The Statue of Liberty in New York harbor was first conceived around 1870 by two Frenchmen ‒ Édouard René Lefèbvre de Laboulaye, the President of the French Anti-Slavery Society, and the sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. France provided the Statue and the United States was responsible for the pedestal. The Statue was ultimately dedicated in 1886 with a multi-day celebration presided over by President Grover Cleveland. The Statue is modeled on the Roman goddess Libertas who is the patroness of liberty and it sought to celebrate the abolition of slavery. Lady Liberty is stepping out of chains at her feet.

However, the original idea behind the Statue was lost because of Emma Lazarus as well as the immigrants who entered the United States by way of New York harbor. In 1883 Lazarus, who was fiercely pro-immigrant, wrote a sonnet entitled “The New Colossus” for the purpose of raising funds for construction of the Statue’s pedestal. Her poem compared the New Colossus (Lady Liberty) to the ancient male Colossus of Rhodes. The poem was unmentioned at the dedication ceremony in 1886 and its words would not be placed on the Statue of Liberty until 1903. Still, it came to symbolize the meaning of the Statue.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "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-tost to me,

The net effect: The Statue, conceived as the triumph of freedom over slavery, instead became a symbol of welcome to the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Without immigrants there would be no present day America. Massive waves of immigrants came from 1850 to 1920. The Irish started in the late 1840s as a result of the potato famine. They were unwelcome with employment ads reading “Irish Need Not Apply.” But they kept coming and their sheer numbers transformed the cities where they landed. By 1880, they had elected an Irish American as Mayor of New York with Boston to follow in 1884. Immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe followed the Irish.  None were turned away or had to prove a skill; only the sick were quarantined. 

Many of us are descendants of immigrants who arrived in the great waves from 1850 to 1920. However, immigration continues to bring people here. Most first generation immigrants are now hiding in plain sight, generally in blue collar jobs. This became crystal clear as the result of a horrible workplace shooting in a town not far from Baltimore. 

A few weeks ago, a Judge sentenced Radee Prince to five life sentences for murdering three people and the attempted murder of two others. Prince worked at a company called Advanced Granite Solutions which is located in Edgewood, Maryland, and is approximately 30 miles north of Baltimore on I-95. Advanced, a small company, specializes in granite and stone applications and is the local place to go for your new granite kitchen countertop.

On October 18, 2017, Prince went to work, opened fire, killing three coworkers and seriously injuring two others.  The names of the murdered and seriously injured:

But now the “huddled masses” are not sailing into New York but, rather, crossing the Rio Grande River, the mountains and deserts of Arizona and New Mexico.  It is clear that the end of Trump and the beginning of Biden became a signal to those “yearning to breathe free.” And behind all of this are the “coyotes” who demand exorbitant sums to get people to the Promised Land. The “coyotes” are the vermin of this world who prey on the poor, the uneducated and the desperate and care nothing if their charges don’t make it as long as they have been paid.

Most people end up where they started. Usually, a person’s natural desire is to stay “home” with their families and loved ones. But what happens when “home” has become intolerable whether because of the absence of economic opportunity or lawlessness. That seems to be the case with respect to most people trying to enter the southern border. In story after story, those who are coming are coming because they are fleeing grinding poverty or gangs which are trying to recruit their children and which make their neighborhoods unsafe.

Last week there was a newspaper story about a Honduran father and his seven-year-old daughter attempting to cross the Rio Grande into Texas. The only contact they had in the United States was a relative in South Carolina. They were caught and sent back.

Then, he sent his daughter by herself and she made it only because of the kindness of a fellow immigrant who found her crying and alone short of the border. As an unaccompanied child, it is virtually certain that she will be allowed to stay.

I try to put myself in her father’s mind. The two had walked through Honduras, then through Guatemala and the length of Mexico to reach Texas. Now they’re stuck. But her father knows that she will be protected if she can reach the United States. He probably thinks “I will follow and find her.” But, down deep, he must also think “even if I don’t make it, it is better for her to make it and be alone than to be with me in Honduras.”

So what is the answer? Many immigrants who are here “legally” are not in favor of “illegal” immigrants and insist that they should have to go through the same bureaucratic, expensive and time-consuming process that they did. This notion may well account for Trump’s surprising level of support from Hispanic Americans in the 2020 election.

As long as Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico remain inhospitable to their people, the immigrants will come and the coyotes will prosper. United States’ immigration policy should first try to stabilize the situation in these countries. That, of course, is easier said than done. In the meantime, we have to develop a coherent policy for dealing with the “illegals.” Here are a few ideas:

1. Our present policy unreasonably limits “legal” immigrants with the result that there are too many “illegal” immigrants. One solution is to increase “legal” immigrants by encouraging family based immigration. In this way, an immigrant would have a family member to assist in his or her integration into the country. Trump railed against this, saying that he wanted “skilled” people to immigrate not the unskilled.  When my great grandfather immigrated, I don’t think he had any “skill” but he had a lot of moxie.  It takes a whole lot of moxie to leave the land of your birth, travel over 3,000 miles to a place you have never seen and where you do not know the prevailing language. His son, my grandfather, inherited the moxie but only got through the third grade.  Things seemed to have worked out pretty well from there.
2. New rules for granting asylum that recognize fear for personal safety from groups like gangs. Right now you can probably get asylum if the neighborhood gangs came after you because you were gay or because of your religious affiliation. However, your next-door neighbor who is dealing with the same gangs, would not qualify if they could not assert fear based on sexual orientation or religion.
3. Funds to help other countries remedy the problems at “home” and to help Mexico to secure its southern border.
4. Trump’s policy of making immigrants remain in Mexico until their asylum cases were decided would not have been so wrong if Mexico were safe but it is not. People escaping gang violence in Guatemala found the same in Mexico. What if funds were found to assist Mexico in providing safe waiting zones?

Some will say “where will the money come from?” If we want the money, we will find the money.  It now appears that there is no shortage of dollars flowing out of the Federal spigot.  Here is one recent example.

The recent $1.9 trillion COVID package passed by President Biden and the Democrats contained $86 billion for a “bailout” of Multi-Employer Pension Trusts. These Trusts were not victims of the pandemic; they had been consistently under funded by employers and workers alike for any number of years. No problem: let’s have the taxpayers properly fund them even though the affected parties had not done so and without even requiring that these Trusts clean up their acts going forward. This was an outright grant of money not a loan. This one item was approximately 5% of the recent legislation. You pretty much know that there is something wrong with a proposal when the Washington Post, New York Times and the Wall Street Journal all question it. These are the broadsheets for the Democratic and Republican parties and rarely agree on anything.

Ronald Reagan, quoting John Winthrop, referred to America as a “shining city on a hill.”  Later, he said:  “And if there had to be city walls, the walls have doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and heart to get there.”

It is fashionable in certain enlightened quarters to dismiss Reagan’s optimistic view of America and to decry its numerous sins: systemic racism, income inequality, gun violence, foreign misadventures and the like. Indeed, these same people scoff at the idea of American exceptionalism described by the “city on a hill” metaphor.

In the end, I believe that immigrants are a positive good for the country. Almost without exception, they are extremely hard-working, grateful and bring an energy to succeed which they pass on to their children. Those of us who were born here often do not realize how special, warts and all, this place is.  

If you don’t think America is a “shining city on a hill,” just ask an immigrant.

Woke is an old word which has now taken on a new life. It was first used in the 1940s by black Americans but became increasingly popular as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement after the deaths of Michael Brown and George Floyd. BLM activists use the word to alert people to keep watch for police brutality. In other words, “wake up” to the systemic racism which continues as a result of America’s inability to expiate its original sin of slavery.

As often is the case, “woke” was appropriated from the black community by the white community to state its own grievances. And “woke” ‒ once loosed ‒ is not easily cabined. “Woke” is now a more generic slang word associated with “progressive” causes such as LGBTQ+ rights, feminism, environmentalism and, as will be seen in a few paragraphs below, the audacity of a non-ethnic person in giving advice on how to prepare ethnic recipes (yes, you read that right).

Without question, the most “woke” governmental body in the United States is the San Francisco School Board. A previous blog on this site introduced readers to this group. The School Board just passed a Resolution to rename 44 schools with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt and even current U.S. Senator Feinstein getting the boot.

The Resolution which passed by a vote of 6-1 on January 27, 2021 provided that the names were being changed because they were historical figures responsible for “…the subjugation and enslavement of human beings; or who oppressed women, inhibiting societal progress; or whose actions led to genocide; or who otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those among us to the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness…”

It is, at best, ironic that the School Board said its actions promoted “the opportunities among us to the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Those words are from the Declaration of Independence which was penned by Thomas Jefferson whose name is now being stricken from one of the schools. You really can’t make this stuff up.

The politicians in San Francisco are so “woke” that no one, including the Mayor, objects to the renaming. Meanwhile, the public schools in San Francisco, both the renamed ones and the others, remain closed with no apparent plan to reopen anytime soon.  As Mark Twain said:  “First God made idiots.  That was for practice.  Then He made School Boards.”

The rap on Lincoln, according to teacher Jeremiah Jeffries, is that he was chosen based on “his treatment of First Nations peoples.”

The Cherokee Nation, after dithering for almost 5 decades (explained over the years as having “no official position”) just “woke up” and requested that Jeep change the name of the Grand Cherokee. The Cherokees may do better copying the Seminole Tribe.

Florida State University retains the name Seminoles, complete with the head dress costumed brave who rides a horse and throws a ceremonial spear into the turf prior to football games. The Seminole Tribe was happy to let this tradition continue, proving once again that money is a great leveler.  Suffice it to say that the Seminoles would have driven an extraordinarily hard bargain for Manhattan.

All of which brings us to one of the most bizarre instances of “woke” from the world of food. Hamantaschens are triangular cookies eaten during the Jewish Festival of Purim (celebrated a few weeks ago). In 2015, Bon Appétit published an article by food writer Dawn Perry on how to make a really tasty hamantaschen. Recently, Abigail Koffler was researching hamantaschen fillings and came upon Perry’s article. She was not pleased and turned to Twitter (where else) to state “that traditional foods need to be updated by someone from that tradition.” Dawn Perry’s sin: she is a Gentile.

Bon Appétit is a part of the Condé Nast mass media empire. Its brands include Architectural Digest, The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ and attract over 72 million consumers in print, 394 million in digital and 454 million across social platforms.

The title of this post copies the title of Bret Stephen’s must read Opinion column in the New York Times of February 23, 2021. Within hours of the Koffler tweet Condé Nast responded as recounted in the Stephen’s piece:

“The original version of this article included language that was insensitive toward Jewish food traditions and does not align with our brand’s standards,” the editor wrote. “As part of our Archive Repair Project, we have edited the headline, dek, and content to better convey the history of Purim and the goals of this particular recipe. We apologize for the previous version’s flippant tone and stereotypical characterizations of Jewish culture.”

…What Bon Appétit blithely calls its “Archive Repair Project” is, according to The Associated Press, an effort to scour “55 years’ worth of recipes from a variety of Condé Nast magazines in search of objectionable titles, ingredient lists and stories told through a white American lens.”

There’s no way to be certain about this but I wager that Dawn Perry’s hamantaschens are tastier than Abigail Koffler’s and that she would be better company. But one thing is surely certain: Condé Nast’s groveling over the Perry article is appalling.

Winston Churchill once said “a nation that forgets its past has no future.” Whatever their now declared sins, Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln are our past and the reasons we have a present and a future. Without Washington, the Revolutionary War would not have been won; without Jefferson there would be no Declaration of Independence nor the Louisiana Purchase; without Lincoln there would be no United States; without Theodore Roosevelt there would be no National Park System and without Franklin Roosevelt there would be no Social Security program or regulation of Wall Street.

Is there anything good about the current “woke” sensibility? With respect to the business of “names” it is clear that certain names should be ditched and others should be elevated. A rough sampling:

1. Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Hood in Texas are huge military bases. Both are named after Confederate generals. We should never give honor to those who fought against the United States. A law school classmate has suggested that the business of renaming strikes him as “empathy on the cheap.” That may be, but I remain convinced that federal military institutions should not honor Confederate rebels.
2. Whatever happened to the elevation of women?  Susan B. Anthony’s face appears on a one dollar coin which is rarely used. Surely more can be done to honor women who were held back for so long but who have been so important to the success of the country. Identifying those women and finding appropriate ways to honor them would be a good “woke” project.  One woman to be considered is Lois Wilson who was the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous Family Groups.  Her more famous husband Bill was co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.  These groups have proven to be the most effective self-help programs ever devised. 
3. What about Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman?  Douglass has a number a public schools named after him and truly more can be done but Tubman has pretty much been slighted. That was so until the Obama Administration decided to place Harriet on the $10 bill in lieu of Alexander Hamilton. That bonehead suggestion was altered only because of the success of the Broadway show “Hamilton.” Now Harriet is being proposed for the $20 bill in lieu of Andrew Jackson. As between Hamilton, who is probably one of the least famous but one of the most important Founding Fathers and Jackson, there is no choice. Put Harriet on the $20 or let her share it with Jackson.

The principal problem with most of the current “woke” movement is that it scours the past for mistakes instead of trying to claim the future. It is the future where inclusion is important and past mistakes can be remedied. 

However, there is one thing I do know for sure:  a cookie whisperer should not be the subject of derision.

Shame, today thy name is Condé Nast.

P.S.  A college roommate recently exposed me to a singer named Eva Cassidy. Twenty-five years ago (January 1996) Eva and a fellow bandmate secured enough money to make a record while they performed a live set at a small but famous music venue in Washington D.C. known as Blues Alley.

Eva would be dead before that year was out. The record from that session has sold over 10 million copies, mostly as a result of word of mouth.

The following is a documentary about Eva, her band and that record. Her marvelous voice is on full display.  Live at Blues Alley