AMERICAN VOICES - Program 1

00.00	Titles
00.36	KATHARINE KORONA: Is twenty two year since I came. In this time, I have seen a ship never. But I remember. The sea on my face. In my hand, Polish bread, cheese. And in my sack, whiskey; a present for my cousin, Thaddeus. My cousin in America!
00.55	COMMENTARY: Between 1900 and 1917, eight million immigrants crossed the Atlantic to start a new life in America. In this New World, it was said, there was a chance for everyone to succeed, to prosper, to live the American Dream. But how far could America fulfil such expectations?
01.28	This program reconstructs the testimonies of four immigrants who came to America in the early years of the twentieth century. Their words survive because, in the late 1930s, they were interviewed by the Federal Writers Project, an oral history project paid for by the US government. Ten thousand Americans were interviewed in all – their lives, their experiences written down, filed away in the Library of Congress. Ten thousand ‘American Voices’.
02.12	KATHARINE KORONA: You like see pictures of old country? Yes? This my fadder, mudder. What color dress is dark, ver’ dark. One day, I am with my mother, we get letter, from America, from Thaddeus. He say, he is married, he has good job, plenty eat, he and his wife they have a room all their own, they are glad. I say to my mother: "I am going to America!". She says: "You go to America? You find the money!" All day long I work in garden, everywhere beets and cabbages, beets and cabbages. Too much, too young, me just fifteen year. But me get money. Me come to America!
03.17	COMMENTARY: The year Katharine Korona left Poland – 1916 – Europe was tearing itself to pieces. The old empires of Britain, Germany, France, Russia, bogged down in the mutual slaughter of the First World War. The immigrants that arrived in America turned their backs on this old world. They fled the poverty of peasant life, they fled a world governed by class, stifling opportunity. Many fled religious or political persecution. Herman Kirschbaum was a Russian Jew from Courland, in what’s now Latvia.
04.15	HERMAN KIRSCHBAUM: When I was fifteen I ran away from home. Took some money from mein fader's desk, ran away. I had no passport, but in Europe with money you can do anything. I got a boat to London, I met this English Jew. He told me ‘America’s the place’. You see, at that time, no Jew could learn a trade, all over Europe it was the same. He said, in America, you can learn a trade. So this London Jew and I, we came together. I bought his ticket. I had money, but no language; he had no money, but he knew the ropes, he – how do you say? – he ‘knew his onions’. We landed in New York, this was Nineteen-hundred-twelve.
04.57	TONY THE GREEK: The first thing I see was the statue, you know, in the harbour. I mean, liberty, you know? Is hard to understand if you are born here. But I came from Greece. I came with bright hopes, I came with love of liberty. I don’t look back. What did Greece give to me? Nothing. What did America give to me? Everything.
05.34	COMMENTARY: The words of a Greek restaurateur, Tony. We don’t know his surname; his testimony gives few details of his arrival. But most immigrants from Europe were processed here, at Ellis Island, just off Manhattan. They’d pass under the watchful eye of medical officers, alert for mental or physical illnesses. There were confusing forms to fill in, 29 questions on their status and prospects. But that was nothing compared to what was to come. Next stop, New York: as bewildering then as it remains today. Miguel Santos, an optician from Cuba, saw New York first in 1904.
06.52	MIGUEL SANTOS: I’m looking at this electric street car, I’m thinking, how can it move without horses? I go to the museums, I go to the Aquarium. I hear Caruso sing at the Grand Opera. I see so many things. The Flat Iron building, and the Brooklyn Bridge, and the subway, and down at City Hall, the rush hour! One thing I do not like is, I cannot sleep, because of the sound of the elevators. The noise, always the noise. But you get used to it. HERMAN KIRSCHBAUM: I thought New York was the best city in the world. I still do. I walked into a restaurant on Rivington Street. It was the corner of Eldridge, I remember it as well as yesterday. I should drop down dead if I didn't for fifteen cents buy a four or five-course meal! I had soup -- a big meat order, and good! -- dessert -- and then tea, coffee. And on top of that, they gave you a big soda -- you know, at the soda fountain - free! And if you gave the waiter a nickel tip once a week, he was your friend for life.
07.59	COMMENTARY: So, what was this place, America, to which they’d come? It was still a new nation – little over a century old – but it was modern, confident, prosperous. It was rich in raw materials; it exported wheat grown in vast quantities in the mid-west, it exported iron and steel. It invited new immigrants to share in this prosperity, to take a job, to pull your way up in the world. It was just a question of finding your feet. Herman Kirschbaum settled in what he called the ‘Jewish Ghetto’ on the Lower East Side.
09.05	HERMAN KIRSCHBAUM: It’s around Sewards’ Park, you know?, and a little further down. Plenty of Jews there. I thought I’d never seen so many Jews. As a matter of fact, I never had. And friendly!… So, anyway. My money runs out, I had to start working. I sold shoelaces for a while, and then I got a chance to learn the fur business; I jumped at it. Inside of two years I was getting fifty or sixty dollars a week. From shoelaces to half a hundred per. Pretty good, eh? It went a little to my head. TONY THE GREEK: When I come here in my teens, I am handicapped not knowing the language. Anyway, I’m working in a hat cleaning parlor, this customer says, how I would like to learn the restaurant business? So that’s what I do. And I’m mingling with the customers, I’m learning. And when the time comes to marry I marry an American girl. I could not fall in love with a girl from the old country because she would not be modernised, you know? I mean, isa relative. People from my country say I made a success in business, they have envy. I believe anyone – you know? – using a little common sense, learning from your mistakes... If you have courage and you want to work, this is a country where anyone can make good.
10.54	COMMENTARY: A country where anyone can make good. Was it true? In these New York tenements immigrants lived in cramped conditions. There was hardship here the archive pictures sometimes gloss over. The files of the Federal Writers Project contain stories of immigrants in sweatshops, dying of dust poisoning in attic rooms. No two experiences were the same.
11.29	For Katharine Korona, New York was just a stop-over. Her cousin, Thaddeus lived in the industrial town of Manchester, New Hampshire. Her testimony recalls the journey north – frightened, bewildered, a peasant girl in a strange and alien land.
11.59	KATHARINE KORONA: You see, on my ship, everyone different; so many language. But now, everyone American, everyone speak American, all dressed the same, only I am different. And then we come to Manchester. I look; no Polish costume do I see. But then I am being held and kissed by these people, they speak Polish but they do not look Polish at all! And they laugh and they tease me, about my old country clothes. So the next day, nothing else will do, good-bye to my skirts and petticoats, my bright kerchiefs, my jacket, with the embroidery, you know? I send them to my sister back home, they are gone; I dress now American! But when I see Thaddeus, I hide. I feel undressed, naked, in these so few American clothes.
13.00	COMMENTARY: Thaddeus had arranged for Katherine work here – in the Amoskoag textile mills. She worked alongside American women of French and Irish origin. Quite a contrast from gathering beets in some Polish field.
13.33	KATHARINE KORONA: I watch for broken threads. I am so proud, I sing, I laugh. Me, me, I have job in America! I send dollars home. Five American dollars for my mother.
13.54	COMMENTARY: But her testimony begs a question. Was it really so easy to leave your old culture behind, to discard your past like a set of old clothes? America’s President, Woodrow Wilson, hoped so. For him, America wasn’t just some bolt-hole from Europe, it was a nation in its own right, with its own identity and culture. But that culture was the culture of the old establishment. White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant; people like him. And the new waves of immigrants – mostly from Southern or Eastern Europe – struggled not to feel like outsiders, struggled to be accepted.
14.49	KATHARINE: I spend there two years, on the same loom. And always, a little trouble here, a little trouble there. There is a girl next to me, she does not like to see me happy. She say something I cannot understand, the others look at me and laugh. One day she trips me so I fall, I break my finger, my food is fallen on the floor. "Eigh, eigh, Polander! eigh, eigh, Polander!" I have no lunch that day. I have dignity, I will not eat the food from the floor.
15.36	TONY: Sure, sure, I had trouble like that once, not long after I arrived. I was on a streetcar, I was looking out of the window, I saw some schoolboys. Maybe I looked funny to them, I don’t know. Anyway, one of them had a rock, he throws it through the window. Isa deep cut, you know? it bled pretty bad. I was so excited to be in America but that made me feel, well, a little unwelcome. But that was a long time ago.
16.29	COMMENTARY: It seems America wasn’t always as welcoming as people hoped. And so the American ‘melting pot’ became a kind of simmering stew, different cultures keeping apart, through pride, but also self-protection.
16.56	MIGUEL SANTOS: You want to know the truth? The word ‘Liberty’ is very much heard in the land of Uncle Sam. So how come when we come here we have to stick together, because of the hatred Americans feel toward us? They get drunk, they pick a quarrel. I said to one, why you talk to me in this contemptuous way? And he’s closing his hand to threaten me. So I’m throwing the first cinbonbase, you know?, punch. And this policeman he comes to arrest me. And you talk about democracy, you talk about the rights of man?
17.39	COMMENTARY: In Manchester, the Polish Community remains strong. In the Polish Church were Katherine married her Polish husband they still worship in the native tongue. It was a balancing act. Becoming American – whilst keeping your own culture intact.
18.24	KATHARINE: And today – is exciting. I go to courthouse. For final papers. Now I become citizen, you understand? Months I study, "Who makes laws in the country?", "Who makes laws in the state?", "What is name of the President of America?", "Why do you wish to become American citizen?". I have answer ready. To hear my children say: "Of course my mother she votes; she is American citizen!" But ssh – secret, I not say this – also I wish to become citizen to join Polish American citizen club. We go to dances, we wear uniform we march. Beautiful uniform, cape red, gloves all white, and a badge as large as a silver dollar!
19.12	COMMENTARY: In 1917, Woodrow Wilson attempted to unify this simmering stew of cultures in a patriotic crusade, joining Britain and France in the war against the Germany. For two years the United States had grown rich trading with the allies, sustaining their war effort. When Germany threatened this prosperity, the delusion of American neutrality sank. The call to arms challenged all Americans – immigrants included.
20.04	TONY THE GREEK: When the War broke out, sure, I joined up. I joined the Navy, I saw some action. My friends, they told me I was crazy, but I was proud to wear the uniform. And when I think about it today, I still feel proud, to have fought for my country, for its ideals. For my country, America, you know?
20.32	COMMENTARY: In the stalemate of the trenches, the arrival of the Americans was decisive. 2 million fresh troops helped the allies push the Germans back. With victory, came questions for the future: what now was America’s role on the world stage? Wilson called for a League of Nations - an international peacekeeping force in which America would take the lead. But the American Senate rejected the League, killing Wilson’s dream. Too much American blood had been spilled already fighting Europe’s war. Let Europe now sort out her own problems. It was an attitude some recent immigrants found easy to understand.
21.31	HERMAN KIRSCHBAUM: You know I tell you about that Jew I met in London? We came over together. He joined up. Got himself killed in France, poor fellow. My parents lost everything, they had to leave Courland. They escaped to Antwerp, in Belgium. And I’m here on sixty dollars a week in the best city in the world, I’m wearing expensive clothes, I’m smoking the best cigars, what should I think? I ran away from all that.
22.05	COMMENTARY: From 1918 to 1924, another million immigrants arrived at Ellis Island. But America was closing the door, limiting the flood of un-American people, un-American ideas. They imposed literacy tests, quotas. Meanwhile those who’d already arrived learnt in their turn what it meant to be American – nations within a nation.
23.03	KATHARINE KORONA: And tonight, I go to dance, with my husband. I will drink beer. Eat the little fish we make of pretzel dough, the sausages, good. And I will watch the men behind the bar, how they are moving, moving, never collide, with patrons, with each other, never do they drop a tray, a drink. And I watch it all, and I love it. This is freedom. This is America. Everybody glad.