Tuesday Voice: Growing up in America

Arrival in New York Harbor

By Rolf Dumke

The sky and waters were calm on Saturday, June 7th, 1952, when the Liberty ship made a slow right-turn into the panoramic view of New York Harbor.

    The immigrant families, “displaced persons” from Germany and Europe, had experienced a rough 10-day passage over a stormy Atlantic from the German port of Bremerhaven. Now, the elements were unusually quiet, as if a great giant was holding his breath. Standing on deck, we saw that by entering the harbor we were gliding into a great calm space, defined by an even sheet of dark-blue water below and a huge dome of cloudless, light-blue sky above. It formed a cupola, Cassius Dio’s “vaulted heaven,” with the blasting midday sun almost straight above, like the ocular of a great new Pantheon.
    Pantheon is a Greek word for a temple, a place for all the important gods of a country, like Mars and Venus, the gods of War and Love. Cassius Dio, in his History of Rome, about 75 years after the Pantheon’s reconstruction, states:

...the building called the Pantheon...has this name because it received among the images which decorated it the statues of many gods, including Mars and Venus; but my own opinion of the name is that, because of its vaulted roof, it resembles the heavens.

I like this definition and use it here.
    The American temple’s grouped statues of gods were formed by the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, before the New Jersey coastline on the left, and, on the right, Manhattan’s skyscrapers, especially the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings, punctuating the skyline. They were as imposing and threatening to newcomers as the giant-faced Polynesian statues on the hills of Easter Island in the Pacific had been intimidating to sailors who came upon them.
    Henceforth, for us immigrants, important American gods could be grouped into Liberty and Fraternity on the left, and Enterprise and Commerce on the right.
    I could not find a historic photo of the panorama of New York Harbor and used a modern one above instead, with the World Trade Center and new bank skyscrapers standing for the new American god of Money, now towering at the tip of Manhattan, unfortunately destroying the architectural balance and the drama of the increasing height of skyscrapers, to their culmination in the Empire State Building. In the pre-9/11 panorama, one gets the impression that the gods of Enterprise and Commerce have lost power to the god of Money, whose heights have soared.
    It seemed as though we had entered a hallowed space run by gods different from the ones we knew in Germany – Kant and Beethoven, Mars and Thor – and I hoped that the new gods would be kinder, and fair. Decades later, in Rome, I got the same chilling goose-bumps up and down my neck and back when I saw the almost two-thousand-year-old Pantheon and I recalled my first impressions of America, when we saw the American gods.

The immigrants’ initial impression of the Pantheon of New York Harbor was overwhelming! We were all dressed in our Sunday’s finest, excited and happy, shouting cheers to each other, eyes and faces shining with awe and hope. But some faces were clouded with anxiety. My parents felt a new ray of hope was shining on us and upon our new great adventure somewhere in his vast new country, without knowing our destination and knowing but shreds of English. Hope was mixed with anxiety. Mutti was holding my young brother tightly, and he must have felt the full force of her mixed emotions. Because of his young age, he had been quartered with Mutti in the women's compartment and was hidden to me for most of the voyage.
    As the ship slowly glided past our new holy lady, Lady Liberty, the excited chatter among the immigrant families on the deck of the ship faded and was replaced by an almost religious awe. Everyone knew this was an unforgettable moment for our subsequent lives. We would remember what our feelings and thoughts were at this moment, many years later, particularly when hearing the first movement of Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony, his hymn to America in 1893.
    My immediate impression, though, was the thought, how hot the sun is. In New York we were now on Naples’ degrees latitude 40 N, as opposed to Munich’s 48 degrees N, like Thunder Bay, Canada. I sweated streams in my “handsome” dark-blue woolen sweater. My long woolen stockings, worn under short pants, were scratching and got progressively soaked. My mother’s idea to have us “dress up” for the occasion, as if going to church in Bavaria’s cool spring, was not appropriate in this new environment – an awkwardness in the New World, which my parents were to commit often thereafter.
    It was hot as hell. I shed clothes to gain liberty. Frank Sinatra was right when he sang, “New York, New York is a helluva town.”
    Our ship was slowly pulled by tug-boats up the North River from the “Battery to the Bronx,” as Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelley, and Jules Munchin might have sung in their engaging musical On the Town (1949), available on Youtube. The film shows New York and New York Harbor sights in 1949 that were almost identical to what I saw in 1952. Leonard Bernstein composed the snappy music, Betty Comden and Adolph Green the great lyrics:

New York, New York is a helluva town
The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down
The people ride in a hole in the ground
New York, New York is a helluva town

Manhattan from the air 1949. Note the bunching of skyscrapers 
in mid- and lower-Manhattan, and the frieze of long piers

The S.S. America (built in 1940, the year of  the photo) makes its way up the Hudson

    This slow movement up the river, past rows and rows of long piers, now defunct and demolished, where ocean liners like the Queen Mary and the S.S. America had recently docked, allowed us to inspect increasingly taller skyscrapers, temples of commence, from the Battery to the Empire State Building in mid-Manhattan, where we docked at Pier 44, if I recall correctly. We anxiously awaited the pier and, like Sinatra and his sailor friends who had a leave of only 24 hours on land, wanted to see a bit of this great city. But we were condemned to watch dock workers slowly unload the ship, storing immigrants’ belongings in a long warehouse on the pier. There was yet more work for the immigrants to do. All men switched into work clothes to clean up the Liberty ship for its next deployment of troops to Europe, now threatened by a Cold War.

Met Life Tower 1909

Woolworth building 1913

Chrysler Building 1930

Empire State Building, 1931

    Ten days cleaning the men’s and women’s halls on the ship had given the immigrants a routine for cleaning up a troop transporter, especially cleaning the mess made by people vomiting during storms. Vomiting became a special problem in the sleeping halls, where tiers of canvas hammocks, five high, were tied together in long rows creating narrow, long “streets” between them, allowing quick spurts to the bathroom. Usually boys and small men were placed in the bottom hammocks. When the bigger men on top got sick at night, cascades of vomited mess came down from the top hammocks. Nights during stormy weather were a disgusting mess, which had to be cleaned up first thing in the morning by groups of men and women, each group doing duty in their own compartment.

The SS John W. Brown, Liberty ship

After cleaning the Liberty ship on Pier 44 and changing into street clothes, the immigrant families were called in alphabetical order to disembark down a long stair to the pier and meet well-dressed and well-organized volunteer women from the Church World Service with clip-boards, each responsible for their “displaced persons,” immigrant families, whose names started with a given letter of the alphabet. Seen from on top, from the ship’s deck, the pier was dotted with groups of persons surrounding colorful spots, providing playful, moving patterns 

Mobile by Alexander Calder

– not unlike the mobiles of Alexander Calder – formed by the colorful hats and summer dresses of the CWS ladies, organising the immigrant families who circled around them.
    We met our charming lady with the letter D clip-board, with handshakes. She was a feminine and self-assured woman in her late 30s, shaded by a wide-brimmed, straw-colored hat, wearing a pink silk scarf around her neck that was tucked into the décolleté of her fluttering summer dress to repel the pier’s dust, which was carried around by each puff of the wind. She exuded confidence and authority over her anxious “displaced persons,” whom she was, in fact, placing very precisely into rural and provincial locations all around America. I had never seen a woman project so much confidence and authority with such grace. Lady D explained that our sponsor was a rural factory owner in northern Ohio, who would employ my father and had the responsibility for our basic well-being – food, housing, medical care – for six years.
    Our fate was to be tied to this sponsor in this rural location for years. This was actually a modern form of indentured servitude, practiced extensively and often abused by sponsors in early colonial times. The immigrant workers, at those times, had a contract to work for a given number of years for subsistence and to repay the cost of trans-Atlantic voyage to the sponsor.

The next paragraphs discuss the operation of the immigration of “displaced persons” and the role of the CWS, before returning to my story of landing in New York Harbor.
    The Church World Service was an amalgam of Protestant churches that had pressured Congress and President Truman to help Europe’s displaced persons after WWII, resettling worthy Europeans in America with 200,000 visas in the 1948 Act, Amended in 1952 with another 200,000. Truman was fuming in his signing speech, scolding Congress that it had set up an inferior program, insufficient to help most of the traumatized Jewish Europeans, but he signed it, after all. This program, which operated between 1949 and 1952, was initially mainly for Jewish families, later amended to enlarge the pool of possible immigrants to include “displaced” ethnic German families and other “displaced” ethnics, as well as regular German emigrants to make up the rest of the quota of 200,000, which included our family.
    A total of 250,000 Jewish displaced persons were living in camps and urban centers in Germany, Austria, and Italy between 1945 and 1952, according to the article “Displaced Persons” in the Holocaust Encyclopedia of the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. The article states that an estimated 136,000 DPs went to the new State of Israel, over 80,000 came to America, and around 20,000 went to other countries, including Canada and South Africa.
    Congress had discussed this program intensively, taking account of different economic and humanitarian interests among the states and their congressmen and senators. Congressmen and senators from Minnesota pressed most strongly for the humanitarian-aid argument presented by the local Lutheran church. Indeed, the American Lutheran Church initiated the US displaced persons program by joining up with all other American Protestant churches, a forgotten historical humanitarian program by the churches. The American labor unions were strictly native and negative. Industrial labor unions worried that immigrants were cheap labor that would displace native workers in industrial towns. Thus, the program had explicit requirements to move DPs into agriculture or handicrafts. The program also provided workers to sponsors who were employers in rural areas.
    The Church World Service obtained the help of the US Government and the US Army in Germany to select worthy applicants and give visas to displaced persons only after a thorough screening in Army camps. The CWS found sponsors in America to employ the selected immigrants.
    Our family had applied to the program in late fall 1951, after my father had gotten an address of the US immigration service for displaced persons from another unemployed man waiting in the weekly line-up of persons getting unemployment insurance support in a Bavarian province. This man was complaining loudly, “I am tired of being unemployed again. I am a skilled person. I am going to apply for immigration to New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States and will go to the first country that responds.” He did, and so did my father.
    Evidently, the “push” factors dominated the emigration of DPs after WWII, as against the “pull” factors that motivate immigration in usual times.

In February 1952, our family was asked to report to a US Army camp outside Munich, a surrogate Ellis Island, where hundreds of families were investigated, screened, and housed in large barracks over the next months. Health screening quickly sorted out families with sick individuals. Writing education and employment records took longer; it required government certificates and letters from former employers. The investigation of possible Nazi complicity and of Communist affiliations required investigation by numerous specialists, and took months.
    My family’s proceedings were held up by my getting hospitalized for a half-month by an infection that was making the rounds among the fifty families in the large hall where we were all bedded, our beds only separated by hung sheets. A stern US official on the base gravely chided us, unfairly, for our delay when he handed us the last available visas from the “Displaced Persons Act of 1948. Amended 1950.”
    And off we were on a long train ride through the night, going to the North Sea port, Bremerhaven, where we immediately boarded the anchored troop transporter. Three hours later we were in heavy seas on the way to the English Channel, and I held fast onto the rails on deck, throwing up, down into the ocean. It became a daily ritual for the next ten days.

“View of the World from 9th Avenue,”
by Saul Steinberg

    My father had hoped to land in a big industrial city. New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles were his mental map of America. The sponsor of one family we got to know on the ship had actually written them from the outskirts of Los Angeles while they were still in the Munich camp, stating that he was interested in sponsoring more German workers. The family said he would probably hire my father. My father asked Lady D if this could be done. She said no, the CWS had contracts with all sponsors that disallowed such changes. My parents were disappointed. They had found new possible friends who were going near an attractive urban location, and they had a possibly interested sponsor and employer at hand, but regulations forbade any change.
    Three hours after arrival at Pier 44, the American bargain between the Protestant churches and sponsors became clear to us: it was an indirect contract between selected DPs, for visas and basic maintenance, and American sponsors, for certified quality workers to work in unattractive areas and for unknown low wages for about a half-decade. Humanity would be served, as well as the demand for capable workers in the US periphery, without costing the taxpayer a cent. The unstable, cheaply produced supply ships, Liberty ships, refitted as troop transporters, could not have returned empty and needed to be loaded with ballast. The walk-on, walk-off immigrants provided almost free ballast for the cost of feeding them for ten days.
    Serving humanity with a crass cost-benefit calculation was a true American deal where both the gods of Liberty & Fraternity and Enterprise & Money joined to create a solution, with the church as midwife and the state as helping hand.

Where is Ohio? My parents were bewildered. Lady D said it was on the shore of Lake Erie. My parents remained baffled. Lady D went to get a map. In the meantime I recalled having read a book on the French and Indian wars with the British army and colonists in the mid-18th century, in which a troop of Englishmen marched from Pittsburgh through northern Ohio to Lake Erie. (Young George Washington was involved in a couple of bad skirmishes against the French and Indians, learning lessons for the later war of independence.) I shouted, “I know, I know where we are going, to Ohio, to Lake Erie, and to the Indians!” My parents calmed me down; they weren’t keen to live in a wilderness with Indians.

Medina’s Prophet Mosque

    Lady D returned with a map, clarifying the location: the sponsor’s factory was in the countryside, outside the small town of Medina, near Akron, Ohio. My parents knew that, besides Mecca, Medina was one of the two holy places for Muslims in Saudi Arabia. They asked, was Medina a settlement by Arab immigrants? Lady D laughed and said no. She wondered why they knew more of Arabia than of America!
    My parents’ anxiety was not pacified. Would we wind up in a rural American backlands, far from urban amenities and culture, with no contact with European civilization? My parents thought that that had been their depressing status quo in provincial Bavaria, from which they had fled. But now there was the promise of a steady job in Medina, Ohio!
    We were sent to collect our luggage from the warehouse. Lady D gave us train tickets for the New York-Akron trip and the address and telephone number of our sponsor, who would pick us up with his car the next morning, a Sunday, at Akron’s train station. She also gave us twenty dollars and coins to use for possible emergency telephone calls, and gave us a hearty good-bye. Along with groups of other immigrants, we were given sandwich bags and sent off in the evening light on chartered buses that rushed through the streets.
    All we saw of the great sights of New York City was the grand Greek temple of the original Pennsylvania Station of 1910, in whose guts we boarded our train. Pennsylvania Station was designed by the renowned American architects McKim, Mead, and Wight in the Beaux-Art style of the Gare d’Orsay of Paris. It was an architectural jewel of New York City, which I had the privilege to see fleetingly in 1952, a decade before it was demolished in 1963. First its air rights were sold, then it was re-located and the old site was demolished. Its splendid past is mere history. Here are photos of the complete building, the main waiting room, and the concourse [from Wikipedia's article, “Pennsylvania Station (1910-1963)"]:

Penn Station 1911

Penn Station Main Waiting Room

Concourse of Penn Station

    The Gare d’Orsay is now a fine art gallery in Paris specializing in 19th century art:

Gare d’Orsay today by Gregory Deryckère

    We liked the ceremony of being ushered up the steps into our passenger coach by a uniformed, elderly, cheerful black porter with a red-rimmed cap. Another porter took us to our compartment, where we finally fell into cushioned seats, a great relief after a day of standing on our feet. The long passenger train then started slowly, squeaking loudly at each curve, as we rode off “in a hole in the ground” under the North River, surfacing in New Jersey in the night. We were on the way to our American adventure, tired, questioning, and sleeping fitfully.

In retrospect, I recall this hopeful beginning, with its many details, and recall especially how suddenly happy and playful, and younger, my mother looked on the Liberty ship deck, discussing a possible fine future in America with new friends on board. But equally sudden, there appeared a look of anxiety on her face as the American adventure appeared as just a hope. My father also reacted to my mother’s sudden mood swings, but in his own quiet, inscrutable, serious manner. I was stolidly looking forward to restarting 4th grade in America. It couldn’t be more onerous than my Bavarian experience.
    It occurred to me that when one takes a chance, luck and endeavor jointly make one’s fate. One also has to include wits in the formula. In effect, our fate was initially charted by my father’s taking a chance to emigrate and to try to make this a success with his background of being an engineer. Only later on, when the German postwar economic miracle became apparent, did it become clear that my father also had a chance of things turning out right in Germany. He didn’t really need to have taken up the American adventure. But in 1951 he was shut out of urban industrial reconstruction, and was emotionally drained and disappointed. He was a good man in a wrong place in a bombed-out country with an acute housing crisis. The push-factor was insurmountable.
    I’ve become an economic historian and was able to explain why my father fled from the oncoming economic boom in West Germany. Ironically, my most cited paper was on the topic of the German economic miracle in Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, November 1990: “Reassessing the Wirtschaftswunder: Reconstruction and Postwar Growth in West Germany in an International Context.”

[The previous installment of “Growing up in America,” “Climbing rocks,” appeared on January 20.]

Copyright © 2015 by Rolf Dumke