I sat in my lawn chair and listened to a free concert of Lerner and Loewe music performed by the Millennium Park Orchestra and Chorus. A beautiful summer night in one of the most luminous spots in one of the world’s great cities. This is about as “First World” as it gets with wine, gourmet foods, good friends and not even an entry fee to get in. Millennium Park is a triumph, a “must see” when you visit Chicago. It is an evolving blend of artwork, interactive sculpture, landscaping, and performing arts, all surrounded on three sides by the rich and varied architecture of the Chicago skyscrapers. It never gets old.
Framing the north end of the park, along Randolph Street, are four prominent office buildings: the Blue Cross Building, the white towering AON Building, the old original skyscraper Prudential Building, and behind it the newer cousin, known as Two Pru (2 Prudential Plaza). There are scores of other residential creations on and behind Randolph, as well, but these are the office buildings. And the Pritzker Pavilion, home to a summer series of concerts, sits at their feet. As night falls and their lights come up, you can’t help feeling very fortunate to be there, in such a riot of lights and colors, all soaring above you in your little musical island of privilege.
It was during their renditions of songs from Camelot, a story now linked as a memory, however faulty, to the Kennedy years, that my mind began to wander. For some reason, I thought of those famous lines from an obscure poet named Emma Lazurus:
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Those words of kindness are written at the base of the Statue of Liberty and taught to generations of American school kids as our nation’s spirit of welcome and offer of a new beginning to those seeking to leave behind a weary world. The golden torch she holds high is that “lamp beside the golden door” to democracy and freedom. Our Camelot.
And yet, those words express only a wish and, like most wishes, are not entirely true and really never have been. Historically for most immigrants, as soon as the stop at Ellis Island was behind you, and you were officially welcomed on the path to naturalized citizenship, you pretty quickly found that you were not all that welcomed by whomever happened to get here before you.
You were a threat. A threat to my job, my neighborhood, my set of beliefs. Maybe you didn’t speak my language, didn’t attend my church. Rich people don’t often emigrate, so you were poor and probably would end up draining the tax coffers in some way. You didn’t have many skills and you may have brought illnesses with you. You were not schooled. You looked different. You were Irish, or Italian, maybe Polish, or a Jew, and you were a threat.
So you took the abuse. You made neighborhoods in the cities and built the ghettos of your particular clan for the safety in numbers it offered, and you took the low work. You worked and married someone like you and started a family. You bought a two flat or a bungalow and you celebrated your culture in the taverns, the church halls, and with parades. And you worked. You and your children and their children earned your way in over several generations.
My wife’s paternal grandfather was such an immigrant. Thomas Hawkins came from Ireland around the turn of the 20th century, passed by the “Irish Need Not Apply” signs all along the Eastern seaboard and made his way inland to Chicago; the CTA hired him to work at a bus barn near North Avenue and Cicero in some entry level job. At the end of his first shift, he asked the foreman if he should come back tomorrow. The foreman, a bit puzzled, said yes. Again the next day and the day after that, he repeated his question at day‘s end until the foreman, now exasperated, told him “Look, man, you have a job. Show up here every day but Sunday.” It had never occurred to young Thomas that there was anything but day work, work as he knew it from the old country. A steady hourly wage, a defined work week, and benefits were entirely new to Thomas and millions like him.
But only a dozen years later, this same immigrant would feel himself American to the core, as did his fellow Irish Americans. His son, Marty Hawkins, my wife’s father, told the story of being a little boy sitting on the front porch steps while his dad and friends had a beer and discussed politics. It was Irish brogues all around. One of them remarked, in a thick brogue that “The trouble with this country was that we’re letting too many foreigners in!” Young Martin looked up from face to face, knowing that every one of them was from Ireland. I asked him what he said or did and he told me, “I didn’t say anything.” A wise young man.
——————
Building lights work differently at night for office buildings than they do for residential buildings. Condos, apartments, and hotels have many more dark windows than lighted ones, what with people travelling, un-booked hotel rooms, being part time or weekend getaway places. It is unusual to see a horizontal string of illuminated windows in such a building running more than four or five windows in a row.
Office buildings, at night, tell a different story. Most offices are open architecture these days, so you will see whole floors of lights flick on or off. And as I sat there for several hours at my concert, it occurred to me that the different floors of lights going on or off reflected the movement and progress of the cleaning personnel who were cleaning those offices. If you wondered who make up those cleaning crews, you need only get on board a southbound Metra in the morning, a train taking you out of the city, not in. Onboard you will find the cleaning crews, some white, and some black, but overwhelmingly Mexican and Central American women, tired at the end of their long night shift and on their way home.
—————-
It seems far from Camelot now, under the brutal and profane thumb of a president who is trying hard to sell his dystopian vision of a white, privileged, isolated USA, where immigrants pose not just a threat to our economy, but also bring crime with them. He is selling fear and specifically fear of immigrants from Mexico and Central America. He has blurred immigrants into those seeking sanctuary from violence. He has separated mothers and fathers from their children. He has abandoned and betrayed our role as world leader.
Sadly, there are many who have bought into his vision of a “walled off” America and to that crowd he has become a sort of Messiah. Equally as sad, he is using his vast presidential powers to enable and empower mean-spirited trolls at the national level who are as devoid of character and compassion as he appears to be. Most of them seem to have lifeless eyes, as if their soul has been removed. They are working hard to dim the lamp of welcome atop that statue in New York Harbor, to have it go dark altogether if they can have their way.
But as I watched those office windows light up, it struck me that this is why the haters will lose: the immigrants will simply outwork them. Just as immigrants before them, like the Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews and others, they will take every lousy job that comes along, make minimum wage, go without healthcare and dental plans, and keep working. They won’t take vacations, they will drive old cars and fix them in their driveways on Sunday. They will work two jobs, take on odd jobs if they can. They will pool their family wages in a weekly effort to survive in America. And they will keep working.
You can see them cutting the grass on your local golf course, wiping down your car at the car wash, running the kitchens of the local eatery, landscaping your house, cleaning your hotel room, scavenging the alleys for old metal, picking the crops, and cleaning the offices at night. And they will keep working. They may clean the offices now, but they know that education is key, and their children will work civil service jobs and entry level management positions and work in those same offices their parents once cleaned and their grandchildren will become the leaders and professionals and they will carry their work ethic into generation after generation. And that’s why they will win, winning for the United States in the bargain.
So as long as those office lights keep shining in the night to mark the progress of the immigrant workers, their glow will have to replace the dimmed lamp of freedom from the Statue of Liberty. And someday soon, when this madness is swept away by the millions of Americans who really understand the value of liberty and the meaning of democracy, perhaps the golden torch will regain its luster and we will once again welcome the world’s immigrants to our new and better Camelot.
