4. The View From Prindle's Head

4.  The View From Prindle’s Head

by

R.E. Prindle

Strangers In A Strange Land

 

In this great storm of 1920, not too dissimilar from the great storm of 2020, the latter being its continuation, perhaps the most troublesome and the originator of America’s greatest sorrows was that of immigration.  After a century of unlimited immigration in 1920 Europe lay devastated, the lives of Europeans were shattered, more especially in the East if that were possible.  The United States of America in contrast seemed to lay untouched and pristine.  The land of promise.

The folly of unrestricted immigration had long been resented by concerned Americans and now the land of promise looked even more promising to Europeans.  Concerned Americans feared an inundation of Europeans.  God only knew how many.  The nation of Jewry planned to remove their entire populations of wretched refuse, to quote the Statue of Liberty, to these promising shores.  Fearful of the reaction to a conspicuous  inundation of Ellis Island, the ports of Corpus Christie and New Orleans had been prepped at great cost for their arrival.  While the Jews pretend that no one knew or knows of this, concerned citizens trembled at the threat.

Fortunately, these ignorant Americans who couldn’t do the right thing had elected a President who could:  Warren G. Harding.  There is a great similarity between Warren G. Harding and his successor a hundred years later, Donald Trump.  Both have understood the threats to America.

Harding quietly moved to outlaw the Communist Party, although the outlawry was rescinded  by the powerful organized Communist’s fellow travelers and Pinkos.  Still Harding was able to place restrictions on immigration that ended the threat of any mass invasion from Europe. This would stay in place until 1965. The Jews were forestalled and stymied.

So, for the first time since the 1870s the country was to get a respite from the burgeoning influx of strangers who were creating a very strange land.  The mélange of cultures could scarcely be managed.  In an effort to frame the controversy, the myth of the Melting Pot was created to abey the warring populations.  The invasions had not been peaceful, conflicts had broken out everywhere.  Thus in 1920 America was a land of huge colonies of various European nationals who had come over in multitudes.  From 1870 to 1920 a third of the entire population of Jewry had invaded American cities like New York which had the largest single population of Jews in the world.  Newark had a large colony that spawned their novelist, Philip Roth, who gives a good portrait of the mental state of Newark Jewry in his paranoid fantasy novel, The Plot Against America.

The Italians, or Sicilians, began arriving in numbers in the 1890s.  Unable to sustain themselves in their native island, Sicilians for many decades migrated North in Europe during the summer months to supply labor, returning to their native isle in the Winter to rest and spend their money.  With the arrival of the reliable steamship they extended their range to include Argentina, moving up through Brazil to Central America and finally discovering New York in the 1890s.  they too came in the millions although they migrated back in the hundreds of thousands.  Poles, Czechs, Scandavians had all come.  Major parts of their peoples.  Swedes nearly formed their own State in Minnesota.  For a long time if you were from Minnesota you were sure to be taken as a Swede.

The Germans tried to form German countries in Texas and almost succeeded in St. Louis.  The Poles took over in Hamtramck as a principality surrounded by Detroit.  And of course the Jews in their millions formed colonies everywhere.  Today Brooklyn is a Jewish colony with smaller colonies from New Jersey into the New York State hinterlands.  New York, Newark, Chicago, everywhere.

The Jews were highly organized and managed by wealthy European families like the Rothschilds.  The small number of Jews who arrived with the Forty-Eighters quickly established themselves, becoming wealthy enough to establish industries to supply the Eastern European Jews with jobs on arrival.  These were tight organizations where English wasn’t needed as in their density Yiddish served.

The fabulous technological advances of the times greatly abetted their efforts.  The sewing machine opened the needle trades to them at the propitious moment.  Previous to the nineties clothing had been homemade.  As the twentieth century emerged store bought clothing became the norm.  All such clothing was the province of the Jews.  While sweatshops have been thought American they were of Jewish origin.  The German Jews exploited the Eastern Jews mercilessly.

By 1920, then, all these European colonies were spread over the land.  All of them speaking their native tongues, speaking a kind of pidgin English.  Accents abounded.  The entertainment industry was practically founded on ethnic humor which lasted until about 1950.  As I was growing up in Michigan I lived among accents that seemed to mysteriously disappear about 1950 when ethnic humor was banned from radio and TV.

Continue to 5.  Unintended Consquences