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#33: Play Ball!! Baseball Helped Generations of Immigrants Become Americans

2018 All Star Game in Washington, DC

The celebrated French American scholar Jacques Barzun wrote “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.”

What is it about this peculiarly American game that has appealed to generations of immigrants and victims of prejudice as a path to becoming American? The game is different from any others. For instance, there is no clock or time limit to determine when the game ends. As Yogi Berra famously said, “It’s not over until it’s over.”

While some parts of the ball field are prescribed, the field of play is different in just about every stadium. Boston has a giant green wall in a short left field dubbed the “green monster.” Kansas City has a large waterfall just beyond the center field fence. The Chicago Cubs have ivy growing on its brick outfield walls in the field of play. A home run over the right field fence in San Francisco will land in the Bay where fans in kayaks will go after it. Baltimore has a warehouse running the length of its right field which is a target for power hitters. Just about every major league team reflects its city’s personality or history in its stadium.

Baseball is known for its one-on-one confrontations between pitchers and batters which consumes most of the game. But once the batter hits the ball and runners are on base, the whole team becomes engaged in an impromptu ballet of teamwork. Perhaps it’s that combination of individualism and teamwork that makes the game so appealing to the American People.

In the early years of the 20th Century, when so many immigrants were crowded in bustling cities, the pristine green playing fields and the perfect dimensions of the baseball diamond were appealing counterpoints to their daily lives. And what other game has a 7th Inning break where everyone gets up, stretches, and sings Take Me Out to the Ballgame? And in what other sport does a fan get to keep a ball if it is hit into the stands?

Baseball is also considered the thinking person’s sport. As Berra described it, “Baseball is 90% mental. The other half is physical.”

“Baseball, it is said, is only a game,” said commentator George Will. “True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal.”

An exhibition by the Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia called Chasing Dreams: Baseball and Becoming American shows how Jews and other minority groups used baseball as a way to come together. At first white immigrant groups took up the game including Irish, German, Polish and Italian Americans as well as Jewish Americans who mostly came from central and eastern Europe. Later, African Americans, Latinos and Asians used baseball as part of their integration into American culture as well.

That exhibit also showed how the integration of baseball with Jackie Robinson helped lead the U.S. away from Jim Crow and into the Civil Rights movement. It showed Japanese Americans playing baseball even in internment camps during World War II. And it included the sheet music for Take Me Out to the Ballgame composed by a Polish Jewish immigrant.

Last year, about a quarter of the players on Major League rosters were foreign-born. Most came from the Dominican Republic (84), Venezuela (74), Cuba (17) and Mexico (11). But 17 other nations were also represented by at least one player in the major leagues.

Whether it is an afterschool pick-up game at a nearby park, a game at a family picnic, playing or coaching youth baseball or attending a Big League game over a season that last nine months from the beginning of Spring Training in February to the end of the World Series in October, it’s a special American Day to celebrate Opening Day every spring.

Exhibitions like Chasing Dreams could be a model for the types of travelling exhibitions that are undertaken by the National Museum of the American People.

 This blog is about the proposed National Museum of the American People which is about the making of the American People. The blog will be reporting regularly on a host of NMAP topics, American ethnic group histories, related museums, scholarship centered on the museum’s focus, relevant census and other demographic data, and pertinent political issues. The museum is a work in progress and we welcome thoughtful suggestions.

Sam Eskenazi, Director, Coalition for the National Museum of the American People

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# 32 – The Timeframe for Chronological Storytelling Exhibitions Can Range from a Day to Billions of Years

History museums that tell their story along a chronological path seem to capture their visitors’ engaged attention for longer periods of time than any other type of museum. Whether the subject is military history, astronomical history, natural history, Holocaust history, the history of a terrorist attack or the history of a people or a nation, audiences are mesmerized and become immersed in the story being told.

The time range for these histories vary wildly from a day to billions of years. The 9/11 Museum, for example, guides the visitor through one of the worst days in U.S. history from sunrise on a beautiful New York City morning through the devastating events of that day and it incorporates a memorial to its victims. At the other extreme, the Cosmic Pathway in the Rose Center at the American Museum of Natural History explores the history of the universe starting with the smallest particle imaginable and its incredible expansion over the first second of time through the current status of the universe today more than 13 billion years later.

Another exhibition at the AMNH in its Hall of Human Origins depicts the history of humans starting with our early ancestors some six million years ago to modern humans who made their appearance an estimated 150-200,000 years ago and spread throughout our planet. The National Museum of the American People picks up that story approximately 20,000 years ago when the first modern humans are believed to have come to the Western Hemisphere.

The NMAP will tell its story along four chronological paths telling about all of the ethnic, nationality and racial groups coming to this land and nation:

  1. The first chapter is from the first peoples in the Western Hemisphere to the first permanent settlement in what became the United States at Jamestown, VA in 1607 and includes first contact between natives and Europeans.
  1. The Museum’s second chapter from 1607 to 1820 depicts Western Europeans coming, slavery, establishment of the nation and its westward expansion via the Louisiana Purchase taking in new peoples.
  1. The third chapter from 1820 to 1924 covers the nation’s major century of expansion to the Pacific including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. The nation becomes the destination for millions of immigrants from throughout Europe and Asia and incorporates Hispanic lands in the Southwest.
  1. The final chapter takes us from 1924 through today focusing on refugees and immigrants arriving in the U.S. from every part of the world.

Other American chronological history museums focus on other events or peoples that the National Museum of the American People will also explore. The Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia takes place along a 29-year path starting with the roots of the revolution from 1760 to 1776, the war until its end at Yorktown in 1781, and the struggle to create a lasting government based on principles of democracy, freedom and liberty that culminates with the U.S. Constitution in 1789.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture tells its story over a 500-year path starting with the beginning of slavery by Europeans in Africa in the 1500s through slavery, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement to achievements of African Americans through today.

While the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History doesn’t have a central chronological exhibition depicting American history, it recently announced plans to open a permanent Latino exhibition space in 2021 where it would tell the story of Hispanic and Latino history in the United States. The NMAP will also be telling these stories through all four of its chapters in the context of all Americans coming or being incorporated into the United States.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum was one of the first major American museums to devote a permanent exhibition telling a story along a path for visitors. Its story is along a 14-year history of the Holocaust from 1932 until its end in 1945 and includes the American connection to those events.

When the Holocaust Museum was built, studies showed that the average visit to museums, whether an art, history or science museum, lasted about an hour and a half. The USHMM found that the average visit through its permanent exhibition was three hours and many visitors spent five hours going through its story. The National Museum of African American History and Culture which is less than three years old has also found that many visitors need well over three hours to explore its permanent exhibition.

The National Museum of the American People also expects visitors to become immersed in its story about the making of the American People. For all Americans, it is their story.

This blog is about the proposed National Museum of the American People which is about the making of the American People. The blog will be reporting regularly on a host of NMAP topics, American ethnic group histories, related museums, scholarship centered on the museum’s focus, relevant census and other demographic data, and pertinent political issues. The museum is a work in progress and we welcome thoughtful suggestions.

Sam Eskenazi, Director, Coalition for the National Museum of the American People

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#31: In the 21st Century Immigration Has Become a Major Issue in the US and the World

As the 21st Century dawned, the U.S. was attacked by foreign terrorists in New York and Washington using hijacked aircraft as weapons. Wars in the Middle East in response to those attacks led to a refugee crisis that has engulfed much of Europe. In the U.S., a crisis has been building on our southern border for an even longer period. There has been a steady focus on immigration over the last two decades.

The National Museum of the American People will be monitoring and marking events such as these, and events we don’t now anticipate, in future years as each move has a role in defining the American People.

In the wake of the 9/11 attack the U.S. passed the Patriot Act that broadened terrorism-related criteria for deportation and broadened inadmissibility rules for noncitizens. In addition it established a foreign student monitoring program.

A year later the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act streamlined electronic border control systems for those entering and leaving the country. In 2002 the Department of Homeland Security was created and established three new agencies to monitor and protect our borders: the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 added more reasons to not admit and to deport noncitizens and increased penalties for alien smuggling. The Border Protection, Anti-terrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005 criminalized violations of federal immigration law.

In 2006 the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration reform bill but the House refused to consider it. The issue of immigration reform has been simmering since then. But Congress did enact the Secure Fence Act that called for more than 700 miles of reinforced fence to be built along the Mexican border in places where there had been a high level of drug trafficking and illegal immigration. In 2006, 6,000 National Guard troops were sent to the Mexican border to assist Border Patrol agents.

After Congress failed to pass an immigration reform bill in 2012, President Obama announced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy to allow those entering the U.S. before the age of 16 to apply for a work permit and two-year protection against deportation. In 2014 President Obama took executive action to delay the deportation of 5 million undocumented immigrants after meeting various conditions and he broadened the DACA program.

In 2017, as one of his first acts in office, President Trump moved to impose new restrictions on immigration from several Muslim-majority countries in conflict regions. Starting in 2018, and continuing today, the President’s effort to build a significant border wall along the Mexican border has emerged as a major national issue.

When the National Museum of the American People opens it will mark all of our nation’s significant actions to determine who the American People are … and who they will be.

This blog is about the proposed National Museum of the American People which is about the making of the American People. The blog will be reporting regularly on a host of NMAP topics, American ethnic group histories, related museums, scholarship centered on the museum’s focus, relevant census and other demographic data, and pertinent political issues. The museum is a work in progress and we welcome thoughtful suggestions.

Sam Eskenazi, Director, Coalition for the National Museum of the American People

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#30: Irish Americans Are the 3rd Largest Ethnic Group in the US

Irish Americans comprise a little more than 10 percent of the U.S. population and are the third largest ethnic group in the nation, and on St. Patrick’s Day it sometimes seems that half the nation makes a point of wearing something green to become Irish for the day.

At the National Museum of the American People the history of Irish Americans immigrating here and what they accomplished is one of the major stories that will be told.

More than 95 percent of the earliest immigrants from Ireland were Scots-Irish, essentially Scottish peoples who migrated to Northern Ireland before coming to America between 1717 and 1775. Their story will also be told in the Museum.

The first Irish Catholics to come in the 18th Century settled in Maryland and Pennsylvania. Later the Irish Famine of the 1840’s led to a much larger surge of Irish Catholics immigrating to the United States. They primarily settled in Northeast and Midwest port cities including Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Buffalo, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Detroit, Cleveland and St. Louis.

In the early part of the 19th Century Irish immigrants were among the largest participants on large scale infrastructure projects including canals and railroads. They moved west as those projects extended the U.S. reach in that direction.

While there were about 50,000 Irish immigrants in the 1820s and 207,000 in the 1830s, about 1.7 million came during the 1840s and 1850s. Another 1.9 million arrived over the rest of the 19th Century. Fewer than 1 million came during the 20th Century.

During the Civil War some 38 Union regiments had the word “Irish” in their title.

By 1910 there were more people of Irish ancestry in New York City than in Dublin. In the 2010 Census there were 35.5 million Irish in America ranking behind only German Americans and African Americans as the largest ethnic groups in the nation.

The National Museum of the American People will embrace the immigration and migration stories of all Americans, including the Irish and Scots-Irish who have come to our shores.

We wish a Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all of those who celebrate it.

This blog is about the proposed National Museum of the American People which is about the making of the American People. The blog will be reporting regularly on a host of NMAP topics, American ethnic group histories, related museums, scholarship centered on the museum’s focus, relevant census and other demographic data, and pertinent political issues. The museum is a work in progress and we welcome thoughtful suggestions.

Sam Eskenazi, Director, Coalition for the National Museum of the American People

 

 

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#29: After 1924 US Doors Closed, Then Opened; Today Immigration Laws Are on America’s Front Burner

In our last few posts we’ve talked about immigration laws before the modern era. This blog discusses immigration laws over most of the 20th Century that have shaped the country we are now. During this period, coinciding with the 4th chapter of the National Museum of the American People’s story, the doors to the United States were all but closed to overseas immigrants in 1924, though the Indian Citizenship Act of that year granted U.S. citizenship to American Indians.

In 1929 as the Great Depression set in, Congress tightened overseas immigration even more by cutting the number of immigrants allowed annually to 150,000. It also linked a 2% nationality quota to the 1920 Census, limiting immigrants from eastern and southern Europe even more than at the end of the Museum’s  3rd Chapter.

Even without these harsher immigration laws, the Great Depression in the 1930s was slowing immigration to a trickle. During the deepest years of the Depression there were more people leaving the United States than entering it.

The political leanings of immigrants became an issue in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1940 the Alien Registration Act required all immigrants above age 13 to register with the government and be be fingerprinted, while it banned “subversives” from immigrating at all. The 1950 Internal Security Act allowed the U.S. to deport immigrants who were ever members of the Communist Party.

During World War II, the U.S. faced a shortage of farm workers and the so called Bracero Program was instituted in 1942 allowing Mexican manual laborers into the U.S. to work on farms. Over the following 22 years, about 5 million Mexican workers participated in the program.

Also during World War II the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed though the annual quota was only 105 and in 1946 the repeal was extended to cover Filipinos and Indians.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, the War Brides Act was enacted in 1945 to allow alien spouses, natural children and adopted children of members of the Armed Forces to become citzens. More than 100,000 entered the U.S. via this route.

The war also led to a massive worldwide increase of refugees and the U.S. passed the Displaced Persons Act in 1948 allowing up to 200,000 refugees into the country. In 1952 the Immigration and Nationality Act consolidated earlier laws and eliminated race as a basis for exclusion. However the quota system remained in place and immigration remained at low levels.

The Immigration Act of 1965 changed all that. While annual immigration from overseas was limited to 170,000 with a maximum of 20,000 from any one country, and immigration from the Western Hemisphere was limited to 120,000, a preference system was established for family members of U.S. citizens and immigrants with special skills. Those two features had no numerical restrictions and led to a major increase in immigrants over subsequent decades.

Special laws were enacted to facilitate refugees from Cuba (1966) and then Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos (1975-76). In 1980 the Refugee Act was adopted to facilitate a variety of refugee issues around the world. Those fleeing their country on account of race, religion, nationality or politics were made a different category of immigrants and increased the number of people who could be admitted to the United States under this category.

A 1986 Immigration Reform Act gave those who entered the U.S. before 1982 a path to citizenship provided that they met a list of criteria. It also legalized certain seasonal agricultural undocumented immigrants, and made it illegal to knowingly hire or recruit undocumented immigrants.

Four years later, the Immigration Act of 1990 set an annual ceiling of 700,000 immigrants for three years and 675,000 after that. As the number of undocumented immigrants swelled during the 1990s, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 allowed deportation of immigrants for a wider range of crimes and applied the law retroactively. The number of Border Patrol agents was also increased.

Over the last two decades immigration has remained a major national political issue. The National Museum of the American People will be continuously updated to bring the story of the making of the American People up to date. In a future blog we will discuss immigration issues that have emerged in the 21st Century.

This blog is about the proposed National Museum of the American People which is about the making of the American People. The blog will be reporting regularly on a host of NMAP topics, American ethnic group histories, related museums, scholarship centered on the museum’s focus, relevant census and other demographic data, and pertinent political issues. The museum is a work in progress and we welcome thoughtful suggestions.

Sam Eskenazi, Director, Coalition for the National Museum of the American People

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#28: US Laws and Constitutional Amendments Between 1820 and 1924 Govern Who Is an American

The National Museum of the American People’s third chapter covering the period from 1820 to 1924 saw a slow but steady stream of immigrants to the U.S. up to the Civil War, predominantly from Western Europe, especially from Germany and Ireland.

In the wake of the Civil War, the Constitution was amended to abolish slavery, make all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. citizens, and prevents the U.S. from denying the vote due to race, color or previous condition of servitude.

As the Industrial Revolution gathered steam during the second half of the 19th Century and early 20th Century, immigration soared. Newcomers were now arriving in large numbers from southern, central and eastern Europe as well as eastern Asia.

The first immigration law enacted during this period was the Naturalization Act of 1870 that allowed aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent to become U.S. citizens.

In 1875, the Page Act became the first immigration law to exclude a group from entering the country. In this case it was Chinese contract laborers and it was the first of many laws discriminating against Asians. Seven years later the Chinese Exclusion Act banned skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese employed in the mining industry from entering the country for 10 years and denied Chinese immigrants a path to citizenship.

Then in 1888 the Exclusion Act was amended to ban Chinese workers from re-entering the U.S. after they left. For years after that Chinese laborers were required to carry a resident permit at all times or face deportation or a sentence to hard labor. The citizen ban was also extended for another 10 years.

In 1907 the so called “Gentleman’s Agreement” between the U.S. and Japan ended the immigration of Japanese workers. The Immigration Act of 1917 instituted still more restrictions of people from Asia and the Pacific Islands.

While these anti-Asian laws were being promulgated over a period of more than 40 years, the U.S. passed laws during that same period excluding people engaged in a host of activities including criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, convicts, polygamists, beggars, and those who committed crimes of “moral turpitude.”

Also excluded were persons with a range of perceived characteristics or conditions. Various U.S. laws specifically mentioned: lunatics, idiots, persons likely to become public charges, the mentally ill, those with contagious diseases, epileptics, imbeciles, feeble-minded people, those with physical or mental disabilities, tuberculosis victims, children without parents, homosexuals, insane persons and alcoholics.

In 1907 a law was passed that said that women must adopt the citizenship of their husbands thus losing their U.S. citizenship unless their husbands became citizens. That law was repealed in 1922.

The Immigration Act of 1891 created the nation’s first agency dedicated to immigrants, the Bureau of Immigration in the Treasury Department. It also called for the deportation of people who entered the country illegally.

Ellis Island opened in 1892 and became the nation’s primary immigration station until it closed in 1954. It is estimated that 40% of Americans have a relative who passed through Ellis Island.

The Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization was created in 1906 and placed in the Commerce Department and in 1924 the U.S. Border Patrol was created.

This chapter of the story told by the National Museum of the American People ends with major laws passed in 1921 and 1924 closing the doors to immigration. While more than a million immigrants arrived in the U.S. during the peak years of this chapter, the Emergency Quota Law of 1921 limited the number of immigrants to the U.S. to 350,000 a year and implemented a nationality quota of 3% of the population of particular nationalities based on the 1910 census. This greatly reduced immigration from eastern and southern Europe.

The National Origins Act of 1924 reduced the number of immigrants allowed to enter the U.S. each year to 165,000 and set the nationality quota at 2% based on the 1890 census. While this quota system did not apply to immigrants from the Western Hemisphere, new immigrants practically disappeared until World War II. We will pick up those laws in the next blog.

This blog is about the proposed National Museum of the American People which is about the making of the American People. The blog will be reporting regularly on a host of NMAP topics, American ethnic group histories, related museums, scholarship centered on the museum’s focus, relevant census and other demographic data, and pertinent political issues. The museum is a work in progress and we welcome thoughtful suggestions.

Sam Eskenazi, Director, Coalition for the National Museum of the American People

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#27: Immigration Laws Between 1607 and 1820

As visitors walk through the story of the making of the American People, they will encounter unique markers along their chronological path that will touch upon laws made in national capitals — London, Philadelphia, New York, Washington, DC — or in individual colonial and then state capitals that affected who could be a citizen and how they would be eligible to become one.

While there are no such markers in the Museum’s first chapter up to 1607, laws passed in the British Parliament affected their colonial outposts starting in the 1600s. English persons and their children in the colonies were considered subjects of the king. It generally took an individual act of Parliament for a non-English person to be a subject and even that exception was strictly limited to Protestants.

In the meantime colonialists were pushing for more open paths to bring people to the colonies and to promote settlement in them. The Plantation Act of 1740 made it easier for aliens to apply for naturalization within their colonies, but that was still limited to Protestants with some exceptions for Quakers and Jews. New York, Georgia and Rhode Island made it a matter of policy to grant rights to Jewish applicants and those are the colonies where Jews settled in the largest numbers.

Several colonies issued their own naturalization policies until Parliament cracked down on that practice in 1773. Pennsylvania led the way in opening its doors to aliens.

In our Declaration of Independence in 1776 one of the specific complaints listed against King George was that “He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”

After the Revolutionary War, the Articles of Confederation in 1781 allowed each colony to pass its own naturalization laws with the understanding that all of the colonies would accept persons so naturalized. Those laws generally required an affirmation of allegiance to an authority and a period of physical residence prior to obtaining the right of citizenship.

The Confederation was superseded by the Constitution in 1789 which provided a stronger central government for the United States. Article 1, section 8, gave Congress the authority “To establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization” to cover the new nation.

The first naturalization law was passed in 1790. It limited naturalization to immigrants who were residents for two years and free white persons of good character thus excluding Native Americans, indentured servants, slaves, free blacks and later Asians. It also provided for citizenship for the children of U.S. citizens born abroad.

Five years later the law was changed to extend the residency period to five years for white persons of good moral character and to pledge allegiance to the Constitution of the United States. In 1798 the residency requirement was extended to 14 years, but that was repealed four years later.

The next major changes to the definition of new citizenship came in the wake of the Civil War. We will explore that period in the next blog which covers immigration laws during the National Museum of the American People’s third chapter from 1820 to 1924.

This blog is about the proposed National Museum of the American People which is about the making of the American People. The blog will be reporting regularly on a host of NMAP topics, American ethnic group histories, related museums, scholarship centered on the museum’s focus, relevant census and other demographic data, and pertinent political issues. The museum is a work in progress and we welcome thoughtful suggestions.

Sam Eskenazi, Director, Coalition for the National Museum of the American People

 

 

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#26: 19 US Organizations Focused on Refugees, Immigrants and Immigration Reform Support NMAP

President George Washington and most of the founders of the United States envisioned the new nation as a haven for those escaping religious persecution and other forms of oppression in their homelands. In that vision they laid the seeds for America becoming the leading nation of the world economically, militarily, scientifically and culturally.

Today as the US and the world struggles with immigration and immigration issues, it is important to remember the history and impact of our nation opening – and closing — its doors to refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants from the nation’s founding through today. Future blogs will deal with immigration laws that affected the story about the making of the American people.

In recalling that history, the National Museum of the American People is proud to have the support of a broad range of organizations that focus on refugees, immigrants and immigration reform. They include:

In telling the story about the making of the American People the National Museum of the American People will be a home for all of these organizations and a beacon for the nation.

This blog is about the proposed National Museum of the American People which is about the making of the American People. The blog will be reporting regularly on a host of NMAP topics, American ethnic group histories, related museums, scholarship centered on the museum’s focus, relevant census and other demographic data, and pertinent political issues. The museum is a work in progress and we welcome thoughtful suggestions.

Sam Eskenazi, Director, Coalition for the National Museum of the American People