(I know: it should be “I”, but I like the alliteration.)
This is a story of connections, coincidences, and disturbing
discoveries. The first string in the skein: immigration.
Wallers and Bogues settled in Massachusetts and then Connecticut
in the early 17th C, some moving on into northern Vermont in the
early 18th C. Taylors and
Morehouses appeared in upstate New York in the early 19th C. Cooks, in Nova Scotia in the 18th C,
emigrating south to Rhode Island in the 19th.
These are the roots from which we Wallers grew. Despite being here a long time and becoming thoroughly
American “Damn Yankees”, they were, still and all, immigrants – without visas –
having ventured here to find and take advantage of opportunity to freely make
of life what they would. And they did
so, contributing to the American commonwealth all along the way.
My grandfather, Halley Templeton Waller, has always been
held up to me as a sterling example of civic leadership, of crusading for
social justice, of upholding the rights of newly arrived Americans. In 1912, HT Waller was recruited by the
Akron, Ohio rubber-barons to move from Cambridge, Mass and become Secretary of
the Akron YMCA
. They were attracted to HT because of his
record of success in creating the Cambridge Y’s Americanization program –
teaching English and citizenship, civics and history to newly arrived immigrant
labor being brought in and eagerly hired by industrialists of Waltham and
Cambridge. And from those
industrialists, HT was able to raise capital and expand the Cambridge Y’s
facilities and outreach; he was a Y star.
Immigration was a flood.
Between 1900 and 1914, some eleven million immigrants arrived on these
shores, mainly from eastern and southern Europe. In 1910, over 40% of New Yorkers were foreign
born or the offspring of foreign born parents.
The burgeoning auto tire industry was centered in Akron; Firestone,
Goodrich and Goodyear wanted their share of that unorganized, eager, cheap
labor supply. HT became the champion of
turning these folks into Americans, teaching them English, encouraging their
pride in their roots while acculturating them to American values and ideals,
and teaching their responsibilities and rights as citizens (including the right
to organize.)
In 1914, the European spigot closed. Europe was at war; US industrial demand
skyrocketing. From where would the pool
of (cheap) labor be replenished?
Second string in the
skein: the Great Migration. Those
labor agents of northern industrialists, shut out of Europe, turned to the
South – the southern United States with its huge surplus of exploited, uneducated,
potentially cheap labor. And northward
they came, by the millions; between 1915 and 1930, over six million blacks
migrated out of the south and into northern industrial cities of Pittsburgh,
Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit – and Akron.
In 1939, a 20’s something African American artist in Harlem
documented the Great Migration in 60 paintings that narrated the causes, tales
and trauma of that mass movement. Jacob
Lawrence’s The Migration Series was competed
for by two prestigious museums. They
finally divided it in two, even numbered panels going to MOMA and odd-numbered going
to the Phillips in Washington DC. Only
twice since ’40 have the two halves been reunited in a show, and this second
time it came to SAM, the Seattle Art Museum.
Why SAM? Because Jacob Lawrence moved
here to join the faculty of UW; he and his wife Gwen Knight lived and died at
Horizon House, where I just finished my nine years as a Trustee. Horizon House has many of their works. Ann and I proudly display a lithograph of
Lawrence’s “Windows”, a Harlem street scene.
My granddaughter, Liza Stoner, visiting from BC, came with us when Ann
and I viewed the show at SAM. For Liza, The
Migration Series was a enlightening discovery, a window on a part of America
she had known not of.
The third string:
backlash. Last night, Ann and I
watched “Digging Their Own Grave”, a segment on CBS’s
60 Minutes that dealt with the use – I’d say, abuse – of H1B visas
to replace American workers with low cost, no benefits, foreigners. Indian in-sourcing companies account for 80%
of these abuses, mainly in the IT sphere.
Indian agents recruit labor and sell them to US companies (as did our
industrialists' agents in Europe and then the South). Adding insult to injury, in most cases the
displaced, fired American employee is forced to train their foreign
replacement; if they refuse, they lose their severance payment. Quite prestigious organizations are
participating in this abuse of H1B, e.g., UCSF Medical Center, which terminated
20+ IT workers and replaced them with Indian imports. The displaced interviewed by CBS feel, naturally,
outraged and betrayed.
They are angry at the Indians, at their former employers, at the system.
 |
| HTW and FCW (my dad): c 1920? |
Nothing new about backlash: in Akron in 1919, as everywhere,
demobilized GI’s were returning home to find foreigners, usually Catholics (in
predominately Protestant Ohio,) had good wage jobs in industry and “Negros”
were edging into their neighborhoods.
Jobs were scarce as the economy slowed.
The ground was ready to sprout dissension and intolerance. And populists took full advantage. In 1921, Ohio boasted the largest among all
states in enrollment of Klu Klux Klansmen.
HTW, then both the Y Secretary and Chair of the Akron school board, became
a visible symbol of the 'coddling of foreigners', the Americanization of 'these Papist
aliens in our midst.' Dad carried all his
life memory of a KKK cross burning on their front lawn when he was about ten.
In 1921, the good citizens of Akron elected a KKK majority to
the school board, a KKK mayor of Akron, and KKK’ers to important positions in
city and county governments. The
KKK-dominated school board fired the school superintendent and replaced him
with a totally unqualified KKK member. Granddad
HT resigned from the school board.
His policies and programs at the Y also brought unwelcome attention
and heat, which the Firestone, Goodrich and Goodyear pooh-bahs didn’t
appreciate; he was asked to resign. Nationally, this was a time of
retrenchment, of the Emergency Immigration Restriction Act of 1921 which put
limits on total immigration and set quotas based on national origin and the
number of immigrants from each country already here. The act greatly restricted southern and
eastern European immigration and favored northern European sources, for the
Irish, German, English, French-Canadian and Polish were already here. Asian immigration earlier had been shut down
by the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone Act.
The KKK tide receded in the middle twenties and Akron slowly
came to its senses, though discrimination, race riots and hate crimes continued
to roil the mid-west throughout the ‘30’s. In time, HT again came to be esteemed as a civic leader, heading up the War Bond drives of
’40 and ’41, chairing Akron’s wartime Rent Control Board.
But . . . my image of HT as champion of
the underdog and social justice has been tarnished in my research on him and
his times, first by discovery that African-American Christian young men were
not welcome at the central Y; they had a Young Negro Men’s Christian Association
of their own. HT was not prejudiced; he
supported them and participated in Secretarial training for African Americans,
but still, he went along with separate but equal, which did not end in the Y
until well into the 40’s in the north, well into the 70’s in the south.
Second, I have found newspaper reports of a speech HT gave
to the Akron Chamber of Commerce calling for support of the Emergency Immigration
Act of 1921. His thesis was that the
values of Western thought were rooted in the culture and beliefs of white, northern
Europeans, and that America must act to protect the primacy of such cultural
values and heritage to avoid their being subordinated to others. HT had become a lesserly Christian as he
matured, not churched, philosophic, a humanist deeply committed to the civic
values of Western civilization; he wanted to protect that legacy and insure its
primacy in America even at the cost of arbitrarily restricting access to our
shores. Even sub-consciously agreeing that some peoples are inferior to others.
So . . . no
American tale is pure -- compromise, enabling, acting and reacting, backsliding. These strings weave a repetitious pattern for
my Waller family -- from my Grandfather to his great, great granddaughter – as
they do for all of us Americans. For
here we are today, again – cheap labor agents at work, newly arrived aspirants
with strange customs and religions, resentment and backlash, immigration
control controversy, arbitrary restrictions by national origin, populist
demagogues, prejudice and hate crimes, even KKK endorsement of the President of
these not-so-United States.
Perhaps
these inter-connected strings are an inevitable part of the warp and weave of
the continuous fabric we call America, with our glories and flaws and, I hope, our
belief that despite set-backs we will over time become stronger, more durable
and more than ever a model to the world.
It’s now ours to look back and look forward, to repair and re-weave, to
bind ourselves together in commonwealth, and to re-examine where we stand and
for what. Now is the time.
