure of this single crop in the 1840s devastated the population of the whole island." "The news of starvation and dissension was so alarming that Queen Victoria paid an emergency visit." "She remarked in her journal on "More ragged and wretched people" ""than I ever saw anywhere else."" "She saw the ones who could stand up." "Literally millions fainted in the fields, crawled home and died of starvation." "The survivors abandoned their hovels, and some are still unsaleable because there's no title, no discoverable owner." "Those who had any energy left limped off to the towns and they did one of two things." "They either formed sedition societies or they headed for America." ""Amerika," wrote Goethe," ""Du hast es besser."" ""America, you have things better over there."" "Certainly, they could not be worse at home." "Hunger, then, was the spur in Ireland." "But in Europe in the one year of 1848, political upheavals deposited hundreds of thousands of refugees at the Atlantic ports." "In Austria, an abdication, arrests and executions." "In Italy, a revolution and a declaration of war by the Pope against Austria." "In Sicily, an uprising against the King of Naples." "In Germany, a liberal revolution that failed." "Throughout the rest of the century, in any troubled country, when no other criminal could be found, there was the ancient culprit, the Jew." "The ghettos were the routine target for the recruiting sergeant and the secret police." "It would be hard to calculate but easy to guess at the millions of American Jews whose forefathers had fled from the stoniest sound in the world, the midnight knock on the door." "(HEBREW DEVOTIONAL SINGING)" "(SINGING CONTINUES)" "In some cities of Europe," "Jews could practise their religion in permitted compounds." "In many more places, they had to worship in stealth." "In America they could worship openly, in their own fashion, Orthodox or Reform." "(HEBREW PRAYER)" "These are plainly prosperous people." "Let's not forget the others, the majority in fact, who prospered outside the church." "The non-religious who, in the cities they settled in, set up their own secular hierarchy, with the Germans always at the top of the social heap." "But to Jews, Gentiles, the devout and unbelievers, there persisted everywhere in Europe one glowing legend which had been passed on by the Spanish from the 15th century " "America was paved with gold." "Not much perhaps, but enough to offer striking proof in photographs from America of well-fed families who looked you in the eye." "Of a father or a cousin wearing a suit and shiny shoes just like a doctor or a merchant in the old country." "When the American republic was only 70 years old, there were 1.5 million immigrants in a population of 30 millions." "By 1890, there were 15 millions." "By 1926, there would be 37 millions." "Just about one American in three had come within two generations from Europe." "In the early 1900s, when the tidal wave of immigrants poured into the European ports " "Antwerp, Glasgow, Constantinople, Piraeus, Bremen - the people had to be corralled and processed." "What you had to have was an exit paper and the price of the passage." "But long before the people reached the ships at the port, emigrant trains started deep inside Russia." "Many people had never seen a train, so they thought they were very grand, even though they were only linked boxcars." "With benches, sometimes without benches." "The men in one car and the women and children in another." "Every few hundred miles, the train would be shunted onto a siding and new armies would come aboard " "Austrians, Hungarians, Lithuanians, and finally a well-policed troop of Germans." "You'd come, say, to Hamburg, where in an enclosure outside the town, you would be bathed and fed, deloused, and your baggage and clothes fumigated." "Then they were all ferried across to the big ship and they came aboard and they untied their earthly possessions." "Now, in the floating commune of the immigrants, the status symbols were humble but they were well defined." "A suitcase, however battered, was a sign of a city man." "A wicker basket was something no peasant had." "Most people tied everything up in a blanket or a sheet, and this is what they thought indispensable." "First of all, as a necessity, a pillow." "This was more than a necessity, a point of pride, a goose-feather pillow." "Some immigrant families kept them as a relic and a symbol right through their lives." "The village girl's only certain dowry a very special extra petticoat." "Lots of these girls were engaged to men on the other side of the Atlantic." "And many of those engagements were obviously broken by the propinquity of so many males in steerage." "For formal occasions, a corset." "Now, like all travellers, both simple and sophisticated, they were suspicious of the other nation's food, so they brought along a cooking pot and a relic of their favourite snacks." "And then the indispensable tokens of their faith." "A cross." "A prayer book." "And if it was a close-knit family, they would almost certainly have some cherished heirloom that had been given to them in the last moment of parting." "And so they were on their way." "There it was at last - Manhattan, the magic island." "First they had to pass through another island in the bay, already known in many languages as the Isle of Tears " "Ellis Island." "Looks now like a well-established college, recently gutted by fire." "It is totally derelict, a frowsy monument to the American habit when something wears out of junking and forgetting it." "They crowded into the main building and the first thing they heard over the shuffle was the voices of inspectors bellowing out numbers in Italian, German, Polish, Hungarian, Russian." "According to number, they were herded in groups of 30 and led through tiled corridors and up a great staircase into the biggest hall that most of them had ever seen." "I recently asked an old friend of mine who came in here over 60 years ago," ""What was the procedure when you got here?"" "And he said, "Procedure?" ""Din." "Confusion." "Bewilderment." "Madness."" "I suppose today it would've looked like nothing so much as a costume try-out for a mammoth Hollywood epic." "They moved in single file through a maze of passageways under the eye of a doctor in a blue uniform who had in his hand a piece of chalk." "He was a very tough, instant diagnostician." "And he would look at the hands and the hair and the faces, rap out a few questions, and he might spot an old, panting gentleman with purple lips, and he would chalk on his back an "H"." "Suspected heart disease." "All children in arms were made to stand down to see if they rated an "L" for a limp." "And any facial blotch - eczema, psoriasis - brought forth an "F"." "Facial rash." "Now, all these doubtful cases were weeded out for further examination." "If you had an infectious, certainly a contagious disease, you would be deported." "It's a shuddering thing to realise that only 70 years ago, every day, they were on the lookout for yellow fever, tuberculosis, even leprosy." "About eight in ten made it and then were subjected to a catechism from tough, underpaid, overworked inspectors." ""Have you ever been in prison?" ""Who paid for your passage?" ""Can you read or write?"" "There was no compulsion to do either." "Identity was checked against the ship's manifest." "You were lucky to emerge with your name." "An Irish inspector would look at "Uspenskyovich"" "and write on the landing card "Spensky"." "Zonenber turned into Sonenberg." "That's what you were from then on." "But if you had a new identity, you had a landing card." "And after a short visit to a booth to change your marks or lire or drachma, or whatever, into dollars - and for many years the cashiers were short-change artists - then you were handed over to the travel agents, the railroad men." "Most people, obviously, couldn't speak a word of English, except one, which they'd memorised, the name of their destination." "A man would unfold a scrap of paper and say, "I want to go to Pringvilliamas."" "Well, maybe he got to Springfield, Massachusetts." "And maybe he didn't." "But whether they went to the place they thought they were going or not, they were eventually ferried and deposited in the West, the Midwest and the Eastern cities, and most of them looked eagerly for a door which was marked "Push to New York."" "(HURDY-GURDY PLAYS)" "Now they had set foot on the earth of the land that was paved with gold." "Well, was it?" "I once asked an old immigrant if his arrival hadn't meant the most shattering disillusion." "But he said, "There was gold, gold to us " ""streetcars, automobiles, markets groaning with food." ""No military on horseback and no whips." ""And neighbours out in the open, shouting, fighting, freely." ""So, to a small boy like me it was a ball, a friendship club." ""And the streets were the open road."" "But there were those who, at best, felt they had traded a fearful time in the homeland for a baffling or brutal time here on New York's Lower East Side." "Such people went for help to the German, Polish," "Lithuanian or whatever immigrant aid societies." "If they were Jews, they just as likely gravitated here, a newspaper office, the "Jewish Daily Forward"." "It's been going since 1897, the last Yiddish daily printed in the United States." "At its peak, a circulation of 250,000." "Today, only 75,000 New Yorkers need to read the daily news in Yiddish." "(THEY SPEAK YIDDISH)" "But the immigrant didn't buy it just for the news, nor was that the reason people came in here clutching painfully written letters." "It was for a feature, a daily feature, that for almost 80 years has served as a first-aid station to the immigrant." "It's called the Bintel Brief and it's letters to the editor from the desperate." "Now, in the beginning, this column did a yeoman job in helping parted relatives come together again." "It was a blessing to many a wife who was yearning to find her husband." "And of course, it was a curse to many a husband who was yearning not to find his wife." "But in the main, it listened to and advised people who were exploited or bewildered by this polyglot society that they'd moved into." ""Dear Editor, I have met a fine young man" ""and would like to marry and leave my parents" ""who quarrel all the time and grieve for the old country." ""He is a Christian." "What shall I do?"" ""Dear Editor, there is a new pogrom in the town I left in Russia." ""Should I go back and fight for my mother and my sisters?" ""Staying here, I feel like a coward."" ""Dear Editor, I was brought up as an Orthodox Jew" ""but I mingle now with progressive people." ""Every time I pass the synagogue and hear the cantor, "I feel very sad." ""What should I do?"" "Everything's special today." "Five dollars." "No more ten." "Cheap today." "Each package is a dollar." "Only $6.99, miss." "You want the bloomer or the Snuggy?" "This is stretchable." "This is very good." "If you don't know, I don't." "Just watch your pockets, girls." "Anybody with pockets, watch 'em." "You gonna buy one or are you monkeying around?" " How much are these?" " Two dollars." "I have it downstairs." "There's too much people." "(SPEAKS OTHER LANGUAGE)" "These look like crowds of thoroughly melted immigrants." "Yet they are bustling in the small confines of Little Italy or Little Russia." "Above the shops, you might've found a hearth and home, but you couldn't bed down forever with your own nationals." "You had to have a link with the big new alien society all around you." "For that, a character haunted the docks and covered the tenements, and staircases like these were his daily beat." "He's a type not greatly admired by students of political science." "But nonetheless he was the lifeline between the castaway and the new society." "He was usually, in New York, a Jew or an Irishman, a native American, but his parents were immigrants." "He knew well what were the primitive needs of people." "I'm talking about the American politician." "In exchange for your vote, and that was always well understood, he would get you a job, he'd get your son out of trouble, he would hound the landlord to repair the toilet or the bathtub." "You had a plain daughter." "He'd go to work on the marriage broker." "In bad times, he brought you coal and food." "He filled out your tax forms." "He knew when the baby was coming and he got the doctor." "He did all these things through a chain of command that reached all the way up to the county leader or even to the mayor." "And because he did them, he ran the cities, well or badly." "Men like Boss Tweed." "His Tammany pals conveniently made clerical errors in the city finances amounting to about $200 million." "Richard Croker made enough to return to Ireland and a stable of thoroughbreds with a Cherokee Indian wife 50 years his junior." "He earned these rewards through what he called honest graft." "Fiorello LaGuardia, the last great reform mayor of New York, who saw no difference between honest graft and the other kind, and called Tammany a rabble of tinhorns and punks." "And, at the time of the immigrant flood, the incomparable Mr Plunkett, who said, "I seen my chances and I took 'em."" "This man, George Washington Plunkett, was a Democrat, a New York Tammany District leader, and he's left a priceless diary." "And the account, for instance, of one day in his life." ""2 a.m. Wakened by a boy with message from a bartender to bail him out of jail." ""3 a.m. Back to bed. 6 a.m. Fire engines." ""Up and off to see my election district captains tending the burned-out tenants." ""Note names for new homes." ""8.30." "To police courts." "Six drunken constituents on hand." ""Got four released by a timely word to the judge." "Paid the others' fines." ""9.00." "To Municipal Court." ""Told an election district captain to act as lawyer" ""for a widow threatened with dispossession." ""11 to 3 p.m. Found jobs for four constituents." ""3 p.m. An Italian funeral." ""Sat conspicuously up front." ""4 p.m. A Jewish funeral." "Up front again in the synagogue." ""7." "Meeting of district captains." ""Reviewed the list of all voters, who's for us, who's agin." ""8 p.m. Church fair." "Bought ice cream for the girls." ""Took fathers for a little something round the corner." ""9 p.m. Back to clubhouse." "Heard complaints of push-cart pedlars." ""10.30." "A Jewish wedding." ""Had sent handsome present to the bride." ""Midnight." "To bed."" "Where he fell asleep, no doubt, counting votes." "And, of course, he got 'em." "While high-minded men might draw blueprints of an ideal city," "Mr Plunkett and his minions stayed with the reality of the city as it was." "They did small things for small people and, incidentally, milked the city's revenues." "There was always a new wave of the helpless." "Poles and Italians might move onwards and upwards, or just away." "Today, their old tenements are inhabited not by new Europeans so much as by American citizens who are immigrants in their own society " "Puerto Ricans and blacks." "The turn-of-the-century immigrants, hemmed in in their tenements, certainly had their fill of loneliness and bewilderment." "But there were institutions that translated into farce their fear of American society and their mockery of each other." "(JAUNTY PIANO)" "There was the burlesque theatre, in which the German comic, the Irish, Jew, Italian, played out the troubles that in life were no joke." "Burlesque was a family theatre, a safety valve against the outside pressures of being alien and pathetic." "Here, they took it out on their common enemies, the slum landlord, the con man, the corner grocer, the cop." "Most of all, the judge." "He was always irascible, outrageously unjust, fatuously susceptible to a pair of pretty legs." "He'd forget all about the law and the case, and start whamming the witnesses with this, a slapstick." "He was often outsmarted by simple immigrants." "He was always bribable, dismissing the case against the gorgeous defendant by arranging to meet her around the corner at half past eight." "In other words, he was WC Fields, Groucho Marx, Buster Keaton, Phil Silvers." "They were all cradled by burlesque." "Unhappy marriage was a favourite theme, of course." "And the family quarrels built up to an enormous climax, which was usually cooled off by a swift application to the rear of the pants of the seltzer bottle." "Outside burlesque, there were the comic strips, and there was a wonderful humorist named Milt Gross who tried to make over the immigrant into an American by retelling American history in the accent of his readers, usually from the Lower East Side." "Here he is on Christopher Columbus." "(JEWISH ACCENT) So it sailed Columbus hover the hocean." "He landed gradually by a land what had gritted him the redskins." "So they said, "Hmm, look." ""Bale people." "A little seasick, no doubt, from the woyages."" "So Chris said, "See, Columbus, that's me." ""And the world is round." ""This is Hindia," ""and I was told to look up a guy entitled Gunga Din." ""This is what?" ""This is America?" ""Ay-ay-ay!" ""Quick, boys, have plenty done, business cards." ""Continents Discovered While-U-Wait." ""If you are pleased, tell the Queen." ""If not, tell us."" "(JEWISH FOLK MUSIC)" "So far, we've gone on the large assumption that immigrants arrived, found relatives, a home and a bearable job." "But the job could shackle you to the bare subsistence level and turn your children into scavengers." "Earlier on, I said all you needed to get to America was an exit pass, a bundle, health and the ability to cope." "But what you mustn't have was a contract for labour." "Now, this law was prompted by a good impulse by Congress, because contract labour could mean industrial serfdom, which could tie you for a lifetime to a job at the same wage." "But the effect when the South-Eastern European flood came was different." "It meant that the really welcome immigrant was jobless." "In the high tide of immigration, it meant a bottomless pool of cheap labour." "Here in New York, immigrants from the European cities poured into the garment factories, and so did peasants, poor farmers transplanted to a city block, and terrified of any journey into the Siberia of the American countryside." "They arrived just in time for the invention of certain labour-saving devices:" "The sewing machine, touted as a boon to the housewife, was a curse to the seamstress." "The labour she'd done for 40 cents an hour was now done by machines." "And she could stay on, if she chose, and do niggling handwork at eight cents an hour, 12 to 15 hours a day." "The industrialists, the coke and steel men, the railroad builders, had the same assumptions about the inexhaustibility of cheap labour." "Henry Clay Frick, bosom partner of Carnegie in his steel enterprises, was a fanatical anti-union man." "He realised that the latest wave of immigrants could always be employed as strike breakers." "One year, he employed Hungarians to break a strike of Italians." "Within a year or two, he had to hire Romanians to break a strike of Hungarians, who by now had developed a skilled trade." "In an irritable moment, he got off a profound remark." ""The immigrant," he said, "however illiterate or ignorant he may be, always learns too soon."" "Well, Frick is known today only to art lovers for his house on Fifth Avenue, now a museum, and its exquisite collection of 18th-century French painting." "And even the offspring hardly know that such fortunes as Frick's were built on the 70-hour week and immigrant labour." "In the same way, Carnegie, the steel king, is now remembered wholly for his worldwide philanthropies." "Huntington, the railroad monopolist, for a monumental library." "Rockefeller, the oil king, for his boundless benefactions to medicine and education." "And Morgan, the supreme connoisseur of money, for a treasure house of art just off Fifth Avenue." "Unlike Carnegie and Rockefeller, Morgan was not new rich." "There'd been money in the family for generations." "He was educated in Boston, Switzerland, Göttingen." "He started to collect as a schoolboy, with a few bits of shattered glass from an old French chapel." "From there, he proceeded to put together what Mark Twain called" ""A collection of indestructibles in a perishable world."" "And what treasures." "These are all manuscripts." "Pope's "Essay On Man"." "Thackeray's "Vanity Fair"." "Sir Walter Scott, "Ivanhoe"." ""Paradise Lost", John Milton." "And when I look at this," "I think of a young Englishman in a Manchester hotel in the 1840s, sitting down on a soggy, smoggy night and starting to write." ""Marley was dead to begin with." ""There is no doubt whatever about that." ""The register of his burial was signed" ""by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker and the chief mourner." ""Scrooge signed it."" "This is it." "Dickens's "Christmas Carol"." "Priceless manuscripts and the rarest books were Morgan's specialty." "Here is the first book ever printed on movable type." ""The Gutenberg Bible", one of the few surviving copies printed on vellum, open at the Book of John." "And the most precious possession of the Morgan collection, the first number in the catalogue, M1, a ninth-century book of the four gospels, bound in gold, encrusted with precious stones." "It's ironical to think that Morgan spent millions on manuscripts and books brought over from the lands of the immigrants who could be bought in job lots for eight cents an hour." "John Pierpont Morgan, the only man alive who could afford to buy out Carnegie, and did, and set up United States Steel, the first billion-dollar corporation." "In this room, Morgan alone redeemed the credit of New York City against the London banks." "In a financial panic, he saved the treasury's gold reserve by buying $65 millions' worth of gold with bonds." "Imperious, I guess, is the word you'd use for Morgan." "His supreme audacity was to form a single company to monopolise transportation between the Great Lakes and the Pacific." "Since he'd set this company up in New Jersey, he said he was ruled only by New Jersey's laws." "But the President of the United States said this was a national monopoly outlawed by Congress." "So Morgan went in a huff to Washington and said to the President," ""Mr President, you get your lawyer and I'll get mine."" "The President got nine lawyers - the Supreme Court, in fact - which ruled," ""The Congress of the United States is not at the mercy of New Jersey,"" "and dissolved the monopoly." "Morgan's improbable conqueror was a man who had been a sickly, short-sighted child, anxiously pampered in the nursery of a Long Island country house." "His boyhood ambition was to be a taxidermist and for a year or two he toddled around in a cloud of formaldehyde." "His name was Theodore Roosevelt, and to help him grow out of his embarrassing puniness, the family doctor ordered him to build up his muscles." "He obeyed with alarming success, and he came to drape the house with the denizens of three continents." "In a short time, he'd become a celebrated hunter and explorer, and, in the long run, he became President of the United States and went gunning for the robber barons." "Today he is affectionately recalled as a half-heroic, half-comic figure, a bespectacled barrel of a man, choking with teeth and jingoism, whose obsession was to match the glory of the British Empire with an American dominion in the Caribbean and the Pacific." "That is the legendary Teddy Roosevelt, but there was another, a splendid side to him." "He was the first man of his time who saw that America was no longer a rural nation but an industrial giant run amok, whose keepers were not in Congress or the White House, but Pittsburgh, Cleveland and that west room of Morgan's in New York City." "We have not mentioned a president since Lincoln." "It's not an oversight." "For 40 years after the Civil War, the true power was with the oil monopoly, the steel trust, the railroad combines, all of whom had voted enthusiastically to put Roosevelt in the White House." "But he looked at the ways, beginning with the holding companies, in which these people preserved their immunity from the law." "He determined if not to break them to bring them under the control of Congress and the courts." "He started as Police Commissioner of New York City and he went after all the petty grafters who'd made life hell for immigrants." "He achieved the feat of making Ellis Island decent and the inspectors courteous." "As Governor of New York, he went after sweatshop owners and the tenement landlords." "And as President, he charged up the social scale, flagellating everybody from food packagers to bankers, challenging them in the name of the government, and especially the men at the top, whom he called in his squeaky but blazing fashion "malefactors of great wealth"." ""The trust," he said, "is an octopus whose longest tentacles bind the immigrants."" "These people must no longer be looked on as nationally identifiable pools of cheap labour." "We must stop talking about the German-American, Polish-American, Italian-American." "We must have no more hyphenated Americans." "Teddy Roosevelt succeeded well enough to have that phrase forgotten and to see Americans of all sorts of origins combine on patriotic holidays to celebrate their Americanism." "This is a Columbus Day parade, an annual shindig in memory of the discoverer." "You may be sure it's made up of the sons and daughters not only of Italians but Poles, Czechs, Irish, Germans, and since this is Philadelphia, of many Swedes who, like the Dutch for a time," "thought America might become their exclusive colony." "Today, in spite of such parades, there are people, once victimised as hyphenated Americans, who now flaunt their national origins as proof of a special individuality." "But the American idea was never to deny a man's roots, only to graft them anew to strengthen one nation indivisible, and the main grafting ground was the school room, a great liberator of the immigrant and, strangely enough, a source of powerful tension between parents and children." "It was not a place where you went simply to learn mathematics and geography, but where you learnt to become an American." "First of all, the morning assembly started with the children standing and reciting an oath of allegiance as they faced the flag." "(CHILDREN)... of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." "# My country, 'tis of thee" "# Sweet land of liberty, of thee I... #" "(COOKE) They were rarely taught that American history started with the Indians dropping down from the Bering Straits all the way to the tip of Chile." "They would pay a passing bow to Christopher Columbus, but soon they'd move on to George Washington, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, the all-American heroes." "Now, games were a vital Americanising force." "They were wholly American, and no immigrant need feel he was starting unequal." "Through baseball, the son of an Italian fisherman, Joe DiMaggio, proved that he was as good as you are, wherever you came from, and probably better." "And three generations of American children who could not name the King of Norway knew that the best football coach there'd ever been was a Norwegian boy immigrant, Knut Rockne." "The quicker a boy or girl learned to speak American English, the sooner his schoolmates would stop calling him a Kraut or a Polack or a Wop." "This was fine for the children but it was tough on the parents." "Children went home and saw their parents reading an Italian or a Yiddish newspaper, and they began to notice the thick accents." "And they felt uncomfortable." "Then they felt ashamed." "This is a great and tragic theme in American life and literature." "Inevitably, there came and comes the time when the parents too go to school to learn the language of their sons and daughters." "(ALL) I will learn English in class 21-3." "Yes, we are learning English in class 21-3." "Now if I ask you, where did you come from?" "Where did you come from?" "Remember the answer?" "I came from..." " I came from Hungary." " I came from Hungary." " (HESITANT) I came from Brazil." " I came from Brazil." "Don't be frightened." "Again." "I came..." " From Brazil." " From Brazil." "I came from." "Remember when I ask you, it is past." "You are here." "It was some time ago." " I came from." "Everybody." " (ALL) I came from." " Again." " (ALL) I came from." "(COOKE) They are still coming for old reasons - persecution, poverty, a fling at a new life." "All these immigrants, in learning the common language, are taking the first step on the way to becoming American citizens." "(ALL) We can speak Chinese." "Now, if you can answer yes or no, then you can answer me if I ask you a question." "If I say, "Can you drive a car?"" "Does anybody come to school by car?" "You don't have cars yet?" "All right, you will." "Here is where the Department of Immigration keeps the master file on everybody who came in as a German, a Pole, a Russian, whatever, took the oath and turned into an American citizen." ""A" for Anagnostopoulos, Theodoros." "Came in from Greece 1897." "I imagine that his father must have been as astonished as the son was to find that he'd fathered a Vice-President of the United States " "Spiro Agnew." ""B" for Israel Baline." "Born in a house in Siberia that was burnt to the ground in a pogrom." "His father, a rabbi, fled with eight children to New York." "Young Israel became the best songwriter of his generation " "Irving Berlin." ""C" for..." "Oh, here's a fascinating one." "A young couple from Naples." "Gabriel and Teresa from the slums of Naples." "The father remained an honest barber till the end of his days." "But his son moved on to much bigger and better things." "The son became the owner of industries and labour unions and warehouses, distilleries, nightclubs." "Alphonse Capone." "You can riffle through these files from Anagnostopoulos to Ziegfeld, and all the entries are of a horde of strangers, mostly poor, but under every letter there's a surprise." "Here, for instance, is the tale of a Polish tailor who fled from a pogrom of the tsars and his name was too much for the Ellis Island inspector." "Marciszewski." "So you could say that the son was christened by the inspector." "Senator Edmund Muskie." "And here a poor boy from Vienna, came in Ellis Island August 10th 1894." ""Note, speaks no English."" "Later became the crusading lawyer of the New Deal, and later still, Mr Justice Frankfurter of the United States Supreme Court." "Would you please raise your hand at this time?" "Do you swear that the testimony you give in this preliminary investigation prior to filing the naturalisation petition will the be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?" " I do." " All right." "And Dr Nemes, you were born in Hungary." " Balaton." "Zalamegy." " That's correct." "OK." "And November 22nd 1966 is the recorded date of your admission for permanent residence." " Yes, correct." " Uh..." "Reading English is a question that is to be asked of you." "Dr Nemes, could you read this phrase for me?" " See other side." " All right." "It's pretty evident from our conversation here that you're able to speak the English language with some fluency." "We have an item of your writing here which states, "I am a physician,"" "and that is sufficient proof of your writing ability in the English language." "Dr Nemes, have you ever, in the United States, or any place, been a member of, connected or associated with the Communist Party?" "No." "Have you ever aided or supported the Communist Party through another organisation?" "No." "Have you ever advocated, taught, believed in, knowingly supported or furthered Communism?" "No." "Dr Nemes, turning to the principles of the United States Government... (COOKE) This is the next-to-last step towards citizenship." "If the man passes this test, he, like every president on the day he takes office, will appear before a judge and repeat the oath of allegiance." "And he will be an American." "There are..." "The highest court in the United States is the Supreme Court." "Do you know about how many judges there are?" " I'm not sure, but I think it's nine." " Nine is it, yes." "Today, in the cities, the masses are more huddled than ever." "They don't come for El Dorado any more." "More often than not, they exchange a rural slum for a city hovel." "They know it and they hate it." "But in the wake of the great immigrant flood that we've been talking about, paupers became shopkeepers and the sons and daughters of generations of peasants turned into accountants and clerks and cab drivers and lawyers and doctors." "Looking back on those sheepish hordes, let's not pretend they were rollicking characters in an American musical comedy." "But let's not forget either the millions who struggled for a decent and tidy life and made it, and still do."